Axe Murder at the Ball Game; Our Shifting Conception of Heroism

One nice thing about soccer games between six-year-olds is that no one kills anyone with an axe. You might see a drunk mom screaming at the ref, or a couple of dads in a fistfight, but that’s about it. People don’t bring broadswords to Pee-Wee soccer events.

It hasn’t always been that way. As exhibit A, I present Egil’s Saga, a 13^th century Icelandic tale composed (the scholars think) by Snorri Sturluson. Early in the story we encounter a ball game between our hero, Egil, age six at the time, and an older boy, Grim, age eleven:

“The game began and Egil proved to be the weaker, while Grim made the most of his strength. Then Egil got so angry that he lifted the bat and struck Grim with it, but Grim took hold of him, hurled him to the ground and gave him some very rough treatment. […] Egil went to look for Thord Granason and told him what had happened.

 “ ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Thord. ‘The two of us will pay him back.’

“ Thord gave Egil a thick-bladed axe he was carrying, common enough at that time, and they went to the field where the boys were playing. Grim had just caught the ball and was racing along with the other boys after him. Egil ran up to him and drove the axe into his head right through to the brain.”

So – I think it’s safe to say I wouldn’t hire Thord as my Little League coach. Even more interesting, however, is the reaction of Egil’s parents:

“When Egil came home, Skallagrim [his father] made it clear that he was far from pleased, but Bera [his mother] said that Egil had the makings of a real viking and it was obvious that as soon as he was old enough he ought to be given fighting-ships.”

The modern equivalent would be discovering that your son had murdered a kid with a brick during a game of pick-up basketball and deciding, as a result, to buy him a Dodge Viper.

Given this level of parenting, I suppose it’s not surprising that Egil never outgrows his childhood brutality. Just at the end of the saga, when he is an old man nearing his death, there’s a great moment in which he tries to decide what to do with two chests of silver he won earlier in his life:

“I want to take my two coffers with me, the ones I got from King Athelstan, both full of English silver. I want them carried up to the Law Rock when the crowd gathered there is at its biggest, and I’m going to throw the silver about […] I’ll bet there’ll be a bit of pushing and punching. Maybe in the end the whole assembly will start fighting.”

When you can no longer kill people yourself, I guess it’s a comfort to know your money can still be used to start a respectable brawl.

The thing I find interesting about these passages, and about Egil in general, is that he is the story’s protagonist. He is the hero. Modern notions of genre and plot structure don’t really apply here, but everything about the saga invites us to sympathize with Egil and to root for him, even when he’s picking fights with the innocent or murdering his Irish slaves.

Between the time Egil allegedly lived (10^th century) and the time his saga was finally penned (13^th), Christianity came to both Norway and Iceland. Sturluson himself received theological training. And yet, the narrator of Egil’s saga refrains scrupulously from any imposition of Christianity’s ethical precepts onto his pre-Christian characters. Of St. Ambrose’s four cardinal virtues – temperance, justice, prudence, fortitude – Egil possesses only the last, and yet he is admired by the narrator (and presumably by the audience), for his own qualities, primarily his physical strength and his ability to compose poetry.

Fantasy, of course, is replete with protagonists of dubious morality – assassins, con-men, barbarians. It’s not often, however, that the writers of these characters find themselves able to utterly discard our modern notions of morality. As one example among dozens, we can take a look at Durzo Blint, the ruthless assassin from Brent Weeks’ The Way of Shadows. In the very first chapter Blint splits open a few bad guys, not realizing, evidently, that his murders are witnessed by a local orphan. It’s revealing to take a close look at the end of the chapter, when Blint discovers this hidden child:

“Just above Azoth on the other side of the floor, Durzo Blint whispered, “Never speak of this. Understand? I’ve done worse than kill children.”

“The sword disappeared, and Azoth scrambled out into the night. He didn’t stop running for miles.”

Blint tells us (and Azoth) that he kills children (and worse), but then he blinks. He doesn’t actually do it. Why? Well, we’d have a pretty damn short book without Azoth, for one thing, but for another, Weeks isn’t willing to allow his protagonist to inhabit an utterly alien morality. If you swapped Egil in for Blint, Azoth’s brains would be leaking into the mud.

I’m not trying to pick on Weeks, here. I love his book, and this type of thing is extremely common in fantasy. We (as readers and writers) can wrap our minds around invented magical systems, new races, and civilizations millions of years old more easily than we can accept protagonists whose ethical makeup is entirely different from our own. Steven Erikson’s barbarian, Karsa Orlong, is the only exception that leaps immediately to mind, and Erikson has written an outstanding essay on just this topic, asking, “How far from our own sensibilities can we be pushed before it’s too much?”

I’m very curious to hear how readers would answer that question. Also, I wonder what other fantasy protagonists out there really do buck the central aspects of our modern ethical and moral systems? What modern writers, like Sturluson, are able to fully imagine an alternate conception of heroism?