Thorstein Veblen
"The Laxdæla Saga. Translated from the Icelandic. With an Introduction 
by Thorstein Veblen"
(New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1925, pp. v - xv.)

The "Saga of (the Men of) Laxárdal", is one of the Icelanders', or family 
group of sagas. The others are the Gísla saga, the Hrafnkels saga Freysgoda, 
the Grettis saga ("Saga of Grettir the Strong") and the Njáls saga,
The Laxdæla Saga is the tragic story of four or five generations of an 
Iceland hero-family from the end of the 9th century to the 11th and in 
particular of Gudrun, who causes the death of the man she loves but 
fails to marry.

Due to copyright protection, we will only present a part of the Introduction.
You can get a brief overview of what is the content of that book.
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[v]
Introduction

It has been something of a convention among those who interest themselves in 
Icelandic literature to speak well of the Laxdaela Saga as a thing of poetic 
beauty and of high literary merit. So, characteristically and with the weight of 
authority, Gudbrand Vigfusson has this to say of the Laxdaela, in the 
Prolegomena to his edition of the Sturlunga Saga: "This, the second only in size 
of the Icelandic Sagas, is perhaps also the second in beauty. It is. the most 
romantic of all, full of pathetic sentiment, which, like that of Euripides, is 
almost modern, and brings it closer to the thoughts and feelings of our day than 
any other story of Icelandic life."
Further, as regards the tale which it has to tell: "Besides the customary but 
always interesting introduction, the story falls into two parts. First the early 
love of Kjartan and Gudrun, the hero and heroine, and the poet's career in 
Norway. The second part goes on with the story after Kjartan's return to 
Iceland, relating his death at his rival Bolli's hand, Bolli's death no long 
while after, and the vengeance taken for both."
As in other sagas whose incidents date from the same period (tenth and early 
eleventh centuries) so also in the Laxdaela, it is the paramount exigencies of 
the blood-feud that shape the outlines of the narrative and create the critical 
situations of the plot and give rise to the main outstanding incidents and 
episodes. Such are the classic sagas which have come down from the saga. period. 
The [vi] blood-feud was then a matter of course and of common sense, about the 
merits of which no question was entertained-no more than the merits of national 
patriotism are questioned in our time. It is only in late and spurious tales, 
dating from after the infiltration of the mediaeval chivalric romances into the 
Scandinavian countries, that other interests or principles of conduct have come 
to supplant the blood-feud as the finally dominant note. And in its class, 
doubtless, the Laxdaela rightly takes rank among the foremost, as a tragic tale 
of intrigue and adventure driven by the imperative call of the blood-feud. Other 
factors and motives come into the tale, in some profusion indeed, and they find 
adequate expression, but this is what may be called the axis of its structure.
But all the while the Laxdaela remains also an ethnological document of a high 
order; perhaps standing in this respect at the head of the list. So that it is 
of prime significance for any understanding of that peculiar phase of culture 
that makes up its setting; that is to say the period which comprises the close 
of the Viking Age, so called, and the advent of the Christian Faith in Iceland 
and in northern Europe more at large. More intimately and more naively than any 
other, this saga reflects the homely conditions of workday life in its time, 
together with the range of commonplace sentiments and convictions which animated 
this workday life. So that it is fairly to be taken as a competent though 
perhaps accentuated record of late-Pagan and early-Christian manners, customs, 
convictions and ideals among the Germanic peoples at large, but more 
particularly touching the Scandinavian and the English-speaking peoples at the 
point of their induction into their feudal and ecclesiastical status in early-
Christian times.
By force of what may be called historical accident the Scandinavian peoples, and 
the Icelandic community in [vii] particular, underwent the conversion to 
mediaevalism, civil and religious, at a relatively late date and with a 
relatively swift transition; so late that it falls wholly within the scope of 
recorded history, and so late also that it comes at a time when the feudal 
system of civil life as well as the feudalistic Church had already attained 
their majority, had reached maturity and finished certitude as an intrinsic 
order of things, or perhaps had even entered on an incipient stage of decay.
These peoples came somewhat abruptly out of a footloose paganism which comprised 
neither Church nor State, properly speaking; neither feudalism nor 
ecclesiasticism. Both in the secular and in the spiritual respect their paganism 
was already infirm and insecure. And they fell somewhat precipitately and 
uncritically into the coils of the new Faith and that new status of servile 
allegiance that made up the universal bond of mediaeval society, civil and 
ecclesiastical. Both of these institutional innovations alike rested their case 
on an assumed congenital unworthiness of the common man; the two pillars of the 
new institutional edifice being Sin and Servility. And both of these concepts 
are in principle alien to the spirit of the pagan past. The sagas of the 
classical period reflect that state of experience, spiritual and temporal, which 
prepared the way f or these new canons of right and honest living; canons 
according to which the common man has in the nature of things no claims which 
his God or his masters are bound to respect. They are at the same time the 
canons which have since then continued to rule the life of these Christian 
peoples in Church and State.
...
This new gospel of abnegation, spiritual and temporal, was substantially alien 
to the more ancient principles of that pagan dispensation out of which the 
North-European peoples had come; but the event goes to show that in principle 
the new gospel of abnegation was consonant with their later acquired habits of 
thought; that their more recent experience of life had induced in these peoples 
such a frame of mind as would incline them to a conviction of sin and an 
unquestioning subjection to mastery. The discipline of life in the Viking Age 
appears to have been greatly conducive to such an outcome. And the Laxdaela 
reflects that state of society and that prevalent frame of mind which led the 
Scandinavian peoples over from the Viking Age to the Mediaeval Church and State.
Here it is necessary to note that while the Viking Age prepared the ground for 
the Christian Faith and the Feudal State, there were at the same time also 
certain institutional hold-overs carried over out of remoter pagan antiquity 
into the Christian Era; hold-overs which also had their part in the new 
dispensation. Chief among these was the blood-feud; which appears to have 
suffered no impairment under the conditions of life in the Viking Age. At the 
same time it appears that in principle, and indeed in the concrete details of 
its working-out, the habits of thought which underlie the blood-feud were not 
obnoxious to the interests of Holy Church or to the Propaganda of the Faith. 
Familiarity with its underlying principles and its logic would rather appear to 
have facilitated conversion [ix] to the fundamentals of the new Faith. The logic 
of the blood-feud, with its standardized routine of outlawry and its compounding 
of felonies, lends itself without substantial change of terms to the preachment 
of Sin and Redemption; perhaps in an especially happy degree to the preachment 
of Vicarious Atonement. So that this ancient and ingrained familiarity with the 
logic of the blood-feud may even be said to have served as an instrument of 
Grace. And as might fairly have been expected, the institution continued in good 
vigor for some centuries after the conversion to Christianity. In a certain 
sense, at least permissively, it even enjoyed the benefit of clergy; and it 
eventually fell into decay under the impact of secular rather than religious 
exigencies.
The Viking Age had prepared the ground for the new Faith and for the new, feudal 
order of Society. The Viking Age had run for some five or six centuries, and the 
discipline of habituation which was brought to bear through these centuries by 
that peculiar institution which has given its name to that era was exacting and 
consistent in an exemplary degree; rising steadily in point of stress and 
legitimation through the greater part of the period; until, in the end, the 
depleted resources of the Viking enterprise were taken over by the feudal State 
and the ecclesiastical establishment, and its pirate captains were supplanted by 
the princes and prelates of the new dispensation.
That occupation which gave its name and its character to the Viking Age was an 
enterprise in piracy and slave-trade, which grew steadily more businesslike and 
more implacable as time went on. It was an enterprise in getting something for 
nothing by force and fraud at the cost of the party of the second part; much the 
same, in principle, as the national politics pursued by the statesmen of the 
present time.
Unavoidably though doubtless unintentionally this busi-[x]ness quite 
consistently yielded a cumulative net average deficit at large and resulted in a 
cumulative privation and servility on the part of the underlying population. 
Increasingly as time passed, the ethics of the strong arm came to prevail among 
these peoples and to dominate men's ideals and convictions of right and wrong. 
Insecurity of life and livelihood grew gradually more pronounced and more 
habitual, until in the course of centuries of rapine, homicide and desolation it 
became a settled matter of course and of common sense that the underlying 
population had no rights which the captains of the strong arm were bound to 
respect. And like any other business enterprise that is of a competitive nature 
this traffic in piracy was forever driven by its quest of profits to "trade on a 
thinner equity," to draw more unsparingly on its resources of man-power and 
appliances, and so cut into the margin of its reserves, to charge increasingly 
more than the traffic would bear. Until, between increasing squalor and 
privation on the material side and an ever increasing habituation to insecurity, 
fear and servility on the spiritual side, this population was in a frame of mind 
to believe that this world is a vale of tears and that they all were miserable 
sinners prostrate and naked in the presence of an unreasoning and unsparing God 
and his bailiffs. So this standardized routine of larceny and homicide ran 
through its available resources and fell insensibly into decay, and the State 
and Holy Church came in and took over the usufruct of the human residue that was 
left. It is the inchoate phase of this taking-over, specifically as it is to be 
seen in Iceland, that is reflected in the Laxdaela.
The subsequent share of Holy Church and its clerics in the ulterior degradation 
of the Scandinavian peoples, including Iceland, was something incredibly 
shameful and shabby; and the share which the State had in that unholy job was 
scarcely less so. But these things come into the case of the Icelandic community 
only at a [xi] later date, and can not be pursued here. The mediaeval Church in 
Iceland stands out on the current of events as a corporation of bigoted 
adventurers for the capitalizing of graft and blackmail and the profitable 
compounding of felonious crimes and vices. It is of course not intended to 
question that this mediaeval Church all this while remained a faithful daughter 
of Rome and doubtless holy as usual; nor is it to be questioned that more 
genial traits and more humane persons and motives entered into the case in a 
sporadic way. It is only that the visible net gain was substantially as set 
forth. In abatement it should also be noted, of course, that there is no telling 
what else and possibly shabbier things might have come to pass under the given 
circumstances in the conceivable absence of Holy Church and its clerics.
But this fuller blossoming of the Faith in Iceland, and its eventual going to 
seed, comes on in the decades which follow the period covered by the Laxdaela; 
which reflects only the more genial inchoate phase of the new dispensation. So 
also the further growth and fruition of that system of Boss Rule that made up 
the working constitution of the Icelandic Commonwealth likewise comes gradually 
to a head at a later date; and this too is shown only in its genial beginnings 
in the Laxdaela. Yet the elements, civil and ecclesiastical, which eventually 
entered into that teamwork of intrigue and desolation that brought the 
Commonwealth to its end in grief and shame are to be seen here. For a nearer 
view of that tangle of corrosive infelicities there are an abundance of 
documents available; such, e.g., as the Saga of Gudmund the Good and the 
Islendinga Saga, together with, the rest of what is included in Vigfusson's 
Sturlunga Saga; while for the Norwegian community at home the Heimskringla, 
together with certain detached sagas of the later kings of Norway, will show how 
the fortunes of that people, from the advent of [xii] Christianity onward, 
swiftly tapered off into a twilight-zone of squalor, malice and servility, with 
benefit of Clergy.

The action of the saga runs over the period from the last quarter of the ninth 
to the first quarter of the eleventh century, coming to a head in the first 
decade of the eleventh.
For this translation use has been made of the Copenhagen edition of 1826, with 
some reference to later and more critical editions of the text. Later editions, 
as, e.g., that of Kaalund, are doubtless preferable in point of textual 
precision; but except for textual, essentially clerical, variations, there is no 
notable divergence between one edition and another or between one and another of 
the manuscript copies of the Laxdaela. The translation has also had the benefit 
of comparison with those made by Mrs. Press (Dent, London 1899) and Rudolf 
Meissner (Jena 1913), both of which are excellently well done, perhaps 
especially the German rendering. The German language appears to offer a more 
facile medium for a rendering of the Icelandic; its idioms appear to run more 
nearly parallel with those of the original.
...
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