Honour in Egils saga Santiago Barreiro IMHICIHU-CONICET. The aim of this presentation is to assess the role that honour plays in Egils saga, a long prose text composed in Iceland c.1220-1240, and which belongs to a type of sagas, the Islendingasögur, that discuss the life and deeds of the first generations of people who inhabited the insular country. Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar("The saga of Egill, the son of Grímr the bald") focuses on a family of settlers who come to Iceland from Norway during the ninth century. The first third of the story narrates the rise and fall of Pórólfr Kveld-Ulfsson, an ambitious man who becomes powerful in the service of the Norwegian king. His nephew, Egill, is the main character of the rest of the saga. Egill is a poet, and adventurer and viking, but remains fiercely independent during most of his life. The action happens in many locations around the North Atlantic and the Baltic. The last part of the saga focuses on Egill as an old man, and it is the only section of the saga that is focused on what happens in Iceland. It is generally acknowledged that matters of honour play a prominent role in the Íslendingasögur. Moreover, it is highly likely that in this aspect literature reflects a main concern of medieval Icelanders, at least those of some social standing. Preben Meulengracht Sørensen's influential Fortælling og Ære defines honour as a social norm, a system of unwritten rules which channels social conflict and penalizes antisocial behaviour through its opposite, shame ("Ære er social norm ( ... ). Den er en del at det system af uskrevne regler, der konstituerer et givent samfund, og sammen med sin modpol, skammen, definerer æren samfundets sociale ideal ( ... ). Ærens normer kan derfor ikke beskrives eller systematiseres udtøtmmende som lovgivningens eller morallærens." Meulengracht Sørensen 1993: 187). This position stands in marked contrast with the earlier ideas of the German scholar Walther Gehl (1937), who saw the ójafnadarmadr ("man of inequity") as the embodiment of the competitive honour of "Germanic" peoples. On the other hand, Meulengracht Sørensen's view is similar to the ideas of the British anthropologist Julien Pitt-Rivers, who studied honour in Mediterranean societies. This stance presents honour as a stabilizing force in society. Honour constitutes at the same time an internal and an external phenomenon: it is the individual acceptance of a social ideal of behaviour but also the judgement passed by how a certain person approaches such ..
ideal (this is, the reputation. See Henderson Stewart 1994). We might add that it is likely that the absence of a strict division between public and private space cements such dual nature. The incarnation of the social ideal in medieval Iceland is therefore, according to this view, the jafnadarmadr ("man of equity") who is able to assign each what is due and preserve social order and peace. Partially contrasting with this view is the idea that honour functioned more as a desirable end for competition than as a