The Heath-Slayings

Before the story, an honest word about the text — because this saga is the corpus's clearest lesson in how fragile its own survival was. Heiðarvíga saga is among the oldest of the Icelandic sagas, but it is also the most damaged. Its one old vellum was carried to Stockholm and Copenhagen, and in the great Copenhagen fire of 1728 the opening of the saga burned. What we have of that lost beginning is not the medieval text at all, but a prose abstract written from memory by the scholar Jón Ólafsson, who had read the manuscript before it was destroyed — a recollection standing in for a vanished original.

So this journey rests on a text that is whole at the end and reconstructed at the start. The killing of Bardi's brother Hall — the wrong the whole saga answers — falls in that lost opening, and reaches us mostly second-hand, through its consequences. It is worth holding onto: the sagas are not timeless monuments but physical books that could and did burn, and what survives is sometimes a copy of a memory of a fire-eaten page. The atlas flags the genuine medieval text where it stands; here, more than anywhere, that flagging also marks where the old text gives out and recollection takes over.

The continuous saga opens with Bardi and his old fosterer Thorarin of Lechmote, talking long and privately, 'and men knew not clearly what they said.'^[1] Bardi is no hot-headed avenger; he is measured, even reluctant, and the vengeance for his brother Hall has been left lying. Thorarin is the cold strategist who sets it in motion: he tells Bardi to go to the assembly and quietly prove his friends — to gather a following for a deed not yet named aloud.

This is one of the things that makes Heiðarvíga saga feel so real: the vengeance is planned, methodically, like a campaign. Thorarin arrays the men, chooses the route, sets the lurking-places. Where a lesser saga might leap to the killing, this one lingers on the patient, almost bureaucratic preparation — the choosing of men, the testing of loyalties, the old fosterer's careful hand behind the young man who will strike. Bardi is the sword; Thorarin is the mind.

The deed still hangs fire — until Bardi's mother forces it. Þuríðr is the saga's unforgettable figure, and her scene is one of the great whettings (the hvǫt) of all Norse literature. When her sons sit to their breakfast with Hall still unavenged, she insists on serving them herself — and lays a stone on each man's trencher beside the meat.^[1]

When they ask what the stones mean, she tells them: she reminds them that 'bigger was Hall your brother' cut down, and that they gnaw at their food while his killing goes unanswered — so they may as well gnaw stones.^[2] It is shaming raised to an art: the mother using the dead son to drive the living ones, refusing them the comfort of a meal until they become the men vengeance requires. The goading woman runs all through the sagas — Bjargey rousing Howard, Guðrún and Hildigunn elsewhere — but Thurid's stones are the starkest image of it. The sons rise from that table bound for the heath.

Bardi led his band west and laid them in ambush as Thorarin had taught, hidden by a great wood on Whitewater-side, waiting for the Southern men — the sons of Thorgaut and their folk — to pass.^[1] When the chance came they struck, and among the first to fall was Gísli, one of Thorgaut's sons.^[2]

This is the spark that turns a planned raid into the running fight the saga is named for. The killing of Gisli and the others is the vengeance Bardi came for — measured against Hall, a life for a life — but it cannot be a clean single stroke. The Southern men's kin and neighbours rouse at once, the alarm is raised, and the chase begins. Bardi's small band, having done what they came to do, must now get home across open country with a gathering enemy at their heels. The deed is done; surviving it is another matter.

The pursuit ran Bardi's eighteen men down on the high moorland of Two-Days' Heath, and there the saga's great set-piece is fought.^[1] Cornered on a narrow neck of ground where only a few could come at them at once, Bardi arrayed his band and they stood with brandished weapons against the chasing Southern men — and a fierce, close, running battle followed, fought in 'brunts,' wave after wave.

The heath-battle is famous for its concreteness. The saga names the men, the ground, the order of the ranks, who stood at Bardi's right hand and who at his left, how the attackers could only come on along one narrow way — the kind of precise, soldierly detail that has made scholars think the account preserves a real memory of a real fight. It is not a poet's set-piece of glorious carnage but something grimmer and more exact: tired men killing each other on a moor, counted and named. The 'heath-slayings' that title the saga are this — and they leave dead on both sides, a vengeance paid for in more blood than it answered.

What followed the killing was not more killing but law. The dispute was brought before the assembly, and the great arbitrator Snorri the Priest — the same cool, far-seeing chief who steers Eyrbyggja saga — was set to help award the case.^[1] The settlement was done in the sagas' characteristic way: the fallen were paired off man for man, killing balanced against killing, and atonement made for the rest, so that the feud was closed by reckoning rather than left open to breed more death.^[2]

For Bardi himself the saga, like Howard's, grants a life after the feud: he puts away one wife, fights and settles, marries again, and in the end goes abroad into the wider Norse world — winning renown in a king's wars far from the heath where he made his name.^[3] The Heath-Slayings thus closes the circle the corpus draws again and again: a wrong, a goading, a vengeance, a battle, and then the slow machinery of law and atonement that lets a society of proud, armed men go on living. That it reaches us half-burned and half-remembered only sharpens the point — this is how thin the thread was by which such stories survived at all.