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Feeling Another's Pain: Sympathy And Psychology Saga Style, William I. Miller
Feeling Another's Pain: Sympathy And Psychology Saga Style, William I. Miller
Articles
Progress is hardly a given in the humanities or the suspect sciences. In many ways we are not quite as astute as our grandparents, and they not as much as theirs, and so forth in an infinite entropic regress. Would I trade Montaigne or Stendhal’s psychological acumen for even the best work that comes from social psychology departments? In this short essay I want to show just how good some medieval people, medieval Icelanders to be exact, were at understanding the mental and emotional states of others, and if of others then presumably, though not necessarily, also of themselves. And …
Home And Homelessness In The Middle Of Nowhere, William I. Miller
Home And Homelessness In The Middle Of Nowhere, William I. Miller
Book Chapters
In Iceland one must have a home; it is an offense not to-in some circumstances, a capital offense. A sturdy beggar was liable for full outlawry, which meant he could be killed with impunity. The laws are hard on vagrants. Fornication with a beggar woman was unactionable; it was lawful to castrate a vagabond, and he had no claim if he were injured or killed during the operation. One could take in beggars solely for the purpose of whipping them, nor was one to feed or shelter them at the Thing on pain of lesser outlawry. Their booths at the …
In Defense Of Revenge, William I. Miller
In Defense Of Revenge, William I. Miller
Book Chapters
One of the risks of studying the Icelandic sagas and loving them, is, precisely, loving them. And what is one loving when one loves them? The wit, the entertainment provided by perfectly told tales? And just how are these entertaining tales and this wit separable from their substance: honor, revenge, individual assertion, and yes, some softer values, too, like peacefulness and prudence? Yet one suspects, and quite rightly, that the softer values are secondary and utterly dependent on being responsive to the problems engendered by the rougher values of honor and vengeance. Is it possible to study the sagas and …
Deep Inner Lives, Individualism And People Of Honour, William I. Miller
Deep Inner Lives, Individualism And People Of Honour, William I. Miller
Articles
With the exception of St Augustine and perhaps Abelard, often praised as modern before their time, it is not unusual to find it maintained that the individual was not available in any serious conceptual, psychological or even sociological way before the seventeenth century. Our thick and deep self, according to this view, is thus a rather recent phenomenon. Some more expansive souls find the individual already emerging a century earlier, during the Reformation. Within the last three decades, medievalists, chagrined at being contemned by classicists on one flank and an alliance of Renaissance scholars, early modernists, modernists and post-modernists on …
Of Outlaws, Christians, Horsemeat, And Writing: Uniform Laws And Saga Iceland, William I. Miller
Of Outlaws, Christians, Horsemeat, And Writing: Uniform Laws And Saga Iceland, William I. Miller
Articles
Our word law is a loanword from Old Norse.1 It makes its earliest appearances in Old English manuscripts in the late tenth century. At that time the Old English word for law was, believe it or not, æ, written as a digraph called "ash." Now most readers, myself included, tend to experience anxiety when we confront a ligatured vowel like ae and so we untie it as a prelude to getting rid of it altogether: we turn an aesthete2 into an aesthete before finally humiliating him (or her) as an esthete, all to resolve our nervousness. King Æthelred the Unready …
Beating Up On Women And Old Men And Other Enormities: A Social Historical Inquiry Into Literary Sources, William I. Miller
Beating Up On Women And Old Men And Other Enormities: A Social Historical Inquiry Into Literary Sources, William I. Miller
Articles
The Icelandic sagas, besides being one of the most impressive literatures existing in any language, preserve detailed accounts of feud and legal action, and describe with intelligence and care the general techniques and strategies of dispute processing. They also contain, incidental to the narrative, information about values and law, marriage and death, householding arrangements and the systems of exchange, naming patterns, and so on, for those who care to coax such information from the texts.
Ordeal In Iceland, William I. Miller
Ordeal In Iceland, William I. Miller
Articles
Ordeal holds a strange fascination with us. It appalls and intrigues. We marvel at the mentality of those cultures that officialize it; we feel a sense of horror as we imagine ourselves intimately involved with boiling water or glowing irons. And we don't feel up to it. So our terror and cowardice becomes their brutality and irrationality. I am not about to urge to reinstitution of ordeals, although most practicing lawyers will tell you that that is still what going to law is, a crapshoot they say. What I want to do is call attention to the difficulty of not …
Gift, Sale, Payment, Raid: Case Studies In The Negotiation And Classification Of Exchange In Medieval Iceland, William I. Miller
Gift, Sale, Payment, Raid: Case Studies In The Negotiation And Classification Of Exchange In Medieval Iceland, William I. Miller
Articles
Near the end of Eyrbyggja saga Porir asks Ospak and his men where they had gotten the goods they were carrying. Ospak said that they had gotten them at Pambardal. "How did you come by them?" said Porir. Ospak answered, "They were not given, they were not paid to me, nor were they sold either." Ospak had earlier that evening raided the house of a farmer called Alf and made away with enough to burden four horses. And this was exactly what he told Porir when he wittily eliminated the other modes of transfer by which he could have acquired …
Dreams, Prophecy And Sorcery: Blaming The Secret Offender In Medieval Iceland, William I. Miller
Dreams, Prophecy And Sorcery: Blaming The Secret Offender In Medieval Iceland, William I. Miller
Articles
An eminent legal historian once noted that the fundamental problem of law enforcement in primitive societies is that of the secret offender. The Icelandic legal and dispute processing systems depended on a wrongdoer publishing his deed, or at least committing it in an open and notorious manner. No state agencies existed to investigate and discover the non-publishing wrongdoer. But there were strong normative inducements to wrong openly; one's name was at stake. There was absolutely no honor in thievery, only the darkest shame; the ransmadr, on the other hand, suffered no shame for his successful raids, even if he did …
Review Of Njáls Saga: Rechtsproblematik Im Dienste Soziokultureller Deutung, William I. Miller
Review Of Njáls Saga: Rechtsproblematik Im Dienste Soziokultureller Deutung, William I. Miller
Reviews
There is little recommend this book. It is ill-conceived and poorly executed. The author's thesis is that the saga-writer intentionally distorted and varied his presentation of the law of the lawbooks in order to show a society being destroyed by uncontrolled egoism, pride, and envy, a society characterized by willful arbitrariness, disorder, and disarray, with few rules to respect and little respect for the few rules that were there. The validity of the thesis is never really tested because the law which the saga-writer distorts is not even minimally established, nor for that matter is the law the saga-writer does …