Table Of Content‘WHY IS YOUR AXE BLOODY?’
‘WHY IS YOUR
AXE BLOODY?’
A READING OF NJÁLS SAGA
WILLIAM IAN MILLER
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For Ginger: Jan. 1, 2000–Aug. 7, 2012
‘Sárt ertú leikinn, Sámr fóstri, ok búð svá sé til ætlat at skammt skuli
okkar í meðal.’
Foreword
Heather O’Donoghue
Medieval Icelandic family sagas—the Sagas of Icelanders—are a unique
literary genre: never before or since, anywhere in the world, have texts like
them been composed. They are long, naturalistic prose narratives, poised
somewhere between history and fiction, which offer a vivid, detailed,
and uncannily believable picture of the everyday life of the first settlers
in Iceland. These settlers created a self-governing republic with its own
complex legal systems and a precocious parliament which lasted for four
centuries after the settlement in the year ad 870.
Njáls saga is widely recognized as one of the finest examples of the genre,
not only because of its length and breadth, and huge narrative sweep, but
also because of its wide range of forceful individual characters—women as
well as men—and the depth and naturalism with which they are depicted.
This calls for some special explanation. For unlike traditional novelists,
saga authors hardly ever reveal (that is, of course, create) the inner life of
their characters; we are very rarely told what these people are thinking, and
thus what motivates their actions, or lies behind their responses. Traditional
literary criticism has always taken a dim view of readers taking it upon
themselves to re-create backstories, or invent inner lives, for fictional char-
acters (even, or especially, those based on historical figures). But William
I. Miller’s A Reading of Njáls Saga does just this. ‘Ferreting out motive’, to
use Miller’s own terms, is what this book is about.
William I. Miller has two impressive qualifications for writing the kind
of reading which flies in the face of time-honoured literary convention.
First, he is the world’s leading expert on medieval Icelandic law, and the
sagas, in their depiction of the social lives of the settlers, take lawsuits as
one of their primary subjects and continually concern themselves with
legally regulated social interactions: marriage, theft, recompense, or slan-
der. Although we cannot measure the plausibility of the action of Njáls saga
against any historical record (for the sagas themselves, in a frustratingly
viii Foreword
closed circle, constitute virtually the only evidence for the workings
of medieval Icelandic society), Miller can cite the medieval Icelandic
law-codes in crucial and authoritative defence of his explanations of how
and why characters are shown to act as they do. But Miller is also himself
a lawyer—trained in the practice of law. He knows how to put together
a case, to adduce (in this case, textual) evidence, to infer motive, to offer
balances of probabilities, and call for reasonable assumptions. The book is a
brilliant example of the forensic lawyer as literary critic.
But Miller is also a teacher—of both law and literature. He has taught
Njáls saga to generations of students, collecting over the years their inter-
pretations of motives and emotions—left largely unstated by saga authors—
and weaving them into his own developing theories of what is going on
beneath the surface of these narratives. The critic W. P. Ker, whom Miller
cites more than once in this book, famously suggested a luminous meta-
phor to explain the relationship between surface narrative and inner life in
a saga: ‘The brevity and externality of the saga method might easily pro-
voke from admirers of Richardson a condemnation like that of Dr. Johnson
on those who know the dial plate only, and not the works. The psychology
of the sagas, however, brief and superficial as it may be, is yet of the sort that
may be tested; the dials keep time, although the works are not exposed.’ In
the process of teaching Njáls saga, Miller has tried and tested his theories,
and now exposes the works, and the dials do indeed run like clockwork.
But then Miller parts company with Ker, for he shows that the psychology
of saga narrative, especially Njáls saga, is not brief and superficial at all, even
if its surface is laconic, but on the contrary, startlingly subtle and com-
plex. Many of even the saga’s most ardent admirers will be surprised by the
psychological depth and literary artistry which Miller’s interpretations of
motive forces reveal the author of Njáls saga to have been a master of.
Some readers, perhaps, will wonder if Miller’s method is a legitimate
one. It does, for instance, assume a sort of timelessness for the psychology
of the saga characters, and does not allow for (arguable) changes in essen-
tial human character and its representation over the intervening centuries.
But we can appeal once again to the uniqueness—the exceptionalism—of
Icelandic sagas, and particularly their distinctive scarcity of authorial com-
ment or depiction of inner life. It might be argued that in paring down to
a minimum his own judgment and analysis of character and action, the
saga author was in fact purposefully providing a text designed to provoke
Foreword ix
debate, discussion, disagreement amongst its original audience (and of
course, not everyone will agree with all of Miller’s explications).
A Reading of Njáls Saga is wonderfully unconventional literary criti-
cism, but then the Icelandic saga is wonderfully unconventional narra-
tive. Miller’s reading of Njáls saga is compelling, absorbing, witty, learned,
insightful, and illuminating. Afficionados of the saga will love it, and so too
will academics who are willing to loosen up a bit. Readers who do not (yet)
know saga literature first-hand will be astonished and delighted. And all
three groups will be irresistibly drawn to read or reread the text itself. I’m
sure that Miller would and could ask for nothing more.
