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violent action. This designation is too limiting, because the desire for
revenge can be the motivation for any form of resolution, whether ar-
rived at through private arbitration or by legal action.4 Heusler’s con-
centration on the aggrieved party’s desire for satisfaction (Genugtuung)
provides only part, albeit an important part, of the whole picture of
resolution. Dispute settlement as it is presented in the sagas is dependent
on the operation of preexisting systems of legal and social relationships.
Although Heusler considers legal issues, he passes over the fact that
community satisfaction rather than justice for an injured party was
usually the deciding factor in arranging a settlement.
More recently Theodore Andersson has considered the resolution of
dispute through purely literary concepts.5 He describes three ways in
which Icelanders arrived at the settlement of a dispute: (1) self-judg-
ment; (2) agreement by the “antagonists” that a neutral arbitrator make
a binding decision; and (3) establishment of an arbitrating commission
to which both “litigants” appointed representatives. Because Andersson
based his categories on literary modes, he did not consider societal and
legal undercurrents. In keeping with this approach, his categories are
severely limited because of his need to fit whole sagas into his six-part
syntagmatic order. For example, Andersson’s first category, sjálfdœmi
(self-judgment), is only one of many possible types of settlement which
could be arrived at directly between individuals.6 His second and third
categories are really two related forms of arbitration: by an individual
and by a commission. The number of arbitrators intervening in a dispute
depended more on circumstances than on an inherent difference be-
tween two forms of arbitration. Andersson’s distinction holds up only as
a differentiation between subcategories of arbitration; it does not define
two separate kinds of resolution. What Andersson seems to be saying by
using the terms “antagonists” in the first category of arbitration and
“litigants” in the second is that the distinction between the two lies in
whether or not a dispute was settled through a court case.7 If my inter-
5 The Icelandic Family Saga: An Analytic Reading (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1967), p. 25.
6 To confuse matters even further, Andersson states on the same page (ibid.,
p. 25) that “self-judgment is never used as a final solution in the reconciliation
section of a saga”; apparently he has forgotten the moving scene at the end of
Vápnfirðinga saga {ÍF 11, ch. 19). See also Icelandic Family Saga, pp. 277-278.
7 This supposition is reinforced by Andersson’s statement made a few pages
later when discussing revenge: “In about half of the sagas the termination of con-