Chronicling a Blood-spattered Isle

This chapter implements the general model of violence on case studies from the history of medieval Iceland, especially the Battle of Helgastaðir (1220) and other episodes from the life of Guðmundr Arason, Bishop of Hólar (r.1203–37). It also establishes how structural analysis of sagas—using the concepts of récit, histoire, and uchronia—nuances the picture of history reconstructed from such sources, tracing the transformation of occurrences (what happened) into events (experienced manifestations of meaning). Guðmundar saga A, the main textual source consulted here, demonstrates how uchronia, the ideology of the past, enabled texts to function autonomously of authorial intent: uchronic texts may reveal truths their authors were ignorant of, let alone truths they wished to suppress. By unpacking the ways brute force inflects both the historical social contests recorded in the saga and the narrative tensions of the recording process itself, this chapter highlights the necessity of examining violence in terms of a complex negotiation of power, signification, and risk. In the course of this investigation, various details of medieval Icelandic history are filled in, deepening and qualifying the general portrayal offered in the Introduction. Readers with little background in Icelandic history are familiarized with the contours of this history, while experts find some of its truisms (such as the categorical distinction between farmers and chieftains, or the supposed uniqueness of Iceland in high medieval Europe) re-examined

The Blood in the Feud

This chapter focuses on the staple form of violence in the sagas: feud. Feud was medieval Iceland’s most important organizing metaphor, at whose core lay individuated enforcement of the social contract through tit-for-tat reciprocity. The chapter examines two paradigmatic feuding episodes, one from the Family Sagas (Þorsteins þáttr stangarhǫggs), the other from the Contemporary Sagas (Íslendinga saga’s account of events centred around Sæmundr Jónsson, c.1215–22). Interlacing these case studies sheds light on how textual strategies converge and diverge across the two genres (and in other, related genres, such as Iceland’s law code, Grágás). Accident is central to both episodes, as is the violent response to it, underscoring the intimate involvement of violence with risk. When misfortune struck, Icelanders faced, first, uncertainty about how to understand what had just happened. Their choices tended to read the past as violent. Second, they needed to decide what do to next. Again, their inclination was towards responding violently. Finally, hard times provided opportunities for social engineering: costs and burdens had to be shared, avoided, or redirected among allies and onto adversaries. Feud, whose logic was well established and widely embraced, proved a versatile solution for channelling such social risks and opportunities, whether through opting into elective affinities (redefining one’s own group boundaries) or by enforcing passive solidarity on others. Icelanders distinguished drengir, ‘gentlemen’, from ójafnaðarmenn, ‘bullies’, by the skill with which they did or did not make their feuding claims seem plausible

Killing Ambition

This chapter seeks to account for the nearly complete absence of warfare from medieval Iceland and its sagas. It argues that a single logic dictated both the embrace of feud as a socially constructive idea and the rejection of war as an abomination. Drawing on anthropological examples and analyses, war is defined by contrasting it with feud; the bond between war and state-formation is emphasized. War presupposes political centralization and differentiation, which Icelanders, committed to the reciprocal logic of feuding, resisted. According to the sagas, ideological opposition to war manifested itself in abortive attempts at political consolidation within Iceland, in confusion and substitution in the face of war elsewhere (in Norway, England, and North America), and in failure to contend with burgeoning warlike activity in thirteenth-century Iceland. Tensions between state-centric warfare and state-resistant feuding existed in historical reality, however, not only in saga accounts of this history; and in reality, tensions could not always be resolved. Uchronia provided a tool for creative, retrospective textual resolution of problems that could not be overcome in practice. As demonstrated by the Icelandic law code, Grágás, the past thus became the path-dependent product of the future. Uchronic ideology worked to emend any perceived historical ‘errors’: any symptoms of war that could not be suppressed in reality were, instead, overwritten and repressed in text

Violence, Naturally

In medieval Iceland, to be human was to be violent, but the converse was equally true: to be violent was to be human. The preceding chapters explore hostilities within communities and between them; this chapter, an excursion into eco-history, carries the examination of Norse violence beyond species boundaries. The sagas, realistic accounts of a society clinging by its fingernails to a volcanic outcrop at the edge of the Arctic, are remarkably reluctant to address the perils posed by the natural environment. To explain this anomaly, this chapter contrasts the sagas’ silence about Nature both with their own fixation on human violence and with the attitudes towards natural phenomena in adjacent genres, mainly hagiography and annals. Representation supplemented practice; humanizing violence in the sagas allowed Icelanders to exercise a measure of control over risks from beyond the social world, risks they could do little about in reality. That such representation flies so boldly in the face of facts highlights the symbiosis between violence and uchronia: forcing their world to make sense required Icelanders to convert real natural hazards into uchronic accounts of human physical nastiness

What Does Violence Have to Do with History?

Historians’ treatment of violence has been dominated by a binary theoretical orientation. A critique of this outlook leads to articulating a new, three-part model of violence as a cultural history problem. Neither functionalist readings in terms of power nor interpretations in terms of signification sufficiently explain violence: it is proposed that risk operates as a bridging category, bringing out the unique features violence introduces to the general social contest over domination and meaning. This chapter details the insights drawn from three key risk analysis theories—prospect theory, edgework, and the calculus of jeopardy—to model risk as a dimension of violence. It defines key concepts used throughout the book: violence (‘forceful physical action apt to cause harm’), power, signification, and risk, as well as risk magnitude, likelihood, realms, and domains

Epilogue Violence as a Cultural System

The Epilogue draws together theoretical discussion and case studies, restating and sharpening the general claims made about the cultural construction of violence, and outlining directions for extending the analysis. It proposes ways of thinking about both Viking Age and present-day violence using the model developed in this book. Historians have so far contributed little to the public and academic discourse on violence, and less to the theory and applications of risk. A more rigorous conceptualization of analytical categories, along the lines suggested in this book, can both nuance historical interpretation and create avenues for the discipline to participate in wider debates

Introduction

The Introduction acquaints the reader with medieval Iceland and sketches the two key problems with which this book engages: how violence in history is to be understood, and how the history of medieval Iceland is to be reconstructed. It introduces the sources and acquaints readers with the accepted portrait of medieval Iceland, outlines the importance of risk and uncertainty for analysing violence, and lays out the structure of the book. By comparing the practice of violence to religion and education, the Introduction suggests that violence performs a critical function in imposing a tidy ethical order on chaotic reality