Njal's Saga

Last year I read the Penguin Classics edition of The Orkneya Saga and this year I’m back for more. Njal’s saga is said to be the best of a large body of Icelandic sagas. The very helpful introduction and notes place it in Iceland in about 1000CE. We are told that some of it is historic, in that there are references to historic events, such as the Battle of Clontarf between the Irish and Vikings in 1014. It is also historic in that the culture and events generally reflect what is known of Icelandic culture and society at the time. Thus, although some characters seem to have a mild version of a gift of prophecy, there are no superheroes or mythical creatures or miraculous events. Even that gift of prophecy seems more like an ability to predict a future event based on past behaviour and other rational criteria. Njal is a farmer, a good man who gives good advice and is held in high esteem in his community. However, he finds himself mixed up in a feud that lasts for several decades. It’s no plot spoiler to say that his death by burning in his own farmhouse is shocking and avoidable. Njal is a product of a society in a state of profound transition – from pagan to Christian, from nomadic to settled, from marauding warriors hungry for plunder to farmers counting their sheep. There is a lot of violence, mainly due to the feud involving Njal’s family that lasts for years and involves an ever-widening network of blood relatives, in-laws and foster-children. The descriptions of fights are often shocking and very different from the kind of Viking battles you see on the streaming channels. Armed encounters are short and vicious and often result in a lopped off limb or head. One feature that surprises, though, is the sense of an evolving legalistic culture where clever words and a knowledge of legal precedents and statutes are at least as valuable as skills with sword and spear. For example, A can murder B but, given that murder is not automatically a capital offence, A can go to court and offer compensation to B’s family in the form of farm animals or bolts of cloth. Even better, if A finds the right clever clogs, he can get the latter to argue that the court hearing the case has no jurisdiction because it has the wrong number of jurors. Case closed. On that point, a big event in the saga, amidst the catalogue of slayings and burnings, is the founding of some kind of national court of appeal in Iceland in the early 11th century. I’ve watched several dramas set in this era in recent years (Vikings, Saxons, etc.). They generally give women a range of roles from servants and concubines to warriors and leaders. There are no female warriors or leaders in this saga. Here women can be influential in the domestic sphere, and indeed the feud in this saga is largely stoked by a malevolent woman, but they take no part in the battles, the law courts or the annual assemblies. That is all men’s work. The translation in this edition dates from 1997 and is a compulsive read. As with most Penguin Classics editions, there is a very useful introduction and notes, some maps and family tress and a glossary. I would recommend it to anyone interested in medieval history who wants to know what the Vikings were really like.

À l’époque des sagas islandaises, il y avait un triangle de relations entre la Norvège, l’Angleterre et l’Islande elle-même. On faisait du commerce, on se battait les uns contre les autres et l’on partait en expéditions de razzias… où l’on devenait alors des Vikings. Ces guerriers revenaient chez eux et se remettaient gentiment à la pratique de l’agriculture et du commerce. Les Islandais s’étaient très tôt convertis au christianisme…dans l’espoir d’adoucir leurs mœurs!

Wer Island liebt, sollte auf jeden Fall auch mal einen Blick in die isländischen Sagen hineinwerfen. Diese Ausgabe ist sehr ausführlich. Mit vielen zusätzlichen Kommentaren und Anmerkungen.

A masterpiece of Medieval literature. If you are into anticuarian writing, this book certainly is for you. The Pinguin Classic edition is also quite good. The end notes are very helpful because they provide historical and anthopological information to complete the story's social picture. To make the long story short, what starts as a simple and apparently frivolous dispute among neighbors' wives, grows small step by small step into a full scale civil war. Great characters, subtle details, tragic conflict, Njal's Saga is one of the best things I've ever read in my life.

I recently became interested in Norse mythology, and after acquiring a number of books on the subject my interest spilled over into Norse, particularly Icelandic, sagas. I bought the hefty Penguin "The Sagas of Icelanders", and since all the reviewers for it lamented the exclusion (understandably, for space reasons) of Njal's Saga, I bought that separately, and I've just finished reading it. I bought this translation, Cook's. There seemed to be two main choices, this or Magnus Magnusson's, and I noticed a few reviewers quite bluntly trashing Cook's translation, promoting Magnus's instead. I decided to start with Cook's anyway, figuring that, even if it was inferior to Magnusson's, I wouldn't know what I was missing, since I hadn't yet read Magusson's. Admittedly, I still haven't read Magnusson's translation, but I enjoyed Cook's translation very much and did not by any means think of it as lacking. In fact, in Cook's notes on the translation presented in the book, he explains his motivation and justification for translating the saga the way he did, in a way that seems to anticipate the disfavor of his translation by loyal Magnusson fans: "[This translation] differs from previous translations of Njal's Saga...in attempting to duplicate the sentence structure and spare vocabulary of the Icelandic text." After giving a few examples of the stylistic eccentricities in which the saga was originally written and demonstrating how he attempted to reproduce them in his translation--even contrasting an excerpt of Magnusson's translation with his own--he goes on to say: "It is hoped that the reader of this translation will accept--and even learn to enjoy--these and other efforts at fidelity, though they may seem strange at first. The intent has been to create a translation with the stylistic "feel" of the Icelandic original." Clearly, Cook did not set out to create a dry, inferior translation; rather he set out to create a more stylistically faithful translation, even if it meant sacrificing some of the flare and drama to which we as modern readers are accustomed. Regarding the story itself...what can one say? There is something immensely powerful about reading a piece of literature that was written over seven centuries ago and discovering that its author and the people about whom he wrote had many of the same thoughts, feelings, and problems that we do today. When a character responds emotionally to a situation, or feels frustrated because of a moral dilemma, we can still, despite the vast chasm of time separating us, so easily relate to him or her. Even the author's humor and wit are delightfully close to home. Stories such as Njal's Saga remind us that people from long ago and far away are just that: people. Just like us. In a popular culture that has a tendency to glorify the ephemeral, trendy Here and Now, it's a fact that's easy to forget.