One deeply impressive thing is that all of this stuff was kept alive for a hundred years or more by oral historian bards before it was written down. Think of that when the reviewer quotes a massive genealogy!
And let's not get too warm and fuzzy about "freedom". There seems to have quite commonly been genuine slavery in Iceland (see "Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas, and Power" by Jesse L. Byock) and there was in the Norse society that they fled. The sagas seem to tell only about the "freemen", who were the landholders at the top of each farm, who were almost always men. Of course, they were the only ones admitted to the legal institutions that the sagas were written about. But there were also lots of other dependents: servants, dependent relatives, and the women of all these categories. Their fates seem to have been controlled by the landholder. There doesn't seem to be a lot written about the women, but I suspect the women of de-facto high status (close relatives of landholders, landholders' wives, etc.) probably had an unrecognized network that wielded considerable power, as seems to be true in most societies. In all of this, they seem to have resembled ancient Athens, as the reviewer says.
I like the fact that often characters face the choice: Do I cleave Gunnar's head with an axe, or do I marry my daughter to his son? As if the only way to not live at daggers-drawn is by creating kinship. Then I realized that this resembled Medieval nobles. So it's probably ancient in humans.
It's a massive over-simplification*, but I sometimes humorously think about that "cleave head versus intermarry" question as the conflict between humanity's chimp and bonobo instincts. Personally I prefer Team Bonobo most of the time...
(* And not evolutionarily accurate since we have a _common ancestor_ with chimps and bonobos. It's not like we _descend_ from either.)
One deeply impressive thing is that all of this stuff was kept alive for a hundred years or more by oral historian bards before it was written down. Think of that when the reviewer quotes a massive genealogy!
And let's not get too warm and fuzzy about "freedom". There seems to have quite commonly been genuine slavery in Iceland (see "Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas, and Power" by Jesse L. Byock) and there was in the Norse society that they fled. The sagas seem to tell only about the "freemen", who were the landholders at the top of each farm, who were almost always men. Of course, they were the only ones admitted to the legal institutions that the sagas were written about. But there were also lots of other dependents: servants, dependent relatives, and the women of all these categories. Their fates seem to have been controlled by the landholder. There doesn't seem to be a lot written about the women, but I suspect the women of de-facto high status (close relatives of landholders, landholders' wives, etc.) probably had an unrecognized network that wielded considerable power, as seems to be true in most societies. In all of this, they seem to have resembled ancient Athens, as the reviewer says.
I like the fact that often characters face the choice: Do I cleave Gunnar's head with an axe, or do I marry my daughter to his son? As if the only way to not live at daggers-drawn is by creating kinship. Then I realized that this resembled Medieval nobles. So it's probably ancient in humans.
It's a massive over-simplification*, but I sometimes humorously think about that "cleave head versus intermarry" question as the conflict between humanity's chimp and bonobo instincts. Personally I prefer Team Bonobo most of the time...
(* And not evolutionarily accurate since we have a _common ancestor_ with chimps and bonobos. It's not like we _descend_ from either.)