Njal's Saga Read Free

Fair-hair, but it embodies the historical legend by including two of the principal
     events – the Conversion (Chs. 100–105) and the establishment of the
     Fifth Court (Ch. 97) – and by incorporating, as do most of the family sagas,
     the detailed genealogies common to the genre of historical writings. Ari Thorgilsson
     mentions an earlier, expanded version of his short book, which contained
     ‘Genealogies and Lives of the Kings’, and there is other evidence
     that written genealogies were among the earliest secular writings in Iceland. Whether
     written or simply preserved in oral family tradition, a knowledge of one’s
     ancestors and of the kinship relations of prominent figures was built into the
     consciousness of every Icelander.
Njála
begins by mentioning Mord
     Gigja and his father Sighvat the Red (his grandfather, according to
The Book of
     Settlements
). The next person introduced is Hoskuld Dala-Kolsson, and his line
     is traced back through his mother to a prominent female settler in the west of Iceland,
     Unn the Deep-minded. The text does not specify that Sighvat and Unn were settlers
     – this is not necessary, for the audience of the saga would have known this.
     Genealogies usually appear in the sagas when a character is introduced, often in
     combination with an insightful description.
    Tracing of family lines goes forward as well as backward. The
     twelfth-century Icelandic historian, Saemund Sigfusson the Learned, is mentioned in
Njal’s Saga
as a descendant of Ulf Aur-godi (Ch. 25) and also of
     Sigfus Ellida-Grimsson (Ch. 26). Gizur the White’s son Isleif, mentioned in
     Ch. 46, became the first bishop of Iceland in 1056, and the audience would have known
     that Isleif’s son was the influential Bishop Gizur who introduced the tithe to
     Iceland. In the fullest genealogy in the saga, that given for Gudmund the Powerful in
     Ch. 113, his line is traced not only to Bishop Ketil (d. 1145) but to the prominent
     thirteenth-century families of the Sturlungs and the people of Hvamm. The abundant
     genealogies, not to mention theabundance of characters, must have
     made
Njála
a rich shared experience for thirteenth-century Icelanders,
     most of whom could trace their ancestry back to at least one of the four hundred
     settlers and to other persons named in this and other sagas.
    In this sense, the modern reader – unless he is an Icelander who
     can trace his lineage for a thousand years (as many can) – is an outsider,
     unable to share fully in the personal excitement of reading about one’s family
     past and one’s national past. There is no disadvantage, however, if the reader
     is prepared to understand sympathetically the historical background just described and
     what it must have meant to the men and women who wrote and read or listened to these
     sagas in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is well documented that the
     thirteenth century in Iceland was an ugly and troubled time, virtually a period of civil
     war, with large-scale battles, with power falling into fewer and fewer hands (instead of
     being distributed among the thirty-nine godis) and with interference from Norway in both
     secular and ecclesiastical affairs. The resolution of this turmoil was submission to
     Norwegian rule in the year 1262, and it was seven centuries before the Icelanders became
     an independent nation again, in 1944. Whether written before 1262 or after (like
Njal’s Saga
), the sagas were written partly out of a need to
     affirm identity, both personal and national, with the past, a time when their ancestors
     fled Norwegian tyranny – rather than succumb to it – and built up a
     new society free of monarchical rule and governed by laws and institutions that
     functioned with dignity, if not without bloodshed.
THE SAGA
    We have seen that the author
of Njal’s Saga
worked
     with traditional materials, oral tales of historical (and