I Am a Polar Bear

This book holds a record for the longest time between reading it and getting onto my Travel Library! I bought it in Exeter back in September, on my way back from my weekend on Dartmoor, devoured the first chapter eagerly on the bus… and then it took until December to actually finish it and now it’s the end of April before it appears on the blog. What book is this? Oh, it’s in the title. Epic Continent by Nicholas Jubber.

It’s a great premise – follow in the footsteps of six epics (well, five epics and a saga) in a journey across Europe from Greece to Iceland. It’s far from the first “use a book to plan an adventure” but it’s the first I’ve seen that’s gone back to the ancient stories. I did hesitate because I don’t know most of the stories but there’s a summary of each at the start of each section and as Jubber travels to the key locations, he explains why he’s going there, what happened there, what’s important about them and what’s going on there now.

The epics in question are The Odyssey (Greece and Turkey), The Kosovo Cycle (Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia), The Song of Roland (Italy, Spain and France), The Nibelungenlied (Germany, Austria & Hungary), Beowulf (England, Denmark & Sweden) and finally, the saga of the bunch, Njal’s Saga (Iceland).

I’ve read Njal’s Saga, I’ve read the Saga of the Volsungs, which is the Icelandic equivalant of the Germanic Nibelungenlied (and I’ve seen the first opera in the Ring Cycle which was derived from it) and I’m dimly and vaguely familiar with Beowulf. I’ve heard of the Odyssey but don’t actually know anything about it and I’ve never even heard of the Kosovo Cycle or the Song of Roland. A part of me says that I’m woefully unprepared for this book but a part of me suspects I’m actually ahead of most people – or at least, most English-speaking people. But as I said, it turns out you don’t need an intimate knowledge of the six epics to follow the journey.

The point and purpose of this book, in the end, is to take a look at Europe and European attitudes throughout the last couple of thousand years (The Odyssey is coming up 3000 years old; the rest are under 1,500 years old) and use them as a lens to look at Europe today. The Kosovo Cycle takes a close look at wars in the Balkan region, the Song of Roland features immigration questions and the Nibelungenlied is all about the Nazis. These are stories that have gone beyond merely being books; they’re stories that exist deep in their respective national consciousnesses and how they’re seen and what they stand for have changed over the centuries. That’s far too big a theme for me to discuss here, which is why the book exists. Why do these stories still exist? Why are people still reading them? Why have so many faded but these are still here?

The one I know best being Njal’s Saga, I’m deeply interested in why he chose that one and not Egil’s Saga. If you think of the sagas as being the Icelandic equivalent of Shakespeare (everyone reads them in school, everyone broadly knows what they’re about, no one reads them for fun except scholars, the language is just far enough removed that it’s an effort but it doesn’t need translating etc), Egil’s Saga is surely the equivalent of Hamlet. It’s the big one, the masterpiece. Njal’s Saga is also one of the big ones but… Look, I’ve read it. The first part is two best friends gritting their teeth and promising to stay friends while their wives take it in turns murdering members of the other’s household. The second half is a tedious legal drama culminating in Njal’s house being burnt down with him still inside. I admit, my first introduction to Njal’s Saga was this article in the Reykjavik Grapevine all the way back in 2012, which posits that Njal and Gunnar were “Iceland’s first gay lovers”, which coloured my perception of it a bit when I finally got round to reading it. But fundamentally, Njal’s Saga just isn’t as interesting as Egil’s. If I was writing this book, I don’t think Njal’s is the one I would have chosen. I might even have gone for Laxdæla Saga, the Saga of the People of Laxárdalur, which is a centuries-long family saga heavily featuring the women of the valley. But Jubber saw connections with the previous stories and with the epic tradition and that’s why it got in, because he’s looking at this in more detail than me.

From the point of view of the philistine reading this book, I actually found I was more interested in the journey than the stories that I didn’t know. I’ve read quite a few travel books and they broadly fit under two categories: they’re either telling the story of a place or they’re about the experience of getting to a place. This one sits under both. It should be about the story of a place – or many places. But it’s also about the process of getting around, of planning and researching a book and so it features the author’s travels along this journey. And to my surprise, there’s a lot more hitchhiking and buses and rolling out a sleeping bag under a fountain than I’d have expected. Jubber wild camps – or rather, curls up under bushes or on the edge of town squares; there’s no tent – a lot more than any author I’ve read before unless that author was specifically writing about wild camping. I almost feel like there’s a second book in here – travelling from the south-east to the north-west of Europe on a shoestring. I suppose it comes down to travel writers not being lavishly paid, certainly not before they’ve written the book, and if you want to make a journey through twenty-odd countries, there have to be sacrifices somewhere if someone else isn’t paying the bills. And yet that’s not the feature of this book. It’s not a shoestring road trip story, it’s an examination of culture and history and the two sit awkwardly side by side.

That’s not a criticism. It’s an observation about reality and about travel and it’s a comment that it’s an unusual approach. It also allows the author to spend time with people who live or work in the countries where these epics have their roots, giving a different perspective on them than “this is the academic consensus which involves no actual human beings” and I like that. I said that some of the epics bring up the question of immigration and how are you going to write that into a book without talking to actual immigrants? How do Germans today feel about the Rhinegold stories compared to Germans of the 1930s? Does anyone in England care about Beowulf?

If you have any interest in stories or humanity or history and you also have an interest in travel, I think you could do worse than pick up this book. It’s a special gift to be able to weave an interesting story out six epics that most of your readers won’t have even heard of, so don’t let that put you off – it might even inspire you to read one or two.