The Dynamics of Medieval Iceland: Political Economy & Literature

As witness to four hundred years of social, economic, and political change, the sagas of medieval Iceland provide access not only to a single energetic past but to processes of continual change. In this innovative book, which connects the political economy of medieval Iceland and its rich cultural artifacts, E. Paul Durrenberger brings anthropological perspectives to bear on the study of medieval Iceland and brings medieval Iceland into the purview of anthropology. The social order of stratified, stateless medieval Iceland contained a dynamism that inexorably led to the discord of the Sturlung age. Icelanders interpreted their experiences within existing cultural categories and from these interpretations produced the family sagas and the Sturlung sagas. Durrenberger convincingly argues that the sagas are not simply thirteenth-century accounts of earlier times but also the cultural artifacts of the age that created them; moreover, the free translations of the sagas are really nineteenth- and twentieth-century artifacts that impose market and modern state perspectives on the radically different society of medieval Iceland. The rendering of the sagas as a political act revaluing honor, reciprocity, and law can be understood only in the cultural context of their time. For anthropologists unfamiliar with the Icelandic tradition, Durrenberger meticulously illustrates his arguments with contextual analyses of saga plots and episodes. He presents his anthropological theses in a way that will enlighten historians, social scientists, and saga and other literary scholars. By addressing methodological issues of translation and contextualization and using sophisticated models of medieval domestic economy and cross-cultural comparisons, The Dynamics of Medieval Iceland serves as an exemplary case study in the expansion of social contexts for literary analysis as well as in the anthropological use of literary and historical data.


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