We live therefore we know saga. We all have a narrative. Our lives tell a story. If we really pay attention to our lives we find that they are populated with interesting and even great characters. Myself included. Yes, I consider dust bunnies characters. I write fiction. I could also be considered a great character in someone else’s narrative. I’m convinced i’ve been called a character many times when coworkers and friends talk about their day to their loved ones.
“You’ll never believe what this character said today…”
The word saga has gotten a bad rap. Somewhere along the line modern culture has linked saga with drama. The pop use of drama itself is abused.
“You don’t want to get involved with them. They bring to much drama.”
“OMG , they’re into daytime television?”
A perusal of some olde fashioned writing tools, dictionaries, will reveal that drama is not even in the lexicon of the definition. The following description appears number one among most definitions. “A long story of heroic achievement, especially a medieval prose narrative in Old Norse or Old Icelandic: a figure straight out of a Viking saga.”
I am not naive in the belief that figures straight out of Viking Sagas were not without some drama. On more than one occasion during the saga of Erik The Red, a character must had the following conversation.
“Where ever Erik goes there is always some kind of drama, what with the pillaging and the looting and all.”
“You know it. Where his he now?”
“The town had him exiled again and he didn’t know what to do with himself. I told him to find an island to explore. That should keep him busy for a while.”
In between the looting and pillaging, what we have come to spin as “conquering,” lands were discovered, legends were born and tales told.
Your life is a saga,hopefully devoid of pillaging and looting, but a saga none-the-less. You are the protagonist in your story. Make sure your character is a nice one. A heroic protagonist would be epic, but a nice person in the least. The world is populated with enough antagonists. By all accounts Erik The Red was not a nice guy.
You don’t get exiled from two towns in Iceland by being a nice guy.
So go live your saga but don’t be like Erik The Red. He brought a lot of drama.
This post happened as a result of the daily prompt meeting my mind. Fortunately there were survivors.
Image – Summer in the Greenland coast circa year 1000 Jens Erik Carl Rasmussen (1841–1893) (public domain).
Saga