Njal's Saga (53 page)

3.
you need to be avenging your father rather than predicting my fate
: Snorri's father Thorgrim was slain by Gisli Sursson, the outlaw hero of
Gisli Sursson's Saga
(see Ch. 16 of that saga). Vengeance in this case was complicated, because Gisli, the slayer, was the brother of Snorri's mother Thordis; Skarphedin's insult is therefore unfair. Snorri's response, that he has heard this insult before, may indicate that the saga author know
Olkofri's Saga
, where Broddi says the same thing to Snorri.

4.
It would be more fitting
…
from your home
: Svanlaug and this story are not known elsewhere.

5.
Thorkel Bully
…
you deserve blame for that
: The slander of Gudmund to which Skarphedin may be referring appears in
The Saga of the People of Ljosavatn
, Ch. 19, as an explicit accusation of homosexuality: ‘I imagine your ass has slaked itself at many streams, but I doubt it has drunk milk before.'

6.
He was the son
…
Hallbjorn Half-troll
: This genealogy repeats the one given for Thorkel's father in Ch. 105.

7.
Balagardssida
: This is thought to refer to the south-west coast of Finland.

8.
a creature half-man, half-beast
: The Icelandic word for this centaur-like creature
is finngálkn
, which does not appear in any other family saga. Thorkel's adventures with this creature and with the flying dragon are more typical of the legendary and romantic sagas. Only in one other family saga,
The Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal People
, Ch. 5, does a man kill a flying dragon.

1.
It's never happened … such a filthy thing
: This insult combines the likely and the outrageous. In Ch. 2 of
The Saga of the People of Ljosavatn
Thorkel and his brothers oppose their father Thorgeir (the lawspeaker who decided in Ch. 105 above that Iceland should be Christian). The charge of eating the mare's rectum has nothing to do with the prohibition against eating horse flesh; the sense is that only someone as low as Thorkel Bully could eat such food, with a hint at his avarice. The small household at his farm Oxara is mentioned in Ch. 13 of
The Saga of the People of Ljosavatn
.

2.
I had this axe in my hand
…
to catch me
: See the account of this killing in Ch. 92.

1.
I felt that the sweetest light of my eyes had been put out
: The phrase ‘light of my eyes', more than any other in the saga, has religious echoes, as in Tobit 10: 4: ‘
lumen oculorum nostrorum
'. In the life of St Alexis appears ‘
lumen oculorum meorum'
(
Acta Sanctorum
, XXXI, p. 252). In both cases a mother is lamenting the death (or presumed death) of a son. The additional word ‘sweet' in this phrase appears only in one other place in the sagas of Icelanders, in Thorstein Eiriksson's prophecy about Gudrid's descendants (among whom were bishops) in Ch. 5 of
The Saga of the Greenlanders
: ‘you will live a long life together, and have many descendants, promising, bright and fine, sweet and well-scented.' The combination of sweetness and brightness in that passage, as in
Njal's Saga
, may go back to Psalm 18: 10-11 (Vulgate), where the commandments of the Lord are said to enlighten the eyes and to be sweeter than honey. Sweetness was associated with sanctity in the Middle Ages.

2.
when I helped your kinsman
…
Hall the Red
: This story is not told elsewhere, but Thorgrim is mentioned in
Thorstein Sidu-Hallson's Saga
and his father, Stout-Ketil, appears in a number of sources.

1.
the farmers' churchyard: Grágás
mentions a farmer's churchyard at Thingvellir, where such payments were made. It is not known where this churchyard (or church) was.

2.
a silk robe
…
on top of the pile
: The robe, though costly, was apparently suitable for either sex and thus gave Flosi an excuse to take offence. Njal may have added these gifts as a gesture of good will, but some readers have suspected that he was deliberately provoking Flosi and in effect sealing his own doom. The fact that he is silent when Flosi asks (twice) who put the robe on the pile can be taken to support this view; if the gift was innocent, why not acknowledge it?

3.
black trousers
…
more need of these
: The insult lies either in the fact that these trousers were women's trousers, or that they were men's trousers which Flosi, with his woman's nature, needed badly.

4.
he uses you as a woman every ninth night
: Similar insults about a man being a woman every ninth night appear in
Thorstein Sidu-Hallson's Saga
, Ch. 3, and
The Saga of Ref the Sly
, Ch. 7. The Svinafell troll, presumably a semi-human creature who lived at Svinafell, is mentioned only here. The seriousness of the insult can be measured by the Old Norwegian Gulathing Law: ‘No one is to make an exaggerated utterance about another or a libel. It is called an ‘‘exaggerated utterance'' if someone says something about another man which cannot be, nor come to be, nor have been: declares he is a woman every ninth night or has borne a child or calls him
gylfin
(some sort of unnatural monster). He is outlawed if he is found guilty of that.' Cited in ‘
Níð
and the Sacred,' by Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, in
Artikler: Udgivet i anleding af Preben Meulengracht Sørensens 60. års fødselsdag 1. marts 2000
(Aarhus: Norrønt Forum, 2000), p. 79.

5.
‘
They can never prosecute us, according to the laws of the land'
: What this means is unclear. Skarphedin seems to think that because of the legal mistake committed (deliberately) by Mord, it will be too late to initiate the legal process once more.

1.
the Lord's Day which falls eight weeks before winter
: Sunday at the end of August, a good time for a long ride in the Icelandic highlands, with the ground hard but not snow-covered.

1.
Sand
: Lomagnupssand, as Flosi indicated in Ch. 124. Today it is called Skeidararsand. The ‘Sand' in the next paragraph is Mælifellssand. The main feature of Flosi's route is that it passes to the north of Eyjafjalla glacier, rather than along the usual route, close to the southern coast.

1.
one fate should await us both
: This phrase, with slight variations, appears four other times in chapters close to the burning (119,123,124 and 130), thus lending a sense of fate to that event. The clause also appears after the burning, at the end of Ch. 152.

1.
Thord Freed-man
: Presumably the son of Thord Freed-man's son and Gudfinna – see Ch. 39.

2.
Gunn of gold
…
cried out
: The translation of the second half of this stanza is conjectural, as these lines have not been satisfactorily interpreted. The first four lines refer to a woman, presumably Skarphedin's wife Thorhild, who will grieve over her husband's death. The fact that there is no mention of the burning does not necessarily mean that the poem was originally composed for another occasion.

1.
Have no doubt that I will be loyal
…
for myself
: Mord was an enemy of the Sigfussons for his part in the slaying of Hoskuld Thrainsson, and thus he is forced to align himself with Kari.

1.
‘
I want to tell you about a dream I had'
: The dream which Flosi is about to recount, in which a figure comes out of a mountain and calls out, in groups, the names of men about to die, has a literary source in the following passage from the
Dialogues
of Gregory the Great, which were known in medieval Iceland: ‘A steep mountain towered high above the monastery, and a deep chasm lay beneath it. When omnipotent God had decided to reward the venerable Anastasius for his labours, a voice was heard one night crying out from the top of the cliff in prolonged tones saying: ‘‘Anastasius, come!'' And when this had been said, seven other monks were likewise called by name. For a short while, however, the voice which had been heard fell silent, and then it called the eighth monk. Since the community had clearly heard this, no one doubted that death was approaching those whose names had been called. Thus within a few days first the most revered Anastasius passed away, and the others also in the same order in which their names had been called from the top of the mountain. That brother whose name had been preceded by a moment of silence lived on for a few days after the others had died and then he too passed away. Thus it was clearly shown that the silence which interrupted the voice signified a brief period of life.' Migne,
Patrologia Latina
, 77, col. 185; the English translation is taken from Einar Ólafur Sveinsson,
Njáls Saga: A Literary Masterpiece
, p. 206.

2.
First he called
…
Kol Thorsteinsson
: The names called out anticipate the deaths of Flosi's men: Grim the Red and Arni Kolsson are killed in the beginning of Ch. 145; later in that chapter come the deaths of Eyjolf and Ljot ‘and about six other men'. For the others see n. 1 to Ch. 152. The only discrepancy between this prophecy and later events is that Glum is not killed in a group of five, as here, but in the group of three killed in Ch. 151.

3.
“First I shall clear the panel
…
for the battlers”
: These words look ahead to the battle at the Althing in Ch. 145. The translation attempts to capture the rhetorical zeugma in the original, where the single verb
ryðja
(‘clear') is used in two different senses with two different kinds of objects, first in a legal sense with ‘panel' and ‘court' and then in its original literal sense with ‘battlefield'.

4.
What I told you once
…
before all this is over
: Flosi had predicted this in Ch. 117.

1.
Flosi was wearing trousers
…
easier to walk
This is obscure, but the idea seems to be (1) that such a garment makes walking easier, and (2) that if Flosi walks, many men of lesser rank will be inclined to join him. Presumably there were not enough horses for everybody.

1.
I give notice
…
Thorgeir Thorisson
: See n. 1 to Ch. 73.

1.
Beitivellir
: ‘Grazing fields', a grassy area between Laugarvatn and Thingvellir where they rested and let their horses graze before the final stretch to Thingvellir.

2.
Flosi had arranged for the Byrgi booth to be covered
: The Byrgi booth seems to have belonged to Flosi and the men from Svinafell. It is mentioned in other sources and tradition associates it with a definite place at Thingvellir.

1.
There was a man named Eyjolf
…
in Iceland
: Eyjolf Bolverksson's family is prominent, and his brother(?) Gellir Bolverksson was lawspeaker on two occasions, but Eyjolf is not known outside this saga. Thorhall Asgrimsson is also referred to as one of the three greatest lawyers, on three occasions – see note 3 to Ch. 109 above. The third is presumably the lawspeaker, who at that time was Skafti Thoroddsson. The designation of both Thorhall and Eyjolf as among the three greatest lawyers anticipates the legal battle between them in Chs. 142-4.

2.
the shameful treatment
…
you Ljosavatn men
: This refers to Skarphedin's insult to Thorkel Bully in Ch. 120, when the Njalssons and Asgrim were going around asking for support at the Althing.

3.
a defence can turn into a prosecution
: An alliterative saying in the Icelandic, referring to the way that the defendants in a lawsuit sometimes turn into prosecutors, if they find an error in the prosecution. This will in fact happen
in Ch. 144, when Flosi's side, the defendants, will bring charges against the plaintiffs for procedural violations.

1.
in-laws
: Gizur was married to Skafti's sister.

2.
when Skarphedin told me
…
over his death
: Skarphedin said these things to Skafti in Ch. no.119

3.
Asgrim
…
killed his foster-brother Gauk
: This was also referred to in Ch. 26; see n. 1 to that chapter.

4.
Few bring up the better if they're aware of the worse
: A proverb expressing the fact that when you want to insult someone you do not choose the least offensive thing about him.

1.
I'll suggest a plan to you
…
the correct one
: Eyjolf's trick, though taken seriously by the author (see Ch. 143), cannot have been valid, since Flosi's change of thing allegiance will come
after
the suit has already been brought in the correct quarter.