Miller, William Ian. Making Sense of the Sources

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  • Author: Miller, William Ian
  • Title: Making Sense of the Sources
  • Published in: Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law and Society in Saga Iceland
  • Place, Publisher:  Chicago: University of Chicago Press
  • Year: 1990
  • Pages: 43-76
  • E-text:
  • Reference: Miller, William Ian. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
  • Key words:

Annotation

Miller opens his discussion of the available source material by noting the complications inherent to the interpretation of textual evidence that is not just temporally displaced from the period that it purports to depict but also in some cases internally inconsistent and skewed by literary convention. He acknowledges the untenability of reading works of narrative literature as representations of absolute historical truth, but nevertheless advocates for their utility as indicators of social and legal norms in ‘Saga Iceland’. Specifically, he argues that the oral tradition on which the sagas were based must have been preserved well enough to retain the essence of the social and legal conventions that the sagas depict, even if the particulars of the overall mentality therein may have been altered and to varying degrees anachronistic. Miller examines in detail an excerpt from the tale of Þorsteinn stangarhögg to illustrate how the saga narratives can reflect legal and social conventions, and in doing so identifies another potential obstacle: that English translations of certain terms and phrases from the original Old Icelandic often prove inadequate because they do not retain the complete cultural context associated with the original term. He cross-examines the literature with the legal codes in order to attain a fuller understanding of the social and legal context of insult and injury, particularly with regard to how the processes behind the dispensation of justice and the payment of compensation were handled. The economy of honor inherent to medieval Icelandic society as represented in the sagas made the prospect of a bloodless settlement uncertain due to the mutable condition of one’s reputation, a situation that could be augmented by the exchange of explicit, symbolic, or even accidental insults and the obsession with emerging from a conflict without any loss of face. Peaceful resolution of conflict, as Miller’s examination indicates, tended to be contingent on the mutual magnanimity and humility of both parties involved, as well as their willingness to ignore the pressure exerted upon them in the form of goading by family and friends. While likely far from explicitly accurate historical accounts, the saga literature retains considerable social historical value in Miller’s view.

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See also

References

Chapter 119: „ Ganga munum vér og leita oss vina : “What is clearly literary in the scene is the compulsion that makes each person visited ask after ‘the man fifth in line.’ But that's all. It would be hasty to dismiss everything else as pure artifice. Requests of support from powerful people required some adherence to forms of protocol; we simply do not know enough to dismiss the precisely ordered line as something to make a good story. Skarphéðin's insults have a certain ritualized quality to them, but it cannot be certain that this is not a form of flyting that our sources suggest was very much a part of Norse lived experience.” (p. 48)

Links

  • Written by: Samuel Levin
  • Icelandic/English translation:
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