Njal's Saga by Anonymous Read Free Book Online

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 byBergthora’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.
POSTSCRIPT
    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