Njal's Saga by Anonymous Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
Further Reading
Translations into English
    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.
Other Primary Sources in 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).
General Criticism of the Sagas of Icelanders
    Andersson, Theodore M.,
The Problem of Icelandic Saga
     Origins
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964).
    â€”— ‘The Textual Evidence for an Oral
     Family Saga’,
Arkiv for nordisk filologi
, 81 (1966),
     1–23.
    â€”—, ‘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