Within and Without Family in the Icelandic Sagas (Three Old Norse Saga Studies) (Essay‪)‬

This essay raises an issue that has long had a central place in Icelandic saga studies, but which I think will reward further discussion, that is, the representation of family life. Recent studies of this aspect of the sagas have yielded interesting results, particularly in the specific context of the contemporary sagas, or sagas that were written at around the same time as the events they describe. When, in 1998, Gudrun Nordal wrote that 'every individual in the saga [Islendinga saga], of social importance or of little means, has a well-defined role to play and the exact family and social relations underscore the action at every level', (2) she was both confirming a long-held sense of the sagas as family documents and surprising us with just how intense family meaning was in the action and ethical dimensions of the narratives. Her study, it seemed, gave very precise support to an earlier contention that had been made by Margaret Clunies Ross, namely, that fundamental 'to the medieval literary and historiographical tradition of which Islendinga saga forms the conclusion is a conception of history as family generated and family linked'. (3) Both the family and contemporary sagas appear to integrate family matters in all aspects of the stories they tell; family is the central and unifying cultural concern of saga authors and their contemporaries. Thus, conflicts in family and contemporary sagas most often have a basis in family life. Allegiances within and between families help create a sense of a logical progression in the majority of disputes, at least as much as do perceived gains or losses in honour, another popular area of inquiry for scholars interested in the basis of saga characters' decision-making. (4) When the underlying framework of family life becomes apparent in the narrative, whether in the large quantities of genealogical information, in stories of the tensions that develop because of kinship obligations, or in sagas taken up entirely with a single family, we find expressed an underlying assumption that a saga is the means by which authors record, define, and interpret family life. If a saga is history, it is history as family biography, and very seldom abstracted beyond the domestic perspectives of key protagonists and their relations.