Aunt by blood or aunt by marriage? Plus, even if she's aunt by blood, she and your relevant parent might be half-siblings and not have common parents so the aunt's father might not be your grandfather anyway.
E.g.
Dad --- Mom ----> Aunt
Dad dies, Mom remarries
Dad 2 ---- Mom ----> My mom -----> Me
Grandmother is the same mother in both cases, so aunt's mother is my grandmother. Grandfather is not the same in both cases, so aunt's father is not my grandfather.
Terry Jones said that sketch came from when he read Njal's Saga expecting an epic adventure and was disappointed that it was mostly about petty feuds and reciting everyone's genealogy.
This review is delightful and makes me want to read Njal's Saga. Does anyone here have a recommended translation, or (even better) a recommended analysis-of-tradeoffs-between-different-translations?
I think the book to read on competing translations (although it covers a lot of other ground too) is J. K. Helgason's The Rewriting of Njáls Saga.
I just read the Penguin translation and really loved it -- my favorite work of literature from the European Middle Ages. Just do make sure you write down characters and their relationships as they appear (a good rule for me for even shorter Icelandic sagas).
The review is clever but I think it missed the point of the Saga. I love Njal's Saga and lots of the other sagas too - the form of the sagas isn't a modern novel, but that's part of the charm. And they are powerful stories with deep meaning - which, again, I think the review just completely missed. Tastes differ, of course.
If you meet an Icelander, ask him/her about the sagas - they are very much alive in Iceland and I've found most Icelanders are eager to discuss them (are they historically accurate or fables? etc.), in part because Icelandic hasn't changed much, enabling people today to read them without translation. And you can visit many of the locations where the action takes place!
Is it possible to give a tl;Dr of the deeper meaning? As I'm writing this, I know it's a ridiculous request, since deep meanings by their very nature take long explanations, but aif it is possible, it would help me decide whether to read that Saga itself.
I've always understood it as the story of choosing law over violence (quite different than the reviewer's understanding). Since I'm a lawyer, I like that story! I'm told that the Icelandic title, btw, is "The Saga of Burnt Njal" - and that is quite significant in understanding the message of the story.
All major European countries have a rich medieval literature. I don't understand why that of Iceland gets so much attention.
Icelandic medieval literature is impressive for such a tiny community, but not in absolute terms, compared to the English, French, Italian, German...
And yet, judging from the internet, it almost seems that the only medieval books people ever read, discuss, or bring up, other than the one they read in school, are the Icelandic. Why is that?
>And yet, judging from the internet, it almost seems that the only medieval books people ever read, discuss, or bring up, other than the one they read in school, are the Icelandic. Why is that?
Taking a wild guess, maybe it's because other European countries have better modern and early modern literature that overshadows their medieval literature. You think of famous English writing, you think of Shakespeare. Spanish, Don Quixote. French, Alexandre Dumas's and Victor Hugo's works. So any sort of "fun fact" page that would take about influential works from a variety of countries might only have the medieval sagas to choose from for Iceland but have a wide variety for other countries.
My other guess is that the Sagas were the best source for history we have of the region, even if they're half fabled. If you're teaching history, you've got a wide variety of sources to pull from for continental Europe you can cite. If you're teaching about Iceland or Greenland, you're only citing the Sagas.
I think that depends where you hang out on the internet. The medieval books I see discussed most on the internet are those of philosophers like Aquinas.
Aren't the Icelandic sagas fairly unique, though, in forming such a substantial corpus of work in the vernacular from such an early period? I am not aware of similar literary works that one can read from early (pre 1066) medieval England (for example) that would paint such a complete picture of what society was like.
The Icelandic saga are not from before 1066. They were written in the 13th and 14th centuries. They are *about* an earlier period, just like countless romances written at the same time (and earlier!) in the countries of Western Europe.
Good point about Aquinas, but philosophy is in a separate category for me. I guess I should have specified: books of fiction/history/poetry.
I didn't say they were written before 1066. I meant that if the equivalent existed in English, we would have a series of literary works written in Anglo-Saxon about England before the Norman Conquest. (The Anglo Saxon Chronicle is more just a list of things that happened each year.) Since Iceland is in the periphery and christianized later than most of Europe, the period of history they refer to is even more "primitive" than just the date would suggest. And for the people who read them, I think that is part of the appeal.
In general you are right that Medieval literature is underappreciated.
Well the French can certainly say that they have a massive medieval literature about the times of Charlemagne. The Spanish too have a tradition of medieval epics set close to the sagas (I only knew of El Cid, but Wikipedia tells me of others, set in earlier times, such as one about Fernán González who lived 910-970). There are lots and lots of lives of saints written in all medieval languages (and in Latin; I don't understand why it matters if they are written in the vernacular), and many of those saints lived in the early Middle Ages. There is a huge amount of archaic Celtic stories, which includes the Arthurian stories that fill the literature of many languages, as well as Irish epics like the Táin. Bede wrote Anglo-Saxon history eloquently.
You may object that stuff like Arthurian romances tell us more about the times in which they were written than the times they are about, but is that not true of the Icelandic sagas as well? I'd be very surprised if the "realistic" details in the sagas were based on the period they are about rather the one in which they were written. Even if we assume that there really is a core of historical fact at the start of the telephone game that leads to any saga, I suspect that what the author really knew for sure would resemble the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
And even if it were true that the sagas tell us everything about 10th century Iceland, or whatever century Iceland, what's so special about that particular time and place? That it's primitive? Is it more magnetically primeval than the world of the Táin? It rather seems to me that many in the Anglophone world have bizarrely adopted Vikingdom as if it were the anglophone world's own past and roots, even though it is not, and treat it as such.
But then I'm not from the anglophone world myself, so what do I know.
The Icelandic sagas were discovered (by the rest of Europe, obviously the Icelanders had always had them) in the nineteenth century, when romanticism was big and there was a strong interest in oral tradition as a kind of collective product of a nation as a whole. The sagas were closer to oral tradition than most surviving European literature, and so got the most praise and attention.
Which has the extra cachet of an introduction thanking a certain J.R.R. Tolkien, in his professional capacity, before he became famous. It's got parts of Njals Saga in it, too, and everything needed to translate it yourself with a lot of work. But the key part is that Old Norse isn't very far from modern English, as languages go - if there's any part of your chosen translation that bugs you, it's easy enough to go to the source, find what the relevant words mean, and maybe if you want to spend the effort, what parts of speech they are and how they fit together. That's not the same as knowing how to translate it **well**, of course, but it should give you a sense of what your chosen translation is doing.
I think a lot of words have rather changed their meaning since they were part of Old Norse. Garth isn't exactly garden (cf. Midgard appox. meaning abode). OTOH, I'm definitely not a Norse scholar (I can't even remember whether "garth" ends with a theta or a thorn. This is just a warning to be really careful when assuming that a word in English like a word in Norse (and even descended from it) means the same thing.
Theta is a Greek letter and could not appear in any Norse word. There is some kind of variation between thorn and eth. In modern phonetics, eth is the symbol that represents the sound at the beginning of the English words "this / that / the / there" etc. ("voiced interdental fricative"), and theta is the symbol representing the sound at the beginning of "thick / thin / three" etc. ("voiceless interdental fricative"). Thorn has no use in modern English or modern linguistics, but survives in modern Icelandic.
Theta originated to represent the sound we would recognize as T, which is why it corresponds to the spelling "th"; its modern value comes from a sound change in Greek. The reverse change happened in Norse, where thorn and eth represent fricatives that have become stops (T or D) in modern Norse languages.
It is not especially obvious why there are two fricative symbols in Old Norse and Old English. In Old English, at least, they represent one and the same sound, which will be voiced or voiceless according to its phonological context - Old English did not draw a distinction in voicing for any fricatives.
This is also true of modern Icelandic, where the two symbols represent one sound today, and almost true of modern English, where there is only one symbol but two different sounds exist while mostly failing to contrast with each other. We have a very robust distinction between voiced and voiceless fricatives, featuring contrasts between f/v, s/z, sh/ʒ ("vision"), and θ/ð. But the distinction between θ and ð shows some signs of linguistic unhealth; it is famously difficult to demonstrate that English treats those sounds differently. (Phoneticians like to do this by demonstrating "minimal pairs", two words that differ only in the sounds that are being claimed as distinct. We can tell that English distinguishes B from M by seeing that native speakers can always tell the difference between "bee" and "me". Only one such pair exists for θ/ð, "teeth" vs "teethe", and "teethe" is not the most common word out there.)
It does, it's just limited to a specialised (mainly religious) sphere. Although in some northern English dialects, "thee/thy" did survive as a common part of speech until the 1970s.
No, because the Os are pronounced differently as well (short in cloth/cloths, long in clothe/clothes), whereas to count as a minimal pair only one sound can be distinct.
Certainly! Even words in English have different meanings in other dialects of English. In this case, just out of curiosity, it looks like the dictionary in the book I linked defines it as:
garðr, m. fence; enclosure, court farmyard; dwelling-place
I was mostly referring to the syntax, the morphology, and even the phonology. Here's a bit I grabbed at random, and the translation from here:
"Gizurr leit við honum ok mælti, 'Hvárt er Gunnarr heima?'"
"Gizur looked at him and said, 'Well, is Gunnar at home?""
There's the "looked with" for "looked at", and the "whether is" construction, but overall it's a whole lot more understandable to me than almost any other language I've run across.
And of course, the action-movie banter of it all, because the guy being addressed just got stabbed with a polearm from inside Gunnar's house, and falls down dead after answering the question.
"Þorgrímr svarar, 'Viti þér þat, en hitt vissa ek, at atgeirr hans var heima.' Síðan fell hann niðr dauðr."
"'Find that out for yourselves,' said Thorgrim; 'but this I am sure of, that his bill is at home,' and with that he fell down dead."
That's a bit more complicated, but the main thing I'd call out is "bill" being the translation of "atgeir", which I called a "polearm".
I'm just reminded that whenever there's ancaps claiming Medieval Iceland as some sort of an example of how ancapism would work (though I'm encountering less of these than before, probably since there's less ancaps around), it sounds absolutely horrible, even in the "moderate" interpretion that it wasn't *quite* as bloody as the sagas say, not the sort of a place where anyone could live; almost like a historical country-sized experiment with the result that, yes, you can indeed technically construct a society according to this principle, even run it for some hundreds of years, but *why*?
Also, a medieval Viking lawsuit Ace Attorney -style game absolutely sounds like... well, not something I'd necessarily play, but certainly something that would gather a small and fervent fanbase that would eventually contribute greatly to general social media meme culture. King of Dragon Pass and its successor games had some similar elements, though also of course a lot of other stuff.
Okay, as literally stated, that's true, but in context, the question is what you think the "ancaps" (read as: libertarians) you criticize mean. That was a response to your rhetorical "Why?"
And no, you DON'T actually have plenty of options. That's the point. You can either submit to the state, or defy it (and almost certainly die horribly).
Emigrate to a different state, presumably - the modern world rather lacks unclaimed islands to set up a new country on.
And gaining power and influence in your own state is much easier said than done - even in the West where the circumstances of your birth are no longer a hard block on social mobility, fundamentally a country of millions (or hundreds of millions) of people can only have a few at most with genuine agency over the State
>the modern world rather lacks unclaimed islands to set up a new country on.
It lacks unclaimed islands, mostly, but Marie Byrd Land is still unclaimed and unlike most other "unclaimed" lands is in fact not administered by any state.
The problems are 1) this is Antarctica (this one is manageable; the Antarctic sea is *very* rich in fish and meat so you can still feed yourself, and you can melt ice to drink with oil-lamps), 2) under international law you can't resign your citizenship without citizenship of another state to replace it, which means *you're still subject to your home country's laws* via citizenship jurisdiction (i.e. if you're a British subject, you move to Marie Byrd Land and you kill someone else who moved to Marie Byrd Land, then the British police will come after you and haul you all the way back to London for a murder trial).
FWIW, not all "libertarians" are anarcho-capitalists. Some are even a form of socialist. (You may not think their ideas would work, but *they* do.)
It's my opinion that NO simple social model will work very well. And that includes "free market capitalism". Adam Smith had a lot of very good points, but they tend to be ignored by the "free market capitalism" ideologues.
OTOH, the sagas are entertainment as well as history, and so they are strongly biased in the way that entertainments are biased. They tend to wildly over emphasize dramatic events, including violence. They events may not be spun out of whole-cloth, but you can't trust their accuracy. (Consider the way 20 years of Scottish history was compressed into Macbeth. And the liberties that were taken with actual history in the process.)
"Thankfully, we have plenty of options guaranteeing we don't generally have to do either."
National liberation / separatist movements are pretty common around the world today, so clearly a lot of people still do think they have to choose one.
Obviously it means they would prefer to die defending their freedom or property or something else they value, rather than serviley submitting to some unjust or criminal imposition.
As Shakespeare said (quoting from memory, so I may have it slightly wrong!) "Cowards die a thousand deaths, but the valiant taste of death but once".
On the other hand, Musashi, who unlike Shakespeare actually fought numerous duels to the death, wrote that a warrior should become accustomed to envisioning his own death.
What I think you're missing when you say the statement "not *quite* as bloody as the sagas say" is that I believe the main line of reconstruction of the death rate is based on the latter sagas' description of an Iceland-encompassing civil war, in which they name every person who is killed and it produces a per capita death rate in wartime below the US murder rate.
If you consider Njalsaga as the equivalent of a cop show "BASED ON REAL EVENTS" that is eagerly seizing on the most exciting thing to happen in this quarter of Iceland and dramatizing it, I think you might not be far off? There are all these timeskip years where nothing happens.
In fact, they do. One of the most famous chunks Njalsaga is in fact about a bit where two major female characters are feuding through their servants, complete with the death toll.
So, they had the right to feud. They could order their servants around. Do they have standing in court? Can they inherit property?
There are all sorts of freedoms. Women in Iceland had more freedom than women elsewhere. They still do. They even got the vote in 1915, before women in the US or England. If you look, you can find tales of women involved in feuds and murder and suborned servants from places like Saudi Arabia and India where women were no better than chattel. For some reason that particular freedom doesn't seem to be on libertarian radar. It's not on mine either.
Women created and voted on the money (a particular kind of cloth). They standardized it by controlling the "official standards boards". This lasted until the mechanical looms came in and disempowered them. But during the period of the sagas women were politically powerful. (OTOH, I don't know that they wrote sagas. Odin was generally only worshiped by men.) I've encountered a few sources that say they couldn't vote in the Allthing, but they didn't mention the time period, and the sources that talk about inheritance (that I found when trying to respond) are generally book length, and I'm not that interested. But the time period would be important.
Viking women were treated much better than women in many other areas and at other times. If you had to go back in time and be a woman, you could do a lot worse than choosing medieval Iceland.
Still, it isn't the same as having political rights. Women didn't become first class citizens until the early 20th century when they got the right to vote. That let them make a lot of other important changes.
Look at modern Saudi Arabia. Women are now allowed to drive there. A brave handful of women had tried to get the right to drive for years. They wrote letters. They protested. They even drove illegally. They were punished for it. Then the king decided to let women drive. Needless to say, none of those sentenced were pardoned. Being able to drive was a right someone else gave them, not a right they took for themselves. There's a big difference.
"similar to mainland medieval Europe" isn't exactly a place I'd like to live, but it does suggest that the Icelandic minimal 'state' was as effective at keeping the peace as the aristocracies that were the norm elsewhere.
I could also be relatively easily persuaded that Iceland actually wasn't that violent per capita because it was necessarily sparsely populated and per capita crime rates go up with density - easier to kill someone if you don't have to hike across a mountain to get to his house.
According to the public scholarship I've seen (mostly Bret Devereaux with a bit from Scott) the Middle Ages were actually unusually low in violent deaths compared to any other period pre-Long-Peace (note here that if the Long Peace is broken soon, the overall average violent death rate for Generation X/Millennials/iGen/Generation Alpha will also be higher than that of the Middle Ages, with only the Silent Generation and Boomers being unusually low; "a thousand 'atta boy's are wiped away with one 'oh, shit!'" when that "oh, shit!" is a nuclear exchange).
Insinuating also works, it's what Iago does with Othello and what Wormtongue does with Theoden: work their way into your life as your closest counsellor and then drop poison into your ear.
"1a: to impart or suggest in an artful or indirect way
1b: to introduce (something, such as an idea) gradually or in a subtle, indirect, or covert way
2: to introduce (someone, such as oneself) by stealthy, smooth, or artful means"
Any time people point to Athens, instead of any number of perfectly functional independent tribes a hundred miles from the closest "civilized frontier" as "a flourishing of human freedoms" I can't help but sigh a little, especially after reading authors like James C. Scott & David Graeber. Sure, Athens had a mighty citizen navy, but also widespread slavery, a great deal of tension between oligarchs and the demos, etc. etc. It was certainly a flourishing of literature and scholasticism and thought, but freedom? Only under really skewed definitions, I think. So I was glad to see that addressed here, albeit in a footnote.
Athens is cited as an early example of freedom combined with literacy; I don't think that describes your tribes beyond the pale. And, lacking literacy or the equivalent, it's hard to be clear on how much oppression, slavery, etc, they may have had. We can imagine them as Noble Savages, if you like - there won't be much historical record to contradict.
The Phoenix Wright video was an incredibly funny touch and I really appreciated it. I assume this book has been translated maybe even a couple times? Of course I believe the Scandinavian's language is much more robust then English and is still legible to current scandanavian's. The main reason I ask is mostly about the focus on Njal as a beardless Christian part being added by translators who found merit in the saga for that reason.
The comparison to greek saga of Orestes was also compelling. I wonder if we have something similar when Justinian and the Byzantines rewrote their judicial system which we mostly have intact today. I also wonder if this is why lawyer shows can be so popular. Of course there most of the time it's about really good lawyers seeing justice served by any means necessary rather then walking the line that Njal's Saga did of showing that law isn't always fair (Though there are very good episodes that do show that dichotomy).
Thanks for sharing! I do not want to read this book, but am glad to know of it.
I imagine the "beardless Christian" part was added when the existing oral saga was first written down circa 14th century, rather than being an artefact of modern translations. It's an unfortunately common feature to old Norse sagas, that because they were only actually written down by Cristian monks we've lost much of the record of the old *religion*, and the record of the culture more generally is probably distorted though much less blatantly.
"Finally, in the saga, Thorhall is lame due to a boil on his foot, and lies bedridden in a hut nearby - each time Mord needs to consult him, he sends messengers to Thorhall’s hut, and Thorhall sends the messengers back with the answer."
*sips coffee*
Wow, that sounds like it would make for a very annoying gimmick.
It works because of Archie Goodwin, who is the narrator and does the majority of the leg work. He (and others on Wolfe's payroll) go out and question witnesses, visit crime scenes, etc. and then brings back the information to Wolfe, who pulls it together and pulls the solution out of the hat.
It works the same way Holmes and Watson work, by establishing for the reader a comfortable formula that is consistent from book to book, but the mysteries are very different. Archie's role is also to nag Wolfe into taking on work and keep prodding him along the way instead of looking for a fast way to wrap it up and get a fat fee for doing so.
Retelling Njal's saga with a first-person smartass go-between as narrator might be entertaining, though the ultimate tone would probably be more Dashiell Hammett "Red Harvest" than Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe.
Excellent review! Short, very entertaining, summarises the book excellently while using it to make a fascinating larger point.
Anyone else think the entries this time round have been MUCH higher quality than last time? In my view the five I've read so far are all top-three quality relative to previous years.
I love this review, I am going to vote it, and does this mean that mediaeval Icelanders were Libertarians?
"When Harald Fairhair declared himself King of Norway, the Norwegians who refused to bend the knee fled west to build a makeshift seastead on a frozen volcanic island. No lords, no kings, no masters. Only lawsuits. So, so many lawsuits."
Last year: "This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done"
This year: "This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done."
Shout out to David Friedman's "Legal Systems Very Different from Ours"
Well, Scott did say, "Last year people kept guessing that various reviews were by me, and I had to reassure you that no, I hadn’t secretly entered my own contest. This year I refuse to confirm or deny anything, so have fun speculating!"
I commented elsewhere that this is the only review that is as or more entertaining than Scott's book reviews. I really hope that after the reveal I learn about another entertaining thinker, but it would be hilarious if the funniest book review ended up being Scott's.
I’m going with, “He still won’t enter, that would go against the whole point of the book reviews. He’s just sick of telling people over and over that he didn’t write them, and this is the least-effort way for him to avoid doing so.”
I think it’s hypothetically possible that Scott offered to upload any videos during this book review process to his YouTube channel so as to preserve anonymity.
"After examining both pieces, I notice some distinctive similarities and differences between the two:
Similarities:
Both pieces present complex topics in a conversational, informal style. They often interject questions and asides to the reader, implying a similar approach to engaging with an audience.
Both use analogies and metaphors to explain abstract concepts. In the first piece, the author uses the metaphor of a landscape with peaks and valleys to explain the concept of canalization. In the second piece, the author uses the analogy of a Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney spinoff to describe the saga.
Both pieces demonstrate a sense of humor and a certain light-heartedness, such as the playful descriptions of the saga characters and the comment about the "world’s wackiest Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney spinoff" in the second piece, and the phrase "mental mountains, trapped priors, relaxed beliefs under psychedelics" in the first piece.
Differences:
The first piece uses more specialized and academic language, with terms like "computational psychiatry", "Bayesian beliefs", and "gradient descent". The second piece uses more straightforward language and simpler vocabulary, even when discussing complex concepts.
The first piece contains numerous references to scientific theories and concepts, suggesting a more technical background, while the second piece centers more around a story or narrative.
The first piece tends to explain concepts more thoroughly, while the second piece focuses more on plot progression and character development.
Given these observations, it's plausible that the same author could have written both pieces, as they share a similar conversational style, use of humor, and approach to explanation. However, the differences in technical language, content, and approach to explanation could also suggest different authors. If I were to quantify this, I would say there's about a 60% likelihood that both pieces were written by the same author, bearing in mind that the nature of the topics might explain some of the differences in approach."
Most of these are relatively circumstantial pieces of evidence. The style is similar, but every year there are imitators of Scott's style. On the other hand, the differences can mostly be chalked up to tackling two different subject areas- although I do think that Scott might have been a little more detailed in the book review.
Does anyone know of any free online fingerprint/authorship analysis pieces? I put them through a text analyzer but don't know enough about the subject to make a judgement on whether the findings were significant.
> Still, there have been a few times when men could boast they were free without it sounding completely hollow. Ancient Athens is the classic, but medieval Iceland surely deserves a place beside it in this pantheon.
Ancient Athens and medieval Iceland were both literally slave-holding societies. and in Athens at least women were somewhere between "second class citizens" and "property".
If by "a time when men could boast they were free" you mean "a time when some men, but no women, could boast they were free" then pretty much every society qualifies. If you mean "a society where everyone was minimally unfree" ancient Athens and medieval Iceland are both terrible, terrible choices.
It's probably neither of your choices and more something like "a society where an unusually larger proportion of men were free compared to typical societies of the time". Once you're done with the (important) caveat about Athenian women, slaves, and immigrants, you're left with a society where even poor citizens had unusual freedom compared to almost all premodern societies.
If the play stood out as exceptional in some way compared to all plays from both the previous and the next thousand years, then I think that would be a legitimate question to ask! Even despite the extremely unfortunate incident concerning Mr. Lincoln.
An interesting point is that at least SOME immigrant women were relatively free in ancient Athens. They couldn't vote, but they weren't owned by anyone. They controlled property. (I don't know that they owned it.) They had to walk a pretty narrow line politically, since they didn't have any "inherent rights", but they were free and powerful compared to "native-born" women. Of course, they might be told at any time that they had to leave, but that was normal in Athenian politics. (Solon was exiled a year after his famous laws were enacted to avoid a civil war. Everybody was mad at him.)
"The Virginians took this idea and ran with it – in the wrong direction. No, they said, we wouldn’t be free if we had to work, therefore we insist upon not working. No, we wouldn’t be free if we were limited by poverty, therefore we insist upon being extremely rich. Needless to say, this conception of freedom required first indentured servitude and later slavery to make it work, but the Virginians never claimed that the servants or slaves were free. That wasn’t the point. Freedom, like wealth, was properly distributed according to rank; nobles had as much as they wanted, the middle-class enough to get by on, and everyone else none at all. And a Virginian noble would have gone to his grave insisting that a civilization without slavery could never have citizens who were truly free."
Talking about the Athenians as having the same conception of freedom as post Enlightenment westerners have is anachronistic. There is a famous essay about the liberty of the ancients vs the moderns from the 19th century by Benjamin Constant. The modern idea of liberty is a more individual one, the right to conduct one's private life as one likes.
For an Athenian citizen, liberty meant being able to participate directly in political decision making and not being ruled by a hierarchy. That was dependent on having leisure (hence, slaves) but also on living in a city state. Hardly anyone in modern societies has that kind of liberty. However, in modern Western societies, there have been more people with freedom to conduct their private affairs (even if they had no political influence, or even the vote).
So, in feud-adjacent arbitration systems like these, why isn't part of the role of "trusted arbitrator" the ability to say "look, Eyjolf obviously neglected to eliminate his six jurors in a bad faith attempt to invalidate the trial, let's just ignore his bullshit and rule on the merits"? That seems like the entire point of having trusted arbitrators.
Or maybe other, similar systems did allow this, and the Icelandic one was just particularly vulnerable to going off the rails due to stupid technicalities? Or maybe Iceland was particularly low-trust, so the arbitrators weren't trusted enough to make a ruling like that without getting stabbed by all of Eyjolf's friends? Would this same thing have happened in the Somali system described in Legal Systems Very Different From Ours?
The footnote mentions that there isn't actually a judge, just a jury and assembled onlookers, so I don't know if there actually was anyone empowered to say "this is bad faith bullshit."
Also, this is complete speculation, but I wonder if it was meant to deter escalation. "You say you don't want weregild? Okay, but the longer this trial drags on, the greater the chance that you get executed for stupid reasons, so think carefully."
Or perhaps it's just an assertion of your power or legitimacy. Like, if you say "The law says my opponents must be put to death because they have the wrong number of jurors" and the guys standing behind you menacingly with axes say "Yes, I know the law, he's right" then the jury will probably listen to the nice men with axes, no?
I'm not an expert, but I suspect it's partly because the story is fictional (at least in part), and this is how the author gets to the climactic ending. The villain employs trickery, there's a dramatic battle at the Althing, and Kari gets a quest for vengeance. Perhaps in a real trial, that trick wouldn't have worked, but folk stories need a cunning trick.
In Iceland, the whole legal system was part of a delicate truce that served the vast majority. They or their ancestors had agreed to accept the law as written rather than face anarchy. If the legal system had been part of a government where laws were rewritten and reinterpreted as part of an ongoing system of checks and balances, there is a chance one could appeal to a higher sense of justice or some other element of the legal framework. When the room is full of armed men with axes who have only refrained from using them because they are bound by the law as written, even a slight deviation from the letter might lead to axe-work.
And the reason lawyers are Esq. is for esquire, because this was the squire representing the knight champion in an argument that if not resolved would lead to trial by combat. And that was only revoked relatively recently (long after the custom of combat had died out) when some guy on the losing end showed up in full armor and issued the challenge. (I think that was in the 1800's.)
The British legal system, from which the US and others are derived was set by the Magna Charta where the nobles defied the king before coming to a negotiated truce. This was followed by a number of kings that only spoke German, and let their powers get eroded. And merchants were more consistent about pushing for the power of the non-aristocracy than the aristocracy was in defending it. So it's also been a delicate truce. (Probably every place has been that hasn't been in active war, if you look closely enough. And I ignored various religious disputes that also played into this. Not to mention various parties engaging in interventionist foreign policy. Delicate is less accurate than chaotic.)
I was reading a 19th century issue of Harper's, and article on Some Precepts for Slandering Safely, and came a across a reference to the 1818 case that ended the right to trial by combat in England. From a footnote:
"I once heard a lawyer from Massachusetts relate a curious instance of the authority of the common law in his state. He said that he once advised a client, who had the reputation of being a fighting man, to plead the right of wager of battle. Now, wager of battle is a trial by combat and was formerly allowed by the common law. By it the defendant had the right to fight with the plaintiff, the result of the conflict proving whether he was guilty or innocent. My friend argued to the court that the common law, as it was at the Revolution, had been adopted in Massachusetts, and when adopted,, a defendant in England had the legal right to wage his battle, and the law never having been abolished by statute in Massachusetts the defendant still had that right, although the law had been abolished in England. The court held the plea to be a good one. I have examined the Massachusetts Digest, but I find no reported case to the above effect. Perhaps the story is mythical. It may have been suggested by the celebrated case of Ashford vs. Thornton, I Barn. & Ald. 405, decided in 1818 in England. In this case the defendant did plead his right to wage battle, and the court allowed it. This case called the attention of Parliament to the fact that this anomaly — this relic of another age — was still a part of the common law of England, and the next year it was abolished."
The author was either correct on this or he talked a good game.
Could this be a result of different laws interacting? For example, one that says "each party much exclude six jurors from the pool" and one saying "failure to follow the proper jury selection procedure is punishable by exile"? The latter intending to prevent people from excluding more than six or something, but technically applying to excluding less than six.
My question though is still that if all these legal loopholes are deemed valid, why haven't they been used as tricks before? It feels like they should be known tricks to look out for. (Though maybe that goes back to other people's answers about it being fiction or a menacing guy with an axe.)
They probably have been used before, the problem is that there are so many potential loopholes, even a highly trained expert struggles to remember all of them.
Low-trust society might be the answer. "Everyone follows the rules exactly, no exceptions" is often an easier Schelling point to converge on in such situations than "everyone follows the rules except when there's a good reason not to."
It reminds me of that time there was a riot in (IIRC) the Church of the Holy Sepulchre because someone moved a chair. It seems like a trivial thing to riot over, and indeed it is, but the church is used by various denominations, all of whom are worried that one of the others will try to monopolise it. Hence they've converged on the Schelling point of "Everything here stays exactly the same and nothing every changes" as a way of alleviating such fears.
I'm really hoping that's not the case. If he won the contest anonymously, what would that prove? That people who like his writing enough to follow his blog and participate in a book review contest, really like his writing? Seems tautological. If he doesn't win the contest anonymously, that would be even more embarrassing.
Chaplin allegedly placed third in a Chaplin impersonator contest. It'd be curious to see if Scott could actually win anonymously. For what it's worth, I'd bet against this review having been written by him, feels more like an especially ardent Scott worshiper.
I didn't think it sounded much like Scott at all. There are superficial similarities. If he was able to write something this funny but also this different, I dunno. That would surpass Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman to see if he still had the magic.
Scott mentioned earlier that he did enter the contest this year. I don't know his motives, but I'd guess it's a combination of:
- testing whether his readers *do* prefer his writing in a blind test (resulting in either an ego boost or an interesting lesson);
- increasing engagement with this series of posts by a) adding a guessing-game element and b) drawing in readers who don't want to miss any of Scott's posts;
- and perhaps changing the way people evaluate the reviews (because a Scott-like voice no longer implies 'imitator').
There's another saga in which the hero kills an advisor to the king and he knows he needs to tell the king about this or else it's murder, but he also knows that if he does then the king will have him killed. His solution is to deliver this extremely cryptic pun-filled speech that at first sounds nonsensical, but when the king thinks about it later he realizes "Hey, wait, that guy just confessed to killing my advisor!" But by that time the hero is gone.
Women were never free in that sense. Even Norse women were smaller and weaker than Norse men. They had to obey their husbands and male relatives or they'd be physically punished. They couldn't go to the council if someone slugged them or killed a relative, and good luck not dying horribly if they fought back. That's about 20,000 of the 40,000 right there. Throw in the fact that even male children, servants and slaves were also not free, and you're talking about a tiny minority of free people. Your number was 500 out of 40,000, so it's hard to think of it as a society of free people. It was a society with 79 out of 80 people being cattle. So, it was 1.25% free. People talking up freedom rarely are. Consider Thomas Jefferson talking up freedom while torturing people to force them to do work for him. (He talked a good game. It's a pity that people who took his fine words seriously are now denounced as "woke".)
A common theory is that Athena was created as the patron goddess of Athens because the Athenians wanted a woman who would always side with men. That's why she doesn't have a mother or is only granted one in a marginal role as a hat tip to Biology 101. She doesn't have any desires or passions of her own like most other goddesses. If you look at classical Athens, in its glory days as the local bully state, women were treated appallingly. There were wives and hetaerae. The former were treated as children with no freedom whatever, and the latter as whores with little more. Oh yeah, lots of slaves, too. I doubt classical Athens was even 1% free.
My girlfriend read Njal's Saga in Old Norse. The moral she took was to make sure you keep that chickweed under control. It dries out and catches fire easily. Having dealt with chickweed, that's just common sense.
So by your standards, was any ancient society free? And if not, what's the point of using the words "free" and "non-free"? It seems like you're doing the equivalent of condemning Newton for not understanding general relativity, and not mentioning the fact that he was way, way ahead of everyone else at the time.
Can't speak for Kaleberg, but my answer would be "no, some but not all modern societies deserve to be referred to as moderately "free", but no premodern ones I'm aware of came close, and I'd be surprised to learn that ones I don't know about did".
It's not a pointless distinction, because see above about existence of modern free societies.
I think it's absolutely fair to describe some ancient societies as "freer" or "less free", but when doing so you should weight heavily towards the bottom of the scale, so a society in with 90% peasants and 10% aristocrats doesn't have to give the peasants many rights to count as "freer" than a society with 20-25% slaves and 75%-80% citizens (of various classes, very much not all equal) like ancient Athens, especially not if it gives women some independence while it's at it.
Freedom is a spectrum. I take that back, it's more of a lattice. Some people place property rights above all others. Some people consider political rights more important. This is why we have politics. Some societies are more free than others, sometimes in different ways.
Athenian democracy was a result of Athens being a community of refugees from different areas, so they needed a mechanism for balancing their interests. It was a step in good direction, but just a small step. I'm not condemning Newton or Jefferson for what they were back then. I was addressing modern discussions such as this one. We can grant the Icelanders a step in a good direction, one that explains further good steps they have taken since. We can't argue that, as far as they have come, they didn't have a long way to go.
Every woman and some men are sure that they were Cleopatra in a previous life. It's easy to judge Ptolemaic Egypt as a wonderful place if you had been Cleopatra, asp and all. It's just that there were a lot more people in Egypt back then, and most of them were not Cleopatra. You can't judge Ptolemaic Egypt by how wonderful it was for one person, especially not if you are assessing the level of freedom it offered.
But it wasn't just one person who had freedom in Athens. It was the whole adult male citizen population, which is maybe 16% of the total. Athens had slavery, but so did every other society. Women didn't have equal rights, but neither did they have equal rights anywhere else. Children had no political rights, but they have no political rights in our democracies either.
Spartans who visited Athens condemned Athenians for how well they treated their slaves, and how they're allowed to freely walk the streets. Spartans treated their slaves especially brutally, but it's entirely possible that Athens treated their slaves unusually well compared to other societies of their time.
Try "treated SOME of their slaves relatively well". The child slaves who died in the silver mines didn't thing they were being treated well. OTOH, they definitely treated some of their slaves well. A few were treated well compared to the average citizen.
Sparta was very unusually harsh in how it treated its slaves. That's a part of why they had to so emphasize military service.
I've wondered about the 3-4 slaves per household measure, too. Slave holding usually follows a power curve with many holding only a few slaves but a few holding many slaves. Athens had public slaves as well as private slaves. Odds are, if you ran a silver mine, you'd have dozens of slaves. There were apparently hundreds of public slaves. I haven't seen a good accounting.
From what I've heard, Sparta was pretty god awful for just about everyone, even its own citizens. Sometimes one wonders what the whole point was. You'd think that at least the boss man would get himself a cushy billet.
The last time I checked, 16% is less than 100%. 5% is less than that. If one is going to call the society of Norse Iceland free, you can still say that it was less free than classical Athens or the American South and definitely less free than our current society. Maybe this is all screwed up, but I judge the freedom a society offers by my likelihood of having maximal allowed freedom if I were living there.
Re: "Spartans who visited Athens condemned Athenians for how well they treated their slaves" - That sounds like typical Athenian propaganda until you learn how the Spartans treated their slaves. Treating them better than the Spartans was a low bar to clear. Slave holders always like to talk about how well they treat their slaves. Who was going to argue with them? Charles Darwin gave an example of this recounting his voyages to South America. Like Darwin, I tend to discount boasts of generosity and benevolence from people who hold all the cards.
For what it's worth, although the passage I'm talking about was written by an Athenian, he was an oligarch who opposed democracy and did not think slaves ought to be treated well. Here's the passage, from The Constitution of the Athenians by Pseudo-Xenophon (aka the Old Oligarch):
"Now among the slaves and metics at Athens there is the greatest uncontrolled wantonness; you can't hit them there, and a slave will not stand aside for you. I shall point out why this is their native practice: if it were customary for a slave (or metic or freedman) to be struck by one who is free, you would often hit an Athenian citizen by mistake on the assumption that he was a slave. For the people there are no better dressed than the slaves and metics, nor are they any more handsome. If anyone is also startled by the fact that they let the slaves live luxuriously there and some of them sumptuously, it would be clear that even this they do for a reason. For where there is a naval power, it is necessary from financial considerations to be slaves to the slaves in order to take a portion of their earnings, and it is then necessary to let them go free. And where there are rich slaves, it is no longer profitable in such a place for my slave to fear you. In Sparta my slave would fear you; but if your slave fears me, there will be the chance that he will give over his money so as not to have to worry anymore. [12] For this reason we have set up equality between slaves and free men, and between metics and citizens."
Thanks. One was definitely better off as a slave in Athens than in Sparta. My take is that you were probably better off as a slave in Athens than a free man in Sparta, but I'm guessing that not all slaves in Athens were well treated. Town slaves and house slaves usually have it a lot better than slaves in mines or on farms. Still, Athens brought in several hundred Scythian slaves to work as policemen, so that's a cohort of slaves that even a free Athenian has to respect otherwise what's the point of making them a policeman.
Then comes the acid test. Would you rather be a slave in Athens or a free citizen of Athens? Assume a d20 roll for occupation and assets.
There were LOTS of ancient societies that were free. But you don't find them living in cities. Cities require too much work to maintain. And "free" meant "you can do what we agree to do, or you can leave and die". (They generally wouldn't kill you, they'd leave that to the local predators. A very few could survive that life for a decade or two.) And they were all small. My wild guess would be that they averaged less than 150 people. And most of they were long before the time of the sagas. (People tend to expand to fill their environment, unless something keeps the population in check. And then there's no room for "real freedom".) But those societies were free. Anyone could choose to leave whenever they decided to. Rejoining was a very different matter.
‘It's a pity that people who took his fine words seriously are now denounced as "woke".‘
The woke are the inheritors of Jeffersonian values? This seems short on insight, and like a low-light, high-heat comment, too. Maybe you can explain why ‘the woke’ are more serious about this than the average civil libertarian, in a specific policy sense?
Anyway, objecting to calling ancient societies with e.g. the rule of law, democracy, rights, etc. “free” because they weren’t 100% free seems, well, like exactly the same sort of short-sighted condemnation that I would not associate with Jefferson or anybody who believes in the spirit of USA Founders. It also exists in serious tension with your comment I address in the first paragraph: are ‘the woke’ also so lacking? If not, why did you draw the obvious parallel to hypocrisy? Confusing!
A society is not simply free or not free. Every society has its free peoples, almost always men and often men from selected ethnic groups. I agree that freedom is a desirable goal, but the idea of freedom has grown over the centuries. A society with one free king has a free man, but a society with 1% or 10% free people is better. Jefferson did advance the cause of freedom, but I consider his work incomplete. It was definitely far from complete in his lifetime.
If you look at the war on the "woke", the complaint seems to be that certain people do not deserve the same freedoms as just about everyone else. People who recited the Pledge of Allegiance and took the "and liberty and justice for all" part seriously are denounced as "social justice warriors". I belong to an ethnic group that wasn't emancipated until the late 18th century, and I know there are people out there who would love to end that emancipation.
I'm not going to let ancient societies off the hook. Some of them were better than others. I am hopeful that our society will be judged harshly for its own lack of freedom in the future. As Thomas Jefferson said, "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever."
Like a lot of Donald Trump's supporters. They hold rallies. They murder people. Trump says they are very fine people. You haven't been following the news, have you?
You mean that one Trump supporter murdered one person during a huge rally with many Trump supporters, and that Trump, while denouncing the murderer, said that there were fine people in the rally--and also fine people among the counter-protesters. Or rather, I hope you meant that, because that's what happened. He was being more charitable than you're being to political enemies, and that's quite a low bar!
Trump wasn't complimenting the counter-protesters. He'd never do a thing like that.
They just convicted one Trump supporter for shooting up a synagogue. Have you read the Turner Diaries? Are you up to date on Qanon? That stuff is mother's milk to Trump's hard core base, and that base votes solid Republican, so few Republican politicians abjure them.
Darrell E. Brooks, anti-Trump Democrat BLM supporter:
"On November 21, 2021, Darrell E. Brooks Jr. drove a sport utility vehicle (SUV) through the annual Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, United States, killing six people and injuring sixty-two others."
Notably, all six people he killed were white.
"A Facebook account reported to belong to Brooks contained viewpoints aligning with that of the Black Hebrew Israelites (BHI)... his former social media accounts "indicate support for some conspiratorial, Black nationalist.. beliefs"
His rap lyrics:
"Fuck the pigs" and "Fuck Donald Trump."
His social media posts:
"B L A C K L I V E S M A T T E R ! ! !"
“So when we start bakk knokkin white people TF out ion wanna hear it…the old white ppl 2, KNOKK DEM TF OUT!! PERIOD”
[Referencing a fake Hitler quote]: "The white citizens of America will be terrified to know that all this time they've been mistreating and discriminating and lynching the children of Israel... God will destroy them as he destroyed Egypt for doing the same thing."
"interesting", a comment left on an ESPN article about NBA player Kyle Kuzma explaining "his belief of what white privilege is."
A middle finger emoji and a police officer emoji, commented on a post supporting Black Lives Matter.
A comment on the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict: "wasn’t surprised 1 bit."
"A 28-year-old, who identified as transgender, has shot dead three children aged nine and three adults at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee.
Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who was once a student there, was killed by police after a confrontation with officers following the attack at the Covenant School.
Hale had a manifesto and detailed maps of the school, and entered the building by shooting through a door before the killings."
“There’s some belief that there was some resentment for having to go to that school,” Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told Lester Holt of NBC News.
And the white men are calling for explicit discrimination against women, homosexuals, Blacks, Chinese, Jews and so on. It used to be the law. Now it no longer has legal sanction. That's why political rights are so important and the anti-woke work so hard to suppress them.
I don't approve of affirmative action either, but that seems to be applied in only a handful of areas. Arguments about it mainly involve elite university admissions. Harvard still discriminates in favor of white men with its legacy and athletic admits. Everyone else if fighting over the scraps. It's more serious with a publicly funded school like Berkeley. There, Californian voters - politics again - are the ones picking up the tab.
A lot of the anti-woke complaints don't involve discrimination against straight white men. Having rainbow "pride" merchandise on sale is kind of silly, like the shamrock and leprechaun stuff that shows up every March, but the anti-woke crowd is pissed at it. Take a look at DeSantis' anti-woke program in Florida. He doesn't want certain people to appear in any text books. He doesn't like teaching certain subjects that make certain white people "uncomfortable". He is anti-woke but is in no way concerned about discrimination against straight white men. He's about discriminating against everyone else.
I don't think affirmative action is ever the correct answer. The only partial justification is to make up for ongoing discrimination in other areas that haven't been properly addressed, and the real answer is to keep addressing those areas. But they aren't always easy to address:
<i>And the white men are calling for explicit discrimination against women, homosexuals, Blacks, Chinese, Jews and so on.</i>
No politically or numerically significant portion of white men is calling for that.
<i>I don't approve of affirmative action either, but that seems to be applied in only a handful of areas.</i>
"To find out how many believe “reverse discrimination” is really an issue affecting their workplace, in November ResumeBuilder.com surveyed 1,000 hiring managers across the U.S.
Key findings include:
52% believe their company practices “reverse discrimination” in hiring
1 in 6 have been asked to deprioritize hiring white men
48% have been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications
53% believe their job will be in danger if they don’t hire enough diverse employees
70% believe their company has DEI initiatives for appearances’ sake"
<i>A lot of the anti-woke complaints don't involve discrimination against straight white men. Having rainbow "pride" merchandise on sale is kind of silly, like the shamrock and leprechaun stuff that shows up every March, but the anti-woke crowd is pissed at it.</i>
No, the anti-woke crowd is pissed at being made to express support for positions they disagree with under threat of being fired.
<i>Take a look at DeSantis' anti-woke program in Florida. He doesn't want certain people to appear in any text books. He doesn't like teaching certain subjects that make certain white people "uncomfortable".</i>
Do you have any examples? As written, this claim is vague as to be practically meaningless.
My experience is that the default was to hire a man for any leadership role. If I suggested a woman, I'd be politely rejected. If suggested another, I'd be told I was discriminating against men. That's how it works.
There's a default, and going against the default rubs people the wrong way. That poll confirms it. If you look at the actual hiring and who is in leadership positions, you'll get a very different story.
Estimates of the population of ancient Athens vary. During the 4th century BC, there might well have been some 250,000–300,000 people in Attica.[4] Citizen families could have amounted to 100,000 people and out of these some 30,000 would have been the adult male citizens entitled to vote in the assembly. In the mid-5th century the number of adult male citizens was perhaps as high as 60,000, but this number fell precipitously during the Peloponnesian War.
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Only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens. The percentage of the population that actually participated in the government was 10% to 20% of the total number of inhabitants, but this varied from the fifth to the fourth century BC.[25] This excluded a majority of the population: slaves, freed slaves, children, women and metics (foreign residents in Athens).
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It is difficult to estimate the number of slaves in ancient Greece, given the lack of a precise census and variations in definitions during that era. It seems certain that Athens had the largest slave population, with as many as 80,000 in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, on average three or four slaves per household.
That sounds like Wikipedia is saying 10-12% were able to vote. Does the 3-4 slaves per household include public slaves as well as private slaves? For example, there were 300 Scythian archers brought in as public slaves to work as policemen. They weren't part of anyone's household, and there are good odds that there were a lot more public slaves.
Some of us would argue that most adults shouldn't be free either (specifically, that the relationship between child and parent is the ideal model for the relationship between the individual and the state).
The part about Norse women seems to be contradicted by another comment here. It explained that even though Njal and Gunnar refused to feud, their wives hated each other and would send their servants to kill so-and-so from the other household. Despite declaring the feud between their families over, Njal and Gunnar were apparently powerless to prevent their wives from sending servants to kill people.
How does that contradict anything? In traditional societies, there is a hierarchy. Wives might be able to boss around servants, but they still didn't have political rights. They couldn't head a family. They weren't part of the 1.25% as estimated in the review.
You said, "It was a society with 79 out of 80 people being cattle." Even if women didn't have official political rights, describing people with their own servants who can prosecute private feuds despite their husbands' opposition as "cattle" is obviously wildly inaccurate.
Could they take their feuds to the court? Could they stand in judgement at the court? Could they take their husbands to court? Just because they weren't confined to purdah doesn't make them free.
There's a whole lattice of political rights, but not having the full set available makes one less than a first class citizen. Being able to sue in court is a big damned deal in the real world. There's a reason they call the higher section of the aristocracy courtiers. They could appear in the royal court, the highest in the land. If someone takes your property or clobbers you and you can't go to court, you are in a worse situation than if you could.
I agree that second class citizens might not be cattle. Maybe that word should be reserved for third or fifth class citizens. Hierarchical societies have lots of levels, some more free than others, however, if you aren't at the top level with the full rights of citizenship, you aren't as free as first class citizens. That's all there is to it.
"They had to obey their husbands and male relatives or they'd be physically punished."
Being powerless to prevent repeated warfare with your best friend's family because your wife hates them is a pretty extreme form of powerlessness. If there's any form of power I'd want as Njal, it would be the power to stop my spouse from having my best friend's family and my own family killed. The wives clearly did not have to obey their husbands in the story.
Not sure what you mean by "political rights", but women could divorce their husbands, own property, etc. Men had more political rights, but the value of that is somewhat diminished by living in a stateless society with no police, no enforcement, and no ruler. The men of the story could sue each other at the Althing to settle feuds, with no lasting effect and often unfair resolutions. The two wives from the story instead repeatedly took justice into their own hands without repercussions from their husbands or the state. They had the power to enact their will while their husbands lacked the power to enact theirs.
Actually, the wives did have to obey their husbands. If you want to get into family dynamics, that's another matter, but it isn't about power or politics. These guys had to live with their wives and counted on them to produce children to continue the family line. A man could divorce them or kill his wife, but then he'd have to deal with their family, likely paying a settlement, and he'd have a problem finding another wife for reputational reasons.
If you are going to talk about freedom, you have to talk about power. Life is full of crap that one has to deal with, and unless you are a hermit there will be garbage people you have to deal with. This is the truth in every political system because people are involved. You can have limited freedom and be better off than if you had none. A Roman slave had more rights than an American slave. Nero even let slaves sue their owners in court. However, if you live in a society and are less than a first class citizen, then you are less free.
They could order someone to kill the person, which seems like the greater power given the description of the courts in this book review.
But why get hung up on that? It was never in dispute. I was specific about which statement is seemingly contradicted by the text, and you seem to be changing the topic.
Did Njal and Gunnar's wives, Bergthora and Hallgerda, have to obey their husbands when they said the blood feud was over?
Edit: This reply was written before your comment was edited, and I guess it doesn't really make sense now.
I've been arguing that Norse society in Iceland was no paradise of freedom because only a handful of people had the idealized level of freedom such as it was. Those with the most freedom lived without kings but at the cost of having to accept a particular legal code. Everyone else was much more constrained and didn't have recourse under that legal system.
Your argument seems to be that women had a special freedom, the freedom to goad men and order servants into feuds and murder. I may be mistaken here. If so, I'll apologize. The wife goading her husband into a feud is a common trope - Kurosawa used it in his version of King Lear, Ran - but that doesn't mean that there wasn't a hierarchy of power with the headmen at the top and lesser men, women,. servants and others below them and much less free. Was obedience absolute? That depends on what sanctions one was willing to apply and whether one was willing to deal with the consequences of applying them.
We seem to be disagreeing about the relative importance of the freedom to goad people into feuds and order servants to commit crimes as opposed to the freedom of having direct access the legal system and being judged by your peers. Is that actually correct? I'm not big on instigating feuds, having people killed or dealing with the court system, but you can probably guess which freedom I think is most important.
P.S. Now, I have to reread the Book of Judges and compare its vision of society and justice with that of the Vikings in Iceland. It's the chunk of the Bible that chronicles the era before King Saul. As with the Vikings, there was a code of law but no centralized authority to enforce it. I remember some legal wrangling and a lot of heads getting cut off, but this time I'll pay more attention to social structure and power relations.
Did being the source of money give them political rights? Could they sue directly in a dispute over cloth? That's not as good as a general right to sue, but it would indicate that their society valued their cloth making ability.
I'm sure life wasn't hell on earth for everyone outside of a handful of leaders in medieval Iceland, but it wasn't a land chock full of freedom either. I'm just tired of freedom fantasies revolving around the improbable likelihood of being the member of a particular class during a particular era. Every woman is sure she would be Cleopatra or Anne Boleyn - women don't expect as much as men in their fantasies - but odds are she'd be an ostler's apprentice.
Where have you heard that theory that Athena was created, etc.?
According to the most prevalent myth of the birth of Aphrodite, she was formed from the sea foam created after the genitals of the castrated Uranus were thrown in the sea. So she had even less of a mother.
That's a good question. I'm pretty sure I first read a version of that theory back in the late 1970s. I was trying to fill in parts of my education. The theory made a lot of sense. Polities create the gods they need to uphold their vision of the political order. If I remember the story from The Gods of Olympus, Athena's creation story has Zeus overthrowing his father and taking charge. He didn't want a son who could overthrow him, so he ate the mother of his children who, inside him, gave birth to a boy and girl. He puked out the girl, Athena, but kept the boy as strictly an internal matter. Athena was female but androgynous, a virgin dedicated to the crafts, knowledge and warfare. I forget which god, but one of the male gods ejaculated on her and his sperm fell on the ground and gave birth to the Athenians. So much for the Crime of Onan. At least he didn't create Athenians.
>Consider Thomas Jefferson talking up freedom while torturing people to force them to do work for him. (He talked a good game. It's a pity that people who took his fine words seriously are now denounced as "woke".)
I mean, from where I stand, the woke are denounced precisely because they're nothing but talk. (And they don't even talk that well, and for quite a while they've even been shedding all the admirable ideals anyway. It's as if the main point was to differentiate oneselves from the establishment elite to justify usurping their positions. It might have superficially looked like an attempt to fight real biases in the establishment for a while, because to succeed you need to be convincing, and you're at the most convincing when you're simply correct. But now some of them have succeeded, and the elite establishment is fully dedicated to equality and fairness - except in cases that, taken seriously, would undermine the very existence of elites, like class or educational credentials, of course, because of course - so the correlation between woke and true/sensible disappeared.) Jefferson at least pushed history forward by helping to replace monarchy with democracy - a genuine systemic progress. What will the woke leave behind?
I have no beef with Jefferson. I just like to remind people how far his program had to go from his day to get even where we are and to pay good attention to what people consider "freedom".
A lot depends on what you consider "woke". If you judge them by the people who denounce them and work against their agenda, the woke were the people who got women the right to vote, emancipated the slaves, ended the Jim Crow laws, repealed the anti-Chinese acts, shoved religious freedom into the Constitution, fought for freedom of the press, legalized gay marriage, outlawed rape within marriage and wife beating and the like.
If you are talking about the handful of academics yakking about critical race theory, a rather pernicious branch of social criticism, then I'm with you on being anti-woke. I find it more useful to accept the group definition used by its enemies. When they say a teacher is "woke" for teaching that slavery is bad and slaves weren't happy being slaves, that says a lot more about who is woke than some idiot paper in an obscure POS academic journal.
P.S. If you think that the establishment is fully dedicated to equality and fairness, then you must be talking about a different establishment from the one running the US and its institutions.
I'm not aware of anyone saying any teacher is "woke" for teaching that slavery is bad. The teachers being called "woke" are those taking the aforementioned idiot paper and presenting it in their classroom as gospel.
The Florida law in question does not prevent teachers from teaching that slavery was or is bad. It does prohibit them from following that up with "and you white kids a hundred and fifty years after slavery was abolished should feel extra bad because you are responsible for it" or "therefore we should give black people today special privileges because their ancestors were slaves a hundred and fifty years ago".
I would prefer that this law not exist. I would also prefer that we had a body of teachers we could trust not to go overboard on the "slavery was bad" messaging.
Do you also support the woke Black Lives Matter activists who continue to slaughter white people, or the woke trans activists who are actively slaughtering Christian children and becoming heroes in the trans community?
Yeah, I guess they don't talk about Audrey Hale and Darrell Brooks on your side of Reddit / Substack / Twitter. The level of reality denial you have is quite impressive.
Oh hey! I have actually read this one, and in the last year at that!
I really liked the review; when I read it I was more struck by the depiction of the transition from paganism to Christianity than from semi-anarchy to rule of law, but the transition the reviewer traces is very interesting and very much one of the real roots of the story.
The thing that maybe struck me most about legal proceedings, as presented in Njal's Saga, was
that pretty much nobody ever disputes the facts in any of the law cases presented at the Althing. (Side note: in the translation I read, it was just called "the Thing," which made me giggle internally every time a character declared he was going to the Thing. "What thing?" "You know, the Thing.")
Nobody ever says, "I didn't do that," or offers an alibi, or says that "he attacked me first!" It's all just arguing over points of law which range from the abstruse to the incredibly convoluted. ETR: I see the details of Eyjolf's trickery are in the Phoenix Wright video, so no need to go over them again!
One point that I think is relevant to the overall dynamic is that you don't have to be one of the ~500 patriarchs postulated in the review to be involved a feud, and in an important way a feud is more likely to be perpetuated when patriarchs are not the primary feuding parties. For example, much of the first half of the saga deals with a feud between the households of Njal and Gunnar. Njal and Gunnar are good friends and pal around together all the time, but their wives Bergthora and Hallgerda hate each other. Every time someone from Njal's household kills someone from Gunnar's or vice versa, Njal and Gunnar meet at the Thing, apologize, offer and accept a generous weregild, and hope that that will be the end of it; but Bergthora and Hallgerda have other ideas. Because there is no mechanism for mediating between Bergthora and Hallgerda --even the often-unsatisfying mediation of the Thing and weregild which is the best the patriarchs have-- the feud can't really end unless one of them gives up, forgives the other, or dies (guess which of these occurs.) It's also relevant that both Bergthora and Hallgerda have male servants who regard themselves as principally responsible to the woman of the house, rather than the man of the house, so if Gunnar says "It's over" and Hallgerda says, "It's over once you go kill that guy," Gunnar has no real way to enforce his edict.
+10! Thank you for pointing out the role of the women--it was such a big part of the book and I was confused that there was no mention of the lack of recourse for women in the society of the book in this review. The closest the reviewer gets is the note about Ragnar's wife refusing to sleep with him.
> It's also relevant that both Bergthora and Hallgerda have male servants who regard themselves as principally responsible to the woman of the house, rather than the man of the house
That strikes me as a curious arrangement for a patriarchal society. To be halfway effective at killing, these servants would have to be armed, so they are probably not slaves? An obvious solution for he patriarchs would be to simply agree to outlaw any servant who committed murder instead of paying the weregild until their wives run out of servants (or the servants wisen up).
Also, if women commonly held command over troops, it seems possible that their power was diminished by Christianity? So a saga about Christianization might paint women in power as petty, unreasonable and vengeful to explain why it was necessary to curb their power?
It's not so much that the women command troops as that they have substantial autonomy, especially within the household. For example, a woman getting married might bring some number of her father's household thralls with her, both male and female. These thralls are now part of the husband/patriarch's household legally, but naturally, they will feel attached to and responsible to the wife rather than the husband if there's a difference of opinion between the spouses.
So the society depicted is formally patriarchal (e.g. women do not attend the Thing), but women have very significant soft power and, in particular, wives are depicted as being very nearly equal to their husbands, both in terms of a household's internal politics and in terms of the household's relationship to other households. If the husbands want peace but the wives want a feud, the feud will almost certainly continue.
I also wondered whether the top servant in Njall's household may secretly have been the father of Njall's sons. Njall appears like somebody with Klinefelter's syndrome to me and would in that case not be fertile.
No beard and extraordinary agreeableness made me think he may have been quite low on testosterone, klinefelter appearing to be the most common condition causing such deficieny. Wild speculation, I admit, and probably leading nowhere.
Objection! Frodi would have to KNOW of the Phoenix Wright games on order to request one from the devil (who is unlikely to tell him without being specifically asked). Unless one of his deals gave him infinite knowledge or something, he would have no way of knowing to ask for this.
This review was fantastic and expect I will heartily support it as winner of the book review contest. If 'support' here entails standing around menacingly with an axe, so be it.
I'd also want to note for anyone who may be inspired to pick up Njal's Saga that, while the review's description of the saga as primarily an account of a series of inane legal disputes is *true*, it's *also* full of completely different stuff. In between court cases, the story follows characters (though not Njal) going raiding (indeed, going viking), complete with proto-swashbucking fights on the high seas. The entire story derails for a couple chapters in the middle to cover the Christianization of Iceland. Njal's friend Gunnar, who is basically Aragorn, kills like a hundred people across a dozen battles (almost always legally.) At one point there's a random side character who is just literally a wizard, no explanations given, and he's forgotten about after a few pages. And so on.
Basically, if you ever thought to yourself, "man, if only LOTR had had a really nicely done filler arc," consider picking up Njal's Saga.
While trying to avoid spoiling things myself; one or more of the sprites/locations/dialogue is a significant spoiler for one or more Phoenix Wright games.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think basically all book reviews so far would have benefited from a little introductory paragraph, just one or two sentences, detailing plainly just what the thing is that's going to be reviewed.
It's really important to not that the version we have now of this saga was first written down hundreds of years later by CHRISTIAN MONKS who had their own lessons and agendas in what they chose to write and how they wrote it.
Think about how much you would trust a church-sponsored documentary about ancient Egypt and you get the idea.
Gee, the wisest person just chose to Christianize really quickly! Gee, these bloody barbarians will all kill each other if I'm endless feuds, and sure need that transition to more Christianity / civilisation.
Hysterical animation. Anyway, I think we can reconcile the idea that their overall murder rate might have been low with the dramatic accounts of murder. It is precisely when murder is uncommon and concentrated among the elites that we get these types of dramas, and this state of affairs is much preferable to the historical norm of elites staying safe and just throwing their serfs at one another in unending bloodbaths. Presumably this is why honor cultures flourished for a time, they were dramatically less wasteful than what came before. We can then blame Napoleon for the return to total war, only this time at the much greater scales that modernity enables vs tribal total war and population replacement.
You gotta be careful about murder rates across eras though. For one thing the comparison needs to be per number of adults in each society not simply total populations. Most murders then and now are committed by adults against adults, so the fact that a modern European society is far more adult-heavy at any given moment than those of a 1,000 years ago is relevant.
Then again, most murders, like most crimes in general, tend to be committed by young men, and given the ageing population profiles of modern western countries, young men are probably a smaller portion of the population than they were a thousand years ago.
No, not at all. Average family size is _much_ smaller today in Europe than a thousand years ago, and a far higher fraction of the total population then was children 10 and under. Literally every European society was Catholic to its core then and cranking out babies nonstop...many of those babies died young, but, still.
So comparisons of murder rates per capita (i.e. using national _total_ populations) today to then would be largely meaningless.
"Most" is an exaggeration unless you count 30somethings as young adults. But yes, 16-29 year olds definitely do commit a higher pct of murders than they represent of the population. In some places, a much higher pct.
That's exactly why comparing murder rates using total national populations now vs 1,000 years ago makes little sense: the European population totals at that time included much higher percentages of preadolescent children than now.
"Njal’s Saga takes place right on the fulcrum of these two world-views, the point where either the natural justice of vengeance or the artificial justice of courts seem like plausible options."
I read it in college for a class called "Hatred, vengeance, and the law," and this was pretty much the takeaway I remember, yes.
On the Christianity point: First, I'd keep in mind that the saga was written after the conversion, so how fast Njal converted in reality is beside the point. Second, I'd bring up that Christianity explicitly calls on us to consider all humans to be God' children, a universal brotherhood of man. Matthew 10:34-39. 1 Corinthians 1:10. Accepting this fictive kinship immediately turns the logic of familial feuds around: your hated enemy is your brother, just like the biological brother that got killed. So how can anyone who feuds ever be in the right?
Christianity as described in the Bible and in Catholic doctrine isn't against all war and all killing, but it does heavily proscribe who can kill whom, under what circumstances, and at whose orders and discretion. There's a big (doctrinal) difference between the Pope supporting a crusade, or the king/government going to war or condemning a criminal, vs. individuals/families wantonly slaughtering one another over various slights.
Under Icelandic law, individuals had the power to engage in what was effectively private war, and only they (and the heads of their families) were responsible for keeping themselves in line. If they broke the rules, others retaliated under those same rules.
Under Christianity, only God has the right to judge and punish us, and sometimes his human representatives on Earth. A group which, in the middle ages in Europe, included the church and secular leadership.
"Who has the right to use violence to support the rules?" is a question every society grapples with. Iceland's answer changed after the conversion to Christianity.
Also: Christians who break the rules of their faith (aka all of them, officially and in practice) are sinners, not liars.
Saying they are sinners only works if you accept the doctrine they claim to support. I suppose you could say hypocrites rather than liars. And I don't accept the Catholic church as the definition of Christian. Christian is supposed to mean a follower of Jesus Christ, and that doesn't describe the Paulists. The Catholics today are better then the Catholics of many times and periods (by my judgement), but that doesn't make them followers of Jesus. (OTOH, I do wonder about the accuracy of the reported words, and even whether he actually existed rather than being a fictional character. There was definitely a lot of tinkering with such records as exist.)
Oh for sure there was lots of tinkering and probably fabrication outright of all kinds of records.
But since you started by accusing me of denying history or calling most Christians liars, I responded accordingly. The Icelandic people who converted to Christianity converted to Catholicism as it existed in the year 1000. Those were the doctrines they were working under. And in general, when discussing other cultures very different from my own, I prefer to at least start by judging them according to their own standards, understanding, and jurisprudence. It's not like they would have known about any of the other early Christian sects with differing beliefs, let alone the later protestant movements or even then-extant moral philosophies from further afield.
You can't be a liar because you're unavoidably ignorant of facts that might have led you to a different conclusion, or because you start from background assumptions different from those that people who don't even exist yet will someday use as a lens for considering history. Otherwise, was Aristotle a liar for not knowing about momentum and Newton's laws of motion? Was Ptolemy a liar because his world model was geocentric? Was Descartes a liar for not considering the Buddhist perspective of enlightenment including a state of no thoughts?
I am curious though: precisely who do *you* consider to be Christian? Today and in the past?
If you prefer hypocrite to liar, I'm quite willing to accept that change.
A Christian would be someone who accepted the reported words of Jesus Christ as the doctrine, and attempted to live by it. And who didn't add additions that were in conflict with either the letter or the spirit of those words. I've known a couple, and they were good people, though they acknowledged that they couldn't actually live up to their beliefs.
"Reported" by whom, though? We're all, at minimum many reports in a long chain away from the original words themselves. Like it or not, we're all making our best guesses about what was actually said, and it isn't necessarily unreasonable for someone of limited time, means, education, and aptitude to decide that a person of institution is worthy of enough trust to accept or at least prefer their interpretation of often cryptic, metaphorical, multilayered, or past-culture-bound statements.
Alas, the words are often contradictory. E.g., compare Matthew chapter 5 (the sermon on the mount) with Matthew chapter 10 ("[34] Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. [35] For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law." KJV).
All Christianities have to "explain away" some things that Jesus is reported to have said. Which usually involves first deciding what the spirit of the words is and than saying you can't take them literally. Shockingly, the spirit is almost always what the author wants the words to mean.
I was gonna hold my tongue on this to not spoil it, but if people are going to be betting on it (even with pretend money), then I think it's worth advising potential bettors to check the name of the youtube account that uploaded the Ace Attorney video, and its past uploads.
While the account does appear to be Scott's, it may have been posted there for the sake of preserving author anonymity (as opposed to cases in past years where external resources linked by the authors gave their names away).
(I was indeed intrigued to see that a video would be posted under an existing channel, *until* I saw it was apparently Scott's)
Part of me hopes it isn’t. A lot of people are saying this is their favorite book review so far. It would be kinda sad to throw a book review content only to confirm that no one can do it as well as Scott. Kinda makes the whole thing feel pointless.
How is being exile different from being outlawed? May one simply slay the outlaw after the verdict, while exiles get safe passage? Can exiles sell there lands and cows, or are they forfeit? For outlaws, were you allowed to offer them safe refuge? "Technically, you are free to slay him, but he appears to be in my homestead, and if you trespass on my land one of us will die."
I envision medieval Iceland as a somewhat hostile natural environment, in which paying the economical value of an adult as weregild should probably bankrupt the median income family and make them starve in the winter, so that a weregild would just be a sentence to death by economy. Was this the case? Or is Ragnar Of The Bloody Axe an elite landowner who decides that he would rather spend his excess income on rape and murder than his fifth battle horse or whatever elites buy?
Also, in a harsh environment, I would expect crime for profit to be rampant. If you only have enough food to bring four fifths of the population through a harsh winter, I would expect the last fifth not to simply roll over and die, but assume that there is conflict until there is enough food to feed the survivors. Better to go to court later than to starve now. Cattle raids would be a related for-profit "crime" I would expect to appear.
Given that apparently, weregild is due even for slain attackers, I would expect that there is something like suicide-by-warrior. Provoking someone into killing you seems reasonable to accomplish, and the weregild for your death might get your clan through lean times.
Also, I would argue that in the face of an imperfect system of law, the threat of a victim going outside the law is actually beneficial for the society. A Viking society where there is a one in six chance (or whatever the game theoretical optimal probability of punishing defection with defection is here) that any murder Ragnar Of The Bloody Axe commits might lead to both clans being destroyed seems much better than one where that never happens. Nine out of ten Ragnar's would be stopped by their fellow clansmen from murdering very much, and the remaining one would be destroyed with his clan and quite a few innocents.
> Kari lies in wait for him, but when Flosi returns to the North, Kari can’t bring himself to strike the killing blow. The two of them swear eternal friendship, and Flosi gives Kari his daughter in marriage. The end.
From my experience, humans do not work that way. Of course, from my experience, humans would also not be happy to receive the weregild for their relatives, never mind waive it. So it is reasonable to assume that these humans had a different attitude to death and violence than we have. A modern family losing one of two children to a car accident is a tragedy, while a medieval family losing four children out of seven to malnutrition and disease is just a statistic or "plenty to take care of us when we are old". By necessity the value of a human life in such a society is tied to their economic value. If you do not feed the working age adults before you feed the children, the children will starve as orphans. Accepting violence as a fact of life might account for "yeah, Torben killed a clansman during a cattle raid. He paid, so whatever. If we were only friends with men who never killed anyone, we would have only wimps as friends." Getting from there to forgiving the dishonorable, cowardly murder of burning the greatest of men in their wooden hall seems a far jump, still. Probably a Christianity thing?
<i>Or is Ragnar Of The Bloody Axe an elite landowner who decides that he would rather spend his excess income on rape and murder than his fifth battle horse or whatever elites buy?</i>
Also, how much leeway did juries have in determining how much weregild a killer owed? If they suspected that a wealthy nobleman like Ragnar was really spending his excess income on rape and murder, could they just jack up the fines until even he wouldn't be able to afford his killing hobby?
IIRC, the Greenland colony was founded by Erik the Red who had been outlawed. So he must have been able to take at least some of his property with him.
I've heard it said that the Vikings evolved their quarrelsome and aggressive ways simply because there isn't that much decent agricultural land in Norway, with all its fjords and the steep slopes bounding them, and the barren plateau inland. So they had to squabble ceaselessly over what little land there was.
Apparently the original meaning of the word "viking" is not known for sure, but I would guess it meant something like "rover". It only really applies to those extra aggressive guys (mostly) who left home to seek their fortune, by fair means or foul, elsewhere. The majority of long-suffering Norwegians must have been content to stay at home.
The most effectively-aggressive men just as well could have driven off the less-effective. Usually it's younger sons who become explorers or sailors or pirates.
I did a lot of reading about this once. And the current consensus seems to be “take every plausible sounding theory and stick it in a blender because we have no actual idea”.
More fertile, more densely populated areas had plenty of fighting over land too. But high population density leads to strong states, so the fighting was mostly state vs. state rather than private.
Other populations in areas with limited land area have different strategies -- the Tibetans are rather pacifistic, for instance. The pacific islanders vary -- the Maoris were much more warlike than their neighbours.
Reading the sagas one gets the impression that viking enterprises were quite normal business for young men of old norse societies, not only for a small antisocial minority. The ancient reports about viking raids and trading in central europe and the precautions that were taken also speak for quite a number of men busy with viking stuff over several generations.
I was under the impression that while "Viking" meant something like "rover" or "traveller", this necessarily meant it included a lot of peaceful traders as well as violent raiders, and probably a number of boats that did a mix of the two depending on where they were sailing at the time.
A fair review, given the reviewer doesn't seem to know much about Medieval Iceland, or simply the unfamiliarity of the setting keeps him from seeing the depths of the characters. Sort of like a classical music reviewer of 1925 citicizing the blue notes of Louis Armstrong. The fact that there is an honest attempt here to find the quality makes this a worthy next round candidate.
For those contemplating reading "Njala," you might try to follow the progression of Hallgerd, from a spoiled brat to, well, you find out. You might as a warmup read "Hrafnekl‘s Frey's Godi." Short and a single plot.
Now, since you all are serious readers, find me a pre Shakespeare work that shows such nuances in a female character. I'm not saying there isn't, jes' curious.
I do agree that there is something Sophoclean in the mixture of character and luck in so many of the characters’ endings. Maybe that's why I am a Hardyist. But Hardy can't even imagine the bloody net woven on the morning of Clontarf. Or the ultimate reconciliation of Flosi and Kari.
Perhaps we shouldn’t forget that a lot of the jokes in Monty Python are on us. Those young snots have stuff that deliberately goes over the head their audience. Cheeky sots.
A lot of work on very difficult material in this review. Congrats
This was by far the most entertaining book review. I think this was the only book review I read more entertaining than Scott's own book reviews. It will be hard for me to weigh it compared to the Meaning of Man book reviews which was very thought provoking, and the cities book review, which gave me a lens into a very intriguing theory I had never considered before, but keep thinking back to now.
Boring sounding book, great essay! Loved the bit in the middle telling me what it was about so I didn't have to think for myself (not sarcastic), and the casual, friendly tone.
This was hilariously well-written, but I wonder about the conclusions. If it's true that we've been domesticating ourselves as a species for a while now, picking out the less-domesticated behavior of some earlier point in the domestication arc and philosophizing about it seems unfair. My highminded and subtle dog-training techniques have resulted in pets much better behaved than any wolf, and probably better than whatever dogs the Romans had signs about saying 'cave canem'. I'm not sure it's my technique, though.
Zippy and fun, well written. The most Scottly of all the reviews so far, by a wide margin.
I'm not sure I was along for the ride philosophically speaking, though. The duality here between cattle domesticated by the state and the glorious liberty of cyclical violence felt overly cynical, and there was no real effort to convince us that the 'middle way' of decentralized courtroom arbitrage was pointing at an improvement over anything. I can see this as being a very compelling review for people that already feel an aesthetic and philosophical pull towards this kind of anarcho-capitalist legalism, don't get me wrong. But it seems like those are the only people reading the 'real' essay- the rest of us are just standing in the street, looking in through the window while somebody else enjoys a nice meal.
Thanks - Iceland today is a model society - funny how cultures evolve
The Althing is hard to imagine on site when you visit it today. It's really a huge campsite with a ridge with no buildings or sign of habitation or ceremony.
Many of today's model societies were (in)famously violent in the past. Perhaps the people in them had to put extra work into developing good institutions to ensure peace and social harmony.
The concept of a "model society" with the population of a medium-sized American county is pretty funny. As if we could just pick out one of the hundreds of Iceland-sized counties in America, many of which score significantly higher than Iceland on quality of life metrics, as a model for the *entire world* to base their societies off of.
I hadn't come across Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney before, but that video had me laughing so much I had to pause it half-way through to catch my breath. Well done!
Since one of the major functions of the rule of law is to stop people from trying to resolve their disputes by killing one another, it seems like the medieval Icelandic version of the law has failed this function pretty badly.
One deeply impressive thing is that all of this stuff was kept alive for a hundred years or more by oral historian bards before it was written down. Think of that when the reviewer quotes a massive genealogy!
And let's not get too warm and fuzzy about "freedom". There seems to have quite commonly been genuine slavery in Iceland (see "Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas, and Power" by Jesse L. Byock) and there was in the Norse society that they fled. The sagas seem to tell only about the "freemen", who were the landholders at the top of each farm, who were almost always men. Of course, they were the only ones admitted to the legal institutions that the sagas were written about. But there were also lots of other dependents: servants, dependent relatives, and the women of all these categories. Their fates seem to have been controlled by the landholder. There doesn't seem to be a lot written about the women, but I suspect the women of de-facto high status (close relatives of landholders, landholders' wives, etc.) probably had an unrecognized network that wielded considerable power, as seems to be true in most societies. In all of this, they seem to have resembled ancient Athens, as the reviewer says.
I like the fact that often characters face the choice: Do I cleave Gunnar's head with an axe, or do I marry my daughter to his son? As if the only way to not live at daggers-drawn is by creating kinship. Then I realized that this resembled Medieval nobles. So it's probably ancient in humans.
It's a massive over-simplification*, but I sometimes humorously think about that "cleave head versus intermarry" question as the conflict between humanity's chimp and bonobo instincts. Personally I prefer Team Bonobo most of the time...
(* And not evolutionarily accurate since we have a _common ancestor_ with chimps and bonobos. It's not like we _descend_ from either.)
1. This is an *extremely* good review, very well done!
2. The voice is very, very Scott, even more so than you'd expect for someone who reads this blog a and presumably admires Scott's writing so much they'd want to imitate it. I'd expect someone this good at writing to have their own authorial voice, rather than sounding exactly like Scott (unless they were intentionally trying to do their best Scott impression). I think there's a very good chance Scott wrote this.
3. I remember seeing something about this stuff on some twitter screenshot a few weeks/months ago. Anyone remember?
There's one case in Njáls saga where someone actually investigates a crime. A big cheese has been stolen and later a big cheese shows up elsewhere under suspicious circumstances. Mord Valgardsson investigates the matter and it turns out that the suspicious cheese exactly fits the mould of the stolen cheese. This lets him prove who the thief is. If the cheese does fit you can't acquit.
Kind of a bizarre review IMO, considering it doesn't even mention or allude to any of the stuff that makes the saga worth reading, like the viking raid or the assault on Hlidarendi, or engage with the actual moral of the story (that women have to be kept on a damn short leash, no matter how good-looking they are or how important their families are).
Yeah, at times I feel the reviewers here take Herodotus' Mirror as an how-to guide. "You know that Big Concept we all think obsessively about? Here is another piece of work it could be shoehorned in. You're welcome"
I'm a bit confused by the discussion in the review of man's justice vs. God's justice. We are told that the justice of God is an eye for an eye. How that plays out depends on whether the goal is compensation or deterrence. If the goal is compensation, you try to negotiate a settlement with the man who poked your eye out, but perhaps he's managed to convince himself that he hasn't done anything seriously wrong. After all, you still have one eye left, so you can still see. That's the point where say, “It appears we don't see eye to eye on the value of an eye. So if that's your final offer, I'll just take one of your eyes and we are done here.” Faced with the prospect of losing one of his own eyes, he will be forced to be honest, with himself at least, about the value he places on an eye. If the system works, he keeps both his eyes and you end up with a fair compensation for your loss.
If the goal is deterrence (or more precisely, deterrence only, because being required to pay compensation is a form of deterrence), you do want to take his eye, or better yet, both of his eyes, to make clear that bad things will happen to him or anyone else who harms you in the future. In this case, the eye for an eye rule is a limit on how far you can go to create deterrence. Presumably the point is that if you only take one eye, the two of you are in some sense equal going forward. Regardless of who is the victim and who is the perpetrator of the original incident, you and he have each taken an eye from the other, which hopefully settles the matter. So the eye for an eye rule is intended to sacrifice a certain amount of deterrence in exchange for a reduced likelyhood of future conflict.
The reviewer tells us that prior to the Hammurabi, “God's justice was the only game on offer.” This is also confusing, because the code of Hammurabi specifies an eye for an eye.
In contrast to God's justice, man's justice is “a weregild for an eye, or maybe getting confused and failing to award any punishment at all.” The first part of this seems to say that man's law is about compensation, which would in turn suggest that God's law is by contrast about deterrence. But we are also told that, “we go with Man's justice naturally...because we're cattle domesticated by the State.” That would mean that current law is an example of Man's law--and current law is a mixture of criminal law, which is about deterrence, and civil law, which is about compensation. (Even civil law is partially about deterrence, which is why we have punitive damages.)
The second part (“maybe getting confused and failing to award any punishment at all”) points to the fallibility of Man's justice, but any system of justice administered by man is going to be imperfect, so it's not clear how God's justice escapes this criticism.
I sent this review to a very sophisticated Icelandic friend of mine, and got the following critical response. Dave Anderson.
I have read the review and have very mixed feelings about it.
I have read Njal's saga several times and it seems I have read a totally different book than the reviewer. I am dismayed of, in my opinion, his mockery of the saga. Be assured that this opinion is very biased!
The Njal's saga is to me so much more than a series of lawsuits, although it is quite clear that the author has respected or is interested in law and lawmaking.
The [saga] author creates characters that are visible to the reader in all their humanity. They are proud, devious, wise, athletic, scoundrels and honest. Every word has a meaning. Every person introduced is mentioned for a reason.
This Saga also includes the history of the beautiful Hallgerdur Langbroek, her third husband Gunnar Hamundarson, Njal's best friend and Njals's wife Bergthora. Two strong willed women whose feud between one another is fierce, but does not destroy the ever lasting friendship of Njall and Gunnar.
Hallgerdur and Bergthora are some of the Saga's most famous women, but for different reasons. In most eyes Hallgerdur is depicted as evil, in others she was probably sexually abused as a young girl. All her actions as a young woman described in Njal's Saga bear the marks of such assaults.
After Gunnar was slain, she ended her life at a farm in Laugarnes (Reykjavik) less than a mile from my home, where her bones were put to rest.
Njal's saga should not be taken lightly. It should be read chapter by chapter and at the end of every chapter the reader should contemplate on what was the meaning of the chapter. What is the author saying? Also the chapters that are only a few lines.
Njal's Saga is a conversation piece. Without the contemplation and preferably continuous ̶̶ as you read through the pages ̶̶ discussion with a fellow reader or historian, the Njal's Saga, in my opinion, will pass you by.
This should make me proud of my heritage, daubed as I am with the tarbrush of the Welsh, Scots-Irish and pre-Celtic Neanderthals. Ond y cyfan rydw i wir eisiau yw i'r pen mawr hwn ddod i ben.
An entertaining read, but much more of a "Euminides style morality play" as opposed to a cold, objective analysis.
Among the more egregious oversights: while I am not a libertarian nor do I agree with the vast majority of the screed - a core part of the screed is that government winds up harming more than helping therefore less government is good.
This is directly alluded to as the reason for Norwegians colonizing Iceland but the corollary is missed: the very practices of Icelandic law via the Althing have clearly de- or evolved from a search for justice into something else. And a very real outcome of law vs. justice is the practice of jailhouse lawyers/patent trolling/nuisance lawsuits etc etc - where the pursuit of justice is, to various degrees of transparency, subjugated under the desire for personal or professional profit.
The same thing occurs with the Euminides example: the bad practice, as seen by modern eyes, or Orestes' trial obscures the reality that justice is an outcome of society and will always be so. Decrying the practices of ancient Greeks then is just as pointless as decrying the practices of other societies today - it is ethnocentrism of the highest degree. Among other things: in a physical human labor based society - there is very much an economic and social inequality between men and women.
Very funny. I appreciate being introduced to this text I’ve never heard of and would definitely never read in a way that makes me think... just maybe I will read it.
Didn't finish reading, but isn't your aunt's father just your grandfather? Wouldn't have been as funny, obviously
If the aunt in question is the wife of my parent's brother, then her father is not my grandfather.
Aunt by blood or aunt by marriage? Plus, even if she's aunt by blood, she and your relevant parent might be half-siblings and not have common parents so the aunt's father might not be your grandfather anyway.
E.g.
Dad --- Mom ----> Aunt
Dad dies, Mom remarries
Dad 2 ---- Mom ----> My mom -----> Me
Grandmother is the same mother in both cases, so aunt's mother is my grandmother. Grandfather is not the same in both cases, so aunt's father is not my grandfather.
> Jefferson promised the Americans “a Republic, if you can keep it”.
Wasn't that Benjamin Franklin?
It was.
"If any of you at home have any ideas about how to get this exciting saga started again, here's the address to write to:
HELP THE EXCITING ICELANDIC SAGA
C/O MATCH OF THE DAY
BBC TV
THE LARCHES
26 WESTBROOK AVENUE
FAVERSHAM
KENT"
Well it wasn't all that terrible.
Terry Jones said that sketch came from when he read Njal's Saga expecting an epic adventure and was disappointed that it was mostly about petty feuds and reciting everyone's genealogy.
Gateway to Industry!
This review is delightful and makes me want to read Njal's Saga. Does anyone here have a recommended translation, or (even better) a recommended analysis-of-tradeoffs-between-different-translations?
Wish I knew; I don't remember who translated the version I read. I can say the book was worthwhile to me too.
I think the book to read on competing translations (although it covers a lot of other ground too) is J. K. Helgason's The Rewriting of Njáls Saga.
I just read the Penguin translation and really loved it -- my favorite work of literature from the European Middle Ages. Just do make sure you write down characters and their relationships as they appear (a good rule for me for even shorter Icelandic sagas).
I know right! Which is funny, given that the author makes the experience of reading it sound less than thrilling
The review is clever but I think it missed the point of the Saga. I love Njal's Saga and lots of the other sagas too - the form of the sagas isn't a modern novel, but that's part of the charm. And they are powerful stories with deep meaning - which, again, I think the review just completely missed. Tastes differ, of course.
If you meet an Icelander, ask him/her about the sagas - they are very much alive in Iceland and I've found most Icelanders are eager to discuss them (are they historically accurate or fables? etc.), in part because Icelandic hasn't changed much, enabling people today to read them without translation. And you can visit many of the locations where the action takes place!
Is it possible to give a tl;Dr of the deeper meaning? As I'm writing this, I know it's a ridiculous request, since deep meanings by their very nature take long explanations, but aif it is possible, it would help me decide whether to read that Saga itself.
I've always understood it as the story of choosing law over violence (quite different than the reviewer's understanding). Since I'm a lawyer, I like that story! I'm told that the Icelandic title, btw, is "The Saga of Burnt Njal" - and that is quite significant in understanding the message of the story.
I thought that was basically what the reviewer thought.
All major European countries have a rich medieval literature. I don't understand why that of Iceland gets so much attention.
Icelandic medieval literature is impressive for such a tiny community, but not in absolute terms, compared to the English, French, Italian, German...
And yet, judging from the internet, it almost seems that the only medieval books people ever read, discuss, or bring up, other than the one they read in school, are the Icelandic. Why is that?
>And yet, judging from the internet, it almost seems that the only medieval books people ever read, discuss, or bring up, other than the one they read in school, are the Icelandic. Why is that?
Taking a wild guess, maybe it's because other European countries have better modern and early modern literature that overshadows their medieval literature. You think of famous English writing, you think of Shakespeare. Spanish, Don Quixote. French, Alexandre Dumas's and Victor Hugo's works. So any sort of "fun fact" page that would take about influential works from a variety of countries might only have the medieval sagas to choose from for Iceland but have a wide variety for other countries.
My other guess is that the Sagas were the best source for history we have of the region, even if they're half fabled. If you're teaching history, you've got a wide variety of sources to pull from for continental Europe you can cite. If you're teaching about Iceland or Greenland, you're only citing the Sagas.
I think that depends where you hang out on the internet. The medieval books I see discussed most on the internet are those of philosophers like Aquinas.
Aren't the Icelandic sagas fairly unique, though, in forming such a substantial corpus of work in the vernacular from such an early period? I am not aware of similar literary works that one can read from early (pre 1066) medieval England (for example) that would paint such a complete picture of what society was like.
The Icelandic saga are not from before 1066. They were written in the 13th and 14th centuries. They are *about* an earlier period, just like countless romances written at the same time (and earlier!) in the countries of Western Europe.
Good point about Aquinas, but philosophy is in a separate category for me. I guess I should have specified: books of fiction/history/poetry.
I didn't say they were written before 1066. I meant that if the equivalent existed in English, we would have a series of literary works written in Anglo-Saxon about England before the Norman Conquest. (The Anglo Saxon Chronicle is more just a list of things that happened each year.) Since Iceland is in the periphery and christianized later than most of Europe, the period of history they refer to is even more "primitive" than just the date would suggest. And for the people who read them, I think that is part of the appeal.
In general you are right that Medieval literature is underappreciated.
Well the French can certainly say that they have a massive medieval literature about the times of Charlemagne. The Spanish too have a tradition of medieval epics set close to the sagas (I only knew of El Cid, but Wikipedia tells me of others, set in earlier times, such as one about Fernán González who lived 910-970). There are lots and lots of lives of saints written in all medieval languages (and in Latin; I don't understand why it matters if they are written in the vernacular), and many of those saints lived in the early Middle Ages. There is a huge amount of archaic Celtic stories, which includes the Arthurian stories that fill the literature of many languages, as well as Irish epics like the Táin. Bede wrote Anglo-Saxon history eloquently.
You may object that stuff like Arthurian romances tell us more about the times in which they were written than the times they are about, but is that not true of the Icelandic sagas as well? I'd be very surprised if the "realistic" details in the sagas were based on the period they are about rather the one in which they were written. Even if we assume that there really is a core of historical fact at the start of the telephone game that leads to any saga, I suspect that what the author really knew for sure would resemble the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
And even if it were true that the sagas tell us everything about 10th century Iceland, or whatever century Iceland, what's so special about that particular time and place? That it's primitive? Is it more magnetically primeval than the world of the Táin? It rather seems to me that many in the Anglophone world have bizarrely adopted Vikingdom as if it were the anglophone world's own past and roots, even though it is not, and treat it as such.
But then I'm not from the anglophone world myself, so what do I know.
The Icelandic sagas were discovered (by the rest of Europe, obviously the Icelanders had always had them) in the nineteenth century, when romanticism was big and there was a strong interest in oral tradition as a kind of collective product of a nation as a whole. The sagas were closer to oral tradition than most surviving European literature, and so got the most praise and attention.
Well, there's always this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Introduction_to_Old_Norse
https://archive.org/details/AnIntroductionToOldNorse
Which has the extra cachet of an introduction thanking a certain J.R.R. Tolkien, in his professional capacity, before he became famous. It's got parts of Njals Saga in it, too, and everything needed to translate it yourself with a lot of work. But the key part is that Old Norse isn't very far from modern English, as languages go - if there's any part of your chosen translation that bugs you, it's easy enough to go to the source, find what the relevant words mean, and maybe if you want to spend the effort, what parts of speech they are and how they fit together. That's not the same as knowing how to translate it **well**, of course, but it should give you a sense of what your chosen translation is doing.
I think a lot of words have rather changed their meaning since they were part of Old Norse. Garth isn't exactly garden (cf. Midgard appox. meaning abode). OTOH, I'm definitely not a Norse scholar (I can't even remember whether "garth" ends with a theta or a thorn. This is just a warning to be really careful when assuming that a word in English like a word in Norse (and even descended from it) means the same thing.
Theta: θ
Thorn: þ
Eth: ð
Theta is a Greek letter and could not appear in any Norse word. There is some kind of variation between thorn and eth. In modern phonetics, eth is the symbol that represents the sound at the beginning of the English words "this / that / the / there" etc. ("voiced interdental fricative"), and theta is the symbol representing the sound at the beginning of "thick / thin / three" etc. ("voiceless interdental fricative"). Thorn has no use in modern English or modern linguistics, but survives in modern Icelandic.
Theta originated to represent the sound we would recognize as T, which is why it corresponds to the spelling "th"; its modern value comes from a sound change in Greek. The reverse change happened in Norse, where thorn and eth represent fricatives that have become stops (T or D) in modern Norse languages.
It is not especially obvious why there are two fricative symbols in Old Norse and Old English. In Old English, at least, they represent one and the same sound, which will be voiced or voiceless according to its phonological context - Old English did not draw a distinction in voicing for any fricatives.
This is also true of modern Icelandic, where the two symbols represent one sound today, and almost true of modern English, where there is only one symbol but two different sounds exist while mostly failing to contrast with each other. We have a very robust distinction between voiced and voiceless fricatives, featuring contrasts between f/v, s/z, sh/ʒ ("vision"), and θ/ð. But the distinction between θ and ð shows some signs of linguistic unhealth; it is famously difficult to demonstrate that English treats those sounds differently. (Phoneticians like to do this by demonstrating "minimal pairs", two words that differ only in the sounds that are being claimed as distinct. We can tell that English distinguishes B from M by seeing that native speakers can always tell the difference between "bee" and "me". Only one such pair exists for θ/ð, "teeth" vs "teethe", and "teethe" is not the most common word out there.)
Thigh/thy is the example I always heard for a θ/ð minimal pair.
That's much worse than teeth/teethe. Teethe is an uncommon word in modern English. Thy doesn't exist at all in modern English.
It does, it's just limited to a specialised (mainly religious) sphere. Although in some northern English dialects, "thee/thy" did survive as a common part of speech until the 1970s.
Another example is aether/either.
Cloth and clothe, too. Or cloths and clothes.
No, because the Os are pronounced differently as well (short in cloth/cloths, long in clothe/clothes), whereas to count as a minimal pair only one sound can be distinct.
Certainly! Even words in English have different meanings in other dialects of English. In this case, just out of curiosity, it looks like the dictionary in the book I linked defines it as:
garðr, m. fence; enclosure, court farmyard; dwelling-place
I was mostly referring to the syntax, the morphology, and even the phonology. Here's a bit I grabbed at random, and the translation from here:
https://sagadb.org/brennu-njals_saga.en
"Gizurr leit við honum ok mælti, 'Hvárt er Gunnarr heima?'"
"Gizur looked at him and said, 'Well, is Gunnar at home?""
There's the "looked with" for "looked at", and the "whether is" construction, but overall it's a whole lot more understandable to me than almost any other language I've run across.
And of course, the action-movie banter of it all, because the guy being addressed just got stabbed with a polearm from inside Gunnar's house, and falls down dead after answering the question.
"Þorgrímr svarar, 'Viti þér þat, en hitt vissa ek, at atgeirr hans var heima.' Síðan fell hann niðr dauðr."
"'Find that out for yourselves,' said Thorgrim; 'but this I am sure of, that his bill is at home,' and with that he fell down dead."
That's a bit more complicated, but the main thing I'd call out is "bill" being the translation of "atgeir", which I called a "polearm".
If you want Tolkien-before-he-was-Tolkien, check out the essay 'Beowulf: On the Monsters and the Critics' sometime.
Fantastic elements don't invalidate artistic virtue? Ya think?
I'm just reminded that whenever there's ancaps claiming Medieval Iceland as some sort of an example of how ancapism would work (though I'm encountering less of these than before, probably since there's less ancaps around), it sounds absolutely horrible, even in the "moderate" interpretion that it wasn't *quite* as bloody as the sagas say, not the sort of a place where anyone could live; almost like a historical country-sized experiment with the result that, yes, you can indeed technically construct a society according to this principle, even run it for some hundreds of years, but *why*?
Also, a medieval Viking lawsuit Ace Attorney -style game absolutely sounds like... well, not something I'd necessarily play, but certainly something that would gather a small and fervent fanbase that would eventually contribute greatly to general social media meme culture. King of Dragon Pass and its successor games had some similar elements, though also of course a lot of other stuff.
When people say they'd prefer to die on their feet than live on their knees, what do you think they mean?
Probably a bunch of different things. Historically, in most countries, probably something connected to national liberation and independence movements.
Thankfully, we have plenty of options guaranteeing we don't generally have to do either.
Okay, as literally stated, that's true, but in context, the question is what you think the "ancaps" (read as: libertarians) you criticize mean. That was a response to your rhetorical "Why?"
And no, you DON'T actually have plenty of options. That's the point. You can either submit to the state, or defy it (and almost certainly die horribly).
You can emigrate. Or you can gain power and influence within your state. Do these count as submission or defiance?
Emigrate to a different state, presumably - the modern world rather lacks unclaimed islands to set up a new country on.
And gaining power and influence in your own state is much easier said than done - even in the West where the circumstances of your birth are no longer a hard block on social mobility, fundamentally a country of millions (or hundreds of millions) of people can only have a few at most with genuine agency over the State
>the modern world rather lacks unclaimed islands to set up a new country on.
It lacks unclaimed islands, mostly, but Marie Byrd Land is still unclaimed and unlike most other "unclaimed" lands is in fact not administered by any state.
The problems are 1) this is Antarctica (this one is manageable; the Antarctic sea is *very* rich in fish and meat so you can still feed yourself, and you can melt ice to drink with oil-lamps), 2) under international law you can't resign your citizenship without citizenship of another state to replace it, which means *you're still subject to your home country's laws* via citizenship jurisdiction (i.e. if you're a British subject, you move to Marie Byrd Land and you kill someone else who moved to Marie Byrd Land, then the British police will come after you and haul you all the way back to London for a murder trial).
FWIW, not all "libertarians" are anarcho-capitalists. Some are even a form of socialist. (You may not think their ideas would work, but *they* do.)
It's my opinion that NO simple social model will work very well. And that includes "free market capitalism". Adam Smith had a lot of very good points, but they tend to be ignored by the "free market capitalism" ideologues.
OTOH, the sagas are entertainment as well as history, and so they are strongly biased in the way that entertainments are biased. They tend to wildly over emphasize dramatic events, including violence. They events may not be spun out of whole-cloth, but you can't trust their accuracy. (Consider the way 20 years of Scottish history was compressed into Macbeth. And the liberties that were taken with actual history in the process.)
"Thankfully, we have plenty of options guaranteeing we don't generally have to do either."
National liberation / separatist movements are pretty common around the world today, so clearly a lot of people still do think they have to choose one.
In most cases, I don't think people who say that /do/ actually mean much by it, I think it's just a slogan they think sounds nice.
"Death is not the worst of evils"?
Obviously it means they would prefer to die defending their freedom or property or something else they value, rather than serviley submitting to some unjust or criminal imposition.
As Shakespeare said (quoting from memory, so I may have it slightly wrong!) "Cowards die a thousand deaths, but the valiant taste of death but once".
On the other hand, Musashi, who unlike Shakespeare actually fought numerous duels to the death, wrote that a warrior should become accustomed to envisioning his own death.
Vision and taste are different senses. :)
True, but witnessing your own death is just as bad as -- in fact, inseparable from -- experiencing it.
The vision in Musashi's statement is metaphorical, just like the taste in Shakespeare's. The two metaphors are referring to different things.
I think I know what that quote meant, but…. I would think dying a thousand deaths requires more courage than dying only once.
Which character said it? Maybe it was one of those rah rah war! guys? I’m too ignorant of Shakespeare to know and too lazy to google it.
That they are not really actually appreciating the balance between life's various values and talk is very cheap.
That they've watched a lot of old Westerns.
I think they're wrong. Put to the choice, most people have made do with a life on their knees.
What I think you're missing when you say the statement "not *quite* as bloody as the sagas say" is that I believe the main line of reconstruction of the death rate is based on the latter sagas' description of an Iceland-encompassing civil war, in which they name every person who is killed and it produces a per capita death rate in wartime below the US murder rate.
If you consider Njalsaga as the equivalent of a cop show "BASED ON REAL EVENTS" that is eagerly seizing on the most exciting thing to happen in this quarter of Iceland and dramatizing it, I think you might not be far off? There are all these timeskip years where nothing happens.
We don't know how many women, servants and slaves were killed. They didn't get into the sagas as a rule.
In fact, they do. One of the most famous chunks Njalsaga is in fact about a bit where two major female characters are feuding through their servants, complete with the death toll.
So, they had the right to feud. They could order their servants around. Do they have standing in court? Can they inherit property?
There are all sorts of freedoms. Women in Iceland had more freedom than women elsewhere. They still do. They even got the vote in 1915, before women in the US or England. If you look, you can find tales of women involved in feuds and murder and suborned servants from places like Saudi Arabia and India where women were no better than chattel. For some reason that particular freedom doesn't seem to be on libertarian radar. It's not on mine either.
Women created and voted on the money (a particular kind of cloth). They standardized it by controlling the "official standards boards". This lasted until the mechanical looms came in and disempowered them. But during the period of the sagas women were politically powerful. (OTOH, I don't know that they wrote sagas. Odin was generally only worshiped by men.) I've encountered a few sources that say they couldn't vote in the Allthing, but they didn't mention the time period, and the sources that talk about inheritance (that I found when trying to respond) are generally book length, and I'm not that interested. But the time period would be important.
Viking women were treated much better than women in many other areas and at other times. If you had to go back in time and be a woman, you could do a lot worse than choosing medieval Iceland.
Still, it isn't the same as having political rights. Women didn't become first class citizens until the early 20th century when they got the right to vote. That let them make a lot of other important changes.
Look at modern Saudi Arabia. Women are now allowed to drive there. A brave handful of women had tried to get the right to drive for years. They wrote letters. They protested. They even drove illegally. They were punished for it. Then the king decided to let women drive. Needless to say, none of those sentenced were pardoned. Being able to drive was a right someone else gave them, not a right they took for themselves. There's a big difference.
Sounds suspicious honestly. "no this society with all this retributive murder wasn't actually all that violent".
When I do a quick look for sources, they seem to say it is similar to other medieval places...which umm seems damning with faint praise.
"similar to mainland medieval Europe" isn't exactly a place I'd like to live, but it does suggest that the Icelandic minimal 'state' was as effective at keeping the peace as the aristocracies that were the norm elsewhere.
I could also be relatively easily persuaded that Iceland actually wasn't that violent per capita because it was necessarily sparsely populated and per capita crime rates go up with density - easier to kill someone if you don't have to hike across a mountain to get to his house.
According to the public scholarship I've seen (mostly Bret Devereaux with a bit from Scott) the Middle Ages were actually unusually low in violent deaths compared to any other period pre-Long-Peace (note here that if the Long Peace is broken soon, the overall average violent death rate for Generation X/Millennials/iGen/Generation Alpha will also be higher than that of the Middle Ages, with only the Silent Generation and Boomers being unusually low; "a thousand 'atta boy's are wiped away with one 'oh, shit!'" when that "oh, shit!" is a nuclear exchange).
Press X for Doubt. I don't think the sourcing is remotely similar.
Sourcing?
> Hrapp insinuates himself with you
Ingratiates?
Insinuating also works, it's what Iago does with Othello and what Wormtongue does with Theoden: work their way into your life as your closest counsellor and then drop poison into your ear.
"1a: to impart or suggest in an artful or indirect way
1b: to introduce (something, such as an idea) gradually or in a subtle, indirect, or covert way
2: to introduce (someone, such as oneself) by stealthy, smooth, or artful means"
My favorite review by far. I laughed and I contemplated! Thank you
Any time people point to Athens, instead of any number of perfectly functional independent tribes a hundred miles from the closest "civilized frontier" as "a flourishing of human freedoms" I can't help but sigh a little, especially after reading authors like James C. Scott & David Graeber. Sure, Athens had a mighty citizen navy, but also widespread slavery, a great deal of tension between oligarchs and the demos, etc. etc. It was certainly a flourishing of literature and scholasticism and thought, but freedom? Only under really skewed definitions, I think. So I was glad to see that addressed here, albeit in a footnote.
Athens might not be free by your standards, but it was definitely freer than most pre-modern societies.
Also, the author is allowed to have different standards than you. I know I do. Freedom!
Athens is cited as an early example of freedom combined with literacy; I don't think that describes your tribes beyond the pale. And, lacking literacy or the equivalent, it's hard to be clear on how much oppression, slavery, etc, they may have had. We can imagine them as Noble Savages, if you like - there won't be much historical record to contradict.
I'll wait to comment more until my brain clears up, but I want to give the reviewer major points for providing analysis that undercuts their thesis.
The Phoenix Wright video was an incredibly funny touch and I really appreciated it. I assume this book has been translated maybe even a couple times? Of course I believe the Scandinavian's language is much more robust then English and is still legible to current scandanavian's. The main reason I ask is mostly about the focus on Njal as a beardless Christian part being added by translators who found merit in the saga for that reason.
The comparison to greek saga of Orestes was also compelling. I wonder if we have something similar when Justinian and the Byzantines rewrote their judicial system which we mostly have intact today. I also wonder if this is why lawyer shows can be so popular. Of course there most of the time it's about really good lawyers seeing justice served by any means necessary rather then walking the line that Njal's Saga did of showing that law isn't always fair (Though there are very good episodes that do show that dichotomy).
Thanks for sharing! I do not want to read this book, but am glad to know of it.
I imagine the "beardless Christian" part was added when the existing oral saga was first written down circa 14th century, rather than being an artefact of modern translations. It's an unfortunately common feature to old Norse sagas, that because they were only actually written down by Cristian monks we've lost much of the record of the old *religion*, and the record of the culture more generally is probably distorted though much less blatantly.
"Finally, in the saga, Thorhall is lame due to a boil on his foot, and lies bedridden in a hut nearby - each time Mord needs to consult him, he sends messengers to Thorhall’s hut, and Thorhall sends the messengers back with the answer."
*sips coffee*
Wow, that sounds like it would make for a very annoying gimmick.
From what I've heard, Rex Stout seemed to make it work with his Nero Wolfe mysteries, although I haven't actually read any.
It works because of Archie Goodwin, who is the narrator and does the majority of the leg work. He (and others on Wolfe's payroll) go out and question witnesses, visit crime scenes, etc. and then brings back the information to Wolfe, who pulls it together and pulls the solution out of the hat.
It works the same way Holmes and Watson work, by establishing for the reader a comfortable formula that is consistent from book to book, but the mysteries are very different. Archie's role is also to nag Wolfe into taking on work and keep prodding him along the way instead of looking for a fast way to wrap it up and get a fat fee for doing so.
Retelling Njal's saga with a first-person smartass go-between as narrator might be entertaining, though the ultimate tone would probably be more Dashiell Hammett "Red Harvest" than Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe.
Excellent review! Short, very entertaining, summarises the book excellently while using it to make a fascinating larger point.
Anyone else think the entries this time round have been MUCH higher quality than last time? In my view the five I've read so far are all top-three quality relative to previous years.
I definitely agree with both points.
Agree, so far quality seems higher than average the last time
Yeah, the book review contest has been a great feature since it started but the entries so far this year really have been all killer no filler.
I agree
I love this review, I am going to vote it, and does this mean that mediaeval Icelanders were Libertarians?
"When Harald Fairhair declared himself King of Norway, the Norwegians who refused to bend the knee fled west to build a makeshift seastead on a frozen volcanic island. No lords, no kings, no masters. Only lawsuits. So, so many lawsuits."
This is the most entertaining review yet, for me.
Mmm...
Last year: "This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done"
This year: "This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done."
Shout out to David Friedman's "Legal Systems Very Different from Ours"
Well, Scott did say, "Last year people kept guessing that various reviews were by me, and I had to reassure you that no, I hadn’t secretly entered my own contest. This year I refuse to confirm or deny anything, so have fun speculating!"
Yes, this review is very Scott-ish.
I commented elsewhere that this is the only review that is as or more entertaining than Scott's book reviews. I really hope that after the reveal I learn about another entertaining thinker, but it would be hilarious if the funniest book review ended up being Scott's.
I’m going with, “He still won’t enter, that would go against the whole point of the book reviews. He’s just sick of telling people over and over that he didn’t write them, and this is the least-effort way for him to avoid doing so.”
I’m willing to come out and say this was written by Scott.
I agree.
Manifold has it at ~50% right now: https://manifold.markets/ShakedKoplewitz/did-scott-write-the-njals-saga-book
I think it's definitely Scott - the video seems to be on his YouTube channel. (Check the other videos there.)
I think it’s hypothetically possible that Scott offered to upload any videos during this book review process to his YouTube channel so as to preserve anonymity.
I’ll take the “no” side of that bet. Scott would not write “Choose civilisation, but remember it’s a choice, and be ready to revoke it.”
Well-predicted! https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-2023-winners
ChatGPT's take:
"After examining both pieces, I notice some distinctive similarities and differences between the two:
Similarities:
Both pieces present complex topics in a conversational, informal style. They often interject questions and asides to the reader, implying a similar approach to engaging with an audience.
Both use analogies and metaphors to explain abstract concepts. In the first piece, the author uses the metaphor of a landscape with peaks and valleys to explain the concept of canalization. In the second piece, the author uses the analogy of a Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney spinoff to describe the saga.
Both pieces demonstrate a sense of humor and a certain light-heartedness, such as the playful descriptions of the saga characters and the comment about the "world’s wackiest Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney spinoff" in the second piece, and the phrase "mental mountains, trapped priors, relaxed beliefs under psychedelics" in the first piece.
Differences:
The first piece uses more specialized and academic language, with terms like "computational psychiatry", "Bayesian beliefs", and "gradient descent". The second piece uses more straightforward language and simpler vocabulary, even when discussing complex concepts.
The first piece contains numerous references to scientific theories and concepts, suggesting a more technical background, while the second piece centers more around a story or narrative.
The first piece tends to explain concepts more thoroughly, while the second piece focuses more on plot progression and character development.
Given these observations, it's plausible that the same author could have written both pieces, as they share a similar conversational style, use of humor, and approach to explanation. However, the differences in technical language, content, and approach to explanation could also suggest different authors. If I were to quantify this, I would say there's about a 60% likelihood that both pieces were written by the same author, bearing in mind that the nature of the topics might explain some of the differences in approach."
Most of these are relatively circumstantial pieces of evidence. The style is similar, but every year there are imitators of Scott's style. On the other hand, the differences can mostly be chalked up to tackling two different subject areas- although I do think that Scott might have been a little more detailed in the book review.
Does anyone know of any free online fingerprint/authorship analysis pieces? I put them through a text analyzer but don't know enough about the subject to make a judgement on whether the findings were significant.
Did you try a “control” with GPT by using another finalist?
> Still, there have been a few times when men could boast they were free without it sounding completely hollow. Ancient Athens is the classic, but medieval Iceland surely deserves a place beside it in this pantheon.
Ancient Athens and medieval Iceland were both literally slave-holding societies. and in Athens at least women were somewhere between "second class citizens" and "property".
If by "a time when men could boast they were free" you mean "a time when some men, but no women, could boast they were free" then pretty much every society qualifies. If you mean "a society where everyone was minimally unfree" ancient Athens and medieval Iceland are both terrible, terrible choices.
It's probably neither of your choices and more something like "a society where an unusually larger proportion of men were free compared to typical societies of the time". Once you're done with the (important) caveat about Athenian women, slaves, and immigrants, you're left with a society where even poor citizens had unusual freedom compared to almost all premodern societies.
But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?
If the play stood out as exceptional in some way compared to all plays from both the previous and the next thousand years, then I think that would be a legitimate question to ask! Even despite the extremely unfortunate incident concerning Mr. Lincoln.
An interesting point is that at least SOME immigrant women were relatively free in ancient Athens. They couldn't vote, but they weren't owned by anyone. They controlled property. (I don't know that they owned it.) They had to walk a pretty narrow line politically, since they didn't have any "inherent rights", but they were free and powerful compared to "native-born" women. Of course, they might be told at any time that they had to leave, but that was normal in Athenian politics. (Solon was exiled a year after his famous laws were enacted to avoid a civil war. Everybody was mad at him.)
"without it sounding completely hollow"
"The Virginians took this idea and ran with it – in the wrong direction. No, they said, we wouldn’t be free if we had to work, therefore we insist upon not working. No, we wouldn’t be free if we were limited by poverty, therefore we insist upon being extremely rich. Needless to say, this conception of freedom required first indentured servitude and later slavery to make it work, but the Virginians never claimed that the servants or slaves were free. That wasn’t the point. Freedom, like wealth, was properly distributed according to rank; nobles had as much as they wanted, the middle-class enough to get by on, and everyone else none at all. And a Virginian noble would have gone to his grave insisting that a civilization without slavery could never have citizens who were truly free."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
Talking about the Athenians as having the same conception of freedom as post Enlightenment westerners have is anachronistic. There is a famous essay about the liberty of the ancients vs the moderns from the 19th century by Benjamin Constant. The modern idea of liberty is a more individual one, the right to conduct one's private life as one likes.
For an Athenian citizen, liberty meant being able to participate directly in political decision making and not being ruled by a hierarchy. That was dependent on having leisure (hence, slaves) but also on living in a city state. Hardly anyone in modern societies has that kind of liberty. However, in modern Western societies, there have been more people with freedom to conduct their private affairs (even if they had no political influence, or even the vote).
So, in feud-adjacent arbitration systems like these, why isn't part of the role of "trusted arbitrator" the ability to say "look, Eyjolf obviously neglected to eliminate his six jurors in a bad faith attempt to invalidate the trial, let's just ignore his bullshit and rule on the merits"? That seems like the entire point of having trusted arbitrators.
Or maybe other, similar systems did allow this, and the Icelandic one was just particularly vulnerable to going off the rails due to stupid technicalities? Or maybe Iceland was particularly low-trust, so the arbitrators weren't trusted enough to make a ruling like that without getting stabbed by all of Eyjolf's friends? Would this same thing have happened in the Somali system described in Legal Systems Very Different From Ours?
The footnote mentions that there isn't actually a judge, just a jury and assembled onlookers, so I don't know if there actually was anyone empowered to say "this is bad faith bullshit."
Also, this is complete speculation, but I wonder if it was meant to deter escalation. "You say you don't want weregild? Okay, but the longer this trial drags on, the greater the chance that you get executed for stupid reasons, so think carefully."
Or perhaps it's just an assertion of your power or legitimacy. Like, if you say "The law says my opponents must be put to death because they have the wrong number of jurors" and the guys standing behind you menacingly with axes say "Yes, I know the law, he's right" then the jury will probably listen to the nice men with axes, no?
I'm not an expert, but I suspect it's partly because the story is fictional (at least in part), and this is how the author gets to the climactic ending. The villain employs trickery, there's a dramatic battle at the Althing, and Kari gets a quest for vengeance. Perhaps in a real trial, that trick wouldn't have worked, but folk stories need a cunning trick.
In Iceland, the whole legal system was part of a delicate truce that served the vast majority. They or their ancestors had agreed to accept the law as written rather than face anarchy. If the legal system had been part of a government where laws were rewritten and reinterpreted as part of an ongoing system of checks and balances, there is a chance one could appeal to a higher sense of justice or some other element of the legal framework. When the room is full of armed men with axes who have only refrained from using them because they are bound by the law as written, even a slight deviation from the letter might lead to axe-work.
And the reason lawyers are Esq. is for esquire, because this was the squire representing the knight champion in an argument that if not resolved would lead to trial by combat. And that was only revoked relatively recently (long after the custom of combat had died out) when some guy on the losing end showed up in full armor and issued the challenge. (I think that was in the 1800's.)
The British legal system, from which the US and others are derived was set by the Magna Charta where the nobles defied the king before coming to a negotiated truce. This was followed by a number of kings that only spoke German, and let their powers get eroded. And merchants were more consistent about pushing for the power of the non-aristocracy than the aristocracy was in defending it. So it's also been a delicate truce. (Probably every place has been that hasn't been in active war, if you look closely enough. And I ignored various religious disputes that also played into this. Not to mention various parties engaging in interventionist foreign policy. Delicate is less accurate than chaotic.)
I was reading a 19th century issue of Harper's, and article on Some Precepts for Slandering Safely, and came a across a reference to the 1818 case that ended the right to trial by combat in England. From a footnote:
"I once heard a lawyer from Massachusetts relate a curious instance of the authority of the common law in his state. He said that he once advised a client, who had the reputation of being a fighting man, to plead the right of wager of battle. Now, wager of battle is a trial by combat and was formerly allowed by the common law. By it the defendant had the right to fight with the plaintiff, the result of the conflict proving whether he was guilty or innocent. My friend argued to the court that the common law, as it was at the Revolution, had been adopted in Massachusetts, and when adopted,, a defendant in England had the legal right to wage his battle, and the law never having been abolished by statute in Massachusetts the defendant still had that right, although the law had been abolished in England. The court held the plea to be a good one. I have examined the Massachusetts Digest, but I find no reported case to the above effect. Perhaps the story is mythical. It may have been suggested by the celebrated case of Ashford vs. Thornton, I Barn. & Ald. 405, decided in 1818 in England. In this case the defendant did plead his right to wage battle, and the court allowed it. This case called the attention of Parliament to the fact that this anomaly — this relic of another age — was still a part of the common law of England, and the next year it was abolished."
The author was either correct on this or he talked a good game.
You are thinking of Ashford v Thornton in 1818.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashford_v_Thornton
There was another case much more recently, where a man demanded the right to trial by combat over a parking ticket: https://keepontrucking.uk/trial-by-combat-demanded-to-settle-dvla-dispute/
The laws of these times were not written down in Iceland. People like Njall worked with memorized stuff only.
Could this be a result of different laws interacting? For example, one that says "each party much exclude six jurors from the pool" and one saying "failure to follow the proper jury selection procedure is punishable by exile"? The latter intending to prevent people from excluding more than six or something, but technically applying to excluding less than six.
My question though is still that if all these legal loopholes are deemed valid, why haven't they been used as tricks before? It feels like they should be known tricks to look out for. (Though maybe that goes back to other people's answers about it being fiction or a menacing guy with an axe.)
They probably have been used before, the problem is that there are so many potential loopholes, even a highly trained expert struggles to remember all of them.
Low-trust society might be the answer. "Everyone follows the rules exactly, no exceptions" is often an easier Schelling point to converge on in such situations than "everyone follows the rules except when there's a good reason not to."
It reminds me of that time there was a riot in (IIRC) the Church of the Holy Sepulchre because someone moved a chair. It seems like a trivial thing to riot over, and indeed it is, but the church is used by various denominations, all of whom are worried that one of the others will try to monopolise it. Hence they've converged on the Schelling point of "Everything here stays exactly the same and nothing every changes" as a way of alleviating such fears.
This is my favorite "your book review" yet, out of any of the contests. Thank you
Same here, I love it!
I'm pre-registering my theory that Scott actually wrote this to test whether he would win the contest anonymously.
I'm really hoping that's not the case. If he won the contest anonymously, what would that prove? That people who like his writing enough to follow his blog and participate in a book review contest, really like his writing? Seems tautological. If he doesn't win the contest anonymously, that would be even more embarrassing.
Chaplin allegedly placed third in a Chaplin impersonator contest. It'd be curious to see if Scott could actually win anonymously. For what it's worth, I'd bet against this review having been written by him, feels more like an especially ardent Scott worshiper.
I didn't think it sounded much like Scott at all. There are superficial similarities. If he was able to write something this funny but also this different, I dunno. That would surpass Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman to see if he still had the magic.
Scott mentioned earlier that he did enter the contest this year. I don't know his motives, but I'd guess it's a combination of:
- testing whether his readers *do* prefer his writing in a blind test (resulting in either an ego boost or an interesting lesson);
- increasing engagement with this series of posts by a) adding a guessing-game element and b) drawing in readers who don't want to miss any of Scott's posts;
- and perhaps changing the way people evaluate the reviews (because a Scott-like voice no longer implies 'imitator').
Curious, how do you feel about this comment now that it turns out this review was in fact by Scott, and did in fact get the most votes?
I feel the same way. It turns out that dedicated fans of Scott's really like his writing. Who knew?
Well predicted! https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-2023-winners
Hehe thanks :)
This was very good. Kudos to the author.
> We go with Man’s justice naturally, almost reflexively, because we’re cattle domesticated by the State.
Well, also, the average prison is horrifying enough that the "eye for an eye" impulse is often sufficiently mollified. The best of both worlds!
There's another saga in which the hero kills an advisor to the king and he knows he needs to tell the king about this or else it's murder, but he also knows that if he does then the king will have him killed. His solution is to deliver this extremely cryptic pun-filled speech that at first sounds nonsensical, but when the king thinks about it later he realizes "Hey, wait, that guy just confessed to killing my advisor!" But by that time the hero is gone.
The writing here is top notch, and the multimedia experience had me in fits. I laughed, I learned, I loved.
The quality of this year's reviews is out of the park, and the originality of this one makes it stand out even in a (already) very competitive field.
Here comes that freedom fantasy again.
Women were never free in that sense. Even Norse women were smaller and weaker than Norse men. They had to obey their husbands and male relatives or they'd be physically punished. They couldn't go to the council if someone slugged them or killed a relative, and good luck not dying horribly if they fought back. That's about 20,000 of the 40,000 right there. Throw in the fact that even male children, servants and slaves were also not free, and you're talking about a tiny minority of free people. Your number was 500 out of 40,000, so it's hard to think of it as a society of free people. It was a society with 79 out of 80 people being cattle. So, it was 1.25% free. People talking up freedom rarely are. Consider Thomas Jefferson talking up freedom while torturing people to force them to do work for him. (He talked a good game. It's a pity that people who took his fine words seriously are now denounced as "woke".)
A common theory is that Athena was created as the patron goddess of Athens because the Athenians wanted a woman who would always side with men. That's why she doesn't have a mother or is only granted one in a marginal role as a hat tip to Biology 101. She doesn't have any desires or passions of her own like most other goddesses. If you look at classical Athens, in its glory days as the local bully state, women were treated appallingly. There were wives and hetaerae. The former were treated as children with no freedom whatever, and the latter as whores with little more. Oh yeah, lots of slaves, too. I doubt classical Athens was even 1% free.
My girlfriend read Njal's Saga in Old Norse. The moral she took was to make sure you keep that chickweed under control. It dries out and catches fire easily. Having dealt with chickweed, that's just common sense.
So by your standards, was any ancient society free? And if not, what's the point of using the words "free" and "non-free"? It seems like you're doing the equivalent of condemning Newton for not understanding general relativity, and not mentioning the fact that he was way, way ahead of everyone else at the time.
Can't speak for Kaleberg, but my answer would be "no, some but not all modern societies deserve to be referred to as moderately "free", but no premodern ones I'm aware of came close, and I'd be surprised to learn that ones I don't know about did".
It's not a pointless distinction, because see above about existence of modern free societies.
I think it's absolutely fair to describe some ancient societies as "freer" or "less free", but when doing so you should weight heavily towards the bottom of the scale, so a society in with 90% peasants and 10% aristocrats doesn't have to give the peasants many rights to count as "freer" than a society with 20-25% slaves and 75%-80% citizens (of various classes, very much not all equal) like ancient Athens, especially not if it gives women some independence while it's at it.
Freedom is a spectrum. I take that back, it's more of a lattice. Some people place property rights above all others. Some people consider political rights more important. This is why we have politics. Some societies are more free than others, sometimes in different ways.
Athenian democracy was a result of Athens being a community of refugees from different areas, so they needed a mechanism for balancing their interests. It was a step in good direction, but just a small step. I'm not condemning Newton or Jefferson for what they were back then. I was addressing modern discussions such as this one. We can grant the Icelanders a step in a good direction, one that explains further good steps they have taken since. We can't argue that, as far as they have come, they didn't have a long way to go.
Every woman and some men are sure that they were Cleopatra in a previous life. It's easy to judge Ptolemaic Egypt as a wonderful place if you had been Cleopatra, asp and all. It's just that there were a lot more people in Egypt back then, and most of them were not Cleopatra. You can't judge Ptolemaic Egypt by how wonderful it was for one person, especially not if you are assessing the level of freedom it offered.
But it wasn't just one person who had freedom in Athens. It was the whole adult male citizen population, which is maybe 16% of the total. Athens had slavery, but so did every other society. Women didn't have equal rights, but neither did they have equal rights anywhere else. Children had no political rights, but they have no political rights in our democracies either.
Spartans who visited Athens condemned Athenians for how well they treated their slaves, and how they're allowed to freely walk the streets. Spartans treated their slaves especially brutally, but it's entirely possible that Athens treated their slaves unusually well compared to other societies of their time.
Try "treated SOME of their slaves relatively well". The child slaves who died in the silver mines didn't thing they were being treated well. OTOH, they definitely treated some of their slaves well. A few were treated well compared to the average citizen.
Sparta was very unusually harsh in how it treated its slaves. That's a part of why they had to so emphasize military service.
I've wondered about the 3-4 slaves per household measure, too. Slave holding usually follows a power curve with many holding only a few slaves but a few holding many slaves. Athens had public slaves as well as private slaves. Odds are, if you ran a silver mine, you'd have dozens of slaves. There were apparently hundreds of public slaves. I haven't seen a good accounting.
From what I've heard, Sparta was pretty god awful for just about everyone, even its own citizens. Sometimes one wonders what the whole point was. You'd think that at least the boss man would get himself a cushy billet.
The last time I checked, 16% is less than 100%. 5% is less than that. If one is going to call the society of Norse Iceland free, you can still say that it was less free than classical Athens or the American South and definitely less free than our current society. Maybe this is all screwed up, but I judge the freedom a society offers by my likelihood of having maximal allowed freedom if I were living there.
Re: "Spartans who visited Athens condemned Athenians for how well they treated their slaves" - That sounds like typical Athenian propaganda until you learn how the Spartans treated their slaves. Treating them better than the Spartans was a low bar to clear. Slave holders always like to talk about how well they treat their slaves. Who was going to argue with them? Charles Darwin gave an example of this recounting his voyages to South America. Like Darwin, I tend to discount boasts of generosity and benevolence from people who hold all the cards.
For what it's worth, although the passage I'm talking about was written by an Athenian, he was an oligarch who opposed democracy and did not think slaves ought to be treated well. Here's the passage, from The Constitution of the Athenians by Pseudo-Xenophon (aka the Old Oligarch):
"Now among the slaves and metics at Athens there is the greatest uncontrolled wantonness; you can't hit them there, and a slave will not stand aside for you. I shall point out why this is their native practice: if it were customary for a slave (or metic or freedman) to be struck by one who is free, you would often hit an Athenian citizen by mistake on the assumption that he was a slave. For the people there are no better dressed than the slaves and metics, nor are they any more handsome. If anyone is also startled by the fact that they let the slaves live luxuriously there and some of them sumptuously, it would be clear that even this they do for a reason. For where there is a naval power, it is necessary from financial considerations to be slaves to the slaves in order to take a portion of their earnings, and it is then necessary to let them go free. And where there are rich slaves, it is no longer profitable in such a place for my slave to fear you. In Sparta my slave would fear you; but if your slave fears me, there will be the chance that he will give over his money so as not to have to worry anymore. [12] For this reason we have set up equality between slaves and free men, and between metics and citizens."
Thanks. One was definitely better off as a slave in Athens than in Sparta. My take is that you were probably better off as a slave in Athens than a free man in Sparta, but I'm guessing that not all slaves in Athens were well treated. Town slaves and house slaves usually have it a lot better than slaves in mines or on farms. Still, Athens brought in several hundred Scythian slaves to work as policemen, so that's a cohort of slaves that even a free Athenian has to respect otherwise what's the point of making them a policeman.
Then comes the acid test. Would you rather be a slave in Athens or a free citizen of Athens? Assume a d20 roll for occupation and assets.
There were LOTS of ancient societies that were free. But you don't find them living in cities. Cities require too much work to maintain. And "free" meant "you can do what we agree to do, or you can leave and die". (They generally wouldn't kill you, they'd leave that to the local predators. A very few could survive that life for a decade or two.) And they were all small. My wild guess would be that they averaged less than 150 people. And most of they were long before the time of the sagas. (People tend to expand to fill their environment, unless something keeps the population in check. And then there's no room for "real freedom".) But those societies were free. Anyone could choose to leave whenever they decided to. Rejoining was a very different matter.
‘It's a pity that people who took his fine words seriously are now denounced as "woke".‘
The woke are the inheritors of Jeffersonian values? This seems short on insight, and like a low-light, high-heat comment, too. Maybe you can explain why ‘the woke’ are more serious about this than the average civil libertarian, in a specific policy sense?
Anyway, objecting to calling ancient societies with e.g. the rule of law, democracy, rights, etc. “free” because they weren’t 100% free seems, well, like exactly the same sort of short-sighted condemnation that I would not associate with Jefferson or anybody who believes in the spirit of USA Founders. It also exists in serious tension with your comment I address in the first paragraph: are ‘the woke’ also so lacking? If not, why did you draw the obvious parallel to hypocrisy? Confusing!
A society is not simply free or not free. Every society has its free peoples, almost always men and often men from selected ethnic groups. I agree that freedom is a desirable goal, but the idea of freedom has grown over the centuries. A society with one free king has a free man, but a society with 1% or 10% free people is better. Jefferson did advance the cause of freedom, but I consider his work incomplete. It was definitely far from complete in his lifetime.
If you look at the war on the "woke", the complaint seems to be that certain people do not deserve the same freedoms as just about everyone else. People who recited the Pledge of Allegiance and took the "and liberty and justice for all" part seriously are denounced as "social justice warriors". I belong to an ethnic group that wasn't emancipated until the late 18th century, and I know there are people out there who would love to end that emancipation.
I'm not going to let ancient societies off the hook. Some of them were better than others. I am hopeful that our society will be judged harshly for its own lack of freedom in the future. As Thomas Jefferson said, "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever."
>the complaint seems to be that certain people do not deserve the same freedoms as just about everyone else.
This really is a pretty lame-ass argument.
>I know there are people out there who would love to end that emancipation.
Like Saudis, or Congolese? Who are you talking about here? Certainly not Americans.
Like a lot of Donald Trump's supporters. They hold rallies. They murder people. Trump says they are very fine people. You haven't been following the news, have you?
You mean that one Trump supporter murdered one person during a huge rally with many Trump supporters, and that Trump, while denouncing the murderer, said that there were fine people in the rally--and also fine people among the counter-protesters. Or rather, I hope you meant that, because that's what happened. He was being more charitable than you're being to political enemies, and that's quite a low bar!
Trump wasn't complimenting the counter-protesters. He'd never do a thing like that.
They just convicted one Trump supporter for shooting up a synagogue. Have you read the Turner Diaries? Are you up to date on Qanon? That stuff is mother's milk to Trump's hard core base, and that base votes solid Republican, so few Republican politicians abjure them.
Darrell E. Brooks, anti-Trump Democrat BLM supporter:
"On November 21, 2021, Darrell E. Brooks Jr. drove a sport utility vehicle (SUV) through the annual Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, United States, killing six people and injuring sixty-two others."
Notably, all six people he killed were white.
"A Facebook account reported to belong to Brooks contained viewpoints aligning with that of the Black Hebrew Israelites (BHI)... his former social media accounts "indicate support for some conspiratorial, Black nationalist.. beliefs"
His rap lyrics:
"Fuck the pigs" and "Fuck Donald Trump."
His social media posts:
"B L A C K L I V E S M A T T E R ! ! !"
“So when we start bakk knokkin white people TF out ion wanna hear it…the old white ppl 2, KNOKK DEM TF OUT!! PERIOD”
[Referencing a fake Hitler quote]: "The white citizens of America will be terrified to know that all this time they've been mistreating and discriminating and lynching the children of Israel... God will destroy them as he destroyed Egypt for doing the same thing."
"interesting", a comment left on an ESPN article about NBA player Kyle Kuzma explaining "his belief of what white privilege is."
A middle finger emoji and a police officer emoji, commented on a post supporting Black Lives Matter.
A comment on the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict: "wasn’t surprised 1 bit."
"A 28-year-old, who identified as transgender, has shot dead three children aged nine and three adults at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee.
Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who was once a student there, was killed by police after a confrontation with officers following the attack at the Covenant School.
Hale had a manifesto and detailed maps of the school, and entered the building by shooting through a door before the killings."
“There’s some belief that there was some resentment for having to go to that school,” Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told Lester Holt of NBC News.
Read hundreds of comments here from woke anti-Trump anti-Christian Democrat atheists defending the trans mass killer: https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/124y1jz/nashville_school_shooter_audrey_hales_parents/
The big problem in terms of body count isn't trans people, it's white male right wing terrorists.
The woke side is the side calling for explicit discrimination against straight white men.
And the white men are calling for explicit discrimination against women, homosexuals, Blacks, Chinese, Jews and so on. It used to be the law. Now it no longer has legal sanction. That's why political rights are so important and the anti-woke work so hard to suppress them.
I don't approve of affirmative action either, but that seems to be applied in only a handful of areas. Arguments about it mainly involve elite university admissions. Harvard still discriminates in favor of white men with its legacy and athletic admits. Everyone else if fighting over the scraps. It's more serious with a publicly funded school like Berkeley. There, Californian voters - politics again - are the ones picking up the tab.
A lot of the anti-woke complaints don't involve discrimination against straight white men. Having rainbow "pride" merchandise on sale is kind of silly, like the shamrock and leprechaun stuff that shows up every March, but the anti-woke crowd is pissed at it. Take a look at DeSantis' anti-woke program in Florida. He doesn't want certain people to appear in any text books. He doesn't like teaching certain subjects that make certain white people "uncomfortable". He is anti-woke but is in no way concerned about discrimination against straight white men. He's about discriminating against everyone else.
I don't think affirmative action is ever the correct answer. The only partial justification is to make up for ongoing discrimination in other areas that haven't been properly addressed, and the real answer is to keep addressing those areas. But they aren't always easy to address:
https://apnews.com/article/black-children-asthma-investigation-8892ec059a4b192b93eb38ccb613fcb9
https://apnews.com/article/black-women-maternal-mortality-rate-df872e86c4bb56ef222b19141dc377f8
to pick just two items I ran across today.
I'll buy that. I'm no fan of affirmative action. I can dislike it from two sides. It can be unfair, and it hasn't done much good.
<i>And the white men are calling for explicit discrimination against women, homosexuals, Blacks, Chinese, Jews and so on.</i>
No politically or numerically significant portion of white men is calling for that.
<i>I don't approve of affirmative action either, but that seems to be applied in only a handful of areas.</i>
"To find out how many believe “reverse discrimination” is really an issue affecting their workplace, in November ResumeBuilder.com surveyed 1,000 hiring managers across the U.S.
Key findings include:
52% believe their company practices “reverse discrimination” in hiring
1 in 6 have been asked to deprioritize hiring white men
48% have been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications
53% believe their job will be in danger if they don’t hire enough diverse employees
70% believe their company has DEI initiatives for appearances’ sake"
https://www.resumebuilder.com/1-in-6-hiring-managers-have-been-told-to-stop-hiring-white-men/
<i>A lot of the anti-woke complaints don't involve discrimination against straight white men. Having rainbow "pride" merchandise on sale is kind of silly, like the shamrock and leprechaun stuff that shows up every March, but the anti-woke crowd is pissed at it.</i>
No, the anti-woke crowd is pissed at being made to express support for positions they disagree with under threat of being fired.
<i>Take a look at DeSantis' anti-woke program in Florida. He doesn't want certain people to appear in any text books. He doesn't like teaching certain subjects that make certain white people "uncomfortable".</i>
Do you have any examples? As written, this claim is vague as to be practically meaningless.
My experience is that the default was to hire a man for any leadership role. If I suggested a woman, I'd be politely rejected. If suggested another, I'd be told I was discriminating against men. That's how it works.
There's a default, and going against the default rubs people the wrong way. That poll confirms it. If you look at the actual hiring and who is in leadership positions, you'll get a very different story.
If Spotted Toad hadn't purged himself from the internet, I would link to his tweet on how Jefferson would be pro-BLM today.
"I doubt classical Athens was even 1% free."
I doubt it was that low.
Some quotes from Wikipedia:
Estimates of the population of ancient Athens vary. During the 4th century BC, there might well have been some 250,000–300,000 people in Attica.[4] Citizen families could have amounted to 100,000 people and out of these some 30,000 would have been the adult male citizens entitled to vote in the assembly. In the mid-5th century the number of adult male citizens was perhaps as high as 60,000, but this number fell precipitously during the Peloponnesian War.
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Only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens. The percentage of the population that actually participated in the government was 10% to 20% of the total number of inhabitants, but this varied from the fifth to the fourth century BC.[25] This excluded a majority of the population: slaves, freed slaves, children, women and metics (foreign residents in Athens).
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It is difficult to estimate the number of slaves in ancient Greece, given the lack of a precise census and variations in definitions during that era. It seems certain that Athens had the largest slave population, with as many as 80,000 in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, on average three or four slaves per household.
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Note that children are not free even today.
That sounds like Wikipedia is saying 10-12% were able to vote. Does the 3-4 slaves per household include public slaves as well as private slaves? For example, there were 300 Scythian archers brought in as public slaves to work as policemen. They weren't part of anyone's household, and there are good odds that there were a lot more public slaves.
>Note that children are not free even today.
Umm children shouldn't be free.
I said it because Kaleberg wrote: "Throw in the fact that even male children (...) were also not free"
And also to point out that the numbers given in those wikipedia quotes are relative to total population rather than adult population.
Some of us would argue that most adults shouldn't be free either (specifically, that the relationship between child and parent is the ideal model for the relationship between the individual and the state).
You have a very strange idea about the care the state has for any average individual. Either that, or you grew up in a very dysfunctional household.
The state sits back and ignores suffering and reason-less death all the time. I really don't think much of that as a parental figure.
The part about Norse women seems to be contradicted by another comment here. It explained that even though Njal and Gunnar refused to feud, their wives hated each other and would send their servants to kill so-and-so from the other household. Despite declaring the feud between their families over, Njal and Gunnar were apparently powerless to prevent their wives from sending servants to kill people.
How does that contradict anything? In traditional societies, there is a hierarchy. Wives might be able to boss around servants, but they still didn't have political rights. They couldn't head a family. They weren't part of the 1.25% as estimated in the review.
You said, "It was a society with 79 out of 80 people being cattle." Even if women didn't have official political rights, describing people with their own servants who can prosecute private feuds despite their husbands' opposition as "cattle" is obviously wildly inaccurate.
Could they take their feuds to the court? Could they stand in judgement at the court? Could they take their husbands to court? Just because they weren't confined to purdah doesn't make them free.
Equally, though, just because they couldn't start their own lawsuits doesn't make them cattle.
There's a whole lattice of political rights, but not having the full set available makes one less than a first class citizen. Being able to sue in court is a big damned deal in the real world. There's a reason they call the higher section of the aristocracy courtiers. They could appear in the royal court, the highest in the land. If someone takes your property or clobbers you and you can't go to court, you are in a worse situation than if you could.
I agree that second class citizens might not be cattle. Maybe that word should be reserved for third or fifth class citizens. Hierarchical societies have lots of levels, some more free than others, however, if you aren't at the top level with the full rights of citizenship, you aren't as free as first class citizens. That's all there is to it.
"They had to obey their husbands and male relatives or they'd be physically punished."
Being powerless to prevent repeated warfare with your best friend's family because your wife hates them is a pretty extreme form of powerlessness. If there's any form of power I'd want as Njal, it would be the power to stop my spouse from having my best friend's family and my own family killed. The wives clearly did not have to obey their husbands in the story.
Not sure what you mean by "political rights", but women could divorce their husbands, own property, etc. Men had more political rights, but the value of that is somewhat diminished by living in a stateless society with no police, no enforcement, and no ruler. The men of the story could sue each other at the Althing to settle feuds, with no lasting effect and often unfair resolutions. The two wives from the story instead repeatedly took justice into their own hands without repercussions from their husbands or the state. They had the power to enact their will while their husbands lacked the power to enact theirs.
Actually, the wives did have to obey their husbands. If you want to get into family dynamics, that's another matter, but it isn't about power or politics. These guys had to live with their wives and counted on them to produce children to continue the family line. A man could divorce them or kill his wife, but then he'd have to deal with their family, likely paying a settlement, and he'd have a problem finding another wife for reputational reasons.
If you are going to talk about freedom, you have to talk about power. Life is full of crap that one has to deal with, and unless you are a hermit there will be garbage people you have to deal with. This is the truth in every political system because people are involved. You can have limited freedom and be better off than if you had none. A Roman slave had more rights than an American slave. Nero even let slaves sue their owners in court. However, if you live in a society and are less than a first class citizen, then you are less free.
They could order someone to kill the person, which seems like the greater power given the description of the courts in this book review.
But why get hung up on that? It was never in dispute. I was specific about which statement is seemingly contradicted by the text, and you seem to be changing the topic.
Did Njal and Gunnar's wives, Bergthora and Hallgerda, have to obey their husbands when they said the blood feud was over?
Edit: This reply was written before your comment was edited, and I guess it doesn't really make sense now.
I've been arguing that Norse society in Iceland was no paradise of freedom because only a handful of people had the idealized level of freedom such as it was. Those with the most freedom lived without kings but at the cost of having to accept a particular legal code. Everyone else was much more constrained and didn't have recourse under that legal system.
Your argument seems to be that women had a special freedom, the freedom to goad men and order servants into feuds and murder. I may be mistaken here. If so, I'll apologize. The wife goading her husband into a feud is a common trope - Kurosawa used it in his version of King Lear, Ran - but that doesn't mean that there wasn't a hierarchy of power with the headmen at the top and lesser men, women,. servants and others below them and much less free. Was obedience absolute? That depends on what sanctions one was willing to apply and whether one was willing to deal with the consequences of applying them.
We seem to be disagreeing about the relative importance of the freedom to goad people into feuds and order servants to commit crimes as opposed to the freedom of having direct access the legal system and being judged by your peers. Is that actually correct? I'm not big on instigating feuds, having people killed or dealing with the court system, but you can probably guess which freedom I think is most important.
P.S. Now, I have to reread the Book of Judges and compare its vision of society and justice with that of the Vikings in Iceland. It's the chunk of the Bible that chronicles the era before King Saul. As with the Vikings, there was a code of law but no centralized authority to enforce it. I remember some legal wrangling and a lot of heads getting cut off, but this time I'll pay more attention to social structure and power relations.
It's more than that. The money was cloth of a particular weave and pattern. It was made by the women. Their wives were their source of money.
Did being the source of money give them political rights? Could they sue directly in a dispute over cloth? That's not as good as a general right to sue, but it would indicate that their society valued their cloth making ability.
I'm sure life wasn't hell on earth for everyone outside of a handful of leaders in medieval Iceland, but it wasn't a land chock full of freedom either. I'm just tired of freedom fantasies revolving around the improbable likelihood of being the member of a particular class during a particular era. Every woman is sure she would be Cleopatra or Anne Boleyn - women don't expect as much as men in their fantasies - but odds are she'd be an ostler's apprentice.
Where have you heard that theory that Athena was created, etc.?
According to the most prevalent myth of the birth of Aphrodite, she was formed from the sea foam created after the genitals of the castrated Uranus were thrown in the sea. So she had even less of a mother.
That's a good question. I'm pretty sure I first read a version of that theory back in the late 1970s. I was trying to fill in parts of my education. The theory made a lot of sense. Polities create the gods they need to uphold their vision of the political order. If I remember the story from The Gods of Olympus, Athena's creation story has Zeus overthrowing his father and taking charge. He didn't want a son who could overthrow him, so he ate the mother of his children who, inside him, gave birth to a boy and girl. He puked out the girl, Athena, but kept the boy as strictly an internal matter. Athena was female but androgynous, a virgin dedicated to the crafts, knowledge and warfare. I forget which god, but one of the male gods ejaculated on her and his sperm fell on the ground and gave birth to the Athenians. So much for the Crime of Onan. At least he didn't create Athenians.
>Consider Thomas Jefferson talking up freedom while torturing people to force them to do work for him. (He talked a good game. It's a pity that people who took his fine words seriously are now denounced as "woke".)
I mean, from where I stand, the woke are denounced precisely because they're nothing but talk. (And they don't even talk that well, and for quite a while they've even been shedding all the admirable ideals anyway. It's as if the main point was to differentiate oneselves from the establishment elite to justify usurping their positions. It might have superficially looked like an attempt to fight real biases in the establishment for a while, because to succeed you need to be convincing, and you're at the most convincing when you're simply correct. But now some of them have succeeded, and the elite establishment is fully dedicated to equality and fairness - except in cases that, taken seriously, would undermine the very existence of elites, like class or educational credentials, of course, because of course - so the correlation between woke and true/sensible disappeared.) Jefferson at least pushed history forward by helping to replace monarchy with democracy - a genuine systemic progress. What will the woke leave behind?
I have no beef with Jefferson. I just like to remind people how far his program had to go from his day to get even where we are and to pay good attention to what people consider "freedom".
A lot depends on what you consider "woke". If you judge them by the people who denounce them and work against their agenda, the woke were the people who got women the right to vote, emancipated the slaves, ended the Jim Crow laws, repealed the anti-Chinese acts, shoved religious freedom into the Constitution, fought for freedom of the press, legalized gay marriage, outlawed rape within marriage and wife beating and the like.
If you are talking about the handful of academics yakking about critical race theory, a rather pernicious branch of social criticism, then I'm with you on being anti-woke. I find it more useful to accept the group definition used by its enemies. When they say a teacher is "woke" for teaching that slavery is bad and slaves weren't happy being slaves, that says a lot more about who is woke than some idiot paper in an obscure POS academic journal.
P.S. If you think that the establishment is fully dedicated to equality and fairness, then you must be talking about a different establishment from the one running the US and its institutions.
I'm not aware of anyone saying any teacher is "woke" for teaching that slavery is bad. The teachers being called "woke" are those taking the aforementioned idiot paper and presenting it in their classroom as gospel.
That's what's happening in Florida. They even passed an anti-work law to enforce it.
The Florida law in question does not prevent teachers from teaching that slavery was or is bad. It does prohibit them from following that up with "and you white kids a hundred and fifty years after slavery was abolished should feel extra bad because you are responsible for it" or "therefore we should give black people today special privileges because their ancestors were slaves a hundred and fifty years ago".
I would prefer that this law not exist. I would also prefer that we had a body of teachers we could trust not to go overboard on the "slavery was bad" messaging.
That's not how the law is being applied.
Do you also support the woke Black Lives Matter activists who continue to slaughter white people, or the woke trans activists who are actively slaughtering Christian children and becoming heroes in the trans community?
Which planet is this on? Fill me in on primary star and orbital characteristics.
Yeah, I guess they don't talk about Audrey Hale and Darrell Brooks on your side of Reddit / Substack / Twitter. The level of reality denial you have is quite impressive.
This Phoenix Wright video doesn't have catchy background music.
I sentence the author to Death.
I am a Phoenix Wright fan and I approve this message.
Oh hey! I have actually read this one, and in the last year at that!
I really liked the review; when I read it I was more struck by the depiction of the transition from paganism to Christianity than from semi-anarchy to rule of law, but the transition the reviewer traces is very interesting and very much one of the real roots of the story.
The thing that maybe struck me most about legal proceedings, as presented in Njal's Saga, was
that pretty much nobody ever disputes the facts in any of the law cases presented at the Althing. (Side note: in the translation I read, it was just called "the Thing," which made me giggle internally every time a character declared he was going to the Thing. "What thing?" "You know, the Thing.")
Nobody ever says, "I didn't do that," or offers an alibi, or says that "he attacked me first!" It's all just arguing over points of law which range from the abstruse to the incredibly convoluted. ETR: I see the details of Eyjolf's trickery are in the Phoenix Wright video, so no need to go over them again!
One point that I think is relevant to the overall dynamic is that you don't have to be one of the ~500 patriarchs postulated in the review to be involved a feud, and in an important way a feud is more likely to be perpetuated when patriarchs are not the primary feuding parties. For example, much of the first half of the saga deals with a feud between the households of Njal and Gunnar. Njal and Gunnar are good friends and pal around together all the time, but their wives Bergthora and Hallgerda hate each other. Every time someone from Njal's household kills someone from Gunnar's or vice versa, Njal and Gunnar meet at the Thing, apologize, offer and accept a generous weregild, and hope that that will be the end of it; but Bergthora and Hallgerda have other ideas. Because there is no mechanism for mediating between Bergthora and Hallgerda --even the often-unsatisfying mediation of the Thing and weregild which is the best the patriarchs have-- the feud can't really end unless one of them gives up, forgives the other, or dies (guess which of these occurs.) It's also relevant that both Bergthora and Hallgerda have male servants who regard themselves as principally responsible to the woman of the house, rather than the man of the house, so if Gunnar says "It's over" and Hallgerda says, "It's over once you go kill that guy," Gunnar has no real way to enforce his edict.
+10! Thank you for pointing out the role of the women--it was such a big part of the book and I was confused that there was no mention of the lack of recourse for women in the society of the book in this review. The closest the reviewer gets is the note about Ragnar's wife refusing to sleep with him.
> It's also relevant that both Bergthora and Hallgerda have male servants who regard themselves as principally responsible to the woman of the house, rather than the man of the house
That strikes me as a curious arrangement for a patriarchal society. To be halfway effective at killing, these servants would have to be armed, so they are probably not slaves? An obvious solution for he patriarchs would be to simply agree to outlaw any servant who committed murder instead of paying the weregild until their wives run out of servants (or the servants wisen up).
Also, if women commonly held command over troops, it seems possible that their power was diminished by Christianity? So a saga about Christianization might paint women in power as petty, unreasonable and vengeful to explain why it was necessary to curb their power?
It's not so much that the women command troops as that they have substantial autonomy, especially within the household. For example, a woman getting married might bring some number of her father's household thralls with her, both male and female. These thralls are now part of the husband/patriarch's household legally, but naturally, they will feel attached to and responsible to the wife rather than the husband if there's a difference of opinion between the spouses.
So the society depicted is formally patriarchal (e.g. women do not attend the Thing), but women have very significant soft power and, in particular, wives are depicted as being very nearly equal to their husbands, both in terms of a household's internal politics and in terms of the household's relationship to other households. If the husbands want peace but the wives want a feud, the feud will almost certainly continue.
I also wondered whether the top servant in Njall's household may secretly have been the father of Njall's sons. Njall appears like somebody with Klinefelter's syndrome to me and would in that case not be fertile.
How does he appear to have Klinefelter's?
No beard and extraordinary agreeableness made me think he may have been quite low on testosterone, klinefelter appearing to be the most common condition causing such deficieny. Wild speculation, I admit, and probably leading nowhere.
Objection! Frodi would have to KNOW of the Phoenix Wright games on order to request one from the devil (who is unlikely to tell him without being specifically asked). Unless one of his deals gave him infinite knowledge or something, he would have no way of knowing to ask for this.
This review was fantastic and expect I will heartily support it as winner of the book review contest. If 'support' here entails standing around menacingly with an axe, so be it.
I'd also want to note for anyone who may be inspired to pick up Njal's Saga that, while the review's description of the saga as primarily an account of a series of inane legal disputes is *true*, it's *also* full of completely different stuff. In between court cases, the story follows characters (though not Njal) going raiding (indeed, going viking), complete with proto-swashbucking fights on the high seas. The entire story derails for a couple chapters in the middle to cover the Christianization of Iceland. Njal's friend Gunnar, who is basically Aragorn, kills like a hundred people across a dozen battles (almost always legally.) At one point there's a random side character who is just literally a wizard, no explanations given, and he's forgotten about after a few pages. And so on.
Basically, if you ever thought to yourself, "man, if only LOTR had had a really nicely done filler arc," consider picking up Njal's Saga.
So, uh... spoilers for Phoenix Wright.
Was anything from Phoenix Wright spoiled here? I've only actually played one of the games and didn't notice anything that felt like a spoiler.
While trying to avoid spoiling things myself; one or more of the sprites/locations/dialogue is a significant spoiler for one or more Phoenix Wright games.
I found Sarah Stapleton's doctoral thesis, "Justice Done: Outlawry Crimes in Medieval
Iceland" to be a fascinating read...
https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1972&context=etd#:~:text=Outlawry%20crimes%20were%20broken%20into,manifested%20themselves%20in%20Icelandic%20society.
My favourite so far, I think, and they've all been pretty good yet.
"On the other side, you have - I don’t know, turning the other cheek doesn’t tend to generate a lot of news articles."
Martha McKay - a woman who forgave her mother's murderer only to be killed by him 23 years after he killed her mother.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think basically all book reviews so far would have benefited from a little introductory paragraph, just one or two sentences, detailing plainly just what the thing is that's going to be reviewed.
It's really important to not that the version we have now of this saga was first written down hundreds of years later by CHRISTIAN MONKS who had their own lessons and agendas in what they chose to write and how they wrote it.
Think about how much you would trust a church-sponsored documentary about ancient Egypt and you get the idea.
Gee, the wisest person just chose to Christianize really quickly! Gee, these bloody barbarians will all kill each other if I'm endless feuds, and sure need that transition to more Christianity / civilisation.
Hysterical animation. Anyway, I think we can reconcile the idea that their overall murder rate might have been low with the dramatic accounts of murder. It is precisely when murder is uncommon and concentrated among the elites that we get these types of dramas, and this state of affairs is much preferable to the historical norm of elites staying safe and just throwing their serfs at one another in unending bloodbaths. Presumably this is why honor cultures flourished for a time, they were dramatically less wasteful than what came before. We can then blame Napoleon for the return to total war, only this time at the much greater scales that modernity enables vs tribal total war and population replacement.
You gotta be careful about murder rates across eras though. For one thing the comparison needs to be per number of adults in each society not simply total populations. Most murders then and now are committed by adults against adults, so the fact that a modern European society is far more adult-heavy at any given moment than those of a 1,000 years ago is relevant.
Great comment. Were they counting boys too young to be doing any murdering on the census tho?
Then again, most murders, like most crimes in general, tend to be committed by young men, and given the ageing population profiles of modern western countries, young men are probably a smaller portion of the population than they were a thousand years ago.
No, not at all. Average family size is _much_ smaller today in Europe than a thousand years ago, and a far higher fraction of the total population then was children 10 and under. Literally every European society was Catholic to its core then and cranking out babies nonstop...many of those babies died young, but, still.
So comparisons of murder rates per capita (i.e. using national _total_ populations) today to then would be largely meaningless.
Most murders are commtited by adolescents and young adults.
"Most" is an exaggeration unless you count 30somethings as young adults. But yes, 16-29 year olds definitely do commit a higher pct of murders than they represent of the population. In some places, a much higher pct.
That's exactly why comparing murder rates using total national populations now vs 1,000 years ago makes little sense: the European population totals at that time included much higher percentages of preadolescent children than now.
To be fair to Napoleon, the previous revolutionary regime had already instituted total war. I agree it was a bad thing, though.
This was an excellent review, thanks!
"Njal’s Saga takes place right on the fulcrum of these two world-views, the point where either the natural justice of vengeance or the artificial justice of courts seem like plausible options."
I read it in college for a class called "Hatred, vengeance, and the law," and this was pretty much the takeaway I remember, yes.
On the Christianity point: First, I'd keep in mind that the saga was written after the conversion, so how fast Njal converted in reality is beside the point. Second, I'd bring up that Christianity explicitly calls on us to consider all humans to be God' children, a universal brotherhood of man. Matthew 10:34-39. 1 Corinthians 1:10. Accepting this fictive kinship immediately turns the logic of familial feuds around: your hated enemy is your brother, just like the biological brother that got killed. So how can anyone who feuds ever be in the right?
Your comment seems to deny the historical actions of "Christendom"...unless you're asserting that most folks of claim to be Christians are lying.
Christianity as described in the Bible and in Catholic doctrine isn't against all war and all killing, but it does heavily proscribe who can kill whom, under what circumstances, and at whose orders and discretion. There's a big (doctrinal) difference between the Pope supporting a crusade, or the king/government going to war or condemning a criminal, vs. individuals/families wantonly slaughtering one another over various slights.
Under Icelandic law, individuals had the power to engage in what was effectively private war, and only they (and the heads of their families) were responsible for keeping themselves in line. If they broke the rules, others retaliated under those same rules.
Under Christianity, only God has the right to judge and punish us, and sometimes his human representatives on Earth. A group which, in the middle ages in Europe, included the church and secular leadership.
"Who has the right to use violence to support the rules?" is a question every society grapples with. Iceland's answer changed after the conversion to Christianity.
Also: Christians who break the rules of their faith (aka all of them, officially and in practice) are sinners, not liars.
Saying they are sinners only works if you accept the doctrine they claim to support. I suppose you could say hypocrites rather than liars. And I don't accept the Catholic church as the definition of Christian. Christian is supposed to mean a follower of Jesus Christ, and that doesn't describe the Paulists. The Catholics today are better then the Catholics of many times and periods (by my judgement), but that doesn't make them followers of Jesus. (OTOH, I do wonder about the accuracy of the reported words, and even whether he actually existed rather than being a fictional character. There was definitely a lot of tinkering with such records as exist.)
Oh for sure there was lots of tinkering and probably fabrication outright of all kinds of records.
But since you started by accusing me of denying history or calling most Christians liars, I responded accordingly. The Icelandic people who converted to Christianity converted to Catholicism as it existed in the year 1000. Those were the doctrines they were working under. And in general, when discussing other cultures very different from my own, I prefer to at least start by judging them according to their own standards, understanding, and jurisprudence. It's not like they would have known about any of the other early Christian sects with differing beliefs, let alone the later protestant movements or even then-extant moral philosophies from further afield.
You can't be a liar because you're unavoidably ignorant of facts that might have led you to a different conclusion, or because you start from background assumptions different from those that people who don't even exist yet will someday use as a lens for considering history. Otherwise, was Aristotle a liar for not knowing about momentum and Newton's laws of motion? Was Ptolemy a liar because his world model was geocentric? Was Descartes a liar for not considering the Buddhist perspective of enlightenment including a state of no thoughts?
I am curious though: precisely who do *you* consider to be Christian? Today and in the past?
If you prefer hypocrite to liar, I'm quite willing to accept that change.
A Christian would be someone who accepted the reported words of Jesus Christ as the doctrine, and attempted to live by it. And who didn't add additions that were in conflict with either the letter or the spirit of those words. I've known a couple, and they were good people, though they acknowledged that they couldn't actually live up to their beliefs.
"Reported" by whom, though? We're all, at minimum many reports in a long chain away from the original words themselves. Like it or not, we're all making our best guesses about what was actually said, and it isn't necessarily unreasonable for someone of limited time, means, education, and aptitude to decide that a person of institution is worthy of enough trust to accept or at least prefer their interpretation of often cryptic, metaphorical, multilayered, or past-culture-bound statements.
Alas, the words are often contradictory. E.g., compare Matthew chapter 5 (the sermon on the mount) with Matthew chapter 10 ("[34] Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. [35] For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law." KJV).
All Christianities have to "explain away" some things that Jesus is reported to have said. Which usually involves first deciding what the spirit of the words is and than saying you can't take them literally. Shockingly, the spirit is almost always what the author wants the words to mean.
Mildly suspect Scott wrote this one. Here's a betting market for it
https://manifold.markets/ShakedKoplewitz/did-scott-write-the-njals-saga-book
I was gonna hold my tongue on this to not spoil it, but if people are going to be betting on it (even with pretend money), then I think it's worth advising potential bettors to check the name of the youtube account that uploaded the Ace Attorney video, and its past uploads.
While the account does appear to be Scott's, it may have been posted there for the sake of preserving author anonymity (as opposed to cases in past years where external resources linked by the authors gave their names away).
(I was indeed intrigued to see that a video would be posted under an existing channel, *until* I saw it was apparently Scott's)
Part of me hopes it isn’t. A lot of people are saying this is their favorite book review so far. It would be kinda sad to throw a book review content only to confirm that no one can do it as well as Scott. Kinda makes the whole thing feel pointless.
Great review.
How is being exile different from being outlawed? May one simply slay the outlaw after the verdict, while exiles get safe passage? Can exiles sell there lands and cows, or are they forfeit? For outlaws, were you allowed to offer them safe refuge? "Technically, you are free to slay him, but he appears to be in my homestead, and if you trespass on my land one of us will die."
I envision medieval Iceland as a somewhat hostile natural environment, in which paying the economical value of an adult as weregild should probably bankrupt the median income family and make them starve in the winter, so that a weregild would just be a sentence to death by economy. Was this the case? Or is Ragnar Of The Bloody Axe an elite landowner who decides that he would rather spend his excess income on rape and murder than his fifth battle horse or whatever elites buy?
Also, in a harsh environment, I would expect crime for profit to be rampant. If you only have enough food to bring four fifths of the population through a harsh winter, I would expect the last fifth not to simply roll over and die, but assume that there is conflict until there is enough food to feed the survivors. Better to go to court later than to starve now. Cattle raids would be a related for-profit "crime" I would expect to appear.
Given that apparently, weregild is due even for slain attackers, I would expect that there is something like suicide-by-warrior. Provoking someone into killing you seems reasonable to accomplish, and the weregild for your death might get your clan through lean times.
Also, I would argue that in the face of an imperfect system of law, the threat of a victim going outside the law is actually beneficial for the society. A Viking society where there is a one in six chance (or whatever the game theoretical optimal probability of punishing defection with defection is here) that any murder Ragnar Of The Bloody Axe commits might lead to both clans being destroyed seems much better than one where that never happens. Nine out of ten Ragnar's would be stopped by their fellow clansmen from murdering very much, and the remaining one would be destroyed with his clan and quite a few innocents.
> Kari lies in wait for him, but when Flosi returns to the North, Kari can’t bring himself to strike the killing blow. The two of them swear eternal friendship, and Flosi gives Kari his daughter in marriage. The end.
From my experience, humans do not work that way. Of course, from my experience, humans would also not be happy to receive the weregild for their relatives, never mind waive it. So it is reasonable to assume that these humans had a different attitude to death and violence than we have. A modern family losing one of two children to a car accident is a tragedy, while a medieval family losing four children out of seven to malnutrition and disease is just a statistic or "plenty to take care of us when we are old". By necessity the value of a human life in such a society is tied to their economic value. If you do not feed the working age adults before you feed the children, the children will starve as orphans. Accepting violence as a fact of life might account for "yeah, Torben killed a clansman during a cattle raid. He paid, so whatever. If we were only friends with men who never killed anyone, we would have only wimps as friends." Getting from there to forgiving the dishonorable, cowardly murder of burning the greatest of men in their wooden hall seems a far jump, still. Probably a Christianity thing?
<i>Or is Ragnar Of The Bloody Axe an elite landowner who decides that he would rather spend his excess income on rape and murder than his fifth battle horse or whatever elites buy?</i>
Also, how much leeway did juries have in determining how much weregild a killer owed? If they suspected that a wealthy nobleman like Ragnar was really spending his excess income on rape and murder, could they just jack up the fines until even he wouldn't be able to afford his killing hobby?
IIRC, the Greenland colony was founded by Erik the Red who had been outlawed. So he must have been able to take at least some of his property with him.
I've heard it said that the Vikings evolved their quarrelsome and aggressive ways simply because there isn't that much decent agricultural land in Norway, with all its fjords and the steep slopes bounding them, and the barren plateau inland. So they had to squabble ceaselessly over what little land there was.
Apparently the original meaning of the word "viking" is not known for sure, but I would guess it meant something like "rover". It only really applies to those extra aggressive guys (mostly) who left home to seek their fortune, by fair means or foul, elsewhere. The majority of long-suffering Norwegians must have been content to stay at home.
The most effectively-aggressive men just as well could have driven off the less-effective. Usually it's younger sons who become explorers or sailors or pirates.
I did a lot of reading about this once. And the current consensus seems to be “take every plausible sounding theory and stick it in a blender because we have no actual idea”.
More fertile, more densely populated areas had plenty of fighting over land too. But high population density leads to strong states, so the fighting was mostly state vs. state rather than private.
Other populations in areas with limited land area have different strategies -- the Tibetans are rather pacifistic, for instance. The pacific islanders vary -- the Maoris were much more warlike than their neighbours.
Reading the sagas one gets the impression that viking enterprises were quite normal business for young men of old norse societies, not only for a small antisocial minority. The ancient reports about viking raids and trading in central europe and the precautions that were taken also speak for quite a number of men busy with viking stuff over several generations.
I was under the impression that while "Viking" meant something like "rover" or "traveller", this necessarily meant it included a lot of peaceful traders as well as violent raiders, and probably a number of boats that did a mix of the two depending on where they were sailing at the time.
A fair review, given the reviewer doesn't seem to know much about Medieval Iceland, or simply the unfamiliarity of the setting keeps him from seeing the depths of the characters. Sort of like a classical music reviewer of 1925 citicizing the blue notes of Louis Armstrong. The fact that there is an honest attempt here to find the quality makes this a worthy next round candidate.
For those contemplating reading "Njala," you might try to follow the progression of Hallgerd, from a spoiled brat to, well, you find out. You might as a warmup read "Hrafnekl‘s Frey's Godi." Short and a single plot.
Now, since you all are serious readers, find me a pre Shakespeare work that shows such nuances in a female character. I'm not saying there isn't, jes' curious.
I do agree that there is something Sophoclean in the mixture of character and luck in so many of the characters’ endings. Maybe that's why I am a Hardyist. But Hardy can't even imagine the bloody net woven on the morning of Clontarf. Or the ultimate reconciliation of Flosi and Kari.
Perhaps we shouldn’t forget that a lot of the jokes in Monty Python are on us. Those young snots have stuff that deliberately goes over the head their audience. Cheeky sots.
A lot of work on very difficult material in this review. Congrats
This was by far the most entertaining book review. I think this was the only book review I read more entertaining than Scott's own book reviews. It will be hard for me to weigh it compared to the Meaning of Man book reviews which was very thought provoking, and the cities book review, which gave me a lens into a very intriguing theory I had never considered before, but keep thinking back to now.
This was an excellent review. I really enjoyed it
Boring sounding book, great essay! Loved the bit in the middle telling me what it was about so I didn't have to think for myself (not sarcastic), and the casual, friendly tone.
This was hilariously well-written, but I wonder about the conclusions. If it's true that we've been domesticating ourselves as a species for a while now, picking out the less-domesticated behavior of some earlier point in the domestication arc and philosophizing about it seems unfair. My highminded and subtle dog-training techniques have resulted in pets much better behaved than any wolf, and probably better than whatever dogs the Romans had signs about saying 'cave canem'. I'm not sure it's my technique, though.
And this one's old enough you don't need to buy it to read it.
https://www.fulltextarchive.com/book/njal-s-saga/
Zippy and fun, well written. The most Scottly of all the reviews so far, by a wide margin.
I'm not sure I was along for the ride philosophically speaking, though. The duality here between cattle domesticated by the state and the glorious liberty of cyclical violence felt overly cynical, and there was no real effort to convince us that the 'middle way' of decentralized courtroom arbitrage was pointing at an improvement over anything. I can see this as being a very compelling review for people that already feel an aesthetic and philosophical pull towards this kind of anarcho-capitalist legalism, don't get me wrong. But it seems like those are the only people reading the 'real' essay- the rest of us are just standing in the street, looking in through the window while somebody else enjoys a nice meal.
Bravo. This is the best book review so far.
Note to Scott:
You don't need to publish any more reviews: #5 is the winner.
Writing like this is the reason I read this blog.
Great writing, great animation, slightly questionable conclusions on society. Certainly one of the best reviews.
Thanks - Iceland today is a model society - funny how cultures evolve
The Althing is hard to imagine on site when you visit it today. It's really a huge campsite with a ridge with no buildings or sign of habitation or ceremony.
Many of today's model societies were (in)famously violent in the past. Perhaps the people in them had to put extra work into developing good institutions to ensure peace and social harmony.
The concept of a "model society" with the population of a medium-sized American county is pretty funny. As if we could just pick out one of the hundreds of Iceland-sized counties in America, many of which score significantly higher than Iceland on quality of life metrics, as a model for the *entire world* to base their societies off of.
I hadn't come across Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney before, but that video had me laughing so much I had to pause it half-way through to catch my breath. Well done!
I enjoyed the review but one correction: it was Benjamin Franklin who said “a Republic, Ma’am, if you can keep it.”
I'd love to know how icelandic law came to have so many dumb technicalities. I mean the us justice system has a bunch of those but not to that level.
Since one of the major functions of the rule of law is to stop people from trying to resolve their disputes by killing one another, it seems like the medieval Icelandic version of the law has failed this function pretty badly.
One deeply impressive thing is that all of this stuff was kept alive for a hundred years or more by oral historian bards before it was written down. Think of that when the reviewer quotes a massive genealogy!
And let's not get too warm and fuzzy about "freedom". There seems to have quite commonly been genuine slavery in Iceland (see "Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas, and Power" by Jesse L. Byock) and there was in the Norse society that they fled. The sagas seem to tell only about the "freemen", who were the landholders at the top of each farm, who were almost always men. Of course, they were the only ones admitted to the legal institutions that the sagas were written about. But there were also lots of other dependents: servants, dependent relatives, and the women of all these categories. Their fates seem to have been controlled by the landholder. There doesn't seem to be a lot written about the women, but I suspect the women of de-facto high status (close relatives of landholders, landholders' wives, etc.) probably had an unrecognized network that wielded considerable power, as seems to be true in most societies. In all of this, they seem to have resembled ancient Athens, as the reviewer says.
I like the fact that often characters face the choice: Do I cleave Gunnar's head with an axe, or do I marry my daughter to his son? As if the only way to not live at daggers-drawn is by creating kinship. Then I realized that this resembled Medieval nobles. So it's probably ancient in humans.
It's a massive over-simplification*, but I sometimes humorously think about that "cleave head versus intermarry" question as the conflict between humanity's chimp and bonobo instincts. Personally I prefer Team Bonobo most of the time...
(* And not evolutionarily accurate since we have a _common ancestor_ with chimps and bonobos. It's not like we _descend_ from either.)
1. This is an *extremely* good review, very well done!
2. The voice is very, very Scott, even more so than you'd expect for someone who reads this blog a and presumably admires Scott's writing so much they'd want to imitate it. I'd expect someone this good at writing to have their own authorial voice, rather than sounding exactly like Scott (unless they were intentionally trying to do their best Scott impression). I think there's a very good chance Scott wrote this.
3. I remember seeing something about this stuff on some twitter screenshot a few weeks/months ago. Anyone remember?
I would like to crowdfund you creating a full Phoenix Wright version of the saga, please.
There's one case in Njáls saga where someone actually investigates a crime. A big cheese has been stolen and later a big cheese shows up elsewhere under suspicious circumstances. Mord Valgardsson investigates the matter and it turns out that the suspicious cheese exactly fits the mould of the stolen cheese. This lets him prove who the thief is. If the cheese does fit you can't acquit.
This has been by far my favorite review this year, and the Ace Attorney video is on point!
Kind of a bizarre review IMO, considering it doesn't even mention or allude to any of the stuff that makes the saga worth reading, like the viking raid or the assault on Hlidarendi, or engage with the actual moral of the story (that women have to be kept on a damn short leash, no matter how good-looking they are or how important their families are).
Pretty funny in parts, though.
Yeah, at times I feel the reviewers here take Herodotus' Mirror as an how-to guide. "You know that Big Concept we all think obsessively about? Here is another piece of work it could be shoehorned in. You're welcome"
I'm a bit confused by the discussion in the review of man's justice vs. God's justice. We are told that the justice of God is an eye for an eye. How that plays out depends on whether the goal is compensation or deterrence. If the goal is compensation, you try to negotiate a settlement with the man who poked your eye out, but perhaps he's managed to convince himself that he hasn't done anything seriously wrong. After all, you still have one eye left, so you can still see. That's the point where say, “It appears we don't see eye to eye on the value of an eye. So if that's your final offer, I'll just take one of your eyes and we are done here.” Faced with the prospect of losing one of his own eyes, he will be forced to be honest, with himself at least, about the value he places on an eye. If the system works, he keeps both his eyes and you end up with a fair compensation for your loss.
If the goal is deterrence (or more precisely, deterrence only, because being required to pay compensation is a form of deterrence), you do want to take his eye, or better yet, both of his eyes, to make clear that bad things will happen to him or anyone else who harms you in the future. In this case, the eye for an eye rule is a limit on how far you can go to create deterrence. Presumably the point is that if you only take one eye, the two of you are in some sense equal going forward. Regardless of who is the victim and who is the perpetrator of the original incident, you and he have each taken an eye from the other, which hopefully settles the matter. So the eye for an eye rule is intended to sacrifice a certain amount of deterrence in exchange for a reduced likelyhood of future conflict.
The reviewer tells us that prior to the Hammurabi, “God's justice was the only game on offer.” This is also confusing, because the code of Hammurabi specifies an eye for an eye.
In contrast to God's justice, man's justice is “a weregild for an eye, or maybe getting confused and failing to award any punishment at all.” The first part of this seems to say that man's law is about compensation, which would in turn suggest that God's law is by contrast about deterrence. But we are also told that, “we go with Man's justice naturally...because we're cattle domesticated by the State.” That would mean that current law is an example of Man's law--and current law is a mixture of criminal law, which is about deterrence, and civil law, which is about compensation. (Even civil law is partially about deterrence, which is why we have punitive damages.)
The second part (“maybe getting confused and failing to award any punishment at all”) points to the fallibility of Man's justice, but any system of justice administered by man is going to be imperfect, so it's not clear how God's justice escapes this criticism.
I sent this review to a very sophisticated Icelandic friend of mine, and got the following critical response. Dave Anderson.
I have read the review and have very mixed feelings about it.
I have read Njal's saga several times and it seems I have read a totally different book than the reviewer. I am dismayed of, in my opinion, his mockery of the saga. Be assured that this opinion is very biased!
The Njal's saga is to me so much more than a series of lawsuits, although it is quite clear that the author has respected or is interested in law and lawmaking.
The [saga] author creates characters that are visible to the reader in all their humanity. They are proud, devious, wise, athletic, scoundrels and honest. Every word has a meaning. Every person introduced is mentioned for a reason.
This Saga also includes the history of the beautiful Hallgerdur Langbroek, her third husband Gunnar Hamundarson, Njal's best friend and Njals's wife Bergthora. Two strong willed women whose feud between one another is fierce, but does not destroy the ever lasting friendship of Njall and Gunnar.
Hallgerdur and Bergthora are some of the Saga's most famous women, but for different reasons. In most eyes Hallgerdur is depicted as evil, in others she was probably sexually abused as a young girl. All her actions as a young woman described in Njal's Saga bear the marks of such assaults.
After Gunnar was slain, she ended her life at a farm in Laugarnes (Reykjavik) less than a mile from my home, where her bones were put to rest.
Njal's saga should not be taken lightly. It should be read chapter by chapter and at the end of every chapter the reader should contemplate on what was the meaning of the chapter. What is the author saying? Also the chapters that are only a few lines.
Njal's Saga is a conversation piece. Without the contemplation and preferably continuous ̶̶ as you read through the pages ̶̶ discussion with a fellow reader or historian, the Njal's Saga, in my opinion, will pass you by.
This should make me proud of my heritage, daubed as I am with the tarbrush of the Welsh, Scots-Irish and pre-Celtic Neanderthals. Ond y cyfan rydw i wir eisiau yw i'r pen mawr hwn ddod i ben.
Who the fuck would want to be "cattle domesticated by the state" even if it is necessary for peace (about which I have my doubts).
Well, we've got a new contender for best review. The video alone was great,
An entertaining read, but much more of a "Euminides style morality play" as opposed to a cold, objective analysis.
Among the more egregious oversights: while I am not a libertarian nor do I agree with the vast majority of the screed - a core part of the screed is that government winds up harming more than helping therefore less government is good.
This is directly alluded to as the reason for Norwegians colonizing Iceland but the corollary is missed: the very practices of Icelandic law via the Althing have clearly de- or evolved from a search for justice into something else. And a very real outcome of law vs. justice is the practice of jailhouse lawyers/patent trolling/nuisance lawsuits etc etc - where the pursuit of justice is, to various degrees of transparency, subjugated under the desire for personal or professional profit.
The same thing occurs with the Euminides example: the bad practice, as seen by modern eyes, or Orestes' trial obscures the reality that justice is an outcome of society and will always be so. Decrying the practices of ancient Greeks then is just as pointless as decrying the practices of other societies today - it is ethnocentrism of the highest degree. Among other things: in a physical human labor based society - there is very much an economic and social inequality between men and women.
"Eye for an Eye" by William Ian Miller is a great book that talks a lot about that period of Icelandic history
Very funny. I appreciate being introduced to this text I’ve never heard of and would definitely never read in a way that makes me think... just maybe I will read it.
Change a few letters in the names and you are dangerously close to Vinland Saga... guessing this is where the idea came from