Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 99
99
A civilizational perspective helps push us across this narrow bridge
between historical studies and literary interpretation, while encouraging
frequent return trips in both directions (jóhann Páll Árnason 2003, 5, 52,
217). If the mediating path crosses through the field of moral values, we
need a more dynamic conception of how those values enter into the flow
of history and saga narrative. Taking values as a cultural pivot, we may
come to understand the transformative powers embedded in historical
causes. By way of contrast, we know of two scholarly strategies that fail to
perform this connection between sagas and standard history, both of which
make the fatal assumption that the secret of development lies entirely
within individual agency. One such strategy uses exchange models, ration
al actors, and efficiency concepts to intensify the strength imputed to indi
vidual actors in charting their own historical destiny. (Some of these
approaches have been critically examined by Sverre Bagge, including the
mantra that “nothing succeeds like success” [1991, 96].) Such methods
invariably downplay the complex social environments in which individuals
assert their presumed power. Stories from the Sturlunga compilation pro
vide us with tempting portraits of just such powerful personalities, and it
seems plausible enough that increasingly large political domains (ríki)
allowed their powerful masters to become more “effective” or “efficient” in
12thcentury Iceland. But unless one reads the sagas solely for the plot, this
line of interpretation has serious limits. Whether powerful individuals
earn success or defeat depends also on the horizons of possibility available
to them under actual circumstances (possibilities alluded to in the subtle
framing qualities of saga narrative). even the strongest agents must take
their chances in ambiguous action arenas, where limits are not fully speci
fied, where outcomes are field-contingent, and where cultural ironies
abound. In using saga evidence, we need to attend both to agents and to the
more elusive cultural fields in which their actions play out.
A second flawed method for supplementing history projects back onto
individual actors a set of intentions or ideologies that are presumed to be
sufficiently powerful to produce historical change. For example, in order
to rescue the agency of Icelanders at various stages of political develop
ment, it is tempting to assign them a prior belief system that devalues
kingship. (It is also possible, according to Ármann Jakobsson [1997], to
posit the opposite belief.) But such projections tend to reduce cultural
CReAtInG At tHe MARGInS