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sagas as either historical fact or literary fiction (Gísli Pálsson 1992). the
most common route has been to treat sagas as repositories of cultural val
ues contemporary with their time of composition. According to this
approach, even if we reject their historical references as literal truth, the
sagas remain undiminished as cultural artifacts, and thus as normative evi
dence of some kind. But this approach does not require us to regard the
sagas as embracing a fixed scheme of values, any more than we accept
timeless structures in historical or sociological studies. If Icelandic social
history evolved over a period of four centuries, we would expect to find
comparable movement at the level of norms, impelled by parallel forces.
The pattern of evolution amid conflict should apply just as well to cultural
values.
this dynamic perspective is often missing from social scientific studies
of norms. Some anthropologists, for example, have tried to import the
sagas into their professional domain as a type of alien “culture” ripe for
antiquarian field studies. But their efforts have achieved mixed results.
Anthropologists may overstate the coherence of value systems, in the same
way that static models flourish in studies of Icelandic law, politics, and
social structures. In their zeal to bring their discipline to bear on saga texts,
social scientists have managed to distort the narrative complexities of saga
writing (Gaskins 1997). They may also be captives of their own cultural
assumptions, which oscillate between treating value systems as either
consensusbased or conflictbased. Consensus theories led to the reductive
arguments of structural/functionalism, while conflict theories impose a
contrived disorder on the texture of moral life.
A promising approach to exploring values in Icelandic sagas and society
has been presented by philosopher Vilhjálmur Árnason, starting with his
seminal essay (1985). Reviewing past efforts to find moral content in the
sagas, vilhjálmur notes the tendency of interpreters to reduce the contents
of saga texts to one or more moral ideologies. It is common enough, for
example, for interpreters to find a finished set of Christian moral beliefs in
various sagas, either replacing or in serious conflict with an opposing
“pagan” moral system. Vilhjálmur questions whether we should read sagas
as advocating (or contesting) such monolithic belief systems, especially
when these systems have been defined centuries later by critics with their
own cultural agendas. Following Hermann Pálson’s terminology, Vil-
CReAtInG At tHe MARGInS