Introduction

Summary

This book is an examination of the way in which kinship, specifically intergenerational kinship, was understood in Old Norse literature and society. The book's primary contention is that Old Norse kinship was conceived of as inherently transpersonal, involving the distribution of the self among those designated kin as part of a corporate body and the reciprocal inscription of kinfolk within the individual self, such that violence to the kin-group became violence to the self and vice versa. The second, and related, major contention is that the transpersonal foundations of kinship were being constantly assailed by disputes and conflicts between kin, springing from the ambivalent reality of day-to-day family relations and emotions. The final contention is that this struggle between solidarity and ambivalence, which constituted the experience of what we would call kinship, was principally explored, articulated and transmitted by means of narrative: that narrative was, in fact, the only medium which could adequately capture the true meaning and complexity of what Old Norse authors and audiences understood as kinship and therefore that kinship cannot be separated from its means of expression. In short, kinship is narrative: a conscious and managed production of information relating to self and social identification which is made in the telling.

As such this is a work grounded first in Old Norse literature and then in anthropological kinship theory. An anthropological approach to Old Norse sources was pioneered by Margaret Clunies Ross in her seminal work Prolonged Echoes, which explored the social and political dimensions of Old Norse myth through the anthropological lens of structural functionalism. The clarity her approach brings to the subject matter, however, is also the work's greatest weakness, as her schema becomes at times too rigid, leaving the reader with an impression of order which does not accurately reflect the corpus of texts (in the sense of both oral and literary productions) she surveys. Kirsten Hastrup has also provided an anthropological perspective on Icelandic culture and society, both medieval and modern, in numerous works throughout her career. More recently, scholars like Richard Gaskins, Pádraig Mac Carron and Ralph Kenna have looked to sociology and the application of social network theory to unravel and to map the complex interpersonal workings, social, cultural and economic, of saga society and the narratives which depict it.