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Sverre Bagge, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson. Viking Friendship: The Social Bond in Iceland and Norway, c. 900–1300., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1716–1717, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy354
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Jón Viðar Sigurðsson’s Viking Friendship opens with the story of a telephone call from the author’s daughter. She was facing an oral examination at school and fearing questions about the “society of kindred,” which formed part of her curriculum, because she knew it was a notion that her father had rejected. Fortunately, however, she was spared the agony of having to choose between her father and the established orthodoxy, as she was not asked about Icelandic history.
The story illustrates the new direction in research on medieval society in Iceland and Norway during the last decades of the twentieth century, a trend in which the author as well as the present reviewer took part. Under the influence of kinship studies from social anthropology, scholars pointed out that Icelandic and Norwegian kinship was bilateral. This meant that only siblings with the same father and mother belonged to the same kindred, which made it difficult to form clans based on kinship, as these would always overlap. Consequently, links between individuals would largely be determined by choice. Sigurðsson therefore concludes that friendship was of far greater importance than kinship. In accordance with the same trend, he also downplays the importance of formal institutions and ideologies, the monarchy, the Church, the assemblies, and the chieftaincies. Finally, this revision also included a new attitude toward the sources. Whereas the earlier generation had often rejected the sagas as fictional, they now became important sources, not necessarily for factual information about concrete events in the early Middle Ages, but as evidence of a specific kind of society, based on personal rather than institutional links.
