Conclusion

Summary

‘Kinship is fascinating’, argued Jennifer Mason, not as an expression of her own subjective opinion but as ‘a sociological observation’. Regardless of historical or geographical situation, kinship has been and remains a source of considerable fascination for every human society, including that of medieval Iceland. Old Norse society was far from unique in its fixation on the intrafamilial dynamics which are reflected so vividly in the imaginative literary works of the period. More striking perhaps is the nuance and complexity with which kinship is approached in Old Norse myth and legend. Parent-child relationships within mythic-heroic literature are characterised by a tension between ambivalence and transpersonal solidarity. Within these narratives, kinsmen are conceived as inherently co-present in one another, sharing mutual being and leading interdependent lives. Concurrently, parent-child interactions are also wracked by ambivalence which is founded on the ever-changing nature of intergenerational relationships, whereby the younger generation matures to accede to the kinship roles of the elder, which must inevitably decline and pass away.

This study has tried to emphasise the fluidity and dynamism of Old Norse kinship as an experiential participation rather than an organising principle. As such, arguments about the existence or non-existence of kinship as an abstract category in the Middle Ages become irrelevant. Hans Hummer has recently argued that ‘kinship did not exist in Europe during the Middle Ages’, in the sense that it was ‘never an indigenous category; […] never an abstraction by which people of the time conceptualized their social life’. As the foregoing analysis has made plain, however, seeking kinship purely as an abstraction can only blind us to the realities of kinship as intersubjective being. If kinship is understood as a process of transpersonal identification, then it becomes impossible to extract kinship as an ‘ontological category’ from its means of expression and its embodied experience. The writers and the audiences of the sources I have studied, and indeed the people of the Middle Ages more widely, were not anthropologists. It was not incumbent upon them to demarcate and define a single term which could encompass everything which the discipline of anthropology has assigned to the study of kinship.