A saga is a told life. The characters in them appear to know this, which is either a literary device or a way of living, and is interesting as both.
Saga characters say things like “this will be told of” before they act. They consider how a thing will look in the account. They are, visibly, aware of being narrated.
Part of that is craft — the sagas were composed for telling, and a character who mentions the telling is doing work for the author. But it also describes something real about an honour society, where reputation was the durable asset and people genuinely did calculate how conduct would be reported.
What I want from it is narrower than either: the observation that people run on a story about who they are and what kind of thing they do, and that the story is partly editable.
Narrative identity research proposes that people make sense of their lives by composing them into an internalized story, and that features of that story — coherence, agency, redemptive structure — are associated with wellbeing and resilience.3
I want to be careful about how much weight this carries. It is a largely interpretive field: life-story interviews, coded for themes, correlated with wellbeing measures. The associations are real and the coding is done carefully, but the direction is not established — people who are doing well may simply narrate more coherently, which would produce the same data.
The redemptive-narrative finding in particular has a cultural specificity problem that the researchers themselves have raised: it is a very American shape, and its association with wellbeing may say as much about which stories are rewarded in that setting as about what stories do to people.
What survives: the story you hold about yourself is consequential for what you attempt, and it is more editable than it feels. That is enough.
The practical residue of this whole essay is a single question, which the saga register supplies: what does the story need here?
It is useful because it is a slightly different question from what do I want, or what am I afraid of. It steps back far enough to see the shape of the thing, and it tends to produce a clearer answer than either.
Applied to a setback it does something specific: it converts a verdict into a chapter. Not “this is what I am” but “this is the part where that happened,” which is both truer and more workable.
A story is a shape imposed on events, and shapes are selective. The frame that makes a setback bearable also makes it tidier than it was, and there is a real cost to becoming the kind of person who narrates everything into significance.
Second: stories have protagonists, and treating your life as a story quietly installs you as the centre of one. That is fine as a private device and less fine as a way of relating to other people, who are in their own stories rather than serving as characters in yours. The sagas are honest about this in an unflattering way — the people whose deeds get told are chieftains, and everyone else is a supporting cast.
The serious one: not everything is a chapter. Some losses are not part of an arc and do not lead anywhere, and the demand that they be meaningful is an additional burden placed on people already carrying one. The redemptive narrative is the culturally rewarded shape, which means people whose experience does not fit it are told, implicitly, that they are failing at their own suffering.
The honest version is that this is a tool for making the workable feel workable, and that it should be put down when it starts requiring meaning from things that do not have any.
Note — not everything is a chapter
The redemptive shape is the culturally rewarded one, which means people whose experience does not fit it get told implicitly that they are failing at their own suffering. This frame is for making the workable feel workable. Put it down when it starts demanding meaning from things that have none.
Lightly, and not about everything.
These essays draw on Old Norse and Old English literature — the Poetic Edda, Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, the Icelandic sagas, and Beowulf — all of which were written down in Christian societies long after the pagan world they describe. Eddic and saga passages follow the translations named below; where a term or picture is contested, the essay says so rather than the list. Modern research is cited by author and publication.
People run on a story about what kind of thing they do, and the story is more editable than it feels — which makes “what does this need here” a more useful question than what do I want.
But stories are selective, they install you as a protagonist, and not everything is a chapter. Some losses do not lead anywhere, and requiring them to is a burden rather than a consolation.