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share a singular focus on the family of the outlaw, on the ties and ten-
sions, the conflicts and loyalties that initiate, perpetuate and conclude his
problematic biography. this raises the question whether the connection
between family issues and outlaw heroes, between the monstrous families
and the familiar monsters inside of them, is significant. to answer this
question, I draw on Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s seminal “Monster Culture
(Seven theses)”,7 in which he states that “the monster is born […] as an em-
bodiment of a certain cultural moment”.8 It “inhabits the gap between the
time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received”.9
therefore, every monster is “a double narrative: one that describes how
the monster came to be and another, its testimony, detailing what cultural
use the monster serves.”10
If one therefore understands the monster as being culturally significant
and pointing towards something beyond and outside of itself, one can read
the connection between monstrous outlaws and their families as being
culturally significant as well. By focusing on the monstrous individual and
the family around him, and on the way the monster interacts with the fam-
ily as well as to what extent the family influences the development of the
monster, the outlaw sagas direct the audience’s attention to these issues,
and to the possible social concerns underlying them. thus, it is possible to
read the double narratives of the outlaw sagas: the way in which the outlaw
becomes a monster, and the cultural use to which this is put. to advance
such a reading, however, it first needs to be established that one can in
fact read the major outlaws of the Íslendingasögur as monstrous. During
previous research on revenants in this genre, I compiled a list of features
that scholars such as Cohen or William Sayers noted as the “hallmarks” of
(revenant) monstrosity, while also adding my own observations.11 These
features are hybridity – and the closely connected notion of transgression
7 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven theses),” Monster Theory: Reading Culture,
ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: university of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3–25.
8 Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 4.
9 Ibid., 4.
10 Ibid., 13.
11 William Sayers, “the alien and alienated as unquiet Dead in the Sagas of Icelanders,”
Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: university of
Minnesota Press, 1996), 242–63 and see rebecca Merkelbach, “Hann lá eigi kyrr: revenants
and a Haunted Past in the Sagas of Icelanders” (MPhil thesis, university of Cambridge,
2012).
“HE HaS LonG forfEItED aLL KInSHIP tIES”