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Feeling Another's Pain: Sympathy and Psychology Saga Style

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2014

William Ian Miller
William Ian Miller*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Progress is hardly a given in the humanities or the suspect sciences. In many ways we are not quite as astute as our grandparents, and they not as much as theirs, and so forth in an infinite entropic regress. Would I trade Montaigne or Stendhal's psychological acumen for even the best work that comes from social psychology departments? In this short essay I want to show just how good some medieval people, medieval Icelanders to be exact, were at understanding the mental and emotional states of others, and if of others then presumably, though not necessarily, also of themselves. And I hope to show in some ways they were rather more sophisticated than we are.

Type
Sea, North, History, Narrative, Energy, Climate: Papers from the 2012 Academia Europaea Bergen Meeting
Information
European Review , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 55 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2014 

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References

Notes and References

1. Obviously, having an idea that someone or an animal is in pain is quite different from feeling their pain. I can tell you are in pain because I just saw you get hit by a brick, but that does not require much sympathetic engagement. And the sympathy I do generate will not necessarily be distinguishable from that I would feel were you my child or my mortal enemy. The sympathy would merely be valenced differently.Google Scholar
2. There is an enormous literature on empathy, sympathy, etc, much of it consistently confusing the experiencing of another's supposed inner states with mimicking them, and then with catching them as if by contagion. And then confusing these processes with benevolence or kindness. None of it, or at least as much as I have glanced at before deciding it was mostly a waste of time, matches the consistent nuance and sophistication of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1st edn, 1759). See recently a fairly reasonable example of the genre: Nordgren, L.F., McDonnell, M. and Loewenstein, G. (2011) What constitutes torture? Psychological impediments to an objective evaluation of enhanced interrogation tactics. Psychological Science, 22, pp. 689–694, finding – guess what? – an empathy gap: we do not feel another's pain like they do. This was knowledge readily available to a Viking thug, but apparently recently lost among the educated classes.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. J. Jóhannesson (ed.) (1950) Hrafnkels saga. Íslenzk fornrit, 11, pp. 95–133. Convenient translation: Pálsson, H. (1971) Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Stories (Penguin: Harmondsworth).Google Scholar
4. ‘Kel’ is a contraction of kettle, Old Norse ketill. Like the tripods of Greek epic, the amount of wealth that went into making a kettle made kettle an honorific suitable for a person's name.Google Scholar
5. A little bit of background gives a fuller picture. Old Thorbjorn told his son Einar that he could no longer afford to keep him on, since his younger brothers and sisters could now do the work, and that he would have to look for work. The old Icelandic laws require everyone to be lodged formally and hire on in a household every year for a year, during a four-day period in the spring. Thorbjorn waited until the end of this period to tell Einar and all the better jobs had been taken. The father was not being irresponsible negligently, but because, as is more than hinted in the text, he could not bear to send his favorite child away.Google Scholar
6. ‘Support’ means finding people to attend the court with you to prevent the other side from overpowering the judges or breaking up the proceedings, which is what Hrafnkel will try to do. Having nobody willing to attend the court with you might bespeak more than your own powerlessness, but also the general popularity or justness of your claim.Google Scholar
7. Which has come to be kind of a ‘poster child’ statement for faux commiseration, first said, allegedly, by Bill Clinton to an AIDS activist.Google Scholar
8. Notice too how Thorgeir blames old Thorbjorn's ‘accident’ as an intentional act of revenge taking but on an inappropriate target: ‘I didn't kill his son; he shouldn't be seeking revenge on me.’Google Scholar
9.In one Norse story, clearly folkloric, a two-eyed man falsely accused by a one-eyed man of stealing his eye offers to settle the matter by ordeal: each of them is to remove an eye, place them on a scale and if they weigh the same then the accuser makes his proof. Needless to say the one-eyed accuser forgoes the challenge; see Hróa þáttr heimska in G. Vigfússon, C.R. Unger (eds) (1860-1868) Flateyjarbók, 3 vols. 2 (Oslo) pp.73–80.Google Scholar
10.Jóhannesson, J., Finnbogason, M. and Eldjárn, K. (eds) (1946) Guðmundar saga dýra. Sturlunga saga (Reykjavík: Sturlunguútgáfan) 1, pp. 160–212. Translated by J. McGrew and R.G. Thomas (1970–74) Sturlunga saga (New York: Twayne), 2, pp. 145–206.Google Scholar