The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.2006, Blaðsíða 31

Vol. 60 #1
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
29
and the marriage partners of your children.
It was your very being. Honour was then
not just a matter of the individual; it neces-
sarily involved a group, and the group
included all those people worthy of com-
peting with you for honour. 13
And "it has long been noted that
shame is the flipside of honour."14 Thus to
maintain honour, any insult or slight
intended to shame the individual was a very
real threat to that individual. "In Iceland,
loss of honour signalled that the individual
was incapable of defending either himself
or his property.1'15 This helps to explain
how we can go from a person first being
insulted in some way, to that person
responding with violence." The sagas
reveal that medieval Icelanders, living in an
honour-based culture, perceived little dif-
ference in the amount of wrong done by a
blow or by a verbal insult, even a homicide
or an insult. Verbal affronts and physical
affronts were collapsed into a single gener-
al category of impingements on one's self
and one's honour."16
There is, however, a problem with
labelling the struggle to maintain honour as
the root cause of much of the violent
actions or harsh feuds. "The sagas show
that some people were remarkably skillful
in maintaining honour without having to
settle every account, even some pretty big
accounts."17 The importance of honour in
the Icelandic saga society remains undi-
minished, but the response to a threat to
ones honour was not always blood-shed.
Indeed "honour was always sensitive to
context and circumstance. Bloodtaking was
not the only course of honour. In certain
settings honour could be won by making
peace, by ignoring an insult, even by for-
giving."18 Likewise, not all feud which did
result in violence seems to have stemmed
from honour in the first place.
Besides honour, a possible explanation
for the origin of the numerous violent
feuds in saga Iceland has been presented as
love and all of its related emotions—or
more specifically, the ways in which love
and all of its related emotions would spur
the characters into action:
What our analyses have shown is that
among a number of the longest and best
sagas from the classical period, we can
identify two types of causes for the bloody
and tragic conflicts. That is, in addition to
the first pattern, consisting of the drive for
achievement and the appetite for wealth
and honour, there exists a second pattern
based on the erotic drive, which—whether
freely acted upon or thwarted—may set in
motion sequences of events catastrophic to
the small society in which they take place:
collisions between rules—whether legal or
customary—and individuals who trans-
gress the rules.19 "when things go wrong in
a saga it is usually because the two patterns
of honour and love have merged and work
together."20 It may seem somewhat ironic
that love should be the root of eventual
violence. But it is just as much of a poten-
tially volatile emotion today as it must have
been in saga Iceland (if the sagas are any
indication). Much of the time, when things
begin to go terribly wrong it does have
something to do with love, lust, or that ever
present phenomenon "which lurks in the
shadow of love:"21 jealousy. "Nobody
denies that jealousy is closely related to
love. The one who loves is always worried
that his love will be taken away from him,
that his beloved may start loving somebody
else."22 If we consider what impact such a
scenario would have on one's standing in
society—on one's honour—we can see
how dangerous this combination of emo-
tions could have been.
Consider the events of Laxdxla Saga.
This particular saga is perhaps best known
for its depiction of the love triangle
between Kjartan, Gudrun and Bolli, and
certainly things did not go smoothly for
any of these characters because of it. But
what is especially interesting to note is that
there were plenty of other events in the
saga which could presumably have instigat-
ed the desire for vengeance, but it is not
until love (or rather unattainable love) is
introduced that things truly begin to fall
apart:
The saga narrative has related numer-
ous conflicts between men up to this point,
but the conflicts between such major char-
acters have not been insoluble. Conciliators
like Hrut and Olaf have always been able
to prevent the worst. For the first time