Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866046.003.0006
Oren Falk
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
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Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866046.003.0005
Oren Falk
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
{"title":"Killing Ambition","authors":"Oren Falk","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198866046.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198866046.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"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","PeriodicalId":356050,"journal":{"name":"Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland","volume":"242 1-2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114041661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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