Opening Passage:
There was a man named Grimur Kamban who was the first to settle in the Faroe Islands. In those days, a great number of men were seeking refuge from the tyranny of King Haraldur Fine-Hair; some men settled themselves in the Faroe Islands and farmed there, while other men sought land on other islands.
When Aud the Deep-Minded was traveling to Iceland, she came first to the Faroe Islands. There she married off Alofa, daughter of Thorstein the Red, from whom descends the entire family line of Faroe-Islanders called the Götuskeggjar who live on Austurey. (p. 31)
Summary: The Faereyinga saga hints at its theme in the very beginning of the work: this is the saga of the independence of the Faroe Islands, settled by men seeking to escape tyranny, who will maintain a sort of independence despite being in some ways the least significant and least powerful of the Scandinavian lands. It primarily takes place over the course of the conversion of the Faroe Islands to Christianity; as with Njal's Saga, the islands are pagan at the beginning and Christian by the end. But the role of the conversion is somewhat different; in Njal's Saga, Christianity provides the means for the resolution of the problem of Iceland spiralling out of control, whereas the primary issue in Faroe-Islander Saga is how the Faroe Islands will genuinely convert to Christianity on its own terms rather than being forced into a pseudo-conversion by the rising power of Christian Norway.
But that is the saga considered at a very abstract level. The saga is actually the story of a wily and ruthless pagan family, the family of Thrandur, one of the Götuskeggjar from the island of Eysteroy, or Austurey, as it is known today. Despite being a younger brother, Thrandur, who we are told is exceptionally lucky, manages to inherit the family farm, which he rents out as he sails away to make a fortune -- which he makes in spades, as an unlikely series of events results in his coming into a massive amount of money. Meanwhile, an accidental death leads to a feud between two other families, those of Hafgrimur of Sudoroy and the brothers Brestir and Breinir Sigmundursson of Skuvoy. Hafgrimur gets the help of Thrandur in a course of events that leads to the death of the two brothers; Thrandur wants to kill their sons, but is prevented by his allies, so instead sells them into slavery. They end up in Norway, where, after they are freed, they are raised by an extraordinarily talented outlaw family who takes them in during a snowstorm and then teaches them to fight and track; Brestir's son, Sigmundur, marries the daughter of the family, Thurid. Sigmundur and his cousin Thorir make their way to the court of Earl Hakon, where they do very well; as a result Sigmundur receives a ring from Earl Hakon that belonged to the goddess Thorgerd and renders its bearer lucky. The boys return to the Faroe Islands, where Sigmundur has to retake his family farm by force, and the two press Thrandur for legal compensation for the death of their father. They eventually agree to travel to the court of Earl Hakon in Trondheim to have him mediate; when only Sigmundur arrives at Trondheim, Earl Hakon decides very generously for Sigmundur and Thorir, and the two then have quite the task of trying to force Thrandur to comply, because Thrandur is not the kind of person to give anything freely.
The invasion of the Jomsvikings furthers the fortunes of Sigmundur and Thorir as they join Earl Hakon to fight them off, and this leads to Sigmundur being in good favor as King Olaf Tryggvason takes the throne and Christianizes Norway. Sigmundur becomes Christian and is tasked by King Olaf with Christianizing the Faroe Islands. Thrandur becomes his major opponent in this, but his luck outmatches Thrandur's for the moment, and he effectively forces Thrandur to convert, although it is clear that the conversion is less than even skin-deep. It also massively aggravates the feud between the two families. Thrandur's foster sons (Sigurthur, Thorthur, Gautur, and Leifur) attempt to assassinate the two cousins twice, but fail both times; the escalation brings things to a head, and finally Thrandur leads a violent raid against Sigmundur's farm, thinking to catch both Sigmundur and Thorir there, but he misses them, and they are repelled by Sigmundur's household led by the very impressive Thorid. Tracked by Thrandur, Sigmundur and Thorir and a servant named Einar manage to get away, although Einar dies in the process, and reach another island. But Sigmundur's luck runs out when they are discovered by a man named Thorgrimur, who murders them both and buries the body so that no one will know that he did it.
Leifur, one of Thrandur's foster sons (and the biological son of the man whom Sigmundur had killed in order to take back his family farm), wants to marry Thora, the daughter of Sigmundur and Thorid, and Thora demands that if Leifur is even to have a chance, he must discover who killed her father and bring them to justice. Thrandur tracks it down to Thorgrimur, and by pagan death-magic is able to find the evidence that convicts Thorgrimur, who is executed for it. (Killing a man is not so great a misdeed in medieval Scandinavian society, and would under most circumstances just legally require a fine, but killing a man and then covering up the killing is a capital crime.) Leifur marries Thora, although there's some indication that Thorid, now known as Thorid Strong-Widow, only allows this because she thinks it may eventually provide a way to get back at Thrandur.
A new King of Norway, Olafur Haraldursson (more commonly known today as St. Olaf), attempts to put the Faroe Islands under the Norwegian tax regimen, but the family of Thrandur repeatedly manages to foil this. In the course of doing this, Sigurthur, Thorthur, and Gautur end up murdering the tax envoy, which estranges them from Leifur, who had befriended him. They are exiled. With there being no one cunning enough or lucky enough to oppose him, however, Thrandur is able to engineer their return, and, even more than that, is able to arrange for Leifur's and Thora's son, Sigmundur Leifursson, to be fostered by him -- despite the fact that everyone in the family knows that the young Sigmundur is effectively a hostage. Sigurthur and Gautur manage to do well for themselves and in particular marry well, but in extraordinarily suspicious ways that lead to a sharp deterioration in their reputation. Thorthur, meanwhile, decides he wants to marry Thorid Strong-Widow, which gives Thorid the beginning of the thread she needs to unravel the family of Thrandur. The sons of Thrandur are caught in a carefully laid trap and killed, although at considerable cost, and Thrandur dies of grief. The family of Leifur and Thora become the dominant family in the Faroe Islands, which become Christian because the family of Thrandur had been the last obstacle to its doing so. Nonetheless, it's because of Thrandur's resistance that the Faroe Islands becomes Christian on Faroe-Islander terms rather than by being forced into it by the much more powerful Kingdom of Norway.
Of all the sagas I have read, this was in some ways the most difficult to read because it is subtle on a level that is far beyond even the ordinary subtle irony of most sagas. From the beginning, it is clear that there is something 'off' about Thrandur. The author never tells us anything about what it is. In fact, he has a habit of going very vague at crucial points in the story. We are told that Thrandur is very lucky, but he often seems too lucky. Some of this is no doubt ties to his entanglements with pagan magic -- for instance, every time anyone tries to work directly against him, they are opposed by bad weather -- but it's more than that. If it were only one or two instances in which Thrandur somehow came out on top agains the odds, okay, that's luck. But it happens again and again, and there is too much pattern to it. Thrandur seems to be cheating at every turn. We are never told that. Everything is told at a surface level in such a way that every individual case could be interpreted as just Thrandur lucking out. But over the course of the saga, we get repetitions, each slightly different, which start to raise questions about the cases we have already read about. And the author's not telling us about how things happened, his going vague at key moments, starts to look very deliberate.
For instance, at one point an associate of Thrandur, Eldjarn, is accidentally killed; this leads to the feud between Thrandur and the sons of Brestir and Beinir. Later, however, he shows up again helping Thrandur. Perhaps the author just forgot that Eldjarn had already died, or made a mistake in confusing him with someone else? Perhaps. But then there is also the episode in which the sons of Thrandur are killed, and then their ghosts start haunting the coast, stealing things and killing people, and then they show up alive again at the most auspicious time. Are both 'deaths' in fact just deceptions perpetrated by Thrandur and his family? The text doesn't tell us -- in fact, it goes very vague at every point where it could tell us something that would tell us yay or nay. If it just happened once -- fine. If something so strange happens twice -- odd. If something so strange happens twice and the narrator keeps denying us the relevant information about what is happening -- there is something going on. There are several other examples of this, like the fact that Sigurthur and Gautur both end up marrying wealthy widows, with whom there had already been rumors that they had been having affairs, shortly after their husbands die and they avenge -- or perhaps "avenge" -- their husbands deaths. We are never told that Sigurthur and Gautur killed the husbands. In fact, we are explicitly given the death scene that leads to Gautur's good fortune, and it very definitely does not say that Gautur killed the husband. In fact, the whole scene can be read as implying someone else's doing it. But when you stop and consider the scene carefully, it doesn't actually say that, either, and everything it says is, strictly speaking, consistent with the possibility that Gautur killed the husband and then blamed someone else, killing them before they could defend themselves. When it also happens to Sigurthur, with only slight variations in the details, it becomes practically certain that the latter interpretation is right. We don't know the details -- we are denied the details -- but Thrandur's family is a frighteningly cunning lot.
That perhaps make the eventual success of Sigmundur's and Thorid's family, and the triumph of Christianity, all the more remarkable.
Favorite Passage:
Next Thrandur instructed a blazing fire be made in the fire-house, and he had four metal grates placed in a square, and Thrandur himself scored nine furrows in the earthen floor, making nine concentric circles around the square, and he sat down on a stool between the fire and the grated pen. He asked his men not to speak to him, and they stood silently by.
For a long while Thrandur sat there.
After some time had passed, a man entered the fire-house. He was all wet. Everyone recognized the man as Einar South-Islander. Einar went up to the fire and warmed his hands; he stood there a long while; then he turned and let. More time went by, and another man came into the fire-house. He went to the fire, warmed his hands, and then departed. Soon after Thorir had left, a third man came into the fire-house, a great man covered in blood, who carried his head in his hands. They all recognized him as Sigmundur Brestirsson. Sigmundure halted at a certain spot on the floor for a time, then he made his departure. (pp. 96-97)
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
***
Faroe-Islander Saga, Robert K. Painter, tr., McFarland & Company, Inc. (Jefferson, NC: 2016).