No one could stop people talking - bloody Njal's Saga

It is not just that there are a lot of deaths in Njal’s Saga.  It’s that they’re described like this (sensitive readers, avert thine eyes):

A huge sheet of ice had formed a low hump on the other side of the channel.  It was as smooth as glass, and Thrain and his men had stopped on the middle of this hump.  Skarp-Hedin made a leap and cleared the channel between the ice-banks, steadied himself, and at once went into a slide: the ice was glassy-smooth, and he skimmed along as fast as a bird.

Thrain was then about to put on his helmet.  Skarp-Hedin came swooping down on him and swung at him with his axe.  The axe crashed down on his head and split it down to the jaw-bone, spilling the back-teeth on to the ice.  (Ch. 92)

The teeth are a nice Tarantinoish detail, aren’t they?  If we were watching the film adaptation of Njal’s Saga, this is a point where we might hear around us in the theater “Aw, c’mon!” as well as “Cool!” and “Gross!”  It is maybe a little far-fetched, yet I will bet the passage is based on a true exploit of arms so amazing that the story was passed down for decades before being plugged into Njal’s Saga.

The book reminds me that the taste for this kind of aestheticized violence was not the invention of Hollywood.

One the same page of my edition is another of my favorite deaths:

Hrapp swung his axe at Grim, but Helgi, seeing this, hacked off Hrapp’s arm.  The axe fell to the ground.

Hrapp said, “What you have done certainly needed doing; that hand has brought harm and death to many.”

“This will put an end to all that,” said Grim, and ran him through with a spear.  Hrapp fell dead.

I have not made a transcription error.  Hrapp is commenting sardonically on the severing of his own arm.  The Icelanders are mostly perfect stoics, shrugging at predictions of their own deaths, shrugging at their actual deaths.

An example, again not for the sensitive:

Thorhall Asgrimsson was so shocked when he heard that his foster-father, Njal, had been burned to death  that his whole body swelled up; a stream of blood spouted from his ears and could not be staunched, until he fell down unconscious and the flow ceased of its own accord.  Then he got up and said that he had not behaved like a man.  “My only wish now is to take vengeance for what has just happened to me upon those who burned Njal to death.”

The others said that no one would call his behavior disgraceful; but Thorhall replied that no one could stop people talking.  (Ch. 132)

If there is any truth to the story at all, people talked for two hundred years or more, and here I am talking about it another six hundred years later.

Perhaps I will move to a less horrible subject tomorrow.

The important thing was the letters, on which he knocked his fingers - Elias Canetti, young reader

If I am reading the first volume of Elias Canetti’s memoir, The Tongue Set Free (1977), tr. Joachim Neugroschel, it is in part for passages like this, from which I learn the most important thing I can learn from any book, that I was right:

She had intellectual interests and an ironic way of talking about things with Mother, none of which I understood.  She lived in the Viennese literature of the period and lacked Mother’s universal interest…  She was Viennese if for no other reason than because she always knew, without great effort, what was happening in the world of the intellect.  (111)

Right, I mean, about that marvelous, obsessive Viennese artistic culture and its literature, art, and music.  Canetti only lived in Vienna for about three years, 1913 to 1916, and he was only eight or nine when he arrived, but he was the perfect sponge for the city.  He was an unusual kid with an unusual mother.

I have never read anything else by Canetti, to my knowledge, nor do I know much about him or his work, and some of what I do know, like gossip about his sex life, is almost embarrassing to know.  I knew about his unplaceability, though.  He was born in Bulgaria, into a family of merchants, Sephardic Jews who spoke Ladino – they even had Ladino newspaper written in Hebrew characters.  Canetti eventually adopted German for his writing, but German was his fifth (!) language (but he came from a place where “[e]ach person counted up the languages he knew”).  The chapter in which his mother teaches him German by means of memorization and insults is hair-raising.  The memoir travels from Bulgaria to Manchester to Vienna to Zurich, which turns out to be in some ways paradise, and of course paradise is the place from which one is expelled, providing a good place to end a childhood memoir.

Canetti’s memoir is, broadly, about two things, his family and his education.  The latter mostly means books, literature, reading.  The Tongue Set Free is a memoir of reading (Canetti must be three or four here):

I tried to find out what fascinated [his father] in the newspaper, at first I thought it was the smell; and when I was alone and nobody saw me, I would climb up on the chair and greedily smell the newsprint.  But then I noticed he was moving his head along the page, and I imitated that behind his back without having the page in front of me, while he held it in both hands on the table and I played on the floor behind him.  Once, a visitor who had entered the room called to him; he turned around and caught me performing my imaginary reading motions…  [he] explained that the important thing was the letters, on which he knocked his fingers.  Soon I would learn them myself, he said, arousing within me an unquenchable yearning for letters.  (26-7)

The newspaper is of course Viennese.  A page later, in a chapter titled “The Murder Attempt,” Canetti tries to murder his cousin with an ax because she won’t show him the writing in her notebook, “letters of the alphabet in blue ink, they fascinated me more than anything I had ever laid eyes on” (28).  I believe this is one of the early predictors of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, as Canetti did seventy years later.