Hrafnkel or the Ambiguities: Hard Cases, Hard Choices

William Ian Miller presents a close reading of one of the best known of the Icelandic sagas, showing its moral, political, and psychological sophistication. Hrafnkel tells of a fairly simple feud in which a man rises, falls, and rises again with a vengeance, so to speak. The saga deals with complex issues with finely layered irony: who can one justifiably hit, when, and by what means? It does this with cool nuance, also taking on matters of torture and pain-infliction as a means of generating fellow-feeling. How does one measure pain and humiliation so as to get even, to get back to equal? People are forced to set prices on things we tell ourselves soporifically are priceless, such as esteem, dignity, life itself. Morality no less than legal remedy involves price-setting. This book flies in the face of all the previous critical literature which, with very few exceptions, imposes simplistic readings on the saga. A translation of the saga is provided as an appendix.

Author: William Ian Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 01/22/2022
Pages: 280
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.23w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9780192855817
ISBN10: 0192855816
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Subjects & Themes | Historical Events
- Literary Criticism | Ancient and Classical
- Body, Mind & Spirit | Supernatural (Incl. Ghosts)

About the Author

William Ian Miller, Thomas G. Long Professor of Law, University of Michigan

William Ian Miller is the Thomas G. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and Honorary Professor of History at the University of St. Andrews. He has written extensively on the bloodfeud, mostly as manifested in saga Iceland: Bloodtaking and Peacemaking (1990), Eye for an Eye (2006),
Audun and the Polar Bear (2008); 'Why is your Axe Bloody?': A Reading of Njáls saga (2014). He has also written books about various emotions, mostly unpleasant ones: Humiliation (1993), The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), The Mystery of Courage (2000), Faking It (2003), and Losing It (2011) about the
loss of mental acuity that comes with age