Gripla - 2020, Qupperneq 283

GRIPLA282
given the opportunity to avenge the killing of his father.47 Yet, in Ámundi’s
case, following immediately on the heels of the saga’s account of Iceland’s
conversion to Christianity, his act of vengeance is arguably understood
to be divinely sanctioned and serves – at least to the saga’s audience – as
an obvious illustration that God “can intervene when and as he sees fit.”48
Yet, through the miraculous killing of his father’s slayer, Ámundi fans
the embers of an old feud, reigniting the conflict between the sons of the
eponymous Njáll and the Sigfússons, which eventually culminates in the
burning at Bergþórshváll.49 The aforementioned efforts of the aged and
nearly blind Ingimundr Þorsteinsson to prevent violence, his extended
dramatic death scene, and his son’s vengeance upon their evil pagan ad-
versaries in vatnsdœla saga, convey a similarly didactic and moral tone.
Ingimundr and his sons are portrayed as proto-Christians whose actions
are informed by a strong sense of Christian morality, which is preoccupied
with determining and doling out both rewards and punishments.50 No
such spiritual framework is provided or even vaguely implied during the
encounter between the two Þorsteinns. Rather, doubtlessly drawing on
the experience of losing his own son to violent conflict, Þorsteinn hvíti
is afforded an opportunity and succeeds in expressing his own personal
views on the futility of the retributive cycle of violence that society seems
to demand he must help to perpetuate.51
47 Einar ól. Sveinsson (ed.), Brennu-njáls saga, íslenzk fornrit XII (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka
fornritafélag, 1954), 248, 272–74.
48 Elizabeth Walgenbach, “Inciting Miracle in njáls saga: Ámundi hinn blindi’s Gift of Sight
in Context,” saga-Book 43 (2019): 132; see also Siân Grønlie, the saint and the saga Hero:
Hagiography and Early Icelandic Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), 142–43. This
episode has generated a great deal of scholarly debate centring on its religious dimensions
and whether the return of Ámundi’s blindness following his act of vengeance should be
interpreted as a punishment for having miscomprehended God’s will by killing rather than
offering Christian forgiveness to his father’s killer; see, for example, Lars Lönnroth, njáls
saga: A Critical Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 145; Annette
Lassen, “Hedninge på kristent pergament: Fremstillingen af mødet mellem hedenskab og
kristendom i dele af den norrøne litteratur,” transfiguration: nordisk tidsskrift for kunst og
kristendom 3 (2001): 23–41; William Ian Miller, Why is Your Axe Bloody? A Reading of njáls
saga (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 188–91; Andrew Hamer, njáls saga and its
Christian Background: A study of narrative Method (Leuven: Peeters, 2015), 122–30.
49 Walgenbach, “Inciting Miracle in njáls saga,” 134.
50 Grønlie, the saint and the saga Hero, 123–33; cf. Morcom, “After Adulthood,” 26–30.
51 Sigríður Baldursdóttir, however, contends that Þorsteinn should be regarded as a proto-
Christian or “noble heathen.” Based on the idea that Þorsteins saga and vápnfirðinga saga