[In the following introduction to his English translation of the Laxdaela Saga, Veblen enumerates the underlying characteristics of the work, including its depiction of a blood feud, its rendering of a society situated between paganism and Christianity, and its idiomatic status as the product of thirteenth-century Iceland.]

It has been something of a convention among those who interest themselves in Icelandic literature to speak well of the Laxdæla 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 Laxdæla, 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 Laxdæla, 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 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 mediæval 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 Laxdæla 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 Laxdæla 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 naïvely 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 particular, underwent the conversion to mediævalism, 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 mediæval 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 for 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.

The conversion of these peoples to the ritual and superstitions of the new Faith was swift, facile, thorough and comprehensive, both in the temporal and in the spiritual phase of it, but more notably so in the latter respect. Indeed the gospel of Sin and Redemption was accepted by them with such alacrity and abandon as would argue that they had already been bent into a suitable frame of mind by protracted and exacting experience of a suitable kind. And on the side of the temporal reorganization, as concerned the revolutionary change in their civil institutions, they made the transition in only less headlong fashion. And in both respects the submission of these peoples to this new order of allegiance was notably abject.

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 Laxdæla reflects that state of society and that prevalent frame of mind which led the Scandinavian peoples over from the Viking Age to the Mediæval 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 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 slavetrade, 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 business 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 Laxdæla.

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 later date, and can not be pursued here. The mediæval 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 mediæval 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 Laxdæla; 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 Laxdæla. 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 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 Laxdæla. 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.

As is true of the general run of Icelandic sagas, the language of the Laxdæla is the language of colloquial speech in its time; the speech of practiced storytellers, idiomatic in an extreme degree and with a pronounced bent for aphoristic diction. Consequently the difficulties in the way of a faithful translation are very appreciable. Necessarily, the idiomatic speech of that time runs on metaphor and analogy drawn from the familiar usage and custom of its own time and setting; such as would be pointed, sententious, and suggestive to the hearers who were familiar with that range of usage and custom. The language of the Saga, therefore, conveys in its own substance and structure that range of sentiments, convictions, ideals, knowledge and belief which is embodied in the action of the story. But it follows that the spirit of its action is not readily, or indeed at all adequately, to be carried over into another language which articulates with the usage current in a different time and place, and the run of whose idiom therefore is, by so much, substantially alien to that of the original.

The idiomatic speech of any given time and place springs from and reflects the workday experience and preconceptions of men in that given time and place. And much water has run under the bridge since the days when the lives of those men and women took shape in the idiomatic speech of the Saga. The run of idiom in the English language as now current is as widely out of touch with that of the Icelandic saga as the current run of custom, knowledge and belief among the English-speaking peoples is now out of touch with the arts of life in that archaic phase of their culture. Under these circumstances translation becomes in good part a work of makeshift and adumbration, in which any consistently literal rendering of the text is out of the question.

By comparison with the common run of sagas, the received text of the Laxdæla is a somewhat prosy narrative, cumbered with many tawdry embellishments and affectations of style and occasional intrusive passages of devout bombast. The indications are fairly clear that the version of the text which has come down to the present has come through the hands of a painstaking editor-author whose qualifications were of a clerkly order rather than anything in the way of literary sense, and whose penchant for fine writing would not allow him to let well enough alone. Coupled with an unctuous sanctimony and a full run of puerile superstitions, such as were current in the late thirteenth century, this clerkly animus of the editor-author has at the same time overlaid the chief characters of the story with an ecclesiastical whitewash of meretricious abnegation, quite alien to the action in which these characters are engaged. So that, e. g., Kjartan Olafson comes to be depicted as a sanctimonious acolyte given to prayer, fasting, and pious verbiage; instead of being a wilful spoiled child, vain and sulky, of a romantic temper and endowed with exceptional physical beauty, such as the run of the story proclaims him. Whereas Gudrun, a beautiful vixen, passionate, headstrong, self-seeking and mendacious, is dutifully crowned with the distinction of having been the first nun and anchorite in Iceland and having meritoriously carried penance and abnegation to the outer limit of endurance. Yet, doubtless, all this glamour of sanctimony which the clerkly editor-author has dutifully thrown over the chief persons of the story is true to life, in the sense that such was the color of Icelandic life and sentiment in his own time, in the seedy times of the Icelandic community's decline and decomposition. Also it will be true to life in the sense that such will have been the consummation to which the drift of things under the new order converged from its beginning in the decades in which the action of the story is laid.

It may be in place to add that this translation follows the Copenhagen edition of the text also in the respect that it includes the chapters at the end (LXXIX-LXXXIII) devoted to the exploits of the younger Bolli, as well as the short story of Gunnar Thidrandabani, which is appended to that edition. This story of the younger Bolli is commonly accounted spurious, doubtless rightly so; as being a late and mythical fabric of the mediæval romancer's art, designed to make Bolli illustrious in the eyes of his descendants. Similarly spurious are the passages in the body of the saga which detail the earlier doings of Bolli the younger. So, e. g., his share as well as the share of his brother Thorleik in the killing of Helgi Hardbeinson and in the negotiations which preceded and followed that exploit are known to be altogether fanciful; Helgi having been disposed of at a date when the two brothers were no more than two and six years old. Indeed, apart from the notice of his birth and his marriage, all that is here told of Bolli the younger is without known foundation.