Faculty Research
Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland: This Spattered Isle: New Book by Professor Oren Falk
Oren Falk's book and research considers the medieval Icelandic sagas as case studies in the violence general to the human experience, arguing that violence, “both perennial and contemporary,” serves as a technique for dealing with uncertainty....
In this book, the Icelandic case studies elaborated reveal the historically specific ways in which such general truisms get acted out in a particular culture. Successive chapters move from the individual level of struggling to survive and assert dominance in a feud, through the sociological level of creating and upholding institutions that will serve elites’ agendas, to the existential level of coming to grips with the harsh environment Icelanders faced, a sputtering volcanic outcrop stuck in the middle of a storm-tossed North Atlantic.
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