Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Iceland History > Item 279
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Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland
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by William Ian Miller
Sales Rank: 641681
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List Price: $22.50
$20.25
At Amazon
on 11-27-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 415 pages
Published by: University Of Chicago Press February 15, 1997
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0226526801
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0226526805
Book Dimensions:
8.8 x 6 x 1 inches
Weighs: 1.3 pounds
Product Description
Dubbed by the New York Times as "one of the most sought-after legal academics in the county," William Ian Miller presents the arcane worlds of the Old Norse studies in a way sure to attract the interest of a wide range of readers. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking delves beneath the chaos and brutality of the Norse world to discover a complex interplay of ordering and disordering impulses. Miller's unique and engaging readings of ancient Iceland's sagas and extensive legal code reconstruct and illuminate the society that produced them.
People in the saga world negotiated a maze of violent possibility, with strategies that frequently put life and limb in the balance. But there was a paradox in striking the balance—one could not get even without going one better. Miller shows how blood vengeance, law, and peacemaking were inextricably bound together in the feuding process.
This book offers fascinating insights into the politics of a stateless society, its methods of social control, and the role that a uniquely sophisticated and self-conscious law played in the construction of Icelandic society.
"Illuminating."—Rory McTurk, Times Literary Supplement
"An impressive achievement in ethnohistory; it is an amalgam of historical research with legal and anthropological interpretation. What is more, and rarer, is that it is a pleasure to read due to the inclusion of narrative case material from the sagas themselves."—Dan Bauer, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Reader Reviews
This review is from: Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Hardcover)
I read this book while a student in Miller's semi-infamous class "Blood Feuds" at the University of Michigan Law School. I went into the class thinking that it would be interesting and fun, but that I wouldn't learn much from it, since I already had such an extensive familiarity with the Icelandic sagas: as an undergraduate I had translated some of them from Old Norse to English, and I had read most of the rest of them several times over in English translation. Yes, it was interesting and yes, it was fun, but man! were my eyes opened as to how much I had to learn about the sagas and about the culture within which they were written. There are two main reasons to read this book. First, to learn history. The history of ninth to fourteenth century Iceland is incredible, and the culture fascinating. Theirs was a culture that knew no central or even local government, no law enforcement infrastructure, and no arms control. And yet the Icelanders developed a complex system of law, essentially codifying the blood feud (which tradition still governs dispute resolution in places like Afghanistan and rural Macedonia), according to which civil injustice could be roughly corrected. Their example has much to teach us about human nature unadulterated by the State. Second, Bloodtaking is an unparalleled gateway into the sagas as literature. Despite my intimate familiarity with every line of, for example, Hrafnkel's saga, until I read Miller's book I had only the most inadequate appreciation for how tightly it is constructed, how elegantly and efficiently it was drafted. The sagas are only vaguely comparable to the very best English-language short stories; the skill that went into them is comparable to that of a Dante or a Shakespeare. A modern reader is not culturally prepared to receive the sagas as they would have been by a medieval Icelander. Miller's book provides the small set of cultural factoids that create relevance where otherwise detail might seem pointless or obscure, and reveals the saga-writers' penchant for humorous understatement and emphasis by ellipse. Armed with a relatively small set of cultural facts and with an eye for a small set of saga tropes, the reader has access to a whole new literary world. Whatever your bent, Bloodtaking makes for fascinating reading.
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Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland
Available from Amazon
Price: $20.25
Updated on 11-27-2008.
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