Gripla - 20.12.2016, Page 305

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It’s also the case that even saga scenes quite distant from actual lawsuits
can have the quality of legal exchanges. the dialogue in the York episode
of Egils saga between Queen Gunnhildr and arinbjörn sounds for all the
world like a colloquy between prosecution and defense. Even dinner
conversations can sound lawyerly in the sagas. or business transactions.
or women’s gossip. In Ljósvetninga saga we see a mock trial as household
entertainment. (a mock trial is one in which ordinary people act out im-
aginary court scenarios. Even in my rural high school, doing mock trials
was a requirement in social studies classes.) the sagas show us a world in
which even children can be figured as imitating trials. In Njála we see boys
playing a game in which one says “I’ll be Mör∂r and divorce you from your
wife.” to which another replies “then I’ll be Hrútr and invalidate your
dowry claim.” as Gisli Sigurðsson reminds us, the sagas suggest that young
boys were expected to learn the law, tutored by legal experts.
one could say that what’s been called the anglo trial’s “peculiar episte-
mology” also amounts to a kind of cultural operating system. that’s what
alexis de tocqueville thought (though he didn’t use the term “operating
system”). a french historian and thinker, tocqueville went to the u.S. in
1830 to study the workings of democracy there. His two-volume ethnogra-
phy devotes a long and crucial section to the cultural force of the american
legal system. Mainly because of the institution of the jury, he thought,
that system had “penetrated beyond the walls” of the american courtroom
out into the very “bosom of society,” affecting all classes and all manner of
political and cultural life, right down to “the games of schoolboys.” think
of that: Icelandic saga kids and nineteenth-century american kids both
playing trial-games.
the reason tocqueville was so struck by the “trialness” of american
culture is that it wasn’t that way at home in france – or, for that matter,
the rest of the Continent. My own research into trial movies suggests that,
to a considerable extent, this remains the case. Here’s a statistic: in film
alone, u.S. production alone, and the sound period alone (ca. 1930 on),
I’ve so far found close to 1800 titles of explicit trial films, as opposed to
the low hundreds from the same period in Continental Europe – a ratio
of roughly 8:1.
and that’s just film. there’s also a long anglo tradition of popular
court room novels and theater, as well as television series like Perry Mason,
SAME FRAME