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SUMMARY
The Art of Reading Sagas: On the Interpretation of the Role of the Conversion
in Njáls saga.
Keywords: Njáls saga, conversion, interpretation, Christian influence, traditional
background.
The article discusses the presence and interpretation of religious and ethical mes-
sages in the Íslendingasögur. It is clear that the saga authors were dependent on the
ethical and religious ideals of their time, and also that they were directly influenced
by didactic literature. But to what extent is it reasonable to see a full religious-ethi-
cal message in a saga as a whole? To what extent is it reasonable to see the structure
as being guided by the desire to illuminate religious-ethical conflicts and ideals? To
what extent are the saga characters and their acts exempla guided by didactic litera-
ture? The starting point of the article is the debate about the ethics of Njáls saga
and the significance of the conversion for the structure, message and conception of
the saga as a whole. The investigations lead to the conclusion that individual sagas
are not intended as religious or ethical exempla and that the individual characters
and actions in them should not be interpreted in the context of didactic literature.
Instead, the structure, development of the plot, character description and implicit
values of the sagas are governed by the saga genre and its tradition.