“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.

[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 I don’t know,” said Gunnar, “is whether I am less manly than other men because killing troubles me more than it does other men.” (Njal’s Saga, Ch. 55)

Happy New Year. I have spent the day, as you’d expect, pretty quietly, though I did make about an inch of progress on my Haakon the Good book. About two hours of reading through my notes culminated in the extrusion of about eight lines of text.

And I’m reading Njal’s Saga, for the umpty-tenth time. It’s not only a long saga, but a very complex one. I keep discovering things in it, partly because I forget so many of the details between readings. Two facts (or opinions) strike me this time around, so far.

First of all, the author’s perspective matters a lot. I can imagine telling this story from a different point of view, making Gunnar and Njal, the traditional heroes, into villains.

Both of them are portrayed as peace-loving men whom fate has marked for tragedy. But in their first act together as friends, they combine to pull a sharp legal trick. Following Njal’s advice, Gunnar goes in disguise to his opponent’s house and tricks him into reciting a legal formula in front of witnesses, which sets the man up for prosecution at the Thing. At the Thing, Gunnar takes full advantage of the situation to win his lawsuit.

The second fact I noted was that, though we’re always told that Gunnar and Njal are the saga’s heroes, the true central figure of the story, the one person who binds it all together, is Gunnar’s wife, Hallgerd, whose nickname is “Long-legs.” She’s one of the archetypal Dangerous Dames, a forerunner to Lizabeth Scott and Barbara Stanwick.

We first meet Hallgerd as a little girl, when her father proudly introduces her to his brother, then asks his brother whether she isn’t very beautiful. The brother concedes that she is, but says, ominously, “I don’t know how thief’s eyes came into our family.”

Hallgerd’s great vice is that she’s a thief. She manipulates several men into committing murders for her, but that’s not considered all that shameful. Such behavior is common in the sagas, and the women seem to be relatively admired for it.

But when Gunnar discovers that Hallgerd has stolen (or ordered a slave to steal) food during a time of famine, and strikes her for it, then his doom is sealed. She vows to get revenge for that slap – someday. Her vengeance will be served very cold, but very effectively, in one of the most memorable scenes in any saga.

We’re in an alien moral landscape here. Being guilty of murder may entail legal difficulties, but it’s not considered shameful. Murder is a dangerous activity, usually requiring courage. So it’s honorable, except in certain particular situations.

But stealing is always shameful. It’s furtive and secretive by its nature. Stealing is an activity suited to slaves and poor people. So theft, though a lesser crime, incurs greater shame. And being shamed is the worst thing that can happen to anybody.

I might also mention that the useful literary device of “foreshadowing” is employed heavily here. Whenever anybody makes a particularly disastrous decision, there’s almost always somebody nearby to prophecy that they’ll come to regret it. They’re always right, of course, because the saga world resembles, but is not identical to, the real world. Like all great literature, it illuminates.