Njal's Saga

Born and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Robert Cook was educated at
Princeton, Zurich and Johns Hopkins and taught English medieval literature at Tulane
University in New Orleans for twenty-seven years. In 1990 he moved to Reykjavík
to serve as Professor of English Literature at the University of Iceland. He has
published on English medieval literature and on the Icelandic sagas, and together with
Mattias Tveitane edited
Strengleikar
(1979), an Old Norse translation of
twenty-one medieval French lais.

WORLD OF THE SAGAS

Editor
Örnolftir Thorsson
Assistant
Editor
Bernard Scudder

Advisory Editorial Board:

Theodore M. Andersson
Stanford University
Robert Cook
University of Iceland
Terry Gunnell
University of
Iceland
FredrikJ. Heinemann
University of Essen
Viðar
Hreinsson
Reykjavik Academy
Robert Kellogg
University of
Virginia
Jónas Kristjánsson
University of
Iceland
Keneva Kunz
Reykjavik
Vésteinn Ólason
University of Iceland
Gísli Sigurðsson
University
of Iceland
Andrew Wawn
University of Leeds
Diana Whaley
University of Newcastle

Translated with Introduction and Notes by

ROBERT COOK

PENGUIN BOOKS

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This translation first published in
The Complete Sagas of
Icelanders
(
Including 49 Tales
) III, edited by Viðar
Hreinsson (General editor), Robert Cook, Terry Gunnell, Keneva Kunz and Bernard Scudder
Leifur Eiríksson Publishing Ltd, Iceland 1997
First published in Penguin
Classics 2001
1

Translation copyright © Leifur Eiríksson Publishing
Ltd, 1997
Introduction and Notes copyright © Robert Cook, 2001
All
rights reserved

The moral rights of the translator have been asserted

Leifur Eiríksson Publishing Ltd gratefully acknowledges the
support of the Nordic Cultural Fund,
Ariane Programme of the European Union, UNESCO
and others.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to
the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired
out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form
of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar
condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 9781101488263

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Further Reading

A Note on the Translation

Chronology of
Njal's
Saga

Njal's Saga

Notes

Plot Summary

Maps

Family Trees

Glossary

Index of Characters

Special thanks are due to Sverrir Tómasson and other learned
scholars at the ÁRNi Magnúisson Institute in Reykjavík, to
Icelandair, to Professor Jón Friðónsson of the University of
Iceland, to Guðrún Ingólfsdóttir, and to my
copy-editor, Elizabeth Stratford. So many others have helped me in one way or another
that in mentioning the following I beg indulgence from those I may have temporarily
overlooked: Carol Clover, Gerda Cook-Bodegom, Helle Degnbol, Susanne Eisner-Kartagener,
Davið Erlingsson, Henry Frey Galina Glazyrina, Terry Gunnell, Fritz Heinemann,
Viðar Hreinsson, Ármann Jakobsson, Örnolfur Thorsson prepared
the maps, genealogies and glossary, and Jón Torfson the index of characters.
Bernard Scudder, Robert Kellogg, Helga Kress, William I. Miller, Hermann
Pálsson, John Porter, Christopher Sanders, Marianne Kalinke, Andrew Wawn and
Yelena Olegovna Yershova.

Njal's Saga
is by far the longest of the forty family
sagas written in Iceland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and over the years
it has proved to be the favourite. The saga teems with life and action, with memorable
and complex characters from the heroic Gunnar of Hlidarendi, a warrior without equal who
dislikes killing, to the villainous, insinuating Mord Valgardsson, who turns out to be
less dastardly than we first expect. Unforgettable events include Skarphedin's
head-splitting axe blow as he glides past his opponent on an icy river bank, or
Hildigunn's provoking of her uncle to seek blood revenge by placing on his
shoulders the blood-clotted cloak in which her husband was slain. In
Njal's Saga
we read of battles on land and sea, failed marriages,
divided allegiances, struggles for power, sexual gibes, malicious backbiting, revenge,
counter-revenge, complex legal processes and peace settlements that fail to bring peace,
not to mention dreams, portents, prophecies, a witch-ride and valkyries. Behind all this
richness lies a well-crafted story of decent men and women struggling unsuccessfully to
control a tragic force propelled by persons of lesser stature but greater ill-will. Just
as in the Norse poem
Völuspá
(‘The
Seeress's Prophecy') the gods met their doom (no mere twilight) at
the hands of brute giants and monsters, after which a new and peaceful earth arose, so
do the terrible events of
Njal's Saga
lead finally and at great cost
to a dignified resolution bearing the promise of a better time.

From the time they adopted the Latin alphabet in the eleventh century,
the Icelanders have been prodigious writers and record keepers. Among the many genres
that have been preserved is a group of annals, begun around the year 1200, most of which
contain, usually under the year 1010, the simple entry ‘Nials
brenna' (the burning of Njal). Another work, which dates back to the twelfth
century,
The Book of Settlements
,
*
a
detailed account of the people who settled Iceland in the late ninth century, reports
this about a man named Thorgeir: ‘His son was Njal, who was burned to death in
his house.' Some versions of
The Book of Settlements
add
‘at Bergthorshvol' and the number of men (varying from seven to
nine) who were burned to death. Snorri Sturluson, the great thirteenth-century writer
and man of affairs, ascribes a half-stanza in his
Edda
to
‘Brennu-Njáll' (Njal of the burning) and
The Saga of
Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue
reports that the general assembly held after the
burning of Njal ‘was one of the three most heavily attended Althings of all
time'.

Thus a number of sources which pre-date
Njal's Saga
, in
several of the genres of medieval Icelandic literature, testify to the fact that around
the year 1010 the buildings at a farm named Bergthorshvol in the south of Iceland, on a
marshy area dotted with hillocks and bordering the ocean, were set on fire and burned.
Inside were the farmer, a man named Njal Thorgeirsson, and some others. The references
to this burning make it one of the best documented events of the so-called
‘saga age' in Iceland (930–1030), and there is no reason
to question it as historical fact.

Another prominent event in
Njal's Saga
(or
Njála
, to use its popular nickname) is supported by external
sources. A stanza in the twelfth-century poem
Íslendingadrápa
by Haukur Valdísarson records that a man named Gunnar defended himself against
an attack by a certain Gizur, and managed to wound sixteen men and kill two. This event
is also mentioned in
The Saga of the People of Eyri
and in
The Book
of
Settlements
, and it seems safe to conclude that
this too was a historical fact.

These two events, the attack on Gunnar at Hlidarendi and the burning of
Njal at Bergthorshvol, constitute the two principal climaxes of
Njal's
Saga
. There is a huge gap, however, between the bare saga-age events and their
elaboration in the prose masterpiece we have before us, written around 1280. As with the
Homeric epics and the
Song of Roland
, well-remembered historical events were
passed down through several centuries of oral tradition and finally shaped by the hand
of a master story-teller and writer into a
non
-historical work of art. The
author of
Njal's Saga
was not trying to write history, but to create
his own dramatic fiction, using events and persons known to him but going far beyond
them with his own inventions and interpretations. There was a man named Njal who was
burned to death in his home around the year 1010, and a man named Gunnar who was killed
by men who attacked his home around 992 – but they are not the Njal and Gunnar
of the thirteenth-century
Njal's Saga
.

In Icelandic the word ‘saga' means both
‘history' and ‘story', and if
Njal's Saga
represents inspired story more than remembered
history, it does not exist in isolation, is not a beginning or an end in itself. It is
the longest, among the latest, and arguably the best of a group of forty sagas written
anonymously in Iceland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries about people who lived
there in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Among these ‘Sagas of
Icelanders' (also known as ‘family sagas') there is a
remarkable consistency, owing largely to the long period of oral transmission. For one
thing, many characters overlap from saga to saga, and are mentioned as well in
The
Book of Settlements
. The family of Hoskuld Dala-Kolsson, introduced in the
first chapter of
Njal's Saga
and prominent in the first half of the
saga, is the principal family in
The Saga of the People of Laxardal
. The
lawspeaker Skafti Thoroddsson (first introduced in Ch.
56
) appears in other
family sagas as well as in historical works, as does Thorgeir the Godi of Ljosavatn, who
played a key role in the adoption of Christianity. Many other characters in
Njal's Saga
are known from other Sagas of Icelanders, including
rulers of Scandinavia like Harald Grey-cloak, Hakon Sigurdarson and Olaf Tryggvason of
Norway,
and Earl Sigurd Hlodvisson of Orkney. The multiple appearance of
characters is so common in early Icelandic literature that the notes to this tradition
occasionally record that a certain character, for example, Gunnar's brother
Kolskegg, does
not
appear in other sources. This may seem gratuitous
information, and it is certainly no guarantee that the character is non-historical, but
in some cases it may suggest that a person has been deliberately invented, either in the
process of oral re-telling or by the late thirteenth-century author.

A second way in which the Sagas of Icelanders display consistency is their
use of a common body of narrative motifs. Scandinavian kings and earls appear frequently
because it is
de rigueur
for a promising young Icelander to establish his
credentials by visiting foreign rulers and making a favourable impression on them,
whether by composing a poem of praise or excelling in games or defeating the
king's enemies. The triumphant journeys abroad of Hrut (Chs. 2–6)
and Gunnar (Chs. 29–32) are two among many such in the corpus. Other motifs
common to
Njal's Saga
and other Sagas of Icelanders are the refusal
to sell (as in Ch. 47), the horse fight, the broken shoelace, quests for support,
dissemination of important information by itinerant women or other unnamed characters,
the use of spies, and, last but not least, the goading woman who incites a man, usually
a kinsman, to take blood vengeance for a slight to the family's honour. Such
common motifs, together with the time and place (Iceland in the tenth to eleventh
centuries), the subject matter (primarily feuds and their resolution), character types,
standardized descriptions of battles and feasts, common thematic concerns and the
general social setting, make the Sagas of Icelanders a homogeneous literary genre.