Gripla - 20.12.2009, Side 96

GRIPLA96
political structures leave unsettled these key dynamic questions. He
reminds us of the truism that political power has an inherent tendency
toward consolidation, but acknowledges that such general assumptions fail
to specify the particular mechanisms through which the competitive strug­
gle played out across the commonwealth period, with its destructive out­
come (Gunnar karlsson 2004, 314). He is also properly skeptical about
some conventional dynamic explanations, including imputed belief systems
or ideologies attributed to Icelandic settlers (e.g. the desire to be free of
Norwegian precedents, the desire to establish “democratic” associations)
(Gunnar Karlsson 2009). And it is likewise problematic to personalize
complex political trends by attributing historical agency to saga protago­
nists featured in the Sturlunga compilation. for the historian, these saga­
mediated personalities explain both more and less than we would like to
know. In short, even with the most prodigious historical research on
political structures, we are left with an intriguing set of questions about
underlying dynamic forces of development.
A similar set of questions arise from the work of historian Jón Viðar
Sigurðsson, who posits a series of structural shifts in the political order
during the commonwealth era (1999). In contrast to Gunnar’s analysis, Jón
believes that an “unstable” goðar system probably never conformed in fact
to the formal prescriptions found in Grágás. He outlines multiple stages in
which political power could have evolved from early decentralized allianc­
es, soon after settlement, to the consolidation of power in family domains,
and ultimately to fatal competition. the evidence for this more fluid pat­
tern remains speculative, and it requires bolder assumptions about how the
historian might weave saga texts into the scholarly tapestry. And the civili­
zational theorist can still ask what particular forces drove these multiple
structural shifts. Jón suggests a wider range of explanations for his struc­
tural shifts: population density, the consolidation of wealth within fami­
lies, increasing scale of landholding, new ideologies of power imported
from Norway, control over church properties. But historians everywhere
face the common difficulty of showing how such broad causes can serve as
“mechanisms” of development in concrete situations. the dynamic orienta­
tion of civilizational theory points to a new kind of approach, and in doing
so pushes interpretation further in the direction of the sagas.
Like Gunnar, Jón is willing to supplement the historical record with