The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Anonymous · a saga of Icelanders in Old Icelandic prose with skaldic verses · 159 chapters in the standard text · composed in Iceland about 1275 to 1290 · scored on the Old Icelandic in Einar Ól. Sveinsson’s edition, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Old Icelandic quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own close English beneath, and Cook’s translation and Magnusson and Pálsson’s for sense
Mode
Saga of Icelanders: family history, lawsuit and tragedy in plain prose, with skaldic verses set in it
Mythos
The feud as doom; prophecy that is always paid; the hero who will not leave his land, the wise man who cannot save his house, the goading woman, the burning
Phase
From Hrútr’s marriage and the child Hallgerðr, about 960, through Gunnarr’s death and the burning of Njáll, to Clontarf in 1014 and the reconciliation of Kári and Flosi: some fifty years and three generations
Presentation
Prose in 159 chapters in the standard edition, with verses and the Darraðarljóð; the longest of the sagas of Icelanders, composed some ten to twenty years after the Commonwealth submitted to the Norwegian crown
Register
The plain saga style: deeds, speech and faces, genealogy and procedure, understatement throughout, with skaldic verse at the turns
Scale
Two households and their neighbours, the Althing and its courts, the conversion of Iceland, and a reach to Norway, Orkney, Ireland and Rome
Governing Proposition
Two households in the south of Iceland are drawn, slight by slight and killing by killing, into a feud that the wisest man in the land foresees and cannot stop, until his enemies burn him in his house with his wife and sons. The wager of the saga is that a society with law and no power to enforce it can be shown entire through what its people do and say in public, and that the law, its one common power, can be turned into a weapon and still be the only thing that might hold the land.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The saga opens a generation before its hero, with Hrútr and the young Hallgerðr. Hrútr looks at the child and gives his sentence on her in one word: “þjófsaugu”
“thief’s eyes.” Nothing is said of what he means, and nothing needs to be: the word is the first doom in a book built of dooms, and every later scene with Hallgerðr will be read against it. The saga moves on to Hrútr’s own marriage to Unnr, left unconsummated under a queen’s curse, and to the divorce of Unnr from Hrútr, a near-comic legal matter of procedure. The prologue is a lawsuit and a word, and the rest of the book will pay for both.
Hallgerðr will be given in marriage three times against her will, and the saga does not say whether the eyes Hrútr saw are her nature or her fate. Here, at the start, the saga sets its way of telling. It reports only what a witness could have seen and heard: who came, who spoke, what was said, a face, a silence. Each new figure enters with his kin, because in this world a man is first his place in a web of obligation. What anyone thinks the reader must infer, as the people in the saga must, and the inference is the drama.
The saga was written in Iceland, most probably in the south, about 1275 to 1290, some ten to twenty years after the Commonwealth submitted to the Norwegian crown (1262 to 1264), in the years of the new royal law codes, Járnsíða (1271) and Jónsbók (1281). It tells of the half-century from about 960 to after 1014, across three generations. In the standard edition it runs to 159 chapters, the longest of the sagas of Icelanders, with skaldic verses set into the prose. It falls into four parts: the prologue of Hrútr, Unnr and Hallgerðr; the story of Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi to his death and its vengeance; Njáll and his sons to the burning; and the lawsuit, the vengeance of Kári, Clontarf and the reconciliation.
Movement II
Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi is the hero of the first story, and his friend is Njáll of Bergþórshvoll, a lawyer of genius with the gift of second sight. Gunnarr’s marriage to Hallgerðr joins the two stories. Between Hallgerðr and Bergþóra, Njáll’s wife, a feud begins that is fought servant for servant: a thrall killed, then a freedman, then a foster-father, then a kinsman, each step a little higher than the last, while the two husbands keep their friendship. It is a small engine, and the whole saga runs on it. The escalation is exact, and it shows in miniature what the book will show at large: a slight answered in kind becomes a chain.
Then a famine, and a theft from Otkell at Kirkjubær, and the quarrels that begin Gunnarr’s ruin. Njáll counsels him, and foresees what will come if Gunnarr breaks the terms of the exile laid on him. On the way into exile his horse stumbles, and he looks back at his farm: “Fögr er hlíðin”
“Fair is the slope.” He will not go. He turns home. The forecast has been spoken, and the saga has only to pay it. The hero who will not leave his land is an archetype, and here it is a man on a horse looking at a hillside.
His enemies come to Hlíðarendi, and he stands against them alone. When he asks Hallgerðr for her hair for his bowstring, she refuses, and remembers the slap he once gave her: “Þá skal ek nú muna þér kinnhestinn”
“Then I will remind you of the slap.” He dies, and is avenged. Afterwards he is seen by moonlight, singing in his howe. The first hero’s story is over. The saga has shown the hero’s way to death, and it has another half to show, on a different virtue, under the same law.
Movement III
Njáll states the law of the book in the course of Gunnarr’s story: “með lögum skal land byggja”
“with law shall the land be built.” The man who says it is the wisest in the saga and the most skilled at law, and the saga lets his wisdom be tested to destruction. His foresight serves his sons’ killings as well as his friends’ suits. Skarpheðinn grins where others speak, and the grin tells the reader what the narrative will not.
On the ice of Markarfljót Skarpheðinn slides across and splits Þráinn’s head. Then the new faith comes. Þangbrandr, the missionary, fights duels and works wonders, and at the Althing of 999 or 1000 Iceland is converted. The saga sets the change down in one generation, the mound-dweller and the missionary in one country. Njáll fosters Höskuldr and, by his craft, wins him a chieftaincy, and the saga sets the founding of the Fifth Court in Njáll’s lifetime and at his suggestion. The law has a new court, and the wise man’s household a new son.
The plan is wise, and it is the cause of the ruin. The honour Njáll wins for his foster-son breeds the envy that kills him. Höskuldr is killed in his cornfield, and he dies forgiving his killers. It is the saga’s plainest showing of what the new faith offered against the feud: not doctrine but an act, a man who will not ask to be paid for. Whether Njáll’s wisdom was wisdom or the cause of what follows, the saga does not say. It shows the man the lawyer meant to raise dead in a field, and the law Njáll built about to be turned on his own house.
Movement IV
Hildigunnr has kept her husband’s bloodied cloak, and when Flosi comes she throws it over him and goads him to vengeance. Flosi answers her: “köld eru kvenna ráð”
“cold are the counsels of women.” The words are his, not the saga’s, and he takes the counsel anyway. The goading woman whose cold counsel a man takes against his judgment is one of the shapes the saga builds out of a farm quarrel, and it stays particular: a cloak, a widow, a sentence spoken in a hall.
At the Althing a settlement is made. Njáll adds a silk cloak to it, and there is an exchange of insults, Skarpheðinn’s over trousers, and Flosi throws the cloak back. The settlement that should have held is broken in a single exchange. The law has done everything it can do. What breaks it is the thing the saga has watched since its first chapter: a word in public, which another man must answer, because in this society honour is what others see and say.
Flosi and his men come to Bergþórshvoll and set fire to the house. Njáll goes in to burn when he might have fought. Bergþóra will not leave him: “eitt skyldi ganga yfir okkr bæði”
“one fate should pass over us both.” Njáll lies down with her under an ox hide, and their grandson with them. Kári leaps out with his clothes and his sword on fire. Njáll has foreseen his own death, and the portents have foretold the fire; the forecast is paid, as every forecast in the book is paid. The wise man’s story ends where the hero’s did, at his own house.
Movement V
The burning goes to law. The saga gives the great lawsuit at the Althing at length, and the suit ends in battle at the Althing itself. The chapters are long, and they repeat their point; they are also the form of a society that lives by procedure, and they show the law the saga praises at the moment it can no longer hold. Then Kári goes after the burners, and his vengeance carries the saga to its end.
His pursuit carries the saga abroad, to the matter of Brian and Sigtryggr and the battle of Clontarf on Good Friday, 1014. Before the battle come portents: a rain of blood, and the valkyries weaving on a loom of men’s entrails, in the poem of the Darraðarljóð set into the prose. The Irish chapters work by their source’s pattern more than by the saga’s own, and here myth is summoned as ornament rather than built. Flosi, for his part, goes on pilgrimage to Rome, and the burner’s way out of the feud passes through the new faith.
The last chapter brings the two men together. Kári and Flosi are reconciled, and Kári marries Hildigunnr, the widow who threw the bloodied cloak over Flosi. The saga that began with a word passed on a child ends with a forgoing of payment, and its sympathy rests, at the close, with the burner. The law of the book has run from a stolen cheese to a burning house and a battle in Ireland: what is done is paid for in kind until someone forgoes payment. The land is not built with law in this book. It is held, at the last, by two men who stop asking to be paid.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine passes the subtractive test. Remove the prologue and Hallgerðr arrives without Hrútr’s sentence on her eyes. Remove Gunnarr’s story and Njáll’s counsel has no proof; the feud of the two wives, servant for servant, is the small engine the whole saga runs on. Remove the conversion and Höskuldr’s death has no meaning; remove the great lawsuit and the argument that law must hold the land goes unmade. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the genealogies that introduce each figure, a convention more than a necessity; long runs of procedure after the burning that repeat their point; and the Irish chapters, which carry more of their source than the saga needs. About a tenth could go with little loss.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: in a society with law but no power to enforce it, honour turns the smallest slight into a chain of killings that the wisest men can foresee and cannot stop, and law, the only thing that could hold it, is itself turned into a weapon. Njáll’s saying stands over the book: með lögum skal land byggja, with law shall the land be built. The man who says it is a lawyer of genius whose craft in fostering Höskuldr and winning him a chieftaincy breeds the envy that kills him. Beside it the saga shows what the new faith offered against the feud, as act rather than doctrine. Held off the top because minds are disclosed only through deeds and speech.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Height is reached often, in the coldest register on the desk. Gunnarr’s horse stumbles on the way to exile and he looks back, Fögr er hlíðin, fair is the slope, and turns home to die. His last stand alone at Hlíðarendi, and Hallgerðr’s refusal of her hair for his bowstring, with the slap remembered. Gunnarr seen singing in his howe by moonlight. Skarpheðinn sliding across the ice of Markarfljót to split Þráinn’s head. Hildigunnr throwing her husband’s bloodied cloak over Flosi. Bergþóra refusing to leave the burning house, Njáll lying down under the ox hide with their grandson, Kári leaping out with his clothes and sword on fire. Held below the top because the heights stand among long flat runs of genealogy and procedure.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, and built out of prophecy rather than gods. The saga is structured by foretelling: Hrútr on Hallgerðr’s eyes, Njáll’s second sight on Gunnarr’s fate if he breaks the terms of his exile, Njáll’s foreknowledge of his own death, the portents before the burning and before Clontarf. Every forecast comes true, and the doom is load-bearing. Out of a lawsuit and a farm quarrel the saga makes archetypes that stay particular: the hero who will not leave his land, the wise man who cannot save his house, the goading woman whose cold counsel a man takes against his judgment, the burning as purgation. Held a step down because the valkyries and portents of Clontarf summon myth as ornament.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the developed family saga, the kings’ sagas, the law books, clerical history and hagiography, and the oral tradition of the south behind the lost tale of Gunnarr. This is a late classical saga: it perfects a form already made more than it breaks one. Its turns are real. It doubles the tragic hero and makes the second’s tragedy the cost of the first’s; it makes law, the courtroom and its procedure, the substance of drama; it sets the heroic ethic under a Christian frame that judges it without repudiating it; it lets its sympathy rest, at the end, with the burner. The stake is an argument about law written under a new king’s law. Held lower because the realist prose saga, the larger swerve, was the genre’s before it was this saga’s.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The saga style shows only what a witness could see and hear: deeds, speech, faces, the weight of a phrase. The saga knows that in this society the self is public, that honour is what others see and say, and its form makes the reader stand where the participants stand, inferring motive from Skarpheðinn’s grin or a silence. Give it a narrator’s access to minds and it would know what the participants cannot, and lose its tragedy, which is that every act is read by others and answered. The double structure is the argument: Gunnarr’s story shows the hero’s way to death, Njáll’s the wise man’s, the same law at work on different virtues. Held off the top where genealogy and procedure become a container rather than an instrument.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise: seven centuries of copying and reading in Iceland, and in the last two a scholarship that has not exhausted it, from the debate over free prose and book prose to Einar Ól. Sveinsson’s Á Njálsbúð (1943), Lars Lönnroth’s Njáls Saga: A Critical Introduction (1976), which read it against clerical learning, and William Ian Miller’s “Why Is Your Axe Bloody?” (2014), which reads it as a work of social and legal intelligence. The text holds its questions open: whether Njáll’s wisdom is wisdom or the cause of the ruin; why he goes in to burn when he might have fought; whether Hallgerðr is a villain or a woman thrice married against her will and slapped; whether Flosi is murderer or tragic hero. Held a step down because the reading abroad is narrower and returns to a few centres.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The field is Old Norse-Icelandic prose of the thirteenth century, the sagas of Icelanders and of kings at their height, and beyond it medieval European narrative, to which the saga was unknown. The intrinsic force is high: the largest and most fully integrated of the family sagas, showing that the form could carry the tragedy of a whole society, its law, its faith and its foreign reach, in one architecture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its language decisive, copied by hand for centuries and become the Icelandic national classic, with Jónas Hallgrímsson’s “Gunnarshólmi” (1838) making Gunnarr’s turning back a figure of the nation; beyond it delayed and narrower, through Dasent’s translation of 1861, in a reach that belongs largely to the sagas as a body.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole in many manuscripts, with variation among witnesses but no lacuna of consequence; nothing is charged. Presence: continuous in Iceland for some seven centuries, copied by hand into the nineteenth century and then printed, read in the schools and by the nation as its own, and translated into the major European languages. Abroad the presence is real but held mainly by the academy and by committed readers, which is grounds for a lower figure than the widest. Fabric: the surface fixed to its moment, the procedure of a court that no longer sits, has become a reason it is read. The span is centuries, the text whole and read without a break in its own language.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on the original as far as close versions and a few known lines carry it. The construction is the most ambitious in the genre: some fifty years and several hundred named persons held by foreshadowing, so that each prophecy plants an ending and each ending is paid; two hero stories joined by Hallgerðr and by Njáll’s friendship with Gunnarr; the feud of the wives escalated by exact steps, a thrall, a freedman, a foster-father, a kinsman. The scene: Gunnarr’s leap in full armour, the slide on the ice, the silk cloak Njáll adds to the settlement and Flosi throws back. Spare dialogue carries what the narrative will not say, and the understatement is load-bearing. Charged: slips of chronology, repeated introductions, the Fifth Court set in Njáll’s lifetime, and verses judged later and weaker.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the opening’s divorce of Unnr from Hrútr, a near-comic legal matter of a marriage unconsummated under a queen’s curse, and the battle of Clontarf with its blood rain and the valkyries weaving on a loom of men’s entrails. One law runs between them: the will of others presses on a person through law, curse and doom, and what follows is paid for in kind until someone forgoes payment. The same law runs from Hallgerðr’s stolen cheese to the burning, across farm quarrels, courtroom, conversion, Norway, Orkney, Ireland and Rome. Charged: the Irish chapters work by a different pattern, joined by Kári’s pursuit more than by the inner law, and the wonders of the conversion sit a register apart from the sober supernatural of dream and second sight.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Held, not listed, through one feud. The state: the Althing, the chieftaincies, the Fifth Court, law as the only common power. The family: marriages arranged and broken, fostering, the wives’ feud, sons who will not be held, a widow’s goading. Labour: the farms, the haymaking, a famine, the theft from Otkell at Kirkjubær that begins Gunnarr’s ruin. History: the settlers’ descendants, the conversion of 999 or 1000, Norway, Orkney and the battle of 1014. The sacred: paganism and Christianity in one generation, the mound-dweller and the missionary, forgiveness and the pilgrimage to Rome. The natural order: the river Markarfljót, the slope at Hlíðarendi, the ice, the fire. All of it passes through two households and their neighbours. Held a step down because consciousness, which the form withholds by design, is the order least directly held.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.2, then The Unconcealment, The Living Form, The Made and The Encompassed at 9.0. A text whole and read without a break in its own language for some seven centuries; a stated condition of law without power, tested to destruction; a form that knows the self is public because it shows only what a witness could see; the most ambitious construction in its genre, held by foreshadowing; and a whole society passed through two households.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.3, held by the genealogies, the runs of procedure after the burning and the Irish chapters, about a tenth that could go with little loss. Among the gated axes, The Swerve at 8.4, held because the realist prose saga was the genre’s achievement before it was this saga’s, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.5, a reach decisive within Icelandic and delayed and narrower beyond it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.2, The Unconcealment at 9.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls short by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.3, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.0. The aggregate, at 8.8, also stands below the summit’s 9.0, so the saga would stand in Tier IV even with every condition met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Brennu-Njáls saga (Njála), anonymous, composed in Iceland about 1275 to 1290, most probably in the south, scored as the saga as transmitted in the standard text of Einar Ól. Sveinsson (Íslenzk fornrit XII, Reykjavík, 1954): 159 chapters, verses included. The verses, some of which scholars have long suspected are later or of mixed quality, are scored as part of the transmitted work, and the Darraðarljóð is scored as part of the saga, where it stands. The text is whole, with variation among its manuscripts and no lacuna of consequence. No text was in hand, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on the Old Icelandic. The saga is known closely in its plot, its cast and its principal scenes, less closely in the genealogies, the full run of the great lawsuit after the burning and the verses, which are neither argued line by line nor charged beyond what is stated. The sound and texture of the Old Icelandic prose at large are known only in its famous lines, and are neither credited nor charged. Old Icelandic is quoted only where its words are certain, briefly, with the desk’s own close English beneath. Events are paraphrased; citations are by part of the saga. Translations · Robert Cook’s (first in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 1997; Penguin Classics, 2001), close and plain, for sense; Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson’s (Penguin, 1960) beside it; George Webbe Dasent’s The Story of Burnt Njal (1861) known in part. None is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the saga. Matters that could not be verified, among them the number and dates of the manuscripts, the date of the first printing, the date of the burning, the size of the cast and the length in English, the order of the saga among the earlier family sagas, and the chapter of several episodes, are not given.