Violence, Naturally

Abstract

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