Excerpt from Njál's Saga

Njál's Saga is often considered to be the best of the Viking-Age Icelandic family sagas. Set around the year 1000 (although not written down for several centuries later), this saga tells how a disagreement between the wives of two prosperous Icelandic farmers ends up in years-long blood feud that results in generations of both families and their retainers being murdered and nearly plunges the western part of the island into civil war.

Although this is a fictional story, many of the people it depicts were historical figures, and the settings can be identified even today. The characters depicted are not aristocrats but instead high-status farmers, the lower status free men and women pledged to support them, and their unfree slaves (thralls). As this excerpt shows, status was something that could be negotiated and signaled by such things as the amount that had to be paid in wergild to atone for injury or death.

Link to the source: Njál's Saga

Image of a medieval copy of Njál's Saga from Kálfalækjarbók (AM 133 fol.), c. 1350, in the collection of the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Rekjavík, Iceland.