His ability to transfix a group of teenagers with his readings from the sagas was legendary. Despite that, or in his view because of it, he had been given the sack the week before. The principal was a slave to the national curriculum; Jóhannes wanted to set his pupils free to delight in their nation’s great literature. The principal was a moron. He was still supposed to see out the term. And he was determined if there was one thing he did in the weeks left to him, it would be to bring the sagas alive to all of his students. He was reading ‘The Tale of Thorsteinn Staff-Struck’. The piece was off-syllabus, but so what? It was a short saga, less than a dozen pages, but it recounted the feud between two neighbouring farms, Sunnudal and Hof. Thorsteinn, the son of the farmer from Sunnudal, had been struck by the staff of a worker from Hof and had been reluctant to take any action in revenge. But Thorsteinn was goaded on by his old and blind father, and blood flowed. There was a fault line running between Sunnudal and Hof in the tenth century, just like there was between Hraun and Bjarnarhöfn in the twentieth.
