Of course pre-modern people had a self

On reading Njal's Saga

Those who read pre-modern literature must eventually decide for themselves one question: Did the people who lived and died before the printing press have a self?

What this means is, did they have a conception of themselves as an individual, with an essential self, something not determined by their reputation or their relationship to others. Or did they view their place as foreordained by God, unchangeable, with their role merely being to do their assigned duties.

To me, the question seems pretty obvious: of course they did? Why would pre-modern people be any different than we are? In my mind, a pre-modern village is just like a modern one: full of squabbling personalities, secret feuds, and secret resentments and desires.

But it’s that last thing that’s the crux of the problem. Did people in the pre-modern era have ambitions? Did they want to better themselves? Attain something more than they had? To this I too think it’s rather obvious they must have!

I guess the problem hinges on your definition of “people". I think I’m supposed to say that right now only free propertied men had any kind of self-determination. But I’m not really sure that’s true. Look at all those people who joined Peter the Hermit’s peasants crusade. Ordinary peasants who packed up stakes and decided to visit the Holy Land. Look at all the hermits we see throughout the Christian era. Or look at all the brigands and robbers! They all had some kind of ambition. Or take the literal hundreds of peasant revolts and slave revolts throughout history? The most famous social upheavalts in the Middle Ages were the revolt of the Ciompi in Florence, the revolt of the Jacquerie in France and Wat Tyler’s rebellion in England (all of them an indirect result of the Black Death). Lots of self-determination there!

But, on the other hand, most people stayed put. A serf, rather definitionally, could expect nothing more than the right to work some fields (although serfs often ran away, fleeing to towns, where if they hid for a year and a day they could be free!) Women had few rights outside of marriage: what could they expect other than to bear children and die? What self could people possibly nurture under those conditions.

Nor is literature much help. We don’t see much evidence of private life in pre-modern literature. We don’t see soliloquoys, we don’t see much lyric poetry (besides that which had a ceremonial or civic purpose), and we certainly don’t see many novels or autobiographies. What we see are epics, about larger than life heroes and gods who are entirely defined by their public standing. There are hints of a private life here and there, like in David’s sorrow for the rebellion of his Son (and, more generally, in the Songs of Solomon and Ecclesiastes), or in Odysseus’s efforts to escape from going on the Trojan War. But literature from the pre-modern era is largely about doings, not feelings.

Still, to me the idea that the self needed to be invented is pretty absurd. Of course pre-modern people didn’t just sit around, happily carrying out their place in the eternal order of things. But we can’t really know. Because the truth is, any self-having literature is written by people rather similar to ourselves, free, propertied, educated people. You can’t read, say, Plato, and conclude that Socrates didn’t have a self: he obviously delighted in his role as pot-stirrer, and he created a legion of imitators (most notably Diogenes). These guys are obvious self-havers. Even Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe, an infamous harridan, seems like a self-haver. But if we walked a few miles out of Athens and visited a farm, would the enslaved people also have a private life?

And, moreso, don’t we on some level want to think our psychology is essentially different from theirs? If you believe in progress, as I do, you want to think that self-actualization—the realm of free, self-directed action—is a new and heretofore-unknown endeavor. Whereas if you hate progress, then you want to believe there is a pristine, unspoiled human nature to return to.

Lately I’ve come to a middle position. I think there are a lot of ways to have a self, and I do think it is possible to think of oneself less than most modern people do. I cannot imagine that people in 1000 AD Iceland woke up thinking “Oh god, I feel so bloated, I really to swing the sword around a bit today” or during the day thought “My kids are so much better warriors than Njal’s kids, I bet he’s so jealous.” They must have held their identity a little more loosely than that. It simply wouldn’t be possible, on their isolated farms, for their selves to come to the forefront as often as ours do today—most of their lives would be engaged in the public (the struggle for survival) rather than in the private (the struggle for self-respect).

At the same time, I’ve just finished reading Njal’s Saga (which I found by using the ‘find random book’ function on my e-reader), and the story seems extremely modern. It’s full of petty feuds and jealousies and ambitions. These are not people who think God is on one side or another—in fact, they switch Gods halfway through the book, converting to Christianity).

I’ve rarely been as charmed by a book as I was by Njal. I’ve read Icelandic sagas before, but aside from the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda, I couldn’t tell you which ones I’ve read or what was in them. I think I’d opened this ebook a good dozen times (according to Amazon I bought it in 2016!) and was put off by the length genealogies and the flood of names. And it’s true that the first few dozen chapters don’t seem to tell a cohesive story.

But one thing about this book—something that I would say is virtually unknown in pre-modern prose literature—is that it tells a thematically coherent story! As in, the entire tale, from beginning to end, is a thematic whole and every incident is about those themes.

In this case, it’s about the legal system of medieval Iceland and the desperate attempts of the men on the island to end the cycle of blood feud. The whole book is essentially one long blood feud, which starts a minor incident (two wives quarrelling) and grows and grows, wrapping up basically every family on the eastern side of the island, and resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people.

But it’s also a very human story! The protagonists are so well-drawn and distinct. There’s Gunnar, a warrior who’s not especially fond of killing, and keeps trying to avoid killing people even though he’s capable of killing everyone he meets. There’s Njal, who is mocked as beardless Njal, who you can’t tell apart from a woman (because he can’t grow a beard), but who is also the wisest person on the island, and everyone respects his knowledge. There’s Gunnar’s proud, acquisitive wife, Hallgerd, and Njal’s equally proud, albeit more loyal, wife Bergthora. And then there’s an additional three dozen major characters and at least a hundred minor ones.

One thing that often goes unremarked, especially in histories of early prose, is the clear influence that the Bible must’ve had upon the development of the novel. The Bible, more than anything else, is a literary anthology, containing examples of poetry, wisdom literature, law-books, and history. Several of the prose narratives in the Bible are essentially novels, particularly Samuel, which tells the story of Saul, David, and Solomon, along with their respective downfalls.

To me, the Sagas, which were likely written down by priests in fourteenth-century Iceland, seem heavily influenced by that tradition.

But it’s also true that the Bible didn’t invent prose histories. Lots of cultures have written prose histories. The sagas are a bit like histories, but supposedly they were originally oral tales (during the saga era, although there was an Old North runic alphabet for creating inscriptions, there weren’t any written texts, as far as we know). I do not think it’s possible that Njal could’ve existed in oral form in anything close to the way it’s written, simply because it’s too meticulously constructed, but the stories at the core of Njal, the death of Gunnar and the burning of Njal, are attested to in other sources and clearly this saga existed in some form in the oral tradition.

The culture that gave rise to the sagas seems utterly unique: a country of small farms that was essentially leaderless, but which was ruled by a complex legal system adjudicated at a series of courts. You needed to be a propertied free man to participate in the legal system, and that population seems to have only ten or fifteen thousand men? Probably less. The population of Iceland during the saga age was about 60,000, and there were no towns or cities—the largest farms could be about a hundred people, but other than that, the biggest gatherings were the Things where the courts would meet. And that population remained fairly stable until 1900—the island could never support more than about 80,000 people.

The saga age gave way to the late medieval era, when the King of Norway took over (in about 1280), and the republic ended. Most of the sagas were written down in the 1300s, after the saga age was long over. At some point, for some reason, we have no idea why, the priests in Iceland started devoting an immense amount of their resources (it’s estimated that the parchment for a manuscript of 200 leaves required the slaughtering of 130 calves) to writing down these old stories. It’s pretty wild! The only comparable example of early medieval vernacular literature comes from the Anglo-Saxon world, but even there, copying down Anglo-Saxon poetry was clearly a sideline: all of the extant Anglo-Saxon poetry comes from just four manuscripts, and it only includes one long secular narrative, Beowulf. In contrast, we have 49 Icelandic sagas.

Almost all Old Norse literature comes from Iceland. From Norway, Sweden, Denmark, we have nothing prior to the languages separating into regional vernaculars: only in Iceland did they write the Old Norse down. This is a society that for some reason reorganized itself economically around preserving this literature.

Njal’s saga is the closest I’ve ever seen to a pre-modern narrative about “regular people”. Njal and Gunnar are relatively rich and powerful, but they still find themselves on the verge of starvation occasionally—one incident in book occurs because Gunnar running out of food, and a neighbor refuses to give him hay and flour. The people in Njal are very much like us: concerned with money, with “making it”, and with launching themselves and their kids in the world. Reputation is important to them, but it’s not the only thing! We see clear examples of private life. These warriors pursue blood feuds, but they also want to live! There is a constant tussle between preserving your ambition and preserving the peace—not exactly something you’ll find in, say, The Mabaharata.

And everyone is an actor, even the women. The whole saga is powered by the feud between Hallgerd and Bergthora. It is their resentment that sets the plot into motion.

The translation I read is a newer one, meant to be plainer and mimic the rhythms of Old Norse more than the older Magnus Magnusson translation (which is not available online). It was hard to read at first, but I got used to it. The story isn’t all (or even mostly) battles. Nor is it all questing and adventures. A lot of it is domestic drama. There are some killer legal scenes, which are kind of funny, when hard-bitten warriors jump up and shout “I object” and try to win a case on a technicality:

Mord went before the court and named witnesses – ‘to witness that the dismissal made by Eyjolf Bolverksson is invalid, because he dismissed men from the panel who have a legitimate right to be there. Any man who owns three hundreds or more in land has the right to sit on a panel of neighbours, even though he does not live off milch animals; and any man who lives off milch animals has the right to sit on a panel of neighbours, even though he owns no land

There are very human moments, too, as when Skafti essentially tells his brother-in-law Gizur, “stop trying to be a hero! You’re not really a hero!”

Skafti replied, ‘This case has nothing to do with you, unless you insist on getting mixed up in it.’

Gizur became angry then and said, ‘You are not at all like your father – though he was thought to be sly, he was always ready to help others when they most needed him.’

Skafti said, ‘We have different temperaments. You think of yourselves as men who have shared in mighty deeds – you, Gizur the White, when you attacked Gunnar at Hlidarendi, and Asgrim because he killed his foster-brother Gauk.’

And although there is no rumination or internal monologue in the story, we see clear evidence of personality, as when this guy, Hrapp, who is a stone-cold killer and a man not to be trusted, shows some self-reflection as he dies, and you get the sense that maybe he was haunted by his own inability to refrain from crime.

Then they went at them. Grim and Helgi saw where Hrapp was and headed for him. Hrapp swung his axe at Grim. Helgi saw this and swung at Hrapp’s arm and cut it off, and the axe fell down.

Hrapp spoke: ‘You’ve done what needed doing – that arm brought wounds and death to many a man.’

‘This will put an end to it,’ said Grim and thrust his spear through him. Hrapp fell down dead

There are even a few jokes.

Gizur looked at him and spoke: ‘Well, is Gunnar at home?’

Thorgrim answered, ‘Find that out for yourselves, but I’ve found out one thing – that his halberd’s at home.’

Then he fell down dead

Now I am going to say something, and I really want you to believe me: this book is better than Game of Thrones.

And I say this because the book is exactly what Game of Thrones wanted to be: a cycle of tit-for-tat revenge that spirals out of control until the whole country devolves into civil war. But unlike Game of Thrones, this book has a thematic end-game. In the end, no system of law can restrain people; ultimately what they need is forgiveness. And that forgiveness can only come if they embrace Christian principles. Woven as an undercurrent through the whole book is their increasing frustration with their system of law and the way it continually fails to prevent bloodshed. In the 3rd act, Christianity comes along and shakes things up, and finally, the two survivors are reconciled after they undertake individual pilgrimages to Rome.

The book is very worth reading, and it will make you a firm believer that all people everywhere had (and have) a self.

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I do not think this plot summary is necessary, or will be of general interest, but the story of the book is quite long and confusing, and it took me a while to put together the threads, so I am providing it in case anyone wants it

Plot Summary

Hrut goes on some adventures, runs afoul of a sorceress queen who renders him unable to satisfy his wife, Unn, who divorces him and remarries, giving birth to Mord.

Hrut's brother Hroskuld has a daughter named Hallgerd, who is proud and wicked. Her first husband hits her, so Hallgerd's foster-father (essentially a servant of her dad's who has become attached to her) kills the husband, and she inherits his wealth. Hroskuld makes a settlement with the husband's family and blood-feud is averted.. Then it happens again! Another guy comes and marries her, hits her, and is murdered at her behest by her foster-father, and there is another settlement.

Then the main character of the novel, Gunnar, wants to marry her. He is the most powerful warrior on the island. He marries her, and meanwhile her daughter by her first husband marries one of Gunnar's neighbors, Thrain. Now Gunnar is best friends with this guy Njal, who is one of the wisest men on the island. There are some hijinx to establish how wise Njal is (he helps Gunnar trick Hroskuld into giving back Unn's dowry), but let's not go into that.

Gunnar and Hallgerd go to visit Njal and his wife, Bergthora. During the dinner, Njal's son and his daughter in law come and Bergthora asks Hallgerd to move over to make room for the daughter in law.

Hallgerd says no. She won't do it.

THIS IS LITERALLY THE LYNCHPIN HOLDING TOGETHER THE WHOLE SAGA

Bergthora gets very mad at Hallgerd. REALLY MAD. So later on, she sends a servant to cut wood in some woods that Gunnar owns, and Hallgerd has the servant murdered. This sets of a cycle of six tit-for-tat revenge killings, while Gunnar and Njal watch helplessly, as Hallgerd retains more warriors and the sons of Njal get involved.

After each killing, there is a financial settlement, intended to prevent blood-feud, but it doesn't work, because neither Bergthora nor Hallgerd will hold to it. It only ends when the sons of Njal directly intervene and kill some relatives of Hallgerd, and they finally agree to be bound by the settlement (and Hallgerd, I suppose, can’t find any more kinspeople who are yearning to die). The main thing is, the final killing in this series is assisted by Thrain, the husband of Hallgerd's daughter. And the sons say, okay, we won't seek revenge against Thrain, but if he ever does anything else to us, watch out!

Gunnar and Njal, who are best friends, breathe a sigh of relief: they’ve managed to stay at peace.

Meanwhile Mord, the daughter of Unn, from the first paragraph of this history, has grown up, and he's become really mad at Gunnar, maybe from jealousy or maybe from other reasons, and he plots Gunnar's downfall. Njal has the second sight and has prophesied that Gunnar will be invincible so long as he never kills two men in the same bloodline (i.e. a father and son) or, if he does kill them, never breaks the settlement for the second killing.

During a hard winter, Gunnar runs out of flour and tries to buy some from his neighbor, Otkel, who refuses (Njal gives him the flour and is like next time come to me first, bro). Hallgerd is insulted by this guy Otkel, so she sends a servant to steal from him and burn down his barn. In the series of killings that follows, Gunnar kills first Otkel, then Otkel's son--all of these flames are fanned by Mord. Remember, Mord actually owes Gunnar because Gunnar got his mom’s dowry back from the first Hroskuld, but Mord doesn’t care about that. Gunnar is sentenced to three years banishment, but he doesn't obey the ruling because he loves Iceland too much, and eventually twenty guys gang up on him, while he's at his house, and kill him.

Njal's sons help one of Gunnar's sons avenge Gunnar's killing. Then they go adventuring in Norway, and they get involved in this really dumb dispute with Thrain. REMEMBER HIM!?!?! Thrain leaves them high and dry, facing justice from the king of Norway.

This is Thrain's second strike, so when the sons get back, they kill Thrain.

Then Njal makes a settlement for Thrain, and adopts Thrain's son, Hroskuld (not the one from the beginning, this story has many Hroskulds), and he basically, maybe out of guilt or maybe to prevent a blood-feud, maneuvers things so that Hroskuld gets elected one of the godi of the island--i.e. he now outranks all of Njal's sons. But of course Njal's sons get a bit jealous. Except they're also foster brothers with Hroskuld and really like him, and it seems like this peace will hold.

Right here is when Christianity comes into the picture. Njal is weary of violence and likes the sound of the new religion and decides to convert. Society is riven by the conflict between pagans and Christians, until eventually they all decide to convert to Christianity just so they can have some peace. And they all live happily ever after, right?

Except now Mord is jealous of Hroskuld, so he manipulates Njal's sons into killing Hroskuld, by saying Hroskuld is going to avenge himself on the sons for the murder of his father, Thrain. (And there’s also this whole other plot involving Njal’s illegitimate son, also named Hroskuld, who gets killed by Thrain’s kids).

Now Njal and his whole family are in deep shit, because everyone really liked Hroskuld Thrainson and because it's just not cool to kill your foster-brother. And all of Njal's enemies from the first half come out of the woodwork. This includes Gunnar's widow Hallgerd and everyone who was allied with Gunnar, because although Gunnar and Njal weren't enemies, there is that old enmity (which started as you might recall, because Hallgerd wouldn't move over on a bench) still simmering between parts of their households.

And Njal tries to create a settlement, but it falls apart and Flosi, Hroskuld's father in law, kills Njal and his whole family. But he doesn't do it in open combat (because he wouldn't win, because Njal's sons are such good warriors). Instead he traps them in their cottage and burns it down around them--a very hideous way to die. There is an implication that Njal chooses to allow his family to die this way (he essentially forces his sons to come into the hut with him, even though they strongly suspect Flosi will burn it), because he senses that with a crime of this magnitude people might eventually be shocked into ending the practice of revenge-killing.

The burning is indeed shocking to Icelandic society (as evidenced by the fact that they’re still talking about it 300 years later), and everyone comes together, with their supporters, to adjudicate the case at the local court. The two sides are represented by Flosi, who is leader of the burners, and Kari, who was essentially an adopted brother to the Njalssons. There is a long and involved and fabulously interesting legal case, that turns on various technicalities, and it results in a fight at the Thing (which is itself highly illegal) that leaves many people dead on both sides. Eventually the case is decided in Kari’s favor (after a few of the survivors generously agree to forgo, in the interest of peace, the payouts that they are due), and Njal’s heirs receive a huge quantity of silver and Flosi is sentenced to three years’ exile. But, of course, the moment it’s over, Kari starts hunting down the burners, one by one.

Eventually Flosi goes into exile, and he undertakes a pilgrimage to Rome. Kari hunts Flosi across the continent, killing many of the remaining burners, but eventually he loses his zeal, and he himself also goes to Rome on pilgrimage. And when the two finally meet back in iceland, their enmnity is gone, and they hug it out like true bros, and Kari marries the widow of murdered Hroskuld (who was Flosi’s daughter), and they all live happily ever after, the end.