Dreams, Fate And Warning In The Icelandic Sagas

Dreams appear constantly in Old Norse saga literature, and they behave according to rules. Understanding those conventions is closer to reading a grammar than interpreting symbols.

Dreams as announcements of what is fixed

Saga dreams overwhelmingly concern the future, and the future they concern is not negotiable. A dream announces what will happen rather than warning of what might.

Characters who understand their dreams correctly still cannot avoid the outcome, and attempts to evade a dreamed fate frequently bring it about by another route.

This fits the wider view of fate in the literature, where knowing one's end is a source of dignity rather than an opportunity for escape.

The standard imagery

The vocabulary is remarkably consistent. Animals commonly stand for people, with the species indicating character and status, and a bear or wolf carrying particular weight.

Attacking animals signal enemies, and the outcome of a dreamed fight generally corresponds to the outcome of a waking conflict. Bloody weather and reddened landscapes signal killing.

Because the conventions are stable across many texts, a reader familiar with them can often anticipate the plot from the dream, which is presumably part of the intended effect.

The role of the interpreter

Dreams in the sagas are usually told to someone. The dreamer reports and another character interprets, often reluctantly, and often with a reputation for skill in such matters.

This makes interpretation a social event within the narrative rather than a private reflection, and the scene of telling is frequently as important as the dream itself.

Interpreters are shown as accurate, which distinguishes the tradition from those in which dreams are held to be routinely deceptive.

What the dreams are doing for the narrative

Saga prose is famously restrained about interior life. Characters are described by what they do and say, with almost no direct account of what they feel.

Dreams provide one of the few channels through which foreboding and dread enter the text, functioning as a permitted exception to the general reticence.

They also manage the reader's expectations, establishing that a killing is coming so the narrative can proceed to it without dramatic emphasis.

Reading them as literature rather than belief

These texts were written down well after the events they describe and after the region's conversion to Christianity, so they are literary compositions rather than direct records.

What the dreams demonstrate reliably is how saga authors used dreaming as a device, and what their audiences were expected to understand by it.

Whether people of the period dreamed this way, or interpreted their dreams by these conventions, is a separate question the sagas cannot settle on their own.