Blood feuds are defined by cultural anthropologists as a means for avenging the crime of murder; when one family members gets killed, their family has the right to kill one member from the enemy family in retaliation. Theoretically, a blood feud can continue on for eternity just as long as people on opposing sides continue to have children. Most likely, the two sides of this small-scale warfare will get tired of murdering one another and agree to a truce. Anthropologists claim that blood feuds are a characteristic means of administering justice in societies with weak or no law enforcement or in places without strong centralized governments that are able to maintain stability. Extensive studies of blood feuds have been done in less developed countries like Albania and Montenegro, within gangs and organized crime families, and in the American frontier before the Civil War. One of America’s most famous blood feuds involved the Hatfield and McCoy families in the Appalachians before effective government was established in that region.
Njal’s Saga is a 13th century account of an Icelandic blood feud that lasted for more than fifty years. It grew to larger proportions until it blew up into wholesale slaughter and the burning down of entire family estates. It is a cold and brutal book with little mercy in it for the characters of the story or for the reader. Its stark depiction of murder and warfare leave little to the imagination; if this is meant to be a moral tale, it may be a failure since no definite ethical stance is articulated, yet if the reader wants to draw their own conclusions, there is plenty of information to work with.
Njal appears to be the pivotal figure of the saga, but just barely. His character grows as he advises his friend, the heroic and upright Gunnar, on how to strategize legally and in battle. Njal is a type of lawyer who knows the Icelandic laws inside and out and serves his community by advising people about their rights. He also has the gift of prophecy so he can he can see the future and give council to those who need it for their battles. Like the witches in Macbeth, he serves a literary function because his prophecies provide a narrative foreshadowing, helping to build tension within the story. But Njal is barely the central figure of the saga because he never participates in violence and actually dies three-quarters of the way through the story. With a little tweaking, this could have worked to good effect in the story-telling because without his foreshadowing, the reader gets set adrift in the text without a map for guidance which might function well in adding an element of unpredictability and suspense. But actually it doesn’t work simply because the events towards the end of the book are not especially different from anything that happens in the beginning or the middle of the book. This was written without the self-consciousness of modern authors or editors, so the anonymous person or people who wrote Njal’s Saga can be forgiven if they don’t live up to current standards.
The other characters are roughly interchangeably versions of each other. One thing to note though is that the Icelandic families tend towards stability and harmony until some character introduces an element of chaos that leads to the resumption of the blood feuds In a similar way, Loki causes chaos in the Norse mythology of the Eddas. One such character is Hildegun, a spiteful woman who marries three different men and often sets them at each other’s throats with her antagonism. There are other Iago-types throughout the whole saga.
There are three main stages of action: the homesteads, the battlefields, and the Althing. The latter is a centralized location at a large rock beside a river where the Icelandic people hold court to settle legal disputes democratically and diplomatically with voters, judges, lawyers, and jury. Every small battle ends with judgment at the Althing; some are settled with money in exchange for corpses, other legal consequences are neutralized, canceling each other out when a life is taken for a life. After the Althing, everybody returns home and goes back to living as usual until the feud begins again.
The homesteads are where people conduct their lives, mostly involving farming and planning for marriages and future battles. Ambushes on or near the homesteads usually reignite the fighting. The people don’t do much for fun at home. One passage describes a recreational horse fight in which Gunnar’s prize stallion gets its eye gouged out so that the horse has to be euthanized.
Of course, it is the battlefields where all the important action takes place. The violence isn’t any more pleasant the aforementioned horse fight. There are no punches pulled in the descriptions when the Icelandic posse comitatuses gather to kill. Legs are lobbed off, heads get severed, bodies get eviscerated and left in piles of blood, guts, and gore. The descriptions are not quite as graphic as those in The Iliad, but anybody with an ounce of morbid imagination will clearly see what is going on. In one crucial scene, an entire family gets roasted to death when marauders burn their house to the ground. The lack of empathy in this saga makes the Icelandic people look like an entire society of psychopaths, caught in an unrelentingly cycle like Sisyphus but with far more brutality.
As was mentioned before, the anonymous author(s) of Njal’s Saga offers no commentary or explanation as to what any of this means. With a bit of deductive reasoning, you might find a few things to take away on your own if you make the effort. One is that respect for law and government, however evasive those institutions might be, are necessary to prevent a society from self-destruction. Without the Althing to even out scores in a rational and civilized manner, medieval Icelandic society could very well have engaged in never-ending warfare until everybody was dead. As ineffective as Icelandic law might have been, at least it put some temporary brakes on the blood feuds. Another subtle message you might get is that absolute loyalty to blood and soil can lead to little more than death when taken to an extreme. If the cycle of retaliatory killings continues on for too long, no one will be left in the end and, by that standard, honor makes life absurd if it is taken as the ultimate and only virtue. Honor can be ridiculous anyways since it means that petty jealousy, spitefulness, or even name calling can result in skirmishes that end with a pile of cadavers waiting to be eaten by vultures and wild dogs. On the same note, Njal prophesied that Gunnar would die if he did not leave his homestead, but Gunnar was unable to force himself to move away because he loved his family and home so much. The result was that the prophecy came true and he got killed. He would have survived to old age if he had not been so stubbornly loyal. Finally, in terms of this text, Christianity did nothing to make the Icelandic people improve their lives. When the missionaries bring Christianity to the island, everybody is forced by law to convert, but then they continue on slaughtering each other as if nothing had actually happened. If anything, the religion makes them even more inhumane because they believe that praying in church makes them superior to the Pagans which further justifies their belief that they have a right to kill their “inferiors”; God will forgive them for any wickedness so they might as well just keep up the bloodshed. The Christians certainly aren’t any more moral than before their conversion since they learn absolutely nothing about theology anyways. They just pray their guilt away and continue living like barbarians. This, by no means, can be taken as a full evaluation of how Christianity effected Iceland since Njal’s Saga is a story and was never intended to be a thorough examination of that particular historical advent.
Njal’s Saga is written with sparse language in a no-fills register. The language is economical to an exreme. This makes it highly accessible, but if you are not used to reading long passages with brief sentences, it takes some getting used to at first. On the sentence-length and descriptiveness spectrum, it is much closer to the Hemingway end than it is to Joyce at the other extreme. The biggest problem with the book is its repetition. The same cycle of life on the homestead being disrupted, leading to bloody warfare with the conflict resolving itself at the Althing is repeated from beginning to end. Ther are only minor variations in detail from battle to battle. If the story were any longer, reading more than half of it would be a waste of time.
Reading Njal’s Saga is a lot like following a thread in Celtic knotwork in which you can find no beginning and no end, repeating itself eternally like the Liffey in Finnegans Wake, if you have what it takes to find any sense in that novel. The medieval Icelandic people fight blood feuds as if that is all they ever did and it is all they ever will do. With temporal and historical distance, it is obvious that isn’t true, but you can get the sense that is how it felt to live in that time and place. Njal’s Saga is an interesting read despite its repetition and if you approach it as a reader the way an Icelandic warrior approached combat, with fierce determination, strength, alertness, and a sense of being loyal enough to see it through to the end, you can get a valuable literary experience out of it. With a little luck, you probably won’t get killed at the end either.
No comments:
Post a Comment