It has been almost a year since I last read classical literature with any intention. At the start of last year, I had set out to read Penguin Little Black classics, and for a while I stayed with that intention. Then, as often happens, reading drifted. Towards other subjects, other curiosities. A new year has begun; we are already in March. And as part of my personal tradition, I have set up multiple reading projects again. One of them is to continue Penguin’s Little Black Classics. Hopefully, this year I’ll finish reading quite a few.

The first two books were different from what I had expected. Boccaccio surprised me with irreverence and laughter. Hopkins slowed me down, asking me to look at the world with wonder and attention.

The third one is The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent‑Tongue, and it again takes you in a different wonderland.

It stands still and lets you notice how far away you are.

One of the first things that struck me while reading this Icelandic saga is the sheer density of names and lineages. People are introduced not just as themselves, but as sons of someone, grandsons of someone else, rooted firmly in ancestry. At first, it felt excessive, even tiring. Over time, it began to feel essential. Identity here is not private or psychological; it is inherited, carried, and shared. A man does not act alone. His name pulls generations with it.

Then there is the way time moves, or rather, how calmly it stretches. Someone leaves home for three years. Those three become five. Promises are made and kept across long absences. People wait. Time does not press. It does not hurry anyone into resolution. Reading this, I could not help but feel how alien this rhythm is to a life structured around immediacy and updates.

At its heart, the saga is a love story. But it is nothing like the love stories we are used to. Gunnlaug and Helga see each other, speak, and are betrothed. There is no prolonged courtship, no emotional negotiation, no attempt to “figure things out.” Love here is not something that grows through interaction; it is something that is recognized. And once recognised, it simply is. That recognition binds more tightly than years of companionship ever seem to today.

When rivalry turns into vengeance, it does not express itself in rage or violence alone. The deepest wound is inflicted socially. The antagonist strikes back not by killing Gunnlaug, but by marrying Helga. Marriage here is not romance; it is finality. It rewrites the future. It closes doors that swords cannot. I found this detail particularly chilling in its quiet cruelty.

The saga moves inevitably toward tragedy. The two rivals fight. Both die. Life goes on. Helga marries again, has children, fulfils every role society expects of her. And yet, the most haunting moment comes at the very end. As she is about to die, Helga chooses to place herself in the cloak gifted to her by Gunnlaug, her first love.

That image stayed with me.

In a world governed by duty, honour, and social order, the saga seems to say that memory remains sovereign. You can live correctly. You can do everything that is asked of you. And still, the deepest truth of your life may belong to a moment that was never allowed to complete itself.

This was a very different experience from the first two Little Black Classics. It makes me wonder if that difference itself is the pattern. Not variety of style or genre, but variety of inner posture demanded of the reader. One book invites laughter. Another invites wonder. This one invites acceptance – of time, of fate, of lives that are not designed around happiness, but around meaning, honour, and remembrance.

If this is what returning to classics entails, then it is not merely a return to old stories. It is a gradual re-education in forgotten ways of being human.