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By common agreement, Njáls saga occupies a transcendent place in the Icelandic tradition as the greatest, if not quite the latest, of the classical sagas.1 It represents such a pinnacle of style, range, and drama that it tends to overshadow the earlier sagas and relegate them to the status of preliminary attempts at a form that matures only in Njáls saga.2 My approach departs from this perspective. Rather than viewing Njáls saga as the crowning achievement, I suggest that it consciously subverts the narrative positions constructed in the earlier sagas. I consider the author less as the master architect perfecting inherited forms than as the satirist and caricaturist who holds these forms up to a searching gaze, revealing what is doubtful and even fraudulent about the older conventions. This reversal is accomplished by isolating patterns in the inherited narratives and inverting them in such a way as to reveal quite different perspectives.3 We may note first of all that Njáls saga dispenses with a historical prelude recounting the settlement in Iceland of an ancestral clan.4 This sort of prelude had been devised in elaborate form for Egils saga and no less stylishly for Laxdœla saga. By the time Njáls saga was written, the historical prelude was so ubiquitous in the classical sagas that it was virtually de rigueur. Such preludes focused on the discovery of a C H A P T E R T E N Demythologizing the Tradition Njáls saga 1 Wolf 1982, 62. 2 On the distinctive style of Njáls saga, see Heusler 1922; Einar Ólafur Sveinsson 1971, 61; Clover 1974, 65. 3 Allen 1971, xvi. 4 Lönnroth 1976, 209–10; Wolf 1982, 64. 183 new land and the creation of a new polity; they may be considered mythological in the sense of being originary stories. They share a certain excitement about origins, new institutions, a new independence, a new assertion of self. There is a prevailing nostalgia about the founding moment when Iceland, like the earth in the cosmogony of “Vƒlusp á,” seemed to rise out of the sea as the scene of a new experiment. But Njáls saga is a story with no prehistory, no focus on the first phases of a new state and a new ideology. How are we to construe this absence of an almost paradigmatic feature in the saga form? On the one hand, it could reflect a new maturity at the end of the thirteenth century, a rejection of nostalgia and patriotic lore. Perhaps the author no longer felt the need to dwell on Iceland’s sense of connection with or separation from Norway. On the other hand, the omission could reflect growing doubts about the golden age of national foundation. Whatever the explanation, Njáls saga shifts away from Iceland’s part in the larger history of the North to focus on one brief moment in its internal history around 1000 ce, a moment that becomes peculiarly burdened in the absence of a fuller context. Just how burdened the moment will be is revealed in the most memorable opening scene to be found in any saga. Hƒskuld Dala-Kollsson (whose notable credentials were presented at leisure in Laxdœla saga) shows off his beautiful girl child Hallgerd to his half-brother Hrút, but Hrút unaccountably demurs, observing that she is fair enough but that he does not know how thief’s eyes got into their family.5 This is the first of many ominous premonitions in the saga and nothing short of an explosive revelation.6 It instantly transforms the proudest lineage of Laxdœla saga into a sinister brood, for thievishness is as unsavory an accusation as can be leveled in the sagas: it is associated with cowardice , sorcery, and sexual perversion in men and with nymphomania in women.7 This last association comes to haunt Hallgerd as the saga unfolds. We never learn all there is to know about her intimate life, but there are suggestive hints. She has an oddly close relationship with her villainous foster father, Thjóstólf. She uses a certain Sigmund Lambason in her feud against Njál’s wife, Bergthóra, and “was no less subservient The Growth of the Medieval Icelandic Sagas 184 5 On this scene, see esp. A. Heinrichs 1994, 333. 6 On the system of premonitions in the saga, see Zimmermann 1984. 7 Helga Kress 1977, 310. [3.19.30.232...

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