The Body Politic

Summary

In this study I intend to discuss how genre can contribute to our understanding of medieval Norwegian and Icelandic political processes, or their ‘body politic’. How did the socio-political structures of the medieval North influence the development of literary genres? On the one hand, the development of genres can be viewed as a reflection of politics, constituting its ‘superstructure’. On the other hand, genres also contribute to the shaping and changing of politics through their function as vehicles for formulating ideologies that frame the ways in which politics is conceived and conducted. In Old Norse society, the growth of literacy in the Roman alphabet and state formation were parallel and interconnected processes. From the first Norwegian king Haraldr hárfagri (r. c. 872–930) onwards, various genres – both spoken and written – were utilised to formulate and legitimise their power and position in society. The same is true of other participants in the body politic, such as the secular and clerical elites. In this chapter, I will briefly trace the main trends in how kings and elites utilised various genres to establish and reinforce their authority and power from the Viking Age (c. 800–1050) throughout the high Middle Ages (c. 1050–1300) in Norway and Iceland, with a shorter section on the late Middle Ages (c. 1300–1500). Since this is a vast topic, emphasis will be placed on the saga genres and on the main ideological developments in Old Norse society. My hypothesis is that there was a shift towards more explicit definitions of genres and ideologies, and that these processes were interrelated, but that both genres and ideologies remained elusive concepts that were implicitly defined using overlapping and indistinct boundaries.

Norway

Skaldic poems were probably the most important vehicles for transmitting and celebrating royal successes until the late twelfth century. In this predominantly oral society, skalds functioned both as preservers of memorable deeds and as embellishers of their patrons’ – mostly kings’ – feats in particular. The stability of the poems over time and their reliability as historical sources have been fervently debated, but there is a broad consensus on their pivotal role in formulating a type of heroic royal ideology.