Vikings Behaving Reasonably: Nordic Hóf in Civic and Legal Rhetoric was written to try and make sense of the rhetoric shown in the Icelandic family sagas, but I expanded its scope to look more at how the medieval Scandinavians dealt with conflicts in both the civic and legal arenas. I found through my research that the medieval Scandinavians had a native rhetorical tradition outside of Classical influence.
In popular culture, the medieval Nordic peoples are generally portrayed as “others.” The Vikings are usually portrayed as ignorant and violent. This is no doubt in part because of the Christian Chroniclers of the day who wrote about the raids against their coastal monasteries in Britain and the continent. So PR has been a problem for studying the Norse in non-violent ways from the beginning. Pop culture is more likely to imagine medieval Scandinavians wielding a bloody battleaxe than subsistence farming near the Artic Circle.
Scholarly studies present other ways of looking at medieval Scandinavians. Medieval Nordic studies often view the time period through a British lens. The Viking Age starts, according to many, when Lindisfarne is sacked in 793 CE. but raids and trading had been going on long before the Norse raiders showed up on England’s shore, and they continued after the Norse defeat at Stamford bridge in 1066 CE. So how do we view and place the medieval Scandinavians? It must be more than just a British view since the scope of Viking studies goes far beyond that. Some scholars push them out to the fringes of Europe and dismiss them as having little real influence while others categorize them as a part of the European fabric of the Middle Ages.
When I began the research for the book, I imagined the Nordic peoples as being part of the Classical, Latinate traditions in rhetoric. After all, Christianity had been in northern Europe for quite some time, even though the Nordic countries were some of the last to convert—much later than say Ireland or England, who are also considered on the fringes. But it became apparent that they never really were integrated into Classical or even medieval rhetorical practices.
At first, I tried reconciling civic and legal rhetoric found in the family sagas with Classical ideas, yet it did not work. The legal rhetoric didn’t follow Cicero’s stasis theory, the courts didn’t follow other medieval court models, neither secular or religious. The Norse didn’t follow the ideas of Classical judicial or epideictic rhetoric. Even looking at James J. Murphy’s classic, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, where he examines the Ars praedicandi, Ars poetriae, and the Ars dictiminis, it became evident that the rhetoric in the medieval Nordic countries needed a different lens. Nothing was adding up.
I had struggled to write almost 150 pages, trying to make a Classical paradigm fit the rhetoric I was seeing in the sagas. But then during a re-reading of Njal’s Saga and the Bandamanna Saga, I noticed the repeated use of reasonableness as a means of judging the behavior and outcomes of the civic and legal events. I dove back into my research and my assumptions about how the medieval Scandinavians were constructing their rhetoric. I looked at histories and archaeological works. I looked at their laws and sagas in a different light, around the idea of reasonableness (hóf). Something clicked in the way I was seeing the materials. Suddenly it made sense. Instead of looking at their rhetorical moves from an imposed outsider stance, I tried to change the frame and see it from their native stance.
Instead of looking at their rhetorical moves from an imposed outsider stance, I tried to change the frame and see it from their native stance.
Instead of the violent images I‘d grown up seeing, I viewed them as a people who had an external way of viewing their civic and legal proceedings. Living on the geographical fringes of Europe the Norse would have needed to work together to survive. If they went around randomly killing each other their small villages would have died out. They had a shame culture where the main purpose of the local laws and civic engagement was to keep the peace. Did violence happen, sure. But that was an aftereffect of failed peace efforts. The sagas often praise people who try to make reasonable solutions to potentially violent situations and criticize those who are ójafn, uneven or unreasonable. The medieval Scandinavians weren’t overly violent or savage, not any more than any other culture at the time, nor were they completely in the fabric of the European Middle Ages—not yet anyway—that would take more time. My book examines the medieval Scandinavian rhetoric, and the way it was used to navigate their daily lives as shown through their history and literature.
By Robert Lively