Remembering our violent conversion

Conflict in the Icelandic conversion narrative

Bibliographic Data

ID5016829
AuthorsKathleen M Self, Kathleen Self (St. Lawrence University, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume40
Issue3
Pages182-192
Publication date2010-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueReligion (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0048-721X • E-ISSN: 1096-1151
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1016/j.religion.2009.10.011
OpenAlexW2007411941
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited15

This article analyzes violent conflict in the medieval narratives of Iceland's conversion to Christianity, as told by the Icelanders themselves. The article considers physical and verbal aggression as interrelated forms of conflict connected in an economy of violent exchange. In the narratives, they are represented as attacks against material and symbolic resources. The competing pagans and Christians struggle to come out ahead as often as they can and thereby win the most converts. Verbal violence takes center stage in this analysis, more specifically three kinds of verbal violence: a particular sub‐genre of insults; coercive speech; and speech as a means of supernatural power. The first of these, the insults use deeply embedded medieval Icelandic constructions of gender to create a highly corrosive discourse that combines cowardice, homosexuality and laziness, among other things, as the traits of the least desirable sort of man. Finally, in contrast the commonplace occurrence of violent conflict in these texts, an internal critique of violence appears in the later versions of the conversion story. This critique reconsiders what forms of violence are legitimate, most significantly disapproving of the previously accepted masculine activity of revenge

Aesthetics · Aggression · Cowardice · Icelandic · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Power (physics) · Sociology · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub