Description
Book Synopsis
To a faithful friend, straight are the roads and short.Odin, from the Hávamál (c. 1000)
Friendship was the most important social bond in Iceland and Norway during the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages. Far more significantly than kinship ties, it defined relations between chieftains, and between chieftains and householders. In Viking Friendship, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson explores the various ways in which friendship tied Icelandic and Norwegian societies together, its role in power struggles and ending conflicts, and how it shaped religious beliefs and practices both before and after the introduction of Christianity.
Drawing on a wide range of Icelandic sagas and other sources, Sigurðsson details how loyalties between friends were established and maintained. The key elements of Viking friendship, he shows, were protection and generosity, which was most often expressed through gift giving and feasting. In a society without institutions that could guaran
Trade Review
Sigurðsson (Univ. of Oslo, Norway) has written a concisely argued book interpreting the importance of friendship versus kinship in early Iceland and Norway. Looking closely at Icelandic family sagas depicting historical literary events from 930 to 1030, and at Heimskringla, a history of the kings of Norway to 1177, Sigurðsson refutes the common notion that early Scandinavian relationships depended primarily on bonds of kinship. He argues instead that friendship mattered to the survival and success of chieftains and householders in Viking society. Historians formerly believed Icelandic family sagas to be factual accounts of individuals and events. Scholars more recently have increasingly interpreted family sagas as literary stories depicting a memory of how life was lived and society functioned, but personal identities and events were not verifiable. Using the family sagas, the author explores how men depended on their friends rather than their kin for support and power. Not until later centuries, when Iceland fell under the rule of Norwegian kings, did kinship give a man of status more influence than friendship. It is a subtle argument, but the concept of friendship, key to understanding Viking society, clarifies the profound changes in social and political structures necessary to form medieval society. Readers should have familiarity with the period's primary sources.
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Table of ContentsIntroduction1: Friendship: The Most Important Social Bond in Iceland in the Period (c. 870-1260)2: Friendship Between Chieftains: "To His Friend a Man Should Be a Friend, and Repay Gifts With Gifts"3: Kings and Their Friends4: Clerics and Friendship5: Jobs and Other Friends of the Gods6: Kinsmen and Friends: "Let There Be a Fjord Between Kinsmen, but a Bay Between Friends"7: Friendship Loses Its Power: Political Changes in the Second Half of the 13th Century8: Pragmatic Friendship
