[fil: SAGAEDDA, 18.12.96]

The Meaning of Speech Acts in Some Sagas of Icelanders

New Light on the Settlement of the Land of the Sagas

by Dr. Thomas Bredsdorff
Margaret and Richard Beck Lectures
University of Victoria
May 23, 1996

People speak in the Icelandic sagas. The sagas of Icelanders, or family sagas, are full of spoken lines, dialogue and monologue, rendered as direct or indirect speech—sometimes switching from one rendition to the other in mid-sentence—but speech in remarkable abundance, left and right.

The importance of the dialogue in the family sagas has been obvious to everyone and is mentioned in every saga primer. The function of the dialogue is not quite as obvious. In one of the most competent and most recent surveys of the genre—the entry under the heading Íslendingasögur in the most recent scholarly encyclopædia covering the field [1]—Professor Vésteinn Ólasonʼs lists three functions served by the dialogue. It enlivens the charactersʼ confrontation with each other; it expresses reasons for antagonism or alliance; and it provides certain acts with a historical dimension by connecting them with past events or pointing to the future through warning and prediction.

A fourth function of the dialogue, however, is no less important, which is that of presenting speech acts. Not only because that function is not embraced by the three functions listed previously but—more to the point—because speech acts (in a strict fundamentalist sense, to which I shall attend presently) happen to be a most crucial feature of the Icelandic sagas and of the society which they depict and presuppose.

Speech acts—i.e. spoken words which by their very being spoken do things rather than report on things—occur in many types of narrative. My contention is that speech acts are so close to the core of a number original classical sagas that speech acts might be considered to be their very theme. That part of the dialogue is not just ornamental, as are the three previously listed ones—not the icing of the cake but its very substance.

And that, I submit, for a very good reason: speech acts were at the core of the ideal society depicted in the family sagas. The decay of that society, which occurred during the time when the family sagas as we know them were written and probably composed, was seen by the Icelanders as the decay of those very same speech acts and were recorded as such in the family sagas.

To argue my case I shall have to refer to Icelandic medieval history—literary and otherwise—as well as to speech-act theory. But let us start in the middle of things, rather than with the necessary support systems.

1

At an early stage in Njalʼs Saga there is an intriguing scene between the two protagonists Njál and Gunnar, a dialogue in which Gunnar is seeking advice from Njál whose recurring task throughout the saga is just that: the dispensing of advice, legal and otherwise. Understanding the saga is to a very large extent the proper appreciation of Njálʼs advice: what is its content, is it warranted, what are its corollaries and ramifications? The task on the part of the reader seems overwhelming from the very beginning: what on earth is really happening here?

Here is what the saga has to say about the very first instance of Njálʼs counselling.

A woman by the name Unn, a cousin of Gunnarʼs, has divorced her husband Hrut and now wishes to retrieve her dowry. Her ex-husband refuses her request. She then turns to her cousin for assistance and he, in turn, approaches Njal on how to revive the legal claim on Unnʼs money. All we know about Njal, who has just been introduced, is that he is someone so skilled in law that no one was considered his equal. What we are about to witness is Njalʼs first performance as a judicial sage. From a legal point of view the advice is astonishing. The act Gunnar is advised to perform looks less like the act of a lawyer than that of an actor:

Set off early tomorrow morning, and as soon as you have crossed west over Hvit River, pull your hat well down over your eyes. People will ask who this tall man might be; your companions are to say that it is Hawker-Hedin the Mighty, from Eyafjord, with handiwork for sale; that he is bad-tempered and loud-mouthed and thinks that he alone knows everything.[2] (Ch. 22)

In other words, Gunnar is to impersonate a character, complete with name and peculiar propensities. Step two is that he is to make known this Hawker-Hedin, whom he is impersonating, his trade, which allows for his travels, and his short temper, which is crucial to step three, the confrontation with the target, Hrut, who sits on the dowry to the annoyance of Unn and her father Mord.

Gunnar, so Njalʼs advice continues, is to go see Hrut, once he is sure that the character of Hawker-Hedin and his short temper is known to his victim. Gunnar is to steer the conversation on to Unnʼs and Mordʼs failed attempt to recover the dowry from Hrut. Hrut will ask him—so Njal suggests—whether he knows anything about the quarrel:

I happen to know, you reply, that Mord took your wife away from you and you could do nothing about it.

The conversation, Njal predicts, will then move on to the matter of the dowry. Hrut will reveal his being aware that Mord might have revived the claim at another session of the Althing. Gunnar then has to pretend curiosity about the manner in which one goes about reviving a claim.

Hrut will ask what claim you are referring to, and you must say, One that doesnʼt concern me at all—how Unnʼs dowry-claim could be revived.

A summons must made either in my hearing or at my legal residence, he will say.

Then you must say, Recite the summons, and Iʼll repeat it after you.

Hrut will do as requested—so Njalʼs prediction continues. Hrut will say the actual words of an actual summons, in quotation marks, as it were, and Gunnar—still disguised as the somewhat quaint Hawker-Hedin—is to repeat the words. The scene has to be enacted twice. The first time Gunnar—or rather: Hawker-Hedin—is to make mistakes, apologize for them, and then ask for a second recital.

You must repeat it directly after him, correctly this time, and then ask him whether you have summonsed him correctly.

Hrut will say that no flaw can be found in it; you must then say in a low voice, so that only your companions can hear you, I make this summons in the action assigned to me by Unn Mordʼs-daughter. (Ch. 22)

The real life action of the saga resumes in the following chapter. Gunnar dresses up for his journey as the hawker. The summons is served according to Njalʼs script. Gunnar emerges as the winner of the ensuing lawsuit at the Althing and Unn recovers her money.

What we have witnessed, clearly, is a fraudulent manner of handling the law. Not only is the server of the summons disguised, the actual serving is disguised as well, in the cloak of instruction, and even the statement that a writ has been served is disguised, this through the statement being whispered inaudibly.

Under any decent rule of law this entire histrionic procedure would have to be considered null and void. Yet, what happens is the opposite. The wise Njal—so skilled in law that no one was considered his equal—has applied his skills in a most remarkable manner to make sure that all the stipulations of the law are represented: yes, the proper words of a summons have been recited by a plaintiff at the accusedʼs legal residence, in his hearing, and in the presence of witnesses—but in an eerie manner.

With laws shall our land be built up but with lawlessness laid waste, so Njal declares (Ch. 70).

What kind of a legal conduct is this? It is not conceivable that a medieval reader or listener should consider such manipulations exemplary any more than a modern reader would. Yet, the point cannot be simply that laws are broken, because there would have been much simpler ways of breaking the laws and achieving oneʼs ends by brute force.

The law—in this and a number of similar instances in the sagas—are abided by and broken by the very same gesture. The legal procedure is followed and mocked at the same time and through the same actions. The proper words are spoken by the individual entitled to speak them at the appropriate spot and heard by the right person—and yet the whole scene is shockingly improper.

Truth or lies? is not a useful question to ask of the words spoken here. Njal is not advising Gunnar to tell lies. Rather the scene seems to be a comment on a certain kind of speech act.

2

It was the English philosopher of language J. L. Austin who first observed that using words is not just saying something, but also doing something. A fairly trivial observation, one would have thought, were it not for the fact that the observation was made in Oxford, an otherworldly place where dons in black gowns used to keep themselves busy for life walking back an forth on green lawns in college quadrangles deciding that a sentence—any sentence—is either true or false, in which case it makes sense, or else it is nonsense. The cat is on the mat is the kind of sentence they loved, those Oxford philosophers. The reason is obvious: the verification procedure is simple. You just inspect the mat and the cat and their relative position and your indisputable verdict will emerge, true or false. For the same reason they disliked sentences like unicorns play fractal symphonies. Such sentences are nonsense, end of story.

Along came this little man, right out of their midst—a professor at Oxford devoted to the philosophy of language like the rest of them—and put a simple question: What about a sentence like I do (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife) as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony?[3] This sentence clearly is far from nonsensical. Yet there is no way it can be verified, that is called true or false, for the obvious reason that it does not describe or report anything. As Austin put it: When I say, before the registrar or altar, etc., I do, I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it. The utterer is doing something with the words, performing. Hence Austin proposed to call that type of sentence a performative sentence, as distinct from a mere statement, which Austin christened a constative sentence, or just a constative.

The enigmatic Austin himself really must have been the kind of person who knew how to perform and do things with spoken words. He managed to speak his way through life without publishing—except for a few conference proceedings that he couldnʼt escape. Like two other great philosophers of language, Socrates and Jesus, we know his words almost exclusively through the good offices of his disciples who published them posthumously. Of the three his feat was perhaps the most astonishing since he, unlike the two others, obtained and kept a tenured position at a renowned university. The normal choice for an academic is publish or perish. Austin was one of the rare academics who neither published nor perished, or indeed by not publishing seems to live forever.

From his initial observation of the archetypal performative—sentences that perform acts like promises, baptisms, wedding ceremonies in churches, and convictions in law courts—Austin proceeded to make inroads into the ordinary statements, the so-called constatives, since saying something is always also doing something. How true is it, he asks, that a constative statement, if it makes sense at all, is always either true or false? How about a statement like France is hexagonal?. Well, Austin reasons, one might say it is good enough for a top-ranking general, perhaps, but not for a geographer.[4] Uh-uh, Austin counters, that wonʼt do. Is it true or false, yes or no? The answer seems to be, well, it depends. The corollary is a very disturbing one: truth is dependent upon the context of the stating of truth.

To feel the firm ground of prejudice slipping away is exhilarating.[5] Austin states in one of his many felicitous phrases. The initial prejudice was the basic tenet of Oxford philosophy: meaningful sentences are verifiable statements. No, Austin proves. Apart from such statements, the constatives, there is also another type of meaningful utterances, the performatives. That is stage one of Austinʼs speech act theory.

But no sooner has he established this stage than he has it slip away and the performatives devour the constatives. That is stage two. At the outset there was nothing but constatives. At the end there is nothing but performatives. From a stage where certain uses of language have been defined as speech acts we have moved on to a stage where every act of speaking has become a speech act. In stead of a useful concept applying to some sentences we have a changed attitude to the use of language as such. That second stage may be useful too, particularly in opening general sociolinguistic approaches. But a useful tool for the analysis of literature has been lost in the transition from the specific stage one to the universal stage two. For a theory that is called upon to explain everything ends up explaining nothing.

Or to put it less militantly: many useful observations in literary criticism have emerged over the last two or three decades based on the notion of speech act in its various senses. What I propose to do today is to enquire into the sagas by means of the early, restricted use of the term, Austinʼs stage one speech act. My contention is that we can derive from it a crucial insight into the workings of the Icelandic family sagas, its rhetoric as well its thematic content, for the precise reason that the sagas—at least a substantial number of them—are about what the fundamentalist speech-act theory was about, i.e. speech-act theory before it swelled—or perhaps rather: was dissolved—into general sociolinguistics.

3

One reason why Austin moved on so quickly from stage one to stage two might be that he wasnʼt very good at classifying the various performatives he had located. He came up with names that deviated drastically from his otherwise smooth Oxonian, non-technical style (terms like Behabitives—a shocker this, he added),[6] and clearly he was not satisfied with the grounds on which he was able to define his categories.

Then his disciple John Searle took over. If Austin is the Socrates of speech-act theory, then Searle is to Austin what the Romans were to the Greeks: they didnʼt really discover anything new; they built a system on the discoveries made by the Greeks; and they built an empire. From Searle a worldwide web of speech-act procurators derive their brief, each with his own little system. None have done better in systematizing and bringing order to the field, however, than Searle himself.

In his Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts, he managed to provide a more adequate classification than Austinʼs without yet departing from the initial findings of the originator. Searle came up with five categories, the same number as Austin but, unlike Austinʼs, consistently defined. His number five is the one we need for our purposes. It covers cases where one brings a state of affairs into existence by declaring it to exist, cases where, so to speak, saying makes it so.[7] Searle christens this category by the simple name of declarations but gives it a strong and distinct definition, which makes it a much sharper tool than its plain name would suggest:

It is the defining characteristic of this class that the successful performance of one of its members brings about the correspondence between the propositional content and reality…if I successfully perform the act of appointing you chairman, then you are chairman…if I successfuly perform the act of declaring a state of war, then war is on; if I successfully perform the act of marrying you, then you are married and, we may add for our present purpose, if I successfully serve a summons on you, then a summons is served and you are indicted. Declarations, Searle summarizes, bring about some alteration in the status or condition of the referred to object or objects solely in virtue of the fact that the declaration has been succesfully performed. A declaration, unlike the four other categories of so-called illocutionary acts, brings about the state of affairs it predicates.

This feature of declarations, according to Searle, is one that Austin had not properly understood. Austin listed the declarations as a subgroup of those performatives with which he introduced his distinction between statements and speech acts, between constatives and performatives. The thrust of Austinʼs work, however, is that this distinction collapses.

The subgroup of declarations, however, so Searle insists, remains a distinct group, not to be digested by the omnivorous performative. How is that possible, he asks, and proceeds to provide the following answer:

all of the examples we have considered [of the speech act declaration, ThBr] involve an extra-linguistic institution, a system of constitutive rules in addition to the constitutive rules of language, in order that the declaration may be successfully performed. The mastery of those rules which constitute linguistic competence by the speaker and hearer is not in general sufficient for the performance of a declaration. In addition, there must exist an extra-linguistic institution and the speaker and hearer must occupy special places within this institution. It is only given such institutions as the church, the law, private property, the state, and a special position of the speaker and hearer within these institutions that one can excommunicate, appoint, give and bequeath oneʼs possession or declare war.[8]

It is obvious that Hawker-Hedinʼs declaration, as staged by Njal, is a declaration in this very specific and restricted sense of the term. The extra-linguistic institution involved in the procedure Njal has suggested to his friend Gunnar is the law, of course.

The question then is: what constitutive rules of that institution is the author of Njalʼs saga hinting at and what comments might his obvious mockery of legal procedure be making?

This takes us to the society depicted in Njalʼs saga, the Iceland of the commonwealth in the tenth and eleventh centuries, or the sagamenʼs dream thereof. It also takes us to another society, that in which Njalʼs saga was written, towards the end of the thirteenth century, when the commonwealth had collapsed and Iceland had become what amounted to not much more than a fief at the mercy of the Norwegian king.

4

The law—any law—requires an enforcement agent for the law to make sense as a social institution. Not quite so in the world of the sagas. The Iceland of Njalʼs Saga and the other sagas of Icelanders is a society with no apparent law enforcement agency—a state under the rule of law, yet with no police to enforce it. The system must have worked reasonably well for a while, or else the commonwealth would have collapsed much earlier. The question arises: who polices the police-less state?

Let us leave the sagas and the medieval historians and minds aside for a moment and speculate, on twentieth century terms, what might have made possible the relative stability of the police-less Icelandic society for centuries and what made it collapse. No one will ever know the answers to such questions with certainty, of course, but one cannot think about medieval Iceland and work with it for years without coming up with some conjectures.

Here are some, and the evidence on which they are based.

Since the institution in question was unique within Europe its foundation most likely is hidden in some feature of what was unique about medieval Iceland. One such feature—unique not only in a medieval context but throughout the history of European colonization—is the fact that the old Norsemen arrived at the shores of an empty land.

Wherever the Europeans went to settle, then or later, there was an indigenous population to kill off. Not so in Iceland. Except for a few Celtic hermits, who are supposed to have taken flight as soon as the Norsemen arrived, there were no aborigines in Iceland and hence no frontier to push into a hostile wilderness and no genocide to perform. Iceland was open to settlers, amicable and fertile, the climate being more agreeable than nowadays, so we are told.

For a period of time—of unknown, and unknowable, length—during the settlement there must have been arable land in abundance. With the Pilgrims in North America—as with every other group of white colonizers who seized land from its previous owners and had to build stockades immediately to protect it—land must have been a scarcer commodity than was the case with the Norse settlers in Iceland around the year 900. In Iceland a relatively large number of settlers must have been able to seize land of relatively comparable size, i.e. as much as they could cultivate and use for grazing, no more, no less. For a while at least it must have been easier for a newcomer to settle further down the coast than to buy or steal land from those already settled.

That golden age came to an end. Yet, traces remained. The resulting society, in material terms, must have been one where a relatively great number of men were of relatively equal wealth (my basis of comparison remains the colonies with an indigenous population). How else would the Icelanders have ended up with an institutional structure with no one great king but rather 36 or 39 little kings, the godar—and that in a minuscule society, much smaller than that of the one Norwegian king. The key to the absence of an executive branch of the Icelandic society lies not in the absence of a king but in the plethora of kings.

The elaborate law that these people established, once their commonwealth was founded, parliament and all, in AD 930, needed enforcement, just like any other law. Officially the agent was the injured and vindicated party himself. The crucial question, however, is: what made this system viable, not only with the strong ones, but also with weak and powerless plaintiffs—if not always, then at least often enough to give the system the appearance of the rule of law?

The only conceivable answer, it seems to me, lies in the relative equilibrium whose unique material causes I have just listed. In a society of that description, a plaintiff who had had his way with the court and was unable to enforce the courtʼs ruling himself, must have stood a reasonable chance of finding somebody of power and standing having a grudge against the party on whom the sentence had been passed, with whose assistance the plaintiff could then enforce the sentence of outlawry, confiscation of property or the like.

The declarative speech acts of the courts, i.e. the verdicts, interfaced with an extra-linguistic institution that was invisible, in that it consisted of neither procedure nor office but of a sociological fact emerging from the type of settlement just described: the checks and balances enabled by a society with a relatively large number of men of relatively equal wealth, and hence power.

Although a verdict of outlawry or confiscation—that epitome of the declarative speech act—did not by its mere being uttered bring about the state of affairs it predicated it still almost did so, by virtue of the availability of freelance executives. As long as such executive agents were available it must have appeared to the Icelanders as though the declarative speech acts grounded in the legal institution were what they were supposed to be: self-sufficient and complete.

The freelance law enforcers, however, could not be available for ever—for the simple reason that the equilibrium just outlined must have been of an unstable, temporary nature. Once all arable land was settled the only way an Icelander could increase his holding, and hence his power, was by buying or appropriating that of his neighbour.

Thus the belated development of a hierarchy, familiar from continental Europe, must have begun. And whatever the intermediate stages, of which we know little, we do know that in the thirteenth century land holdings, and thus power, was concentrating on ever fewer hands, eventually only in the hands of a handful of families, fighting ever larger battles with one another and finally, in 1262, giving in to the ultimate hierarchy, the king of Norway.

The medieval Icelanders tended to interpret this development in moral terms. In the good old days a man was as good as his word. The legal spine of the society, based on declarative speech acts, was the model of decent behaviour. The decay so often depicted in the family sagas as they approach contemporary times is often depicted as a decay in the dependability of words, indeed as a state of affairs where supposedly declarative speech acts no longer function as such.

The sagas dealing with contemporary history, i.e. the history of the thirteenth century, collected in the Sturlunga saga, abound in such examples of the deterioration of declarative speech acts. To take just one example, from Tord kakalis saga, a certain Gisli is having a feud with a certain Kolbein, who has killed off some of Gisliʼs closest friends. A broker, the priest Eyvindr Thorarinsson, tries to persuade this Gisli to swear allegiance to Kolbein, which naturally doesnʼt appeal much to him. The priest then points out that he has a son who has the same name as his enemy. Why donʼt you, the priest suggests, swear allegiance to Kolbein, only keep in mind my son Kolbein as you declare your allegiance. And so he does.[9]

The similarity between that act and the one Gunnar is persuaded by Njal to perform with Hrut is striking. What is depicted in both instances is not just a violation of trust and justice. In a certain perverted sense of the word both scenes depict a scrupulous adherence to the rules of the declarative speech act. By mimicking those rules so closely the fraud becomes obvious to the reader or listener. The declarations are deprived of the sincerity condition which is required if they are to work.

With laws shall our land be built. By depriving the laws of their declarative sincerity shall the land be laid waste. The corruption of the declarative speech act functions in the saga as both a metaphor for and an explanation of the corruption of the ideal society of the original commonwealth.

If my sketchy outline of the material foundations of the Icelandic commonwealth holds any truth then the decay of the rule of law, or at least the increasing insufficiency of the law, is based on causes beyond the reach of any individual. You do not have to accept that sketch nor the materialist tenets underlying it, however, to accept my contention concerning the thematic function of the declarative speech act. If my history sketch doesnʼt appeal to you, you can forget it. At least, I will forget it in order not to let it interfere with the gist of my paper, which is literary rather than historical.

Let us just say, therefore, that for some unexplained reason the mechanics of the law seem to be of the utmost concern to the authors of the sagas. A certain ambiguity is evident.

On one hand the law seems to work. Feuds arise and unfold within an elaborate legal institution. On the other hand peopleʼs handling of the law seems to aggravate the conflicts. The legal sage, Njal, proffers advice which mocks legal behaviour. Later in the saga he constructs an extra institution, a fifth court of appeal, which is supposed to enhance the legal standards but which in actual fact wreaks havoc on the law and the land. The construction of the law appears to be the deconstruction of legality. Central to this ambiguity is the declarative speech act: the declaration which no longer brings about the state of affairs it predicates or, conversely, which does bring it about but in an ostentatiously fraudulent manner.

Njalʼs Saga, the richest of the lot, is too large for this contention to be substantiated in the space of a short paper. Let me turn, instead, to one of the shortest and most tightly knit of the Icelandic sagas.

5

Hrafnkelʼs Saga is a saga about speech acts if ever there was one. The story arises from one declarative speech act, an oath, which might—and perhaps ought to—have been discarded but wasnʼt; it reaches its climax through another declarative speech act, a verdict, which, so the protagonist believes, will be discarded but isnʼt. The whole story of Hrafnkel is a story about what speech act theory is about, language and its power: the power to make the world rather than mirror it, to bring about states of affairs rather than report on them to quote someone to whom I shall return.

Hrafnkel is one of many saga characters deviating pleasantly from those of the homilies, legends, and heroic epics in that he is neither totally good nor totally evil. Hrafnkel was a bully, yet also a man of many qualities.[10] Furthermore, he is a man of great possessions, the owner of an entire valley, into which he allows settlers only on condition that he be their overlord. The hierarchization that I have referred to is already flourishing.

Hrafnkel also owns a very special horse, which he loved so passionately that he swore a solemn oath to kill anyone who rode the stallion without his permission (Ch.3).

That, of course, is exactly what happens. The offender, the poor farmer Thorbjornʼs son, whom Hrafnkel had hired as a farmhand, is killed by Hrafnkel for riding the horse, not in deference to the offended party—the horse is neither offended nor injured—but out of Hrafnkelʼs consideration for his own honour: I hold the view that nothing good can happen to people who break their solemn vows (Ch.6).[11]

Thorbjorn turns down Hrafnkelʼs offer of material compensation for his sonʼs death. That would have been the end of his story—poor peasant versus wealthy chieftain—had it not been for the multi-centred character of the Icelandic saga that I outlined earlier. Thorbjorn entreats his better-off brother to advocate his case, unsuccessfully, then, successfully, his still better-off nephew, Sam, who in turn pleads with a total stranger, an ex-chieftain, whom he surprisingly manages to persuade into persuading his brother, Thorgeir, an incumbent chieftain, to helping poor Thorbjorn get his dues.

Thus armed with supporters worthy of his opponent, Thorbjornʼs nephew Sam pleads his case against Hrafnkel in full accordance with the laws of the land (Ch.11). Impressed by the poor peasantʼs following nobody wants to speak in Hrafnkelʼs defence. Hrafnkel himself had not even bothered to appear in court. Seeing that Hrafnkel has made a serious miscalculation people rush to collect him:

Hrafnkel wasted no time, called on his men, and went to the court, not expecting to meet with any opposition. He was determined to discourage men of little account from bringing lawsuits against him, for he intended to break up the court by force and so put an end to Samʼs action. But there was no chance of that now, because a large number of people had gathered there and Hrafnkel could get nowhere near the court. He was barred from approaching it by sheer weight of numbers, so he couldnʼt even hear what the prosecutor was saying and it was impossible for him to present his legal defence. Sam followed up his case demanding maximum penalty, and so it came about that Hrafnkel was sentenced to full outlawry then and there at the Althing. (Ch.11)[12]

I can think of no more charming and shocking presentation of the old Icelandic blend of power and the law than the passage I have quoted here at length. Hrafnkel plans to disregard the pending legal speech act—the judgesʼ declaration of his being outlawed—simply because he doesnʼt expect it to occur, seeing how superior is his force to that of his adversary.

This turns out to be a miscalculation. The irony of the scene is that justice is done, not because justice will prevail against brute force, but because there is a comparatively equal amount of brute force on either side. For justice can prevail only where force is balanced by force.

There is a second declarative speech act to perform before the deed is done. The saga carefully announces it:

The man isnʼt a full outlaw until the court of confiscation has been held, and that must be done at his legal residence, fourteen days after the weapontake. [Weapontake is when people ride home from the Althing.] (Ch.12)[13]

That act, too, is performed according to the rules. The poor manʼs new friends are seeing him through. Hrafnkel is brutally tortured and evicted from his farm.

The remainder of the saga is devoted to the elaborate revenge Hrafnkel takes. By miscalculating his opponentʼs force Hrafnkel fell victim to a speech act. By waiting until his opponent has lost his new-found friends and he himself has become a wealthy landowner once again Hrafnkel gets in a position to redress the humiliation he has suffered and prove the cynical truth that in the long run—and in the ʻmodernʼ society depicted in Hrafnkelʼs Saga—what matters is force and cunning, not law and declarative speech acts.

So much for the power of language to bring about the state of affairs it predicates! The declarative speech act as treated in Hrafnkelʼs Saga demonstrates not only the power of speech but also its limits.

6

In recent years speech-act analyses of fiction have become fashionable. The term, however, occurs in two very different ways.

In one of the major contributions to the field, a speech-act analysis of Coriolanus, Stanley Fish defines the two and passes a harsh judgement on one of them under the title What Not To Do With Speech-Act Theory..[14] The term speech act may be used in a loose, metaphorical sense so as to head listings of various categories of what is being said, such as the general speech act of telling a story Fish quotes one critic saying. Fish warns against such use of the term—although a word as mild as warning is hardly an appropriate description of the type of harangue that is customary with Stanley Fish when he takes issue with fellow critics.

Although I agree with gist of his paper—that the restricted definition is advisable—I disagree with his condemnation of looser uses of the concept of speech act. Such applications of the term can be very useful indeed, provided one knows what one is doing. Thus I find Frederic Amoryʼs study of Speech Acts and Violence in the Sagas[15] both stimulating and informative, not only because of his eye-opening comparison between the seemingly senseless violence emanating from status loss in medieval Icelandic society with similar occurrences in modern American society, but also because of its useful categorization of violence-provoking speech acts in the sagas, of which Amory finds five: refusals of requests, breaches of contract, threats, insults, and challenges.[16]

I repeat: very useful. Yet I believe it is also useful to follow a different procedure—as does Fish, and as I have been trying to do—applying the crucial term in the restricted sense, strictly abiding by the fundamentalist Austin-Searle definition of illocutionary speech acts, which does not encompass such acts as refusing a request or breaching a contract.

This procedure will yield results only when applied to the small number of literary texts that happen to be about what the theory is about, language and its power: the power to make the world rather than mirror it, to bring about states of affairs rather than report on them.[17]

Shakespeareʼs Coriolanus, Fish claims and convincingly proves, is one such text, a speech-act play. Sagas like Njalʼs and Hrafnkelʼs and a number of other Icelandic family sagas are other prominent members of that limited category. For to a large extent they are about language and its power to make the world—and the limits to that power. Indeed, they are about those limits.

The power of language in this oral society resides in the spoken word. That is why dialogue in the Icelandic sagas is important not only, as stated in the encyclopedic entry that was my point of departure, because dialogue is an apt means to enliven the tale, to provide reasons for actions, and to add historical perspective, but also because dialogue is the bearer of speech acts—not only in the broad sense of acts such as threats, insults, challenges—but also because the spoken line is the bearer of the declarative speech act: the speech act that brings about the state of affairs it predicates, so crucial to the Icelandic commonwealth which relied on it, and hence both mimicked, mocked, parodied and, tragically, depleted, thus giving way to the alternative means of bringing about a different state of affairs, which is sheer violence.

1. Medieval Scandinavia, ed. Phillip Pulsiano & Kirsten Wolf, Garland Publishing, New York & London 1993, p. 333-36.

2. Quotes from the Penguin edition of Njalʼs Saga, translated by M. Magnusson & H. Pálsson, 1960.

3. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, Oxford 1962, p. 5.

4. Ibid. p. 142.

5. Ibid. p. 61.

6. Ibid. p. 50.

7. J. Searle, Expression and Meaning, Cambridge 1979, p. 16ff.

8. Ibid. p. 18.

9. Tord Kakaliʼs Saga Ch. 1, in Sturlunga Saga, vol. 2, translated by J. H. McGrew & R. George Thomas, Twayne, New York 1974, p. 230f.

10. Generally, I shall quote the Penguin edition of the translation of Hrafnkelʼs Saga, by H. Pálsson, 1971, identifying the quote by chapter number. Here, however, I have altered Pálssonʼs translation, Hrafnkel was a bully despite his many qualities in order that the parallel between good and bad becomes as evident as in the original: [Hrafnkell] var óiafnarmaðr mikill en mentr vel (Ch. 2).

11. Here again I am in slight disagreement with the Penguin translator. The word átrunaðr, which he renders as faith is used here in its weakened sense, (i.e. view, opinion) rather than faith, religious conviction.

12. Ibid. p. 54f.

13. Ibid. p.55.

14. S. Fish, How To Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech-Act Theory and Literary Criticism, in Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge, Mass., 1980, pp. 1972–45.

15. In Arkiv för Nordisk Filologi 106, 1991, pp. 57-84.

16. Ibid. p. 62.

17. Fish, op.cit., p. 244.