An acquaintance on another forum suggested this relevant passage from Friedman's "Machinery of Freedom" [1]:
There is a scene in Njal's Saga that provides striking evidence of this stability. Conflict between two groups has
become so intense that open fighting threatens to break out in the middle of the court. A leader of one faction asks a
benevolent neutral what he will do for them in case of a fight. He replies that if they start losing he will help them, and
if they are winning he will break up the fight before they kill more men than they can afford. Even when the system
appears to be breaking down, it is still assumed that every enemy killed must eventually be paid for. The reason is
obvious enough; each man killed will have friends and relations who are still neutral— and will remain neutral if and
only if the killing is made up for by an appropriate wergeld.
Our main sources of information on the Icelandic system are the sagas, a group of histories and historical novels
written in Iceland, mostly in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. On first reading, they seem to describe
quite a violent society. That is hardly surprising. At least since Homer, the spectacle of people killing each other has
been one of the principal ways in which writers entertain their audience. The chief innovation of the saga writers was
to spend as much time on law suits as on the violent conflicts that generated them. The one error in the quotation from
Bryce with which I started this chapter is the claim that the chief occupation of Icelanders was killing each other. The
chief occupation of the characters of the sagas appears to be suing each other; the killings merely provide something to
litigate about.
A more careful reading of the sagas tells a different story. The violence, unlike that in contemporary accounts
elsewhere in Europe, is on a very small scale. The typical encounter in a saga feud involves only a handful of people
on each side; everyone killed or injured is named. When two such encounters occur in consecutive chapters of a saga it
seems as though the feuding is continual—until you notice that a character not yet born at the time of the first
encounter is participating in the second as an adult. The saga writers telescope the action, skipping over the years that
separate the interesting parts.
There is a scene in Njal's Saga that provides striking evidence of this stability. Conflict between two groups has become so intense that open fighting threatens to break out in the middle of the court. A leader of one faction asks a benevolent neutral what he will do for them in case of a fight. He replies that if they start losing he will help them, and if they are winning he will break up the fight before they kill more men than they can afford. Even when the system appears to be breaking down, it is still assumed that every enemy killed must eventually be paid for. The reason is obvious enough; each man killed will have friends and relations who are still neutral— and will remain neutral if and only if the killing is made up for by an appropriate wergeld.
Our main sources of information on the Icelandic system are the sagas, a group of histories and historical novels written in Iceland, mostly in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. On first reading, they seem to describe quite a violent society. That is hardly surprising. At least since Homer, the spectacle of people killing each other has been one of the principal ways in which writers entertain their audience. The chief innovation of the saga writers was to spend as much time on law suits as on the violent conflicts that generated them. The one error in the quotation from Bryce with which I started this chapter is the claim that the chief occupation of Icelanders was killing each other. The chief occupation of the characters of the sagas appears to be suing each other; the killings merely provide something to litigate about.
A more careful reading of the sagas tells a different story. The violence, unlike that in contemporary accounts elsewhere in Europe, is on a very small scale. The typical encounter in a saga feud involves only a handful of people on each side; everyone killed or injured is named. When two such encounters occur in consecutive chapters of a saga it seems as though the feuding is continual—until you notice that a character not yet born at the time of the first encounter is participating in the second as an adult. The saga writers telescope the action, skipping over the years that separate the interesting parts.
[1] http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf