From Small Beginnings

Among the very few lectures my busy schedule allowed me to attend during my years at university, and almost the only ones that have left recoverable traces in my memory, are those which Christopher Tolkien (son of J. R. R.) devoted to his brilliant retellings of the Norse sagas. He held large audiences spellbound with his stories of the Völsungs and the Nibelungs, of Sigmund, slain in battle by the god Odin, of Sigurd Fafnir’s-bane, of Gudrun and Brynhild, of Andvari’s gold-hoard, and of the smith Regin, reforger of the sword Gram.

I was as spellbound as anybody and already an enthusiast since schooldays for The Lord of the Rings. So these myths from the frosty north struck a powerful chord in me, and when in 1960 a volume bearing the title Njal’s Saga appeared in the Penguin Classics series, I fell on it eagerly. I was in for a surprise. No gods, no dragons, no gold-hoards, no reforged swords. Instead – what? An everyday story of country folk. But what folk! And what a country! In bald terms, the Icelandic sagas, of which Njal’s Saga is by common consent the finest exemplar, recount the actions and fortunes of the island’s early settlers. Collectively they form a hugely impressive body of work. Among them, Njal’s Saga owes its pre-eminence to its literary artistry and to the fact that, while the majority of the sagas are straightforwardly chronological accounts, Njal’s Saga has the literary structure, psychological insight and moral seriousness of a Shakespearean tragedy. The author is unknown to us but the work can be dated to the last quarter of the fourteenth century, which would make him a contemporary of Chaucer. The action, however, is set around the year 1000, mainly in Iceland, but with excursions to Ireland, Wales, Orkney, Norway, Denmark, Scotland and the eastern Baltic (a reminder that the sea was these people’s backyard and that, though they were basically farmers, the land was poor, so seaborne raiding and trading were a common – even a necessary – sideline). The saga centres on two Icelandic families and recounts a feud between them which, from small beginnings, spins out of control and escalates until both families are utterly destroyed. Their respective heads, Njal and Gunnar, are firm friends, both comfortably off, both widely respected. Their friendship never wavers, but by itself it is not enough to prevent the unfolding tragedy. The causes of the feud are unspectacular: spite, petty jealousy, a disputed dowry, a casual insult, Gunnar’s malicious and manipulative wife, the inability of Skarp-Hedin, Njal’s eldest son, to keep his temper. But trivial character flaws and run-of-the-mill human weaknesses can have terrible effects, especially in a society where disagreements regularly end in bloodshed. The only way of mitigating this propensity for violence lay in recourse to the law, which provided that a killing could be atoned for by the payment of compensation. And it is to the law that Njal (an expert in the field) and Gunnar turn with each violent death among the outlying members of their respective families. But however hard they try, they cannot halt the cycle of violence. The climax is reached when first Gunnar and then Njal are besieged and killed in their own homes. Gunnar, a famous bowman, keeps his attackers at bay until his bowstring breaks. He asks his wife Hallgerd for a lock of her hair to make a new bowstring and, when she coolly refuses on the ground that Gunnar once slapped her, he is overwhelmed and slain. Njal and his wife and sons perish when they are trapped by their enemies inside their burning home. The sole survivor of the burning is Njal’s son-in-law Kari, who manages to escape from the house in the smoke and confusion, and on him now falls the duty of exacting restitution. At the Althing, where disputes and feuds are (in theory, at least) settled by legal mediation, Kari, as is his right, refuses to accept the compensation offered by the Burners. Instead he confronts and kills them one by one, even tracking them abroad to Orkney and then Wales. Finally only Flosi, the leader of the Burners, is left, and the story comes to its end when Kari, returning to Iceland, is shipwrecked on arrival. What happens next is as moving as it is surprising.

It was snowing hard. His men asked Kari what they should do now. Kari replied that his advice was to go to Svinafell and put Flosi’s nobility to the test. They walked to Svinafell through the snowstorm. Flosi was in the hall. He recognized Kari at once and jumped up to welcome him; he embraced him and placed him on the high-seat by his side. He invited Kari to stay for the winter, and Kari accepted.

They made a full reconciliation.

Surprising? Yes, in Hollywood terms, in which the hero must always be the last man standing, with the last enemy dead at his feet. But in terms of medieval Icelandic society, not surprising at all. The reconciliation rests on an unspoken acknowledgement between the two men that both have acted honourably throughout. Both are ruled by a code based on an absolute duty of loyalty – to family, clan or war leader. As long as a man never swerves from this duty, honour, a man’s most precious possession, is preserved, and only his cowardice, treachery or a broken promise can rob him of it. The sagas show us, in intimate detail, a self-governing agricultural frontier society in which hard men support themselves and their families in an unforgiving environment. Throughout there runs a common thread – the unending and often bloody contest between law on the one hand and personal violence on the other. This is a story with which we are all in a sense familiar. The struggles of the Icelandic settlers to maintain an orderly, rule-bound community mirror precisely the conditions which obtained during the settlement of the American West, conditions which inform the basic plot-line of almost every Hollywood Western ever made. Even the style is familiar. The characters all talk like Randolph Scott: that is, they say exactly as much as the situation requires and not one word more. The narrative style, too, is brilliantly laconic, almost biblical, with a clarity that comes from a total lack of superfluous detail. If we are told, for example, ‘Thorkel was sitting on his bed and his axe was leaning against the wall by the door’, then we can be sure that something is about to happen in which the relative positions of Thorkel and his axe will have their part to play. And here the narrator shows his literary cunning: by telling us about Thorkel and the axe, he has not only raised our expectations but in doing so he has also increased the tension. A second tension-raising device lies in the tendency of the characters to foresee coming harm. Njal in particular has this gift of foresight. Every time one or other of the actors commits or proposes some rash deed or plan, it is Njal who accurately predicts the outcome. Yet, as with the witches in Macbeth, what he foresees he cannot forestall, and this fact adds an air of tragic inevitability to the unfolding of the story. Ever since my first delighted discovery of the Icelandic sagas all those years ago I have been beating the drum for the story of Njal and his friend Gunnar, thrusting copies of the book into the hands of likely converts. If this little testimony to the excellence of the tale wins it a few more admirers, I shall be more than happy.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 39 © Roger Jones 2013