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Byock.14 Vilhjálmur Árnason has made use of Byock’s work and seems to
accept MacIntyre’s basic idea: “we need to understand [the morality of the
sagas] in terms of the social structure of the sagas.”15 utilising the Hegelian
distinction between reflective Moralität and unreflective Sittlichkeit, the
institutionalised ethical order of saga society, he argues that “the saga
Sittlichkeit is characterized by an aporia that creates a sociomoral conflict
which is of the essence in the sagas.”16 this conflict seems generated by the
dominance, within this institutionalised ethical order, of competitive virtues
created by the demands of honour, at the cost of cooperative virtues: “the
conflict that exists between the unconditional morality of personal honor
and the social need for peace which promotes more conciliatory values”.17
While MacIntyre is concerned with addressing the ancient Greek moral
outlook and explicitly compares it with the medieval Icelandic one, neither
Byock nor Vilhjálmur place any weight on comparing the medieval Icelandic
social world to an ancient Greek one. What I shall suggest in the next sec­
tion, however, is that MacIntyre’s conception of heroic societies, indebted as
it is to accounts of honour in Homeric society, is conceptually flawed in a
manner that seemingly tends to mark discussions of cultures of honour.
Now for the ambitious aim of liberating honour and shame for the
modern world. The first thesis of the previous section laid down a distinc­
tion between shame-cultures and guilt-cultures. This distinction was based
on the conspicuous role that honour played in Archaic Greek culture, a role
no less conspicuous in medieval Icelandic culture. that role has been clear
for a long time, as it has in the case of the Greeks, although the inferences
drawn in the case of medieval Icelandic culture have varied.18 Presenting
14 See jesse Byock, Feud in the Icelandic Sagas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: university of
California Press, 1982), and Viking Age Iceland (London: Penguin, 2001); see also William
Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago:
university of Chicago Press, 1990).
15 vilhjálmur Árnason, “Morality and Social Structure in the Icelandic Sagas,” Journal of
English and Germanic Philology 90/2 (1991): 157–74, at 162), and see also his “Saga og sið­
ferði: Hugleiðingar um túlkun á siðfræði íslendingasagna,” Tímarit Máls og menningar 46
(1985): 21–37.
16 vilhjálmur Árnason, “Morality and Social Structure in the Icelandic Sagas,” 164.
17 Ibid., 168.
18 See Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære, especially ch. 9, and Helgi Þorláksson,
who offers an overview in his “Inngangur” in Sæmdarmenn, eds. Helgi Þorláksson et al.
(Reykjavík: Hugvísindastofnun Háskóla íslands, 2001), 7–13.