Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 100
GRIPLA100
forces to static ideologies, rather than treating values and beliefs as part of
an evolving cultural field. Gunnar karlsson seems properly skeptical that
implied belief systems of this sort can tell us very much about why history
turns out the way it does (Gunnar Karlsson 2009). As conflicts unfolded in
the thirteenth century on a very broad canvas, certain underlying forces
favored actors with one or another set of strong beliefs. The beliefs alone
can never explain the results. unless the eventual outcomes of those
heightened struggles are treated as simply inevitable, we need to identify
the contingencies favoring their success. A civilizational approach pursues
these matters into the field of values.
evolving moral structures
Over the space of four centuries, a newly settled land passes through a suc
cession of political forms, culminating in an expanding series of regional
conflicts. the historical evidence, separated from us by nearly a thousand
years, provides structural snapshots of that development, but the process
itself must have been continuous, fluid, oblique, complex. Social scientists
may look for supplementary theories to codify these hidden dynamics,
anything from Marxism to rational choice; but the choice of such theories
is itself a matter of scholarly taste, if not a leap of faith.
Historians like Gunnar and jón viðar bring saga texts into their analy
ses – although with considerable circumspection, in light of the traditional
divide between historical and literary modes of interpretation. And yet the
most distinctive quality of the Icelandic commonwealth must surely be its
singular capacity for self-commentary in the sagas, which continued even
as the political order ceded autonomy to the Norwegian crown. Such crea
tive expression at the periphery of europe, flourishing at the margins of
kingly power and Christianizing forces, may point to dynamic undercur
rents that elude traditional history. If civilizational theory hopes to gain
from its experimental tour through early Iceland, its path must pass
through the sagas.
the notion that sagas may reveal the deeper cultural fabric of common
wealth Iceland has its own history of caution and excess. In recent decades,
scholars have sought detours around the old dichotomy of interpreting