Grettir at Thorhall-stead

Frank Norris (1870–1902)
From American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Interesting Links
“Drangey Bird Cliff in North-Iceland and the Viking Grettir the Strong” and “The Lair of the Viking Grettir the Strong in Öxarnúpur in North-East Iceland” (Regína Hrönn Ragnarsdóttir, Guide to Iceland)

“Frank Norris, The Octopus, and the Southern Pacific Railroad” (Richard Wright, Reader’s Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selection by Frank Norris
“Hunting Human Game”

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American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to Now
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Two drawings by American illustrator Joseph J. Gould (1880–1935) for “Grettir at Thorhall-stead” in Everybody’s Magazine, April 1903.

“Suddenly we have found that there is no longer any Frontier. The westward-moving course of empire has at last crossed the Pacific Ocean,” proclaimed the novelist Frank Norris a few months before his death in 1902. Norris saw the century of America’s westward expansion as a rich story of heroes and villains, of conflict and settlement, of “race-movements, migrations, wars and wanderings.” Yet, in the posthumously published essay “A Neglected Epic,” Norris rhetorically asked, “What has this produced in the way of literature?”

The Trojan War left to posterity the character of Hector; the wars with the Saracens gave us Roland; the folklore of Iceland produced Grettir; the Scotch border poetry brought forth the Douglas; the Spanish epic the Cid. But the American epic, just as heroic, just as elemental, just as important and as picturesque, will fade into history leaving behind no finer type, no nobler hero than Buffalo Bill.

. . . The farm folk of Iceland to this very day treasure up and read to their little ones hand-written copies of the Gretla Saga chronicling the deeds and death of Grettir the Strong. But the youth of the United States learn of their epic by paying a dollar to see the “Wild West Show.”

Norris’s longing for an epic worthy of America—worthy, that is, of a nascent “empire”—led him, as a writer, in two directions. He had begun work on his magnum opus, The Epic of the Wheat trilogy, of which two volumes were finished: The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) and The Pit: A Story of Chicago (1903). When he died at the age of thirty-two, he had just started to outline the final volume, The Wolf: A Story of Europe. “Norris projected an image of American as an emerging world empire,” writes literary scholar John R. Eperjesi in The Imperialist Imaginary. “By seeing America as an empire on the move, Norris sanctified not only the nation’s status as carrier of world history but, more importantly, its actions and entanglements in the world beyond its borders.”

Yet Norris’s interest in epic literature inspired him to take a second path; among his writings are stories more directly influenced by European legends. His first book, Yvernelle: a Legend of Feudal France (1892), is a verse romance based on a passage from Goethe’s autobiography, in which a spurned woman places a curse on the next woman who kisses him. The influence of Icelandic sagas is apparent in Norris’s retelling of a folk tale, “Grettir at Drangey.” And, perhaps most surprisingly, he altogether abandons his trademark realism for several eerie Poe-like tales, such as “The Ship That Saw a Ghost” and “The Guest of Honour.”

For decades literary scholars and biographers, who had pigeonholed Norris in the vanguard of American naturalism, didn’t know what to do with this handful of writings based on medieval legends and featuring supernatural elements, and you will find nary a mention of them in most of the scholarship on his fiction. They were largely forgotten or ignored until the science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz plucked “Grettir at Thorhall-stead” out of obscurity for inclusion in the 1971 anthology Horrors Unknown. In the decades since, other long-forgotten stories by Norris have been included in horror and fantasy collections, but “Grettir at Thorhall-stead” is unique among the rediscoveries for its blending of Norris’s dual fascination with medieval legends and supernatural yarns, and it was selected by Peter Straub for inclusion in the Library of America collection American Fantastic Tales.

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Thorhall the bonder had been to the great Thingvalla, or annual fair of Iceland, to engage a shepherd, and was now returning. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Hunting Human Game

Frank Norris (1870–1902)
From True Crime: An American Anthology

Previous Story of the Week true crime selections
• “The Hossack Murder,” Susan Glaspell
• “A Memorable Murder,” Celia Thaxter

In 1894, at the age of twenty-four, Benjamin Franklin (“Frank”) Norris finished his fourth year at Berkeley but didn’t receive his degree, having repeatedly flunked the mathematics portion of his examinations. His failure to graduate did not slow him down. During the following eight years he took writing courses at Harvard; reported for the San Francisco Chronicle on the Boer War in South Africa, where he fell ill before being expelled from the territory; wrote at least 160 short stories, sketches, and essays for various newspapers and magazines; covered the Spanish-American War in Cuba, where he again became sick (and where he befriended Stephen Crane); became an editor for Doubleday in New York (where he “discovered” and championed the novel Sister Carrie by up-and-coming writer Theodore Dreiser); and managed to finish writing seven novels, including the national bestseller The Octopus. In 1902, he was back in the San Francisco area and planning a trip around the world on a tramp steamer when he suffered an attack of appendicitis. Initially ignoring the pain, he finally went to a doctor—but it was far too late. Suffering from gangrene, he died of peritonitis at the age of thirty-two.

Like fellow San Francisco writer Jack London, Norris was heavily influenced by the theories of Charles Darwin and the literary naturalism of French writer Émile Zola. (In spite of overlapping careers and friendships, Norris and London appeared to have never met.) Jeanne Campbell Reesman, in her essay for A Companion to the American Short Story, tallies up some of the many similarities in Norris’s and London’s works: “such key naturalistic concerns as the nature of the self; heredity and environment in shaping lives versus free will; Darwinistic ideas concerning an individual’s ability to adapt to environment; awareness of the human capacity for animalistic and brutal behavior; patterns of dominance and submission; survival of the individual versus survival of the community of species.” All of which explains Norris’s fascination with crime and criminals in such pieces as “Hunting Human Game.”

This week’s story was recommended by longtime Story of the Week fan Ben Ostrander of Austin, Texas, who found this “grisly little report on an Australian serial killer” to be a fine early sample of true crime writing. (Squeamish readers need not worry: the grisliness is left entirely off the page and to the reader’s imagination.)

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On the 21st of November in the year 1896 there appeared in one of the newspapers of Sydney, Australia, an advertisement to the effect that one Frank Butler—mining prospector, was in search of a partner with whom to engage in a certain mining venture. . . . If you don't see this week's selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.