-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 9:57 PM -0500 on 12/26/02, Somebody wrote:

Obviously he hasn't read Njal's Saga.

Yeah, people say this a lot, but it's more the exception that proves the rule. For instance, multi-generational blood feud that runs over the course of Njal's Saga goes over a century or more, I think, so a simple body count doesn't work very well. In addition, the reason they made a saga out of the story was that the events in it were so exceptional, not just the burning of Njal and the Njalssons, but the whole fight that lead up to it. Like the paper said about Icelandic conflicts in general, when the burning was over, the whole "war" was over -- without dragging in a cast of thousands. Hype is a very old thing. The saga said, among other things, that Gunnar could also jump his own height from a standing start, too, remember? :-). Like they said in the Old West, which was also much more peaceful than the pulp-novels, movies, and gun-control advocates would have you believe, "We didn't need the law until the lawyers came." The Norse, like people in early America were, of course, all armed to the teeth, and an armed society is a polite society. Remember that rabbits fight to the death by disembowelment, while rattlesnakes just bump chests to see who gets the girl... Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPgvK88PxH8jf3ohaEQJDSwCfXVukQ1nvHKtY55LpGuB2TJCr3qgAoKyC txJTrHdsyw7zKeviCRE7kRRs =S1jd -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'