“Bare is the back of a brotherless man.” (Kari Solmundarsson)

This is to publicly certify that I have completed another re-reading of Njal’s Saga, from the Complete Sagas of the Icelanders collection. My chief take-away is that I didn’t remember it as well as I thought I did.

My faulty recollection revealed itself mostly in the fact that I forgot how complicated the whole thing was. In my first reading report, I named Hallgerd Long-legs as the chief villain. But she actually disappears about half-way through the story, after her husband Gunnar is killed. Two further major sections follow, with at least one further villain.

The first villain is the very strange character of Mord Valgardsson. He remains a figure of loathing in Iceland to this day; I read somewhere that one of the worst insults to an Icelander is to call him a “murderous Mord.” Mord delights in manipulating people into murder, playing both sides against the other. His motive for this behavior seems obscure. He’s just a bad guy.

Yet, ironically, when it comes time to prosecute the men who burned Njal and his family in their house, the injured parties pressure Mord into leading the prosecution – which he does quite effectively.

After the burning, there’s no clear villain anymore. The burners (one of them is Gunnar’s son) are painted negatively, except for their leader Flosi, an honorable man who seems remorseful and fatalistic. The great hero of this section is Kari Solmundarsson, a family friend who manages to escape the burning, and devotes himself thereafter to getting even. His attempt to prosecute ends in an epic battle at the Thing (an amusing element in that episode is one man who promises to keep his warriors on the sidelines, in order to intervene once the killings reach the limits of the plaintiffs’ ability to pay fines for them). After that, Kari takes the law into his own very capable hands, and the story proceeds to describe the experiences of some of the burners at the Battle of Clontarf, after which, eventually, both Flosi and Kari call an end to it after pilgrimages to Rome.

Among the points that struck me was a scene at the jarl’s hall in Orkney, shortly before Clontarf. Kari rushes in and kills a man before the jarl, in a scene suspiciously similar to the killing of Thore the Seal at Augvaldsness by Erling Skjalgsson’s nephew Asbjorn (which you may recall from my novel, King of Rogaland). It’s touches like this that make historians look askance at saga accounts.

I also noted with interest that in many of the fight scenes, a fighter’s weapon gets caught in a wooden shield, and the shield’s owner then twists the shield to disarm the man. This is a move much prized among Viking reenactors, and I’m happy to say that I accomplished it myself once. (Others have done it more; my reflexes aren’t very good.)

Also, the scenes of lawsuits at the Things involve a whole lot of Norse legalese, which is just as stilted and tedious as in the English/American tradition.

That covers it, I think. If I recall any more, I’ll post about it tomorrow.