Recently I watched the 1978 classic slasher film Halloween, and it gave me the peculiar feeling of experiencing something that is the first incarnation of a whole bunch of things that have been copied and iterated on, over and over for a hundred times. It was a combination of feeling very appreciative of how complete and tied together all these now cliched things were in their original form, and also a little underwhelmed because I know exactly how all the tropes were going to play out. It’s almost like I had to have imagined myself as a moviegoer in the late 70s to be able to feel how mind blowing it must have been to audiences at that time.
minor spoilers for the Saga of the Volsungs after this point
Reading this book felt like watching Halloween, but with a caveat, that the stories still got more bonkers from time to time than anything that tried to copy it. Take Tolkien for instance. Sword that was broken and reforged after it had been passed down over generations. Check. Cursed magic ring that consumes the wearer with greed. Check. Powerful dragon that guards said ring. Check. Warrior woman who decides to join with her brother to fight against invaders from the East. Check.
But but but, does Tolkien have badass heroes that are fated to be killed by a she wolf who sticks her tongue in the hero’s throat to lick all the honey that he happened to be covered with, after which the hero bites down on the tongue of the she-wolf, ripping it out of her throat, which kills her and affords his escape. How about the part where the hero’s sister who is married to an evil king sends her sons to the forest to be apprentices of the hero, only to have them killed one by one when she finds out they were too weak? After which she switches bodies with a witch, seduces her brother, gives birth to a bastard boy who is finally strong enough because he is of purer blood? Nope, that stuff was probably too crazy for early twentieth century fantasy literature.
The Saga follows the lives of the Volsung dynasty, who were supposedly the bravest of warriors among the Norse. It wasn’t really easy to follow the storyline because a lot of the Volsungs had very similar names: Sieggy, Signy, Sigmund, Sigurd. This one guy has a sword named Gram, a horse named Grani, and a blood brother named Gunnar. I found myself constantly referring to the wikipedia summary of the saga to see what was happening. Also, most of the text is basically, “awesome king so and so fought some other less awesome guy who challenged his honor and won”, and “so and so killed her husband in her sleep to avenge the death of her brother”. But then you get the crazy parts, which will definitely stick in my head.
The gods intervene from time to time, but it’s really a crap shoot in terms of whether their intervention will help or harm you. Odin would appear in a battle from out of nowhere and fight you and break your sword that he himself gave to your ancestors, causing you to lose the battle and die. Loki would think it’d be fun to kill an otter who turned out to be shapeshifting dwarven prince. Then when his dad demanded payback, Loki robbed another poor dwarf of his treasure to pay the dwarf daddy, which included one cursed ring, which then led to a whole cascade of misdeeds and misfortunes for the mortals.
Out of all the heroic figures of the Volsung line, Sigurd the dragonslayer, was probably the most epic. Very Aragon-esque dude. The sword reforged, the slaying of the dragon that guards the treasure including the one cursed ring, that was all him. And then his story tied in with an epic love triangle with two women. First is Brynhild, whose story was so influential it got copied into Germanic legend, and finally to Richard Wagner composing an epic called The Ring of the Nibelung, where she is a central character. Also yes, it’s a story about a corrupting magic ring. Second is Guðrún, who for the whole time I pictured as the Icelandic RnB singer GDRN, who carries the epic saga till its end. Both of them were badass women warriors of course, who fight alongside their brothers, and kill their own husbands and children at one point or another.
Tolkien was such a fanboy that he wrote an entire book length epic poem called The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, which replicated in English the poetic structure of the sagas in their original Old Norse.
I think all these classics need to be appreciated, and one can only learn to appreciate them slowly, with multiple re-readings in multiple forms. I was once at a hackathon in Sri Lanka, and this guy was telling me about how they had a tradition of re-staging the Ramayana every year, with a different retelling, and how over the years, the story of the civil war and the various struggles of their nation had been woven into the retellings. Originals have power both as touchstones and cornerstones. You find them while tracing a journey backwards from something that struck you in the present, but once you find them, they open a door to a whole world of things that sprung from them.