Understanding Outlawry in Medieval Iceland
Joonas Ahola
Joonas Ahola
Lectio praecursoria Helsingin yliopistossa 24.5.2014
Outlaws occupy a central role in the modern western culture. The image of an outlaw hero, as we know it today, may originate in Robin Hood. He is the exemplar of a brave and virtuous outlaw. Eric Hobsbawm (1972) defined such a positively conceived bandit as a ”social bandit” who opposes an ”evil” authority and benefits the people. In this sense, an outlaw is not far from a guerrilla fighter who opposes an authoritarian leadership.
Not all outlaws in the popular culture have achieved their popularity through virtuousness. Instead, their fascination is rather connected to the images of freedom and independence that outlawry is associated with. This is undoubtedly a factor that has enhanced the positive reputation of some major criminals.
The outlaws in the American Westerns are at least as familiar to us as Robin Hood. These outlaws suit the image of the USA in the 19th century as the land of opportunity: a frontier where the law was only tenuously enforced. You all probably recognize the names Jesse James, William H. Bonney (a.k.a. Billy the Kid), and Robert Leroy Parker (a.k.a. Butch Cassidy). Their Finnish counterparts Antti Isotalo and Antti Rannanjärvi, who lived in the late 19th century, can also be mentioned. The fame of all these outlaws seems to be based on eventful narratives in which the individual opposes the state authority and the prevailing norms.
The outlaw is a popular character also in medieval Icelandic Family Sagas. In the course of this study, I found seventy-eight named ones in thirty-five different saga texts. In many cases, it is possible to recognize in them something similar to those outlaws that were just mentioned. However, there is a significant difference: in Iceland, there was no central authority that these outlaws would have opposed. Judgments were passed at collective assemblies, and the outlaw was pursued by the person against whom he had violated – not by a sheriff or alike.
The Icelandic Family Sagas
The Icelandic Family Sagas are prose narratives that were written in the 13th and 14th centuries. The events that they describe take place mostly in Iceland around the change of the first millennia, approximately between A.D. 970 and 1030. The medieval Icelanders’ conceptions about this period in Iceland are here referred to with the general term “Saga World“, closely related to Katharine Young’s (1987) notion of the Taleworld.
The subject matter in the Family Sagas mostly consists of biographies and conflict accounts. These sagas are based on historical traditions that were passed orally from generation to generation through the two centuries between the events and the time that they were put into writing in the sagas. However, the sagas are not faithful recordings of oral traditions. Instead, they are narratives produced by literal means even though they lean on oral tradition. In John Miles Foley’s (1991, 247) terms, they are to be approached as “oral-derived” narratives (see Sigurðsson 2004, 48).
In receiving a narrative we resort to frames of reference. A single thing can signify different things depending on the frame of reference within which we interpret it. For example, Snow White biting an apple signifies different things from nutritional, narrative and psychoanalytic frames of reference. Our instinctive frames of reference to understand the narratives about outlaws in the saga literature reside, for example, in our images of outlaws (Robin Hood and others) and in our expectations of narratives about such characters. Such frames of reference also include valuations based on our cultural background, for instance on models we retain of heroic behavior.
The medieval Icelanders’ frames of reference for receiving and reproducing the saga narratives were different. The cultural environment in which they lived was different from ours. For example, the Saga World was close and identifiable for them – not only a world of tales. Therefore, understanding a single phenomenon, such as outlawry in the saga literature, requires that the conventional and repetitive (presumably collectively approved) depictions are preferred and that the texts are read in a way that is as close to the medieval readings as possible. This requires inspecting the sagas in terms of those frames of reference that we can presume the medieval Icelanders to have resorted to in making sense of the saga narratives.
In this study, I construct such frames of reference on the basis of available sources. The sources to medieval Icelandic thinking are so scarce that it is necessary to use as wide a corpus as possible. My approach is based on my studies of folklore in the University of Helsinki. Especially the studies of Anna-Leena Siikala, Satu Apo and Lotte Tarkka have influenced my approach even though I am able to directly refer to them only occasionally in my thesis, because of the differences between the research materials that we use.
Outlawry
The law texts provide an obvious source for understanding the legal conviction and the consequent legal status of outlawry. The law texts reveal that there used to be different levels of outlawry in Iceland. All of them included banishing from society, for longer or shorter periods of time. The most severe level of outlawry, ”full outlawry”, which is of special interest here, meant that the outlaw lost all of his property and that no-one was allowed to help him or to transport him out of Iceland.
The law symbolized society (e.g. Hastrup 1985, 135). Therefore, outlawry symbolized an attack against this society and against the values that it beheld. Still, in spite of this, it was possible that outlaws were talked about in a praising and admiring tone.
The family sagas are compilations of shorter narratives that are interconnected in different ways. The descriptions of events and characters may simultaneously contribute to many narrative structures. Understanding why a particular narrative passage, for example about an outlaw, is formed the way it is, requires taking these different narrative structures into account. Generally, it is possible to state that as focal characters, outlaws are depicted in positive (sympathetic) terms, whereas the depiction of outlaws as secondary characters is rather negative. These two modes of depiction are actualized by means that are reflected also in other medieval Icelandic literature.
In order to study how the outlawry of the Saga World is reflected in different medieval Icelandic frames of reference, it is necessary to discern the abstract basic features of outlawry. These are marginalization, banishment and solitariness. Looking at how individuals with these basic features are treated in the other texts than the sagas gives information on values and meanings that were connected to outlawry in the Family Sagas through traditional referentiality (Foley 1995, esp. 42–47). Actually, many of the texts that reflect the different frames of reference have provided narrative models to the Family Sagas.
The settings of the Family Sagas are primarily located in the pre-Christian era, but when the sagas were written, the Christian frame of reference was relevant for the interpretation of a wide range of narratives. The vernacular mythological and heroic Taleworlds comprise of events and characters that were possible to associate with the saga outlaws. Even though outlaws had to run and hide, and even though they often died as fugitives, their fate was not necessarily despised. It is good to bear in mind that the fate of many Norwegian kings was similar. They were the royals that the Icelanders were best aware of. Many of them were banished and some were even slain as exiles.
Conclusion
The present study shows that the narrative elements, especially the conventional elements, of the Family Sagas are connected in many ways to the cultural surroundings behind the saga texts. The significations of outlawry comprise only a part of the network of significations that the Family Sagas are involved in. For their part, the outlaws help in understanding saga narration in general.
In saga literature, outlawry is a severe tragedy to an individual. It means marginalization, banishment, rejection and eventually, death. In the tight, small Icelandic community, outlawry was an extreme state. It is a psychologically effective, identifiable state that has reflections in many forms of medieval Icelandic cultural expression. The depth of meaning that these reflections provide may explain why an outlaw is such a strong and versatile narrative character in the Icelandic Family Sagas.
Ahola, Joonas 2014: Outlawry in the Icelandic Family Sagas. Helsinki: Helsingin yliopisto. [online] <http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-10-9907-6>
Literature
Foley, John Miles 1991: Immanent Art. Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis.
Foley, John Miles1995: The Singer of Tales in Performance. Indiana University Press: Bloomington & Indianapolis.
Hastrup, Kirsten 1985: Culture and history in Medieval Iceland. Clarendon Press: Oxford.
Hobsbawm, Eric 1972: Bandits. Harmondsworth: Suffolk.
Young, Katharine 1987: Taleworlds and Storyrealms: The Phenomenology of Narrative. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers: Dordrecht.
Sigurðsson, Gisli 2004: The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition. Harvard University Press: Cambridge & London.