Gripla - 20.12.2009, Síða 230

GRIPLA230
individuals faced between violence and compromise”49 in the free State,
one could argue that from his standpoint the reference to fate is used as a
justification for resorting to violence or at least for evading consensual
solutions.
There are reasons to believe that in their own way, each of these three
accounts of the role of fate in the sagas are misleading, one­sided: mainly
because they do not give due consideration to the way in which the meta­
physics of fate is related to the ideology of honour that is rooted in cultural
conditions which are foreign to the new Icelandic society. The metaphysics
of fate provides a perfect background to the old morality of unconditional
honour, the rigid imperative of revenge, which does not give people much
leeway for deliberation and doubt but provides them with an interpretative
key to their personal existence and social world. When the conditions that
nourished this old morality are undermined in the transformation of the
ethos in the Icelandic free State, the bonds of the metaphysics of fate
inevitably slacken and a space opens up for a rationalizing use of the idea.
This goes hand in hand with the opening up of options between respond­
ing to the imperative of revenge on the one hand, and adopting a more
consensual view towards honourable conflict resolution on the other.
Playing on a famous title by John Rawls, I will suggest that what is of pri­
mary importance for the distinctive morality and civilization described in
the sagas is political, not metaphysical.
II
In my discussion so far I have tried to show how different interpretations
of the sagas lead to different understandings of sœmd. But there is another
general value that is prominent in the sagas, though it is more in the back­
ground of the narrative. this is the value of peace and the related cluster
concepts of grið, sættir and other things conducive to peace. Some of the
sagas show how the traditional ideal of unconditional sœmd, which is asso­
ciated with the standing of individuals and families, clashes with efforts to
secure peace which is of general interest to society as a whole. Vésteinn
Ólason has called this “the tension between the desire for revenge and the
49 Byock, Viking Age Iceland, 2.