Viking Age Iceland

Description

A book that challenges the violent and lawless image of the Viking age and serves as a companion to the Icelandic sagas. The popular image of the Viking Age is of warlords and marauding bands pillaging their way along the shores of Northern Europe. In this history, Jesse Byock shows that Norse society in Iceland was an independent, almost a republican free state, without warlords or kings. Combining history with anthropology and archaeology, this study serves as a companion to the sagas, exploring all aspects of Viking Age life: feasting, farming, the power of chieftains and the church, marriage, and the role of women. With interpretations of blood feud and the sagas, Byock reveals how the law courts favoured compromise over violence, and how the society grappled with proto-democratic tendencies. A work with broad social and historical implications for our modern institutions, Byock's history aims to alter long-held perceptions of the Viking Age.

Jesse Byock is Director of Norse Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne, Georgetown University Law School, the Universities of Iceland and Lund, he is also a member of UCLA's archaeology, folklore and Indo-European faculties. His books include 'Feud in the Icelandic Saga'; 'Medieval Iceland Society, Sagas and Power', a translation of 'The Saga of the Volsungs: The Norse Epic of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer'

"Byock brings several disciplines to his work, crossing the boundaries between history, literature, law, and archaeology. This well-written book takes up a wide variety of subjects, including the social fabric, domestic realities, cultural codes, politics and legal infrastructures, and the mechanisms that defused conflicts among the fiercely independent early Icelanders." Viking Heritage Magazine"A vital and original reinterpretation both of the sagas and of the society which created them. Byock's book is an essential guide at once to living conditions and to mentalities." The London Review of Books