The Burning of Njáll

Njáll loved his foster-son Höskuldr above almost anyone, and raised him so high — a chieftaincy, a good marriage — that the man seemed proof against the feuds that swirled around the family. But Mörðr Valgarðsson, that tireless engine of ruin, dripped slander into the ears of Njáll's own sons until they believed Höskuldr meant them harm.^[1]

They caught him one morning sowing his field, and killed him — an innocent man, by the saga's own clear judgement. Of all the killings in the saga this is the one with no justification and no easy price. When the news reached Njáll, the old man wept; he had untangled a hundred blood-feuds, and he knew at once that this was the one that might not be untangled at all. He foresaw, that very day, his own death and the death of his wife and all his sons.^[2]

Höskuldr's widow Hildigunnr prepared her uncle Flosi's welcome with terrible care — the high-seat dressed, the household arrayed — and Flosi, sensing a trap in the honour, kicked the high-seat away: he was no king, he said, and would not be made a mock of. She laughed a cold laugh and said there was nothing new in that; they would go nearer yet before they were done.^[1]

And then she did. She fetched from her chest the cloak Flosi had once given Höskuldr — the one he was murdered in, kept unwashed, stiff with his blood — came up behind Flosi at the cleared table, and flung it over him so the dried gore rattled down across his shoulders. She called on God and all good men, and adjured him by his Christ and his manhood to avenge every wound on the dead body, or be called every man's dastard.^[2]

Flosi hurled the cloak back into her lap. “Thou art the greatest hell-hag,” he said — “women's counsel is ever cruel.” But the saga watches his face do the thing no man can argue with: blood-red, then ashen as withered grass, then blue as death. He was already lost. The goading had done its work.

What makes Flosi tragic rather than villainous is that he saw it all coming. Gathering the sons of Sigfus, he heard the hotheads among them — Grani, Lambi — cry for outlawry and death, and he answered them with cold sight: even if we kill Njáll and his sons, he said, they are men of such worth and such family that the blood-feud and hue and cry afterward will ruin us; many of you will lose your goods, and some your lives.^[1]

He was exactly right — the whole second half of the saga proves it. But Hildigunnr's cloak had bound him past the reach of his own wisdom. He rode to the Thing to try, first, the lawful way.

At the Alþingi the great men laboured to settle it, and very nearly did. Njáll begged both sides to stay and let good men make an award; the suit, he said, had sprung from an ill root, and only an arbitrated peace could draw it out. Hall of the Side talked Flosi into agreeing, arbitrators were named for each side, and they shook hands on it. A huge atonement was heaped up.^[1]

Then Flosi looked at the pile, saw a garment laid on top, and asked who had added it — and got no answer. He asked again, sharper, and made a savage joke at Njáll's expense, sneering at the beardlessness the saga has needled all along. Skarphéðinn answered in kind, with an insult so vicious it could not be taken back.^[2] In a heartbeat the settlement collapsed. The peace was off, and both sides walked away from the law for the last time.

Now the saga slows and darkens. Flosi gathered a hundred men and rode for Bergþórshváll. On the way the omens crowd in — blood on men's weapons unbidden, a goatless bleating, dreams of a great rider on a grey horse hurling fire. At Bergþórshváll itself the household sensed it too. The saga lets the dread accumulate the way it always does before a catastrophe: quietly, in signs, while the people who will die go about an ordinary evening.^[1]

Njáll, who could read men and law better than anyone alive, could not read his way out of this. He had been told, long before, that he would die in a manner he would least expect. The reader already knows what is coming up the road in the dark.

They came in the night. Njáll made the fatal, human choice to bring everyone inside the strong house rather than fight in the open — and Flosi's men, unable to beat the defenders at the doors, set the hall alight. Even then there was black saga humour in it: as they built the fire, Skarphéðinn called out from within, asking whether the lads were lighting a fire or taking to cooking. “Thou shalt not need to be better done,” came the answer.^[1]

The women smothered the first flames with whey. So the burners fired the loft above, with the vetch-stack, and the roof was ablaze before anyone inside knew. Njáll quieted the wailing women with terrible calm: this is but a passing storm, he said, and God is merciful and will not let us burn in this world and the next.^[2]

Flosi, to his credit, offered mercy at the door — the women, the children, the servants might all go free. Njáll sent them out. One of his sons, Helgi, tried to slip out in a woman's cloak and kerchief, but Flosi's eye caught “a tall woman, broad across the shoulders,” and when they moved to seize him Helgi threw off the cloak, struck once, and Flosi took his head at a stroke.^[1]

Then Flosi offered Njáll himself the door — it was unworthy, he said, that so old a man should burn. Njáll refused: he was too old to avenge his sons, and he would not live in shame. Flosi offered Bergþóra her life. She answered that she had been given to Njáll young and had promised to share one fate with him, and she would keep that promise.^[2] They went back inside together.

Njáll and Bergþóra lay down in their bed and took Kári's little son between them — the boy had refused to leave, saying he would rather die with his grandmother than live after her. Njáll told his steward to mark where they lay, so men would know where to find their bones, and had an ox-hide spread over the three of them. They signed themselves and the child with the cross, gave their souls into God's hands, and spoke no more.^[1]

Skarphéðinn watched his father lie down and said only, with that flat unflinching wit, that the old man had gone early to bed, as was to be looked for. When the bones were found afterward, unburnt beneath the fallen hide, men took it for a sign of grace.^[2]

The fighting men caught the falling brands and hurled them back, and threw the spears returned at them, until Flosi told his men to stop shooting and let the fire do the work. When the great roof-beams began to drop, Skarphéðinn knew his father was dead — he had heard neither groan nor cough from him.^[1]

Kári begged Skarphéðinn to leap out with him over a burnt cross-beam while the smoke blew their way. Skarphéðinn would not go first, and pressed Kári to save himself: it gladdened him, he said, to think that if Kári got out, Kári would avenge them. Kári ran the beam with his hair and clothes already ablaze, hurled a blazing bench to scatter the men below, threw himself from the roof and crept away in the smoke to a stream — and the burners, seeing a figure leap, decided it was only Skarphéðinn flinging a firebrand, and let it pass.^[2] So the one avenger escaped.

Skarphéðinn did not. Pinned at last by a fallen beam, he died on his feet against the wall — and when they found his body, his legs were burned off below the knee but the rest unburnt, his axe driven so hard into the gable it held, and on his face, the saga insists, no fear. He had even pressed a cross with a hot iron between his own eyes.^[3]

Kári quenched his burning hair in a stream and lay hidden in a smoky hollow that bears his name to this day. Behind him, Bergþórshváll was a ring of fire and forty-odd dead — Njáll, Bergþóra, their sons, a household. Flosi had got exactly the vengeance Hildigunnr demanded and exactly the ruin he had foreseen.^[1]

The Burning is the hinge of the whole saga. Everything before it is the long road in; everything after is the blood-price, paid out across years and an ocean, with Kári as its instrument. He had told Skarphéðinn the truth in the fire: if he leapt out, he would not leap back — each would go his own way now. One went into the cairn. One went out to avenge it.