Old Norse-Icelandic sagas tell about individual characters, their families and relations between these families. Literary representations of social and cultural conditions, which we may call ‘the human condition’, therefore play an important role in these texts. The idea of the human condition encompasses a very broad range of features that are all essential to human existence, for example: birth, growth, emotionality, conflict and/or death. In literary texts these features are also important for the narrative because they can determine the plot or change the course of action. Saga characters, as characters in medieval literature in general, are quite puzzling to modern readers because they do not develop in the sense of modern psychology. The identities of these characters are mainly determined by social relationships and by their behaviour, depending on the literary genre or subgenre and on the story to which they belong.

Since the human condition is a spectrum far too wide to be dealt with in one short chapter, I want to limit myself to the cornerstones of family life: the aspects of marriage and death, and the emotions connected with these events, for instance love or sorrow. These will be explored in a selected number of Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders); these are chosen with the aim of covering ‘classical’ texts as well as the so-called ‘post-classical’ sagas. Although each saga deals with the human condition in its very own specific way we may suppose that they nevertheless may display some common – or generic – characteristics. In this chapter I want to complement previous scholarship and investigate the ways in which representations of the human condition and emotions are important for the saga narrative and why the narrators may have chosen a particular way of literary representation in the genre of the Íslendingasögur.

Previous Scholarship

For a long time, the topic of the ‘human condition’ was treated in saga scholarship mainly from a historical, a sociological or an anthropological point of view. These early works dealt with the history of the human condition and the history of emotions rather than with their literary functions.