ATTITUDES TOWARD VIOLENCE AND THE RESTRAINT THEREOF IN EARLY SCANDINAVIA AND AMONG THE EARLY CHRISTIANS
This research paper examines the role of violence and its restraint in early Scandinavian society and the contrasting attitudes of the early Christians to violence under Roman rule in the early third century A.D. These two societies had diametrically opposed attitudes toward violence and its control.
The Icelandic saga, Gunnlaug Wormtongue, concerns a late 10th century blood feud between young rival suitors, Gunnlaug Wormtongue, the son of Ilugi the Black, a Norse chieftain in Iceland, and Hrafn, the son of Onund, a local high priest, for the hand of the beautiful Helga, daughter of Thorstein Egilsson, another chieftain. Helga is pledged in marriage by her father to both protagonists. Gunnlaug fails to return from his foreign travels within the time specified by her father so Hrafn's later vows take precedence over his. Helga marries Hrafn. Passionately devoted to Helga and she to him, Gunnlaug challenges Hrafn to a fight to the death, which takes place on an island off the Norwegian coast. Both rivals and their cohorts are killed in sword fights. Since Hrafn used trickery to kill Gunnlaug, Gunnlaug's family takes homicidal revenge on the Onunds.
Violence played an important role in early Scandinavian society. It was controlled largely by a strict code of family honor and law at home and by providing outlets for it abroad in the form of Viking raids on northern Europe. Other restraints, which are mentioned but understated in the saga, were bringing it under greater control in Iceland by the late 10th century.
In the harsh, icy climes of the north, the Germanic tribes which settled in Scandinavia developed by the sixth or seventh centuries into a warrior-farmer caste society. Scandinavian society valued in its leadership class (of which the protagonists in the saga were a part) courage, daring, passion, contempt fo...