SAGAS AND TIME 

I've been thinking about the similarity between cinquentas and sagas. (A
cinquenta is a particular kind of very short story, exactly 50 words long.)
Not exactly the terseness of the sagas, but where the terseness comes from. It
seems like a practical illustration of the world view that the futures are
implied in the gelling present.

If you cut a saga off at the end of an episode, it won't change much (for most
of them). They are not organized with beginning-middle-end, climaxes, etc.
They just report what is happening now for a series of nows. They are terse
because they have such a strong sense, shared with their audience, of how the
past forms the present. They tell you what happened and you see for yourself
how that leads to the next present. You are expected to work out the causal
relationships and implications for yourself.

A cinquenta is like the sagas in that. It has to tell you a few things and let
you feel for yourself how it came from the past and see for yourself the
futures implied in it. Which the sagas do repeatedly--they are like a lot of
very short pieces in series.

The sagas go a step beyond cinquentas and similar short fiction of showing you
the next episode and the next and so on. But they also convey the idea that
this is what *did* happen next, not what *must* have occurred next. There is a
very practical sense of how the options are limited by the personalities,
habits, commitments, etc of real, individual characters. But these are seen as
constraints, not controlling factors.

What gives the sagas such a powerful sense of time view is that the author and
the reader assume that all the short pieces *are* linked, through the laying
of layers in the Well. And yet the linkages are all implied and there is
always the idea that things might have gone differently, but didn't. There is
not the sense of inevitable machinery grinding forward that one so often gets
in other-medieval literature.