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ethical models portrayed in the sagas of the Icelanders are shared by
Christian medieval culture at large, both in their condemnation of pagan
conduct and in their presentation of Christian ideas. Both the romantic
and the humanistic interpretations can be substantiated by textual refer
ences. But they are limited by their guiding hermeneutic ideas that saga
morality can be analysed primarily in terms of the moral conceptions or
ethical elements – values, virtues, rules and obligations – as such, without
inquiring about the particular shape they take in the context of medieval
Iceland. In this way, these positions prematurely and erroneously invite
comparisons with other cultures. For example, the virtues of the Greek
megalopsychos are nurtured by a moral context which is radically different
from the “modern” ethos and will, therefore, hardly be revived within it.
While similar basic features of morality can be found in every social
interaction, they take on a distinctive shape in their interplay with the par
ticular culture of which they are a part. Although there is a common core at
the surface or at the abstract level, a study of a concrete, socially condi
tioned morality cannot isolate the moral elements from the social context.22
If this is not taken into account, then otherwise interesting interpretations
of saga morality are endangered by subjectivistic and idealistic reduction
ism, reducing saga morality to abstract moral values, religious ideas or
personal character traits. Such interpretations deal with the subject matter
without tracing its roots to the socio-moral substance: the duties and
norms of conduct that were peculiar to the Free State, and their relation to
the social institutions and political processes which enveloped the distinc
tive ethos of saga society.
It is here that the third interpretation of saga morality marks its field of
investigation. It is difficult to generalize about sociological readings of the
sagas but they account for individual actions portrayed in the sagas in light
of the social structures and political institutions, or rather the lack of them,
in the Icelandic free State.23 Such readings of the sagas have enabled us to
place actions and attitudes in a social setting against which they can be bet
ter understood. one of the most interesting and important questions in
22 for an interesting discussion of this point and its relation to relativism, see Stuart
Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Harvard: Harvard university Press, 1987), 36–43.
23 See, for example, Gísli Pálsson, ed. From Sagas to Society. Comparative Approaches to Early
Iceland (London: Hisarlik Press, 1992), and Richard Gaskins, ”félagsvísindamannasaga”,
Skírnir (1997): 237–259.
An etHoS In tRAnSfoRMAtIon