Taking the story of how Harald Fairhair unified Norway in the ninth century as its central example, Bruce Lincoln examines narratives of state-formation as an unstable genre situated between history and myth, where multiple variants of the stories sometimes celebrate the heroic state-founder and the kingship he established, while others reveal the more disquieting aspects of establishing kingship (e.g., violence, ambition, chicanery, and ingratitude), and the necessary restructuring of society (e.g., legal procedures, ...
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Taking the story of how Harald Fairhair unified Norway in the ninth century as its central example, Bruce Lincoln examines narratives of state-formation as an unstable genre situated between history and myth, where multiple variants of the stories sometimes celebrate the heroic state-founder and the kingship he established, while others reveal the more disquieting aspects of establishing kingship (e.g., violence, ambition, chicanery, and ingratitude), and the necessary restructuring of society (e.g., legal procedures, property rights, kinship, the military, and administrative systems) in order to produce a more powerful state. Lincoln looks closely at how purported secondary characters and side incidents are treated in variations of the stories to reveal a pattern whereby texts written in Iceland were more critical and infinitely more subtle than those produced in Norway, reflecting the fact that the former had a dual audience, not just the Norwegian court, but also Icelanders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, whose ancestors had fled from Harald and founded the only non-monarchic, indeed anti-monarchic, state in medieval Europe. The book will be read by specialists in Scandinavian literature and history, but also those with an interest in methods to distinguish between official, revisionist, and critical history more broadly and in other historical and geographical contexts.
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