[Njal said:] “Never kill more than once within the same bloodline, and never break any settlement which good men make between you and others, least of all if you have broken my first warning.”
Still working on reading Njal’s Saga, yet another time. As I write, I’m now approaching Gunnar’s last stand, and I’m not even half-way through the story.
Impressions – yesterday I commented on the way fate lies heavy on all the characters here. No major player goes to his death without someone handy (Njal himself excels at this) to tell him plainly that if he goes ahead and does what he’s about to do, it will end in his death. In each case, the character says he understands, but he’s going to do it anyway. He seems to be, as some other sagas like to say, “fey,” which does not mean effeminate here, but deceived by faery powers, helplessly doomed.
In Njal’s Saga, this business of recognizing fate while still ignoring it rises at one point to what we might today describe as “meta.” One of the hero Gunnar’s enemies is aware of Njal’s warning/prophecy, quoted at the top of this post. So he proposes to a co-conspirator that he bring a cousin along the next time they attack Gunnar. This is because Gunnar has already killed one of his relatives, so if he kills the second one, he’ll trip the wire on his doom. (The loss of a cousin is apparently considered an acceptable sacrifice.)
That’s kind of remarkable as a literary device. It’s almost like breaking the proscenium, as if at the end of a mystery play, the butler is shown to be the killer, and he turns to the audience and says, “Curses! I was sure the cliché would prevent anyone suspecting me!”
Yet, oddly, this heavy-handed fatalism, which you’d think would spoil the story, does not. Rather, it makes it fascinating, like watching a house fire or a train wreck.
Njal’s Saga is believed to have been written about 300 years after the events it describes. We know that the author was a Christian, and I wonder what he thought about this heathen fatalism. Did he believe in free will himself? Did he think that his ancestors, before their conversion to Christianity, were bound in slavery to the devil, and therefore doomed?
Just thinking out loud (or, rather, visibly) here. I’ll keep you posted as I continue reading.
What an exciting contribution to the New Year – thanks for the first two, and looking forward to more!
What illustrations, too!
That penultimate paragraph is quite the question: I keep coming back to it with Tolkien as Old English scholar – his great Beowulf lecture, especially – and as fiction-writer in his imagining of early human history apart from revelation. Now I’m thinking I should look up how much ‘we’ know about how much Old Norse he read in translation and how soon he learnt Old Norse as a young man (on this the 134th anniversary of his birth).