Category Archives: Myth

The North Wind’s Gift: a trickster tale from Italy

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If you haven’t already done so, I suggest you read the preceding post, Notes on Trickster stories, which provides a background and context for this article.  Both posts were inspired by “The North Wind’s Gift,” a tale from Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales, 1956.  The story came to my attention in Allan Chinen’s discussion of tricksters and appealed because of its relative simplicity and relevance to our own times.

Italian Folktales

Here’s a synopsis of the story:

Once there was a farmer named Geppone who toiled in his fields every day of the year but could barely feed his wife and three children.  The North Wind blew at harvest time and ruined his crops.  Finally Geppone had enough and set out to find the North Wind and demand justice.  He reached the North Wind’s castle.  “Every year you ruin my crops,” he said.  “Because of you, my family is starving to death.”

“What can I do?” the North Wind asked.

“I leave that up to you,” Geppone replied.

The North Wind’s heart went out to the little farmer.  He brought out a box.  “This is a magical box which will give you food when you open it, but tell no one else about the magic or you’ll lose it.”

Geppone thanked the Wind and set out for home.  On the way, he opened the box.  Instantly a table appeared, piled with food.  When he got home, Geppone opened the box again and treated his family to a feast.  He told his wife not to tell anyone, and especially to say nothing to the priest, who was their landlord and a greedy man.

The next day, the priest spoke to Geppone’s wife and wrung the story out of her.  He summoned Geppone and  demanded the box on pain of eviction, offering seeds in return, which proved to be worthless.  As bad off as he was before, the farmer returned to the North Wind’s castle to ask for another boon.

At first, the North Wind refused, saying, “You ignored my warning.  Why should I help you again?”  Geppone pleaded, and reminded the Wind that he was still the cause of the family’s ruin.

“Very well,” said the North Wind at last.  He gave Geppone a magnificent gold box, but said, “Open this only when you are starving.”

On his way home, Geppone stopped and opened the new box.  This time a ruffian with a club jumped out and began to beat the farmer, who struggled to close the lid.  When he did, the ruffian vanished.  Geppone limped home, sore and bruised.  When his wife and children clamored to try the golden box, Geppone left the room.  This time two ruffians jumped out and began to beat the family.  Geppone slipped back into the room, closed the box, and the assailants vanished.

“This is what you must do,” he said to his wife.  “Tell the priest I brought home an even finer box, but say nothing else.”

Geppone’s wife understood and did as her husband instructed.  When the priest called the farmer and demanded the golden box, Geppone feigned reluctance, but at last agreed to trade it for the original box.  The priest rubbed his hands.  The bishop was due to join him for Mass the next day; a feast would be just the thing to win the approval of his superior.

The next day, after Mass, the priest, the bishop, and their retinue gathered for supper.  When the priest opened the box, six ruffians jumped out and beat the clerics.  Geppone, who was waiting at the window, took his time in closing the box to save them.

No one objected when he carried this second box home.  The priest never bothered Geppone again.  The farmer was careful to guard the North Wind’s gifts, and his family lived in ease and comfort for the rest of their days.

You can read the story as it appears in Italian Folktales here:  The North Wind’s Gift

***

It’s clear at the start of the story that we’re in a post-heroic fairytale world.  Geppone is not out to slay a dragon, rescue a princess, or win a kingdom – he just wants to survive.

Allan Chinen speaks of the different life stages that different fairytales address.  While the majority center on young people venturing into the world,  “middle-tales” like this have older protagonists with different kinds of problems.  From a Jungian perspective, Chinen notes that tricksters usually don’t show up in our dreams when we’re 18 and planning to take the world by storm – they visit us when we’re 40, with a mortgage, a couple of kids, and a car that needs an engine overhaul.

Geppone works from dawn until dark but can barely make ends meet.  His wife doesn’t listen to him, and the landlord threatens eviction.  This setup makes his story seem contemporary – if we’re not in this situation ourselves, one of our neighbors probably is.

We get the feeling Geppone has been down on his luck and taking it on the chin for a while.  Something finally awakens within him and spurs him to action.  As a result, he meets the North Wind, a wild spirit who will become his guardian and mentor and teach him the wiles of the trickster.

The North Wind is invoked in the Song of Solomon, in Aesop, and in Greek and Norwegian folklore.  He shows up in George McDonald’s novel, On the Back of the North Wind, in the stories of Hans Christian Anderson, and in Pokemon.  The North Wind is also associated with thunder gods like Zeus and Odin.  It’s not surprising that he is a shadowy trickster in Italy, where invaders and winter both arrive from the north.

Almost every successful fairytale character wins the help of a guiding spirit, and the North Wind’s help is just what Geppone needs.  It prompts him first to stand up for himself and ask for what he needs and then to learn enough strategy to overcome his oppressive priest and landlord.  To Jungians, fairytale allies like helpful animals, fairy godmothers, and nature spirits represent parts of the unconscious mind that are older and wiser than ego, which gets us into trouble in the first place.

What this means in practical terms is a vast subject, beyond the scope of a few blog posts.  Jung would suggest to patients who were comfortable in a religious tradition to return to it for guidance.  Much of Jung’s work aimed at helping people estranged from existing traditions who still needed to tap inner sources of wisdom.

In the “Power of Myth,” Bill Moyers asked Joseph Campbell where ordinary (i.e., busy) people might look to experience the wisdom of myth.  Campbell suggested we take 30 minutes or an hour a day in a quiet place where we can read what inspires us and perhaps keep a journal.

Just like this story, the psyche is home to ruffians and riches, and the old stories are not to be taken literally.  James Hillman, a prominent Jungian thinker, always insisted that literalism is the greatest enemy of inner wisdom.  So how does trickster wisdom manifest  in our world right now?  I don’t think we have to look very far.

A world that’s increasingly dysfunctional serves as a magnet for trickster energy, for good as well as for ill.  A Facebook friend mentioned that he once loaned out a book on trickster mythology and never got it back.  That fits the myths of trickster gods like Hermes who are also patrons of thieves.  Hermes may be the supreme image of the trickster.  As fluid as the metal which bears his Roman name, Mercury, he was the messenger between gods and humans who also conducted souls to the afterlife.  Patron of travelers, herdsmen, poets, orators, athletes, and inventors, his herald’s staff, the caduceus, is the symbol of healing to this day.

I find myself watching for positive manifestations of trickster energy, which usually turn up under the radar of corporate and government organizations which carry a vested interest in the status quo.  When you look, quite a few individuals and groups are trying out new solutions.  I’ll post at least one example in the near future.

In the meantime I would love to hear where you find trickster energy in yourself and in those around you.

Skinwalkers by Tony Hillerman: A book review

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Skinwalkers

As I worked on a recent post, Favorite Fictional Detectives, I realized I didn’t remember the details of Skinwalkers, a key Tony Hillerman novel that I read soon after it was published in 1986.  I read it again and found it to be a thoroughly satisfying mystery.  I offer this brief review to encourage others who may not know Hillerman’s work to give it a look.

***

Officer Jim Chee, of the Navajo Tribal Police, tosses and turns one night in the airstream where he lives in the desert.  When his closest neighbor, a feral cat, shoots through the pet door, Chee gets up to peer out the window at what might have scared it so badly.  Probably a coyote, he thinks.  For a moment, thinks he sees a shape in the darkness.  Then the night explodes.  Three shotgun blasts tear holes in the trailer just above the bed where Chee was sleeping moments before.

In the morning, as he cleans up his trailer, Chee makes a frightening discovery.  Among the shotgun pellets that litter the floor is a small bone pellet.  Navajo witches, or skinwalkers, inject bone into the bodies of people they want to kill.  The bone produces the fatal “corpse sickness.”  This bone fragment links three apparently separate killings that Lt. Joe Leaphorn, a senior tribal detective, has been trying to solve without success.  When Leaphorn and Chee join forces, their first problem is persuading anyone to talk, when tradition holds that speaking a skinwalker’s name will attract his harmful attention.

Chee is learning to be a traditional Navajo healer.  With a background in college psychology classes, he understands his role to be restoring people to the core Navajo values of beauty and harmony.  Skinwalkers have fallen away and try to take others with them.

Leaphorn is not a believer, but he learned by hard experience that other people are.  Early in his career, when he ignored talk of witches, three murders and a suicide were the result.  As he and Chee grope through the dark, a very real menace is watching from a direction they do not expect.

This book represents fine storytelling, with characters and a setting that are outside our normal experience.  It’s one of the best mysteries I’ve read, and I suspect it will make you want to read more of Tony Hillerman’s work.

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Scott Fenstermaker’s blog, “People-Triggers,” aims to “Understand what makes us do what we do.” In a fine article called, “The Personal Myth,” Scott explores some recent research on the importance of the stories we tell ourselves in shaping and creating our experience of self and world. “People who come out of psychotherapy testing higher on well-being indicators tend to tell similar personal stories with themes of conquered demons and redemption.The newer story may be no more factually true than the old, because all personal stories are fables, but the newer version is healthier.” In 1983, James Hillman wrote Healing Fictions, a book with a similar argument. This article quotes and links to some up-to-date research emphasizes the importance of the “screenplays” we’re always composing in our heads.

peopletriggers's avatarPeople-triggers

“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble, it’s the things we do know that just ain’t so.” —Mark Twain

MythsSome (very reputable) psychologists are absolutely convinced that DNA is destiny. Other (very reputable) psychologists are convinced that your personality is shaped by what happens to you as an infant – or perhaps even in the first few minutes of life. This is what I love about psychology: the theories are all over the map and yet somehow everyone is still credible.

One very interesting dimension to personality has to do with the stories that we tell ourselves. Research has increasingly revealed that our personal life stories – our mental self-narratives – contribute substantially to our personalities and behaviors. An excellent New York Times article from 2007 summarizes much of this current research.

As the interpreter of our world, the mind is very…

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Pandora’s box, repression, and gun violence

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From my perspective, the big news this week was the start of senate hearings on gun violence, which evoked a wide range of passions across the spectrum of public opinion.  More poignant than any testimony in Washington was the death of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15 year old honor student who performed at President Obama’s inauguration on the 21st.  The day before the speechifying began, Hadiya was shot and killed in public park in a “nice” section of Chicago, about a mile from the president’s house.  Police think it was a case of mistaken identity.

I thought of Hadiya Pendleton as I was out walking the dogs in a “nice” local park.  I remembered a lecture one of my psych professors gave 20 years ago.  We were studying defense mechanisms, and of these, repression gets a lot of bad press.  Nobody wants to be repressed or live in a repressive society.

My professor expressed an alternate view in his lecture:  repression kept a lid on many antisocial behaviors.  He quoted James Hillman who said, “What used to be the darkest dreams of Freud’s neurotic patients are now played out on our streets.”

The human psyche has not changed in 100 years, but our world has altered dramatically.  Men no longer need to wear boiled shirts, and women are free to bare their ankles.  We’ve learned to embrace the individual conscience and the search for an “authentic me,” but we don’t know what to do if someone’s “authentic me” turns out to be a sociopath.

We’ve found out the hard way that you  can’t just unrepress the good stuff.  When we let our angels out of the box, the demons get a pass too.  Which brings to mind the story of Pandora.

In order to punish humans for Prometheus’ theft of fire, Zeus sent Pandora to earth with a sealed jar (later mistranslated as “box”) and instructions not to open it.  We all know what happens in folklore with orders like that.

Pandora by John Waterhouse, 1896

By the time Pandora got the lid back on, all the evils of the world had been released.  Only hope remained in the jar.  Pandora’s dilemma is ours.

When it comes to our violent behaviors, inhibition was not such a bad thing.  Now that it’s out of the box, the question becomes, what do we do with our hope?

Are we there yet: apocalyptic yearnings

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The Last Days of Pompeii by Karl Briullov, 1827-1833. Public Domain

The Oakland Hills Fire which broke out in October, 1991, was a major disaster by any estimate: 25 people died, 150 suffered injuries, and 3300 homes were destroyed. What I remember about the event, however, was an account by an independent journalist (whose name I have forgotten) who covered people arriving at evacuation shelters.

He said that a few were upbeat, almost giddy, as they talked of starting over.  The journalist said they were the first to be taken to counselors.  On-scene mental health triage workers assumed they were hysterical, most in need of hearing how terrible it was that they had lost everything.  How sad you must feel.  Have a kleenex.

I’ve always wondered about that.

The first historical accounts I know of that detail people waiting for the apocalypse date from December, 999, when groups across Europe trekked to high ground to wait for the millennial rapture.  The name, “rapture,” says it all.  It’s not the kind of disaster you read about in the papers.  It’s a chance to start over for true believers.  This is the hope picked up by new age proponents of the Mayan apocalypse, since the Mayans themselves left no hints of when the world will end.

The apocalyptic dream is the hope for a new heaven and earth that are better than this one.  Who wouldn’t like one of those, especially this year?

All the worlds religions tell us this world is not our home, but the mature voices in those religions do not hold out the hope of a cosmic get-out-of-jail-free card reserved for some chosen group.  They tell us that heaven and earth are transformed when an individual turns transformation.  Like Dante at 33, understanding he’d lost his way in a dark wood.  Like Rainer Maria Rilke who was viewing an ancient statue of Apollo when he heard an inner voice say, “here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”

So tomorrow when we wake and the world looks the same, we can remember that it is not.  The sun will have turned from it’s southern trajectory, beginning its road back to summer.  And as we savor the morning coffee and the good things in our lives, we can take a moment to contemplate that turn toward a new heaven and earth.  The first steps lie with each and every one of us.

The end of the world as we know it

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Having slept through Black Friday, the next big event on my calendar is the Mayan apocalypse, scheduled for December 21.

I had no intention of blogging about this until I received the Winter 2012 issue of the University of Oregon Quarterly, where an article by Alice Tallmadge, “Doomsday or Deliverance?” discusses this prophecy in the context of end-of-the-world folklore.

Associate professor Dan Wojcik, director of the UO folklore program, plans to travel to Chichen Itza, one of a huge number of visitors expected for the event, which for some heralds the shift to a higher world age, in the same spirit as the Harmonic Convergence of 1987.  The main organizer of that event, as well as the biggest publicist of 12/21/12, was Jose Arguelles (1939-2011).  In his obituary, the New York Times described his philosophy as “an eclectic amalgm of Mayan and Aztec cosmology, the I Ching, the Book of Revelation, ancient-astronaut narratives, and more.”

On the other end of the spectrum, Alice Tallmadge reports that sales of survivalist goods have spiked in recent months.  A recent Reuters poll found that 15% of people worldwide, and 22% of Americans believe the world will end during their lifetime.  The apocalypse has been a feature of Christian theology from the start, but professor Wojcik notes a recent uptick in secular end-time beliefs:  pandemics, overpopulation, and climate change are seen as threats to the planet without any hope of spiritual redemption.

Things that have a beginning have an end, from gnats, to humans, to stars, and all of creation in the western view of time as linear.  When the world survives a predicted ending date, the error is put down to miscalculation; the expectation persists.  What is it about end-time predictions that continue to fascinate most of us and motivate many believers?  The old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” doesn’t hold in this realm.

I wonder if it parallels our continuing love for disaster film?  Stories of terrible struggle and danger where we get to imagine ourselves among the survivors or among the happily raptured, coming through the ordeal to enjoy “a new heaven and earth.”  The ultimate do-over.

They don’t get any better than one of my all time favorite “disaster films,” made decades before the phrase was coined:  San Francisco (1936), with Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Jeanette MacDonald surviving the 1906 earthquake.

Here’s hoping all our December disasters turn out as well!

And finally, for extra credit, here’s a different kind of celebration, with REM performing “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine).  Enjoy!

Njal’s Saga: some concluding remarks.

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1879 title page in Swedish. Public domain

It took me a while to get the gist of  Njal’s Saga. The first time through, I could have used a Cast of Characters; much of the effort was just keeping track of people whose names I couldn’t pronounce.  In rereading key sections aloud with the group in Iceland – the mode of presentation the author intended – the drama and human passion began to emerge.  And as I read these passages again while writing posts for this blog, a larger picture appeared.

Njal’s story is framed by the end of an era.  The best minds of the time made wrong decisions and couldn’t hold back the tides that swept outworn institutions away.  The suffering was intense and the body count was high.  “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” said Yeats at a similar time.

As I read of the battle at Thingvellir, a moment of near civil war, I kept thinking of similar periods.  Of the fall of Troy, the Mahabharata war, the end of the Roman Empire, and the “great war” in Europe.  And I thought of our own time, that Andrew Bacevich likens to the period of the Peloponnesian War, when the Athenian empire bled itself dry.  We know our current mode of living cannot be sustained.  We know that our leaders don’t have the wisdom the times demand, and like Matthew Arnold, we find ourselves, “Wandering between two worlds, one dead the other powerless to be born.”

Does Njal’s Saga offer any insight for times like these?

Not directly, for simple platitudes would be of no help.  It does offer up a number of vivid characters, some of whom manifest courage and generosity in the face of disaster, and others whose self-centered designs bring the disasters about.  We can’t help but ask ourselves who we want to emulate.  And something very interesting happens at the end of the tale.

By the end of the saga, Kari, who survived the killing of Njal, and Flosi, the chieftan who led the killers, have hunted and fought each other across Iceland, Scotland, and Ireland.  Both crossed Europe on foot to seek absolution in Rome.

Flosi returns to Iceland first.  Kari’s ship is wrecked on the coast in a winter storm, though his crew survives.  They wash up near Flosi’s homestead, and make their way there during a blizzard.  When they arrive, the saga tells us Flosi recognized Kari at once and “jumped up to meet him and kissed him, and then placed him in the high seat by his side.  He invited Kari to stay there for the winter.  Kari accepted.  They made a full reconciliation.  Flosi gave Kari the hand of his brother’s daughter, Hildigunn.”

The next summer, Flosi set out for Norway in a ship in bad condition, that he said was “good enough for an old man doomed to die.”  The ship was never seen again.  Kari named one of his sons, Flosi, and this Flosi’s son grew up to be “the most distinguished man of that line.”

Marriages like this, in folklore and myth, are never one dimensional affairs – a sacred marriage also takes place that brings new life to our broken world.  The Pandava line survives the Mahabharata war, and Aeneas leads the survivors out of Troy.  Monks on the coast of Ireland preserve the wisdom of Rome, and poppies grow in Flanders field.

The sacred marriage in alchemy. Public domain.

For the rest of us, who won’t see a new dawn anytime soon, we can remember the words of Tolkien, who was inspired by the sagas of Iceland as he wove his own account of surviving Mordor, a hell he experienced first-hand at the Battle of the Somme.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” Frodo tells Gandalf.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times.  But that is not for them to decide.  All we have to decide is what to do with the times we are given.”

Njal’s Saga, part 3

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Gunnar looks back at his home, 1898 illustration. Public domain.

In order to follow this discussion, it will help if you’ve read two earlier posts:

  1. Njal’s Saga, an Introduction: http://wp.me/pYql4-2sS
  2. Njal’s Saga, part 2: http://wp.me/pYql4-2tb

Scholars suggest that the author wove together two separate stories, an oral “Gunnar’s Saga,” and a related but distinct, “Njal’s Saga.”  Both men die during attacks on their homes.  Historically 18 years passed between the events; Gunnar died in 992 and Njal around 1010.  In the last third of the saga, Njal’s son-in-law, Kari, mounts a campaign of revenge against the killers which threatens the stability of the nation.  A pitched battle breaks out at the Althing, the National Assembly, which was sacred ground where fighting was forbidden.  When reconciliation finally comes, it signifies the dawn of new vision of life and its purpose.

Once the saga gets going, certain scenes come alive like movies – I know there’s a screenplay here…

***

Soon after Gunnar and Hallgerd were married, they attended a feast with Njal and his wife, Bergthora.  In no time, the two women were at each other’s throat.  The insults grew so extreme that Gunnar dragged Hallgerd out of the hall. Soon after that, she had one of Bergthora’s slaves killed.  Bergthora paid her back in kind, initiating a feud that escalated and took the life of free retainers and then kinsmen on both sides.

The killings took place while the husbands were at the Althing which  convened for two weeks every summer.  Aside from social activities, this was the time for legal action on matters the lower courts couldn’t settle.  It was also where “compensation” for killings was determined.

If you killed a man, even in self defense, you confessed it in front of witnesses.  A hidden killing was treated as murder and could result in exile for life.  A killing confessed was manslaughter and terms of compensation could be set:  a slave was worth seven ounces of silver, a freeman fifteen, and a kinsman as much as 200.  It may seem cold, but the system was designed to break the cycles of revenge that the old ethic of “honor” and blood retribution entailed.

Gunnar and Njal tried to keep up with the legalities of the killings-for-hire their wives initiated, but it became harder as stakes were raised.  Each killing drew more people, bound by family and friendship, into the feud.  Into this deadly mix came Mord Valgardsson, son of Unn,  who despised Gunnar and Njal.

If Hallgerd spawned chaos and harm, she did so in a half-unconscious manner.  She was reactive, without clear designs or premeditation.  Mord, by contrast, was cunning, able to weave elaborate snares for his enemies.  Our tour leader, Robert Willhelm, pointed out the similarity of Mord’s name to Mordred, King Arthur’s  son and nemesis.

During a famine, Hallgerd sent a servant to steal food from a man who refused to sell any to her husband.  When Gunnar, with his concept of honor, discovered the theft, he slaped his wife, who had already buried two husbands who hit her.  Hallgerd warned Gunnar that she would never forget the blow.

Njal prophesied that if Gunnar killed two members of the same family and broke the legal settlement for the killings, he would die soon after.  Through trickery, Mord ensured that Gunnar killed the son of a man he’d already slain.  In addition to a financial settlement for the killing, the Althing court sentenced Gunnar to three years in exile.

In one of the most poignant scenes, as Gunnar and his brother rode to the harbor, Gunnar’s horse slipped while fording a river.  Springing off the horse, Gunnar looked back at his farm and said, “Lovely is the hillside – never has it seemed so lovely to me as now, with its pale fields and mown meadows, and I will ride back home and not leave.”

That autumn, Mord sent word that Gunnar was home alone and 40 of his enemies mounted an attack.  Firing arrows from the second floor, Gunnar killed two assailants and wounded eight.  Then a man named Thorbrand got close enough to cut Gunnar’s bowstring.

Gunnar defending his home, 1898. Public domain.

Gunnar turned to his wife and asked for two strands of her waist length hair for a new bowstring. Hallgerd said, “Does anything depend on it?”

“My life depends on it,” Gunnar said, “for they’ll never be able to get me as long as I can use my bow.”

“Then I’ll recall,” she said, “the slap you gave me, and I don’t care whether you hold out for a long or short time.”

Gunnar wounded eight more attackers before he finally fell, exhausted and wounded in fifteen places.  One of the attackers said, “His defense will be remembered as long as this land is lived in.”

Gunnar’s mother was ready to kill Hallgerd who fled the house.  Gunnar’s friends raised a burial mound, and one night, as two of Njal’s sons passed by, they saw the mound open.  Four lights shone and cast no shadows.  The brothers heard Gunnar’s spirt sounding content as it spoke skaldic verse.

***

Gunnar embodied the old warrior ideal of life and death with honor that won you a place in Valhalla.  The dark side of this ethos was an unending string of killings that threatened the nation itself.  Things were about to change.  Shortly after Gunnar’s death, a Christian missionary named Thangbrand arrived in Iceland.  He wasn’t the sort of evangelist you want on your doorstep, since he carried a crucifix in one hand and a sword in the other and didn’t much care which he used.

One autumn morning, as Thangbrand celebrated mass, a man named Hall of Sida approached.  “In whose memory are you celebrating this day?” he asked.

“The angel Michael’s,” Thangbrand said.

“What features does this angel have?”  Hall asked.

“Many,” said Thanbrand.  “He weighs everything that you do, both good and evil, and he is so merciful that he gives more weight to what is well done.”

Hall said, “I would like to have him for my friend.”

With his openness to new ideas and the simple way he voices his spiritual longing, Hall becomes the first convert.  In 999 or 1000, the Althing declared Christianity to be the new religion.  Mord continued to work behind the scenes fomenting trouble for Njal and his sons, and around the year 1010, 100 armed men attacked Njal’s home and burned it, with him and most of his family inside.  Only Kari of Orkney, Njal’s son in law, escaped.  He raised a force to attack the burners, and at the next Althing, when the retribution process broke down, a pitched battle erupted at Thingvellir, the spiritual heart of the nation.

Battle at Thingvellir. Public domain.

During a lull in the fighting, members of the assembly intervened to arrange a truce.  Hall of Sida stood between the combatants and said, “All men know what sorrow the death of my son Ljot has brought me.  Many will expect payment for his life will be higher than for the others who have died here.  But for the sake of a settlement I’m willing to let my son like without compensation, and what’s more, offer both pledges and peace to my adversaries.”

Things have changed.  A few decades earlier, such a statement would have cost Hall his honor, but the saga says that when he sat down, “much good was spoken about his words, and everybody praised his goodwill.”

The combatants submitted to judgement.  Cash payments were levied as well as three years exile from Iceland for the combatants.  During the exile, they slew each other in Orkney and along the coast of Ireland, but finally, when the leaders returned to Iceland, they pledged friendship to each other.  The old ways had cost too much in blood and suffering.  The survivors had no stomach for anymore fighting.  The saga ends with a sense that a new wind was blowing through the land.

Next:  reflections on the story.