Going through critiquer notes for TE, I came upon the comment that a particular passage sounded too modern for Gunnar to have spoken it to Hallgerður a thousand years past:
Everyone has their own way of being remembered. I will not ask you again.
This made me smile, because it turns out that line comes directly from Njál’s Saga, though it’s true that there are other translations with a slightly less contemporary feel.
Sometimes the past–and the ways of human motivation–is not so different as we think. (Other times, of course, the past is indeed an alien country, because time is funny that way.)
All of which doesn’t mean I won’t look at the line, and make sure that as worded it’s supported by the rest of the story I’m telling (which is not a straight-up retelling of the saga) and fits in with it–the fact that something is true is never an excuse for fiction if it doesn’t work otherwise. But even so it pleases and intrigues me, that words spoken a thousand years ago (or, perhaps, 800 years ago, by an anonymous writer imagining life 1000 years ago) might still ring familiar today.