When discussing Aeneans with Tatiana Thane, Chunderban Desai mentions:
"'...your sense of privacy which makes you reluctant to bare the souls of even fictional characters.'"
-Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010), p. 124.
How can there be fiction that does not reveal the inmost thoughts and feelings of at least one viewpoint character? Quite easily. We are used to reading the inner lives of viewpoint characters in novels although, since a novel is merely a long prose fiction, it is possible to write a novel with third person narration that tells us what its viewpoint character sees, hears, says and does but not what he thinks or feels - or even a novel that objectively describes interactions between characters without any one of those characters providing a narrative viewpoint?
As often happens when I look for a particular book by Poul Anderson, I have not been able to put my hand on a copy of Hrolf Kraki's Saga. However, I am fairly certain that, in his introduction to that volume, Anderson points out that sagas (like epics) did not have point of view narration. Anderson's own stories written in that vein follow the same narrative form. The reader is informed that a named individual lived in a particular place, then that individual's grandson turns out to be the central protagonist of a narrative that tells us what he did although not how he felt about it.
The Aeneans might write saga-like novels or some other literary form not yet created. (Alan Moore, in less serious vein, suggested a future synthesis of philosophy with horror fiction. Thus, Frankenstein Meets Wittgenstein etc.)
Desai discusses only the dominant, "nord," Aenean culture. Meanwhile, Ivar is out there with the diametrically opposed tinerans, contemptuous of "townsitters." (p. 113) The nords' respect for learning is preserved millennia later by their descendants, the Kirkasanters.
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