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Critics have long acknowledged the destruction wrought by women in the family sagas, and have interrogated the motivations and structure of their deeds, and those of the men around them.1 For Richard F. Allen, sagas continue and transform the "heroic" spirit of Germanic poetry, which displays an archetypal "struggle between dark, bloody, engulfing forces from a chaotic realm, forces represented as belonging to a "female chthonic side of nature, against powers with a masculine signature, often incorporated into a single hero, a figure of light."2 Developing this structuralist and Jungian approach, Allen goes on to speculate on the persistence of the motif of women whetting to revenge, suggesting that:
one explanation is that the figure of the vengeful woman is an outward projection of man's own uneasy awareness of the divided state within him, that it is a mechanism whereby the blame and guilt for his failure to control his passions (and his desire for such failure) can be shifted to an outside cause.3
Drawing on the structuralist analysis inaugurated in saga studies by Andersson, Lönnroth sees the feud begun by Hallgerthr and Bergthóra as leading to "the hostility between Thrainn Sigfusson and the Njalssons," but seems to accept that there is
a shift in the ethical climate of the saga. The second part has a unity of its own. It centers around one single feud between the sons of Njál and Höskuldr Hvítanessgothi. The first stage is represented by the Conversion of Iceland. . . . Njál works to promote (conversion), but the old villains work against it.4
That is, Lönnroth sees the "Gunnar's Saga" section of the text as "a prelude" to the rest, and discusses Gunnar's downfall in religious terms, and does not focus on the actions of women as a class.5 On the other hand, Andersson rejects the importance of the initial quarrel between Bergthóra and Hallgerthr, pointing out that, "the rivalry has no function in the plot, but is simply a bit of unattached prefatory matter."6 More recently, Anne Heinrichs has discussed the way that the Brynhildr-Sigurdr story "reflects a clash between . . . a prepatriarchal culture with strong female influence and the ultimately triumphant patriarchal culture."7
In this paper, I wish to take as my starting point Allen's...