Jón Bjarnason Academy - 01.05.1936, Page 17

farm during a time of food scarcity. Gunnar discovered what
his wife had done and gave her, in a moment of indignation,
a slap on the face. She retorted that she would never forget
that slap. Killing succeeded killing, Gunnar invariably being
the attacked and the provoked party. In the end, however, as
the result of several deaths which he had caused when defend-
ing himself against the wanton onslaught of a crowd of enemies,
he was outlawed from Iceland. Njal advised him to go abroad
and to return only when the period of his outlawry was over.
Gunnar prepared himself for the voyage, but as he was riding
down from Hlitharendi to the •waiting ship his horse stumbled
and threw him. He fell with his face towards his home, and
looking up saw the beauty of the scene which he loved so
well. “Fair is the hillside,” were the words which broke from
his lips, “it hath never seemed to me fairer—golden are the
corn fields, and the hay is mown—I will ride home and fare
away never.” This breach of the terms gave Gunnar’s ene-
mies the opportunity for which they were waiting. From all
sides they gathered, and, after slaying Gunnar’s faithful Irish
hound, surrounded the farm. For a long time Gunnar kept
them at bay with his arrows, but at length a man leapt upon
the roof and succeeded in cutting Gunnar’s bow-string. What
followed let the Sagaman tell in his own incomparable style.
“Gunnar said to Hallgerda, ‘Give me two locks of thy hair’
(Hallgerda had throughout her life been noted for the beauty
and abundance of her hair) ‘and do thou and my mother
plait them together to make a bow string for me.’ ‘Doth
ought lie on it for thee?’, saith she. ‘My life lies on it,’ saith
he, ‘for they can never get to close quarters with me as long
as I may use my bow.’ ‘Then shall I now,’ saith she, ‘remind
you of the slap in the face; and I care not at all whether
thou defendest thyself for a long or a short time.’ ‘Every
man hath something of which to boast,’ saith Gunnar, ‘and
I shall ask thee no more for this’.” So Gunnar, rather than
be discourteous to an unnatural wife, met gaily and blithely
his end. He had proved himself faithful to the moral code
of his race.
The years passed by, and a company of foemen, bent on
the sacred duty of blood-revenge, surrounded the homstead
of Njal at Bergthorshvol. Such was the tragic culmination
of a series of crimes. The sons of Njal, high spirited and proud
Viking warriors, had been guilty of two slayings. The latter
of these had been particularly atrocious, as the victim wyas their
own guileless and gentle-spirited adopted brother. They had
been led to perpetrate the crime through misunderstandings,
deliberately sown between them and their adopted brother by
the malignant jealousy of a certain Mord—son of the second
marriage of that woman who long ago had been divorced from
her first husband, in consequence of the physical incompati-
bility of which the Saga at its opening tells. Thus the mys-
terious chain of causation, partly in the natural world, partly
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