New and Old Interpretations

of Njáls saga

Lars Lönnroth

N jáls saga has been read and loved and understood and misunderstood
in many different ways through the centuries, as Jón Karl Helgason has
shown in his excellent book The Rewriting of Njáls saga (1999). The proliferation
of different and often incompatible interpretations of the text is the fate of most
great classics in the Western literary canon, so the fact that sagas are read in
different ways is actually an indication that they are indeed great classics. The
modern scholarly understanding of Njála, however, was started and for a very
long time dominated by Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, professor of Icelandic literature
at the University of Iceland from 1945 until his death in 1984 and one of the
leaders of the so-called Icelandic school in saga studies. When I went to Iceland
for the first time in 1962 Einar was the unchallenged international authority on
Njála — its text (1954), its historical background and literary sources (1933), its
interpretation, its function as a work of art (1943).
In later years, he has remained an authority but the views of the Icelandic
school have been challenged by Theodore Andersson (1964), Gísli Sigurðsson
(2002), and others for underestimating the importance of oral tradition and for
seeing the sagas primarily as the creation of individual thirteenth-century authors.
Einar himself has been criticized, particularly by Andersson (1964) and also by
myself (1976), for exaggerating the importance of literary influences, rittengsl,
from written sources on the text of Njála and other sagas. In recent years, Einar’s
philological principles in dealing with the medieval manuscripts have also been

Lars Lönnroth (lars.lonnroth@lit.gu.se) is professor emeritus of comparative literature at

Göteborgs universitet.
Abstract: In this article, a revised version of a lecture presented at the University of Iceland
in May 2016, I discuss a number of recent books and articles about Njáls saga, setting their
interpretations against those of earlier works by Einar Ólafur Sveinsson and myself. My
conclusion is that although Einar Ólafur Sveinsson’s views need to be revised in some respects,
they still are very much valid and his scholarly results are, to a large extent, likely to stand.
Keywords: Njáls saga, Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, the Icelandic school, Christian influence, ‘folk
epic’, ‘national epic’, rittengsl, Todestrieb.

Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 13 (2017), 101–114 BREPOLS    PUBLISHERS     10.1484/J.VMS.5.114352

102 Lars Lönnroth

challenged and are currently being revised by younger philologists with new
principles.1 Furthermore, Einar’s approach to the sagas has been criticized by
Jesse Byock for being too nationalistic. In my own doctoral dissertation of 1965
and in my book about Njála from 1976 I tried to show that he exaggerated
the influence of secular Icelandic thirteenth-century chieftains and farmers on
the production of sagas and underestimated the importance of clerical writers
and Christian European influence on the creation of works such as Njáls saga.
Nevertheless, there are today other scholars, such as Theodore Andersson
(2006) and Daniel Sävborg, a spokesman for so-called ‘retrospective methods’ of
folkloristic origins, who would argue that Einar is guilty of the opposite sin: that
of emphasizing Christian influence on Njáls saga too much.2
Perhaps one can say that Einar after his death has become the giant that
everybody wants to wrestle with and find faults with, something that often
happens to prominent scholars who have been very dominating in their own
time. Yet it nowadays seems obvious to me that most of the extensive research
that Einar Ólafur Sveinsson did on Njáls saga is likely to survive and be respected
by future generations, even though it may be revised in various details. It is true
that he sometimes underestimated the importance of oral tradition in Njáls saga,
in spite of the fact that he was actually one of the foremost folklorists of his time.
It is true that his opinions about literary sources and rittengsl are partly obsolete.
It is true that his text of Njála probably needs some revision, even though it is still
superior to other existing versions and is therefore still the edition that all scholars
use. It is true that his book Á Njálsbúð, although it was in many ways a brilliant
analysis of Njála as a work of art, is a bit too nationalistic for contemporary taste,
especially in its introductory chapter, where Einar ruminates on the ruins of
Njáll’s assembly booth, or when he solemnly concludes, at the end of the book,
that ‘fundamentally the life-view of the saga is native’, i.e. Icelandic, even though
he admits that its ideology has been influenced by Christian ideas and foreign
literature. It is true that his speculations about what was going on in the author’s
mind when he wrote Njáls saga nowadays appear somewhat old-fashioned and a
bit too adventurous in view of the fact that we have no idea who this author was.
Yet in spite of all these objections I think Einar’s understanding of the saga
has lasting value and will on the whole remain valid. This is especially true of his

1 
See the internet presentation of the current research project ‘The Variance of Njáls
saga’, led by Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir, Haraldur Bernharðsson and others <https://njalssaga.
wordpress.com> [accessed 1 August 2017].
2 
For my critique of Sävborg, see Lönnroth 2009 and 2012.
new and old interpretations of njáls saga 103

analysis of the Njálsbrenna itself, i.e. the key chapters about the burning, which
he interprets as a Christian atonement for the killing of Ho˛skuldr Hvítanessgoði.
Einar, unlike many other saga scholars, understands that Njála is at least
partly a Christian drama about crime and punishment, about atonement and
reconciliation, just like Dante’s Divine Comedy and other great works in the
medieval literary tradition.
I also think that Einar is right in assuming that there is one authorial mind
behind the text of Njála, one strong redactor responsible for ordering and
controlling the traditions on which the text is based. This does not mean that I
believe, as Einar sometimes appears to do, that Njála was created by a completely
independent intellectual author with a personally conceived Lebensanschauung
like that of Dante or Goethe or Halldór Laxness. It seems to me more probable
that Njála in its present form was written by somebody who worked in the
mainstream of Icelandic saga tradition and, at the same time, in the mainstream
of clerical thinking and writing of thirteenth-century Iceland. This writer may,
as Einar believed, have been a layman with some clerical education; for my own
part, I think it is more likely that the writer was a priest or a monk working in
the interests of one of the old chieftain families in Eastern or Southern Iceland,
possibly the Svínfelling family. But we will never really be able to establish the
identity of this anonymous person, so let us just forget that problem, at least for
the time being.
I will now take a closer look at some recent interpretations of Njála by other
scholars and try to measure them against the background of the work that Einar
had previously done. It should be noted, by the way, that all of them base their
readings on the text established by Einar, and the same is largely true of my own
work on Njála, except for the fact that I have found good reasons in the oldest
manuscripts to revise his chapter divisions and his structural divisions in general
(see Lönnroth 1975).

Alois Wolf
The first new interpretation I will mention is a recently published book in German,
Die Saga von der Njálsbrenna und die Frage nach dem Epos im Europäischen
Mittelalter (The Saga of the Njálsbrenna and the Question of Epos in the
European Middle Ages), written by Alois Wolf, professor of Germanic languages
at the University of Freiburg. It is a comparative study of the epic in Latin as well
as vernacular tradition during the Middle Ages. Wolf does not present a formal
definition of ‘epic’ but what he has in mind is evidently a poetic narrative of the
104 Lars Lönnroth

kind usually referred to as ‘folk epic’ or ‘national epic’, i.e. a text like Beowulf,
Nibelungenlied, or the Chanson de Roland, considered as expressing the ideals,
character, and traditions of a people or a nation as the Iliad and Odyssey expressed
those of the Greeks or Vergil’s Aeneid those of the Romans. It may seem rather
adventurous of Wolf to characterize Njáls saga as an epic, since it is in fact not a
narrative poem but a work in prose, and in that respect rather different from all the
other works he is considering in his study. And in fact Wolf does not attempt to
show that Njáls saga is influenced by the Aeneid or the Iliad or by early Germanic
epic texts such as Beowulf. What he wants to show with his comparisons is rather
an ethos or a literary function that has developed out of indigenous Icelandic
traditions but is nevertheless reminiscent of medieval epics in other countries.
Wolf ’s basic thesis is certainly very bold and can easily be questioned but,
even so, he manages to throw some interesting light on the overall structure of
Njála and some of its basic themes and central episodes. His comparisons with
other epic works are often illuminating, and his literary analysis shows that this
particular saga, in contrast to other Íslendingasögur such as Egils saga, has an
overriding ideological perspective that concerns not only individual heroes or
families but Icelandic society as a whole. For this reason, the most important
scene of action in Njála is not a local farm such as the one where Njáll or
Gunnarr lives, but the Alþing itself, where chieftains and farmers come together
at Þingvellir in order to make decisions about matters that concern the most
essential laws and principles of the country and particularly the transition from
pagan to Christian ethics. This is all in rather close agreement with Einar Ólafur
Sveinsson’s and also with my own reading of the saga. Gunnarr represents the
heroic ideals of the pagan era, while Njáll himself becomes a spokesman and
finally a martyr for a new Christian ideal and a new world order. The great fire
of Bergþórshváll, where Njáll and his family perish in the flames, is seen by Wolf
as a great catastrophe similar to that of the Battle of Ronçevaux in Chanson
de Roland. The ending of the saga, where Kári and Flosi both travel to Rome
in order to be absolved from sin by the pope and then, after returning home
to Iceland, are finally reconciled, can then be read as a fitting conclusion of a
national epic about Iceland’s heroic past.
On one very important point, I disagree with Wolf ’s reading of the saga
and that concerns the famous scene where Gunnarr returns to Hlíðarendi
after being condemned at the Alþing to be exiled for three years. We all know
what happens: the horse stumbles, Gunnarr falls to the ground, he looks up at
the beautiful slopes and exclaims: ‘Fo˛gr er hlíðin svá at mér hefir hún aldri jafnfo˛gr
sýnzk, bleikir akrar ok slegin tún, ok mun ek ríða heim aptr ok fara hvergi’ (How
beautiful the slopes are, more beautiful than I have seen them before, pale
new and old interpretations of njáls saga 105

cornfields and new-mown hay. I am going back home and will not go away;
Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 182).
Wolf interprets this scene (2014, 81–82) in largely the same way as Jónas
Hallgrímsson in his famous poem Gunnarshólmi, i.e. he sees Gunnarr’s decision
to turn back as motivated by a noble love for the beauty of his own farmland
and his own country, Iceland. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson tends to read the scene in
a similar way in his introduction to his Njála edition of 1954 (pp. xxxiv–xxxvii),
but he is actually more cautious in his interpretation, so he writes more about
Gunnarr’s love for his farmland than about his love for Iceland as a nation. For
my own part I have always thought that it is mistaken and basically anachronistic
to read any kind of nationalism into this scene. Nationalism of the kind that Alois
Wolf and Jónas Hallgrímsson attribute to Gunnarr hardly existed in thirteenth-
century Iceland. And Gunnarr’s decision obviously goes against the wise counsels
of Njáll and the advice of his noble brother Kolskeggr, who rightly points out
that by returning to Hlíðarendi Gunnarr is breaking an honourable settlement
and dishonouring his pledge in a way that is completely unacceptable. The only
person who is happy when Gunnarr returns home is his evil wife, Hallgerðr, and
her joy is an indication that the hero has made a tragic mistake, a mistake of the
same kind that he made in his younger days when he was seduced by Hallgerðr’s
beauty and decided to marry her, in spite of the warnings he received from good
advisers not to fall for her seductive charms. And, as we know, Hallgerðr is the
one who will soon bring about Gunnarr’s death by refusing to give him the locks
of her hair that could have saved his life when his enemies attacked him.
In a brilliant recent article Torfi Tulinius (2015) has described Gunnarr’s
passion for Hallgerðr with the help of a Freudian concept, Todestrieb or death
drive, and he comments as follows: ‘It is as if the saga is telling us that sexual
passion can only bring tragedy, and that happiness is only achieved by steering
clear of desire’ (2015, 110). I agree with Torfi’s interpretation, even though
I am not generally in favour of psychoanalytical readings. The bleikir akrar of
Hlíðarendi can be seen, as Helga Kress has pointed out (2008, 40) as a symbol of
Hallgerðr’s seductive soft hair and fatal beauty.
Gunnarr’s fall from his horse thus leads to his moral fall. As Einar Ólafur
Sveinsson has shown in the introduction to his edition of Njála (p. xxxvi), the
scene has a close parallel in Alexanders saga, when Alexander passionately falls
in love with a beautiful landscape in Asia, described as containing ‘fagra vo˛llu ok
bleika akra’, and decides that he will conquer this beautiful world and never return
to his home again. For even though Alexander may seem to do the opposite of
Gunnarr when he decides never to turn back, he is seduced, like Gunnarr, by
the beauty of the landscape and his own pride and ambition. Just as Gunnarr is
106 Lars Lönnroth

doing the wrong thing by going against the advice of his wise counsellor Njáll,
Alexander is doing the wrong thing by desiring what he should not desire, thus
going against the advice of his wise counsellor Aristotle, the great philosopher,
who plays the same role for Alexander as Njáll plays for Gunnarr in Njáls saga.
Neither Gunnarr nor Alexander can thus be seen as national heroes willing
to sacrifice themselves for their country. They should rather be seen, I think, as
heroes with tragic flaws that result from their too great ambitions and too ardent
desire to possess the deceptive beauties of this world. Njáls saga can perhaps to
some advantage be read as a national epic but mainly in a metaphorical sense: a
narrative about Iceland’s great past that Icelanders can still love and identify with.

William Ian Miller

A completely different way of reading Njáls saga is found in William Ian Miller’s
new book, ‘Why is your Axe Bloody?’: A Reading of Njáls saga (2014). Miller
is a professor of law at the University of Michigan and has become famous as
an expert on the Old Icelandic judicial system and the way it functions in the
Íslendingasögur. In that capacity he has made several important contributions to
the understanding of the sagas, especially those that deal with legal matters, and
that is certainly the case in Njáls saga. Since Miller also writes well and knows
how to make his arguments entertaining, his books about the sagas have become
quite popular, not only among specialists in the history of law but also among
ordinary readers of the sagas, especially in the United States. In this book, as in
the earlier ones, he has made several brilliant observations about law and legal
matters in Njála (for example Miller 1990 and, in his new book, the chapter on
the trial of Flosi, pp. 259–75). Miller is unsurpassed when it comes to such things
as explaining the difference between murder and manslaughter in Old Icelandic
society, which fines should be paid for killing a slave, or how a process against an
adversary should be prepared in order to be successful at a meeting of the Alþing.
But in this new book Miller wants to be not only a professor of law but also a
literary critic and present an interpretation of Njáls saga as a work of art. This is a
task that he does not manage very well.
The main problem is that Miller reads Njáls saga as if it were a naturalistic
crime-novel, a sort of Nordic noir, about secular people in modern Western
society and not a medieval narrative deeply rooted in Old Norse tradition and
religious ideas about the world. He wants, for example, to supplement the saga’s
description of the characters — a description that totally centres on their actions
and outward behaviour, not on their thoughts or feelings — with modern
psychological theories about their inner motivation. He also does his very best
new and old interpretations of njáls saga 107

to explain away the many supernatural and religious elements in the text as more
or less irrelevant or insignificant, since he tends to see the author of the saga as a
modern, rational, and secular lawyer like William Ian Miller himself. Like Daniel
Sävborg he therefore rejects any interpretation based on Christian ideas about
guilt, reconciliation, or divine grace. He even refuses to see any change in the
ethics of the saga after the introduction of Christianity, since he cannot see that
the conversion of the main characters to the Christian faith makes them less
violent or immoral in their behaviour.
On that point I tend to agree with him, at least to some extent. The fact that
the saga characters stop sacrificing to the pagan gods and start building churches
certainly does not mean that they automatically become more virtuous or that
they stop killing each other. The ethics of revenge prevail even after the conversion
of Iceland. But after the conversion the leading Christian characters, such as Njáll,
Skarpheðinn, Kári, and Flosi, feel a greater responsibility before God for what they
are doing. This is exactly what Flosi says to his followers when he decides to burn
down Njáll’s farm: he says that the burning ‘is a grave responsibility before God,
since we are Christian men ourselves’. This way of thinking is even more typical of
Njáll, who realizes that the feuding and killing must be replaced by reconciliation,
not only in the sense that the feuding parties must achieve a settlement and a
lasting peace but also in the sense that the individual protagonists must become
aware of their guilt, regret the evil they have done, atone for their sins, and forgive
each other in a spirit of Christian love. The theme of Christian atonement and
reconciliation becomes increasingly important towards the end of the saga and is
revealed not only in what Njáll and Flosi and other characters say but also in the
divine miracles and visions that appear in the latter half of Njála.
Miller, however, is determined to read the saga as a crime-story without any
supernatural elements. His interpretation is thus more naturalistic than any
previous interpretation. When Njáll can predict future events it is not, according
to Miller, because of his second sight or other supernatural gifts but because he
is simply so smart and has so much knowledge about the laws that he can figure
out rationally what will happen. When miracles and other supernatural events
are reported by characters in the text, Miller thinks that the reports should be
understood as the result of primitive superstition. And when even the narrator
reports divine interventions in the form of miracles, Miller does his very best to
read such incidents as an ironic play with the saint’s life as genre, not as a serious
element in the narrative.
To what extent is then his reading compatible with the text of the saga? Let us
take a look at the description of the great fire, the Njálsbrenna, where Njáll and
his family are burned to death. The catastrophic burning is anticipated in several
108 Lars Lönnroth

supernatural visions and prophecies. Long before the enemies arrive Njáll sees
blood on the table and the food in his house — a vision that is hardly a result
of his legal knowledge but of his second sight, his prophetic gift. When the
enemies arrive, Njáll, his sons, and several other members of his household are
waiting outside in front of the house, but Njáll tells them to go in again, in spite
of Skarpheðinn’s very sensible objection that they risk being burned in the house
if they go in. And indeed that is exactly what happens, even though Flosi points
out to his men (Njála 1954, 328) that they will all have to carry a heavy burden
of responsibility before God (ábyrgð fyrir Guði) for the Njálsbrenna. As Einar
Ólafur Sveinsson made clear (1971, 174–76), the reason for Njáll’s seemingly
foolish decision is that he wants his sons to regret what they have done and atone
for their crime of killing Ho˛skuldr. The key to his action is found in the speech
he makes to his people, when the fire has just started: they should put their faith
in the mercy of God, for he will not let them burn both in this world and the
next. (‘Trúið þér ok því, at guð er miskunnsamr, ok mun hann oss eigi bæði láta
brenna þessa heims ok annari’, Njála 1954, 329). Njáll then goes to bed with his
Bergþóra and they cross themselves, commend their souls to God, and wait for
death. Skarpheðinn first tries to escape the flames but resigns himself to his fate
when a wall crashes down on him. Later, when the dead bodies are found under
the ashes, it turns out that Njáll’s and Bergþóra’s bodies are perfectly preserved
and people see a radiance around Njáll’s body that they interpret as a miracle.
Skarpheðinn’s body turns out to be half burned and have two burn-marks in the
shape of a cross, one between his shoulders, one on his chest. The people present
conclude that he has burned these crosses himself, and the meaning is obviously
that he has died as a Christian, regretting his sins.
Miller, however, sees nothing supernatural or Christian in these details
(Miller 2014, 232–37). That Njáll’s and Bergþóra’s bodies are well preserved can
be explained by the simple fact they were covered by an oxhide on the bed. What
about the burn-marks on Skarpheðinn’s body? Miller appears to regard them
as purely accidental, the result of natural causes. What then about the radiance
around Njáll’s body and his pious words about not burning both in this world
and the next? Miller does not even care to comment on such matters, evidently
because he thinks they are unimportant: mere figments of the imagination or
superstitions held by the saga characters but not to be taken seriously by modern
readers. To him the Njálsbrenna is just a crime story about arson without any
religious overtones.
When Miller comes to the last chapters of Njála, however, he finds it
increasingly difficult to maintain this kind of interpretation, since these chapters
— especially those about the Battle of Clontarf — abound with miracles, religious
new and old interpretations of njáls saga 109

statements, and divine interventions that cannot be explained away easily. It is

also in these chapters that Kári and Flosi both make their pilgrimages to Rome
and are absolved from sin by the pope. After their return to Iceland the former
enemies finally meet at Svínafell after a snowstorm, embrace each other, and are
fully reconciled — an ending that is in some ways reminiscent of the ending
of the excellent Icelandic film Rams (Hrútar), where the two elderly brothers
Gummi and Kiddi, who have always hated each other, finally embrace each other
in a snowstorm. The modern film and the medieval saga differ, however, in their
perspective on this final reconciliation: in the film the perspective is secular,
whereas in Njála it is religious.
The miracles, the pilgrimages, the pope’s absolution of the two sinners, and,
at the very end, this edifying embrace between Kári and Flosi simply become
impossible for Miller to deal with, so the only thing he can ultimately do is to
complain that the author of the saga here, towards the end, appears to have lost
his grip of the saga and gone astray (Miller 2014, 294–300). But it isn’t the author
or the saga that has gone astray, just William Ian Miller himself.
In spite of my objections to Miller’s way of reading the saga I would like to
recommend his book, since it is very entertaining, particularly when he defends
unconvincing readings of the text. It is also very instructive to read his book as a
radical experiment in interpreting the text of Njála as a rational piece of modern
fiction. The result of this experiment, however, is obvious: it just does not work.

Andrew Hamer
I now come to another book that was published almost simultaneously with
Miller’s but has not received half as much attention: Andrew Hamer’s Njáls saga
and its Christian Background: A Study of Narrative Method (2014). The author,
Andrew Hamer, recently retired from the University of Liverpool, was originally
a student of Hermann Pálsson at the University of Edinburgh, and has remained
faithful to Hermann’s way of reading the sagas. Hamer’s book on Njála appears to
have been under way for a long time and resulted in articles along the way (1992,
1997) until he finally presented his results in the form of a doctoral dissertation at
the University of Groningen in Holland. The book that has now been published
is a revised version of the dissertation. It is based on very thorough, ambitious,
and scholarly research and, as the title makes clear, its main purpose is to clarify
the Christian background and sources of Njála. Unlike Miller he presents an
interpretation of the text that is inspired by religious thinking and supported
by evidence from a large number of religious texts available to saga-writers in
110 Lars Lönnroth

thirteenth-century Iceland, among them liturgical texts from the Gospels, the
Psalms, and the Acts of the Apostles, theological works by Saint Augustine and
Pope Gregory the Great, and saints’ lives (Saints Paul and Stephen). This does
not mean that Hamer wants to prove that the author of Njála has read and been
influenced by all of these texts; unlike Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, he is not primarily
concerned with rittengsl from specific sources. What he wants to do is to provide
a background to the author’s way of thinking, and that he does very well.
Hamer’s own theological knowledge is impressive and so is his knowledge
about saga scholarship, but his presentation is sometimes a bit awkward,
speculative, and hard to follow. While reading his book I have vacillated between
admiration, scepticism, confusion, and irritation at his way of writing, often in
slightly pompous and repetitious formulas such as ‘This study will argue’, ‘This
study will show’, ‘This study will indicate’, and so on. Nevertheless, it seems
obvious to me that Hamer’s long and intense study of Njála and its religious
background has resulted in a very important book with many new insights and
interesting interpretations.
He starts out by summarizing much of the modern discussion about written
and oral tradition in the sagas and about Christianity in Njála, including the
discussion between Daniel Sävborg and myself in Gripla some years ago, where
Sävborg attacked my Christian reading of the text and I defended it (Sävborg
2011, Lönnroth 2012). Before Hamer begins his own interpretation of Njála,
however, he devotes a chapter to an earlier saga, Laxdæla saga, which in his view
has a similar perspective on the moral behaviour of the characters and their duty
to atone for their evil deeds before they can be absolved from sin and achieve a
true reconciliation. He then proceeds to Njála and shows how Icelandic society
in the first half of the saga, before the introduction of Christianity, has a judicial
system dominated by a simple principle of equality: whoever causes injury or
damage to other people shall suffer a comparable amount of injury or damage in
return, through either revenge or economic compensation in the form of fines. In
the second part of the saga, when the country has become Christian, this system
is supplemented by some new principles: justice may now be modified by mercy
and forgiveness; but whoever breaks the law shall not only compensate for the
harm done but shall also repent and make penance according to the same model
that can be seen in Laxdæla and in most other Christian texts of the Middle Ages.
In the ensuing chapters Hamer discusses metaphors in Njála that have to do
with vegetation, productivity, and harvest. He argues that some of these metaphors
are dependent on religious language: ‘evil roots’, ‘reaping anger’, ‘sowing love’, and
similar expressions. Mo˛rðr, for example, is a ‘sower of discord’, and the lawsuit
he prepares at the Alþing is characterized by Njáll as having grown ‘from an evil
new and old interpretations of njáls saga 111

seed’. Against this background, Hamer makes an interesting new interpretation

of Gunnarr’s return to the beautiful slopes and pale cornfields of Hlíðarendi.
According to Hamer, Gunnarr is doomed by fate to return to the metaphorical
harvest that he himself produced as a result of his own actions in the feuds with
his enemies. Hamer also compares Gunnarr’s fall from his horse with the scene in
the Icelandic version of the Legend of Saint Paul, where Saul, the sinful enemy of
Christ, is transformed into Saint Paul, the Apostle and follower of Christ, after
having had a miraculous vision, which made him fall from his horse on his way
to Damascus. Needless to say, Gunnarr’s fall from his horse does not make him
a Christian apostle but Hamer sees him instead as a sort of martyr for the noble
heroic ideals and ethics of the pagan era. By returning to Hlíðarendi he thus
assumes the full responsibility for his own actions, Hamer argues. I find it just a
bit difficult to accept this way of reading the episode since Gunnarr’s return is so
obviously in direct violation of the law and goes completely against Njáll’s and
Kolskeggr’s noble advice, but I do think that Hamer’s interpretation is interesting
and ingenious. And the parallel with Saint Paul’s falling from the horse — a horse
not mentioned in the Bible but very much so in the medieval Icelandic legend
— is really quite striking, although it may seem somewhat startling at first sight.
When Iceland becomes Christian at the beginning of the second half of the
saga, the fosterson of Njáll, Ho˛skuldr Hvítanessgoði, becomes, in Hamer’s view,
Gunnarr’s Christian successor since he becomes a heroic champion of a new
and better order of justice, just as Gunnarr was the heroic champion of the older
system. When Ho˛skuldr is murdered on his cornfield by Skarpheðinn and the
other sons of Njáll, he asks God to help him and also to forgive his enemies:
‘Guð hjálpi mér en fyrirgefi yðr.’ Margaret Cormack (1994) had already pointed
out analogues to this scene in other saints’ lives but Hamer has found a new
and interesting parallel in the legend of Saint Stephen or Stephanus, the first
Christian martyr, who is killed under similar circumstances and also asks God
to forgive his killers. The parallel is strengthened by the fact that both men’s
deaths are plotted by the enemies of Christ, in Ho˛skuldr’s case by the evil Valgarðr
who breaks crosses and holy objects in his hatred of the Christian God. Hamer
summarizes his interpretation of Ho˛skuldr’s death as follows: ‘Ho˛skuldr’s death
is not the result of a political power struggle but, like Stephen’s, a chapter in the
history of the transition from the old to the new faith, a transition that involves a
reinterpretation of the law’ (Hamer 2014, 191).
I think this is a good way of understanding the text, certainly much better
than William Ian Miller’s attempt to explain the death of Ho˛skuldr simply as a
result of rivalry between Ho˛skuldr and the sons of Njáll. The death of Ho˛skuldr
then becomes the direct cause of the Njálsbrenna. Hamer’s interpretation of the
112 Lars Lönnroth

fire and the symbolism of the dead bodies is very similar to that of Einar Ólafur
Sveinsson and myself and several other readers of Njála. The same thing may be
said about his interpretation of the Clontarf episode and the ending of the saga
with the reconciliation between Kári and Flosi. But Hamer backs up his Christian
interpretations with several new analogues and parallels from Christian literature
of the Middle Ages.
There are perhaps some places where Hamer’s Christian analogues are a bit
too far-fetched and his theological interpretations a bit too learned and subtle.
One should of course never forget that Njáls saga is, after all, a story based on
oral traditions about feuds between Icelandic families in the Viking era, not a
religious tract or a philosophical allegory like The Divine Comedy. But Hamer’s
book helps us to see the deep undercurrents of the text and the working of the
intellect that collected the stories of the past and used them to form the artful
structure of Brennu-Njáls saga.

Torfi Tulinius
Finally I should like to make a few further comments about Torfi Tulinius’s
recent application of the Todestrieb concept to the text of Njála. One of his
examples (2015, 99) is the very end of the saga, where Flosi as an old man sails out
to sea, despite the warnings that his ship is in a bad condition. But ‘væri ærit gott
go˛mlum ok feigum’ (Flosi said that it was good enough for an old man doomed to
die). This is indeed a good example of death drive but it is a completely different
kind of death drive from the one that drove Gunnarr towards Hallgerðr and the
beautiful slopes of Hlíðarendi. For while Gunnarr was prompted by a dangerous
desire that led to his death, Flosi at the end of his life, when he has been reconciled
with his enemies and absolved from sin by the pope, desires nothing more. Like
Njáll at the Njálsbrenna, who is also characterized as feigr, doomed to die, Flosi is
finally at peace with this world and ready to meet his creator. And thus the end of
Njáls saga is really a happy end in conformity with a Christian worldview of the
kind that was promoted by the Icelandic Church at the time when the saga was
written. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson described this ending of Njála as having
a sort of late-summer serenity – everything is clear and bright and transparent. Life
has lost the belief in itself as the highest good which it possessed during the growing
time of spring, and death has lost its terror. Some things are of greater and others of
lesser value but life itself is not the greatest. This view of life possesses an intimation
of infinity: it signifies complete freedom and independence. (1971, 203)

These words, which conclude the English translation of Einar’s book Á Njálsbúð,
are beautiful, I think, and also very much to the point. Perhaps one of the most
new and old interpretations of njáls saga 113

important purposes behind the decision to write Njáls saga was to show to Flosi’s
descendants in the late thirteenth century how their famous ancestor managed
to become free of his terrible burden of responsibility for having initiated
Njálsbrenna, the infamous crime that had lived in oral tradition for more than
two hundred years before it was finally explained, forgiven, and put to rest in one
of the most brilliant literary texts of medieval Europe.

Works Cited

Primary Sources
Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, ed. 1954. Brennu-Njáls saga. Íslenzk Fornrit 12, Reykjavík: Hið
Íslenzka Fornritafélag

Secondary Sources
Andersson, Theodore M. 1964. The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins: A Historical Survey,
New Haven: Yale University Press
Andersson, Theodore M. 2006. The Growth of the Medieval Icelandic Sagas (1180–1280),
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 183–203
Byock, Jesse. 1992. ‘History and the Sagas: The Effects of Nationalism’, in From Sagas
to Society: Comparative Approaches to Early Iceland, ed. Gísli Pálsson, Enfield Lock:
Hisarlik, 43–59, 305–28
Cormack, Margaret. 1994. ‘Saints and Sinners: Reflections on Death in Some Icelandic
Sagas’, Gripla 8, 187–218
Einar Ólafur Sveinsson. 1933. Um Njálu, Reykjavík: Bókadeild Menningarsjóðs
Einar Ólafur Sveinsson. 1943. Á Njálsbúð: bók um mikið listaverk, Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka
bókmenntafélag. Translated 1971 by Paul Schach as Njáls saga: A Literary Masterpiece,
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press
Einar Ólafur Sveinsson. 1953. Studies in the Manuscript Tradition of Njáls saga, Studia
Islandica 13, Reykjavik: Leiftur
Gísli Sigurðsson. 2002. Túlkun íslendingasagna í ljósi munnlegrar hefðar: tilgáta um aðferð,
Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi. Translated by Nicholas Jones as The
Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press
Hamer, Andrew. 1992. ‘“It Seemed to Me That the Sweetest Light of my Eyes Had Been
Extinguished”’, in Introductory Essays on Egils saga and Njáls saga, ed. John Hines and
Desmond Slay, London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 93–101
114 Lars Lönnroth

Hamer, Andrew. 1998. ‘Njáls saga, the Story of a Hall’s Angel’, in Proceedings of the Eleventh
Biennial Conference of the British Association of Scandinavian Studies (University of
Hull),  ed. Philip  Holmes and Charlotte  Whittingham, Hull: University of Hull,
Department of Scandinavian Studies, 137–54
Hamer, Andrew. 2014. Njáls saga and its Christian Background: A  Study of Narrative
Method, Germania Latina 8, Leuven: Peeters
Helga Kress. 2008. ‘Óþarfar unnustur áttu’: Um samband fjölkynngi, kvennafars og
karlmennsku í Íslendingasögum’, in Galdramenn: Galdrar og samfélag á miðöldu, ed.
Torfi H. Tulinius, Reykjavík: Hugvísindastofnun, 21–49
Jón Karl Helgason. 1999. The Rewriting of Njáls Saga: Translation, Politics and Icelandic
Sagas, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters
Lönnroth, Lars. 1965. European Sources of Icelandic Saga-Writing, Stockholm: Seelig
Lönnroth, Lars. 1975. ‘Structural Divisions in the Njála Manuscripts’, Arkiv för nordisk
filologi 90, 49–79
Lönnroth, Lars. 1976. Njáls saga: A  Critical Introduction, Berkeley: University of
California Press
Lönnroth, Lars. 2009. ‘Christianity, Revenge and Reconciliation in Njáls saga’, in The
Academy of Odin. Selected Papers on Old Norse Literature, Odense: University Press of
Southern Denmark, 179–87
Lönnroth, Lars. 2012. ‘Att läsa Njáls saga’, Gripla 23, 367–74
Lönnroth, Lars. 2015. [Review of Hamer 2014, Miller 2014 and Wolf 2014] in Samlaren
136, 379–81
Miller, William Ian. 1990. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga
Iceland, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Miller, William Ian. 2014. ‘Why Is your Axe Bloody?’: A Reading of Njáls saga, Oxford:
Oxford University Press
Sävborg, Daniel. 2011. ‘Konsten att läsa sagor. Om trosskiftets betydelse i Njáls saga’,
Gripla 22, 181–209
Torfi Tulinius. 2015. ‘Seeking Death in Njáls saga’, New Norse Studies: Essays on the
Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia,  ed. Jeffrey Turco, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 99–115
Wolf, Alois. 2014. Die Saga von der Njálsbrenna und die Frage nach dem Epos im Euro­
päischen Mittelalter, Tübingen: Francke