No Risk, No State

This is a review of a recently published book by a saga scholar from the USA Oren Falk dedicated to the first period of Icelandic history (before 1262, the so-called “Icelandic Commonwealth”): Falk O. Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland: This Spattered Isle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. XIII, 358 p. ISBN: 978-0-1988-6604-6. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866046.001.0001. Falk addresses not only the widely known (and long ago translated into many languages, Russian among them) family sagas and the Sturlunga saga, but also those sagas and þættir that are rarely used as sources and therefore poorly known (or completely unknown) to the general reader. Falk pays special attention to the analysis of Guðmundar saga Árasonar, the saga about Guðmund Árason, a bishop of Hólar in the early 13th century who played major role in the strife of the sturlungaöld, which ultimately led to Iceland’s loss of independence. Falk has developed new analytical models in source studies and narratology, introducing risk theory into the analysis of Icelandic sagas within the framework of a structuralist approach. He builds a new, deeply founded, cultural-historical model for understanding violence and offers a new approach to the study of historical memory, putting forward the concept of uchronia. In addition, Falk reveals the connection between environmental risks (for Iceland, this is primarily volcanic activity) and social processes. No scholars before Oren Falk had ever set any of these tasks. Falk suggests that social and political violence, expressed in clan feuds in medieval Iceland, blocked the emergence of a state on the island and open warfare, while risks in the surrounding world (the effects of volcanic activity, etc.) contributed to the “taming” of nature through the humanization of the environment. As Falk seeks to show, violence in medieval Iceland offered some of the universal solutions to the problems of individual and collective social activity, a technology for mitigating and redirecting risks in a world where predictability was always at a premium.