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shame (and honour), however, by contrasting it with guilt (and conscience)
is a more recent phenomenon. William Ian Miller utilises the concept in a
particularly clear manner: “the core belief at the heart of most revenge
cultures is that man is more naturally a chicken than a wolf. Thus [sic]
revenge cultures are invariably shame cultures …”.19 Miller is explicit in his
application of the terms shame and honour to characterise medieval
Icelandic culture and he cites Kant to explain the difference between dig­
nity and anything with a price, like honour.20
The first move of those who aim at liberating honour, as found in saga
literature, is to undermine this distinction. Hence they embrace the third
thesis outlined above and argue against the usefulness and even the legiti­
macy of the shame­guilt antithesis. As one of the objectives of this thesis is
to make ancient Greek morality more readily intelligible to modern read­
ers, or even an alternative to modern conceptions, so, when applied to
Icelandic medieval morality, the aim is to rehabilitate the positive notion of
honour (rather than the negative one of shame, interestingly enough).
Þorsteinn Gylfason, eschewing completely the sociological approach,
argues for a timeless conception of honour, according to which it is in fact
understood in the same way in the modern world (particularly Iceland) as
it is in the world of the sagas. Further, he argues along the lines of Bernard
Williams that “[t]here is, in Greek tragedy as well as in an Icelandic saga,
plenty of room for a higher honour, independent of received opinion. In
our time too.”21 A similar idea informs the work of Kristján Kristjánsson
in his attempt to portray the saga moral outlook “as an atemporal, universal
moral outlook”.22 He takes over Williams’ repudiation of the guilt­shame
antithesis but goes further than Williams and in a rather surprising direc­
tion, as will presently become clear.
Here we approach the use made of the fourth thesis, that of utilising
Aristotelian virtue ethics in an effort to understand and liberate saga moral­
ity. In short, saga morality bears a resemblance to the morality championed
by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, in particular Aristotle’s description
19 William Ian Miller, Eye for an Eye (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2006), 96;
cf. his Bloodtaking and Peacemaking, 29, 302–3.
20 William Ian Miller, Eye for an Eye, 99–100 and 130–32.
21 Þorsteinn Gylfason, “Introduction,” Njal’s Saga (Ware: Wordsworth, 1998), xxviii–xxx.
22 kristján kristjánsson, “Liberating Moral traditions: Saga Morality and Aristotle’s Mega­
lopsychia,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1 (1998): 407.
HonouR AnD SHAMe