Njáls saga and its Christian Background: A Study of Narrative Method by Andrew Hamer (review)

Andrew Hamer’s study of Njáls saga, one of three books about the most famous of the Íslendingasögur to appear on the market in 2014 (the other two are by William Ian Miller and Alois Wolf), has been many years in the making. As the author notes in the Preface at p. xi, earlier articulations of “ideas and methods presented in this study” can be found in articles published in 1992, 1997, 2002, and 2008. It is a useful enterprise to bring these ideas and methods together in the present monograph, and saga scholars who read the study will find much to think on from so doing. Most importantly, as the monograph’s title suggests, the study draws attention to the importance of “Christian ideas and themes taken, for the most part, from familiar ecclesiastical literature, including Scripture, saints’ lives, Biblical commentaries, and the liturgy” (p. xii) as keys to understanding the thematic and structural rhetoric of Njáls saga. These sources, Hamer argues, fundamentally and directly informed both the posited Njáls saga author’s shaping of his narrative material, and the ways in which contemporary medieval Icelandic audiences would have interpreted climactic scenes in the saga. The sophistication of Njáls saga as a literary work, in conjunction with the dynamic nature of its transmission and reception, is such that fresh literary-historical and critical readings of it as a narrative and attempts to shed light on circumstances surrounding its composition and transmission are always possible and welcome. Moreover, since arguably fewer medievalists in the twenty-first century have as thorough a theological background as did medievalists in past centuries, Hamer’s clearly expressed presentation of, and commentary on, Christian values and teaching and ecclesiastical literature that would have been known in medieval Iceland serves as a useful reminder of the centrality of these ideas and their various written articulations—whether or not one agrees with his theories about the composition of Njáls saga.

The monograph comprises an Introduction, six chapters that present close literary readings and arguments for identifying specific exegetical sources for individual narrative episodes, and finally, a short concluding chapter. The first of the six chapters that form the core of the book focuses not on Njáls saga but on Laxdœla saga (Chapter One: “Laxdœla saga: Shipwreck and Salvation”). Not least, Hamer’s reason for doing so is to explore the question of the textual relationship between the two sagas—a subject that has already been touched on in the Introduction (at pp. 18–21). On the basis of how Hamer claims ecclesiastical sources appear to have been drawn on, and the functions that these sources and Christian elements fulfil within the narratives, Hamer argues that Laxdœla saga directly influenced and was a narrative model for Njáls saga. Here and in many places throughout his study, the ways in which Hamer frames his commentary and presents his arguments point to his unmistakably book-prosist approach to saga criticism—a point to be returned to below.

Chapter Two, “Pre-Christian Society in Njáls saga,” focuses on “forces that undermine the social bonds of law and marriage in pre-Christian Iceland of Njáls saga” (p. 55), taking Hrútr Herjólfsson and Hallgerðr Hǫskuldsdóttir as case studies. Chapter Three, “Justice and Mercy,” argues that “a principal theme within Njáls saga is the fulfilment of the old law, which functioned to dispense simple justice, by a new ethic which added mercy as an essential component of good judgement. The combination of justice and mercy … is based on the model of divine judgement, a model of love and reconciliation” (p. 131); the episodes in Njáls saga that narrate the Battle of Clontarf and Iceland’s conversion to Christianity are case studies. Chapter Four...