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Njal's Saga (Classics)
- Sales Rank: #288741 in Books
- Brand: Penguin Classics
- Published on: 1960-10-30
- Released on: 1960-10-30
- Original language: Old Norse
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.74" h x .72" w x 5.14" l,
- Binding: Mass Market Paperback
- 384 pages
Features
Most helpful customer reviews
42 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
Ian Myles Slater on: A Reliable, Readable, Option
By Ian M. Slater
This is a highly readable translation (although not the only one) of a work of literature that has several familiar names. In full, it is "Brennu-Njals Saga," or "The Story of Burned Njal," but just plain "Njals-Saga" is equally correct. And, like several other sagas, it has a nickname in its native Iceland, "Njala" (like "Grettla," for "Grettir's Saga"). It is generally conceded to be the outstanding monument of a burst of literary productivity at the very edge of medieval European civilization. For those who know it, with its unforgettable portraits of men and women presented through their responses to the events that entangle them, it has a place alongside the great novels of modern Europe. It demands patience of the reader; although it starts off with a couple of resounding scandals, including a Queen-Mother's affair with a handsome Icelander, before plunging into disputes over property, and who stole the hay, and wise advice that is never followed. (There are certain resemblances to Westerns; including the problem of subsistence in an unforgiving environment, and the critical importance of a reputation.)
Magnus Magnussson and Hermann Palsson made the decision to give a plain-language version, which I think has stood up well for over forty years (first published 1960). On my first reading I found the Introduction, Genealogical Tables, Glossary of Proper Names, Note on Chronology, and maps, all very useful. It has been supplanted in the Penguin Classics list by a new translation by Robert Cook, but I hope that this older version will continue to remain available. (Penguin sometimes has two, or even three, translations of a given work in circulation.)
"Njal's Saga" is, like several others, a long account of cascading disputes between farmers, and the resulting fights and lawsuits, broken up with voyages and adventures in Viking-Age Europe. (There are a great many shorter ones on the same basic pattern, generally less complex and diverse.) "Njala" includes a famous account of the official conversion of Iceland to Christianity, and a description of the Battle of Clontarf in Ireland, just over a decade later -- both apparently drawn from pre-existing accounts, and both inserted into the sequence of events quite naturally, although possibly with some violence to chronology.
The co-translators' most dramatic departure from the Icelandic text was the decision to relegate most genealogical descriptions of characters to footnotes. Many chapters begin something like "There was a man named A who lived at B. He was the son of C, son of D, son of E, who was the first who came to B, and he was the son of F, son of G, the kinsman of ..." Those of us who persist in reading the major sagas will soon learn to decipher such passages to mean either, "A came from a famous family, and would have many allies in a dispute," or "A was a complete nobody, whose most notable ancestors were famed only for being violent and unreasonable." Until then, these paragraph-long descriptions are just a jumble of names -- there is a "Monty Python" routine based on that impression, which is very, very funny if you know the sagas; and, I am told, amusing anyway if you don't.
"Njala" has had a long series of translations from its original Old Icelandic into other languages -- there is a whole book on its "reception" into other literatures, "The Rewriting of Njals Saga: Translation, Ideology, and Icelandic Sagas," by Jon Karl Helgason. And it bulks large in Andrew Wawn's "The Vikings and the Victorians,' because it received a magnificent first translation into English, by George Webbe Dasent, "The Story of Burnt Njal, or, Life in Iceland at the End of the Tenth Century," pubished in 1861. Dasent had begun work in 1843, but the whole subject was still so unfamiliar that Dasent, probably wisely, spent a good part of the two-volume first edition just explaining medieval Iceland to his readers. This material was dumped in later, one-volume editions of Dasent's translation, including the Everyman's Library reprint of 1911, which got a new introduction and select bibliography by E.O.G. Turville-Petre in 1957. It was available in paperback in the 1970s, in competition with the Penguin Classics translation.
Dasent's "Burnt Njal" has many merits, even today. Unfortunately, between Dasent's decision to imitate the Icelandic vocabulary and sentences, and changes in English since the 1850s, many will find his prose indigestible; and the 1772 edition of the saga he was using is now *very* obsolete. For those who want a look, there is an HTML edition on-line; the translator's name is there given as DaSent. Modern readers can turn to Jesse Byock's "Viking Age Iceland" for an equivalent of Dasent's introduction and appendices, with their maps and diagrams; it is much more readable, as well as much more reliable. And I would certainly make the suggestion of Magnusson and Palsson as a better place to start with Njal and his associates.
Another alternative is the American-Scandinavian Foundation's 1955 "Njal's Saga," translated by Carl F. Bayerschmidt and Lee M. Hollander. For American readers it had the slight advantage of not being quite so British in tone as the Penguin translation (let alone the mid-Victorian Dasent!); but it seems to have been available in recent years only in a 1998 paperback from a British publisher, in the "Wordsworth Classics of World Literature" series, with a new introduction by Thorsteinn Gylfason. It too has maps, family trees, and notes.
There is a substantial critical literature on "Njal's Saga," some of it in English. Richard F. Allen's old "Fire and Iron: Critical Approaches to Njals Saga" is very literary in approach. Jesse Byock's "Feud in the Icelandic Saga," which argues that behavior in the sagas reflects real social patterns, has thirty pages on this saga (Chapter 9, "Two Sets of Feud Chains"), which I think are brilliant; but probably most helpful to those who already know the story, and can appreciate how he makes connections between scattered-looking events.
For those who find "Njala" a bit too long to start with, there are variety of other sagas in excellent translations -- and also some not-so-good translations. Going strictly by the sagas themselves, other good places to start would be "Laxdaela Saga," which shares some important characters, scenes and events with "Njala," "Grettir's Saga," the story of a famous outlaw, with some wonderful accounts of battles with supernatural as well as human enemies; and "Egil's Saga" (Egils Saga Skallagrimssonar; "Egla" for short), which is closer to the popular idea of an Icelandic saga. The hero is a warrior-poet, brilliant, bad-tempered, and remarkably ugly; he takes after his grandfather, who was nicknamed "Evening-Wolf," and suspected of being a shape-shifter, and Egil spends much of his time on Viking adventures abroad, instead of tending the flocks ... .
Incidentally, "Njala," "Laxdaela," and "Egla" all contribute, along with the master-narrative of Snorri Sturluson's "Heimskringla" (a long saga-history of the Kings of Norway) to the late Poul Anderson's fine historical novel, "Mother of Kings," which is another approach to the world of the sagas.
[Addendum, September 2015: As noted in my response to one of the comments below, I had forgotten that I had reviewed this translation separately. It turns out that it had been dropped from the Penguin Classics, and replaced by a different translation, which I described in a review of a Kindle version of Dasent's translation, as follows:
"The most recent translation, by Robert Cook, is readily available in paperback and Kindle editions. It was originally published in 1997, as part of a set of "The Complete Sagas of the Icelanders," and was issued separately by Penguin Books in 2002. Cook, like Dasent, aimed at reproducing as much as possible the spare prose style of the Icelandic original, and doing so without the archaic vocabulary and dialect words that Dasent sometimes adopted (usually related to the Icelandic form; a precedent followed by William Morris and E.R. Eddison). Whether Cook succeeded, or just raised a barrier to appreciation of the saga, is a matter of some dispute. Some reviewers have compared it unfavorably to the translation which it (unfortunately) replaced in the Penguin list, by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson. They made the decision to give a plain-language version, which I think stood up well for over forty years (first published 1960). I have reviewed it at some length (along with a comparison to Dasent), and I must say that I think it is a better entry into the saga literature than either Dasent or Cook. These days one has to find it in a library, or as a used book."
See also the "Comments" below for my advice on how most easily to find the Cook translation on Amazon, as of Sept. 2, 2015.]
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
My Favorite of the Sagas
By Thorvald
My online nickname, Thorvald, may give you a hint that I'm fond of the Norse Sagas :-) . Of them all, this is my favorite.
The Sagas are adventure stories, historical novels, and family histories all in one. They were written approximately 800 years ago about the Nordic world around the turn of the last millennium. The Magnusson and Paulson translations are quite good, very readable, but don't expect to find anything resembling a modern novel.
The Norse Vikings were quiet farmers, talented poets and artists, politically enlightened people with a democratic government and strong rights for women...then they'd get drunk and head off for a fun-filled summer of rape, pillage, and slave-taking. They were cooly dispassionate about everything, including death for even their gods would die eventually. Though the saga writers were Christians (Iceland converted in the year 1000), they present the pagen Norse religion without editorial comment. They write about it as about everything, in a very unemotional manner.
The unemotional tone is one that the modern reader will find most odd yet, as you read more sagas, may begin to appreciate. The sagas have a clear, bright, unencumbered atmosphere to them. Events are presented, people live, act, and die and it is left to the reader to decide how they must have felt. Consider a modern newscast--the reporter will inevitably ask, "How do you feel about that?" Current style is to try to delve into feelings and emotions rather than facts and events. The sagas are the opposite.
Terrific Viking stories in a fascinating world lost to time.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
The Archetypal Saga - Two Thumbs Up!
By Andrew B. Jordan
In addition to what other reviewers have added, let me state that the main plot of this saga is the attempt of the prescient Njal to save his family from the destruction that he forsees in the future by creating political and marriage alliances with other powerful families. In doing so, Njal innevitably draws more and more of Iceland into the web of his own fate, whose strands finally peter out after the Battle of Clontarf in Ireland (c.1014 ?).
Although some detractors criticize the style,the reader must understand that Njal's Saga is written in typical saga style with stock characters and situations. This is NOT a modern-day novel; it is written in an idiomatic style. Conversation and narrative contain the dry wit, excellent understatement and brevity that characterizes saga style. Strict Norse traditions of hospitality (even to enemies)and the strong relationships of foster ties are also peculiar to these types of sagas.
After reading Njal's Saga, one can come away not only with a great story, but also keen insights into Norse culture and tradition. I highly recommend it!
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