Recently I’ve been reading through some of the Sagas of the Icelanders. For those unfamiliar with these, they’re the recorded histories of how the Vikings settled Iceland, from a thousand years ago, and the oldest novels in existence.

Here’s the tie in to scripture: in the Sagas it is very apparent that there are conflations between the individual and their household/group/warband, and also drastic condensing of conversations and times. And it’s written in exactly the same style as much of the old Testament. So when I reread the stories of those books, now I’m a lot more aware of these things occurring there as well, of conversations that took months getting condensed to a sentence and such.