ecl@hocsj.UUCP (10/29/84)
Njal's Saga
A book review by Mark R. Leeper
Imagine a mammoth historical novel about a culture as alien as the
Nippon of SHOGUN. All the events are historical fact, as accurate as any
historical record of its period. Now remove most of the descriptive
passages and replace them with more characters and more plot, so that every
paragraph advances the story, yet all are still accurate to the plot, or at
least the folklore, of the period. Now, of course, you have too many
characters to keep track of, so add an appendix giving a thumbnail history,
by chapter, of each character of any importance, over 150 in all. The story
is now written so densely that just about any stretch of ten pages has
enough plot for a novel itself. What you have is a huge narrative with
characters developed by their actions, not by long descriptions that slow
the story, yet the characters remain well-developed and believable. Is
anyone writing novels like this? Nope.
Has anyone ever written novels like this? As a matter of fact, for
everything but the appendix, the answer is yes. The appendix was provided
by the translator. The book I am describing is in print and has been for
over twenty years. It has juts been hidden in the Classics section of the
bookstore. It is NJAL'S SAGA, a 13th Century account of a 10th Century
blood feud that involved hundreds of families and clans in Scandinavia and
Britain, though it was centered in Iceland.
The story revolves around the friendship of two men, Njal Thorgeirsson
and Gunnar Hamundarsson who through a complex and long chain of events make
both enemies and many allies. Without the aid of the appendix, the complex
set of loyalties would be nearly impossible to keep straight. Nearly every
year at the annual Athling--the legal counsel where grievances are re-
dressed--their friends or enemies are involved with grievances. Eventually
the enemies conspire an attack on Gunnar's household, killing all. After
twenty-one more years of battles and grievances, the enemies conspire to
burn Njal's homestead.
This is a solidly entertaining book that tells a lot about the social
order of Iceland in the 900's. Just from context there is a wealth of
information about the legal system--both how to was intended to function and
how it actually did function, how land and sea battles were fought, how
Christianity came to Iceland. The book is available from Penguin Books in a
translation by Magnus Magnusson (you may remember he did an excellent series
on the Vikings for PBS) and Hermann Palsson. If you can't find it in your
local bookstore, it should be available by mail from Penguin in Baltimore.
(Evelyn C. Leeper for)
Mark R. Leeper
...ihnp4!lznv!mrljpexg@mit-hermes.ARPA (John Purbrick) (11/02/84)
Funny you should mention the Sagas--I just read Njal's, Egil's and the Laxdaele Sagas (all in successsion) over the summer. Yes, they're entertaining, as you say, but the sheer volume of violence is astonishing. Every page is full of action, like a nice ambush, a pitched battle or two or the cozy domestic burning of Njal and his family. All vividly described in a slightly stylized way. Of the 150-odd characters, maybe three quarters end up dead. Did you notice the similarity in style with "Lord of the Rings"? Tolkien was, of course, a noted expert on Northern European mythology and folklore.