This was a recommendation from my The Heart is a Lonely Hunter book friend.
“It’s fantastic. Reading it now and it’s all about lobbying and politics and getting as many people on your side as possible. You realize that nothing ever changes. You can see so much of modern Sweden in there, too. You read this and you’ll understand us Nordic people better than we understand ourselves.”
Maybe I do now, and maybe I don’t. For being something like seven hundred years old, plenty of things still seem modern. The lobbying and politicking, sure, but also the dialogue (at least, as translated into Swedish from Icelandic by Lars Lönnroth). Reading Njals Saga is a completely different beast from reading The Iliad or The Odyssey. People in Njals Saga are just constantly roasting each other with devastating one-liners, starting as early as Hrutr’s comment about his niece Hallgerd to her boasting father: “I do not know how thieves’ eyes came into the family.”
More personally for me and my flavor of bad brain, the structure of Njals saga also makes it an easier read than other classics. The Swedish translation is prose, not poetry, and divided into relatively short episodes—I assume this reflects the original. Yes, it also happens to be 500 pages long, but it’s not a difficult 500 pages. Other epics of this style are usually poetry and usually translated as such, and somehow that’s enough to make my eyes glaze over. Even though I’m otherwise a huge mythology nerd! Impossible to explain. A public domain English translation is available at the Icelandic Saga Database, so you can browse yourself and see what you think.