4 - Uncles and Aunts

Summary

Intergenerational family relationships in the mythic-heroic corpus are not confined to parent-child relations. These are supplemented by, or contrasted with, relationships between uncles and aunts and nephews and nieces, which have the same intergenerational dynamic even though the participants are less closely related. Aunts and uncles were important members of the wider kin-group. According to Grágás, uncles and nephews were liable to pay or receive a two-mark ring in compensation for the other's killing, more than first cousins but less than fathers, brothers, sons, grandfathers and grandsons. Given the ambivalence which so often characterises parent-child relations, it might be expected that these relationships could prove to be substitutes for dysfunctional or broken parent-child relationships. From the literary evidence of the Íslendingasögur, Steven B. Johnson and Ronald C. Johnson suggest that ‘uncles and nephews were strong allies’, citing the example of Njáll and his nephew Þorgeir skorargeir in Njáls saga. Still, they do not discount the evidence of Orkneyinga saga, where the joint rule of an uncle and his nephew quickly results in the nephew's murder, suggesting alliance between uncle and nephew was by no means guaranteed in Old Norse literature.

Johnson and Johnson's is one of the few studies to examine uncle-nephew relations in Old Norse literature in any detail. In the fornaldarsögur, depictions of interactions between uncles or aunts and nephews or nieces are less common than parent-child interactions and have received minimal critical attention. This chapter will explore relationships between children and their parents’ siblings in Old Norse myth and legend, relationships complicated by the fact that, in certain incestuous cases, a child's uncle or aunt can double as their parent. Since it has long been suggested that the relationship between the mother's brother and his nephew was an especially intimate one in Germanic society, I devote particular attention to this bond. The foundation for this intimate assessment of maternal uncle-nephew relations in Germanic culture has rested largely on Tacitus’ description in Germania:

sororum filiis idem apud avunculum qui apud patrem honor. quidam sanctiorem artioremque hunc nexum sanguinis arbitrantur et in accipiendis obsidibus magis exigunt, tamquam et animum firmius et domum latius teneant.