Davis, Cultural asimilation.pdf

Oral Tradition , 13/2 (1998): 435-455

Cultural Assimilation in Njáls saga

Craig R. Davis

Introduction

Lars Lönnroth has recently described the social context of the

Icelandic family saga as follows: thirteenth-century Iceland comprised two

overlapping and peacefully coexisting cultures jointly promoted by the

Church and the secular chieftains, one dominated by native oral tradition,

the runic alphabet, Old Norse feud stories, Eddic and skaldic poetry, the

other dominated by the Latin alphabet, clerical education, and foreign

literary genres (1991:10).

Both “literary production systems” contributed to the writing of sagas:

For even though the plots and narrative language of the Icelandic sagas

usually come from the first and indigenous culture, the actual writing, the

chronology, the encyclopaedic background of knowledge, the literary

composition, and the entire production of codices on a large scale

presuppose the diligent work of clerics belonging to the second culture (10).

Lönnroth thus envisions two distinct, but productively interacting, literary

“systems” cultivated within the larger framework of Icelandic political and

ecclesiastical life.

Carol Clover, in her summary of the question over a decade ago,

described more precisely the new “syncretic form” produced by this

interaction (1985:294). The Icelandic family saga derived from prose oral

tales or ættir —Lönnroth’s “Old Norse feud stories”—that were elaborated

in the process of being written down into the constituent episodes of longer

narratives that themselves had been only “immanent” or potential in native

oral tradition, that is, generally understood by experts in that tradition but

never actually performed in their entirety (Lindow 1995, Foley 1991). The

elaboration of these episodic oral narratives in writing produced a new

“long prose” form, and consequently a new literary tradition, where

competition between the two systems could be played out in a more

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disciplined and structured form. Such competition, we may imagine, had

already occurred to some considerable extent in the successive and

multifarious oral performances of vernacular verse and prose. After all, even

oral storytellers had been at least nominal Christians for over two hundred

years; some very successful performers were themselves priests of the

Church, like Ingimundr in Sturlunga saga (Bauman 1986:135). These

performers of native tradition, whether cleric or layman, cultivated a

distinctive value system of secular manly honor—“the drengskapr complex”

(140-46)—that nonetheless may have accommodated some sharp, and not

perhaps always entirely consistent, penetrations of Christian ethics and

ideology (Andersson 1970). But the sometimes comfortable, sometimes

anxious process of assimilation between secular and clerical culture—the not

unfriendly competition between the two systems—was accelerated and

finally resolved as churchmen were involved more closely in the literal

production of saga texts. In fact, it is in the writing of the family sagas

themselves that medieval Icelandic culture achieved its most fully

integrated, comprehensive, and definitive expression. The family sagas are

an ideological workshop, the primary site in the imaginative life of the

country, the place where the last nails of cultural assimilation were neatly

and irretrievably driven home.

My ambition in this essay is to explore more deeply the final fraught

stages in the dynamic assimilation between Lönnroth’s two systems of

medieval Icelandic literary culture, between the one system dominated by

the most prestigious narrative complex in clerical education and ideology—

the Bible and its dependent vitae sanctorum —and the other system first

generated within the matrix of pre-Christian Norse mythology. More

specifically, I intend to argue that the most potent, but subtle and ramifying,

issue at the heart of the greatest of the Icelandic family sagas, Njáls saga , is

that between two competing systems of eventuality, two opposed

formulations of what Joseph Harris has called the “plot of history”

(1986:202, 213; 1974:264). For all the accommodation between the two

systems prior to the composition of Njáls saga —whether oral or literary,

whether in verse or in prose—there remained in this work one last barrier to

full assimilation: the recalcitrant “deep structure” of traditional Norse plots.

This adaptation of Chomsky’s linguistic term is useful in describing

the basic plot-system or pattern of events that was characteristic of

traditional narratives in the late pagan period. A new system of narrative

eventuality was introduced to the culture during the conversion of Iceland to

Christianity at the end of the tenth century, perhaps much earlier, in fact,

since some of the founding families were already Christian by the time they

arrived. The biblical pattern, with its providential plot of history, with its

CULTURAL ASSIMILATION IN NJÁLS SAGA

437

sequence of sin and salvation, of preparation and fulfillment, of progressive

dispensations of grace, is neatly formulated in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans:

Scimus autem quoniam diligentibus Deum omnia cooperantur in bonum

(“And we know that to them that love God, all things work together for

good. . . “) (Vulgate/Douay-Rheims, 8:28). The heroes of this narrative

anticipate or recall that of Christ; they are understood to approximate an

imitatio Christi . The late pagan pattern is perhaps most succinctly

summarized in the famous old chestnut from Hávamál (stanza 77):

Deyr fé, deyiafræmdr,

deyr siálfr it sama;

ek veit einn, at aldri deyr:

dómr um dauan hvern

Animals die; loved ones die;

Oneself dies the same.

I know one thing that does not die:

The reputation of the dead.

This formula encapsulates the defensive fatalism implicit in traditional

Norse plot-structures, that tradition’s characterization of the way things

work out in this world, a process of negative and ultimately disastrous

eventuality that may be resisted and delayed but must also finally be

confronted with the stoic courage and grim dignity that will at least secure

the respect of posterity. This is the pattern of sacred history preserved in

Völuspá, Snorra Edda , and other works.

Many saga characters—the two órólfs of Egils saga , Arnkell goi in

Eyrbyggja saga , Gísli Súrsson in Gísla saga, and Gunnarr of Hlíarendi in

Njáls saga , to name only a few—act out this traditional plot of history.

These figures exemplify the value-system of unflinching manly fortitude in

the face of overwhelming odds that is encoded in this narrative structure.

The saga-writers sometimes even invest their heroes’ deaths with an aura of

uncanny force or heroic apotheosis. Gísli, for instance, is said to have

lét líf sitt me svá mörgum ok stórum sárum, at fura ótti í vera. Svá hafa

eir sagt, at hann hopai aldri, ok eigi sá eir, at högg hans væri minna it

síasta en it fyrsta.

died of so many great wounds that there seemed to be something strange about it. His

attackers said that he never gave ground, and they could not see that his last blow was

weaker than his first ( Gísla saga 1943: 115; trans. Johnston 1963:58).

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After death, Gunnarr is seen by moonlight in his grave mound, exultantly

chanting a verse in his own honor (Sveinsson 1954:193). Such

mystification is the reflex of a sacred tradition of heroic demise: the

strangeness of Gísli’s ferocious invincibility and the spookiness of Gunnar’s

defiant apparition invest their example with a special—and traditional—

potency in the reader’s sensibility.

To summarize the principle in operation here: the process of events in

secular legend reflects the pattern of eventuality in the Heilsgeschichte or

“sacred history” of the culture. In the late pagan universe, temporal

security is precariously wrested from aboriginal chaos and inevitably

collapses back into it, as seen most clearly in the rise and fall of the Æsir

against the monsters of chaos. This process of chaos, creation, and

catastrophe is the precise inverse of the biblical creation ex nihilo , fall, and

redemption. Both plot-systems exerted a pervasive influence upon the

structure of stories composed under their narrative hegemony. The implicit

truth or validity of those secondary narratives—their historicity as

understood by their contemporary audiences—is confirmed by the closeness

with which they approximate the temporal structure of events in narratives

of superior cultural authority. As Marshall Sahlins argues with regard to

the various Polynesian heroic traditions, what constitutes a significant

account of the past is very differently formulated in the narrative systems of

distinct island groups: “different cultures, different historicities,” he

concludes (1985:x). Actual historical events are assimilated to the

“underlying recurrent structures” in the tradition of their narration (72); the

presence and recognition of those structures are a large part of what makes

the stories “true” to the participants in that tradition. Clover comments on

the historicity of the early sagas in just these terms: they “sprang from

historical reality but . . . once set in oral motion, they were slowly but

surely rationalized, localized, contemporized, and above all ‘traditionalized’

(repatterned according to the narrative ‘laws’ of that society)”

(1985:284-85). These traditional plot structures implicitly define the way

things can happen in their world, but can themselves be subjected, and

progressively acculturated, to competing traditions of eventuality. And the

process of “traditionalization” is not confined merely to the performance of

oral narratives, of course; it continues in literary traditions as well.

As I suggested earlier, we may assume that the oral feud stories of

founding Icelandic families had come to reflect in some cases considerable

influence from Christian patterns of narrative organization before they were

construed during the process of literary composition into the longer sagas

that they had only implied or adumbrated. But they were not as yet fully

CULTURAL ASSIMILATION IN NJÁLS SAGA

439

assimilated to a biblical world-view or Christian value-system, certainly not

in the deep structure of their plots. Many of these still retained the intimately

shaping imprint of the late pagan system in which these stories had first been

generated. The new Christian plot of history, the biblical pattern of

eventuality, though introduced to native hagiography and the stories of some

founding ancestors, was not deeply or securely internalized in saga prose

until the mid- to later thirteenth century, in Laxdæla saga and, more

especially, in Njáls saga , where the resolution of the conflict between the

two systems of eventuality constitutes the underlying cultural work of the

saga form.

Laxdæla saga

The impressive, if rather bald and peremptory, conversion narrative of

Gurun Ósvífs-daughter with which Laxdæla concludes anticipates a deeper

and more complex integration of Christian conversion paradigms in the

plotting of Njáls saga . Nonetheless, the author of Njála seems to have

learned some of his strategy of narrative organization from the earlier saga’s

depiction of Gurún’s four marriages, each different but all ending in the

divorce or death of her husband in ugly or regrettable circumstances (Conroy

1980:117). The technique of sequenced structural redundancy in these

marriages, anticipated by Gurún’s four dreams as a young woman and

Gestr Oddleifsson’s foreboding interpretations of them, prepares us for the

final overturning of the established pattern in her concluding “marriage” to

God as Iceland’s first nun and anchoress, founder of the most distinguished

monastery on the island. God, one might say, turns out to be the only “man”

good enough for Gurún, the only one to whom her marriage can be termed

an unmitigated success. From the repentance of this “chief of sinners”

springs the religious life in Iceland; from her troubled marriages descend the

many distinguished churchmen who furthered the progress of grace in the

land. From a repeated pattern of failure emerges the redemptive plot of

history implicit in the concluding episode of Laxdæla .

I will try to show how the author of Njáls saga adapted this pattern

of sequenced but finally overturned redundancy in his own work and why it

is especially effective there. But before I do so, I would like to point out

one other thing that he learned from the author of Laxdæla : that is, how to

stage a martyr’s death for a secular hero, a death not actively fierce like that

of the órólfs, or Gísli or Gunnarr, or Óæinn or órr, but passive and

principled, like that of Christ or one of the martyrs who imitate him.

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