My ambition in this essay is to explore more deeply the final fraught stages in the dynamic assimilation between Lonnroth's two systems of medieval Icelandic literary culture, between the one system dominated by the most prestigious narrative complex in clerical education and ideology--the Bible and its dependent vitae sanctorum--and the other system first generated within the matrix of pre-Christian Norse mythology. More specifically, I intend to argue that the most potent, but subtle and ramifying, issue at the heart of the greatest of the Icelandic family sagas, Njals saga, is that between two competing systems of eventuality, two opposed formulations of what Joseph Harris has called the "plot of history" (1986:202, 213; 1974:264).Not
