An Insular Marriage in Egils saga .

Santiago Barreiro - CONICET

Egils saga, composed in Iceland c. 1220-1240, is one of the better known examples of
the saga genre. While in many aspects it is possesses the traits typical of the slendingasgur
subgenre, it is exceptional in the large number of spatial locations in which the action takes
place. Rather than focusing only in Iceland (and Norway), its geography extends to the
Baltic, the British Isles and the lands near the White Sea. The Northern Isles play a
significant role in one episode of the saga, centred on the events surrounding the marriage
between Bjrn and ra. This story occupies chapters 32 to 35 of the saga. The episodes
involve several actors beyond the married couple: The heads of three families play a
prominent role in the story, as does the Norwegian king. The narrative begins in Norway,
climaxes in three insular settings (Orkney, the Shetlands and Iceland) and finally returns to
Norway. We will argue that those insular settings appear as spaces of conflict and tension,
while the mainland is contrastingly depicted as a place of order. We will briefly describe the
events before attempting to analyse them.
The story begins in chapter 32 1 . The chapter introduces Bjrn, hersir rkr (a
powerful lord) from Sogn in Norway. He has a son and heir named Brynjlfr, who in turn
has two young sons: Bjrn and orr. This second Bjrn, a great traveller, attends a feast
and meets ra, the sister of another hersir, rir Hralsson. He asks her in marriage, but
her brother refuses. Bjrn later kidnaps her (the saga does not inform if she agrees or is
taken forcefully) and brings her back home. They intend to marry; Brynjlfr rejects this, as
he finds svviring (dishonour) in the actions of his son, who breaks the friendship between
him and rir. Brynjlfr sends an emissary to ras brother, who reclaims her to go back
home, instead of accepting compensation. But Bjrn refuses to let her go, and instead asks
his father for a warship and a crew. Brynjlfr refuses, fearing that his son will cause more
trouble, and instead gives him a merchant ship and orders him to head for Dublin to trade.
He accepts, but (against his fathers will) he brings ra in the trip. During the expedition

Following the slenzk Fornrit edition. All references to Egils saga here refer to it and are listed by chapter
and page number

they have bad weather. The ship becomes damaged and they get stranded in Shetland with
their cargo.
The saga now tells that a ship came from Orkney with a message for jarl Sigurr
from king Haraldr that Bjrn Brynjlfsson must be killed: the saga tells he also sent the
same message to the southern islands even up to Dublin. While in Shetland, Bjrn marries
ra, spending the winter there, but as soon as spring arrives, he prepares to leave. His ship
is carried till Iceland by strong winds. Iceland is described as almost virgin and uninhabited
(S ar til lands inn ekki nema boa eina og hafnleysur. Egils saga 33:86). Bjrn arrives at
Borg and meets by chance Skalla-Grmr, who happens to know his father Brynjlfr. SkallaGrmr offers the group residence and help, and they stay there. The news of Bjrns action
reach Iceland. Questioned by Skalla-Grmr, Bjrn finally confesses he has married ra
without her brothers agreement; the farmer becomes furious, reminding of his close
friendship with rir. But his son, rlfr and other people in the farm intercede, saying it
is unfair to treat the guest in such a way. Grmr then tells rlfr to deal with Bjrn himself.
Chapter 35 tells that during the summer, ra bears a daughter, sgerr. Meanwhile,
rlfr and Bjrn become good friends. Skalla-Grmrs son persuades him to send an offer
of compensation to rir, and the farmer yields. Brynjlfr joins the offer, and rir agrees
and pardons Bjrn. After another winter, Bjrn leaves for Norway with rlfr and ra,
but they leave sgerr to be fostered at Borg. The episode ends with full reconciliation
between Brnjlfr, his son and rir hersir.
It can be seen that the plot of the episode is rather simple. Conflict arises in Norway
due to Bjrns rejection of the will of both his father and (future) brother-in-law. Bjrn
moves against the established rules of kinship and escapes the country with ra, angering
both his own father and rir. They arrive in Shetland, where they do what they were
unable to in Norway: marrying. Threatened by the insular representatives of the Norwegian
king as a law-breaker, Bjrn escapes further away to Iceland. Due to his kinship ties SkallaGrmr both welcomes him and becomes furious by his actions. But friendship from the
young rlfr and the local opinion saves Bjrn, making Skalla-Grmr change his mind and
support a settlement. By the combined efforts of the Icelanders and Brynjlfr, rir accepts
and order is re-established, bringing back stable kinship and friendship ties between three
families.

We can see a dual spatiality: Norway is at the same time where order exists and
breaks down (and also, where is finally re-created). The Northern Isles appear as a place of
both conflict and of actions against the established order. Similarly, Iceland is an undefined,
ambiguous place, a frontier of potential solutions but also of uncertain conditions.
This is coherent with the first mention of these places in the saga. Chapter 4 says:

En af essi jn flu margir menn af landi brott ok byggusk margar aunir va,
bi austr Jamtaland ok Helsingjaland ok Vestrlnd, Sureyjar, Dyflinnar ski, rland,
Normand Vallandi, Katanes Skotlandi, Orkneyjar ok Hjaltland, Freyjar. Ok ann
tma fannsk sland.
And because of this tyranny [King Haraldrs] many men left the country and settled in
many places, both east in Jamtland and Helsingland and Vestland, the Hebrides, Dublin
shire, Ireland, Normandy in France, Caithness in Scotland, Orkney and Shetland, the
Faeroes. And at that time, Iceland was found. ( Egils saga 4: 12)
This episode mentions several of these places: Iceland, the Hebrides, Shetland,
Orkney and Dublin. They are presented as places of resettlement, but only Iceland is
presented as a new space. This is a similar situation to the one present in the saga, as the
Northern Isles, if ambiguous and uncertain, appear at least nominally as an extension of the
Norwegian domain. It is hard to say how effective royal power was in them at the time of
composition of Egla, as sources for Orkney are scarce for the period between 1195-1267
(Waerdahl 2011:78), but it seems reasonable to assume the earl and bishop in Orkney were
able to partly oppose and counterbalance the power of the royally-appointed sheriff, who
was the main figure of authority in Shetland, which was under direct rule by the king. In
any case, in Egils saga, the Northern Isles are a much less defined space than either
monarchical Norway or the new society Iceland. They appear as a territory for adventure,
even while not as clearly foreign as the lands in the Baltic or the Far North, but as more
unpredictable and blurry than the rest of Britain, which is depicted as a land of kings and
commerce.

Liminality?
While undoubtedly this narrative is part of a literary construction, I intend to analyse
it under a different light. I will try to assess the utility of the concept of liminality to
understand the spatial and social dynamics of this scene. This concept, originally coined by
the Dutch theorist Arnold van Gennep in his 1909 Les Rites de Passage, has to be
understood as part of the broader effort of the Durkheimian sociological school to
understand the roots of social order, especially in its links with religion. In its basic meaning,
liminality refers to the state in which something (more frequently: someone) is in a
transitional stage, after the separation from a certain institution/structure and before its
reintegration into it.
The notion, as other notions coined by the French sociological school (notably
Mauss idea of gifts and Halbwachs idea of collective memory) became foundational for
social anthropology, in France, Britain and beyond. Durkheim and his disciples, as well as
other functionalists, have been often criticised for a lack of interest in social conflict as a
constitutive element of social order. The appropriation of the notions of the Durkheimian
school by later anthropologists applies also to the concept of liminality, which was adopted
by the Mancunian anthropologist Victor Turner. The Manchester school is well-known for
their emphasis in the analysis of situations of tension and conflict, derived from their
positive reception of both classical and structural (French) Marxism. In his classical The

Ritual Process, discussed the main traits of liminality and identifies four main traits,
building on Van Genneps original characterization:
1) Stripping off of pre-liminal and post-liminal attributes (Turner 1974: 102)
2) Submissiveness and silence (Turner 1974: 103)
3) "The neophyte in liminality must be a tabula rasa, a blank slate, on which is inscribed the
knowledge and wisdom of the group, in those respects that pertain to the new status
(Turner 1974: 103)
4) Sexual continence, derived from an status of undifferentiation (Turner 1974: 104)

In other words, a person in a state of liminality is undefined and formless, yet it is ready to
be inscribed with the new structural marks of existence during his or her reaggregation into
the social structure. Liminality is not simple ambiguity, but it is a defined box of a lack of
defining features in which someone is in a state of what Turner calls by the somewhat
elusive notion of communitas The spontaneous, immediate, concrete nature of communitas,
as opposed to the norm-governed, institutionalized, abstract nature of the social structure.
Yet, communitas is made evident or accessible, so to speak, only through its juxtaposition to,
or hybridization with, aspects of social structure" (Turner 1974: 127). The limited, the
transitional nature of liminality is thus constitutive of its character: In rites de passage, men
are released from structure into communitas only to return to structure revitalized by their
experience of communitas (Turner 1974: 129). In short, communitas refers to a state of
equality, comradeship, and common humanity, outside of normal social distinctions, roles,
and hierarchies (Olaveson 2001: 93)
Liminality, Communitas and Old Norse sources
Liminality has appeared somewhat frequently in Old Norse studies during the last
few years, much in the same way the aforementioned notions of collective memory and giftgiving did. While indeed these terms sound attractive, very often theyr are not used in their
technical, conceptual sense but simply appear as a synonym of marginal or ambiguous. It
can be pointed out that Turner himself did not use it at all in his own analysis about
Icelandic sagas (Turner 2001 [1971]); I suspect that this suggest that it does not apply easily
to the saga world, at least with some important modifications.
The most basic is that Turner was mostly thinking through his fieldwork in a
structurally very different society, the Zambian Ndembu. They are a matrilineal huntergatherer village society, while medieval Iceland was a bilateral agrarian-pastoral society
based around isolated farms. Both kinship and economic ties thus work in very different
ways in both groups, and these traits are crucial for our episode, which focuses on the issues
of a ritual of kinship through alliance, but where also certain economic ties (like trade and
monetary atonement) play a significant role.

Moreover, a crucial element in liminal situations, communitas, seems to be absent in

the saga world, and the four traits listed above do not seem to be common in ritualised
behaviour present in the sagas. For example, the transition from (juvenile) single to (adult)
married life is indeed ritualised, but it appears to work through an individual, case-by-case
dynamic as expected in a bilateral community, which does not prescribe how and when
people marry and who in strict way. Moreover, the main communal activity in saga
literature, feasting, is highly structured, sexually and socially differentiated (See Viar
Plsson, forthcoming 2016): it reinforces social divisions and pre-established hierarchies in a
way reminding much more of a Potlatch or Moka than of the communitas-inducing
levelling or inversion of the established order expected in, for example, the Selknam Hain
or the initiation rituals of the Ndembu. Any reader of Njls saga, for example, clearly
grasps that the last thing happening in the feasts was to promote egalitarian, effervescent

communitas. In Durkheimian parlance, feasts can be said to promote a form of re-creative

effervescence which reinforces the existing social bonds (the Turnerian structure).
Furthermore, the prevalent unfocused and individualistic attitude of laymen during the main
religious ritual, the mass, is congruent with this lack of communitas, and was sanctioned by
theology The liturgy had an automatic effect if it was performed in correct form; the state
of mind of those present was of secondary importance (Nedkvitne 2009: 95. Emphasis is
mine)2. There is no hint of personal devotion here, and figures such as the chieftain Hrafn
Sveinbjarnarson are unusual in their personal faith, at least when they are not clerics.
Moreover, a rejection of communitas-inducing behaviour can be clearly seen in
Hvaml, which warns the audience of the dangers of acting improperly in feasts. For
example:
Inn vari gestr, er til verar kmr, / unno hlji egir; / eyrom hlir, enn augom
scoar; / sv nsiz frra hverr fyrir. (Hvaml 7: The careful guest, who comes to a

meal, keeps silent with hearing finely attuned; he listens with his ears, and looks about
with his eyes, so every wise man informs himself )

Nedkvitne compares the situation between the central middle ages and the emotional description in the latemiddle ages Laurentius saga, where the emotional response to mass is emphasized, but affirms this is limited
to clerics (Nedkvitne 2009: 96).
2

Haldit mar keri, drecci at hfi mio, / mli arft ea egi; / kynnis ess vr ic
engi mar, / at gangir snemma at sofa. (Hvaml 19. A man shouldnt hold on to the

cup but drink mead in moderation; its necessary to speak or to be silent; no man will
blame you for impoliteness if you go early to bed)
Frr icciz, s er fltta tecr, /gestr at gest hinn; / veita gorla, s er um veri glissir, /
tt hann me grmom glami. (Hvaml 31: Wise that man seems who retreats when

one guest is insulting another; the man who mocks others at a feast doesnt reallhy
know whether hes shooting off his mout amid enemies)
However, the aspect of chaos and uncertainty which permeates the representation of
insular spaces in Egils saga is akin to an aspect of liminality, and the Northern Isles here
appear literarily as transitional stages in the resolution of the case. A temporary life abroad
as a place for the realization of a transitional instance (this is, a rite of passage) also applies
to law-breakers subjects sentenced to temporary outlawry (see Poilvez 2012). The marriage
between Bjrn and ra is also a place of tension and potential change of established order
as much as of its reproduction, and in this it resembles Turners idea of ritual, and specially
the liminal stage, as creative and potentially revolutionary for the established structure.
Bjrn simply refuses to obey the custom by which men require the agreement of the
brides closest relative (usually the father or a brother) to marry her. This, on the one hand,
might be historically related to the long and complex process of transition in the ideas about
marriage in Iceland from family consent to individual mutual consent (as proposed by
Church doctrine), analysed in Property and Virginity. Moreover, the issues of what is a
legitimate marriage is of crucial importance in Egils saga, as illustrated by the disputes about
sgerrs inheritance (in the later part of the saga) and the wedding of Hilirr (in the
earlier). On the other hand, it also serves in the narrative to illustrate how, beyond the rule
of royal authority, ritual and custom do not work as expected. In this sense, the Northern
Isles appear indeed liminal, as they appear to be both nominally inside but practically
outside of the effective reach of Norwegian political power. This can be related to the
nature of kingship in the medieval north, which diminished drastically once the (itinerant)
king was not effectively present (Orning 2008; cf. Bagge 2010). Bjrn subverts the structure

of kinship, of custom, and of law, but does not challenge it on the spot, but in a place where
he does not need to oppose the structure to succeed, simply because the structure is no
longer present.
Reaggregation, the last step of transition from liminality back to structure, is here
realised by the effort of Icelanders. I have argued elsewhere that one of the core ideological
messages of Egla is that the Mramenn, and especially Skalla-Grmr and Egill, are presented
as a source of a new authority, both similar and distinct from the Norwegian authority
structures of the hersir, the lendir menn and the monarch, grounded on the notion of
founding father settlement (Barreiro 2015). Grmr here plays his part accordingly: in the
uncertain, new world of Iceland, he acts (grudgingly as usual and delegating the task to his
son rlfr) promoting a peaceful settlement through a structured and culturally accepted
response to conflict: the offer of compensation and the use of friendship and kinship ties to
mediate in inter-family conflicts. The mramenn ancestors here play a role similar to
arbitrators in a feud and thus promote a brokered return to normality. As unexpected
participants in the ritual of marriage, which should have been limited to the families of
groom and bride, they take advantage of the uncertainties of the case, but also of the margin
of decision-making given by their new spatial environment, to solve the transitional crisis
smoothly, restoring expected order (and earning honour and prestige for themselves).
Conclusions
I have briefly examined an episode in Egils saga and the theoretical notion of
liminality. It seems that this can be applied fruitfully to the case here discussed as long as we
are willing to accept there is little resembling communitas. Following Helgi orlkssons
(2012) insight about the proper ways to use anthropological cases of comparison to analyse
medieval Iceland, it can be thought that this must be related to differences in the kinship
structure, and the highly individualistic (and factional) logic of social action promoted by
bilateral kinship structuring. The main question is if transitional, structure-breaking
situations could still be called liminal or they should instead be named something else given
that there is no communitas involved. But more fundamentally, this opens up the question
for thinking if there is some form of communitas to be found in the Norse sources.

Bibliography
Primary sources
-Sigurur Nordal (ed.) (1933), Egils saga Skalla-Grmssonar, slenzk fornrit II, Reykjavk:
Hi slenzka fornritaflag
-Neckel, Gustav (ed.) (1962), Hvaml, en Edda: Der Lieder der Codex Regius nebst

verwandten Denkmlern, Heidelberg: Carl Winter.

Secondary sources
-Bagge, Sverre (2010), From Viking Stronghold to Christian Kingdom: State Formation in

Norway c.900-1350, Copenhague: Museum Tusculanum Press.

-Barreiro, Santiago (2015), Genealogy, Labour and Land: The Settlement of the Mramenn
in Egils saga, Networks and Neighbours 3.1:22-44.
-Helgi orlksson (2012), Sagas as Evidence for Authentic Social Structures, unpublished
paper delivered at the XVth International Saga Conference, Aarhus, 5-11 august 2012.
-Nedkvitne, Arnved (2009), Lay Belief in Norse Society 1000-1350, Copenhague: Museum
Tusculanum Press.
-Olaveson, Tim (2001), Collective Effervescence and Communitas: Processual Models of
Ritual and Society in Emile Durkheim and Victor Turner, Dialectical Anthropology
26: 89-124
-Orning, Hans Jacob (2008), Unpredictability and Presence: Norwegian Kingship in the

High Middle Ages, Leiden: Brill.

-Poilvez, Marion (2012), Access to the Margins: Outlawry and Narrative spaces in medieval
Icelandic outlaw sagas, Brathair 12.1: 115-136.
-Turner, Victor (1974), The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure , Ithaca: Cornell
University PRess.
-Turner, Victor (2001 [1971]), An anthropological approach to the Icelandic Saga, en
Beidelman, T. O. (ed.), The translation of culture: Essays to E.E. Evans-Pritchard ,
London: Routledge, 349-374.

-Viar Plsson. (forthcoming 2016), Language of Power. Feasting and Gift Giving in

Iceland and its Sagas., Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

-Wrdahl, Randi (2011), The Incorporation and Integration of the Kings Tributary Lands

into the Norwegian Realm c.1195-1397, Leiden: Brill.