Damnation and Salvation in Old Norse Literature by Haki Antonsson (review)

As scholars have increasingly appreciated in recent decades, Iceland when its famous sagas took their present shape, largely in the century and a half from about 1180, was a part of Western European Christendom. Haki Antonsson's book is an exploration of the hitherto little examined role played in the sagas by the most fundamental concern of medieval Christians—their fate in the afterlife, whether it be salvation in heaven, damnation in hell, or a period of atonement for their sins in Purgatory prior to admittance into paradise.

Haki covers a very impressive number and range of works, but states that he focuses on those 'that illuminate and exemplify the principal themes and patterns that I have observed in reading the Old Norse corpus' (p. 2). Much of his attention is devoted to sagas set in a clearly Christian milieu—Sturlunga saga, the sagas of the Icelandic bishops, and sagas of the kings of Norway—but several representatives of the more famous Íslendingasögur genre also receive attention, along with a handful of poems and other works.

Some chapter headings, including 'Confession and Penance', and 'The Hour of Death', give a clear indication of their content. Others deal with life as a journey toward salvation or damnation, often fatal betrayal of a central character by family or friends, outlaws and marginal figures including Gísli Súrsson and Grettir Ásmundarson, and supernatural and preternatural indications of salvation and damnation in the world surrounding the saga figures. The final chapter, 'Last Things and Judgement Day', is primarily an exploration of how the book's concerns play out in medieval Iceland's most celebrated prose work, Njáls saga.

This is a book setting out to argue a case, that by focusing on the twin Christian concerns of salvation and damnation we obtain an enriched understanding of the nature of the works discussed, how they are structured, and how they would have been understood by audiences at the time they were composed. Especially in the case of sagas set in the twelfth and thirteen centuries the case is quite convincing, but at times we are asked to accept that the audience had a degree of theological knowledge and sophistication about which there might be debate. Thus, we read that 'although Yngvars saga never explicitly states that Yngvarr's quest is for his own salvation, a well-versed audience would have recognized the signs that his journey carried religious connotations' (pp. 85–86). Similarly, it is said of Svínfellinga saga that 'like most other sagas, [it] refrains from explicitly claiming that a character is damned. Rather, subtle yet clear hints are made about the sinner's poor posthumous prospects' (p. 103). It does seem open to doubt whether after Gunnarr's celebrated defence in Njáls saga an audience should be aware of his 'seeming damnation' as someone who 'dies as a pagan' (p. 212), or whether the lights in his burial mound might possibly 'evoke the four points of the cross' (p. 216).

While it would be unjust to suggest that this is not an impressive piece of scholarship, based on thorough research in the primary sources and extensive reading in secondary literature relating directly to Scandinavia and more broadly to medieval Christendom, it is somewhat disfigured by an unusual number of usually slight blemishes. On p. 106 a passage presented in Old Norse and English in accordance with the book's normal practice states that Þorgils skarði was invited to feasts and received gifts. It is provided as evidence of 'Þorgils's lavish display of gift-giving and feast-holding'. The intention was probably to quote the immediately preceding paragraph in the saga. The reference to Högni Njálsson on p. 215 should be to Högni Gunnarsson. Bróðir's prophecy before the Battle of Clontarf is significantly misrepresented on p. 226. English translations can be surprisingly free...