Viking Justice

Print copies available here: http://www.cambridgescholars.com/ideology-and-power-in-norway-and-iceland-1150-1250

When one brings up the Nordic peoples of the Viking Age in a conversation, the image that comes to the minds of most people is one of bloodthirsty barbarians ravaging and plundering their way across Europe. Unless being discussed among historians, professional or otherwise, they are not likely to know of the highly complex social structure of the Nordic people during this period. One such area of this complex social structure is law. For instance, unless one is a student of this period, or a linguist, one is not likely to know that the English word "law" comes from the Old Norse word lag. Moreover, just as modern law can be twisted to benefit the unjust, so too could the law during the Viking Age. However, during that time there was a way in Iceland and Norway for a litigant to achieve the justice sought by a faster route than a suit. Anyone could challenge his opponent to a duel called an hólmganga. It is this aspect of Nordic law, the hólmganga, and its regulations, use, abuse, and possible fictionalization that will be discussed herein.

skemman.is

The Icelandic Free State (c.930-1262) is well known as a model of ‘a feuding society,’ due to its unique social system based on the principle of feuding without any jurisdiction by a king. Iceland came under the rule of a Norwegian king in the early 1260s, and it is generally thought that feuds in Iceland came to an end as a result of the royal legislation introduced from 1271. This paper reconsiders this assumption and aims to reveal the legal practice under kingship in late 13th-century Iceland and its relation to the state formation there. Although the information available to us is limited, it does indicate that people kept on feuding long after submitting to the rule of the king. At the same time, the king’s policy was executed by his representatives through institutions such as the summons to Norway or the oath of fidelity, which were based on the new royal law-code. However, the king did not delegate his power to the Icelandic king’s men as much as he did to Norwegian representatives; the Icelandic king’s men also worked for the king, but they did not become the receiver of the oath of fidelity to the king. There was also discrepancy on the matter of the subjects’ obligation between the king and Icelanders: the king, as rex iustus, began to demand absolute obedience from his subjects, but Icelanders were not always aware of it. They maintained their traditional ways of participating in decision making with their ruler, such as feuds or negotiations at assemblies, and the king could not readily prevent them. In the period of the 1270-80s, Iceland was no longer a purely feuding society, and the centralisation of legislative and judicial power in the hands of the king was actually progressed; nevertheless, it should be noted that Icelanders tended to retain their traditional ways, regardless of the demands of the Norwegian king.

Wiley-Blackwell, 2012

Stephen Pax Leonard is a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and a Research Associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute. Educated at the University of Oxford, he studied modern and ancient languages before developing interests in linguistic and existential anthropology. He has carried out both linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. More recently, he spent a year living with the Inugguit of north-west Greenland who live in the northern-most permanently inhabited settlement in the world, documenting their vulnerable minority language and spoken traditions.

Saga book..., 1895

2014

The present study scrutinizes the outlawry and outlaws that appear in the Icelandic Family Sagas. It provides a thorough description about outlawry on the basis of extant law and saga texts as well as an analysis of referential connotations attached to it. The concept of outlawry was fundamental for the medieval Icelanders conceptions of their past. Indeed, understanding outlawry is essential for understanding many of the Family Sagas. Outlaws appear in saga texts in significant roles. The Icelandic Family Sagas comprise a group of prose narratives that were written down in the 13th and 14th century Iceland. They are based on events and personae that belong to the 10th century Iceland. These narratives introduce many outlaws, out of which some 75 are named. The Family Sagas are studied here as one corpus and special emphasis is given to those narrative features that repetitively appear in connection with outlawry and the outlaw characters. Therefore, the eventual objects of this study are the medieval Icelanders general conceptions of the historical outlawry as well as the variations of these conceptions throughout the period of saga writing. The medieval Icelanders general conceptions about the 10th 11th century, which are reflected in the Family Sagas, are here referred to as the Saga World. The Saga World is the historically based taleworld to which all of the Family Sagas refer. The medieval law texts, which were derived from centuries old legislative traditions, reveal that outlawry meant banishing from the society and being denied all help, and that the outlawed person lost the protection of the law. In practice, outlawry was a death sentence. However, outlaws occupy many differing roles in the saga narratives even in connection with recurrent narrative motifs. These roles reflect the social and spatial structures of the Saga World. The inspection of outlawry within these structures reveals that the definition of outlawry as it appears in the law texts is insufficient for understanding outlawry in the saga texts. The social and spatial structures also provide a basis for the connotations of outlawry. In this study, these connotations are inspected primarily from the referential connections between outlawry in the Family Sagas and corresponding phenomena in other concurrent literature. This is done by studying the implementations of the basic elements of outlawry in the Family Sagas marginalization, banishing, rejection and solitariness within other literary genres and the taleworlds to which they refer. It is argued that these taleworlds reflect the same ideas that were associated with outlawry in the Family Sagas albeit in different forms and that these different forms reciprocally contributed to the conceptions of outlawry. The variety of denotations and connotations of outlawry that is visible in the medieval Icelandic texts reflects the ambiguity of outlawry in the Family Sagas. This ambiguity may shed light to questions such as why an outlaw could be perceived as a hero in a literary genre that predominantly promoted law and order and why the same outlaw could be perceived as a villain on another occasion.

2012

Last proofs. The book is almost sold out but a few last copies can still be purchased here: http://haskolautgafan.hi.is/node/880

When Grettir is sentenced to full outlawry he is declared a 'skógarmǫnnum,' literally a forest-man. The existing English translations render this title as 'outlaw.' 'Skógarmǫnnum' carries more significant implications than 'outlaw' conveys and attention to the use of the word in 'Grettis Saga' and the 'Grágás' gives us a greater understanding of the role of the much loved, wild and solitary hero.