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Articles

1988

University of Michigan Law School

Sagas

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Beating Up On Women And Old Men And Other Enormities: A Social Historical Inquiry Into Literary Sources, William I. Miller Jan 1988

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 Jan 1988

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 …