The Emergence of Rationality in the Icelandic Sagas: The Colossal Misunderstanding of the Viking Lore in Contemporary Popular Culture
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The general argument that sagas are not just about lawlessness and violence is sound but not original. It is well-informed by some recent scholarship but arguably not enough on Njáls saga and its genre. As a general characterisation of the nature of Sagas of Icelanders, though, this is an effective article.
Arguably one weakness of the article is the uncomplicated use of 'rational' and 'rationality'. These surely require critique? What specific type of rationality is it that the twelfth-century thinkers were advocating? So far as I can recall, Sagas of Icelanders don't actually say anything explicit about what is 'rational' or a correct way of thinking. I think some reference to relevant secondary scholarship on C12 western European scholarship is required.
The argument on p.7 seems to be that Njáls saga's author imagines an evolution of Icelandic society? If so, I think the case needs to be made more convincingly. The fact that the main dispute in the saga gets increasingly serious is not the same as supposing that the author has an idea of historical change.
This text is one of those sagas which does not discuss the colonisation period. Surely if the text was so concerned about a change from lawlessness to lawfulness then it would discuss earlier generations and make obvious statements which show change?
One thing that might be added here is that the text is keen to include the establishment of the Fifth Court. Arguably this does fit with what I take to be the author´s argument and I think they should discuss it.
An alternative reading of Njáls saga would be that it demonstrates how law ultimately cannot stop violent revenge; this would seem to be why the final part of the text involves Kári pursuing his enemies and killing them. I think the author needs to admit that this reading is also possible.
On p.10 it is suggested that Grágás represents a "legal system". I think most people would not see Grágás as quite so schematic. A quick revisit of some of the mainstream scholarship on Iceland might suggest better phrasing here.
The article mentions the date of Njáls saga. Mention should be made of the probable date of Laxdæla saga and whether that has any implications for its themes.
Overall I think it is essential that the author reads William Ian Miller´s 2014 book, Why is your axe bloody?, which is notable by its absence here. Other fairly recent scholarship on Njáls saga is also missing, e.g. Ármann Jakobsson's 2007 article which, again, might undermine some modern popular understandings of 'vikings': https://www.academia.edu/1348106/_Masculinity_and_Politics_in_Nj%C3%A1ls_saga_Viator_38_2007_191_215
Hannah Burrows' 2010 article is worth reading and including for (brief) context on the role of law in Njáls saga: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/362856
I would recommend that the author looks at Vésteinn Ólason's Dialogues with the Viking Age (1998) and Oren Falk's Violence and Risk... (2020) because they offer useful context or support for the argument made here about the nature of Sagas of Icelanders.
Typos:
P. 6, l.278 typo: Hrust should read 'Hrut'?
l. 283, Brynjolf should be Brynjólf to be consistent in the use of diacritics?
l. 303 Orkel should be Otkel
P.8 l.383 councilors should be counsellors?
P.10 l. 466 Grágás is the correct spelling
Bibliography: Scudder rather than Scuddle.
Author Response
I very much welcome those suggestions and references. I have incorporated some of those, but did not want to go overboard and become a victim of name dropping. I have revised further, responding to the good questions, and corrected those typos. Thank you, and I hope that this satisfies your concerns.
Reviewer 2 Report
At present state, the article is unfortunately severly flawed. While its general aim - the juxtaposition of recent political misappropriations of 'Viking' heroism and factual depictions in Icelandic sagas - is in itself valid and would have merit, its presentation in the form of the article is as yet insufficient, especially due to structural reasons of the argument which the author is trying to present.
These problems result mainly from the unsuccessful try to conjoin three major areas of research: the question of the 'twelfth-century renaissance', the extremely large area of popular medievalism with its centuries-long history, and (narratological) readings of individual sagas, in this case the largest Íslendingasaga, Njáls saga. It seems that these three areas have as yet been too vast for the author to construct a neat and succint argument with a discernible red thread that structures the process of thought. The various points raised and presented do not create a sense of continuity, but unfortunately rather of volatility.
As such, it is not clear what exact purpose the introductory section on the 'twelfth-century renaissance' serves if the author makes clear that there is much discussion among scholars as to its exact nature, norms and constituents, while repeatedly stressing later that "We would stretch the available evidence too thin if we tried to superimpose the concept of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance onto that Icelandic heroic genre in straight terms". If the article is not tyring to argue this point, then why does it form its beginning for one of only ten pages? Especially since van Nahl 2022, being variously referenced, has all but argued just this for the neighbouring genre of the Kings' sagas? Caution is surely justified in this regard, especially since the material transmission of the sagas creates severe problems to the matter of dating (see especially Glauser and Lethbridge in Mundal (ed.) 2013 "Dating the Sagas"), but at present state, it remains unclear why this part of the study is necessary. Also without it, the point that the Icelandic sagas are more complex than what is presented in (especially right-wing) modern day-reuse can be made. A note on chapter headings is in order here, too, as this section does decidedly not constitute a "theoretical introduction".
In the section on popular appropriations of 'Norse' elements, it comes as a little suprise that non-political medievalism is referred to rather shortly and only after the presentation of current right-wing misuses, being rather one of the grounds on which appropriations through right-wing ideologies become so influential in contemporary culture. The last paragraph suddenly introduces a "culture war" between Christian and neo-pagan groups, only to then shift to a summarising statement hinting at LARP-communities alongside right-wing ideologies, which in the beginning were themselves described as aiming at "traditional white, patriarchal, and Christian hegemony". Are then the LARP-communities to be understood as neo-pagan? All this is initially juxtaposed with remarks on the lowering presence of medieval studies in universities, which - true as it is - does not help the argument in getting more straightforward, especially since the transitions between individual thoughts seem to become confusing here. Ultimately, the understanding of popular medievalism appears as quite one-sided: the end of sections 4 reveals that in the author's eye, the only attractors to Old Norse themes in popular culture seem to be "deeply-rooted racism, Neo-Nazism, and fear of non-Germanic races". This is a rather bold overstatement considering that there is an array of forms of adaptations that does not engage in right-wing ideology at all.
The second section also introduces one of the main problematic aspects of the article: it becomes clear that because author laments right-wing appropriations of 'Norse' elements, this leads them to using a journalistic style and tone in some areas which to my mind is not appropriate to a scholarly paper (e.g. end of section 4: "it is most regrettable that they sink so low as to misuse their medieval sources" - this was declared as the point of the article!). Especially, however, more care should be invested in terminology and conceptualisations of the terms used in the article. These seem to be rather simplistic in some areas: right-wing ideologies being 'heroic' and 'martial', while the Vikings are historically "basically pirates, criminals, and robbers", and a reference to the Alþingi in any saga text seems to indicate 'rationality'. Here, more attention to sociohistorical context would seem necessary, as it does not seem fruitful in a scholarly environment to judge different objects of research from a (modern) normative standpoint, but rather to explain them against the background from which they stem.
Accordingly, the analyses of saga texts presented in the later half of the article appear rather thin, as they hardly engage with the (vast!) scholarship that has been produced on Njála as the most prominent of all the Íslendingasögur. The reading that this text depicts an ideal of community and law is thus hardly a "new one" (as announced in the abstract - not even Lönnroths 1976 "Njáls saga: a critical introduction" might be the first here!), but, since much of the corpus of scholarship on the text in question is disregarded, appears as rather unnuanced and superficial. As does the reading of Laxdæla saga as a text thematizing the transition of an older to a newer system - at least a discussion of Meulengracht Sørensen's 1993 (Fortælling og ære) section on the text would be in order here. It is also suprising that there is no discussion of the meeting of Kjartan and Óláfr Tryggvason as one of the neuralgic moments of the plot, since Kjartan's stay in Norway is what first sets the catastrophic cylce of killings back in Iceland in motion. It is thus hard to see that it is this moment which should lay the grounds for the theme of 'rationality' in the saga.
The red thread of this section seems to be the assumption that whenever there is mention of settlements instead of feuding or the legal system as such, this should be seen as a counterpoint to the popular, right-wing ideology that 'Norse' equals 'martial' and 'heroic'. It is, of course, clearly true that the Icelandic sagas are much more complex than what popular imagination allows for, and that in Iceland and elsewhere in the medieval world, there is a complicated legal system that should prevent blood feuding mechanisms (which, however, can and should not be meassured in modern standards - legal practice in the Icelandic sagas largely depends on the amount of support of socially high-standing members of the upper class that can be mustered, and decidedly not on how just the cause may be).
However, the line of argument as presented in the article is too simplistic to be convincing, as it suppresses the problematic matter of the relationship between medieval Icelandic laws and depictions of the sagas (already debated in Heusler 1911: Das Strafrecht der Isländersagas - at least Scheel (ed.) 2020: Narrating Law and Laws of Narration should be discussed here at some length, if not also Scheel/Schwandt (ed.) 2021: Imaginationen und Praktiken des Rechts = Das Mittelalter 25/1) as well as the fact that popular adaptations rather rarely are based on or concerned with sagas about Icelandic life itself but rather heroic tales or Viking romances.
The point that these tales should be read and give a much fuller than just a 'heroic' picture is doubtlessly right (as well as the fact that right-wing appropriations of these texts are a sad reality), but more carefulness and level of detail including problematics of the texts themselves should be invested in reaching that conclusion. This should by all means include citations being made at least in notes in the original Old Norse and not only on the basis of translations.
The main point that an older, 'heroic' ideal is being replaced in the Icelandic sagas by an ethic of community and law is a traditional one in Old Norse studies (see e.g. Kirsten Hastrup's analyses and her saying that society was "co-terminous with the law" [Cosmology and society in medieval Iceland]), but none of the exceptable quotes are made unfortunately. Thus, at least Andersson's 1970-article "The displacement of the heroic ideal in the Family Sagas" is curiously absent. Indeed, the thought of societal development along the law is already apparent in Íslendingabók, an Icelandic text itself (on which see Gropper 2018 in FS Heizmann as quoted), which is also curiously absent from the argument of the article.
Thus, overall, also the view of Icelandic societal developments opened in sections 3-6 seems unfortunately unbalanced and superficial - laws were in effect long before Icelands submission to Norway (on which see also Boulhosa 2005: Icelanders and the Kings of Norway), while there is curiously no mention of the Sturlung Age which has been seen as such an influential background for the writing of the sagas, nor is there a discussion of the meaning of law in medieval societies, other than its juxtaposition made by the author to the 'heroism' that is seen as a constituent of right-wing ideology.
It is also necessary to say that some of the quotations that are in the article go amiss: The quote of Dinzelbacher on p. 6 (section 6) does not seem to support or help the argument made there, since it explicitly treats the birth of a "non-theological world-view", only in order for the next sentence to claim that a religious component is to be disregarded in the argument made - then why the quote? Also in the conclusion-section, the reference to Schmidt/Hahn (ed.) 2021 goes amiss, since none of the articles contained treat the problem of blood feuds vs. arbitrations in the sagas. Whereas in the note on the Nibelungenlied and the characterisation on Siegfried, a reference to Deichl 2019: Die Welt der Völsungen would be expectable.
Inspite of these problematics, I think the article can be reworked into a valuable piece of research with some redactions as to its structure and engagement with scholarship, and some more-indepth discussions of the saga and its problematics.
Author Response
Thank you. I believe that I have already addressed most of those issues in response to the editor's comments; you can see a lot of changes. I appreciate the care you took to evaluate my piece, and hope that you will agree with me that this is now close to your expectations.
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
I unfortunately cannot discern an outstanding development in the article, albeit I would not reject it as it stands.
The engagement with sources, especially Njáls saga, to my mind remains quite superficial, as there is no mention at all of the fight at the Alþingi in this reading focused on 'rationality', nor of the darker shades of Njáll's character (see, most prominently, Tirosh 2014: Víga-Njáll): his focus on law is also a way of asserting his own control and authority over Icelandic society. Moreover, there seems to be an almost ironic depiction of the law assemblies in the text. Njáll creates the Fifth Court in order to advance the social position of his fosterson Höskuldr, while Mörðr uses the system to his own ends, and there is a remark toward the end that some legal expert did not expect someone else to know of a specific statute that he thought only he himself and Njáll were supposed to know. I would thus read Njála as an example of rational use of the law indeed, but one that shows this use by the characters as so rational that it seems to be bordering on cynical.
However, as the article now makes quite clear that its only aim is to juxtapose the elements of law, court-processes and settlements themselves with current right-wing misappropriations and focusses on untamed violence, while acknowledging that there is plenty of that to be seen in the texts, and also stating outright that the aim "cannot be to review the vast scholarship on this and other sagas or to trace the specific issues debated and negotiated at the various Althing meetings within the text", the reading provided will be sufficient to have made the point. However, it would seem advisible to me to insert at least a footnote on what is understood as 'civilized' (beyond the negative reference to Elias 1939 on page 9). If the aim of the article is not to provide in-depth readings of textual complexities as opposed to ideological simplifications, the difference between 'rationality' and 'civilisation' (as well as their connection to each other - the 'Renaissance of the Twelfth Century' then being read as a step toward the modern system of statehood) on the one hand, and to right-wing ideology ('barbarism'?) on the other should be made even more poignant.
The article as it stands is readable and an average contribution to scholarship, being in line with typical ways of reading the texts in question, while a lot is being referenced. It remains unfortunate to my mind, however, that the discernible diligence in engagement with scholarship does not extend to studies of the individual texts in question. The idea of the article could have produced an even more interesting and novel contribution to scholarship.
It remains to be said, additionally, that the reference to Schmidt and Hahn (ed., 2021) still seems out of place, while I would still advise to refrain from the inappropriate qualifying style ("sink so low as to...").
Author Response
I appreciate the valuable comments and have responded to all of them, sometimes at length, sometimes briefly, as recommended. I have added more references, and qualified some of the comments on Njal, acknowledging the fact that he was really accumulating his own power. But I did not go so far as to call him cynical. I have also checked the entire text, correcting a little here and there. I followed the advice to replace the odd phrase (sink so low), and tried to discriminate further in my judgments. I hope that this satisfies the reader. I was not so sure what to make out of the ref. to Tirosh 2014. Thank you.
