Njal's Saga and the Icelandic sagas

Njal's Saga (Brennu-Njals saga, 'the saga of Burnt Njal') is an Icelandic prose narrative of about 159 chapters, written by an unknown author around 1270 to 1290, though it describes events from about 960 to 1020. It is the longest and most admired of the Sagas of Icelanders, a group of about forty prose stories about the first settlers of Iceland and their families, written down in the 13th and 14th centuries. The story follows the wise lawyer Njal and his friend, the fighter Gunnar of Hlidarendi, whose lives are drawn into a spiral of feuds, driven by pride, honor and quarrelling wives.¹²

The saga's famous climax is the burning of Njal's farmstead by his enemies, in which Njal and his wife Bergthora refuse to leave and die inside; the burning and the long legal and violent aftermath follow. Law is at the center: the saga describes the Althing assembly, lawsuits and the attempt to replace blood feud with settlement, and it includes the Icelandic decision to accept Christianity around the year 1000. Scholars debate how far the sagas record real events, since they were written two to three centuries after them, but they remain a main source for the Norse world and have influenced writers such as William Morris, Borges and Tolkien.¹