The Law In Njal's Time Compared To Our Current Law

One thing that I did not really pay attention at the beginning of the book was the law. I was really impressed when I first read the first massacre in this book because the consequence of this act was very little. When Gunnar was being sent to the Law Rock I thought that they were going to kill him. At first I thought that the law was eye for eye, tooth for tooth, but then I noticed that there were other ways of reaching to agreement between the two sides. First, I saw that when there were two sides in the battle if one side had one loss and they other one had also one these deaths would compensate each other. “The decision was that Skammkel should lie without compensation, that the amounts for Otkel’s death and for the spur-wound were to cancel each other out and that the other slayings were to be paid for according to each man’s worth,” pg 97 that is one day to solve problems but imagine that our common day system of laws were to be enforced in Njal’s time. I think that if that happened Gunnar would already have lifetime sentence to jail because he has committed all those slayings and Njal would be also in problems with the law for helping Gunnar reach this massacres. Now imagine that the law that was enforced in Njal’s time was now to be enforced in our current time. I think the world would be a more difficult place than it already is. Imagine that you go out to the streets and they kill you and the only thing they give to your family is your lives’ worth and the person who killed you just stayed like this. Or for example in the Twin Towers the only thing they would do to Osama Bin Laden is to make him pay for all the lives that he killed it would not be fair. What I am trying to say is that in Njal’s time the life of a person had a set amount of money and that was all he was worth and personally I think that life has no price. If today they kill one person, even though they give money and put the person who did this in jail, the family will not be completely satisfied because no money or material thing will be able to compensate a life.