3.5/5

There are a lot of written works out there that were never composed solely for the sake of entertainment. Today, these are customarily churned through for philosophical/social/religious/historical/various other noble concerns. All very well, but more rare are the ones through which one can get a firm grip on the origin of 'How to Get Away with Murder' in all its sordid glory: abusing circumstantial technicalities, citing obscure parts of archaic rulings, fighting fire with fire, all in the effort to, leastwise in terms of the main story, continue the toppling dominoes of a revenge tragedy. I won't pretend I didn't find the TV show far more engaging than the saga, but that's a natural consequence of modern taste and modern law. You won't find habeas corpus or DNA evidence or drone surveillance in the world of Njal. Instead, you'll get outlaws, premonitions, fifty bajilliion witnesses, hundreds of judges, gigantic religious shifts, lawyers, and the kind of evidence based foresight that Sherlock would kill to have if he ever found himself the head of an 10th-11th century Icelandic household. One would think having multiple instances of a character uttering a string of events that are later replicated exactly in the narrative would dull rather than sharpen the intensity of the events, but often the logic is so strangely engaging that you wouldn't be surprised if such crafty plots of social manipulation had actually worked all those centuries ago.

The great thing about anonymous narratives is that the entire point is no one is supposed to know who wrote them. This isn't a case of an Unknown, of course. One could take the onanistic route and assume that a narrative filled with characters that look like you was necessarily written by someone who looks like you (bear in mind both characters and writer were composed/writing in the era before White People™ were invented), but that would turn a conscious denial of obsession with the individual into indoctrination. The common route is commonly taken by those who confuse common sense with anything but the current hegemony of a dominant paradigm, which is why I subvert it when I can by reading anonymous works during Women in Translation Month of the Summer of Women. You could argue with this if you really wanted to, but then you'd have to take on the OED as part of your set of claims, although from the looks of it, their staff is too uniformly incompetent to give 'anonymous' as pure and self-effacing definition as it deserves. This all has very little to do with Vikings and blood feuds and clairvoyance and everything to do with my own reasons for reading really old stuff, but as long as I'm prolonging its survival by reading it, no one has any credible reason to complain.

As much as I am intrigued by and have been advised to pursue, my heart lies in literature, not law. This is why I liked Beowulf more, as it is, in one simplistic sense, prettier, as well as more poignant. One can admittedly extract far more juicy material from this saga's treasure trove of sociocultural norms of the period both written of and writing, but that would have been best served by reading this in academia, and I already spent my one work classes on Middlemarch, Paradise Lost, and The Canterbury Tales. I would love to come back however, to see what I could see. Grad school, perhaps.