Madness, Disability and Social Exclusion by Jane Hubert

Author:Jane Hubert [Hubert, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415230025
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 8259620
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2000-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

9 Impaired and inspired: the makings of a medieval Icelandic poet

LOIS BRAGG

Anyone interested in narratives depicting social exclusion finds the medieval Icelandic Family Sagas an embarrassment of riches. In this large and impressive body of anonymous, vernacular literature we find the social margins overflowing with Irish slaves, Saami sorcerers, Swedish goons, Hebridean witches, discarded concubines, disabled Viking veterans, paranoid old men, teenaged mass murderers, poor widows with half-witted sons, poets lurking around large estates to seduce farmers’ daughters or wives, to name but a few.

The tenth- and early eleventh-century Settlement Era in which the Family Sagas are set was a grand social experiment in a stateless society. Law and order were effected, in theory, by consensus among propertied men, led by those who earned the widest respect for their judgement. By the thirteenth century, however, when the earliest Family Sagas were written, Iceland society was in collapse. The shrinking oligarchy that traced its origin to the great men of the settlement generation was unable to maintain social order or even personal safety, and eventually submitted the erstwhile Commonwealth to Norwegian rule. The Family Sagas, written by and for this foundering elite, are thus best regarded as a nostalgic enterprise, a wistful look back at the fancied origins of a society that ultimately failed. As such, they document a spontaneous endeavour to manufacture a palpable myth of origins, and it is in this light that the colourful social margins of the saga world are to be considered.

The myth-making function of the Family Sagas can be illustrated by their stereotypical ascriptions of ethnic origins to various stock characters. The prominent settlers to whom the elite of the saga public traced their lineages are said again and again to have been mighty landowners in south-western Norway, who emigrated to Iceland because of their fierce independence and proud refusal to submit to the nascent monarchy. In fact, however, we know that many of the prominent settlers came not directly from Norway but rather from northern and western coastal areas of the British Isles, where their fathers would have been landless Norwegian adventurers and their mothers local Celtic girls.

Even those among the settlers who came directly from Norway, however, were likely to have been of similar mixed ethnicity because south-western Norway had long enjoyed economic, cultural, and blood ties with the Celtic North Atlantic seaboard. So, when the sagas depict blue-blooded Norse settlers heroically destroying treacherous Irish slaves and malign Hebridean witches, we properly read this social scenario in light of the anxieties of the latter-day Icelanders, who were struggling to come to terms with Norwegian hegemony while editing their genealogies. In other words, thirteenth-century Icelanders seem to have been salving their pride by mythically eliminating the historic Celtic elements in their society, and imagining a pure Norwegian ancestry that would explain their present submission to Norway as reunion with the putative homeland.

Modern readers of the sagas, when confronted with such unabashed classism and racism (not to mention the even more egregious sexism), are sometimes

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