Performance and Honor in 13th-Century Iceland

Author(s): Richard Bauman

Source: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 99, No. 392 (Apr. - Jun., 1986), pp. 131-150
Published by: American Folklore Society
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 RICHARD BAUMAN

Performance and Honor in

13th-Century Iceland

Three lines of performance-centered analysis may be distingushedin current

folkloric and anthropologicalthought,focusing respectivelyon performanceas
practice, the analysis of culturalperformances,and the poetics of performance.
Employing the third of these as a frame of reference, I analyze the
interrelationshipsbetweenartisticverbalperformanceand thepursuit of honor in
13th-century Iceland, demonstratingthat they constituted a unified semiotic
system and suggestingsome comparativeimplicationsof thesefindings.

FOLKLORE, PERHAPS MORE THAN ANY OTHER DISCIPLINE, has been disadvan-
taged by the quest for disciplinary autonomy that has characterized modern
scholarship for most of the past century or more. In particular, folklorists have
been wrenched by the counter-pulls of literature and anthropology, the hu-
manities and the social sciences, which have threatened the unified frame of
reference that was folklore's foundation in the thought ofJohann Gottfried
von Herder, James G. Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, and other giants of our
field. In this light, then, the recent essay by Clifford Geertz (1980), heralding
the refiguration of social thought-which is to say the reintegration of the so-
cial and the humanistic-should be especially gratifying to folklorists, though
it poses a deep challenge as well.
Geertz's vision is gratifying because those very symbolic forms that serve
as the bases of the interpretive analogies for social action that he advances as
evidence of this emergent refiguration-drama, game, and text-have been
close to the center of folkloric inquiry from the first coalescence of folklore as
a field of study, and they have indeed sustained the integrative perspective on
society, culture, language, art, and ideology that have been folklore's birth-
right. The challenge, of course, is that folklore is likely to be open to much
wider scrutiny than before, as this intellectual refiguration gathers momen-
tum; we cannot expect anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, or literary
scholars simply to honor our prior claims to the field, but must rather dem-
onstrate that our long years of cultivation of the territory have made us espe-
cially ready to participate in and contribute to the refiguration that Geertz has
articulated.
RichardBauman is Director,Centerfor Intercultural
Studiesin FolkloreandEthnomusicology
Universityof Texas,Austin, Texas78712.

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132 RICHARD BAUMAN

I believe that one of the areas in which folklore can contribute especially
fully to this intellectual enterpriseis in the study of performance. Although
Geertzcentershis discussionon drama,game, and text, he does in fact employ
the term "performance"as an effective cover term for the whole rangeof sym-
bolic and aestheticforms from which the new social models are being drawn:
"In the social sciences, or at least in those that have abandoneda reductionist
conception of what they are about, the analogies are coming more and more
from the contrivancesof culturalperformancethanfrom those of physicalma-
nipulation-from theater, painting, grammar, literature, law, play" (1980:
168).
As with drama, game, and text, performanceoffers the analysta multiplic-
ity of perspectiveson the symbolic constitutionof social life. One may distin-
guish in currentanthropologicaland folkloricthought at least threemajorlines
of performance-centeredanalysis, convergent in many ways but informed by
different orientations. The most general of these perspectivesis founded on
the notion of performance as practice;a second takes culturalperformances
as its
frame of reference;and the third derives its focal orientationfrom the poeticsof
oralperformance.
Performance as practice.One of the most fundamentaland far-reachingreo-
rientationsproviding increasinglycoherentdirectionto inquiryin all the social
disciplinescenters arounda concern to redressthe long-standing imbalancein
social thought favoring conceptions of society and culture as abstract, nor-
mative, collective systems-privileging institution over act, langue over pa-
role, the traditionalover the emergent-and toward a view of social and cul-
tural life as situated human accomplishments, produced and reproducedby
purposeful human action. Sherry Ortner (1984) has recently provided a mas-
terful analytical survey of the intellectual foundations of this reorientation,
sparing me the necessity of attempting to do so here. Suffice it to say that a
significantbody of thought along these lines is coalescing aroundthe concept
of practice, centrallyinformed by the Marxiannotion of praxis. Among folk-
lorists and linguistic anthropologists (especiallythose in the ethnography of
speaking), performancehas tended to be the preferredterm, partly as a chal-
lenge to the Chomskyian relegation of performancebeyond the margins of
properlinguistic inquiry and partlybecauseperformanceevokes the artfulness
of those symbolic forms most dear to folklorists. This generalizedsense of
performance as practice characterizesespecially the earlier attempts to for-
mulate a performance-centeredperspective on language and verbal art (see,
e.g., Bauman 1972; Bauman and Sherzer 1974; Ben-Amos and Goldstein
1975), and while more recentformulations(discussedbelow) have endeavored
to specify more closely what constitutes verbal art in particularas perfor-
mance, the fundamentalnotion of performanceas practice,as situatedaction,
remainsfully as salient as before.
Culturalperformances. A second line of performance-centeredanalysis fo-
cuses attention on those framed, heightened, public, and symbolically reso-
nant events that Milton Singer (1972:70-75)has termed culturalperformances

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13TH-CENTURY ICELAND 133

and Roger Abrahams enactments and display events (1977, 1981), such as rit-
uals, festivals, fairs, ceremonies, and spectacles. Rooted in a long-standing
Durkheimian tradition of symbolic analysis, the study of cultural perfor-
mances views such events essentially as metacultural enactments, occasions in
which members of society put their culture on display for themselves and oth-
ers in performance. The densely reflexive nature of such cultural performances
makes them privileged foci for cultural analysis: they are cultural forms about
culture, social forms about society, in which the central meanings and values
of a group are embodied, acted out, and laid open to examination and inter-
pretation in symbolic form, both by members of that group and by the eth-
nographer. The work of Victor Turner has been especially influential here, as
has the dramatism of Kenneth Burke. Not the least important contribution of
this line of analysis for folklorists has been to provide a productive interpretive
framework for the comprehension of those large-scale, public, heterogeneous,
and multisemiotic symbolic forms, like festivals, fairs, and spectacles, that
contrast so markedly with the intimate, face-to-face, domestic forms-the
folktales, ballads, riddles, proverbs, and the like-that have provided the
frame of reference for much of folkloric theory and method.
The poetics of oral performance.The third perspective I would identify, and
the one to which I have devoted most of my own efforts, is concerned with
the formulation of a poetics of oral performance. This line of inquiry draws its
conceptual influences most centrally from the Prague School poetics of Roman
Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky, and from linguistic anthropology, especially
the ethnography of speaking.
With primary regard, then, to verbal art, I have suggested (Bauman 1977) a
conception of performance as a mode of communication, a way of speaking,
the essence of which resides in the assumption of responsibility to an audience
for a display of communicative competence, highlighting the way in which
communication is accomplished, above and beyond the additional multiple
functions that the act of communication may serve. In this sense of perfor-
mance, the act of speaking itself is framed as display, objectified, lifted out to
a degree from its contextual surroundings and opened up to evaluative scru-
tiny by an audience. From the point of view of the audience, the act of com-
munication on the part of the performer is thus laid open to evaluation for the
way it is done, for the relative skill and effectiveness of the performer's display.
Additionally, it is offered for the enhancement of experience, through the
present appreciation of the intrinsic qualities of the act of expression itself.
Viewed in these terms, performance may be understood as the enactment of
the poetic function, the essence of spoken artistry.
While this performance-centered approach to spoken art clearly enriches the
study of verbal folklore per se, I would emphasize that this should not be con-
sidered its sole end. For many of us who pursue this line of study, it is part of
a more comprehensive enterprise as well, namely, the ethnography of speak-
ing, which seeks to elucidate the interrelationships among language, culture,
and society at their source in the culturally patterned use of language as an

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134 RICHARD BAUMAN

element and instrument of social life-language, or better, speaking, as prac-

tice. It is here, I think, that the poetics of performancemay participatemost
fully in the largerintellectualprogramoutlined by Geertz.The purposeof this
essay, then, is to suggest by example how the folkloric anaysisof verbalart as
performance may be extended outward toward the illumination of other
spheres of social and culturallife.
The substantive focus of my study will be 13th-centuryIceland, based on
an analysis of literary sources, thus indexing another dimension of the refi-
guration of social thought: if we can turn literarymodels to the study of so-
ciety, we should find it equally productive to apply sociological perspectives
to literary texts. As regards the use of early Icelandicliteraturefor perfor-
mance-centeredanalysis, I take my charterfrom Victor Turner. Although his
perspective on performance, as noted, differs from my own, his essay, "An
Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic Saga" (1971) shows the way.
Turner's article is an analytical reading of Nja'lssaga, arguably the greatest
work of literature that Iceland has produced, as a record of social dramas in
early Iceland, those recurrent processual episodes of tensional irruption that
were such an enduring concern in his work. His treatment is a convincing ar-
gument-actually, a demonstration-of the productiveness of undertaking
anthropological investigations of historical cases based on literary source ma-
terials. Investigations of this kind, of course, demand careful assessment of the
ethnographic accuracy of the sources employed, a matter that Turner ad-
dresses at some length in his article. One problem, in regard to early Iceland,
is that the family sagas, of which Njdls saga is the most famous, were written
two to three centuries after the events they recount; Njdls saga was written
sometime around 1280, but the narrative spans the period from about 960 to
1016, with the climatic events-the killing of Gunnar in 990 and the burning
of Njal and his sons in their house in 1011-bracketing the turn of the 11th
century. Turner (1971:358) and other scholars such as Jesse Byock (1982:10),
Kirsten Hastrup (1985:12), Laura Thompson (1969:181 n.3), Richard Tomas-
son (1980:29-31), and Rosalie Wax (1969:101-125), who are interested less in
precise historicity than in the sociological accuracy of the sagas, argue persu-
asively that they do in fact present a usably accurate picture of society in the
Free State period, from about 930 to 1262. I won't discuss the arguments in
detail here, but I believe they are valid with regard to the social structures,
patterns, and processes with which these scholars deal, such as kinship, feud,
wealth, power, worldview, and so on. When it comes to matters of expressive
culture, however, which is my own central concern, it seems safer to draw
primarily from sources that are more nearly contemporaneous with the events
they recount. Oral tradition may have preserved some features of earlier verbal
behavior patterns for extended periods, for example, before they were cap-
tured in the written sagas, but the literary representations of ways of speak-
ing-my primary interest-more likely reflects the usage of the period in
which the sagas were written. Accordingly, I have based my own analysis not
on the family sagas, but on Sturlungasaga.2

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13TH-CENTURY ICELAND 135

Unlike the family sagas, Sturlunga saga is not a unitary work but a compi-
lation of separate sagas treating events that span the period from 1117 to 1284,
but concentrating on the years between 1230 and 1262. This latter period has
come to be known as the Age of the Sturlungs after the dominant family of
the time, among whom was Sturla P6ordarson, the author of Islendinga saga
which is the lengthiest of the works making up Sturlungasaga. The separate
sagas that make up the composite work were written from about 1212 to 1280
and brought together around 1300. Dealing as it does with recent and familiar
events, more as history than as literature, Sturlungasaga is generally regarded
as more historically and ethnographically reliable for 13th-century Iceland
than the family sagas.
The most conspicuous performances of verbal art reported in Sturlungasaga
have to do with storytelling (sagnaskemtan) and the recitation of poetry
(kvecandi). To be sure, the two are closely interrelated: the interplay of prose
and verse is a distintive feature of Icelandic narrative, both written and oral.
By way of example of such artistic verbal performance we may consider the
often-cited account of a week-long wedding celebration at Reykjaholar, re-
counted in 'Porgilssaga ok Haflida, where the entertainments prominently in-
cluded storytelling and poetry3:

Hr6lf from Skalmarnestold a saga about Hr6ngvid the viking and about Olaf, the Lidsmen's
King, about the barrow-robber, Prainthe berserk,and about Hr6mund Gripsson-with many
strophestoo. ... Ingimundthe priesttold the Sagaof Orm the Skaldof Barra,with many verses
and, toward the end of the saga, many goodflokkrs which Ingimundhimself had composed. [Ss
E 2:44;Ss I 1:27]

Significantly, Ingimund was distinguished for his skills as a verbal per-

former, as the descriptions of him make clear:

He was a good skaldand in many ways a most worthy man [innmestimatismad].... Ingimund
was a very learnedman and was a practisedstorytellerand entertainedpeople with poems and
composed verses. He himself made good poems and was famous thereby in other lands. [Ss E
2:28-29; Ss 11:13]

And again,

Ingimund was a most worthy man [it mestagfiiugmenni], a good skald, a great show-off both in
temperamentand in manners, a man always the life of the party and one who provided many
sorts of entertainment.[Ss E 2:39;Ss I 1:23]

To cite another case of a man well known for his verbal artistry, we may
consider Sturla 'Pordarson, the author of Islendinga saga and perhaps other
parts of Sturlunga saga, as well as a major figure in the narrative itself. As a
result of a complex series of political and legal events, Sturla had to leave Ice-
land for Norway, some time around 1263. Because of the bad reports spread
by his enemies, he received a decidedly cool reception at the Norwegian court.

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136 RICHARD BAUMAN

Ordered to accompany King Magnuis on a seajourney, Sturla was at first badly

provided for; his fortunes turned, however, when he was asked to entertain
the crew with stories:

"If you like," said Sturla.

Then he told them the saga of Huld betterand more knowledgeablythanany of them had ever
before heard it. Many of them pressed forward to the foredeck, wanting to hear as clearly as
possible, so that there was a great crowd there. The queen asked, "Whatis that crowd of men
on the foredeck?"
A man said, "The men up there want to hear the saga which the Icelander is telling."
She said, "Whatsaga is that?"
And he replied, "It's about a great troll-wife, a good story, and it is being well told."
The king told her to pay no attentionto this but go to sleep. She said, "I think this Icelander
must be a highly worthy man [g6dr drengr]and much less worthy of dispraise than he is said to
be." [Ss E 2:495;Ss I 2:232-233]

The next day, Sturla is invited by the queen to tell the story again to herself
and the king. When the king smiles slightly, Sturla sees his opening and asks
permission to recite a poem he has composed about him. The king unbends
still further, calls Sturla the next day, drinks to his health-to Sturla's great
relief-and asks for Sturla's poem about his father, King Hakon. Magnus's
evaluative reponse to Sturla is "To my way of thinking, you recite better than
the Pope" (Ss E 2:497; Ss I 2:234). I am not sure how good a performer the
pope was, but evidently the king intends this as strong praise and thereafter
Sturla was held in very high favor at the royal court.
There are several points I want to draw from these examples. To begin with,
it is clear that performance abilities and verbal artistry were valued and useful
skills in Icelandic society. The descriptions of Ingimund that I have quoted
indicate that his skills as a performer-storyteller, poet, entertainer-consti-
tuted an important basis for designating him a worthy man. There are other
desirable qualities mentioned as well-his wisdom, hospitality, and generos-
ity, for example-but artistic verbal ability and capacities as an entertainer
counted fully as much. It was not bad to be a showy person, but a matter of
praise.
Nor are the descriptions of Ingimund unique. Although he is described twice
in the text, and more fully than most other individuals, similar qualities are
singled out in descriptions of other worthy figures as well. OfHrolf, a friend
of Porgils Oddason, it is said, "he was a notable lawyer, experienced in law-
suits; he was also a historian and composed fine poetry. He was well-to-do
and kept a good house" (Ss E 2:29; Ss I 1:14). The great chieftain, Gizur Por-
valdsson, is described as "of moderate height, a very accomplished man, with
shapely limbs and keen-eyed-he had piercing eyes, intelligent in expression;
he was better spoken [betrtaladr] than most men here in the land, affable, with
a grand voice; not an impetuous man but one always considered of very sub-
stantial value in all counsels" (Ss E 1:306; Ss I 1:402). Or, to take still another
example, Vermund Tumason "was a man greatly given to show, a most de-

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13TH-CENTURY ICELAND 137

liberate man, and one who had great vocal powers" (Ss E 1:346; Ss I 1:441).
Note again, in this last description, that Vermund, like Ingimund, is a showy
person, given to display, a performer, that is, in more general terms. I will
return to this point later. What I want to emphasize for the moment is that
verbal skills and performance abilities represented a route to high public regard
in Icelandic society.
Granted that the roles of storyteller and poet were honored ones in Iceland,
the next question I want to pose is what our performers were telling and ver-
sifying about. As the accounts of the wedding celebration at Reykjaholar and
Sturla's shipboard performance indicate, part of the storyteller's repertoire
consisted of traditional folktales-tales of trolls, legends of viking exploits and
so on-told for entertainment and evaluated for their intrinsic interest and the
performance skills of the narrator. Recall the evaluative comment of Sturla's
shipmate about his story of the troll-wife: "a good story, and it is being well
told."
We know also that there was a significant corpus of oral traditions centering
around the historical events of 10th- and 11th-century Iceland and Norway
which were later rendered in written form in the kings sagas and the family
sagas. The interrelationship between the oral and the written traditions has
been the subject of extensive and vigorous debate by generations of saga schol-
ars-the so-called freeprose versus bookprose debate4-but no one can plau-
sibly deny that oral legends were told about the feuds, exploits, and heroic
achievements of bygone days by contemporary and later generations of Ice-
landers. Indeed, Sturlungasaga itself contains ample evidence of the continuity
of this oral narrative tradition. I will develop this point further shortly, but we
may recall at this point Ingimund's telling of the Saga of Orm the Skald ofBarra
at the wedding celebration. While no version of this saga is known to us, it
was clearly in the tradition of family sagas about noted poets, of which Egils
saga, Kormdkssaga, Hallfredar saga, Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu,and Bjarnarsaga
hitdelakappa are surviving examples.
Among other things, these sagas about poets demonstrate that the making
of poetry was itself highly reportable, worthy of a story (soguligr)in the sense
of representing a resource for further literary production. And this was no less
true of contemporary poetry than of verse composed by earlier skalds. To cite
one of many available examples in Sturlungasaga, there is a passage in Islendinga
saga recounting the killing of one Hall Kleppjarnsson which states, "When the
slaying of Hall was known west in the Dales of Saudafel, men said that Sighvat
Sturluson spoke this poem," followed by the poem itself (Ss E 1:151; Ss I
1:259), suggesting the currency of narrative accounts about the performance
of a noteworthy poem. In citing evidence of this kind for the currency of oral
accounts I should acknowledge that I side with those scholars who view such
oral "source references" as more than mere literary convention, crediting
them rather as indicators of a real oral narrative tradition (Andersson 1966;
Liestol 1930; Manhire 1975-76). While not all such attributions should be
taken at face value, there is abundant supporting evidence in Sturlungasaga and

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138 RICHARD BAUMAN

elsewhere that 13th-century Icelanders were active storytellers, employing a

variety of narrative genres from the local anecdote of current gossip to the
elaborate legend of heroic exploits of bygone days, and additional evidence
that establishes beyond question an Icelandic tradition that has persisted until
modern times of stories about the making and performance of poetry (see,
e.g., Almqvist 1961).
In addition to stories about poetry, one finds also poems about poetry. Is-
lendingasaga contains, for example, a poem about the rewards of making po-
etry, celebrating the honors won by Snorri Sturluson for a poem of his own
(Ss E 1:162; Ss I 1:269). Such stories and poems are all further corroborations
of the cultural salience of verbal artistry in 13th-century Iceland. But this poem
about Snorri leads us to something else as well; it honors Snorri for the honors
he has earned with his poetry, and indeed, this matter of honor is crucial to the
development of my argument.
When we go on to examine the further currency and performance of stories
and poems about recent or contemporary events in Sturlungasaga, we find that
a significant number of them, like those just mentioned, celebrate exemplary
behavior, that is, some action or deed that won honor for an individual. Let
me offer a few representative examples.
In Pordar saga Kakala, we find a series of verses praising the generous hos-
pitality of Brand Kolbeinsson, known as "an extremely generous man [manna
orvastraffe]' who "enjoyed a good reputation [ordstirgo6dan]as a consequence"
(Ss E 2:305; Ss I 2:270). Here is a sample.

Greatwas the fame [ordstir]

This noble man won,
Generouswith gold,
MagnanimousBrand.
Little he cared
About hoarding his wealth,
But gold he gave freely
To all of his friends.

And,

Steadfastthis warrior
Was steadfastin giving:
Greatwas his wealth,
Ever generous his hand.
His fame is far-reaching
-Well-beloved this leader-
Such glory so won
Will not lessen with time. [Ss E 2:305-306;Ss I 2:70-71]

These verses are all the more significant in that they were composed by the
poet Ingjald Geirmundarson, a supporter of 6Trd, who at this point in the
saga is an enemy of Brand's.

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13TH-CENTURY ICELAND 139

In 'Porgilssaga ok Haflida, one of the early episodes deals with the settlement
of a legal case contested by the two main figures on behalf of their respective
kinsmen. The text reports that "These verses were composed at that time,"
apparently by supporters of Porgils. Here is one of the verses:

Halfidi paid out

This wergild for Hneitir-
The heir of Oddi [ = Porgils]
Was a famous protector.
Nimble-witted, he proved
-So men long remember,
And I often versify-
A true man of honor [dgetismanni].[Ss E 2:37;Ss I 1:21-22]

In Porgils saga Skarta, the hero distinguishes himself by his conspicuous brav-
ery in fighting a fire. "Torgils won great honor [scemd]from this action," the
saga reports, "as is celebrated in the poem":

The blaze broke out

As night filled men's homes.
The guard poured out
With their glorious king,
But the valient [krekbradr= courageous]'Porgils
Won all men's praise[lofi]
Whereverflamesblazed
Or fire raged againstthem. [Ss E 2:358;Ss I 2:114]

To cite one last example, in one of the numerous violent encounters that fill
the pages of Islendingasaga, special attention is given to the valor of Odd P6-
rarinsson:

Now Odd was also attackedby many men but as long as he stood up he was only slightly
wounded. He protectedhimself with his shield and struckout with his sword or swung it around
him. He defended himself so bravely [frieknliga= valiantly]that, it has beenjudged since, in
those times almost no man betterdefendedhimself so long in the open field, againstan attackby
so many assailants.[Ss E 1:427;Ss I 1:515]

I take this phrase "it has been judged since" to indicate that the story of Odd's
valiant fights was told and retold in times after the battle as an example of
manly valor. As summarized after the account of the battle, "Odd lost his life
there, but he met his death with great valor and manliness" [vid mikla hreysti
ok drengskap](Ss E 1:428; Ss I 1:516). Relevant here, and to the foregoing ex-
amples as well, is Peter Foote's observations (1984b[1974]:47-48) that the so-
cial developments and political turbulence of 13th-century Iceland called forth
relatively large gatherings of fighting men as the retainers of powerful chief-
tains, among whom in their leisure hours demands for such entertainments as
storytelling were likely to be constant. One would expect gatherings of this

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140 RICHARD BAUMAN

sort to be especially preoccupied with manly virtues and stories about them,
such as the account of Odd's valiant death.
If we draw together the qualities celebrated in the poems and stories of the
kind I have just presented-designated by nouns such as hreysti (valor, prow-
ess), and karlmennska(manhood, valor), or adjectives like irr affe (generous),
]rekbradr (courageous), vel taladr (well-spoken), frcknligr (valiant), vaskr
(manly, valiant), or frcendhollr (faithful to one's kinsmen)-we can capture
them with one of the most ideologically salient and value-laden terms in early
Icelandic discourse: drengskapr.The concept, and code, of drengskaprunder-
went a complex evolution over several centuries preceding the 13th, but in the
usage of that period at least it was perhaps the most embracing cover term for
the ideal complex of manly virtue and honor (Foote and Wilson 1970:425-
426). An exemplar of this ideal is called a drengr,or, with similar connotations,
a metismadr (worthy man), gofugmenni (noble, worshipful man), or dgcetismatr
(great or excellent man)-all terms of high praise. And it is by displaying the
qualities of a drengrthat one wins honor (somi, samd) and is esteemedto be a man
of worth (virding). I will elaborate on the pursuit and achievement of honor
shortly in greater detail; the point I would introduce here is that stories and
poems were not only means of gaining honor for the verbal artists who created
and performed them, but were also potent instruments for bestowing honor
on others by celebrating their virtues and achievements in artful and thus
memorable ways.
They were also, I should add, equally effective means for denying honor, by
impugning the honor of others. The following episode from Islendingasaga is
especially revealing in this regard:

There was a man named Tann in Midfj6rd, the son of Bjarni Kalfsson. He was a spiteful gos-
sip. He composed verses and was libellous [nidskcar].He was on good terms with no man. There
appeared in Midfj6rd then this poem about the sons of Gisl:

Five spear-wielding, ill-minded,

Byrnie-bound warriors-brothers-
Born to one household,
Luckless and vicious, as often occurs,
No good intending to other men then

On account of this verse the sons of Gisl killed a man. After this there arose renewed evilness
and provocative words [ordasukk]. The men of Vidadal raised a mocking jest in which they said
the men of Midfj6rd constituted a mare: 1PorbjornBergsson was the back of the mare; his brother
Gisl, the mare's belly; Gisl's sons, the feet; OlafMagnisson, the thigh, and Tann Bjarnason, the
arse. For, they said, he dirtied all who had anything to do with him with his filthy droppings.
From these rumors [ordasveim] and many others that were current then, such hostility arose
that it was dangerous to be among them. [Ss E 1:155-156; Ss I 1:262-263]

Note first that Tann, like our earlier figures, is described in terms of speaking,
but negatively in his case, to reveal him as an unworthy rather than a worthy

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13TH-CENTURY ICELAND 141

man: spiteful, libellous, and on good terms with no one. Note too the poten-
tially serious consequences of mocking verses; the better and more artfully
memorable they are, the greater their efficacy in impugning the target's honor,
to the point even where they provoke the butt of the insult to killing and to
further escalation of the conflict.
Among the many other instances of artful attacks on the honor of others
reported in Sturlungasaga (e.g., Ss E 1:149-150, 1:230-231, 1:174, 2:306, etc.)
it is worth singling out the mocking of others' poetry. If poetic skill was a
route to high regard, the snide derision of another's poetic ability was a potent
denial of it. In one instance that provides a nice counterpart to the verse men-
tioned earlier honoring Snorri Sturluson's poetry, "T6rodd in Selvag paid one
man a whole sheep" to write an insulting parody of one of Snorri's poems that
is cuttingly dismissive of its worth-and his (Ss E 1:173; Ss I 1:278-279).
As numerous scholars have pointed out, 13th-century Iceland was a society
intensely preoccupied-all the more so at its upper levels-with honor, es-
teem, and reputation. As Einar Olafur Sveinsson, the great social historian of
the Age of the Sturlungs, observes, "The sense of honor was at this time as
highly developed and delicate as love was later on. . . . Sagas about earlier
times [which were written, we recall, in the 13th century] comonly center
around matters of honor, and the quarrels of Haflidi Masson and TPorgilsOd-
dason [in Sturlunga saga] show well how extreme the insistence on points of
honor was in actual life: trifles and matters of form are turned into main issues"
(1953:90-91).
The role of honor and related moral values in early Icelandic society has been
the subject of extensive scholarly treatment and the issues are far too complex
to recapitulate, let alone resolve, here.5 One set of problems in this literature
stems from the tendency on the part of some scholars to equate honor with a
heroic ideal of the fighting man, to limit the concept to martial prowess and
heroism and a constant readiness to fight in defense of one's honor and pride.
Other scholars argue instead for coexistent, contrasting, and even conflicting
ideals of the honorable man, principally the touchy defender of personal and
family integrity (the extreme type of which is the 6jafnadarmadr, the over-
bearing man) on the one hand and the moderate, just, conciliatory man
(h6fsmatr, or moderate man) on the other. Certainly, special speaking qualities
may be noted in clear exemplars of both the h6fsmadr and the 6jafnadrmadr.
Compare, for example, from Islendinga saga, the description of Gizur TPor-
valdsson as a moderate man, quoted earlier ("he was better spoken than most
men in the land, affable, with a grand voice; not an impetuous man but one
always considered of very substantial value in all counsels" [Ss E 1:306; Ss I
1:402] ) with the characterization of Snorri Porvaldsson, who will figure again
later in the discussion, as an overbearing man ("valiant, true to his word, and
fair-spoken," but one who "if he did make a suggestion . .. insisted that his
opinion prevail no matter with whom he was dealing, otherwise he became
very ugly to deal with" [Ss E 1:252; Ss I 1:341] ). It is clear that many-even
most-of the family sagas and constituent sagas of Sturlunga saga do exploit

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142 RICHARD BAUMAN

and turn on the inherent potential for conflict between these two sets of stan-
dards for behavior. Nevertheless, while the qualities by which honor could be
achieved and measured might well cluster into such clearly contrasting types,
especially in literary treatments, my own reading of Sturlunga saga suggests
that those qualities, from touchy pride backed up by martial prowess to con-
ciliatory moderation, are better conceived as constituting a larger pool, or rep-
ertoire, of ethical standards, available for selection and combination in a vari-
ety of ways in the pursuit of honor and reputation, depending upon situa-
tional, personal, or strategic factors. The investigation of how those choices
are made and what outcomes result from those choices reveals much about the
sagas as literature and about the differences between periods in Icelandic social
history. For my own purposes, however, it will suffice to consider the general
repertoire of honor-accruing qualities, in all its diversity.
Systems of honor may be conceptualized in many ways, as abstract norma-
tive systems, as principles of social organization and hierarchy, and so on; my
own preference, for reasons that will soon be apparent, is to consider them as
semiotic systems, systems of communication. The values of drengskapr,to be
more specific, organized a complex communicative system. To begin with,
honor was not considered in early Iceland to be an innate, inherent quality, but
had to be achieved through the performance of actions that displayedthe hon-
orable qualities of valor, generosity, hospitality, and so on, that is through the
display of signs of moral worth. I do not use the term "performance" casually
here, as I will show in a moment. Moreover, these enactments of honor had
to be public; they had to be seen to be effective, for, as Peter Foote and David
Wilson have meaningfully observed, "The standard for honourable conduct
was ultimately set by public opinion, and public opinion provided the reward"
(1970:432). Not only did honor have to be enacted and obsrved, it had to be
publicly acknowledged, by being talked about and evaluated. That is, praise
was a necessary instrument of honor; indeed, the word lofmeans both praise,
good report, and a laudatory poem, a eulogy. The quest for honor was thus
centrally a quest for reputation, resting on the need to be well talked about.
The crucial importance of talk in giving expression to honor is clearly evident
in the two most common terms for reputation: ordstfr, from orc (word) + tirr
(glory), and metord, from met (weights [of scales]) + ord (word). Similarly, the
avoidanceofshame (skQmm)demanded the avoidance of verbal condemnation or
blame, that is, dmeli, from a (against) + mala (to speak).
I have already indicated the role of performance in the public bestowal or
denial of honor by means of verbal performance. Let me turn now to the com-
plementary role of performance in the enactment of honor by those who as-
pired to it. Earlier, I proposed a definition of performance as the assumption
of accountability to an audience for a display of communicative competence,
subject to evaluation for the relative skill and effectiveness by which the act of
communication is accomplished, above and beyond the other communicative
functions of the verbal utterance. Now, although this initial formulation was
developed with specific reference to verbal performance, I would like here to

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13TH-CENTURY ICELAND 143

suggest that the notion is in fact generalizableto other semiotic systems, that
is to other communicative codes. With specific referenceto the case at hand,
insofar as the value system of drengskapr is a semiotic system which rested on
the public enactmentof signs of honor, I would submit that it too might pro-
ductively be examined in performance-centeredterms. Let me elaborate.
Value systems like drengskapr are relative and hierarchical.A value system
representsan arrangementor ordering of things into socially defined hierar-
chies of preference,as more or less desirable(cf. Goodenough 1963:258).Ac-
cordingly, value systems are characteristicallydriven by an upward impulse,
a quest for excellence, that is, a desire to attainthe upper reachesof the hier-
archyof preference.If what counts is hospitality, or courage, or the fulfillment
of obligations to kinsmen, what counts best in honor-seeking behavior is the
doing of actions that index these qualitieswith special skill and effectiveness,
that is, with noteworthy competence. There is also, quite understandably,a
tendency toward competition in such systems, a seeking for opportunitiesto
best others in displays of honored qualitiesand ajealous guardingof one's sta-
tus in confrontation with others. The Icelandic term for this, mannjafJadr,
means literally "a comparison of men," or "man-matching." The rivalry and
comparison of individual accomplishments that mannjafnactrimplies is de-
scribed by Sveinsson as "among the most characteristic features of old Icelan-
dic civilization" (Sveinsson 1953:85; cf. e.g., Ss E 2:186). In value systems like
drengskapr,then, which rest on the pubic display and acknowledgment of val-
ued behaviors, there would seem to be an inherent drive toward performance,
the display of communicative competence in the enactment of honor, subject
to evaluation for the relative skill and effectiveness with which the act of com-
munication is carried out. And that is what we find in 13th-century Iceland:
drengskaprwas a performance domain par excellence, characterized by the dis-
play of signs of moral worth before an audience with conspicuous attention to
good form in the pursuit of honor and reputation.6 Evidence for this is plen-
tiful in the pages of Sturlungasaga.
Consider, for instance, the quality of valor in battle, one of the cornerstones
of the drengskaprcomplex in a society that left the avenging of grievances in
the hands of the aggrieved. In one violent encounter, selected almost at ran-
dom from the many such incidents in Islendingasaga, we find this vignette:

PorbjornSnorrason. . . was defendingthe entrancedoor with Odd; no man was braver[vaskr]

wherever valor [karlmennska] distinguisheda man. Porbjdrnstood in the doorway nearOdd; he
wore a sleeveless coat-of-mail, held a shield before him in his left hand, and dealtblows with his
sword in his right hand. Audun Seldaelstruck at Porbj6rnwith his sword and gashed his left
arm right down from the biceps;that was a severe wound. Audun said, "Thatgot you."
Porbjornanswered, "Not badly." [Ss E 1:426;Ss I 1:514-515]

This is not merely the exercise of valor; it is conspicuous valor, the perfor-
mance of valor for the camera, if I may be permitted an anachronistic figure
to underscore a point.

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144 RICHARD BAUMAN

An essential feature of Porbj6rn's courageous display is the dismissive la-

conicity of his response to Audun's exultant cry. This is an instance of what
Theodore Andersson (1967:62-64) has called "posturing," in tacit recognition
of the performance aesthetic that furnished the ideal standard for the display
of manly virtues in the face of injury and death. Andersson identifies such pos-
turing as one of the rhetorical devices of saga style, and suggests that "it is
often so improbably and theatrically heroic" as "to depart from a realistic pres-
entation" (1967:62). Indeed, the examples cited by Andersson from the family
sagas do tend toward improbable exaggeration, but the insouciant heroism of
Sturlungasaga tends to be more credible on the face of it and is certainly com-
patible with the cool style that characterizes ideals of manly toughness in other
reliably documented cultures (e.g., Herzfeld 1985:126).
In a society in which the exercise of violence was an ever present prospect,
the way in which a man confronted death was fraught with significance-per-
haps the ultimate significance-for his reputation. As a contemporary work
reminded its readers, "Remember that there are many who themselves live but
a little while but whose conduct lives after them, and it matters much what a
man is remembered for, for some become famous for good deeds, and they
live on for ever after him, and his honor is always alive, though he himself is
dead" (Foote and Wilson 1970:432). The modern dictum, "better a live cow-
ard than a dead hero," clearly had no credit in 13th-century Iceland. Within
this context, then, consider the account of the death of P6rd Bjarnarson, from
7Pordarsaga Kakala:

P6rd responded in the best way in all respects and offered for himself all that he honorably
[s6mdi]could, but when he saw that Orm would settle for nothing less thanhis life he asked for
a priest;this was grantedhim. After that he was led to the outer room, P6rd then lay down on
his back and told them to see whether he blenchedat all. Orm got a man named Einarmunk to
kill him. [Ss E 2:272;Ss I 2:40]

Note that P6rd does not merely submit to his death with composure; he calls
upon an audience "to see whether he blenched at all." Again, the performance
of courage.
Similar in some ways is the death in battle of Bj6rn Dufgusson, in the same
saga: "Five [men] attacked him at the same time and all the blows struck deep;
then Ottar the bishop's kinsman struck Bjor in the neck and Bj6rn died. Men
said that he was laughing when he died" (Ss E 2:280; Ss I 2:47). This is im-
pressively conspicuous bravery: it takes five men to bring Bj6rn down, and he
dies laughing with the apparent joy of battle and the glory of his fierce demise.
Such bravery is eminently reportable and reported it was; Bjorn's death was
something to tell about and thus his honor lived on. As Roberta Frank aptly
notes, "it was the leader who died fighting, ajoke on his lips, who made good
copy and won everlasting fame" (1978:142).
But valor in battle is only one element of the code of drengskapr.Let us con-
sider hospitality, also an important arena for the winning of honor. In Porgils
saga Skarda, the hero, ?Porgils Bodvarsson, as part of his effort to consolidate

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13TH-CENTURY ICELAND 145

his power, offers a number of feasts for the substantial farmers, or boendr(sing.
bondi):

Porgils held another feast in the autumn and invited most of the more prominent bondis. The
company at the feast was large and they were treated with great liberality. Again there were fine
gifts at parting and no one who had been invited went away without a gift. From these feasts
Porgils won great esteem [vircding]from the bondis. [Ss E 2:463; Ss I 2:207]

The scale and generosity of Torgils' feasts and gifting raised them to the status
of performances of hospitality; successful performances, I might add, for so
they were evaluated by the audiences before whom they were enacted.
One last example. In early Icelandic society, one of the principal ways of
upholding one's honor and fulfilling one's obligations to kinsmen to defend
theirs was the conduct of lawsuits against those who offended that honor. Ma-
jor cases were held at the Albding, the yearly assembly that was one of the
most remarkable institutions of the early Icelandic political system. Sturla
P6ordarson of Hvamm, the father of Snorri Sturluson and the grandfather of
Sturla P6rdarson, the author of islendingasaga, was a man noted for the skillful
conduct of his lawsuits in this notably litigious society. The saga devoted to
his life and career recounts that,

One day when many men were coming to the Law Rock, Sturla walked out to the protecting
wall in front of his booth, for it was his custom often to hold long conversations about his law-
suits, as he was both a wise and an eloquent [tungumjakr]man. Besides he always wanted his
prestige [virdting]widely recognized. [Ss E 1:111; Ss I 1:113]

What we have here, once again, is performance. Sturla places his skill in law
on public display; he wants to be seen and recognized for his legal cleverness
and eloquence. As he stands before his booth he is onstage, in full perfor-
mance, not for the immediate sake of winning his cases, but for the sake of his
reputation.
Now if the performance of drengskaprfor the sake of reputation, of being
recognized and talked about, was a necessary component of the communica-
tive complex that was constitutive of the value system, how much better to be
well-talked about. The performance of honor was at its most successful when
it elicited the most artful talk, a tale or poem, for the attractiveness of these
verbal art forms, susceptible to full verbal performance in their own right,
helped to ensure the perpetuation of one's reputation, making it more mem-
orable by making it more artful. As Roberta Frank observes, "Poetry perpet-
uates. In cultures in which fame and honor are the supreme virtues, eulogy
and satire play a central role" (1978:120).7 Thus, in the quest for honor and
reputation, Icelanders explicitly sought to act in such a way as to be worthy of
a story or a poem; their behavior was artfully staged with an eye-and an ear-
toward being artfully reported and praised (cf. Herzfeld 1985:174).
In one oft-cited instance from Islendingasaga. TP6rdand Snorri Porvaldsson
are surrounded by enemies and their force is badly outnumbered.

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146 RICHARD BAUMAN

When the brothers realized that there was no hope of peace, and were all shriven, they prepared
to defend themselves, for not on any account would they surrender; they said that then there
would be little to tell about. [Ss E 1:252; Ss I 1:352]

Later in the same saga, a poem records that Oraekja Snorrason, preparing his
force for battle, urged them to be "worthy of a saga" (Ss E 1:293-294; Ss I
1:390). And in another famous episode, from 'Porgilssaga Skardca, 'orgils is
captured with his friend 'P6rd and locked up in a room as his captors deliberate
whether or not to kill him. When P6rd asks about his restlessness, TPorgils
replies, "I was thinking .. .how little I should like it if there were no story
about me, before the end of my life, if I could not take revenge for the dishonor
[svivirding] now done to me" (Ss E 2:379; Ss I 2:132).
In all these instances, then, we see our performance complex come full circle
in the impulse to have one's performance of honor performed about in words.
Each performance domain sustains the other, with honor, reputation, and
praise as the goal, and neither is less important than the other for the mainte-
nance of the overall value system.
To recapitulate: I have attempted to demonstrate that artistic verbal perfor-
mance was a means of earning honor in 13th-century Iceland; to be a good poet
or storyteller was to earn attention, esteem, praise, and even material reward.
But the performance of poems and stories was also a means of bestowing
honor on others, for displays of valor, hospitality, generosity, the fulfillment
of obligations to kinsmen, and artful speaking itself-the constituent values of
the drengskapr complex-represented expressive resources around which
poems were recited and stories were told. That is, these artistic verbal forms
served as important vehicles for the public and memorable recognition of
honor, without which honor was incomplete-indeed, impossible.8 Accord-
ingly, reputation-seeking behavior was itself crafted and enacted before an au-
dience with the goal of being celebrated poemsin and stories; in other words,
the display of honored qualities in action itself represented a performance form
carried out with a view toward eliciting recognition and advertisement
through verbal performance. Artistic verbal performance and the performance
of honor were mutually interdependent elements of a larger performance com-
plex of central moral significance in Icelandic society.
The discovery that honor and verbal art in 13th-century Iceland constituted
an integrated semiotic system organized around performance as the commu-
nicative mode by which moral values were enacted and sustained has, I be-
lieve, significant implications for the comparative study of moral systems. The
comparative literature on honor and shame, for example (e.g., Davis 1977:89-
101; Schneider 1971), is largely materialist and abstractly structural in its focus
(but cf. Herzfeld 1980, also useful its critical caution on the use of "honor" as
a gloss), and tends to give short shrift to expressivity. There is, however, a
small but suggestive body of ethnographic work, produced, not surprisingly,
by folklorists, that argues convincingly for the inclusion of an aesthetically
grounded performance component in any attempt to comprehend how claims

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13TH-CENTURY ICELAND 147

to moral worth are communicatively accomplishedand recognizedin the con-

duct of social life whatever may be the social structuraland economic foun-
dations and results of such performances. One may cite in this connection
Stanley Brandes'sMetaphorsof Masculinity(1980), a study of gender and status
in Andalusianfolklore, Roger Abrahams'sTheMan-of-Wordsin the WestIndies
(1983), which tellingly illuminatesthe interrelationshipsthat link artfulspeak-
ing and reputation-seekingbehavior in Afro-Caribbeansociety, and Michael
Herzfeld's resonant ethnography of a Cretan village, The Poeticsof Manhood
(1985), the very title of which highlights its performance-centeredperspective,
based on aJakobsonianconception of poetics that is closely relatedto my own
and that furnishes an integrated perspective on verbal performanceand the
performanceof manhood. Normative, materialist,and structuralanalyses of
moral codes give us of the abstractresidueof social practice;what these folk-
loric studies-to which I would hope to add my own more modest effort-
should bring to awarenessis that morally chargedsocial structuresmay be in
significant part aestheticallyaccomplished,through performance.
In an essay of this brief scope, I ventureno comparativeconclusions myself
beyond pointing up the potentialsignificanceof the interrelationshipbetween
artistic verbal performance and the performanceof reputation- and honor-
seeking behaviors. The detailed comparative work remains to be done. I
might, however, indicateat least one additionalspherethatmay be illuminated
by studies undertakenin these terms, namely, the social dynamics of gender.
Consider again the titles of the works cited earlier:Metaphorsof Masculinity,
The Man-of-Words in the WestIndies,and The Poeticsof Manhood-all male. In
this regardthe Icelandiccase I have presentedis quite consistentwith the oth-
ers. It is not that women are missing from the pages of these works, but the
work of male ethnographers in strongly patriarchalsocieties, in many of
which a marked segregation of the sexes is itself a cornerstoneof the honor
and shame complex, will be predictablyandrocentric.But this need not be
altogethera bad thing; indeed, I think it may be turnedto significantscholarly
and social advantagefor gender studies. If we recognize, as I think we must,
that ideologies of male dominance, the hegemony of public value systems that
glorify manhood, and the expressive forms that sustain such systems are of
central importance to the place of women as well as men in these societies,
studies of such systems may be recognized as indispensableto a unified per-
spective on gender. It will take more than this, of course; we will also need
researchthat focuses explicitly on women in such societies, that explores fe-
male modes of existence and avenuesof artisticexpressionin societies that glo-
rify manhood. If performanceand valorizationof the more public forms of
folklore is largely reservedto males, as it seems to be in the societies reported
on in the works I have mentioned, thatin itself is a significantfinding. We need
to check and see, with special attentionto what women are doing as well (cf.
Weigle 1978).
But this is but one of the many avenuesthatthe poetics of performanceopens
up to us. There are a great many others. Let me conclude, then, on a more

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148 RICHARD BAUMAN

general note by reaffirmingthe point on which I began. A large part of my

own agenda in investigating the poetics of performancestems from a convic-
tion that whatever anthropology, folklore, and linguistics have gained from
the modern pursuit of disciplinaryautonomy has come at the sacrificeof the
unified vision of language, art, and society that constitutes our common in-
tellectualheritage. The poetics of performance,I submit, can provide a pow-
erful integrative frame of referencefor the next stage of our inquiry into that
most fundamentaland fascinatingof all problems-the art of life itself.

Notes

An earlierversion of this paperwas presentedas a lectureat St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Min-
nesota, 11 April 1985. I would like to thankRobertLavendafor his hospitalityon thatoccasion. I am grateful
also to Jesse Byock and MichaelHerzfeldfor their criticalreadingsof a subsequentversion thathave resulted
in the improvement of this one and to Pamela Ritch for helping me to tighten up my closing remarkson
gender. The researchon which this paperis based was supportedby grantsfrom the AmericanCouncil of
LearnedSocietiesand the University ResearchInstituteof the Universityof Texas which areherebygratefully
aknowledged.
'The most carefuland criticalassessmentof the sagasas ethnographicsourcesis Lindow (1973).
2The standardedition of Sturlungasagais Johanneson, Finnbogason,and Eldjarn(1946). For the English
translationspresentedin this articleI have for the most part followed McGrew and Thomas (1970-74), but
have modified their text in some cases where I consider that they have not capturedsemantic distinctions
relevantto my analysis.I have also followed McGrew andThomas in renderingIcelandicnamesin translation
without case inflections.In quoting passagesfrom Sturlungasaga,I give referencesto both the English trans-
lation (cited as Ss E followed by volume and page numbers)and the Icelandicedition (cited as Ss I followed
by volume and page numbers);the translationsofferedhere may be checkedagainstboth. Certainkey terms
are given in Icelandicas well as English, enclosed in bracketsfollowing the English equivalents.Saga titles
are given in Icelandic. The letters f(thorn) and d (eth) represent,respectively, voiceless and voiced dental
fricatives,as in English "thing" and "clothing."
3Foote(1984a[1955-561)is an excellent social-historicalaccountof the literarysignificanceof this episode
and summarizesother scholarlycommentaryupon it.
4The most comprehensiveaccount of this debate concerningthe oral vs. literaryorigins of the Icelandic
sagas is Andersson (1964);also useful are Allen (1971:11-28)and Byock (1984), the latterof which should be
of specialinterestto folklorists. The classicfolkloric contributionto the debateis Liestol (1930), perhapsthe
richeststatementof the freeproseposition.
5Gehl (1937) has long been the standardwork, but for a representativerangeof treatments,some critical
of Gehl, see Andersson(1970), Foote and Wilson (1970:424-433),Hallberg(1962:97-113),Lindow (1973:16-
21), MeulengrachtSorensen(1983), and van den Toorn (1955).
6E. V. Gordon, in a brilliantobservationthat providedpartof the stimulus for this study, recognizesthe
deep significanceof the aestheticconstructionof conduct in early Icelandicliterature:"Probablyin no other
literatureis conduct so carefullyexamined and appraised;and the basis of the valuationis not moral, but
aesthetic"(1957:xxxiii). See also Abrahams(1984:89).
7CompareNagy (1979:222),summarizingDumezil (1943):"Indo-Europeansociety operatedon the prin-
ciple of counterbalancingpraiseand blame, primarilythroughthe medium of poetry." Of course, the poetic
managementof honor and shame, praiseand blame, are not restrictedto Indo-Europeansociety; a broader
comparativeperspectiveis suggested in the concludingsection of this paper.
8CompareFoote (1984b[1974]:51):"Now, Jewish andChristiandoctrine,for example, may set out in very
explicit terms what a man should or not do. 'Heroic'doctrine,on the other hand, can only presentexamples
in poems and stories to make very generalprescriptions."

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13TH-CENTURY ICELAND 149

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