En at skilnaði þeira Arinbjarnar ok Egils, þá gaf Egill Arinbirni gullhringa þá tvá,
er Aðalsteinn konungr gaf honum, ok stóð mǫrk hvárr, en Arinbjǫrn gaf Agli sverð þat,
er Dragvandill hét. Þat hafði gefit Arinbirni Þórólfr Skalla-Grímsson, en áðr hafði
Skalla-Grímr þegit af Þórólfi, bróðr sínum, en Þórólfi gaf sverðit Grímr loðinskinni,
sonr Ketils hængs; þat sverð hafði átt Ketill hængr ok haft í hólmgǫngum, ok var þat
allra sverða bitrast (Egils saga, ch.61, 194–95)
[When Arinbjǫrn and Egill parted ways, Egill gave Arinbjǫrn those two golden rings
that King Aðalsteinn had given him and each weighed a mark, and Arinbjǫrn gave Egill
the sword called Dragvandill. It had previously been given to Arinbjǫrn by Þórólfr
Skalla-Grímsson, but Skalla-Grímr had received it before from his brother Þórólfr
[Kveld-Úlfsson], and Grímr loðinskinni, the son of Ketill hængr had given the sword to Þórólfr [Kveld-Úlfsson]. That sword was owned by Ketill hængr,
and he carried it into duels, and it was the sharpest of swords.]
In chapter sixty-one of Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, Egill and his friend Arinbjǫrn exchange gifts before parting ways in England. This
scene is placed immediately after one of the climaxes of the saga, when the main character
is pardoned by his enemy, King Eiríkr, due to both his own skill as a poet and the
intercession of Arinbjǫrn on his behalf. As the latter is part of the royal retinue,
both scenes can be understood as illustrating the tension in divided loyalties between
lord and friend. Egla, as the saga is often called, was written ca. 1220-1240, and it is essentially a
tale of the conflict between the kings of Norway and a family of noble exiles who
become Icelandic settlers. The action moves back and forth between several locations,
most notably Norway and Iceland. It is divided in two parts: a first, shorter part
centred on the rise and fall of Þórólfr Kveld-Úlfsson, which prefigures the longer
second part, where the main character is Egill Skalla-Grímsson, his nephew. The saga
recurrently highlights the circulation of wealth: taxes, gifts, land transfers, pillages,
and feasts play a meaningful role in the narrative, which reflects the action-driven,
secular, and often mundane interests of the subgenre known as “Family Sagas” or “Sagas
about early Icelanders” (Íslendingasögur).
The scene of parting gifts discussed here is presented in great detail, by contrast
with the formulaic and brief description usually given to parting gifts scenes in
saga literature, which usually happen in the aftermath of stereotypical feast narratives.
My aim is to analyze the scene in Egils saga ch. 61 in three different aspects. First, I examine the scene as a window to a pattern
within social relationships in Medieval Iceland. I want to examine how a scene of
gift exchange between two agents whose (unusual) friendship goes beyond political
alliance operates against the background of some current analytical trends in gift
studies. Second, I discuss how gift-exchange (as a common framework to channel ties between
people) can work as a device that creates memories (both within particular individuals
or in larger groups), considering the recent trends in memory studies which reinvigorate
(and reinterpret) notions originally defined by Halbwachs. Narratives about the story
of certain goods and how they changed hands are here particularly interesting, as
they tie the institution of gift-giving with specific people who are meant to be highlighted.
These aspects of the analysis converge in a critical reflection on the advantages
and limits of two closely related theoretical models originating in two members of
the Durkheimian sociological school. The third and final part of the article focuses
on studying the scene in Egils saga ch. 61 as part of a narrative produced within a specific historical context, that
is to say, as part of a politically oriented saga written during the Sturlung age.
In the example discussed here, the gifts exchanged (two rings and a sword) are given
a past story by the donors at the moment of the exchange. This exchange displays materially
(and narratively, of course) a memory of the bonds between the ancestors of both characters.
The Icelandic historian Viðar Pálsson mentions it in his study about gift-giving in
medieval Iceland and briefly comments that
re-circulating gifts with a respected history behind them was both a source of cultural
and symbolic capital and a means of transmission ... Fully appreciating and maintaining
the symbolic worth of objects might otherwise require presenting their extended ‘genealogies,’
as in Egils saga ... Gifts were thus no mere objects but potential biographies of relations. (Pálsson
2010, 154)
His analysis highlights that this is but one example of a pattern illustrated in other
sagas, such as the
Sturlunga compilation.
Viðar’s view is based in an anthropological trend of studies that has been prominent
during the last four decades in the study of Medieval Iceland, following an initial
impulse in the years around the nineteen-seventies (Turner; Gurevich; Lunden). Their influence is evident in the work of many major scholars of the field. It is interesting to remark that most of them are not professional anthropologists
but historians, and thus their use of anthropological theory is instrumental. Amongst these, the topic of the control of distribution of goods as a tool for creating
and preserving power is a recurrent one: gift-giving is crucial by reason of its prominence
in the sources. Yet maybe gift-giving is also significant because it strikes a modern
reader with the inversion of the equation industrial societies have on the relationship
between wealth, prestige, and power. To become prominent, keeping resources like a
rational (in the Weberian zweckrational, instrumental sense) saver to reinvest seems to help little, but giving them away
is beneficial.
This is certainly what surprised the founders of the gift-theory. Boas and Malinowski
described systems that seemed irrational to a conventional economist, yet made perfect sense in the societies where they existed. But the point was not
fully made into a theory until Mauss published his “Essai sur le don.” In saga scholarship, however, Mauss is often quoted when writing about gifts usually
in the way Marx is when talking about class: just as a quick homage in passing, rather
than as a serious revaluing of his views. This might have to do with the difficulties
in his style and the rather subtle (some might say obscure) way he argued his points.
Making a long history short (and surely oversimplifying it), it could be said that
medievalists writing on gift-giving take one of two broad stances. A first, individualistic
view, depicts gifts as tools that agents (either individuals or factions) use strategically
and that can be employed for a series of alternative ends, generally related to power-
and/or wealth-building. This view seems to have been somewhat dominant in saga studies,
and it can be traced back to Miller (1986), which later formed a chapter of a very
influential book (Miller 1990). It also became popular in medieval studies in general. A recent, more nuanced take of this view is by Viðar Pálsson (2015), who however
displays considerable influence from Bourdieuan sociology; Miller (2008) similarly
shows strong traces of this more nuanced approach espoused by the French
theorist.
The second, holistic perspective is closer to the Maussian view. It is less common
in Medieval Scandinavian studies, with the partial exception of those works influenced
by substantivism. The emphasis is not on what one can do with gifts, but on what gifts do regardless of or beyond individual choice. In other words, it is about compulsion
and structure, and not so much about calculation and decision-making. This approach
can be dismissed as either mystic or too deterministic, and therefore has not been
particularly popular in recent scholarship. It remains mostly associated with the
Soviet medievalist Aaron Gurevich. In this article, I try to find some of the insight
that may be gained from a holistic approach when it is used to overcome some of the
limits of the strategic view. Moreover, it seems profitable to entwine it with ideas
about collective memory, which rose from the same holistic theoretical milieu as the
Maussian school, as it was coined by a close associate of his, Maurice Halbwachs.
Given the common intellectual root, theories of memory expectably suffer similar theoretical
problems as the gift-theories derived from Mauss. For example, the Israeli scholars
Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam recognize that “the inconcreteness of collective memory is
the stumbling block in Halbwachs’ theory,” given that he makes it rest on an abstract,
hard-to-pin-down idea of society straight
from Durkheim (Gedi and Elam 38). In fact, their arguments cast a severe doubt on
the usefulness of collective memory
as a scientific concept, and, by extension, on holistic theoretical stances in general.
I would broadly agree with them, yet I must qualify that their criticism is particularly
poignant for holistic takes on objects that exist mostly on a psychological, mental
level (such as memory) and are thus inextricably linked to individual manifestations.
However, holism becomes less problematic when applied to objects that can be observed
beyond individual cases, as if anchored in extra-individual empirical phenomena, such
as, say, the position within the structure of production (for example, in the Marxist
notion of class); or the political, institutional, or symbolic positions within a
system (as in the many forms of structuralism); or even the norm of reciprocity evidenced
amongst other things by gift-exchange (in the Maussian tradition, which in this aspect
shows a rather more resilient theory than most other Durkheimians, including Halbwachs).
Therefore, a holistic view that can encompass both fields that are relevant for us
needs to overcome similar difficulties, as both a study of gift-giving and as a study
of memory.
I begin by considering the passage under analysis as an anthropologically meaningful
illustration of social logics, as a “window to the past” rather than as a piece of
literature. The obvious question to start with is: why
do Egill and Arinbjǫrn exchange gifts? And the (equally obvious) answer should be:
because they are friends.
However, here this means “true” friends, not allies-named-friends as in most friendships
described in sagas with
words such as vinir or vinátta. The text itself says it explicitly, mentioning the kærleikr [love] after the exchange scene when it is said that “skilðusk þeir með kærleik inum
mesta” [They parted ways with the most love (for each other)] (Egils saga, ch. 61, 195). But this expression might be just formulaic: for example, Laxdæla saga uses it regularly (Sävborg 85) for all types of friendship, and there are some similar
examples in Egla itself, and these do not denote a tie of genuine affection.
Instead, what in my view confirms the degree of their friendship is how both men behave
throughout the saga. They take unnecessary risks for each other, something rather
opposed to the idea of a calculated political alliance. Arinbjǫrn risks his life and
position in the chapters before this scene, defending his friend against his own lord’s
bloody axe. That they have a sentimental tie is also illustrated by the fact that
Egill only wrote spontaneous long poems for Arinbjǫrn and for his dead sons. This is an unusual deed, more remarkable given the harsh disinterest in most people
displayed by the main character of the saga. Moreover, the degree of friendship becomes
even materially evident when Arinbjǫrn pays a compensation Egill wants and will not
get from a man named Berg-Ǫnundr, even if Arinbjǫrn had very little to gain in the
conflict for the inheritance of the landowner Bjǫrn. He pays, at his own expense, just to make Egill happy, rather than out of any sense
of convenience of contractual duty.
Thus, assuming they are true friends rather than simply allies, they would not need to use the gifts to build
an alliance, which, in any case, is shown to be well-established at this point in
the saga. Instead it seems that they are just renewing their alliance with the gifts
in the scene discussed here, which act as tokens that display both their friendship
and their social standing.
But why do they exchange in private? There is no mention of anybody present in the
scene apart from them; Egill is beyond doubt alone as his travel companions were left
behind when he rode to the court in York (Egils saga ch. 59, 177). If the intentions were display, it would make as much sense as a potlatch with no guests: it communicates nothing to other members of society. Moreover, given
that the scene is set in England, any possible bystanders would have little to tell
of the scene to the people who might be more interested in it. In fact, a public display
actually would have been dangerous, as the news could easily reach King Eiríkr’s court
nearby. Arinbjǫrn already risked the King’s (and Queen’s) wrath by interceding for
Egill, so it would have been plain stupid to immediately go on to advertise his alliance
with the ugly poet by way of an impressive gift-exchange. This reinforces the idea
that the scene happens in private, as it would be irrational for both men to make
a fuss about it. And Arinbjǫrn, at least, is portrayed as a very reasonable man; Egill’s
behaviour is rather less predictable. Keeping it private avoids this risk, but then the problem of the utility behind the
exchange remains unanswered.
This can be solved by stating that the exchange is not useful. Utility is not a concern for them as they are not acting strategically. Egill does
not want to profit in any way from Arinbjǫrn and vice versa. This is not a political
alliance called by the name of friendship, but real, emotion-driven friendship. However, this would not cause any theoretical difficulties
if this friendship was not performed through the same institution, gift exchange,
that strategic vinátta uses. They are neither acting instrumentally nor following
an ideological goal, but doing what they are expected to do and expressing emotions. This might sound obvious, but it is often ignored by scholars
promoting strategic analysis, who tend to choose examples of negotiated, maximizing,
utility-driven exchange of gifts that fit their chosen theoretical model and ignore
the rest. Indeed, the sagas tend to reinforce this approach, as they often dwell on
these interesting cases and say little on exchanges motivated by different reasons,
such as feelings or tradition.
My argument is far from new in theoretical terms. In fact, it reinstates one of the
criticisms anthropological formalists received from substantivists fifty years ago
in a well-known and long theoretical debate. Dalton noticed that the principles of
rational choice and maximization only help if we can calculate numerically the outcome
of strategies, for example as in business investment. Similar criticism (Graeber 26–30)
has also been directed towards the approach espoused by Bourdieu, who held a similar
view to that of most economists and anthropological formalists in these matters. An
anti-utilitarian theoretical trend has explained social action placing it along two
poles, the one of calculation and the other on empathy (called aimance), by demonstrating that altruistic behaviour cannot be reduced to a hidden strategy
(Caillé). In this anti-utilitarian view, Egill and Arinbjǫrn are closer to the aimance
than to self-interest in their exchange.
Thus, I would want to shift the discussion away from what motivates individuals to
act, to what is socially instituted and orients their actions. It seems that in this scene
Egill and Arinbjǫrn exchange gifts because friends are socially expected to express their friendship through gifts. An institution, gift-giving,
guides their action, regardless of any use they could aim to make of it. Therefore,
it takes precedence over strategies that logically depend on how flexible certain
institutional contexts are. The reason for this precedence seems to be rooted in the fact that the socially displayed
aspect is the visible shape, not the inner (even if known-by-all) true motivation. The generosity is, and must be, what appears visible and memorable in
the gift, not any calculations behind it, which must remain hidden. A gift without
calculation is still a gift, but a gift without a display of generosity is not.
I will now consider the scene as a narrative aimed at a certain audience, rather than
as an illustration of a social logic expressed by the text. Anthropologists have noticed
that the display of the biographies of gifts can have an impressive effect. This phenomenon
was already mentioned by Mauss (in 1925) and Malinowski (in 1922) and explained in
further detail by later anthropologists (Weiner; Godelier). The idea empowering gifts
that change hands amongst memorialized owners is that
gifts are never fully given. They always keep part of the original owner and so each link in the chain of circulation
amplifies their value, adding to it the value of subsequent possessors who gave them
away. The display of biographies here serves such purpose, but it also shows the connections
of those men and their families to each other and highlights the ties between important
men. If lineage played a meaningful role in the ideology of preeminent thirteenth-century
Icelandic families, it seems likely that a tale of gifts with an intergenerational
biography would help those claiming a connection through descent with these great
men of old.
It has long been suspected that Egils saga uses this kind of device, as there are important hints that point to the author and
magnate Snorri Sturluson or someone in his close milieu as being involved in the creation
of the saga. It is not difficult to imagine that this scene is meant to impress the
public listening to (or reading) the saga, by suggesting that a descendant of Egill
and the owner of his farm had already such a high lineage and a close (but not necessarily
friendly) relationship to the kings of old and their trusted men. A narrative of the
ties between the main character and other important men of his time would have further
enhanced the prestige of the earlier Mýramenn and, thus, presumably of their descendants.
Indeed, the narrativization of an illustrious past remains a common strategy for men
who claimed superiority through lineage, and it was rather common throughout Medieval
Europe, given the connection between holding power and having (and/or inventing) an
illustrious ancestry (Crouch 124–35). Seen in this light, the inclusion of this scene
helps us understand Egla as a political story and not only as a story about the inner life of a person. Using the narrative to give the gifts a biography transforms an institution, competitive
gift-giving, which in its basic forms lends itself better to unstable, big-man style forms of leadership, into something more stable. It shapes it into a form of lordly generosity that lasts
in time, and it does so because it echoes the generosity of men who are remembered
and who precede the givers. In other words, the added value in these gifts is their
load of memory.
In sum, Egill and Arinbjǫrn act as aristocrats showing off their lineages and connections.
This is likely an anachronism, reflecting the social conditions of the context of
production rather than those of their time of action—especially if the saga can be
associated with the milieu of Snorri Sturluson, the similarities are strengthened. However, the relationship between them (as aristocrats) and kings is shown to be
ambiguous and tense: while the link with Æthelstan is mentioned to enhance the prestige
of the gifts given, Arinbjǫrn’s preference for Egill over Eiríkr is in the immediate
background of the scene, and could not have passed unnoticed by the audience. For
the authors of the saga, if they were somehow able to link themselves by descent with
the early settlers, this stance would have been very useful. It would have allowed
them to present a past they could reclaim as their own and akin to what they strove
to be: aristocratic men close to monarchs, but not subdued by them. This hypothesis
is treated in the final section of this text, but at present I will turn to how the
scene can be read in terms of memory studies.
In the recent decades, memory has become one of the main focuses of interest in saga studies. The surge in memory
studies approaches was inspired partly from the work of scholars in different but
related fields of study, the most reputable being those of communicative memory and cultural memory explored by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann. His ideas have been brilliantly summarized
and applied to the sagas by the Danish literary scholar Pernille Hermann. My focus
is on the earlier concept of collective memory, which is at the roots of Assmann’s ideas (Hermann 334). It was coined by the French
sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the interwar period:
his Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire was published in 1925, while the better known La Mémoire collective was published posthumously in 1950.
Like Mauss, Halbwachs was a member of the Strasbourg school led by his doctoral supervisor,
Émile Durkheim, the man often considered the central founding figure of French sociology.
Like several other members of the school, Halbwachs had a profound interest in the
German scholarship of his time, hailed from a middle-class background, had close ties
with the Jewish community, and was a socialist. For students of Norse society, his name might be less known
than that of his friend Mauss, or that of the somewhat antagonistic (and peripheral,
but closely related) founder of liminality studies, Arnold van Gennep.
However, somewhat unlike Mauss (and decidedly unlike Van Gennep), Halbwachs arguably
remained staunchly rooted in a functionalist and holistic paradigm when approaching
social phenomena, diverging little in this aspect from his master, Durkheim. His studies
about collective memory characteristically show an effort to diminish internal contradictions
and intra-group variation and recurrently insist on showing how collective solidarity
in a group was always dominant, to the point that it made individual variety irrelevant.
As with the reception of other anthropological concepts rooted in functionalist theory
(such as gift-giving or feuding), I suspect that this bias towards explaining social
function and glossing over conflict and contradiction can often affect how concepts
are applied to specific historical contexts and artefacts.
Thus, this function-driven bias easily blurs the dynamics in societies that were heterogeneous
and composed of antagonistic factions even within the same group such as the Icelandic
elite of powerful chieftain families of the Sturlungar period in which Egla was surely created. Highlighting one aspect of a culture or society often implies
diminishing (directly or by omission) others, and whatever the collective interests
and traits of the leading family factions were, they were decidedly different from
each other in many aspects and strategies of legitimation. The Halbwachsian tendency
to blur individual variation might partially explain a main weakness perceived in
contemporary memory studies: they often forget to identify both subjects and reception,
and thus to place objects in their precise place in the past (Kansteiner). Taking
this criticism into account, it is pertinent to ask whose memory is being
upheld by the saga.
In broad terms, Egils saga can be understood as an artefact that creates cultural and collective memory by being
stored in the archive of a society, and thus a memory-bearing entity. Yet, it is hard
to tell if it was so (except potentially) back in the thirteenth century when it was written, unless one asks about its context
of production, circulation, and reception. In other words, it is meaningful to ponder
the extent to which a text is “collective” when it might have been meaningless, irrelevant,
or even infuriating for part of
the society in which it was created. Further questions derive from this. Could it
have been sanctioned as a legitimate memory of the past only by certain groups? To
what extent can there be something like publicly-sanctioned, official memory (that
is, cultural memory) in a society that for the most part lacked overarching public
institutions? In short, how can the memory produced by Egla be described?
To add a further complexity to the issue, sagas are written mediums of memory. Following Assmann and Connerton, Hermann argues that “writing
differs from other types of externalized memory, for example, rituals … partly
in facilitating an interpretative and re-inventive engagement with the past” (Hermann
347). This contrast is very marked indeed if ritual is seen through a functionalist,
Durkheimian-Halbwachsian
paradigm, as a fixed institution that essentially reinforces and re-creates social
order.
But ritual, when understood from a perspective inspired by a more dialectical approach
as that of Victor Turner, does not differ from literature in this aspect. Precisely the opposite could be argued,
again in a Turnerian fashion: ritual is precisely one of the key moments a community
(or, more precisely, some of its members) has to re-interpret the past and engage
creatively with it, even if at the same time it does allow for a certain reinforcing
of tradition. This scene in Egils saga seems to be an example of this: it uses a familiar ritualized action, parting gifts,
to say something different about the social order than what the previous scene shows.
It seems to argue that, however effective royal power is, other social ties are also
(more?) powerful, and these are based on sustained reciprocity rather than on threats
and subordination. The contrast between the scene discussed here and the extremely
tense scene preceding it (the scene of Hǫfuðlausn) is hard to miss.
However, it can be said that sagas, as a medium for memory, work similarly on both
levels that rituals do: they at the same time reinforce and re-create a collective
and cultural memory and a “storehouse for knowledge” (Hermann 347), but they also
create particular individual forms of “memory” that are best read as legitimating
discourses driven by ideology, particular interests,
or both. This might seem self-evident, but it is important to remember that no aspect
of culture is fully collective, at least in hierarchical societies. Egils saga belongs in medieval Icelandic culture, but it does so as a product of its elite culture.
Several themes in the saga point to a world of wealthy and important people: the main
characters are almost uniformly people of important families. While many characters
are very nuanced in terms of virtues and defects, some of those who are clearly depicted
as villains are men whose low ancestry turned them to wickedness (the sons of Hildiríðr).
Inversely, the arguably more honourable character in the saga, Arinbjǫrn, belongs
to the aristocracy (both as a hersir and high-ranking courtier). Moreover, this sagaʼs world is cosmopolitan, spanning
from the White Sea to the British Isles, something that makes Egla closer to the kings’ sagas than to the often provincial and localist family sagas.
Even in the newly settled Iceland, Skalla-Grímr grants land to newcomers like a lord
(Egils saga, ch.28), and by the end of the saga, Egill settles a dispute between his son Þorsteinn
and
a neighbour, Steinarr, in a rather lordly fashion, backing his decision on landownership
and lineage (ch. 82).
The saga might even possibly belong in an even narrower subset of cultural creations,
such as a pro-Sturlungar set of texts. Cultural creations are all collective, but not all equally broad and inclusive. Therefore,
it does not (or does less) likely represent other shards of medieval Icelandic culture,
such as, say, the culture of poor cottagers, those of smaller chieftains, or of other
less literary-prone leading families. If Egils saga is compared with other Íslendingasögur produced in the same region, like the (slightly
earlier?) Bjarnar saga and the (most likely later) Hœnsa-Þóris saga, it is not difficult to see both common cultural traits and noticeably different
ideological stances.
Admittedly, this problem does not matter much if we see sagas as bearing cultural
memory only in terms of literary representation and not as discussing “past reality
as such” (Hermann 351), given that literary representation does not imply a necessary
concern with social
and political divergences unless it explicitly engages with this issue. In other words,
if sagas are seen as texts independently from context, each becomes a world in itself
and can be read on its own. Such an approach is indeed valid, but it might be somewhat
disconcerting for social historians, who have spent a considerable amount of effort
to show the ways in which sagas (typically read through anthropological frameworks)
can be used to investigate how society and culture worked in every aspect, literary
representation being just one of them.
At the same time, a perspective inspired by memory studies can help us avoid a problem
common to anthropologically-driven approaches, which forget that the reconstructions
seen through sagas bear the burden that these are constructed pasts, and, more importantly,
constructed by and for a rather limited group of people who typically were on top
of the social hierarchies. Therefore, it provides a way out for the criticism posed
against the uniformities in the “anthropological” approach (Nedviktne), by denaturalizing
historical narratives about the past present in the sources.
For example, the feuds and gifts that populate the plot in many Íslendingasögur are
frequently memorialized in sagas, but it then must be asked whose culture was a part of feuding and gifting culture in Medieval Iceland: did it include
all Icelanders, as one tends to deduce by reading, for example, some well-known books
(Byock, Miller 1990)? Or was it essentially an aspect of the culture of chieftains
and other wealthy
farmers, who then wrote so extensively about them?
Keeping these issues in mind, let us return to the question of the specific case stated
above. Egils saga is driven by conflicts that resemble feuds structurally but do not qualify as such
strictly speaking, as there is a clear asymmetry between the main parts involved,
typically the Mýramenn versus Norwegian royalty. It also, as I have discussed above,
involves scenes of gift-giving that do not confirm to the typical pattern of enacting
alliances through exchange of presents. It is thus central to ask what is being made into memory in this saga. Does the saga memorialize a general give-and-take
mentality of feuds and competitive gift-giving, or does it memorialize the particular
interests behind the composition of that particular saga, which portrays conflicts
that were not feuds as it were and dwells on gifts of an unusual kind, or are both
aspects relevant?
I would suggest that both aspects were indeed made into a meaningful memory in the
case studied here, but each along different lines. The gift exchange between Egill
and Arinbjǫrn does generally memorialize an aspect of medieval Icelandic culture: gifts created and reinforced
social bonds, were ritualized, and could embody memories of past exchanges that added
to their efficacy. The sagas, and Egla is no exception, highlight literarily the importance of the exchange, of those involved
in it, and of the institution of gift-exchange. But at the same time, Egils saga memorializes a particular type of gift that did not involve any clear agonistic element, as a symbol of a rather
unusual form of vinátta that resembles modern, emotionally-loaded friendship rather
than utilitarian alliance, and which further hints at an idea of ties that exist before
and beyond those of utilitarian alliance. Through this, it memorializes specifically
two families of early settlers (the Mýramenn primarily, but also the Hrafnistumenn)
and landowners of highborn immigrants whose friendship transcended standing on different
sides of the pressing issue of royal service.
The first is the general, structural aspect that I suspect shows how literary representation
brings in wide aspects of the “past reality as such”: elaborated gift-giving and the
value associated with giving biographies to objects
cannot be pure literary inventions, and the frequency of this phenomenon in the ethnographical
record suggests that it is rooted in real social practice. The second is arguably a particular and interest-driven memorialization, a shard
of culture that coexisted with other discursive possibilities to deal with the same
phenomenon, including possibly antagonistic ones. The most extensive discussion of
the possible contexts and ideology for creating Egils saga is Torfi Tulinius’ The Enigma of Egill, which reaffirms the (inconclusive, but widespread) hypothesis that the saga was
created by Snorri Sturluson to further his own agenda and reflects his personal interests
and concerns. Torfi argues the case for Snorri composing Egla on sociological-political, literary, and psychological grounds. While I am somewhat
sceptical of using psychological arguments about figures we only know through texts,
it seems clear that both the literary style and milieu in Egils saga are coherent with the world of Snorri. The ideology promoted by the saga, with its
insistence on the benefits of strong landowners and kings who must respect aristocrats,
does match what we know of Snorriʼs views and projects. The fact that Egla is also the tale of some of his ancestors—those who settle a core area of his domain—does
also support this theory. However, it is necessary to remember these links do not
prove Snorri to be the author, as someone close or similar to him in aspirations could
have written this text: Snorri is just a good bet.
For example, the (equally unusual) relic-like gift in Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa, where the main memory-bearing gift is a garter. This gift is not yielded between
two friends of high-ranking families, but by a saintly royal patron to the leader
of a relatively small family of chieftain-peasants. The ideological message is consequently
different, and there are indications that both sagas represent two different types
of chieftains: the often expansive Sturlungar and the smaller, waning family of the
Hítdælir (Kristinsson 10–12).
If members of these families are behind the composition of sagas remembering illustrious
ancestors linked with kings, it can be argued that the memories built around them
are sharply different. Bjǫrn is a protégé of a Christian, saintly king, eager to be
integrated in courtly life (Finlay). Analytically, he stands in contrast both to Egill,
the enemy of tyrannical pagan
kings (and proto-Christian himself, if of a pretty unsaintly kind) and Skalla-Grímr,
the isolationist landowner who ignores all power but his own. That example shows that
artefacts stored in the collective memory of a society can be very different, yet
both highly representative of the culture that created and preserved them and equally
limited in their reach and appeal: the exchange between Arinbjǫrn and Egill and the
exchange between Bjǫrn and king Óláfr represent rather different approaches to the
culture of gift-giving, presumably creating meaningful memories for different collective
agents. And at the same time, they belong together as representatives of broader mental
and material aspects of a culture: in this case, as testimonies of the importance
of gift-giving, of memorializing the early settlers in writing, often through a specific
literary genre, the saga.
On a different aspect, scenes like the one discussed here suggest that a distinction
between history (as a form of abstract, impersonal recollection of events) and collective
memory (which dwells on the idea of a lived experience) is not particularly useful
for our research case (Russell 796–801). The memorialization of the family ties between
Egill and Arinbjǫrn through gift-exchange
makes them remember events that are both personal and lived and others learned from
earlier generations. Egill obviously participated personally when Arinbjǫrn and Aðalsteinn gave him gifts.
Arinbjǫrn experiences the gift that Egill gives him and the one given by Þórólfr Skalla-Grímsson.
It is unclear if any of them were present in the earlier stages of the biography of
the sword Dragvandill: Egill may or may not have seen the (implicit) transfer from
Skalla-Grímr to his elder brother Þórólfr, but it is likely they knew of the earlier
exchanges (the path of the sword from Ketill hængr until it reached Skalla-Grímr)
through their relatives.
Yet, no distinction on those grounds is made in the saga. This makes sense, given
that if there was a distinction, the exchange scene would be less powerful, as seamless
family continuity is what the text wants to emphasize, rather than individual, lived
experience. In the exchange studied here, the personal, familiar, and the impersonal,
the objective and the subjective, are difficult to disentangle. That, in fact, makes
the exchange so powerful, and creates the feeling of a world lacking a clear distinction
between collective and individual (Gurevich 177–89), but also one lacking a clear
distinction between people and things (Torfing), where experiences tend to overlap
and form a unified sense of a meaningful past.
The gift-exchange scene discussed throughout this article uses the objects as tokens
that represent social relationships. Kate Heslop has noticed that the presence of
memory in objects is a common feature of the sagas, writing that
material objects as bearers of memory, such as the skeletons (Egils saga, Eyrbyggja saga), churches (Hávarðar saga, Þórðar saga), and bells (Kjalnesinga saga) mentioned in the closing chapters of some sagas of Icelanders, are a well-known
feature of the cultural memory work carried out by these texts. (Heslop 92)
The goods exchanged by Egill and Arinbjǫrn do not seem to have survived into later
time like Egill’s bones or the famous spear Grásíða, but they do serve a similar role.
This leads us back to our theoretical model: Mauss wrote that in the gift exchange,
the obligation is expressed in myth and imagery, symbolically and collectively; it
takes the form of interest in the objects exchanged; the objects are never completely
separated from the men who exchange them; the communion and alliance they establish
are well-nigh indissoluble. (Mauss 31 )
At the same time, the objects exchanged are created as embodiments of a social tie,
are remembered as symbols of that exchange and the people involved in it, and survive
thus as signifiers of the importance of the event.
This is a core point of the Maussian take on Durkheimian holism: objects do express
society in some way, even if some forms of thought (that is, ideological constructs)
pretend that they precede or exceed it. This mirrors the (Halbwaschian) idea that
collective memory does the same, and individuals bear memories also as an effect of
society, rather than as their own. While this can lead the analysis to portray a conflict-less, uniform society, I do
not think that such an issue is enough to completely dismiss a holistic approach,
given that conflict can be incorporated within the analysis. For the purposes outlined
here, it suffices to try to identify the agents and factions promoted by the scene,
in other words, to show its ideological stance as an aspect of its creation of memory
worth remembering.
From the analysis above, the memory described in this scene of Egla can be described as the collective memory of a lineage, and as both historical and lived experiences expressed (or created) through a literary
artefact. Unlike most sagas, Egils saga is firmly dated to a specific context of production: be it late (ca. 1240) or early
(ca. 1220) amongst the proposed datings, there is little doubt that it was produced
in Iceland, in or near Borgarfjörður. The broadest possible context is the age of
the Sturlungar, within one of the most culturally active areas of the insular nation, where the fortunes of the Sturlungar were always one of the crucial elements of the
political context. The saga makes clear that the area was settled by Skalla-Grímr,
and that this grumpy bald farmer excelled at both improving, distributing, and managing
the lands under his claim, and established a dominant family in the area, the Mýramenn:
it is primarily their memory that is upheld, and it was possibly created to give a
meaningful, legitimating past to some of their descendants, for example, some Sturlungar.
An advantage of the bilateral kinship system of Medieval Iceland was that it was possible
to choose a preferred ancestry through both male and female figures. For example,
the line from the Mýramenn to the Sturlungar runs mostly through a male line, but
it shifts to a female line one generation above Snorri and his brothers, as it is
their mother, Guðný Bǫðvarsdóttir, who descends from Egill and Grímr. By contrast,
a text such as the genealogy known as Skrá um ættartölu Sturlunga skips them, as it traces the ancestors of their father, Hvamm-Sturla.
Moreover, it is also a long illustration of the relationship between Icelanders and
kings. Egils saga is one of the Íslendingasögur where kings play a more prominent role (Á. Jakobsson
2002), at a time where the issue of the relationship between Icelanders and kings
was
of both literary and political interest, at least for a considerable part of the Icelandic
elite. The scene discussed here adds an interesting element, if read sociologically:
the figure of a loyal, highborn royal servant, who, unlike Egill’s brother and uncle
(both named Þórólfr), does not succumb to the risks of royal service, be they courtly
intrigue or military service. Arinbjǫrn is both the perfect courtier and a force of
his own. The scene is a corollary to the highest display of independent strength by
the Norwegian aristocrat, which subtly but evidently makes sure that his lord, King
Eiríkr pardons his friend in the scene crowned by the delivery of the poem Hǫfuðlausn. The exchange of gifts between Arinbjǫrn and him is a political statement, one that
says that aristocrats and wealthy farmers can interact beyond the reach of kings.
The exchange discussed in this text is better read primarily as a literary creation
(regardless of its relation to events that happened in the extra-textual reality),
but it does tell an audience a story of people and things that endured time and needs
to be remembered. It makes them matter. Literary memory is thus a powerful tool, simply
because it tells of a past that is deemed to be worth telling (sǫguligr, to be more precise), not a small issue in a society where aiming for legitimate
domination was a prime concern for those involved in the power struggles in the era
that created Egils saga.