The Narrative of Social Order in Sturla Þórðarson’s

• Main Author: Richard Gaskins
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.535.5367; http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~alvismal/4order.pdf

responsibility. But the most frequent reason why men desire to hurt each other, ariseth hence, that many men at the same time have an Appetite to the same thing; which yet very often they can neither enjoy in common, nor yet divide it; whence it follows that the strongest must have it, and who is strongest must be decided by the Sword. — Thomas Hobbes, De cive ([1651] 1983, 46) he final decades of the Icelandic Commonwealth, as portrayed in Sturla Þórðarson’s masterpiece, provide a rich field of speculation for students of social order. For today’s readers, the saga seems to offer a classic Hobbesian tale of escalating violence, as a stable but fragile public order degenerates into nasty, brutish competition among powerful chieftains. From the perspective of modern nationalist movements, it provides an early, medi-eval warning of the high price paid by polities that are too weak to control the conflicting ambitions of strong individuals. Given the historical distance of these events, however, is it reasonable to connect this thirteenth-century perspective on contemporary events with the social dilemmas of our own century? For one thing, the problem of social order inhabits a distinctive modern context, shaped by historically competing visions of human nature and of mankind’s capacity for peaceful cooperation. Whatever their internal differences, these modern views are all deeply concerned with powers exerted by the secular state — an institution conspicuously absent in medieval Iceland. How, then, can we apply our interpretive categories to Sturla’s text, when the twentieth-century problems of social structure are so far removed from the living substance of Íslendinga saga?