The message of Njal’s Saga is “choose Civilization, but remember it’s a choice, and be ready to revoke it at any moment”.

From Your Book Review: Njal’s Saga, by unnamed at Astral Codex Ten.  The author will be named in the future.  He has an interesting conclusion.  

So what is Njal’s Saga’s place in the Western canon? I claim it is as a dark mirror of The Eumenides.

The Eumenides is a play from 5th-century-BC Athens (another of those brief efflorescences of human freedom - this is important!). Orestes learns his mother has murdered his father. Any man who does not avenge his father’s death is accursed. But any man who murders his mother is also accursed.

Orestes does not die. He kills his mother and becomes accursed; thus he is haunted by the Furies, spirits of vengeance. He goes to Athens and asks Athena for help. Athena invents a new institution: the trial. She invites Athenian citizens to serve as the jury, the Furies to be the prosecutors, and Apollo to be defense attorney.

Like the trial in Njal’s Saga, everyone immediately agrees the suspect committed the crime and digresses into insane moon arguments. Orestes believes mothers aren’t really parents, because they just sort of incubate the embryo, who is made entirely from the father’s genes. Athena (???) thinks men are better than women, so your father’s right to be avenged takes precedence over your mother’s right not to die. But the arguments aren’t the point. The point is that Law and Reason - even dumb Reason that fails Biology 101 - gets precedence over Ghost Curse Logic. Everyone cheers. The Furies rebrand as patron goddesses of Athens. Some combination of Athena and the Chorus announce that they have founded Civilization and everyone should be Civilized from now on. The end.

Like Njal’s Saga, The Eumenides is about the transition from the ancient logic of feuds and vengeance to the modern logic of courtroom trials. Like Njal’s Saga, it’s a free society looking at itself and noticing that its freedom depends on a certain conception of logic-driven Law.

But compared to Njal’s Saga, The Eumenides is kind of cartoonish. The gods themselves come down and make the trial work out! Orestes is a sympathetic defendant, the Furies are insane death ghosts, the whole thing is a black and white morality tale cheering on the Law side of the dichotomy.

Njal’s Saga tells the same story - a trial in a society on the cusp between feud and law - but doesn’t pull its punches the same way. The feuds are caused by humans, with valid human concerns. The law is administered by humans, with normal human failings. And while Athena railroads Orestes’ trial to her chosen outcome, Njal’s trial simply fails. Eyjolf is able to come up with an insane technicality that Mord and Thorhall fail to observe, and produce a manifestly unjust verdict; the defendant gets off scot-free, the plaintiff’s attorneys are condemned to death. In the end it is Thorhall, the finest legal mind in Iceland, who starts the massacre, as if the saga author is emphasizing that there is no possible legal way out of this mess. Only the man who knows all the rules can be sure that the time has come to break them.

The message of The Eumenides is “choose Civilization, the gods themselves have decreed it”. The message of Njal’s Saga is “choose Civilization, but remember it’s a choice, and be ready to revoke it at any moment”.

When someone has offended me, I think of Njal, kindest and most tolerant of men - but I think of this too.