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imprecation with an appeal to Flosi’s sense of honour: ‘In the name
     of God and all good men I charge you, by all the powers of your Christ and by your
     courage and manliness, to avenge all the wounds which he received in dying –
     or else be an object of contempt to all men’ (Ch. 116). A few lines after Njal
     spoke the words of Christian comfort quoted above, he declines an offer of free exit
     from the burning house with these words: ‘I will not leave, for I’m
     an old man and hardly fit to avenge my sons, and I do not want to live in
     shame.’ It may be that in such conflations of Christian language and the code
     of honour we see best how Christianity functions in this saga – not as
     antithetical to pagan values but as complementary. Christianity did not at first condemn
     the blood feud, and the noblest pagan virtues were consonant with Christian values.
    There is a clear Christian presence in the saga, but the question is, does
     it change anything? It has become common to regard the Conversion episode in Chapters
     100–105 as marking a turning-point in the moral structure of the saga, whereby
     the older, pagan ethic of heroism and pride is replaced by a new Christian ethic of
     mildness and peace. Such a view is based on a false opposition between pagan and
     Christian; it overlooks the fact that there are other pagan virtues than heroism and
     pride, and that humility and a willingness to make peace are among them. Christianity
     does not affect the values already existing in the saga, in Gunnar’s and
     Njal’s moderation and love of peace, or in the young Hoskuld’s
     willingness to be content with the compensation paid for his father (Ch. 94). Those
     values were there before the Conversion, and continue after it, though set in a changed
     historical context. A Christian reading would have to judge Flosi’s burning of
     Bergthorshvol as a sin in the light of the martyr’s death suffered by Njal.
     The saga, however, treats the burning as a necessary but regrettable deed, and Flosi
     emerges from it with honour. Nor does the coming of Christianity have any direct effect
     on the course of events. The Christian elements in the saga are part of its historical
     realism, of its rhetoric. After the Conversion in the year 1000 people are made to think
     and speak in religious terms, and there is a new spirit in the land, but the events of
     the saga follow their own course, quite unaffected by it.
    The claim has also been made that it is their
     pilgrimages to Rome and the absolution they received there that enable Kari and Flosi to
     become reconciled at the end of the saga. The reconciliation comes
after
the
     pilgrimages, to be sure, but it does not come
because of
them. The
     reconciliation results from full and sufficient blood revenge, sheer exhaustion and the
     mutual respect these two good men have long had for each other. The feud, the longest
     and deadliest in any of the sagas, has simply run its course. What Kari demonstrates is
     not the value of Christian absolution, but that the only way to end a feud for once and
     for all is to carry out total vengeance.
    The thirteenth-century author
of Njal’s Saga
was a
     Christian, looking back with respect at his pagan forebears and the time when
     Christianity came to his country. He is not preaching a sermon, nor writing a
     theological treatise, for he knows that the two systems are in many ways compatible. His
     characters may convert, and acquire Christian rhetoric, but they do not change their
     nature. Njal is the same man after the Conversion as before, and Hall and Hoskuld would
     have been the same as they are had there been no Conversion.
Njal’s
     Saga
is secular literature.
THE TWO PARTS
    Finally, a consideration of parallels and contrasts between the two main
     parts of the saga, Gunnar’s story and Njal’s story, may help to
     clarify the shape of the saga. In both