Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.02.2016, Blaðsíða 54

The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 2 — 2016TV ON THE ANCIENT MANUSCRIPT
So what New York City is to cities, what
the Mona Lisa is to paintings, what In-
N-Out Burger is to fast food, what Jesus
Christ is to prophets, Njáls Saga is to
the Sagas. Now that you’ve sat through
that list, you realize what it’s like to hear
people who love Njáls Saga talk about
it. It’s kind of annoying, right?
It’s a trap!
Njáls Saga is talked about so often in
both scholarship and Icelandic popular
culture that it’s one of very few sagas
to have a cutesy nickname, dropping
the word “Saga” —it’s just “Njála.” Even
one of the cutest streets in Reykjavík
is Njálsgata. But don’t let all this hype
and cuteness fool you. It’s boring and
everyone sucks and then dies. You can
literally stop here if you want. I wouldn’t
blame you.
Just like New York, Mona Lisa, In-
N-Out, and Jesus, Njála is just an ex-
haustingly over-pimped, tediously me-
diocre pile of whatfuckingever. None
of these things are necessarily bad,
and each have their merits, but overall
they are no more intrinsically amazing
than Osaka, Odd Nerdrum’s NSFW self
portrait with boner, Pret a Manger, The
Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Eyrbyggja
Saga. Or anything, really.
Now that we’ve appropriately de-
flated Njál’s ego, we can get to the ac-
tion. Or some of it. The problem is that
Njála is longer than God’s dick and
has more characters than the average
Reykjavík resident’s sex life, so I can’t
even dismiss all the subplots with sin-
gle, sassy clauses in longer sentences.
I’ll do my best, but most of it I’ll just skip
completely. This is for the best. I do it
for you.
So we start this one with some
cougar-hunter who’s after the queen
of Norway, but she curses him with im-
potence because he already has a wife,
it turns into some weird dowry dispute,
he mentions his niece Hallgerður has “a
thief’s eyes” and she turns out to be a
super shitty person. Big surprise.
Feudz b4 dudez
Now enter the main characters, Njáll
and Gunnar. Njáll is supposed to be
some sagely lawyer revered for his ad-
vice (most of which turns out to be ter-
rible and only exacerbates the feuds),
and Gunnar is a big, strong, manly
dude. They’re best bros, even though
people think Njáll is basically a homo
because he has no beard. Gunnar is
like, “I totes wanna marry that thiefy-
eyed biddie Hallgerður,” and even Njáll
is like, “Not cool, man, she’s already
had two husbands killed.” But Gunnar
thinks the third time’s the charm or
some dumb shit like that and marries
her anyway.
She doesn’t get along so well with
Njáll’s wife Bergþóra and there’s this
weird sequence where they each con-
vince random dudes to kill each other’s
slaves, for which their husbands then
pay each other back. Although this
makes no fucking sense, it happens
three times.
Hallgerður must really love cheese
(well, who doesn’t?) because she
sends another rando to steal cheese
from some other rando. The first rando
gets caught. When she and Gunnar are
arguing about it, the douche hits her.
(Pro-tip: even if you have the shittiest,
most thiefy-eyed skinka of a wife in all
of Iceland, you don’t get to hit her.) In
her only act of appropriately placed
spite, she swears she’ll get even.
Like ten boring feuds and some bad
advice from Njáll later, Gunnar ends
up getting exiled but refuses to leave
because Iceland is just too pretty. Fair
enough. He’s then ambushed in his
home, and when he asks Hallgerður for
some of her hair to use as a bowstring
she basically asks, “Are you gonna die
if I refuse?” And he’s like, “Yeah, duh.”
So she says, “Remember that time you
hit me? Oops, you’re dead!” She basi-
cally flips her hair and keeps eating
her cheese while she watches him get
mowed down by a bunch of dudes and
she’s probably totally into it. Then she
basically disappears from the story and
good riddance ‘cause she fucking nasty.
Just play it by beard
Njáll’s sons come back from Norway
with some guy named Kári and he mar-
ries into their family. They also bring
back some unsavoury characters that
help to stir some spice into this giant
pot of lame-sauce. Three or four feuds
later, there’s a scuffle involving some of
these new jerks and Skarphéðinn, one
of Njáll’s sons, literally slides past the
troublemaker on ice and beheads him
along the way. It’s basically the only
cool killing in the book until the burn-
ing. Even so, I like to imagine him doing
the moonwalk instead. Another feud or
two later, Njáll adopts the dead guy’s
son Höskuldur.
He becomes the favourite son and
grows up to be a great chieftain and
score a hot wife. Some other chieftain,
Mörður, gets so jelly that you could
spread him on toast and he convinces
Njáll’s sons and son-in-law to murder
Höskuldur. One of his relatives, Flosi,
wants settlement. They take up a gi-
ant collection to pay off the murder
and Njáll throws in a fancy cloak, but
Flosi is insulted that some beardless
homo has offered him a unisex article
of clothing (what’s next, gender-neutral
bathrooms?! The horror!) so he decides
to kill Njáll’s family instead.
More like the
Saga of Böred Njál
He descends upon Njáll’s house with
an army of one hundred other assholes
and they burn the motherfucker down.
He allows the women and beardless
Njáll to leave first, but he and Bergþóra,
who is the real hero of this story if you
ask me, refuse to leave their sons. So
they all burn. Except Kári, who escapes
along the roof-beams so he can avenge
them. This sounds all noble and shit,
but allow me to remind you he leaves
his own son to die in the fire so he can
avenge him… rather than just saving
him. There is certainly not a “World’s
Best Dad” mug in Kári’s office.
Anyway, Kári chases the attackers
literally all the way to Scotland and kills
them. He even breaks into the feast
hall of the Earl of Orkney to kill a man
who is shit-talking Njáll. I guess that’s
kind of cool, but it doesn’t make any of
these people any less stupid assholes
than they all were. Even Bergþóra had
all those slaves killed. Eventually some
peace is achieved when Kári marries
into Flosi’s family. Don’t even worry
about what happened to his first wife.
Now, fucking finally, is the end.
If you think my recap was too re-
ductive but you’re too lazy to read all
bajillion pages of the saga to prove me
wrong: A. reductive is the point, duh;
and B. you’re in luck. Borgarleikhúsið is
currently staging an adaptation of Njála
and the poster has a dude in a shiny
gold tunic, so maybe they’ve spiced it
up for you. Or at least abridged it to
trick you into thinking it’s good.
We need to talk about Njáls Saga. Fully titled the Saga of Burned Njál, it is considered
the absolute zenith of literary brilliance in Iceland’s original prose genre. It is basically
THE SAGA. The one and only. Some particularly stuffy Icelandic writers would have you
believe that it (written in the late 13th and recorded in the early 14th century) and ‘In-
dependent People’ by Halldor Laxness from 1934-5 are the only real achievements in
Icelandic literature and everything before, between, and after has just been pulp. (Fuck
those guys, though.)
Words Grayson Del Faro Illustration Inga María Brynjarsdóttir
RECAP:
Njáls Saga
Episode four:
Or, the one where
they burn that
motherfucker down
Morals of
the story:
1. Everyone is the worst
and will die eventually,
including you.
2. Cheese will not only
provide nutrients to
postpone your inevitable
death, but it is also good.
3. Njáls Saga is not. It will
only bring you closer to
death. So don’t bother.
GRAPEVINE
HÚRRA
P R E S E N T S
Singapore
Sling+guests 26FEBRUARY
22:00NAUSTIN101 REYKJAVIK