This review is delightful and makes me want to read Njal's Saga. Does anyone here have a recommended translation, or (even better) a recommended analysis-of-tradeoffs-between-different-translations?
I'm just reminded that whenever there's ancaps claiming Medieval Iceland as some sort of an example of how ancapism would work (though I'm encountering less of these than before, probably since there's less ancaps around), it sounds absolutely horrible, even in the "moderate" interpretion that it wasn't *quite* as bloody as the sagas say, not the sort of a place where anyone could live; almost like a historical country-sized experiment with the result that, yes, you can indeed technically construct a society according to this principle, even run it for some hundreds of years, but *why*?
Also, a medieval Viking lawsuit Ace Attorney -style game absolutely sounds like... well, not something I'd necessarily play, but certainly something that would gather a small and fervent fanbase that would eventually contribute greatly to general social media meme culture. King of Dragon Pass and its successor games had some similar elements, though also of course a lot of other stuff.
Any time people point to Athens, instead of any number of perfectly functional independent tribes a hundred miles from the closest "civilized frontier" as "a flourishing of human freedoms" I can't help but sigh a little, especially after reading authors like James C. Scott & David Graeber. Sure, Athens had a mighty citizen navy, but also widespread slavery, a great deal of tension between oligarchs and the demos, etc. etc. It was certainly a flourishing of literature and scholasticism and thought, but freedom? Only under really skewed definitions, I think. So I was glad to see that addressed here, albeit in a footnote.
The Phoenix Wright video was an incredibly funny touch and I really appreciated it. I assume this book has been translated maybe even a couple times? Of course I believe the Scandinavian's language is much more robust then English and is still legible to current scandanavian's. The main reason I ask is mostly about the focus on Njal as a beardless Christian part being added by translators who found merit in the saga for that reason.
The comparison to greek saga of Orestes was also compelling. I wonder if we have something similar when Justinian and the Byzantines rewrote their judicial system which we mostly have intact today. I also wonder if this is why lawyer shows can be so popular. Of course there most of the time it's about really good lawyers seeing justice served by any means necessary rather then walking the line that Njal's Saga did of showing that law isn't always fair (Though there are very good episodes that do show that dichotomy).
Thanks for sharing! I do not want to read this book, but am glad to know of it.
"Finally, in the saga, Thorhall is lame due to a boil on his foot, and lies bedridden in a hut nearby - each time Mord needs to consult him, he sends messengers to Thorhall’s hut, and Thorhall sends the messengers back with the answer."
*sips coffee*
Wow, that sounds like it would make for a very annoying gimmick.
Excellent review! Short, very entertaining, summarises the book excellently while using it to make a fascinating larger point.
Anyone else think the entries this time round have been MUCH higher quality than last time? In my view the five I've read so far are all top-three quality relative to previous years.
I love this review, I am going to vote it, and does this mean that mediaeval Icelanders were Libertarians?
"When Harald Fairhair declared himself King of Norway, the Norwegians who refused to bend the knee fled west to build a makeshift seastead on a frozen volcanic island. No lords, no kings, no masters. Only lawsuits. So, so many lawsuits."
Last year: "This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done"
This year: "This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done."
Shout out to David Friedman's "Legal Systems Very Different from Ours"
> Still, there have been a few times when men could boast they were free without it sounding completely hollow. Ancient Athens is the classic, but medieval Iceland surely deserves a place beside it in this pantheon.
Ancient Athens and medieval Iceland were both literally slave-holding societies. and in Athens at least women were somewhere between "second class citizens" and "property".
If by "a time when men could boast they were free" you mean "a time when some men, but no women, could boast they were free" then pretty much every society qualifies. If you mean "a society where everyone was minimally unfree" ancient Athens and medieval Iceland are both terrible, terrible choices.
So, in feud-adjacent arbitration systems like these, why isn't part of the role of "trusted arbitrator" the ability to say "look, Eyjolf obviously neglected to eliminate his six jurors in a bad faith attempt to invalidate the trial, let's just ignore his bullshit and rule on the merits"? That seems like the entire point of having trusted arbitrators.
Or maybe other, similar systems did allow this, and the Icelandic one was just particularly vulnerable to going off the rails due to stupid technicalities? Or maybe Iceland was particularly low-trust, so the arbitrators weren't trusted enough to make a ruling like that without getting stabbed by all of Eyjolf's friends? Would this same thing have happened in the Somali system described in Legal Systems Very Different From Ours?
There's another saga in which the hero kills an advisor to the king and he knows he needs to tell the king about this or else it's murder, but he also knows that if he does then the king will have him killed. His solution is to deliver this extremely cryptic pun-filled speech that at first sounds nonsensical, but when the king thinks about it later he realizes "Hey, wait, that guy just confessed to killing my advisor!" But by that time the hero is gone.
Women were never free in that sense. Even Norse women were smaller and weaker than Norse men. They had to obey their husbands and male relatives or they'd be physically punished. They couldn't go to the council if someone slugged them or killed a relative, and good luck not dying horribly if they fought back. That's about 20,000 of the 40,000 right there. Throw in the fact that even male children, servants and slaves were also not free, and you're talking about a tiny minority of free people. Your number was 500 out of 40,000, so it's hard to think of it as a society of free people. It was a society with 79 out of 80 people being cattle. So, it was 1.25% free. People talking up freedom rarely are. Consider Thomas Jefferson talking up freedom while torturing people to force them to do work for him. (He talked a good game. It's a pity that people who took his fine words seriously are now denounced as "woke".)
A common theory is that Athena was created as the patron goddess of Athens because the Athenians wanted a woman who would always side with men. That's why she doesn't have a mother or is only granted one in a marginal role as a hat tip to Biology 101. She doesn't have any desires or passions of her own like most other goddesses. If you look at classical Athens, in its glory days as the local bully state, women were treated appallingly. There were wives and hetaerae. The former were treated as children with no freedom whatever, and the latter as whores with little more. Oh yeah, lots of slaves, too. I doubt classical Athens was even 1% free.
My girlfriend read Njal's Saga in Old Norse. The moral she took was to make sure you keep that chickweed under control. It dries out and catches fire easily. Having dealt with chickweed, that's just common sense.
Oh hey! I have actually read this one, and in the last year at that!
I really liked the review; when I read it I was more struck by the depiction of the transition from paganism to Christianity than from semi-anarchy to rule of law, but the transition the reviewer traces is very interesting and very much one of the real roots of the story.
The thing that maybe struck me most about legal proceedings, as presented in Njal's Saga, was
that pretty much nobody ever disputes the facts in any of the law cases presented at the Althing. (Side note: in the translation I read, it was just called "the Thing," which made me giggle internally every time a character declared he was going to the Thing. "What thing?" "You know, the Thing.")
Nobody ever says, "I didn't do that," or offers an alibi, or says that "he attacked me first!" It's all just arguing over points of law which range from the abstruse to the incredibly convoluted. ETR: I see the details of Eyjolf's trickery are in the Phoenix Wright video, so no need to go over them again!
One point that I think is relevant to the overall dynamic is that you don't have to be one of the ~500 patriarchs postulated in the review to be involved a feud, and in an important way a feud is more likely to be perpetuated when patriarchs are not the primary feuding parties. For example, much of the first half of the saga deals with a feud between the households of Njal and Gunnar. Njal and Gunnar are good friends and pal around together all the time, but their wives Bergthora and Hallgerda hate each other. Every time someone from Njal's household kills someone from Gunnar's or vice versa, Njal and Gunnar meet at the Thing, apologize, offer and accept a generous weregild, and hope that that will be the end of it; but Bergthora and Hallgerda have other ideas. Because there is no mechanism for mediating between Bergthora and Hallgerda --even the often-unsatisfying mediation of the Thing and weregild which is the best the patriarchs have-- the feud can't really end unless one of them gives up, forgives the other, or dies (guess which of these occurs.) It's also relevant that both Bergthora and Hallgerda have male servants who regard themselves as principally responsible to the woman of the house, rather than the man of the house, so if Gunnar says "It's over" and Hallgerda says, "It's over once you go kill that guy," Gunnar has no real way to enforce his edict.
Objection! Frodi would have to KNOW of the Phoenix Wright games on order to request one from the devil (who is unlikely to tell him without being specifically asked). Unless one of his deals gave him infinite knowledge or something, he would have no way of knowing to ask for this.
This review was fantastic and expect I will heartily support it as winner of the book review contest. If 'support' here entails standing around menacingly with an axe, so be it.
I'd also want to note for anyone who may be inspired to pick up Njal's Saga that, while the review's description of the saga as primarily an account of a series of inane legal disputes is *true*, it's *also* full of completely different stuff. In between court cases, the story follows characters (though not Njal) going raiding (indeed, going viking), complete with proto-swashbucking fights on the high seas. The entire story derails for a couple chapters in the middle to cover the Christianization of Iceland. Njal's friend Gunnar, who is basically Aragorn, kills like a hundred people across a dozen battles (almost always legally.) At one point there's a random side character who is just literally a wizard, no explanations given, and he's forgotten about after a few pages. And so on.
Basically, if you ever thought to yourself, "man, if only LOTR had had a really nicely done filler arc," consider picking up Njal's Saga.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think basically all book reviews so far would have benefited from a little introductory paragraph, just one or two sentences, detailing plainly just what the thing is that's going to be reviewed.
It's really important to not that the version we have now of this saga was first written down hundreds of years later by CHRISTIAN MONKS who had their own lessons and agendas in what they chose to write and how they wrote it.
Think about how much you would trust a church-sponsored documentary about ancient Egypt and you get the idea.
Gee, the wisest person just chose to Christianize really quickly! Gee, these bloody barbarians will all kill each other if I'm endless feuds, and sure need that transition to more Christianity / civilisation.
Hysterical animation. Anyway, I think we can reconcile the idea that their overall murder rate might have been low with the dramatic accounts of murder. It is precisely when murder is uncommon and concentrated among the elites that we get these types of dramas, and this state of affairs is much preferable to the historical norm of elites staying safe and just throwing their serfs at one another in unending bloodbaths. Presumably this is why honor cultures flourished for a time, they were dramatically less wasteful than what came before. We can then blame Napoleon for the return to total war, only this time at the much greater scales that modernity enables vs tribal total war and population replacement.
"Njal’s Saga takes place right on the fulcrum of these two world-views, the point where either the natural justice of vengeance or the artificial justice of courts seem like plausible options."
I read it in college for a class called "Hatred, vengeance, and the law," and this was pretty much the takeaway I remember, yes.
On the Christianity point: First, I'd keep in mind that the saga was written after the conversion, so how fast Njal converted in reality is beside the point. Second, I'd bring up that Christianity explicitly calls on us to consider all humans to be God' children, a universal brotherhood of man. Matthew 10:34-39. 1 Corinthians 1:10. Accepting this fictive kinship immediately turns the logic of familial feuds around: your hated enemy is your brother, just like the biological brother that got killed. So how can anyone who feuds ever be in the right?
How is being exile different from being outlawed? May one simply slay the outlaw after the verdict, while exiles get safe passage? Can exiles sell there lands and cows, or are they forfeit? For outlaws, were you allowed to offer them safe refuge? "Technically, you are free to slay him, but he appears to be in my homestead, and if you trespass on my land one of us will die."
I envision medieval Iceland as a somewhat hostile natural environment, in which paying the economical value of an adult as weregild should probably bankrupt the median income family and make them starve in the winter, so that a weregild would just be a sentence to death by economy. Was this the case? Or is Ragnar Of The Bloody Axe an elite landowner who decides that he would rather spend his excess income on rape and murder than his fifth battle horse or whatever elites buy?
Also, in a harsh environment, I would expect crime for profit to be rampant. If you only have enough food to bring four fifths of the population through a harsh winter, I would expect the last fifth not to simply roll over and die, but assume that there is conflict until there is enough food to feed the survivors. Better to go to court later than to starve now. Cattle raids would be a related for-profit "crime" I would expect to appear.
Given that apparently, weregild is due even for slain attackers, I would expect that there is something like suicide-by-warrior. Provoking someone into killing you seems reasonable to accomplish, and the weregild for your death might get your clan through lean times.
Also, I would argue that in the face of an imperfect system of law, the threat of a victim going outside the law is actually beneficial for the society. A Viking society where there is a one in six chance (or whatever the game theoretical optimal probability of punishing defection with defection is here) that any murder Ragnar Of The Bloody Axe commits might lead to both clans being destroyed seems much better than one where that never happens. Nine out of ten Ragnar's would be stopped by their fellow clansmen from murdering very much, and the remaining one would be destroyed with his clan and quite a few innocents.
> Kari lies in wait for him, but when Flosi returns to the North, Kari can’t bring himself to strike the killing blow. The two of them swear eternal friendship, and Flosi gives Kari his daughter in marriage. The end.
From my experience, humans do not work that way. Of course, from my experience, humans would also not be happy to receive the weregild for their relatives, never mind waive it. So it is reasonable to assume that these humans had a different attitude to death and violence than we have. A modern family losing one of two children to a car accident is a tragedy, while a medieval family losing four children out of seven to malnutrition and disease is just a statistic or "plenty to take care of us when we are old". By necessity the value of a human life in such a society is tied to their economic value. If you do not feed the working age adults before you feed the children, the children will starve as orphans. Accepting violence as a fact of life might account for "yeah, Torben killed a clansman during a cattle raid. He paid, so whatever. If we were only friends with men who never killed anyone, we would have only wimps as friends." Getting from there to forgiving the dishonorable, cowardly murder of burning the greatest of men in their wooden hall seems a far jump, still. Probably a Christianity thing?
I've heard it said that the Vikings evolved their quarrelsome and aggressive ways simply because there isn't that much decent agricultural land in Norway, with all its fjords and the steep slopes bounding them, and the barren plateau inland. So they had to squabble ceaselessly over what little land there was.
Apparently the original meaning of the word "viking" is not known for sure, but I would guess it meant something like "rover". It only really applies to those extra aggressive guys (mostly) who left home to seek their fortune, by fair means or foul, elsewhere. The majority of long-suffering Norwegians must have been content to stay at home.
A fair review, given the reviewer doesn't seem to know much about Medieval Iceland, or simply the unfamiliarity of the setting keeps him from seeing the depths of the characters. Sort of like a classical music reviewer of 1925 citicizing the blue notes of Louis Armstrong. The fact that there is an honest attempt here to find the quality makes this a worthy next round candidate.
For those contemplating reading "Njala," you might try to follow the progression of Hallgerd, from a spoiled brat to, well, you find out. You might as a warmup read "Hrafnekl‘s Frey's Godi." Short and a single plot.
Now, since you all are serious readers, find me a pre Shakespeare work that shows such nuances in a female character. I'm not saying there isn't, jes' curious.
I do agree that there is something Sophoclean in the mixture of character and luck in so many of the characters’ endings. Maybe that's why I am a Hardyist. But Hardy can't even imagine the bloody net woven on the morning of Clontarf. Or the ultimate reconciliation of Flosi and Kari.
Perhaps we shouldn’t forget that a lot of the jokes in Monty Python are on us. Those young snots have stuff that deliberately goes over the head their audience. Cheeky sots.
A lot of work on very difficult material in this review. Congrats
This was by far the most entertaining book review. I think this was the only book review I read more entertaining than Scott's own book reviews. It will be hard for me to weigh it compared to the Meaning of Man book reviews which was very thought provoking, and the cities book review, which gave me a lens into a very intriguing theory I had never considered before, but keep thinking back to now.
Boring sounding book, great essay! Loved the bit in the middle telling me what it was about so I didn't have to think for myself (not sarcastic), and the casual, friendly tone.
This was hilariously well-written, but I wonder about the conclusions. If it's true that we've been domesticating ourselves as a species for a while now, picking out the less-domesticated behavior of some earlier point in the domestication arc and philosophizing about it seems unfair. My highminded and subtle dog-training techniques have resulted in pets much better behaved than any wolf, and probably better than whatever dogs the Romans had signs about saying 'cave canem'. I'm not sure it's my technique, though.
Zippy and fun, well written. The most Scottly of all the reviews so far, by a wide margin.
I'm not sure I was along for the ride philosophically speaking, though. The duality here between cattle domesticated by the state and the glorious liberty of cyclical violence felt overly cynical, and there was no real effort to convince us that the 'middle way' of decentralized courtroom arbitrage was pointing at an improvement over anything. I can see this as being a very compelling review for people that already feel an aesthetic and philosophical pull towards this kind of anarcho-capitalist legalism, don't get me wrong. But it seems like those are the only people reading the 'real' essay- the rest of us are just standing in the street, looking in through the window while somebody else enjoys a nice meal.
Thanks - Iceland today is a model society - funny how cultures evolve
The Althing is hard to imagine on site when you visit it today. It's really a huge campsite with a ridge with no buildings or sign of habitation or ceremony.
I hadn't come across Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney before, but that video had me laughing so much I had to pause it half-way through to catch my breath. Well done!
Since one of the major functions of the rule of law is to stop people from trying to resolve their disputes by killing one another, it seems like the medieval Icelandic version of the law has failed this function pretty badly.
One deeply impressive thing is that all of this stuff was kept alive for a hundred years or more by oral historian bards before it was written down. Think of that when the reviewer quotes a massive genealogy!
And let's not get too warm and fuzzy about "freedom". There seems to have quite commonly been genuine slavery in Iceland (see "Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas, and Power" by Jesse L. Byock) and there was in the Norse society that they fled. The sagas seem to tell only about the "freemen", who were the landholders at the top of each farm, who were almost always men. Of course, they were the only ones admitted to the legal institutions that the sagas were written about. But there were also lots of other dependents: servants, dependent relatives, and the women of all these categories. Their fates seem to have been controlled by the landholder. There doesn't seem to be a lot written about the women, but I suspect the women of de-facto high status (close relatives of landholders, landholders' wives, etc.) probably had an unrecognized network that wielded considerable power, as seems to be true in most societies. In all of this, they seem to have resembled ancient Athens, as the reviewer says.
I like the fact that often characters face the choice: Do I cleave Gunnar's head with an axe, or do I marry my daughter to his son? As if the only way to not live at daggers-drawn is by creating kinship. Then I realized that this resembled Medieval nobles. So it's probably ancient in humans.
1. This is an *extremely* good review, very well done!
2. The voice is very, very Scott, even more so than you'd expect for someone who reads this blog a and presumably admires Scott's writing so much they'd want to imitate it. I'd expect someone this good at writing to have their own authorial voice, rather than sounding exactly like Scott (unless they were intentionally trying to do their best Scott impression). I think there's a very good chance Scott wrote this.
3. I remember seeing something about this stuff on some twitter screenshot a few weeks/months ago. Anyone remember?
There's one case in Njáls saga where someone actually investigates a crime. A big cheese has been stolen and later a big cheese shows up elsewhere under suspicious circumstances. Mord Valgardsson investigates the matter and it turns out that the suspicious cheese exactly fits the mould of the stolen cheese. This lets him prove who the thief is. If the cheese does fit you can't acquit.
Kind of a bizarre review IMO, considering it doesn't even mention or allude to any of the stuff that makes the saga worth reading, like the viking raid or the assault on Hlidarendi, or engage with the actual moral of the story (that women have to be kept on a damn short leash, no matter how good-looking they are or how important their families are).
I'm a bit confused by the discussion in the review of man's justice vs. God's justice. We are told that the justice of God is an eye for an eye. How that plays out depends on whether the goal is compensation or deterrence. If the goal is compensation, you try to negotiate a settlement with the man who poked your eye out, but perhaps he's managed to convince himself that he hasn't done anything seriously wrong. After all, you still have one eye left, so you can still see. That's the point where say, “It appears we don't see eye to eye on the value of an eye. So if that's your final offer, I'll just take one of your eyes and we are done here.” Faced with the prospect of losing one of his own eyes, he will be forced to be honest, with himself at least, about the value he places on an eye. If the system works, he keeps both his eyes and you end up with a fair compensation for your loss.
If the goal is deterrence (or more precisely, deterrence only, because being required to pay compensation is a form of deterrence), you do want to take his eye, or better yet, both of his eyes, to make clear that bad things will happen to him or anyone else who harms you in the future. In this case, the eye for an eye rule is a limit on how far you can go to create deterrence. Presumably the point is that if you only take one eye, the two of you are in some sense equal going forward. Regardless of who is the victim and who is the perpetrator of the original incident, you and he have each taken an eye from the other, which hopefully settles the matter. So the eye for an eye rule is intended to sacrifice a certain amount of deterrence in exchange for a reduced likelyhood of future conflict.
The reviewer tells us that prior to the Hammurabi, “God's justice was the only game on offer.” This is also confusing, because the code of Hammurabi specifies an eye for an eye.
In contrast to God's justice, man's justice is “a weregild for an eye, or maybe getting confused and failing to award any punishment at all.” The first part of this seems to say that man's law is about compensation, which would in turn suggest that God's law is by contrast about deterrence. But we are also told that, “we go with Man's justice naturally...because we're cattle domesticated by the State.” That would mean that current law is an example of Man's law--and current law is a mixture of criminal law, which is about deterrence, and civil law, which is about compensation. (Even civil law is partially about deterrence, which is why we have punitive damages.)
The second part (“maybe getting confused and failing to award any punishment at all”) points to the fallibility of Man's justice, but any system of justice administered by man is going to be imperfect, so it's not clear how God's justice escapes this criticism.
I sent this review to a very sophisticated Icelandic friend of mine, and got the following critical response. Dave Anderson.
I have read the review and have very mixed feelings about it.
I have read Njal's saga several times and it seems I have read a totally different book than the reviewer. I am dismayed of, in my opinion, his mockery of the saga. Be assured that this opinion is very biased!
The Njal's saga is to me so much more than a series of lawsuits, although it is quite clear that the author has respected or is interested in law and lawmaking.
The [saga] author creates characters that are visible to the reader in all their humanity. They are proud, devious, wise, athletic, scoundrels and honest. Every word has a meaning. Every person introduced is mentioned for a reason.
This Saga also includes the history of the beautiful Hallgerdur Langbroek, her third husband Gunnar Hamundarson, Njal's best friend and Njals's wife Bergthora. Two strong willed women whose feud between one another is fierce, but does not destroy the ever lasting friendship of Njall and Gunnar.
Hallgerdur and Bergthora are some of the Saga's most famous women, but for different reasons. In most eyes Hallgerdur is depicted as evil, in others she was probably sexually abused as a young girl. All her actions as a young woman described in Njal's Saga bear the marks of such assaults.
After Gunnar was slain, she ended her life at a farm in Laugarnes (Reykjavik) less than a mile from my home, where her bones were put to rest.
Njal's saga should not be taken lightly. It should be read chapter by chapter and at the end of every chapter the reader should contemplate on what was the meaning of the chapter. What is the author saying? Also the chapters that are only a few lines.
Njal's Saga is a conversation piece. Without the contemplation and preferably continuous ̶̶ as you read through the pages ̶̶ discussion with a fellow reader or historian, the Njal's Saga, in my opinion, will pass you by.
This should make me proud of my heritage, daubed as I am with the tarbrush of the Welsh, Scots-Irish and pre-Celtic Neanderthals. Ond y cyfan rydw i wir eisiau yw i'r pen mawr hwn ddod i ben.
An entertaining read, but much more of a "Euminides style morality play" as opposed to a cold, objective analysis.
Among the more egregious oversights: while I am not a libertarian nor do I agree with the vast majority of the screed - a core part of the screed is that government winds up harming more than helping therefore less government is good.
This is directly alluded to as the reason for Norwegians colonizing Iceland but the corollary is missed: the very practices of Icelandic law via the Althing have clearly de- or evolved from a search for justice into something else. And a very real outcome of law vs. justice is the practice of jailhouse lawyers/patent trolling/nuisance lawsuits etc etc - where the pursuit of justice is, to various degrees of transparency, subjugated under the desire for personal or professional profit.
The same thing occurs with the Euminides example: the bad practice, as seen by modern eyes, or Orestes' trial obscures the reality that justice is an outcome of society and will always be so. Decrying the practices of ancient Greeks then is just as pointless as decrying the practices of other societies today - it is ethnocentrism of the highest degree. Among other things: in a physical human labor based society - there is very much an economic and social inequality between men and women.
Very funny. I appreciate being introduced to this text I’ve never heard of and would definitely never read in a way that makes me think... just maybe I will read it.
Didn't finish reading, but isn't your aunt's father just your grandfather? Wouldn't have been as funny, obviously
> Jefferson promised the Americans “a Republic, if you can keep it”.
Wasn't that Benjamin Franklin?
"If any of you at home have any ideas about how to get this exciting saga started again, here's the address to write to:
HELP THE EXCITING ICELANDIC SAGA
C/O MATCH OF THE DAY
BBC TV
THE LARCHES
26 WESTBROOK AVENUE
FAVERSHAM
KENT"
This review is delightful and makes me want to read Njal's Saga. Does anyone here have a recommended translation, or (even better) a recommended analysis-of-tradeoffs-between-different-translations?
I'm just reminded that whenever there's ancaps claiming Medieval Iceland as some sort of an example of how ancapism would work (though I'm encountering less of these than before, probably since there's less ancaps around), it sounds absolutely horrible, even in the "moderate" interpretion that it wasn't *quite* as bloody as the sagas say, not the sort of a place where anyone could live; almost like a historical country-sized experiment with the result that, yes, you can indeed technically construct a society according to this principle, even run it for some hundreds of years, but *why*?
Also, a medieval Viking lawsuit Ace Attorney -style game absolutely sounds like... well, not something I'd necessarily play, but certainly something that would gather a small and fervent fanbase that would eventually contribute greatly to general social media meme culture. King of Dragon Pass and its successor games had some similar elements, though also of course a lot of other stuff.
> Hrapp insinuates himself with you
Ingratiates?
My favorite review by far. I laughed and I contemplated! Thank you
Any time people point to Athens, instead of any number of perfectly functional independent tribes a hundred miles from the closest "civilized frontier" as "a flourishing of human freedoms" I can't help but sigh a little, especially after reading authors like James C. Scott & David Graeber. Sure, Athens had a mighty citizen navy, but also widespread slavery, a great deal of tension between oligarchs and the demos, etc. etc. It was certainly a flourishing of literature and scholasticism and thought, but freedom? Only under really skewed definitions, I think. So I was glad to see that addressed here, albeit in a footnote.
I'll wait to comment more until my brain clears up, but I want to give the reviewer major points for providing analysis that undercuts their thesis.
The Phoenix Wright video was an incredibly funny touch and I really appreciated it. I assume this book has been translated maybe even a couple times? Of course I believe the Scandinavian's language is much more robust then English and is still legible to current scandanavian's. The main reason I ask is mostly about the focus on Njal as a beardless Christian part being added by translators who found merit in the saga for that reason.
The comparison to greek saga of Orestes was also compelling. I wonder if we have something similar when Justinian and the Byzantines rewrote their judicial system which we mostly have intact today. I also wonder if this is why lawyer shows can be so popular. Of course there most of the time it's about really good lawyers seeing justice served by any means necessary rather then walking the line that Njal's Saga did of showing that law isn't always fair (Though there are very good episodes that do show that dichotomy).
Thanks for sharing! I do not want to read this book, but am glad to know of it.
"Finally, in the saga, Thorhall is lame due to a boil on his foot, and lies bedridden in a hut nearby - each time Mord needs to consult him, he sends messengers to Thorhall’s hut, and Thorhall sends the messengers back with the answer."
*sips coffee*
Wow, that sounds like it would make for a very annoying gimmick.
Excellent review! Short, very entertaining, summarises the book excellently while using it to make a fascinating larger point.
Anyone else think the entries this time round have been MUCH higher quality than last time? In my view the five I've read so far are all top-three quality relative to previous years.
Every bit of this was just fantastic
I love this review, I am going to vote it, and does this mean that mediaeval Icelanders were Libertarians?
"When Harald Fairhair declared himself King of Norway, the Norwegians who refused to bend the knee fled west to build a makeshift seastead on a frozen volcanic island. No lords, no kings, no masters. Only lawsuits. So, so many lawsuits."
This is the most entertaining review yet, for me.
Mmm...
Last year: "This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done"
This year: "This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done."
Shout out to David Friedman's "Legal Systems Very Different from Ours"
> Still, there have been a few times when men could boast they were free without it sounding completely hollow. Ancient Athens is the classic, but medieval Iceland surely deserves a place beside it in this pantheon.
Ancient Athens and medieval Iceland were both literally slave-holding societies. and in Athens at least women were somewhere between "second class citizens" and "property".
If by "a time when men could boast they were free" you mean "a time when some men, but no women, could boast they were free" then pretty much every society qualifies. If you mean "a society where everyone was minimally unfree" ancient Athens and medieval Iceland are both terrible, terrible choices.
So, in feud-adjacent arbitration systems like these, why isn't part of the role of "trusted arbitrator" the ability to say "look, Eyjolf obviously neglected to eliminate his six jurors in a bad faith attempt to invalidate the trial, let's just ignore his bullshit and rule on the merits"? That seems like the entire point of having trusted arbitrators.
Or maybe other, similar systems did allow this, and the Icelandic one was just particularly vulnerable to going off the rails due to stupid technicalities? Or maybe Iceland was particularly low-trust, so the arbitrators weren't trusted enough to make a ruling like that without getting stabbed by all of Eyjolf's friends? Would this same thing have happened in the Somali system described in Legal Systems Very Different From Ours?
This is my favorite "your book review" yet, out of any of the contests. Thank you
This was very good. Kudos to the author.
> We go with Man’s justice naturally, almost reflexively, because we’re cattle domesticated by the State.
Well, also, the average prison is horrifying enough that the "eye for an eye" impulse is often sufficiently mollified. The best of both worlds!
There's another saga in which the hero kills an advisor to the king and he knows he needs to tell the king about this or else it's murder, but he also knows that if he does then the king will have him killed. His solution is to deliver this extremely cryptic pun-filled speech that at first sounds nonsensical, but when the king thinks about it later he realizes "Hey, wait, that guy just confessed to killing my advisor!" But by that time the hero is gone.
The writing here is top notch, and the multimedia experience had me in fits. I laughed, I learned, I loved.
The quality of this year's reviews is out of the park, and the originality of this one makes it stand out even in a (already) very competitive field.
Here comes that freedom fantasy again.
Women were never free in that sense. Even Norse women were smaller and weaker than Norse men. They had to obey their husbands and male relatives or they'd be physically punished. They couldn't go to the council if someone slugged them or killed a relative, and good luck not dying horribly if they fought back. That's about 20,000 of the 40,000 right there. Throw in the fact that even male children, servants and slaves were also not free, and you're talking about a tiny minority of free people. Your number was 500 out of 40,000, so it's hard to think of it as a society of free people. It was a society with 79 out of 80 people being cattle. So, it was 1.25% free. People talking up freedom rarely are. Consider Thomas Jefferson talking up freedom while torturing people to force them to do work for him. (He talked a good game. It's a pity that people who took his fine words seriously are now denounced as "woke".)
A common theory is that Athena was created as the patron goddess of Athens because the Athenians wanted a woman who would always side with men. That's why she doesn't have a mother or is only granted one in a marginal role as a hat tip to Biology 101. She doesn't have any desires or passions of her own like most other goddesses. If you look at classical Athens, in its glory days as the local bully state, women were treated appallingly. There were wives and hetaerae. The former were treated as children with no freedom whatever, and the latter as whores with little more. Oh yeah, lots of slaves, too. I doubt classical Athens was even 1% free.
My girlfriend read Njal's Saga in Old Norse. The moral she took was to make sure you keep that chickweed under control. It dries out and catches fire easily. Having dealt with chickweed, that's just common sense.
This Phoenix Wright video doesn't have catchy background music.
I sentence the author to Death.
Oh hey! I have actually read this one, and in the last year at that!
I really liked the review; when I read it I was more struck by the depiction of the transition from paganism to Christianity than from semi-anarchy to rule of law, but the transition the reviewer traces is very interesting and very much one of the real roots of the story.
The thing that maybe struck me most about legal proceedings, as presented in Njal's Saga, was
that pretty much nobody ever disputes the facts in any of the law cases presented at the Althing. (Side note: in the translation I read, it was just called "the Thing," which made me giggle internally every time a character declared he was going to the Thing. "What thing?" "You know, the Thing.")
Nobody ever says, "I didn't do that," or offers an alibi, or says that "he attacked me first!" It's all just arguing over points of law which range from the abstruse to the incredibly convoluted. ETR: I see the details of Eyjolf's trickery are in the Phoenix Wright video, so no need to go over them again!
One point that I think is relevant to the overall dynamic is that you don't have to be one of the ~500 patriarchs postulated in the review to be involved a feud, and in an important way a feud is more likely to be perpetuated when patriarchs are not the primary feuding parties. For example, much of the first half of the saga deals with a feud between the households of Njal and Gunnar. Njal and Gunnar are good friends and pal around together all the time, but their wives Bergthora and Hallgerda hate each other. Every time someone from Njal's household kills someone from Gunnar's or vice versa, Njal and Gunnar meet at the Thing, apologize, offer and accept a generous weregild, and hope that that will be the end of it; but Bergthora and Hallgerda have other ideas. Because there is no mechanism for mediating between Bergthora and Hallgerda --even the often-unsatisfying mediation of the Thing and weregild which is the best the patriarchs have-- the feud can't really end unless one of them gives up, forgives the other, or dies (guess which of these occurs.) It's also relevant that both Bergthora and Hallgerda have male servants who regard themselves as principally responsible to the woman of the house, rather than the man of the house, so if Gunnar says "It's over" and Hallgerda says, "It's over once you go kill that guy," Gunnar has no real way to enforce his edict.
Objection! Frodi would have to KNOW of the Phoenix Wright games on order to request one from the devil (who is unlikely to tell him without being specifically asked). Unless one of his deals gave him infinite knowledge or something, he would have no way of knowing to ask for this.
This review was fantastic and expect I will heartily support it as winner of the book review contest. If 'support' here entails standing around menacingly with an axe, so be it.
I'd also want to note for anyone who may be inspired to pick up Njal's Saga that, while the review's description of the saga as primarily an account of a series of inane legal disputes is *true*, it's *also* full of completely different stuff. In between court cases, the story follows characters (though not Njal) going raiding (indeed, going viking), complete with proto-swashbucking fights on the high seas. The entire story derails for a couple chapters in the middle to cover the Christianization of Iceland. Njal's friend Gunnar, who is basically Aragorn, kills like a hundred people across a dozen battles (almost always legally.) At one point there's a random side character who is just literally a wizard, no explanations given, and he's forgotten about after a few pages. And so on.
Basically, if you ever thought to yourself, "man, if only LOTR had had a really nicely done filler arc," consider picking up Njal's Saga.
So, uh... spoilers for Phoenix Wright.
I found Sarah Stapleton's doctoral thesis, "Justice Done: Outlawry Crimes in Medieval
Iceland" to be a fascinating read...
https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1972&context=etd#:~:text=Outlawry%20crimes%20were%20broken%20into,manifested%20themselves%20in%20Icelandic%20society.
My favourite so far, I think, and they've all been pretty good yet.
"On the other side, you have - I don’t know, turning the other cheek doesn’t tend to generate a lot of news articles."
Martha McKay - a woman who forgave her mother's murderer only to be killed by him 23 years after he killed her mother.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think basically all book reviews so far would have benefited from a little introductory paragraph, just one or two sentences, detailing plainly just what the thing is that's going to be reviewed.
It's really important to not that the version we have now of this saga was first written down hundreds of years later by CHRISTIAN MONKS who had their own lessons and agendas in what they chose to write and how they wrote it.
Think about how much you would trust a church-sponsored documentary about ancient Egypt and you get the idea.
Gee, the wisest person just chose to Christianize really quickly! Gee, these bloody barbarians will all kill each other if I'm endless feuds, and sure need that transition to more Christianity / civilisation.
Hysterical animation. Anyway, I think we can reconcile the idea that their overall murder rate might have been low with the dramatic accounts of murder. It is precisely when murder is uncommon and concentrated among the elites that we get these types of dramas, and this state of affairs is much preferable to the historical norm of elites staying safe and just throwing their serfs at one another in unending bloodbaths. Presumably this is why honor cultures flourished for a time, they were dramatically less wasteful than what came before. We can then blame Napoleon for the return to total war, only this time at the much greater scales that modernity enables vs tribal total war and population replacement.
This was an excellent review, thanks!
"Njal’s Saga takes place right on the fulcrum of these two world-views, the point where either the natural justice of vengeance or the artificial justice of courts seem like plausible options."
I read it in college for a class called "Hatred, vengeance, and the law," and this was pretty much the takeaway I remember, yes.
On the Christianity point: First, I'd keep in mind that the saga was written after the conversion, so how fast Njal converted in reality is beside the point. Second, I'd bring up that Christianity explicitly calls on us to consider all humans to be God' children, a universal brotherhood of man. Matthew 10:34-39. 1 Corinthians 1:10. Accepting this fictive kinship immediately turns the logic of familial feuds around: your hated enemy is your brother, just like the biological brother that got killed. So how can anyone who feuds ever be in the right?
Mildly suspect Scott wrote this one. Here's a betting market for it
https://manifold.markets/ShakedKoplewitz/did-scott-write-the-njals-saga-book
Great review.
How is being exile different from being outlawed? May one simply slay the outlaw after the verdict, while exiles get safe passage? Can exiles sell there lands and cows, or are they forfeit? For outlaws, were you allowed to offer them safe refuge? "Technically, you are free to slay him, but he appears to be in my homestead, and if you trespass on my land one of us will die."
I envision medieval Iceland as a somewhat hostile natural environment, in which paying the economical value of an adult as weregild should probably bankrupt the median income family and make them starve in the winter, so that a weregild would just be a sentence to death by economy. Was this the case? Or is Ragnar Of The Bloody Axe an elite landowner who decides that he would rather spend his excess income on rape and murder than his fifth battle horse or whatever elites buy?
Also, in a harsh environment, I would expect crime for profit to be rampant. If you only have enough food to bring four fifths of the population through a harsh winter, I would expect the last fifth not to simply roll over and die, but assume that there is conflict until there is enough food to feed the survivors. Better to go to court later than to starve now. Cattle raids would be a related for-profit "crime" I would expect to appear.
Given that apparently, weregild is due even for slain attackers, I would expect that there is something like suicide-by-warrior. Provoking someone into killing you seems reasonable to accomplish, and the weregild for your death might get your clan through lean times.
Also, I would argue that in the face of an imperfect system of law, the threat of a victim going outside the law is actually beneficial for the society. A Viking society where there is a one in six chance (or whatever the game theoretical optimal probability of punishing defection with defection is here) that any murder Ragnar Of The Bloody Axe commits might lead to both clans being destroyed seems much better than one where that never happens. Nine out of ten Ragnar's would be stopped by their fellow clansmen from murdering very much, and the remaining one would be destroyed with his clan and quite a few innocents.
> Kari lies in wait for him, but when Flosi returns to the North, Kari can’t bring himself to strike the killing blow. The two of them swear eternal friendship, and Flosi gives Kari his daughter in marriage. The end.
From my experience, humans do not work that way. Of course, from my experience, humans would also not be happy to receive the weregild for their relatives, never mind waive it. So it is reasonable to assume that these humans had a different attitude to death and violence than we have. A modern family losing one of two children to a car accident is a tragedy, while a medieval family losing four children out of seven to malnutrition and disease is just a statistic or "plenty to take care of us when we are old". By necessity the value of a human life in such a society is tied to their economic value. If you do not feed the working age adults before you feed the children, the children will starve as orphans. Accepting violence as a fact of life might account for "yeah, Torben killed a clansman during a cattle raid. He paid, so whatever. If we were only friends with men who never killed anyone, we would have only wimps as friends." Getting from there to forgiving the dishonorable, cowardly murder of burning the greatest of men in their wooden hall seems a far jump, still. Probably a Christianity thing?
I've heard it said that the Vikings evolved their quarrelsome and aggressive ways simply because there isn't that much decent agricultural land in Norway, with all its fjords and the steep slopes bounding them, and the barren plateau inland. So they had to squabble ceaselessly over what little land there was.
Apparently the original meaning of the word "viking" is not known for sure, but I would guess it meant something like "rover". It only really applies to those extra aggressive guys (mostly) who left home to seek their fortune, by fair means or foul, elsewhere. The majority of long-suffering Norwegians must have been content to stay at home.
A fair review, given the reviewer doesn't seem to know much about Medieval Iceland, or simply the unfamiliarity of the setting keeps him from seeing the depths of the characters. Sort of like a classical music reviewer of 1925 citicizing the blue notes of Louis Armstrong. The fact that there is an honest attempt here to find the quality makes this a worthy next round candidate.
For those contemplating reading "Njala," you might try to follow the progression of Hallgerd, from a spoiled brat to, well, you find out. You might as a warmup read "Hrafnekl‘s Frey's Godi." Short and a single plot.
Now, since you all are serious readers, find me a pre Shakespeare work that shows such nuances in a female character. I'm not saying there isn't, jes' curious.
I do agree that there is something Sophoclean in the mixture of character and luck in so many of the characters’ endings. Maybe that's why I am a Hardyist. But Hardy can't even imagine the bloody net woven on the morning of Clontarf. Or the ultimate reconciliation of Flosi and Kari.
Perhaps we shouldn’t forget that a lot of the jokes in Monty Python are on us. Those young snots have stuff that deliberately goes over the head their audience. Cheeky sots.
A lot of work on very difficult material in this review. Congrats
This was by far the most entertaining book review. I think this was the only book review I read more entertaining than Scott's own book reviews. It will be hard for me to weigh it compared to the Meaning of Man book reviews which was very thought provoking, and the cities book review, which gave me a lens into a very intriguing theory I had never considered before, but keep thinking back to now.
This was an excellent review. I really enjoyed it
Boring sounding book, great essay! Loved the bit in the middle telling me what it was about so I didn't have to think for myself (not sarcastic), and the casual, friendly tone.
This was hilariously well-written, but I wonder about the conclusions. If it's true that we've been domesticating ourselves as a species for a while now, picking out the less-domesticated behavior of some earlier point in the domestication arc and philosophizing about it seems unfair. My highminded and subtle dog-training techniques have resulted in pets much better behaved than any wolf, and probably better than whatever dogs the Romans had signs about saying 'cave canem'. I'm not sure it's my technique, though.
And this one's old enough you don't need to buy it to read it.
https://www.fulltextarchive.com/book/njal-s-saga/
Zippy and fun, well written. The most Scottly of all the reviews so far, by a wide margin.
I'm not sure I was along for the ride philosophically speaking, though. The duality here between cattle domesticated by the state and the glorious liberty of cyclical violence felt overly cynical, and there was no real effort to convince us that the 'middle way' of decentralized courtroom arbitrage was pointing at an improvement over anything. I can see this as being a very compelling review for people that already feel an aesthetic and philosophical pull towards this kind of anarcho-capitalist legalism, don't get me wrong. But it seems like those are the only people reading the 'real' essay- the rest of us are just standing in the street, looking in through the window while somebody else enjoys a nice meal.
Bravo. This is the best book review so far.
Note to Scott:
You don't need to publish any more reviews: #5 is the winner.
Writing like this is the reason I read this blog.
Great writing, great animation, slightly questionable conclusions on society. Certainly one of the best reviews.
Thanks - Iceland today is a model society - funny how cultures evolve
The Althing is hard to imagine on site when you visit it today. It's really a huge campsite with a ridge with no buildings or sign of habitation or ceremony.
I hadn't come across Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney before, but that video had me laughing so much I had to pause it half-way through to catch my breath. Well done!
I enjoyed the review but one correction: it was Benjamin Franklin who said “a Republic, Ma’am, if you can keep it.”
I'd love to know how icelandic law came to have so many dumb technicalities. I mean the us justice system has a bunch of those but not to that level.
Since one of the major functions of the rule of law is to stop people from trying to resolve their disputes by killing one another, it seems like the medieval Icelandic version of the law has failed this function pretty badly.
One deeply impressive thing is that all of this stuff was kept alive for a hundred years or more by oral historian bards before it was written down. Think of that when the reviewer quotes a massive genealogy!
And let's not get too warm and fuzzy about "freedom". There seems to have quite commonly been genuine slavery in Iceland (see "Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas, and Power" by Jesse L. Byock) and there was in the Norse society that they fled. The sagas seem to tell only about the "freemen", who were the landholders at the top of each farm, who were almost always men. Of course, they were the only ones admitted to the legal institutions that the sagas were written about. But there were also lots of other dependents: servants, dependent relatives, and the women of all these categories. Their fates seem to have been controlled by the landholder. There doesn't seem to be a lot written about the women, but I suspect the women of de-facto high status (close relatives of landholders, landholders' wives, etc.) probably had an unrecognized network that wielded considerable power, as seems to be true in most societies. In all of this, they seem to have resembled ancient Athens, as the reviewer says.
I like the fact that often characters face the choice: Do I cleave Gunnar's head with an axe, or do I marry my daughter to his son? As if the only way to not live at daggers-drawn is by creating kinship. Then I realized that this resembled Medieval nobles. So it's probably ancient in humans.
1. This is an *extremely* good review, very well done!
2. The voice is very, very Scott, even more so than you'd expect for someone who reads this blog a and presumably admires Scott's writing so much they'd want to imitate it. I'd expect someone this good at writing to have their own authorial voice, rather than sounding exactly like Scott (unless they were intentionally trying to do their best Scott impression). I think there's a very good chance Scott wrote this.
3. I remember seeing something about this stuff on some twitter screenshot a few weeks/months ago. Anyone remember?
I would like to crowdfund you creating a full Phoenix Wright version of the saga, please.
There's one case in Njáls saga where someone actually investigates a crime. A big cheese has been stolen and later a big cheese shows up elsewhere under suspicious circumstances. Mord Valgardsson investigates the matter and it turns out that the suspicious cheese exactly fits the mould of the stolen cheese. This lets him prove who the thief is. If the cheese does fit you can't acquit.
This has been by far my favorite review this year, and the Ace Attorney video is on point!
Kind of a bizarre review IMO, considering it doesn't even mention or allude to any of the stuff that makes the saga worth reading, like the viking raid or the assault on Hlidarendi, or engage with the actual moral of the story (that women have to be kept on a damn short leash, no matter how good-looking they are or how important their families are).
Pretty funny in parts, though.
I'm a bit confused by the discussion in the review of man's justice vs. God's justice. We are told that the justice of God is an eye for an eye. How that plays out depends on whether the goal is compensation or deterrence. If the goal is compensation, you try to negotiate a settlement with the man who poked your eye out, but perhaps he's managed to convince himself that he hasn't done anything seriously wrong. After all, you still have one eye left, so you can still see. That's the point where say, “It appears we don't see eye to eye on the value of an eye. So if that's your final offer, I'll just take one of your eyes and we are done here.” Faced with the prospect of losing one of his own eyes, he will be forced to be honest, with himself at least, about the value he places on an eye. If the system works, he keeps both his eyes and you end up with a fair compensation for your loss.
If the goal is deterrence (or more precisely, deterrence only, because being required to pay compensation is a form of deterrence), you do want to take his eye, or better yet, both of his eyes, to make clear that bad things will happen to him or anyone else who harms you in the future. In this case, the eye for an eye rule is a limit on how far you can go to create deterrence. Presumably the point is that if you only take one eye, the two of you are in some sense equal going forward. Regardless of who is the victim and who is the perpetrator of the original incident, you and he have each taken an eye from the other, which hopefully settles the matter. So the eye for an eye rule is intended to sacrifice a certain amount of deterrence in exchange for a reduced likelyhood of future conflict.
The reviewer tells us that prior to the Hammurabi, “God's justice was the only game on offer.” This is also confusing, because the code of Hammurabi specifies an eye for an eye.
In contrast to God's justice, man's justice is “a weregild for an eye, or maybe getting confused and failing to award any punishment at all.” The first part of this seems to say that man's law is about compensation, which would in turn suggest that God's law is by contrast about deterrence. But we are also told that, “we go with Man's justice naturally...because we're cattle domesticated by the State.” That would mean that current law is an example of Man's law--and current law is a mixture of criminal law, which is about deterrence, and civil law, which is about compensation. (Even civil law is partially about deterrence, which is why we have punitive damages.)
The second part (“maybe getting confused and failing to award any punishment at all”) points to the fallibility of Man's justice, but any system of justice administered by man is going to be imperfect, so it's not clear how God's justice escapes this criticism.
I sent this review to a very sophisticated Icelandic friend of mine, and got the following critical response. Dave Anderson.
I have read the review and have very mixed feelings about it.
I have read Njal's saga several times and it seems I have read a totally different book than the reviewer. I am dismayed of, in my opinion, his mockery of the saga. Be assured that this opinion is very biased!
The Njal's saga is to me so much more than a series of lawsuits, although it is quite clear that the author has respected or is interested in law and lawmaking.
The [saga] author creates characters that are visible to the reader in all their humanity. They are proud, devious, wise, athletic, scoundrels and honest. Every word has a meaning. Every person introduced is mentioned for a reason.
This Saga also includes the history of the beautiful Hallgerdur Langbroek, her third husband Gunnar Hamundarson, Njal's best friend and Njals's wife Bergthora. Two strong willed women whose feud between one another is fierce, but does not destroy the ever lasting friendship of Njall and Gunnar.
Hallgerdur and Bergthora are some of the Saga's most famous women, but for different reasons. In most eyes Hallgerdur is depicted as evil, in others she was probably sexually abused as a young girl. All her actions as a young woman described in Njal's Saga bear the marks of such assaults.
After Gunnar was slain, she ended her life at a farm in Laugarnes (Reykjavik) less than a mile from my home, where her bones were put to rest.
Njal's saga should not be taken lightly. It should be read chapter by chapter and at the end of every chapter the reader should contemplate on what was the meaning of the chapter. What is the author saying? Also the chapters that are only a few lines.
Njal's Saga is a conversation piece. Without the contemplation and preferably continuous ̶̶ as you read through the pages ̶̶ discussion with a fellow reader or historian, the Njal's Saga, in my opinion, will pass you by.
This should make me proud of my heritage, daubed as I am with the tarbrush of the Welsh, Scots-Irish and pre-Celtic Neanderthals. Ond y cyfan rydw i wir eisiau yw i'r pen mawr hwn ddod i ben.
Who the fuck would want to be "cattle domesticated by the state" even if it is necessary for peace (about which I have my doubts).
Well, we've got a new contender for best review. The video alone was great,
An entertaining read, but much more of a "Euminides style morality play" as opposed to a cold, objective analysis.
Among the more egregious oversights: while I am not a libertarian nor do I agree with the vast majority of the screed - a core part of the screed is that government winds up harming more than helping therefore less government is good.
This is directly alluded to as the reason for Norwegians colonizing Iceland but the corollary is missed: the very practices of Icelandic law via the Althing have clearly de- or evolved from a search for justice into something else. And a very real outcome of law vs. justice is the practice of jailhouse lawyers/patent trolling/nuisance lawsuits etc etc - where the pursuit of justice is, to various degrees of transparency, subjugated under the desire for personal or professional profit.
The same thing occurs with the Euminides example: the bad practice, as seen by modern eyes, or Orestes' trial obscures the reality that justice is an outcome of society and will always be so. Decrying the practices of ancient Greeks then is just as pointless as decrying the practices of other societies today - it is ethnocentrism of the highest degree. Among other things: in a physical human labor based society - there is very much an economic and social inequality between men and women.
"Eye for an Eye" by William Ian Miller is a great book that talks a lot about that period of Icelandic history
Very funny. I appreciate being introduced to this text I’ve never heard of and would definitely never read in a way that makes me think... just maybe I will read it.
Change a few letters in the names and you are dangerously close to Vinland Saga... guessing this is where the idea came from