Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 138

134
GRIPLA
his own sons in an endeavor to assure peace between the two families;
Höskuld’s words of forgiveness when slain by his brothers: ‘May God
help me and forgive all of you!’; Flosi’s inner conflict between the
pagan duty of blood vengeance and the keen realization that burning
Njáll and his family was a transgression against God; Njál’s deliberate
and premeditated sacrifice of himself and his family in expiation of
the sins of his sons; Skarphéðin’s symbolic buming of a cross on his
back and chest; the saintly glow of Njál’s body; Hallr af Síða’s renun-
ciation of compensation for his slain son in an effort to bring about a
trace between the hostile parties; the reconciliation between Flosi and
Kári after both have received absolution of their sins in Rome; and
the marriage between Hildigunnr, who unleashed fearful vengeance
for the slaying of Höskuldr, and Kári, who wreaked equally fearful
countervengeance for the burning, as a symbolic pledge of the per-
manence of that reconciliation—all of this would have to be scrapped
as superficial Christian additions to a pagan story. But this, of course,
is patent nonsense, and speculation of this kind can only lead away
from the meaning of Njála and, indeed, from the meaning of all the
Sagas of Icelanders.
What conclusions can we reasonably draw from the saga passages
quoted and discussed here? Without in any way generalizing about the
íslendingasögur as a genre, we can state that to the extent that these
quotations represent the views of the authors and are integral parts of
the sagas in which they occur, they do not seem to lend support to
the romantic doctrine that these stories were written from a pro-pagan
point of view.