The Vengeance

When men dug through the ashes of Bergþórshváll, they found Njáll and Bergþóra and the little boy beneath the ox-hide — the bodies unburnt, where everything around them was cinders. To the people of the saga it read as a sign of grace on the old peacemaker. To Kári Sölmundarson, who had leapt from that fire with his hair ablaze, it was something else: a debt.^[1]

Kári had told Skarphéðinn, in the smoke, that if he got out he would avenge them. Everything that follows — years of it, across an ocean — is the keeping of that word. The burning was the saga's catastrophe; the vengeance is its long, cold reckoning.

On the other side, Flosi slept badly. He dreamed of a man in goatskins with an iron staff coming out of the fell-side — Irongrim, the figure named himself — who called Flosi's followers by name, one after another, some sooner and some later. Then he said he was bound for the Alþingi: to challenge the inquest, challenge the courts, and clear the field for fighters.^[1]

Kettel of the Mark read it the only way it could be read: every man the goatskin figure named was fey — doomed. Best, he said, to tell no one. Flosi already knew the shape of what was coming; he had said himself, after the burning, that they would have to bow the knee to many a man before this was over. The saga, as ever, announces its deaths before it deals them.

The dead of Bergþórshváll had a formidable kinsman left: Ásgrímr Elliða-Grímsson, who took up the prosecution and rode the country gathering chieftains to it, with Kári at his side. Against him the burners hired the sharpest lawyer in Iceland, Eyjólfr Bölverksson, bought with a gold bracelet. What followed at the Thing was a duel of pure procedure — summons and counter-summons, technical flaws sprung like traps — the law pushed to the very edge of what it could bear.^[1]

It is Njála's genius that it treats a lawsuit with the same tension as a battle, because in this society they are the same contest by other means. But a case this poisoned could not hold inside the courts. When the legal machinery jammed — a deadlock of technicalities — there was nowhere left for the rage to go but out.

So the holiest peace-ground in Iceland became a battlefield. When the suit collapsed, the two sides took up arms at the assembly itself and fought — the burners and the avengers, hacking at each other across the very plain where disputes were supposed to be ended without blood. Men fell on both sides before the great chieftains could force a halt and impose, by main weight, an arbitrated peace.^[1]

That a fight could break out at the Alþingi is the saga's bleakest verdict on where the burning had brought everyone: the law, Njáll's lifelong instrument, broken open into open war on its own ground. A settlement was hammered out for most of the burners. But Kári would not be party to it. He took no atonement. His feud stayed his own.^[2]

Now the saga does something unexpected: it turns, for a stretch, almost comic. Kári took up the hunt alone, and his companion was Björn of the Mark — a small farmer who boasted enormously of his own courage and whose wife mocked him for it. Kári, with dry patience, took Björn at his word and brought him along, and Björn — to everyone's surprise, including perhaps his own — proved genuinely brave when it came to it, guarding Kári's back through ambush after ambush.^[1]

The pairing is the saga breathing out. Around the relentless killing it sets this odd, warm double-act — the grim avenger and the puffed-up little farmer who turns out to have the heart he claimed. Kári hunts the burners in twos and threes across the south, and the body-count of Flosi's dream begins to come true.

The hunt could not stay in Iceland, because the burners did not. Flosi led his men abroad — on pilgrimage, in part, to wash off the burning — and Kári followed across the sea. The last act of the longest feud in the sagas plays out not in the valleys of the south but in the Norse world's wider reach: the Orkneys, Caithness, the courts of earls and kings.^[1]

This is the migration the whole corpus runs on, turned to vengeance — the same sea-roads that carried settlers from Norway to Iceland now carrying a feud out to the islands and on to Ireland. Kári went as a man with one purpose, into the orbit of Earl Sigurðr of Orkney, whose guardsman he had once been.

Kári came to Earl Sigurd's hall in Orkney on Yule-day itself, unannounced, and stood outside listening. Within, the burner Gunnar Lambason was entertaining the king and the earls with the tale of the burning — telling it with a sneering twist, claiming Skarphéðinn had wept at the end, and laughing as he lied.^[1]

Kári could not stand it. He walked into the hall and struck Gunnar's head from his shoulders so cleanly that it spun across the board and landed before the king, in a wash of blood. The earl shouted to seize and kill him — but Kári had been the earl's own beloved guardsman, and not a man moved. And then his enemy spoke for him: Flosi himself said Kári had done nothing without cause; he was in no atonement with them, and only did what he had the right to do.^[2] Kári walked out unhindered. Even in the depth of the feud, the saga insists, these are men who recognise one another's honour.

The feud's last killings were folded into a far greater catastrophe. At Clontarf outside Dublin — “Brian's battle,” the saga calls it — the Norse of the islands and Ireland met the army of the Irish king Brian on Good Friday, 1014. Earl Sigurðr fell there, carrying the raven banner that the saga says brought victory to the host before it but death to the man who bore it; one by one his standard-bearers were killed until no one would lift it, and the earl carried it himself and died.^[1]

Several of the burners died at Clontarf too, swept up in the great slaughter — the saga threading its small feud into one of the famous battles of the age, with a freight of portents and visions around it. Kári was there, on the winning side. The blood-account was nearly closed.

One account still stood open. Kári ran down Kol Þorsteinsson — the last of the burners on his list — and killed him far away in Wales, paying out a market-stall debt with a sword-stroke, the body's head falling even as it counted its coins.^[1] With that the long ledger of Flosi's dream was settled: nearly every man Irongrim named had fallen, in battle or by Kári's hand.

Kári had done what he told Skarphéðinn in the fire he would do. And now, the killing finished, the saga had one move left — the one that makes it more than a revenge tale.

Kári turned at last for home. Sailing late in the season, his ship was dashed to pieces on the Icelandic coast in a gale — and of all the houses he might have made for, he chose, deliberately, to go to Flosi's hall at Svínafell and, as the saga puts it, put Flosi's manhood to the proof. He walked in out of the storm, his enemy of all these years.^[1]

Flosi knew him the instant he entered. He sprang up, went to meet him, kissed him, and sat him in the high-seat at his own side. They were reconciled with a full atonement — and Flosi gave Kári the hand of Hildigunnr: Höskuldr's widow, the woman whose blood-stiff cloak had set the whole burning in motion. The feud ends in the marriage-bed of its own beginning.^[2]

Flosi, grown old, later sailed for Norway in a ship men told him was unseaworthy; he said she was good enough for an old and death-doomed man, put to sea, and was never heard of again. And there, the saga says plainly, the story of Burnt Njáll comes to its close — not on a killing, but on two enemies who had taken everything from each other choosing, in the end, peace.