The power of storytelling - Old Norse style
How one medieval Icelander changed the course of his destiny with a simple story
Long, cold winters, the uncertainty of tomorrow, or the human need to impress with your knowledge. If there is one people enthralled by the power of storytelling and who raised it to the intricate art that rivals Odin’s poetry, that would be the medieval Icelanders.
Storytelling in the Old Norse world, however, also had a more operational role to play. Stories share the immense capacity to bind and spellbind others to the extent of influencing perceptions, save you or damn you. Memory is the greatest treasure to possess in a culture where parchment could cost you your livelihood, and being a “man of memory” could elevate you more than any jarl title.
Let’s have a look at the very interesting Sturla Thordarson (1214–1284), who recounts a story called Huldar saga at the Norwegian court. Preserved in Sturlu þáttr (The Tale of Sturla), it serves as a biographical coda to the Sturlunga saga compilation and illustrates how someone can employ tall tales or “lying sagas” (lygisögur) to navigate a precarious political environment and secure a spectacular comeback.
Sturla is the nephew of none other than Snorri Sturluson, both prominent Icelandic chieftains and lawmen caught in the violent power struggles of the Sturlung Age, the last period of independence of the Icelandic commonwealth. In 1263, after falling out of favour with King Magnus Hakonarson and being slandered by political adversaries, Sturla flees to Norway. Upon his arrival, the king seems to be ill-disposed toward him, and at court, Sturla experiences deep humiliation and marginalisation.
The turning point occurs while Sturla walks on board the King’s ship as they sail. When the men are settling down for sleep, the king’s forecastle-man inquires if there’s anyone who could provide entertainment. Sturla agrees to do so and tells Huldar saga, a tale of a “great troll-woman”, now unfortunately lost, a comic tale of a giantess likely belonging to the fornaldarsögur (legendary saga) genre.
The audience follows along in enchantment. Sturla told the story better and more cleverly (fróðligar) than any of those present had heard before, causing a massive crowd to assemble on the deck to listen. Queen Ingibjörg, intrigued by the commotion, also inquires about the story. A man informs her about the topic of the troll-woman and how well the talented Sturla delivered.
The following morning, the queen sends for Sturla, asking him to bring along the trollish saga. Coming from a royal environment influenced by international literature and Latin translations, the queen assumes the saga is a physical object, a written book. Yet Sturla stands for something else, namely an Icelandic tradition in which learned men maintained vast oral repertoires and performed the saga from memory. Which, to us moderns in the age of AI, might sound like an insurmountable challenge or in itself a “lying saga”.
Medieval Icelanders and other memory specialists from mostly oral environments (indeed, Icelanders wrote a great deal, yet before those stories were committed to the calfskin, they would retell them over and over again) likely relied on mental fix-points and mnemonic techniques rather than manuscripts to remember narratives or contribute to them in meaningful ways that would maintain the logic and structure of the stories.
Sturla retells the saga in the presence of royalty, thus in political circumstances that heavily favour him. The king, who had long been hostile, listens in silence. The success of the troll-woman story opens the door for Sturla to show off his more formal skills as a skald. Poetry would have been even more convoluted, albeit perhaps a tad easier due to the clear formal elements. Following the entertainment show, Sturla is allowed to recite a praise poem for King Magnus and another for the king’s father, Hakon the Old. King Magnus is flabbergasted by the performance that he even dares to utter “I think you are a better poet than the pope”.
What a comeback. Through his unique storytelling and mnemonic abilities, Sturla not only regains the King’s trust, but he is subsequently commissioned to write the official biography of King Hakon (Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar) and later the biography of Magnus himself. So this kind of story, which we would also judge as children’s fairy tales today, did enjoy a high status in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. For a long time, these so-called “lying sagas” were dismissed as literature of the common folk, but Sturlu þáttr shows us that even the most elite historians and monarchs cherished them as sophisticated narratives with tremendous entertainment potential. Furthermore, in the medieval North, the ability to tell a good story was a form of cultural capital that could thaw royal hostility and turn into a formidable tool for social and political advancement.
The raven Munin oversees the whole process. From a mnemonic perspective, memory in such a scene retrieves forlorn ideas and also becomes a dynamic product that triggers historiographical remediation. Sturla is presented as the prototypical minningarmaðr (man of memory) whose retentive capacity places him among the intellectual elite of the medieval North and attracts the envy of generations to come. We could not be more different, as Google-human hybrids.
Sturla’s ability to narrate a complex, multi-episodic saga without recourse to a physical manuscript means that he managed to build an internalised storehouse of wisdom (thesaurus sapientiae). This suggests his memory was trained through principles similar to the classical memoria rerum, where he navigated mental places (loci) and images (imagines) to retrieve the narrative. Such high-level oral narration was, in fact, aided by internal mental fix-points and mnemonic scenery, which would allow the storyteller to visualise the events as they were described.
The text uses the term fróðligar (wisely or cleverly) several times to describe that memory links to fræði, a semantic field encompassing both historical knowledge and mythological lore. Memory seems structured by a systematic understanding of tradition rather than mere repetition.
The interaction between Sturla and the “bookish” queen Ingibjörg also exposes a “media-theoretical” friction regarding how memory is stored and accessed. Sturla’s approach shows a type of embodied knowledge, where the guarantor of the text’s authority and preservation is the human body and its voice. The scene ultimately reflects the transitional state of 13th-century Icelandic culture, where memory and literacy co-existed as complementary instruments of storage.
Memory has often been described as a social and performative process. In this episode as well, memory as a collective phenomenon requires a social framework to be activated. The crowd gathering on the ship’s deck creates a memory community, where the audience’s attention and reaction serve to validate the narrative. This sort of interaction transforms a private recollection into a shared cultural asset. We know almost nothing about the story, but it must have been very vivid to cause such an overwhelming reaction. Both the striking imagery embodied by the troll-woman and Sturla’s performance skills effectively burn the memory into the minds of the listeners. And ultimately, this also causes the king to thaw and restructure social hierarchies.
By using his mastery of the past, Sturla once again gains cultural capital. He consumes his previous humiliation by replacing it with a new, prestigious memory of his own performance. Whoever controls the narrative of the past, especially through the persuasive power of a well-told story, holds incommensurable power in the present.