Men Who Brew: Masculinity and the Production of Drink in Medieval Icelandic Literature

162 Reviews Ages, both as individual concepts and side by side, which will be of value for many years to come. Natalie Tomas School of Historical Studies Monash University Clunies Ross, Margaret, Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse Myths in Medieval Society. Vol. 2: The Reception of Norse Myths in Medieval Iceland (The Viking Collection 10), Odense, Odense University Press, 1998; cloth; pp. 222; R.R.P. US$32.00; ISBN 8778383323. Clunies Ross, Margaret, ed., Old Icelandic Literature and Society (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 42), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000; board; pp. vii, 336; R.R.P. AUSS135.00; ISBN 0521631122. The appearance of these two new books testifies to an ever-increasing interdisciplinary sophistication in Old Norse studies. Clunies Ross brings immense expertise, imagination, inspiration, and downright indefatigability to the tasks of authorship and editorship. In what follows I shall briefly highlight some key ideas and conclusions. Prolonged Echoes Vol. 2, the sequel to Vol. 1: The Myths (1994), extends the familiar notion that templates derived from heroic narrations were immanent in medieval Icelandic literature so as to make parallel claims for the inherited mythology. Sometimes invoked consciously, sometimes merely latent, myths maintained their status as powerful cognitive tools throughout the period when this literature took shape. Although official Christian belief is often privileged, the texts are not univocal but provide a synthetic world view. Analyses of an episode from Landndmabok (in Chapter Two, 'Myths to live by') and similarly of an episode found in both Grettis saga and Fostbrcedra saga (in Chapter Three, 'Myth and narrative') illustrate this dialogism from various perspectives. Grettir's rather grandiose self-mythicisation, voiced in the skaldic citations, sits in company with the narrator's intermittent irony and a predominantly Christian perspective. In Chapter Four, 'History, myth and genealogy in early Iceland', nonrealistic dimensions are shown as integral to the sagas, notably the genealogies, where the mythic content, rather than being fossilised, evolved in response to social needs, not least those of the elite, such as the Oddaverjar. Here and in Reviews 163 Chapter Five, 'Myth, the region and family: the nexus between subclasses of the Icelandic saga', Icelandic magnates are shown to have 'collected' sagas in an expression of material and symbolic power. These aggregations could be geographically based, as in Landndmabok, Modruvallabok and Vatnshyrna, or based on commonalities in the prosopography, for instance the ubiquitous Mi3fjar9ar-Skeggi. In Chapter Six, 'Myths of settlement and colonisation', the author argues that family self-legitimisation is operative in Landndmabok, where the settlers are shown as employing rituals. Masculine land-taking bases itself on constructions of the land as feminine and of competing inhabitants as rivals to be humiliated. Substituteritualsand understandings of divination and ofthe Irish papar were developed to accommodate female and Christian land-takings. In Chapter Seven, 'Myth and the individual talent', the author demonstrates that a common ancestor was ascribed qualities needed by the clan for success in medieval society, for instance as poets, priests, doctors, and lawmen. Marked pagan talents among the ancestors correlate closely with marked Christian talents among the descendants, as exemplified by GudriSr in Eiriks saga rauda. This brilliant study is rounded off with a select bibliography, a brief chapter ofconclusions, a full list of references, and a detailed index. For its part, the collaborative volume Old Icelandic Literature and Society will prove an attractive and invaluable orientation to recent research and a source of exciting new ideas for professional scholars and students alike. The chapters are supplemented by a full introduction, thorough bibliographies, notes on contributors, and index. Clunies Ross sets the scene in her introduction, identifying a predominantly social framework for the book. In his 'Social institutions and belief systems of medieval Iceland (circa 870-1400) and their relations to literary production', Preben Meulengracht Sorensen extends this to argue for textualisation in medieval Iceland as an interactive process. More than just a case of a society adopting writing, society in toto became understood as text. While certainly Icelanders' historical experience provided a basis for the literature, equally the literature contributed to shape history. Judy Quinn ('From orality to literacy in medieval Iceland') discusses the forms of oral tradition—laws, folktales, heathen rituals, verses, genealogies, and lists...

The Development of Education in Medieval Iceland

MLRy 98.2, 2003 533 Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Ed. by Margaret Clunies Ross. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 42) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000. xii + 336pp. ?47.50. ISBN 0-5216-3112-2 (hbk). Old Icelandic Literature and Society differs from other introductory surveys of Old Icelandic literature, not simply, as the title suggests, by paying attention to the society which produces and consumes the manuscripts in which it is preserved, but, more distinctively, by a quite conscious effortto cut loose from earlier preoccupations in order to signal the new directions of twenty-first-centuryscholarship. Now that the 'bubble of romantic nationalism has burst', suggests Margaret Clunies Ross in her introduction, the literature can be recontextualized in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the period when much of it was written down, rather than as artefacts of the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the best-known sagas ofthe Icelanders are set and when much of the poetry, both Eddic and skaldic, was composed. The crucial moment in Icelandic literature, then, is no longer the Conversion in 999 or 1000, or even the composition of the firstvernacular text, Islendingabok, in the 1120s, but rather the ending of Iceland's independence in 1262-64 with its capitulation to the Norwegian crown, sundering Iceland from the institutions and traditions of its past. The volume is primarily a reliable account of Icelandic literary genres, with a wel? come focus on those, such as the indigenous romances or the biblical translations, which have generally been accorded less attention; only the sagas of Icelanders escape comprehensive survey treatment. Most chapters, however, slant their consideration of the generic range in keeping with the book's overall intention of recontextualization . Thus Judy Quinn's account of oral material within literary genres gives way to an interesting analysis of oral/literate interaction in such areas as list-making in laws and manuals of poetics; both Kari Ellen Gade and Gudrun Nordal highlightthe changing roles of poets and poetry in the thirteenth century, as skaldic tradition gives way to eyewitness accounts in the writing of sagas, and as the main Icelandic chieftain families begin to employ poets to compose panegyrics for them in the manner of earlier Norwegian kings. Jiirg Glauser's short but ambitious chapter, nominally about the sagas of Icelanders, pinpoints their post-1262 origin in manuscript as cru? cial for understanding the sagas' dialogic engagement with the past; their awareness ofthe rupture of 1262-64 makes it impossible to read the sagas as repositories of unbroken tradition, but rather as containing a cultural memory of that which is now irrecoverable. Diana Whaley's long chapter on historical writing in Iceland, centrally placed, is a well-thought-through account of how historiography impinges on other genres, informing our understanding of literature and of its social context and origins. Torfi Tulinius's chapter argues fora socio-politically grounded antiquarianism in the fornaldarsogur, noting their fascination with a highly idealized concept of monarchy once Iceland was subject to the Norwegian king. Whether with Glauser's appropriationof JanAssmann's idea of 'cultural memory', Tulinius's noting of how Icelandic genres interact within a literary system, as defined by Umberto Eco, or Geraldine Barnes's analysis of how the riddarasogur 'persuade us exuberantly of the power oflanguage', with their knowingly ironic narrators, the book provides a well-grounded and interesting introduction to Old Icelandic literature, with the bonus ofmultiple signposts towards new directions in Old Norse scholarship. St John's College, Oxford Carolyne Larrington ...

In Chateaubriand's Voyage en Amérique et en Italie, we read: “In Gothic languages, Scandinavia was called Mannaheim, which means ‘country of men,’” and what the Latin of the sixth century has translated with vigor by these words: “the factory of the human race.”2 This extract, as an echo of Jordanes's vagina nationum, demonstrates the growing interest for Scandinavia in French intellectual life during the nineteenth century, and especially for Iceland, described by Chateaubriand as “the Norse historical archive.” Just as MacPherson's Ossian had at the end of the preceding century, the discovery of Ari Thorgilsson or Snorri Sturluson (“the Herodote of the North” for Chateaubriand) further opened a new field of research for French scholars.In fact, this field had been opened up from at least the middle of the eighteenth century, when Montesquieu fantasized about a mythicized North as a homeland of freedom (in opposition to the South) and saw it not only as factory of mankind but as the “factory of instruments that break the iron forged in the South” (Montesquieu 1973, EL, XVIII:5; Mohnike 2016, 18; Davy 2010, 96–7). Reviving Montesquieu's historical approach, the French scholars of the nineteenth century saw the North as a well that drew its waters from many streams.Legal historians did not hesitate to tap into it (Sturmel 2002, 90–121; Audren and Halpérin 2013), testifying to their own curiosity, but more generally to the scientific interest of French lawyers and historians for Scandinavia. This was demonstrated when the academician Louis-Jean Koenigswarter wrote in 1853: “The ancient customs and laws of Scandinavia have real advantages for those who study the antiquities of European laws over the first written customs of the barbarians.”3 This interest of French historical, legal, or geographical sciences for Iceland is reflected also in the superlatives used to qualify the Nordic island. For Jean-Marie Pardessus, Professor at the Faculty of Law of Paris, Iceland is, of all the parts of Northern Europe, “the most remarkable by its civilisation, its literature and its laws” (Pardessus 1834, 45). For Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, geographer and politician, the Icelandic nation “is one of most intelligent from all over the world,” and “no one is more faithful to its own traditions’ (Bory de St-Vincent and Lacroix 1840, 251–8). For Henri Prentout, Professor at the University of Caen, Iceland is “the most interesting country to have a picture of the Scandinavian society in [the] 9th century” (Prentout 1911, 206). Pardessus's judgment about Icelandic singularities reads as follows: I could say that Iceland is almost more Scandinavian than Norway, because alliances and invasions [that] came from Europe have quickly altered the pure Scandinavian race in Norway. . . . That is so true that historians who wanted to study mores, customs, laws, and Scandinavian literature have always focused on Iceland.4Such an affirmation by a French scholar in the middle of the nineteenth century is not surprising because the North had become the home of a myth a few centuries earlier, dating back perhaps to the reception in France of Olaus Magnus's Historia om de nordiska folken in the middle of the sixteenth century (Davy 2019, 12), or to Rudbeck's Atlantica sive Manheim, a work that so influenced Montesquieu and Chateaubriand (Wolfram 1990, 2) in its confusion of Plato's Atlantis story and Virgil's Ultima Thule, and which managed to trace the homeland of all civilizations back to Scandinavia (Anttila 2014, 245). Thus, what Xavier Marmier writes in the middle of the nineteenth century is significant: Beyond the Baltic Sea, we leave our science. A wall of fog hides the surroundings and Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Lapland, Spitzberg, Finland, and also Russia appear behind this wall with their imprecise forms and confuse themselves with our imagination. It is here our Thule; here is this country half fabulous and half historical of Ancients, this foggy kingdom whose customs we cannot identify and position with precision, and on which we are told so many strange things. (Marmier 1840, 95)In fact, since the beginning of the early modern period, Thule seemed to embody a sort of original sanctuary where the origins of peoples and of their laws could be found, the birthplace of the world. Why should it not, therefore, also be the fons et origo of the homo juridicus? Certainly, French scholars were not unanimous in assimilating Thule to Iceland. But such an assimilation was often made by many of them, and it contributed to this mythical approach and the quest for the origins of Europe's nations there.At the beginning of the nineteenth century, John Pinkerton reminded everyone that famous and talented scholars had based their research on the “imaginary hypothesis” of a Scythian migration from Scandinavia outwards. In their minds, he says, the language, mythology, and morals of the Scythes had been preserved in the “Icelandic desert” intact, such that the Scythian advance through Scandinavia has become “a very curious object of study” (Pinkerton 1804, 247). A few years later, in 1822, Fabre d'Olivet believed that he had located the source for the first Mexican legislators in the Atlantis, and in the Borean race, “whose peregrinations have led it from Iceland to America” (Fabre d'Olivet 1822, 188). The belief was repeated by the jurist Ernest Glasson at the end of the same century (1889, 12). Here, we find ourselves on the threshold of a larger Indo-European perspective, amply exploited since the beginning of the nineteenth century by Malte-Brun, for example, who envisaged “one great family from the banks of the Ganges River to the shores of Iceland” (Malte-Brun 1828, 400), but also by Frédéric Eichhoff (1853, 11–2) and Adolphe Pictet (1859, 3).Furthermore, since the days of Montesquieu, there was no doubting that the North had been, long ago, a country of freedom. This was an idea that became widespread through to the end of the nineteenth century. Ernest Nys (the famous Belgian promoter of the study of international law), for example, envisaged the Far North as “the liberty's servant and defensor which fought for the independence of men versus despotism” (Nys 1896, 125). Iceland embodies this topos through the memory of the Norse migrations, Norsemen being forced to flee the tyranny of Harald Fairhair (Haraldr inn hárfagri) at the end of the ninth century. Land of freedom, founded on an anti-monarchical legacy, Iceland is also described as the land of equality, that being, as Henri Prentout pointed out, a dominant trait in old Scandinavian society (1911, 206).Following in the footsteps of Paul-Henri Mallet, who called Iceland “the Athens of the Ice,” several French historians in the nineteenth century presented Scandinavia as the “paragon of democracy.” “Common misfortune had brought them together,” wrote Georges Depping, “all equal, and no one could impose their own domination on others.” And, after enumerating the powers of the assemblies and the “lavmand” (i.e., lawman, lögmaðr/lögsögumaðr, who presided over the Althing), he added: Here was the simple and democratic government of this small Free State, separated from Europe by the boreal seas, and seated between the rocks, volcanoes, and ices of Iceland.5Various scholars made the small step that transformed Iceland into the antecedent of the Parliamentary system. Charles Hertz saw medieval Iceland as a Parliamentary republic (1879, 336); Gabriel Gravier located Iceland as the origin of Parliaments (1887, 171); Joseph-Louis Ortolan attributed a Norse origin to the word “Republic” (1831, 373); and Ernest Nys depicted Iceland as the “mother of England and grand-mother of United-States” (1896, 100).All these historical and legal reflections attest to the evidence of a relationship woven in fantasy between Iceland and the French scholarly world from the end of the eighteenth century until the end of the following century. There are therefore questions to be asked about the stance of French legal historians in that period toward Iceland, and about what it meant. On the one hand, it allowed them to renew their approach to their indigenous legal culture by locating in unknown (or hitherto ignored) sources the origins of their own national law elsewhere than in Roman law or in those law-codes that they termed “barbarian.” On the other hand, this allowed them to retain the notion of a civil law-code whilst avoiding the risk of an ever more perilous “Germanism.” When it comes to meaning, the use of Icelandic sources gave to many of these scholars of a liberal disposition (almost all of them from 1830s to 1840s) a sort of historical base from which their own political opinions could flourish.It even gave birth to a “Norse school” in French universities, a “school of legal history with a Scandinavian wing.” This school focused, on the one hand, on discovering (or rediscovering) Icelandic sources of law (see section I below) and, on other hand, on modeling those sources as a way to discover the distant origins of French law (see section II below).At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Noël de la Morinière, interested in Scandinavian antiquities in Normandy, admitted to the widespread contemporary ignorance of Norse texts: “They are not familiar to French people,” he said. “These documents seem to us like as Boreal forests which we only know from the sea littoral but in whose milieu we dare not penetrate” (Morinière 1799, 28). And when Domenico Alberto Azuni, a Sardinian jurist summoned to Paris by Napoleon Bonaparte, published his treaty on maritime law in 1810, he managed to ignore Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and, of course, Icelandic laws. When Jean-Marie Pardessus presented his monumental Collection des lois maritimes in the Themis review of 1823, he disregarded Scandinavian laws on the subject before the fifteenth century. In 1839, Édouard Laboulaye, member of Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres and Professor at the Collège de France, wondered out loud: ‘Who knows the name of Gragàs [sic], that curious law-code of the Icelanders?’ (Laboulaye 1839, 49). So we need to step back and review how the interest of French scholars in Icelandic sources took shape.The corpus of old Icelandic texts in France became known less through the writings of the early French pioneers of Icelandic studies in the seventeenth century (Isaac de La Peyrère or La Martinière) than through the authors of the eighteenth century, such as Jean-Baptiste Des Roches de Parthenay and Paul-Henri Mallet. The former, with a presentation of the Edda and a few sagas, such as the Eiríkr saga rauða (Saga of Erik the Red), in his Histoire du Dannemarc (1730), showed how French intellectuals begin to become acquainted with the wealth of this hitherto unknown culture (Des Roches de Parthenay 1730, lii–lviii). Mallet rooted the Icelandic medieval corpus within the domain of European learning. Mallet analyzed the Edda, used the sagas and the Grágás, and joined together the three elements of the poetic, narrative, and legal triptych in Icelandic patrimony (1755). For this Swiss scholar, these sources are the tabernacle of an immemorial culture (Davy 2022). A century later, Frédéric Eichhoff, a linguist and philologist, after translating Völuspá (sometimes called a “mythological code of the old Scandinavians” [Cordier de Launay de Valéri 1806, 168]), wrote as follows: How not to recognize in [this patrimony] the vigorous and true picture of the ancient Scandinavia's beliefs, the same as that in the Germania, the same as that across barbarian Europe before the Middle Ages; these latter fade into obscurity before the Gospel light, cast like a late spine-chilling gleam on the frozen rocks of Iceland?6Mallet and Eichhoff both follow in the path of Giambattista Vico and his hope that poetry and myths will help to unravel the mystery of ancient cultures (Gianturco 1977, 93–4). The philological development of fables and legends becomes a “literal mime of history,” and the mythological corpus becomes “its articulated discourse” (Schefer 1977, 172). In French universities, the reading of Vico offered a challenge to the exegetic school that gradually influenced the small band of legal historians such as Lerminier, Klimrath, or Laferrière (Audren and Halpérin 2001, 4). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the influence of Vico's New Science opened up two lines of thought.On the one hand, we know how, via Vico and through Mallet, the members of the Coppet group draw inspiration from Icelandic poetry for their own approach to liberalism. For Germaine de Staël, to take an example of someone whose influence on the destiny of legal history in France remained important during the first half of the nineteenth century (Gaudemet 1998, 109), the North seemed “naturally metaphysic” and a national “soul,” a “genius,” and a “spirit.” These are the lessons that she derived from the Icelandic sources that she discovered through her reading of Mallet (Berthier 1977, 206). With Mallet, as Sismondi repeated in 1807, the study of Scandinavian customs, laws, religion, and liberty became paramount, “not only for Scandinavian peoples, but for all Europeans too” (Sismondi 1807, 17). This would have notable consequences on the works of some French jurists such as Henri Klimrath (Audren 2006, 123). And, at the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Ginoulhiac, Professor at the Faculty of Law in Toulouse, affirmed nothing less when he wrote that “because German and Frankish peoples, as Gauls before them, kept, in their own poetry or their songs, the memory of the important events of their founders, it is hardly surprising that they should preserve by that same route the legislation that they adopted” (Ginoulhiac 1884, 151). In other words, for many lawmen or historians of the French nineteenth century, Icelandic poetry was the to discovering the of old the other hand, the texts were also a source for ancient famous and that Icelandic legal were to the democratic de la These to Klimrath, as a of the legal Frédéric de at the sagas in the same In his they are the of the Scandinavian first For some jurists in the nineteenth century who the origins of French laws, the sagas which Iceland has a were fables and that a that allowed one to For them, this was no an and their about the legal an behind which was to human destiny through to discover the origins of through the of and also and In at the Faculty of Law in Paris and the of in the ancient that he would take the most ancient texts of barbarian by to the Edda and the saga on which Jean-Marie Pardessus that the wrote “a that the civil and political of his A few later, would a of this famous saga on two Danish and as “the true picture of ancient Scandinavian de la 1896, to in his about the in French law from sagas were written they us with on the law of Scandinavian peoples because they ancient customs (1879, These French scholars did not the about the of the texts on which they those of Mallet, who on the of between and in sagas because of their for the and fabulous or those of who that no one should ignore the that the sagas are of On the many French jurists of the period wanted to the between sagas and and to name but a Grágás, the of which was by in of to have remained unknown during a of the to be used in French historical in the of the nineteenth century. Pardessus, who in with the Danish of the that of the sagas would we had the our very A of for de la a sort of of to the French for (1879, the could not, be as laws or to Pardessus, because the had not been (Pardessus such many French jurists of the nineteenth century this as a of “the most ancient Scandinavian as Koenigswarter it 188). For the in his at the Faculty of Law of Paris in of all the old laws, the Icelandic customs most For the is the Scandinavian most ancient For at the Collège de the only to the century, but it a law So it becomes to the as the of ancient customs, which is how the legal and Henri would it in the first of the century the late of the was not as because jurists and historians had in the by sources that to the laws before the century Pardessus and or because one had to the of an by the of the that it into Scandinavian laws could not the whilst “the most laws in of their of are the in of their other words, the philological of discovering a corpus of texts that had been hitherto had a of when it came to Iceland, a that European nations were to at is what Ernest Nys Icelandic our and life is based on that most the of This them with remarkable which a to the modern world. It is to them, that we on the subject of the most interesting of the Scandinavian the Norsemen the some of the first It is to them that we to know so many about customs, and was and it was with those Icelandic sources in that a of the French legal was the half of the nineteenth century, In Scandinavia we find the ancient Germania, the morals and that had no by the of and they have been altered or through this the simple did French jurists and historians discover through their interest in old Icelandic the first many legal historians of the period a of history that the as the barbarian invasions of the century. The origins them, perhaps more Gothic than of all these peoples from a of the North as a of as Koenigswarter it It was from ancient Ortolan that “the old us the of Gothic who to other their own (1831, 45). This approach both of that of late and that of the reflected that in the middle of the century. here the approach of a of history that several French such as to “In the and sixth Scandinavian was the same as that of the who not to the great wrote Ernest the national of the the when they focused on ancient laws, many French legal historians on through what medieval Scandinavian sources to For the law of Scandinavian the with law as by In de was to the notion that Scandinavian law and what and us about and barbarian laws in the century” between what the legal historians about old barbarian laws and what they about ancient Scandinavian laws is Louis-Jean Koenigswarter pointed out, what had been on the of ignorance was by some research on ancient Scandinavian laws, which have been to have with the and customs of German peoples, hitherto described by the modern world as when they on the historical on the of this legal many authors Icelandic sagas as a way to ancient barbarian laws The of Frédéric de on this is “The law-code was not a of barbarian laws but the of customs, as not only in Icelandic and the and the but also in the and the Scandinavian sources could be a to old Europeans laws. This was one of the lessons in the works of the academician on medieval The study of the history of Scandinavian law and customs one of the sources from which modern Icelandic and the Grágás, us the example in modern that had not been transformed by and the Edda, that great whose is a the the and its us back to the customs, the and the through which we in the and of our Middle the until the end of the nineteenth century, French scholars barbarian laws in the of Icelandic texts For the French the to that of ancient Scandinavian it is they take with the So that in the have a Nordic origin in the word in Icelandic law one that in the of Montesquieu, the origins of many French scholars in the nineteenth century, Iceland as the sanctuary of the culture of that an ancient brought together “the from a The discovery of legal Icelandic sources through that Koenigswarter into his history of French law as a of its origins a in the of our ancient and allowed modern legal to the Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish us of some new to they will help us to the study of the of laws in their and to approach to Icelandic one which “the of the old was not, its at the University of it as he that the study of Icelandic law in the century the interest of an ancient and based on the of but not influenced by the and very to the other Norse laws of the years earlier, Louis-Jean Koenigswarter had also written that the Scandinavian race is nothing than the race in its ancient is But he that the myths and of ancient Scandinavia could on antiquities than the barbarian laws written in Latin and influenced by the 4). he “one on which all European scholars is that they the customs, religion, and law from Scandinavian and cast on the between religion, customs, and law in both French ancient Icelandic law was because of its to and Roman in to the laws, which all from the of the on them the pointed out, the laws written during the century cannot an idea of laws because and had the life and of the Roman Thus, Icelandic it became to study old laws in their original forms Norse culture was therefore in to a medieval Europe after had been to the political and legal of And it was a of by their very the most of scholars many to for the origins of European laws in Icelandic That is what a of law at the University of in his study of French law The old Scandinavian documents are the most important source of the legal That is not only because they are and more than other but also because they are written in the through which to us added: The first them, that is to say those of Iceland, law to us in its and from for the of Icelandic law-codes was historical and geographical which many scholars pointed to the and de it is to their boreal that the the of their national de Ganges presented in the Grágás, the and academician to us a hitherto the world In his in at the Faculty of Law in Paris, seemed in his affirmation that on the were the of the influence of the on ancient On the many French jurists in Iceland an original and legal In that they an that a to and history in the of ancient law 2001, 17). pointed out, the was an original code that had not been by It is a law from all repeated a national law-code to Laferrière This was the of French legal historians in the and For Louis-Jean law remained to Norse and only Scandinavia many centuries after other European peoples had been to Iceland into a Scandinavian Iceland That is where there are the most of Norse and Norse Icelandic laws, as we them, are not than those of Sweden, or Norway, but they are more by the of the ancient de la culture had been altered in or Sweden, their own customs and their intact, writes Eichhoff (1853, used by French scholars in the nineteenth century to attest the original of Icelandic law-codes was to on the in which they had been preserved over many barbarian laws transformed by out Icelandic law has an (1853, 4). In the same Laferrière writes that “Icelandic law . . . had been in the of the a long before it was written at the beginning of this law was by the of called the of This sort of the interest of French jurists and historians in on the as evidence of legal In Icelandic law is of a widespread are in Iceland, And this of gradually came to on the (Davy the remained example, the in a study published in in the they the interest in the the for the was the for written laws are the of his he was of civil French jurists saw the as the of the “Icelandic legal The interest of French legal scholars in Iceland should not be In many the Icelandic legal to historians and jurists a to find an but political and on which to their about the origins of European laws and and the origins of their own But such an approach was on a of only some of which out to be was a in a that has to be was this “Norse school” in French a Certainly, it was a hope that a of liberal jurists Klimrath, influenced by legal It had a on the following which had to in the of and the of the in The to Icelandic sources to through a sort of political which Laferrière until or the to through Norse history the origins of French laws from those of laws of of were of to a into French The political and of its also have to its before the the of Edda, of the sagas and of the Grágás, was as new and Scandinavian works became into French The sciences also a real in France at the of the nineteenth and between the quest for the New and its of new scientific and the influence of other on how to the national law of ancient It was the end of an we should on the of by when to further back than the century in of the origins of the law of de la en Paris, could on not in some

Volcanoes in Old Norse Mythology: Myth and Environment in Early Iceland

<i>Kumlbúa þáttr</i>, an Eschatological Event: The Traumatic Ontology of Being in Time in Medieval Iceland

Medieval Iceland was, according to its sagas, a society riven with feud. Numerous prose narratives composed from the thirteenth century onwards related narratives that focused on feud, set in the centuries from the island’s settlement (around 870) to just after its conversion to Christianity (roughly 1030). These are conventionally known as the ‘sagas of Icelanders’ (Íslendingasögur). During the same period, a further set of sagas was composed, dealing with more recent history, from the mid-twelfth century up until a few decades before the date of composition: these are known as the ‘contemporary sagas’ or samtíðarsögur. Both saga genres derive their narrative material and dramatic impetus from stories of kin-group-based reciprocal violence. Much has been written, by historians, literary scholars, legal historians and anthropologists about the violence apparently endemic in medieval Icelandic society. Can anything new be said about it? The answer to this question turns out to be an emphatic ‘yes’. This new book, by Oren Falk, takes a fresh look at violence as a phenomenon in the saga corpus. Falk propounds a complex and persuasive analysis of violence, as being concerned not only with the exercise of power and the creation of symbolic significance, but also—as his title signals—with risk. Falk nuances standard theories of violence as instrumental or expressive with a sophisticated understanding of the ways in which violent actors assess risk; he incorporates notions of jeopardy with regard to multiple factors, and ‘edgework’—the recognition that some actors do not care about minimising risk, but rather take pleasure in exhibiting their particular skills in risky situations.

First full analysis of the skaldic verse appearing in the family sagas of Icelanders, considering why and how it is deployed. Sagas of Icelanders, also called family sagas, are the best known of the many literary genres that flourished in medieval Iceland, most of them achieving written form during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Modern readers and critics often praise their apparently realistic descriptions of the lives, loves and feuds of settler families of the first century and a half of Iceland's commonwealth period (c. AD 970-1030), but this ascription of realism fails to account for one of the most important components of these sagas, the abundance of skaldic poetry, mostly in dróttkvætt "court metre", which comes to saga heroes' lips at moments of crisis. These presumed voices from the past and their integration into the narrative present of the written sagas are the subject of this book. It investigates what motivated Icelandic writers to develop this particular mode, and what particular literary effects they achieved by it. It also looks at the various paths saga writers took within the evolving prosimetrum (a mixed verse and prose form), and explores their likely reasons for using poetry in diverse ways. Consideration is also given to the evolution of the genre in the context of the growing popularity in Iceland of romantic and legendary sagas. A final chapter is devoted to understanding why a minority of sagas of Icelanders do not use poetry at all in their narratives.

First full analysis of the skaldic verse appearing in the family sagas of Icelanders, considering why and how it is deployed. Sagas of Icelanders, also called family sagas, are the best known of the many literary genres that flourished in medieval Iceland, most of them achieving written form during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Modern readers and critics often praise their apparently realistic descriptions of the lives, loves and feuds of settler families of the first century and a half of Iceland's commonwealth period (c. AD 970-1030), but this ascription of realism fails to account for one of the most important components of these sagas, the abundance of skaldic poetry, mostly in dróttkvætt "court metre", which comes to saga heroes' lips at moments of crisis. These presumed voices from the past and their integration into the narrative present of the written sagas are the subject of this book. It investigates what motivated Icelandic writers to develop this particular mode, and what particular literary effects they achieved by it. It also looks at the various paths saga writers took within the evolving prosimetrum (a mixed verse and prose form), and explores their likely reasons for using poetry in diverse ways. Consideration is also given to the evolution of the genre in the context of the growing popularity in Iceland of romantic and legendary sagas. A final chapter is devoted to understanding why a minority of sagas of Icelanders do not use poetry at all in their narratives.

Dreamworlds, Storyworlds: Narrative Proliferation and the Case of <i>Stjörnu-Odda draumr</i>

Homeboy Masculinity

Readings in Times of Crisis: New Interpretations of Stories about the Settlement of Iceland

Reviewed by: Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World: Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross Randi Eldevik Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World: Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross. Edited by Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop, and Tarrin Wills. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007. Pp. xiv + 456; 6 illustrations. $116. This collection of essays by twenty scholars active in Old Norse studies quickly announces its ambition to be something more coherent and organized than the random mélange one ordinarily expects a Festschrift to be. Divided thematically into sections ("Theoretical Frameworks for Understanding Old Norse Literature"; "Old Norse Myth and Society"; "Oral Traditions in Performance and Text"; "Vernacular and Latin Theories of Language"; "Prolonged Traditions") and commencing with an introduction that provides a rationale for the choice of topics and for the significance of "Learning and Understanding" as the overall theme that links the essays together, this book clearly is the consequence of considerable thought and attention from its editors. It is a pity that, having gone as far as they did, the editors' efforts did not extend just a bit further. One of the most striking features of this collection is the frequency with which writers talk past one another. By that I do not mean "disagree with one another," for disagreeing implies a modicum of engagement with another scholar's ideas, if only to dispute them. What I mean is that quite a few of the contributors to this volume often seem totally oblivious to what other contributors have written-either works that would be helpful in clinching a particular argument, or works that contradict it and therefore must be refuted. The editors of this collection, with their comprehensive grasp of what the collection contains, could easily have nudged certain contributors in the right direction by pointing out writings of other contributors that needed be taken into account if the essays by the negligent contributors were to be watertight. For example, in one of this book's outstanding essays, "Structuralist Approaches to Saga Literature," Lars Lönnroth has occasion to refer to an earlier work of his own, the illuminating Njáls saga: A Critical Introduction, with which anybody working in Old Norse studies should be familiar. Mats Malm's contribution to the "Vernacular and Latin" section of the Festschrift, a rather weak essay called "The Notion of Effeminate Language in Old Norse Literature," would have been greatly enriched and rectified by consulting the discussion of elaborate descriptive language (which is what Malm means by "effeminate language") in Lönnroth's book, but Malm and/or the editors evidently overlooked it. A comparable situation involves two essays found side by side in the "Oral Traditions" section, Edith Marold's meager and disappointing "Mansǫngr-a Phantom Genre?" and the far superior "The Art of Poetry and the Sagas of Icelanders" by Gudrún Nordal. Nordal's essay frequently mentions the poetry found in Grettis saga, yet Marold never mentions Grettis saga in the part of her essay that is concerned with obscene poetry, which is one of the possible meanings of mansǫngr. [End Page 267] Marold claims that verses of this kind existed orally but were legally suppressed and thus cannot be found in any extant Old Norse texts; but the salacious verses occasioned by the encounter between the lusty wench and the saga's protagonist Grettir certainly seem to fill the bill. If for some reason these verses do not qualify as mansǫngr, it would be nice to have an explanation of why. Likewise, Vésteinn Ólason's relatively weak essay "The Icelandic Saga as a Kind of Literature with Special Reference to its Representation of Reality" would have benefited greatly from consultation of works by the two scholars whose contributions immediately follow his in the "Theoretical Frameworks" section of the Festschrift. These two are Lars Lönnroth, whose essay has already been mentioned, and Torfi Tulinius, who contributed an essay on Eyrbyggja saga that shows, by means of a structural analysis, the enduring value and usefulness of Lévi-Strauss's approach. Mimesis and historical change, not structuralism, are the issues taken up by Vésteinn Ólason-specifically, the question of...

Reviewed by: The Saint and the Saga Hero. Hagiography and Early Icelandic Literature by Siân E. Grønlie Margaret Cormack The Saint and the Saga Hero. Hagiography and Early Icelandic Literature. By Siân E. Grønlie. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 2017. Pp. xi, 306. $130.00. ISBN 978 84384 481 5.) Siân E. Grønlie comments in the volume under review that "the saints were not just literary characters to the medieval Icelanders, but a powerful and active presence in their lives" (p. ix). This basic fact is often ignored by scholars of medieval Icelandic literature and culture. While a token nod may be made to the fact that the thirteenth-century saga authors were Christian (indeed as is now repeatedly suggested, they may have been associated with monasteries), the significance of that fact is often overlooked. Those who study the secular sagas have all too often neglected to read the translated passiones and vitae of the saints. This in spite of the fact that, as Stefán Karlsson pointed out two decades ago, over one-third of the surviving medieval Icelandic manuscripts contain saints' lives. This is twice as many as the next most frequent category (kings' sagas) and three times as many as the two next most popular groups, sagas of Icelanders and chivalric romances.1 The present volume provides a much-needed corrective to this neglect. Dr. Grønlie is thoroughly familiar not only with native saga genres, but also with translated religious literature that would have been available at monasteries, cathedrals, and some churches. That literature included homilies, saints' lives, patristic writings, liturgical books, and works such as Peter Comestor's Bible commentary, Vincent of Beauvais' Historia Scholastica, and Isidore of Seville's Etymologies. After an introductory chapter on "Saints' Lives and the Sagas of Icelanders," her monograph is far more than a search for parallels such as have been undertaken in the past; she is well aware that the sagas do not blindly adopt the ideology of the saint's life, and shows how they respond creatively to it. Using polysystem theory, Grønlie examines how hagiography [End Page 618] and sagas of Icelanders interact with each other, and how different authors imitate, invert, and subvert hagiographic structures and ideals. Her second chapter—about the translation of a Latin work by the monk Oddr Snorrason, known as Oddr's Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason—is a wonderful illustration of the numerous influences that can be traced in this saga, and how they were used. Well aware of later additions to the Icelandic text, Grønlie discusses the insights the underlying text provides into the community of writers at the monastery at Þingeyrar and Oddr's practice as a historian (and, perhaps, would-be hagiographer). Like Ari Þorgilsson, Oddr lists his informants, and it is worth noting that three of the six are female. Grønlie discusses not only Oddr's work but also the poems about Óláfr, both verses contemporary with his life and others by two poets contemporary with Oddr; she concludes that those living in the late twelfth century were working from the same body of material. The following chapters consider sagas that are thematically similar: "The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert," "The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint," "The Outlaw, the Exile, and the Desert Saint," and "The Saint as Friend and Patron." All provide in-depth readings of passages dealing with particular events, such as the conversion to Christianity, and characters, such as Bishop Friðrekr and Þangbrandr, in works as varied as Kristni saga, Þorvalds þáttr víðförla, Vatnsdæla saga, and Njáls saga. Grønlie is aware that medieval Christianity itself was not uniform (and very different from most modern varieties); she points out that in descriptions of a single episode, the attitude to violence that may be problematized in one saga may be valorized in another. She notes that the heroic violence of the missionaries, and the greater sympathy for the (often quite reluctant) convert, are innovations on the part of saga authors when compared to other missionary accounts. As in any detailed study there are occasional errors, for example, the...

Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders