Orkneyinga Saga

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

There was a king called Fornjot who ruled over Finland and Kvenland, the countries stretching to the east of what we call the Gulf of Bothnia, which lies opposite the White Sea. Fornjot had three sons, Hler (whom we also call Aegir), a second called Logi and a third, Kari, the father of Frosti, who was in turn the father of Snaer the Old, the father of Thorri. He had two sons, Nor and Gor, and a daughter called Goi. (p. 23)

Summary: The Orkneyinga Saga is a text about divisions. We begin with a legendary history of Scandinavia; nobody knows for sure what 'Fornjotr' means, but the myths are consistent that he is the father of the elements: sea (Hler), fire (Logi), and storm (Kari). Storm begets frost or cold (Frosti), which begets snow (Snaer); Thorri is a god about whom we know very little who is associated with the winter and had a winter month and festival named after him. Ultimately we get to the children of Thorri; Thorri's daughter Goi goes missing, and Nor and Gor vow to find her. Nor skis across the land, laying claim to wherever he travels; Gor sails across the sea, doing the same. They do eventually find Goi, but a division has been laid between the house of Nor, which rules Norway, and the house of Gor, which rules the northern islands. From there we focus in on the Orkneys and the Shetlands (with Caithness, the northern tip of Scotland nearest to the Orkneys, occasionally relevant), as they live a somewhat precarious existence trying to maintain their independence while being an easy sailing distance from the much more powerful kingdom of Norway. 

When the islands are unified, things are good, but the situation is not stable, and no matter how much any Earl of Orkney unifies them, divisions keep arising. Part of this is the meddling of Norway; Scotland too occasionally interferes, although not as often. More often it is just family feuding over inheritance and property. The Earls of Orkney in the period primarily covered by the saga (from about the late ninth century to the beginning of the thirteenth century) are all from the house of Eystein (whose younger son Sigurd the Powerful becomes the first Earl of the house). About twenty-eight descendants of Eystein were Earls of Orkney in that period, a number of them concurrently. Given the geography of the islands, the division when there are two Earls of Orkney tends to be roughly one Earl controlling about two-thirds of the territory and another controlling the rest, but it easily flips. And of course, while Christianity comes to the islands during the course of the saga, it comes in waves rather than a clear, clean conversion, and in any case it's still early medieval Scandinavia -- if the Earls aren't successful getting each other's land by legal and political machinations, they are not opposed to getting it by force.

The Orkneyinga Saga has a less unified story than one often finds in Icelandic sagas. We get a full smorgasbord of things; legends, genealogies, hagiographies, battles complete with heroic verse, a pilgramge to the Holy Land, property disputes, truly byzantine political maneuvering. However, the saga is not completely disunified, either; it gets a sort of unity having two major peaks. The first peak is the martyrdom of St. Magnus Erlendsson, which is fairly brief in itself but plays an outsized role in the story, and the second is the much longer life of St. Rognvald Kali. The two are connected in part by being local saints from the same family (Rognvald is Magnus's nephew), although their stories are about as different as can be. St. Magnus, the Holy Earl, is exactly the sort of person you would expect to be a saint; he tries to keep the peace somewhat naively by making concessions, which works for a little while, but only for a little while, and in his dispute with Earl Hakon he goes bravely to his death praying for divine mercy to be given to the man whom Hakon forces to behead him. St. Rognvald, on the other hand, is a wily political operator engaged in large-scale political maneuvers against several other wily political operators; he very obviously has a zest for a good fight, for battle-poetry, for flirting with beautiful women, and for crushing his enemies with all the force they deserve. It's not surprising that St. Magnus eventually graduated from the local calendar to the universal calendar while St. Rognvald's right to a place on any calendar of saints has occasionally been questioned; but as far as the saga itself is concerned, they are both obviously saints, confirmed both by divine miracles and papal permissions, and of course, if anyone would know who is a saint, it's God and the Pope. 

St. Rognvald's pilgrimage to the Holy Land is itself part of his holy life, although it is as full of fighting as you would expect a Scandinavian pilgrimage to the Holy Land to be, and indeed, has much more fighting and much less Holy Land you would expect. The goal just seems to have been to get there and then come back, which might seem odd to us, who tend to think of pilgrimage as a sort of religious tourism. That is not at all how Scandinavian Christians (and indeed many early medieval Christians elsewhere) saw it; it was primarily a penitential practice. The hardship on the road was penance, and was the point; the destination was primarily of symbolic force. We might not think of heading out with the boys to lay siege to castles and fight Saracen pirates on the seas as holy penance, but if it was done on the way to Rome or Jerusalem, my Scandinavian ancestors in the Viking Age certainly thought it could be. The pilgrimage is the stuff of legend -- it occupies five detailed chapters of the saga -- but it was probably a political mistake; it allowed his major enemy, Svein Asleifarson, time to make trouble why he is away, and although he is able to start getting a handle on the trouble when he returns, he keeps finding himself in vulnerable positions until his luck and cleverness run out and he is murdered. Then again, he might have had similar problems had he stayed. Less popular than some of his rivals, he had leaned heavily into the cult of St. Magnus, and he was buried in the church of St. Magnus that he himself had built. One of his first miracles was that the rock on which he had been murdered remained wet and bloody.

The saga has everything, so it is not surprising that it has all the things that are most charming about sagas -- dry wit, direct action, one-liners, and, of course, the Scandinavian habit of distinguishing people by nicknames. I confess, at one point I wondered whether the author was doing a bit of leg-pulling, when I read about Einar Buttered-Bread -- we are never informed about why he is called Einar Buttered Bread -- is murdered by his cousin, Einar Hard-Mouth. (Neither should be confused with Einar Belly-Shaker, Einar Wry-Mouth, or Einar Vorse-Raven.) Is it really true that Buttered-Bread was murdered by Hard-Mouth? Actually, it seems that it was not quite the case; Einar Buttered-Bread's nickname was actually Kliningr, which is usually thought to be related to the word for 'smear'. So Einar the Smearing, I suppose? He seems to pre-date any actual known practice of buttering bread -- which is invented later than one might think -- although it may very well still refer to smearing something else on bread. In any case, it perhaps fits; a member of a family who often get nicknames like Skull-Splitter, Einar Buttered-Bread was inevitably doomed to be toast.

This is a fun saga, although it's not one of the easier ones to get through. It's fragmentary construction and everything-and-the-kitchen-sink content can be a bit overwhelming. Nonetheless, I can also guarantee for the same reason that anyone can certainly find parts that they would enjoy.

Favorite Passage:

On the tenth day of Christmas, a day of fine weather, Earl Rognvald stood up and told his men to arm themselves and to blow the trumpets summoning everyone to the castle. The firewood was taken right up to the ramparts and piled all around. Then the Earl gave orders where each of his chief men was to attack; he himself and the men of Orkney from the south, Erling and Aslak from the west, John and Guthorm from the east and Eindridi the Young from the north. When they were all prepared for the assault, they set fire to the wood-piles, and the Earl made this verse: 

Most admired of maidens,
gold-decked at our meeting,
Ermingerd the exquisite
once offered me her wine -- 
now fiercely we bear fire
up to the fortress,
assault the stronghold
with unsheathed sword-thrust.

They attacked ferociously with iron and fire, hurling a shower of missiles into the fortress, this being the only way they could assault it. The defenders held the ramparts none too decisively, poured down burning sulphur and pitch, though this did little harm to the Earl's men. Eventually, as Erling had foreseen, the ramparts started crumbling before the fire, leaving huge gaps where the mortar failed to hold. (pp. 169-170)

Recommendation: Recommended. 

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Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney, Palsson & Edwards, trs. and eds., Penguin (New York: 1981).

The Beacon of Alexandria

 Today is the feast of St. Athanasius, Bishop and Doctor of the Church. From his work, On the Incarnation 16:

For men's mind having finally fallen to things of sense, the Word disguised Himself by appearing in a body, that He might, as Man, transfer men to Himself, and centre their senses on Himself, and, men seeing Him thenceforth as Man, persuade them by the works He did that He is not Man only, but also God, and the Word and Wisdom of the true God. This, too, is what Paul means to point out when he says: That ye being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length, and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge, that you may be filled unto all the fullness of God. For by the Word revealing Himself everywhere, both above and beneath, and in the depth and in the breadth — above, in the creation; beneath, in becoming man; in the depth, in Hades; and in the breadth, in the world — all things have been filled with the knowledge of God. Now for this cause, also, He did not immediately upon His coming accomplish His sacrifice on behalf of all, by offering His body to death and raising it again, for by this means He would have made Himself invisible. But He made Himself visible enough by what He did, abiding in it, and doing such works, and showing such signs, as made Him known no longer as Man, but as God the Word. For by His becoming Man, the Saviour was to accomplish both works of love; first, in putting away death from us and renewing us again; secondly, being unseen and invisible, in manifesting and making Himself known by His works to be the Word of the Father, and the Ruler and King of the universe.

Links of Note

 * Mateusz Kotowski & Krzysztof Szlachcic, Deconstructing the Phantom: Duhem and the Scientific Realism Debate (PDF)

* Jane Psmith reviews Peter Lawrence's Road Belong Cargo, at "Mr. and Mrs. Psmith's Bookshelf". Highly Recommended.

* Erich Przywara, Philosophy as a Problem, at "Church Life Journal"

* Carla Bagnoli, Kant and Sidgwick on Practical Knowledge and Rational Action (PDF)

* SDG, What is a miracle? It depends partly on interpretation, at "SDG's Dailies and Sundays"

* David Hume and Suzanne Collins's Sunrise on the Reaping 

* W. Matthews Grant & Mark K. Spencer, Activity, Identity, and God (PDF). This paper makes the common mistake made on this topic, of conflating identitas with identity (the former is a much less restrictive term), and (a perhaps related mistake) in at least one passage seems to make odd assumptions about rationally distinct acts (e.g., that they are not actually distinct). I think this mistake also leads to exaggerating some of the differences among the Thomistic commentators. But with that caveat, it's a nice collection of arguments on various aspects of what it means to say that distinct acts are not diverse things in God.

* Ken MacVey, Corporations, Free Will, Responsibility, and AI: How Do They Fit Together?, at "3 Quarks Daily"

* Leonardo Flamini, Inquiry and conversation: Gricean zetetic norms and virtues (PDF)

* Chad Hansen, Daoism, at the SEP

* Klaas Kraay, Divine Freedom, also at the SEP

* Bartosz Biskup, Two Senses of Law as an Artefact (PDF)

* Bradley J. Birzer, Canticle for Leibowitz

* Laurenz Ramsauer, The Efficacy Problem (PDF), on the nature of legal systems

*John Michael Greer, The death of Progress, at "Unherd"

* Lisa Cassell, The Positive Argument for Impermissivism (PDF)

* Armand D'Angour, The truth about love, on Diotima and Socrates, at "Aeon"

* Nathan Pinkoski, Pope Francis's Managerial Revolution, at "Compact"

In Love's Empty Chair

 A Song
by Lizette Woodworth Reese 

O Love, he went a-straying,
 A long time ago!
 I missed him in the Maying,
 When blossoms were of snow;
 So back I came by the old sweet way;
 And for I loved him so,
 I wept that he came not with me,
 A long time ago! 

 Wide open stood my chamber door,
 And one stepped forth to greet;
 Gray Grief, strange Grief, who turned me sore
 With words he spake so sweet.
 I gave him meat; I gave him drink;
 (And listened for Love's feet).
 How many years? I cannot think;
 In truth, I do not know--
A long time ago! 

 O Love, he came not back again,
 Although I kept me fair;
 And each white May, in field and lane,
 I waited for him there!
 Yea, he forgot; but Grief stayed on,
 And in Love's empty chair
 Doth sit and tell of days long gone--
'Tis more than I can bear!

Lizette Woodworth Reese, the Poet Laureate of Maryland in 1931, spent most of her career as a high school English teacher in Baltimore; she has quite an extensive oeuvre, prose as well as poetry, most of which did quite well, both in popularity and in critical acclaim, in her day. Her most famous poem is "Tears".

Devereaux on Spiritual Power in Tolkien

 Bret Devereaux, at "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry", recently had a very good series on Rings of Power, that touches on issues that go well beyond that series, with problems in how one's handling of medieval settings in fantasy fiction can go wrong:

The Siege of Eregion, Part I: What Logistics?

The Siege of Eregion, Part II: What Siege Camp?

The Siege of Eregion, Part III: What Catapults?

The Siege of Eregion, Part IV: What Siege Equipment?

The Siege of Eregion, Part V: What Tactics?

He's also had two other post that are not strictly part of the same series, but do have some broader thematic links:

Why Celebrimbor Fell but Boromir Conquered: The Moral Universe of Tolkien

How Gandal Proved Mightiest: Spiritual Power in Tolkien

The latter is especially good, and is the one to read if you only read one. One thing I will add is that the Wizards' staffs seem to function as insignia of (spiritual) authority, and thus (like their words) as part of how they exercise authority (which for them can have effects on the world) -- this seems quite clearly indicated by Gandalf's breaking of Saruman's staff, in which, having been promoted by higher powers, he is effectively removing Saruman from office, both substantively and symbolically. (It's an interesting comparison and contrast with the Ring. The staffs seem to be just effective symbols of an authority received by mission from a higher power; this is essential to the function of Wizards, who are in fact massively more powerful than they appear but who are only authorized to use that power for purposes related to their mission. With the Ring, however, Sauron has alienated much of his own power into an artifact in order to use his own power more effectively -- he is a case study in the evil of using yourself as a mere means. The Ring is not a sign of his authority, because he has no mission, but just is partly Sauron himself. And the closest we get in The Lord of the Rings to seeing Sauron himself directly exercise power is when Frodo, seeming to be a figure in white with a wheel of fire on his chest, faces Gollum and out of the fire a commanding voice tells Gollum to go, and if he ever lays hands on him again, he shall be cast into the Fire of Doom. And it is so. Frodo is not Sauron -- but the command through the Ring has much of the authority of Sauron, limited only by the limitations of Frodo himself. Someone like Gandalf or Galadriel could do far more with it, effectively adding much of the power of Sauron to their own; and Sauron, of course, far more still.)

Sympathetic Affections

 It is true that nature has sympathetic affections gently inclining us to love and do good to our neighbour. Philosophers did not delay in firmly attaching their shaky morality to them, but the effort was soon seen to fail. Good sense saw that sympathetic affection and gentle inclinations did not contain the authority of law. Subject to illusions and eccentricities, and even to serious disorders, they also vary capriciously in different individuals,a nd sometimes lead us to offend rather than practise virtue. Affections, therefore, could not be considered the principle of the moral activity necessary for individuals, for society and for the human race. Moreover, even if we found affections on the same level and with the same nature in everyone, and free from the restrictions we have mentioned, we would still have to take account of their uncertain tenuous power....

[Antonio Rosmini, The Essence of Right, Cleary and Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1993), pp. 119-120.]

Another Himself

 Today is the feast day of St. Caterina di Jacopo di Benincasa, Virgin and Doctor of the Church. usually known in English as St. Catherine of Siena. From the Dialogue:

The soul, who is lifted by a very great and yearning desire for the honor of God and the salvation of souls, begins by exercising herself, for a certain space of time, in the ordinary virtues, remaining in the cell of self-knowledge, in order to know better the goodness of God towards her. This she does because knowledge must precede love, and only when she has attained love, can she strive to follow and to clothe herself with the truth. But, in no way, does the creature receive such a taste of the truth, or so brilliant a light therefrom, as by means of humble and continuous prayer, founded on knowledge of herself and of God; because prayer, exercising her in the above way, unites with God the soul that follows the footprints of Christ Crucified, and thus, by desire and affection, and union of love, makes her another Himself. Christ would seem to have meant this, when He said: To him who will love Me and will observe My commandment, will I manifest Myself; and he shall be one thing with Me and I with him. In several places we find similar words, by which we can see that it is, indeed, through the effect of love, that the soul becomes another Himself.

Intellect and Alternate Possibilities

If we look at positions that accept the idea that human beings can select from alternative possibilities, we can divide a large portion of them into two families.

(1) Both the intellect and the will are free powers. On this view, the full phenomenon of what we call 'free will' involves not merely freedom of choice in the will but also a kind of freedom in the intellect (sometimes called freedom of decision). The intellect, when dealing with matters less than perfectly certain can decide to suppose, or presume, or hypothesize, or guess, or select, or some such, entirely as part of its own operation, and in a way that is distinct from any choice of the will. (This is not necessarily to say that every case in which the intellect seems involved with alternative possibilities is purely on the part of the intellect; depending on the specifics of the position, there may be cases in which the will can direct the intellect as well.) An example of a major philosopher who accepts a position like this is Thomas Aquinas. 

However, this is by far the minority view. The majority view is:

(2) The intellect is a natural power and the will a free power. While the will may freely choose from among alternatives, the intellect is entirely natural and determinate; any case in which the intellect seems to be doing something involving alternative possibilities is in reality a case in which the will is directing the intellect. The Cartesians are a major modern example of (2); this position in fact plays a significant role in Cartesian theories of error. As Descartes develops the idea in Meditation V, we only ever go wrong because the will misuses its freedom to jump to a conclusion that is not clearly and distinctly perceived. 

Malebranche gives a slightly different, and much more explicitly developed, version of the Cartesian position in The Search after Truth (Book One, Chapter Two). As Malebranche develops the idea there, for something to be genuinely evident (i.e., obvious), the intellect has to have examined the matter fully, and in particular has to have considered all relevant relations. This is pretty much the entire function of the intellect -- it perceives, either incompletely or completely, either clearly and distinctly or not. When the intellect has done so, there's nothing left for the will to do -- it can't will for the intellect to consider a new relation, because there isn't any, so it has to repose with what the intellect has done. 

On Malebranche's account, this repose is what we are talking about when we talk about judgment and inference as if they were involuntary things. The will is in fact what does them, it's just that it has reached the end of what it can do, so it rests. In matters in which the intellect has not done a complete examination, however, so that parts of the subject are unexamined or still obscure, the will can choose to have the intellect look at something new, or it can stop. This covers cases in which our judgments and inferences seem to be voluntary.

As Malebranche notes, this account means that there is no fundamental distinction between what is called intellectual assent and what is called the consent of will; intellectual assent just is volitional consent. When we are dealing with good, most people can easily recognize that consent to good is a voluntary act of will, but they struggle when it comes to consent to truth:

But we do not likewise perceive that we make use of our freedom in consenting to truth, especially when it appears altogether evident to us; and this makes us believe that consent to truth is not voluntary. As if it were necessary that our actiosn be indifferent to be voluntary, and as if the blessed did not love God quite voluntarily, without being diverted by anything whatever, just as we consent to this evident proposition, that twice two is four, without being diverted from believing it by anything indicating otherwise. (LO 9)

The real distinction between the two doesn't have to do with the act but the object; the true consists in the relations we perceive between things, whereas the good consists in the relation things have with us. The will merely consents to their being relations between things we perceive, but it consents both to the relation of a thing to us and also to our impulse to it, and it is the double consent in the case of goodness that makes it more obvious to people that the will is involved. 

Error, of course, is when we either consent to a relation that the intellect has not actually perceived or consent to a love or impulse that is imperfect. However, Malebranche's conception of this is somewhat different from Descartes's, because he takes us to have an experience of "inward reproaches" (LO 10), shocks or blows as he calles them elsewhere, of reason, and he relies on this more than on the bare case of clear and distinct perception. Thus the rules for avoiding error are, paraphrasing slightly:

1. Never give complete consent to something as true unless it is so evident that we cannot refuse our consent without experiencing internal pain and "inward reproaches" of reason. 

2. Never completely love something if we can refuse to love it without remorse of conscience.

It's important, however, in the case of the first rule that it's not the bare experience of internal pain when we try not to consent, but the experience of it on the basis of the evidentness of the thing, which is tied, again, to the intellect having thoroughly examined the matter. This way of thinking means that the thorough examination rule from Descartes's rules of method plays a much more obvious role than it sometimes does in other Cartesians, including Descartes himself. Malebranche holds that we should sometimes consent to probabilities, albeit specifically in a way that recognizes them as such, as parts, so to speak, of an inquiry not yet finished. It also means that we can in principle always tell whether we are in error or not simply by self-examination.

In any case, the work here is all done by the will, which directs everything. The intellect is a passive power, and Malebranche thinks that treating it as if it were an active one like the will is a serious mistake that creates methodological problems. There are other varieties of the second family noted above, however, that regard the intellect as active -- they would in fact distinguish assent and consent, they just think that the assent of the intellect is natural. Thus we get the division:

	The intellect itself is a free power	The intellect itself is not a free power
The intellect is an active power	(1), e.g., Thomas Aquinas: the intellect and the will each have their own distinctive free acts	(2a), e.g., John Duns Scotus: the intellect has its own distinctive acts, but all free acts are of the will
The intellect is a passive power	(completely empty, as far as I know)	(2b), e.g., Nicolas Malebranche: the intellect merely receives representations of relations, and all acts, free or not, are of the will

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Nicolas Malebranche, The Search after Truth, Lennon & Olscamp, eds., Cambridge UP (New York: 1997).