Solstice of Knives: Violent Realism and the Evolution of Enmity in Sturlung Iceland

• Main Author: Noah Richard Mincheff 2000-
• Other Authors: Háskóli Íslands
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2024
• Subjects: Miðaldafræði; Iceland
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1946/46618

The late 12th and early 13th centuries brought great change in Iceland; the island was on the cusp of a literary golden age, a cultural dawn which would have Icelandic poets and storytellers rubbing elbows with Scandinavian monarchs. However, the Icelandic Commonwealth also sat on the brink of collapse, a social dusk which would have power concentrate in the hands of a few, spawn political power struggles, and lead to the advent of warfare in Iceland. Sturlusaga, the first entry in the Sturlungasaga compilation and the primary text of concern in this work, chronicles the early stages of this social upheaval spanning approximately from 1148-1183, in which one may observe the emergence of new violent modalities, and of armed conflict divided along political lines rather than blood ties. While traditional Íslendingasögur place the bloody deeds of their characters within the confines of established procedures for conflict resolution, and often subtly criticize their conduct, the violence of Sturlusaga is less morally legible. The latter piece’s narrative tone is one of violent realism, in which the narrator recounts the events of notable conflicts involving the chieftains of central western Iceland with little idealization or moral messaging. What emerges from this narrative is an image of Icelandic society as the social order they long imposed through compensatory justice and personal confrontation fractures beneath the growing force of rising political powers. As once respectable individuals shirk single combat or family skirmishes in favor of conspiracy, execution, and battle, they become menacing belligerents in political rivalries of ever-increasing scale. Through a psychoanalytical lens, these characters’ actions reveal the root of human violence, an enmity founded on complex human emotion rather than primitive impulse, and their interactions with the customs of conflict in their culture reveal that violence is a language of its own, with a history that runs parallel to ours.