The cultural construction of violence in medieval western Scandinavia

Violence is an inadequately theorised subject in historical research. Historical analyses all too often treat physical violence as an immutable, dysfunctional product of our biological heritage, which specific societies only mine as resource or curb as threat. In such analyses, violence functions as a limiting category of culture, each one defining the other by mutual exclusion.;This dissertation explores ways for refining historians' conceptual grasp of past violence. I approach interpersonal violence as part of the array of social exchanges that make up all cultures, studying violence and its cultural context as mutually constitutive categories. I propose a model that analyses the subject along three principal axes: power, communications and risk The dimension of power pertains to the political agency exercised through violence. Communications pertain to the structural codes which govern violent practice, the ways in which it can be articulated and the things that can be articulated in it. Risk mediates between the two other aspects. It lends cultural constraints to the practice of power, a weight of political consequence to communications, and the open-endedness of incertitude to both.;I test my abstract model by applying it to historical sources from medieval western Scandinavia, mainly Icelandic sagas. West Norse societies in the Middle Ages have long had a reputation for violence. My analysis of prose sagas, documentary sources, poetry and other source types clarifies how different forms of violence serve distinct purposes in the normal functioning of Norse society---regulating internal conduct, controlling external contacts and creating zones of self-evidence for everyday life. My analysis suggests that the medieval West Norse were violent in distinctive ways, though not necessarily more or less than other historical societies. No less significant is the demonstration that an analysis of violence according to the principles suggested by my model can elicit insights into the workings of a culture in general and of acts of brutality in particular.