Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Page 174

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William Sayers
legal experts, entertainers, and others called on to travel outside their normal
environment offamily, clan and túathrights, responsibilities andobligations. The
hostels should be seen as dynamic but relatively secure nodes in the early Celtic
social organization characterized by interaction and exchange of various kinds,
not least of information. In the absence of more detailed description, we can only
conjecture as to what degree the hostellers served as brokers or middlemen in
various transactions more and less material in nature. And whether the Norse in
the West retained impressions of social reality or story-telling convention, they
would have known of the hostels as situated prominently on trafficked roads,
large or otherwise prominent structures that, ostensibly offering hospitality, were
also intended to make entry almost inevitable, in order to maximize the hosteller’s
potential gain in social standing from all traffic in the area. Although we have
little evidence as to the benefits of non-commercial hostelry in Ireland other than
the prominence and good reputation that accrued in a society that valued
generosity, assumption of the briugus responsibilities was a way to move up the
social ladder, which meant legal empowerment and the possibility of entering
contractual and jural relations with greater stakes.
To what extent this insdtudon could have been successfully transferred to
Iceland in its first six decades we can only speculate on the meagre basis of motifs
in the historical literature from an appreciably later period.26 But if land allotment
was complete, as reported, within this period, some landholders of modest but
adequate means, especially women who through choice or circumstance were
making their own way and did not have resources for lavish gift-giving, may have
opted for the rather risky investment in public good will that a guest-house may
have offered.27 In the three examples, we note a slight degree of social alterity: a
man with a foreign nickname, a divorced woman, and a widow. For the women,
their prior experience in household management would be directly applicable in
this more exclusive focus on hospitality. In the family sagas depicting the evolved
social and economic circumstances of a century and more later we still find
women, like Gróa of Fljótsdœla saga, who eschew marriage in favor of liberal
independence.28 Our evidence for hostels in early Iceland is spare in the extreme
26 1 am acutely aware that these proposals are made in a near complete vacuum as concerns the
economic circumstances of the land-takers and the first generation of Icelanders, and in
particular as to how a hosteller function might be fitted into the better known social and
economic structure. A limited selection of relevant studies, which provide orientation to the
problem without squarely addressing it, may be cited: Björn Þorsteinsson 1966, Byock 1988,
Gelsinger 1981, Gísli Pálsson 1991, Gunnar Karlsson 1972, 1977, Gurevich 1986, Hastrup
1985,Jakob Benediktsson 1969, 1974,Jón Viðar Sigurðsson 1989, Jón Haukurlngimundarson
1992, Kalifa 1967, McGovern et al. 1988, Skúli V. Guðjónsson 1949, and Tomasson 1980.
27 In a later generation modest surpluses might be invested in joint overseas trading but this activity
seems less likely during the settlement years.
28 The Norse settlement of Shetland has left little trace of any prior Celtic or other population. It
would be of interest to know whether the medieval saga public perceived Droplaug and Gróa
from Norse Shetland, like immigrants from the Hebrides, as having a Celtic tinge - or even a
Pictish one.