This was great! Sometimes the old Icelandic sagas can be a bit dry with all the pedigrees and various relationships.

I don't know how much the translator helped, but there were some seriously badass action scenes in this saga - heroes sliding on ice, catching spears and throwing them back, limbs flying everywhere. I wonder if it also counts as one of the earliest courtroom dramas, because legal intrigue is what we get in between the episodes of violence.

Characters' personalities and motives are typically understated as usual in such sagas. However you get intriguing glimpses of their natures, such as with Skarp-Hedin's enigmatic smiles.

Definitely one of my favourites of the genre, with action, intrigue, and drama in spades. ( )

This is one of those books that I think need to re-read. There are too many characters, and their relationships change, from enemies into family by marriage. I also struggled with the culture. This is a story that is told for an audience who know the characters. They don't need an explanation for common knowledge. However, to show how a rich a homesteader is, a list of luxury items, and number of servants are listed.

Its not an easy book, and the Penguin Edition was nicely annotated, however I found the family trees at the end to be mostly useless. ( )

"...Kol was counting out the silver...Kari rushed at him with his sword drawn and slashed at Kol's neck. Kol kept on counting, and his head said 'Ten' as it flew from his shoulders."

"[Flosi] walked all the way to Rome, where he was accorded the great honour of receiving absolution at the hands of the Pope himself; he paid a large sum of money for it."

The writing is so spare and to-the-point that it verges on comedy sometimes. I find the directness novel. No flowery language or wasted words. I guess that's the oral-tradition factor.

A lot of HONOR and stoic dudes that are surprisingly fragile (in terms of masculinity, but also limbs and heads seem to get hacked off with ease).

A multigenerational blood-feud that ends with two survivors of opposite factions becoming buds...as it should be, really.

And there I end my review of the saga of the Burning of Njal. ( )

An icelandic Iliad. A gory, funny saga of a 50 year feud ( )

Here’s a family saga that makes the Hatfields and the McCoys seem like amateurs, genealogical narratives that make those in the Bible seem brief, and grisly descriptions of hand to hand combat that are the equal of the Iliad. In the introduction to this edition of the English translation by Bayerschmidt and Hollander, Þorsteinn Gylfason notes, “An Icelandic scholar of the eighteenth century said that all the sagas of the Icelanders could be summed up in four words, 'Farmers came to blows.'"

But between these dismemberments are the stories of resentment and craftiness that precede the gore, and more fascinating to me, the legal suits and maneuverings in the Althing, the medieval Icelandic assembly, to award compensation to the families of the slain in exchange for a pledge of peace. Then after all parties were satisfied, the plotting of the next round of the vendetta starts just as soon as all have returned home. Equally fascinating to me is that in the middle of all this feuding and strife—in the year 1000 by our current calendar—everyone converts to Christianity, and then continues on exactly as they did as worshipers of the old Norse gods. ( )