Njal's Saga (5 page)

When we read that one of the leading godis in Iceland calls himself
‘a man of no importance' and renounces any form of redress for his
dead son, we are witnessing the complete antithesis of the old code of honour, in fact a
new kind of honour.

The two strains are neatly counterpointed in the feud between Hallgerd and
Bergthora in Chs. 35–45. On the one hand the two women act systematically
according to the code of feud, each killing giving the occasion for the next. On the
other hand their husbands, who would normally carry out blood revenge, make generous
offers of peace on each occasion.

How do these two strains relate to the Christian element in the saga? This
element is especially strong during and after the account of the Conversion in Chs.
100–105, although as early as Ch. 81 Kolskegg (Gunnar's brother) is
baptized in Denmark and becomes a Christian knight. Religious terms like
‘baptism', ‘preliminary baptism',
‘Mass', ‘the angel Michael',
‘responsibility before God' and ‘God is
merciful' begin to appear after Ch. 100, and at least three memorable
utterances catch the ear with their religious overtones: Hoskuld's dying words
‘May God help me and forgive you' (Ch. 111); Njal's
plangent cry over that same killing, ‘when I heard that he had been slain I
felt that the sweetest light of my eyes had been put out' (Ch. 122); and
Njal's words of comfort at the burning, ‘Have faith that God is
merciful, and that he will not let us burn both in this world and in the next'
(Ch. 129). The battle of Clontarf in the final chapters is pointedly fought between
pagan and Christian forces, and the Christian side wins.

At times the two sets of values, Christian and pagan, intersect in a way
that seems strange today. When Hildigunn goads Flosi by throwing Hoskuld's
blood-stained cloak over his shoulders, her words
combine Christian
imprecation with an appeal to Flosi's sense of honour: ‘In the name
of God and all good men I charge you, by all the powers of your Christ and by your
courage and manliness, to avenge all the wounds which he received in dying –
or else be an object of contempt to all men' (Ch. 116). A few lines after Njal
spoke the words of Christian comfort quoted above, he declines an offer of free exit
from the burning house with these words: ‘I will not leave, for I'm
an old man and hardly fit to avenge my sons, and I do not want to live in
shame.' It may be that in such conflations of Christian language and the code
of honour we see best how Christianity functions in this saga – not as
antithetical to pagan values but as complementary. Christianity did not at first condemn
the blood feud, and the noblest pagan virtues were consonant with Christian values.

There is a clear Christian presence in the saga, but the question is, does
it change anything? It has become common to regard the Conversion episode in Chapters
100–105 as marking a turning-point in the moral structure of the saga, whereby
the older, pagan ethic of heroism and pride is replaced by a new Christian ethic of
mildness and peace. Such a view is based on a false opposition between pagan and
Christian; it overlooks the fact that there are other pagan virtues than heroism and
pride, and that humility and a willingness to make peace are among them. Christianity
does not affect the values already existing in the saga, in Gunnar's and
Njal's moderation and love of peace, or in the young Hoskuld's
willingness to be content with the compensation paid for his father (Ch. 94). Those
values were there before the Conversion, and continue after it, though set in a changed
historical context. A Christian reading would have to judge Flosi's burning of
Bergthorshvol as a sin in the light of the martyr's death suffered by Njal.
The saga, however, treats the burning as a necessary but regrettable deed, and Flosi
emerges from it with honour. Nor does the coming of Christianity have any direct effect
on the course of events. The Christian elements in the saga are part of its historical
realism, of its rhetoric. After the Conversion in the year 1000 people are made to think
and speak in religious terms, and there is a new spirit in the land, but the events of
the saga follow their own course, quite unaffected by it.

The claim has also been made that it is their
pilgrimages to Rome and the absolution they received there that enable Kari and Flosi to
become reconciled at the end of the saga. The reconciliation comes
after
the
pilgrimages, to be sure, but it does not come
because of
them. The
reconciliation results from full and sufficient blood revenge, sheer exhaustion and the
mutual respect these two good men have long had for each other. The feud, the longest
and deadliest in any of the sagas, has simply run its course. What Kari demonstrates is
not the value of Christian absolution, but that the only way to end a feud for once and
for all is to carry out total vengeance.

The thirteenth-century author
of Njal's Saga
was a
Christian, looking back with respect at his pagan forebears and the time when
Christianity came to his country. He is not preaching a sermon, nor writing a
theological treatise, for he knows that the two systems are in many ways compatible. His
characters may convert, and acquire Christian rhetoric, but they do not change their
nature. Njal is the same man after the Conversion as before, and Hall and Hoskuld would
have been the same as they are had there been no Conversion.
Njal's
Saga
is secular literature.

Finally, a consideration of parallels and contrasts between the two main
parts of the saga, Gunnar's story and Njal's story, may help to
clarify the shape of the saga. In both sections a series of events growing out of feuds
lead to the hero's being attacked and killed at his own home, after which
revenge is exacted. The attack comes when a settlement for a major offence committed by
the hero's side is broken or rejected, leaving the way open for his enemies to
attack in force. In both stories Mord Valgardsson plots to bring about the
hero's downfall, which comes after two killings (of father and son) in the
same family. The contrasts between the two sections are instructive: burning the
besieged in his house, which was rejected as shameful in the attack on Gunnar, is the
tactic used in the attack on Bergthorshvol, and Hallgerd's betrayal is
counterpoised by
Bergthora's willingness to die with her
husband. The chief contrasts between the Gunnar story and the Njal story, however, are
in the nature of the narrative line and in dimension. Gunnar becomes entangled in a
series of clashes with different opponents – Otkel and his allies, Starkad and
Egil and their sons – who eventually join together to form an overwhelming
force against him. In Njal's story there is a single, straight plot line, from
the slaying of Thrain Sigfusson (and even before) to the burning. The other main
contrast is the greatly increased scale, which creates, in addition to the rhythm of
hopes raised and dashed, a sense of ever heavier seriousness. It may seem callous to
speak of Gunnar's feuds as trivial, since enmities are aroused and men are
killed, but in comparison to the immense gravity of the feud in the second part they
come off as petty stuff. The killing of the promising Thorgeir Otkelsson is regrettable;
the killing of the saintly Hoskuld Thrainsson is tragic. Forty men attack Hlidarendi; a
hundred (meaning a hundred and twenty in the old sense of ‘hundred')
attack Bergthorshvol. After his death Gunnar sings in his mound like a bold pagan. The
pathos of the deaths of Hoskuld and of Njal and his family, heightened by Christian
overtones, is unmatched by anything in the first part of the saga. The vengeance for
Gunnar occupies one chapter and falls on four men; for Njal it occupies twenty-seven
chapters and some thirty men die. Gunnar's chief enemies were shallow men,
though they dragged some prominent figures along with them. Njal's chief
enemies include, with good reason, some of the best men in Iceland.
Njal's
Saga
is a large and ponderous saga, and especially the second half shows how
massive the effects of human folly – and how ineffective human intelligence
– can be.

This introduction has been drafted in a rented cottage at
Brekkuskógur in Biskupstunga in the south-west of Iceland, just short of the
rim of the uninhabited central highland, about ten kilometres from the hot springs at
Geysir. Two kilometres north of Geysir is Haukadal,
where
Thangbrand baptized Hall Thorarinsson (see Ch. 102), and where Ari Thorgilsson (author
of
The Book of Icelanders
) spent his formative years in the late eleventh
century. Two or three kilometres from where I sit, up the road towards Geysir, is the
still-working farm Hlid (now called Uthlid), to which Geir the Godi
‘retired' when he left our saga in Ch. 80.

Looking south-east from my veranda I see the steam rising from Reykir (the
name means ‘steams') five kilometres away, just as it rose a
thousand years ago when the forces of Thorgeir Skorargeir and Mord Valgardsson met with
Asgrim Ellida-Grimsson to ride together to the momentous Althing (Ch. 137). In that
chapter it is reported that they first crossed the Bruara (‘Bridge
river'), and indeed the river at that point (width 25 metres, current swift)
shows me that this was a detail worth mentioning, just as the impressive columns of
steam would have made Reykir a natural meeting place. Looking beyond Reykir, twelve
kilometres further on from where I sit rises the mountain of Mosfell, which gave its
name to the farm at its southern foot where Gizur the White lived. And although an
intervening rise prevents me from seeing it, I know that four kilometres south of
Mosfell is Tunga, Asgrim Ellida-Grimsson's farm on the river Hvita. With such
abundant, palpable evidence to hand it is not surprising that generations of Icelanders
regarded the sagas as literally true. Is there any literature as firmly anchored to
geographical reality, not to mention socio-historic reality, as the Icelandic sagas?

Fortunately, enjoying this saga to the full does not require having
Icelandic blood or having trod the saga sites. In fact it can be misleading to know the
sites, and an advantage not to know them. The alert reader will have noticed how, in my
musings in the previous paragraph, I was beginning to think that Asgrim and Thorgeir
really met at Reykir with their combined forces, and that Geir the Godi –
though we can be fairly certain he lived at Hlid – in fact did the things the
saga says he did. The reader should not be seduced by the dry, factual prose style and
the convincing social and geographical setting into thinking that this is anything other
than a masterful work of prose fiction.

The Story of Burnt Njal
, translated by George Webbe Dasent
(Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1861); reprinted in Everyman's Library,
1911; reissued in 1957 with an introduction by E. O. G. Turville-Petre.

Njál's Saga
, translated by Carl F.
Bayerschmidt and Lee M. Hollander (New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation,
1955); this translation has been reprinted, with an introduction by Thorsteinn Gylfason,
by Wordsworth Editions Limited (1998).

Njal's Saga
, translated by Magnus Magnusson and
Hermann Pálsson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, i960).

Njal's Saga
, translated by Robert Cook, in
Viðar Hreinsson
et al
. (eds.)
The Complete Sagas of
Icelanders
(
Including
49
Tales
), 5 volumes
(Reykjavík; Leifur Eiríksson, 1997), III, 1–220; an earlier
version of the present translation.

Ari Thorgilsson,
The Book of the Icelanders
, translated in
Gwyn Jones,
The Norse Atlantic Saga
, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986), pp. 143–55.

The Book of Settlements;
some passages in the above; a
translation of one version by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (Winnipeg:
University of Manitoba Press, 1972).

Laws of Early Iceland.
Grágás I-II
, translated by Andrew Dennis, Peter Foote and
Richard Perkins (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1980 and 2000).

The Sagas of Icelanders
, with an introduction by Robert
Kellogg, includes the following: Egil's Saga; The saga of the People of
Vatnsdal; The Saga of the People of Laxardal; The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey's
Godi; The Saga of the Confederates; Gisli Sursson's Saga; The Saga of Gunnlaug
Serpent-tongue; The Saga of Ref the Sly; The Vinland Sagas, (the Saga of the
Greenlanders and Eirik the Red's Saga); and seven Tales (Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 2000).

Andersson, Theodore M.,
The Problem of Icelandic Saga
Origins
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964).

—— ‘The Textual Evidence for an Oral
Family Saga',
Arkiv for nordisk filologi
, 81 (1966),
1–23.

——, ‘The Displacement of the Heroic
Ideal in the Family Sagas',
Speculum
, 45 (1970),
575–93.

Kellogg, Robert, and Scholes, Robert,
The Nature of
Narrative
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).

Ker, W. P,
Epic and Romance
(London: Macmillan, 1897).

Miller, William Ian,
Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and
Society in Saga Iceland
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

Nordal, Sigurdur, ‘The Historical Element in the Icelandic
Family Sagas', W P. Ker Memorial Lectures, 15 (Glasgow, 1957).

Ólason, Vésteinn,
Dialogues with the Viking
Age: Narration and Represen tation in the Sagas of the Icelanders
, translated
by Andrew Wawn (Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 1998).