This book (or at least the review) might be of interest to some members.

Best wishes,

John
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Sent: Thursday, July 09, 2009 5:07 PM
Subject: H-Net Review Publication: 'State Formation in Medieval Norway:
Strong Kings and Weak Things?'


> Hans Jacob Orning. Unpredictability and Presence: Norwegian Kingship
> in the High Middle Ages. Translated by Alan Crozier. The Northern
> World: North Europe and the Baltic c. 400--1700 AD: Peoples,
> Economies and Cultures. Leiden Brill, 2008. vi + 375 pp. $161.00
> (cloth), ISBN 978-90-04-16661-5.
>
> Reviewed by Shami Ghosh (Centre for Medieval Studies, University of
> Toronto)
> Published on H-German (July, 2009)
> Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
>
> State Formation in Medieval Norway: Strong Kings and Weak Things?
>
> The formation of increasingly centralized monarchies in western
> Europe was arguably one of the most significant transformations in
> medieval European political history, representing a change from a
> system based largely on personal ties between kings and aristocrats
> to a quasi-modern bureaucratic style of government, in which the
> person of the king began to be eclipsed by the royal office. This
> development went furthest in England; Germany, famously and
> controversially, never really managed to unite as a centralized state
> during the Middle Ages. With the exception of Iceland, the
> Scandinavian countries had long had kings by the period discussed in
> the book under review (1177-1263), but the authority of the
> king--like that of all early medieval rulers--depended primarily on
> his ability to enrich his followers and forge alliances with other
> powerful aristocrats, and probably less on the authority of royal
> office. Hans Jacob Orning's often convincing, if sometimes
> problematic monograph argues that although the authority of kingship
> certainly grew during the period in question, kings nevertheless
> ruled only by means of creating a sense of fear among the magnates
> and peasants, enforced by their shifting presence in various parts of
> Norway, and by the fact that the kings' responses to conflicts were
> generally not predictable.
>
> The first chapter presents a lengthy introduction to the theoretical
> background of this work (what Orning defines as the "legal
> anthropological turn" in historical approaches to the Middle Ages),
> and draws significantly on the works of Fredric Cheyette, Paul Hyams,
> and Stephen White, historians of medieval English and French
> institutions and politics, as well as recent work on anger, emotion,
> and ritual in medieval politics. Much of the material in the
> introduction, which surveys the scholarship on patron-client
> networks, itinerant kingship, and interactions between law and
> ritual, will be familiar to medieval historians and scholars of the
> development of state institutions. As the author points out, with the
> significant exception of the many works of William Ian Miller (who
> has worked almost exclusively on Icelandic rather than Norwegian
> sources), Scandinavian historians of this period have not been
> greatly influenced by anthropological approaches to state formation
> and institutional history. Orning's book is intended to rectify this
> gap. He grounds his arguments on the following two bases: first, on
> the difference between absolute and contextual loyalty--while
> normative texts often suggest that some sort of absolute loyalty
> bound aristocrats to kings in this period, other kinds of evidence
> reveal that in fact the bonds were often quite loose, and depended
> largely on the context of interaction between the king and other
> segments of society. Second, Orning argues that loyalty to the king
> was not absolute, but dependent on the king's current presence or
> absence at a particular location; his immediate resources in terms of
> fighting men and supplies for them; and overall, the apparatus of
> power that he could draw on to enforce loyalty on his aristocrats.
> The strength of a monarchy could be said to depend on the king's
> presence and the unpredictability of his response to situations of
> conflict. Although ideological statements about good kingship often
> stressed absolute legal frameworks, in fact, the king was not so
> tightly bound by formal laws, and the king's expression of anger--and
> his resultant actions--could frequently play a significant role in
> enforcing his authority. By the same token, he might choose not to
> act on his anger, but show magnanimity even towards crimes he himself
> proclaimed to be great; this element of unpredictability meant that
> magnates and peasants had to take care in their dealings with kings,
> as they could have no means of knowing how he would react. Needless
> to say, the enforcement of authority along these lines depended on
> the king's physical presence; most medieval monarchies were thus
> itinerant. These ideas, stated briefly in the introduction, are then
> given a detailed exposition in the following chapters.
>
> Orning's presentation of the theoretical background and his main
> arguments seem sound enough, but I have a few concerns: one is that
> the scholarship referred to in the introduction, with the exception
> of work on Norway, is very rarely integrated into the rest of the
> study, leaving something of a gap between the theoretical
> presentation and its actual application to the Norwegian source
> material. Although the conclusion returns to the theoretical
> material, the bulk of the text makes little mention of most of it. A
> possible cause for this difficulty leads to my second concern:
> English and French (and even German) history in the thirteenth
> century can be written on the basis of many overlapping contemporary
> narrative accounts (which often present widely differing
> perspectives), and can also draw on a number of normative sources, as
> well as extant letters and diplomata, that show us what kings
> actually did to rule and resolve conflicts. For Norway, in contrast,
> Orning must rely almost exclusively on a single narrative for the
> reign of each of the two kings who are his primary subjects: Sverrir
> Sigurðsson (1177-1202) and Hákon Hákonarson (1217-63). These
> accounts cannot be judged against alternative perspectives provided
> by other narratives or against contemporary normative sources or
> diplomata, and thus cannot really bring us much beyond the
> propagandists' views of the reigns of Sverrir and Hákon. Thus, while
> Orning's readings of his sources are often quite illuminating, for
> me, at least, the gap between the lacunae of the source base and the
> interpretative burden placed on the extant sources occasionally looks
> like a dangerously dark chasm. (I should note, however, that all
> scholarship on this period of Scandinavian history faces this
> problem.)
>
> Part 1 of the study, consisting of a brief introduction and two
> chapters, is entitled "Ideal Subordination: Obedience and Service,"
> and provides an examination of terms used in a wide variety of
> sources for obedience (Old Norse _lýðni_; Latin _obedentia_) and
> service (Old Norse _þjónusta_; Latin _servitia_). Orning is able to
> show (not very surprisingly) that by the end of the thirteenth
> century, the notion of loyalty to the king was modeled on concepts of
> subservience to God. He suggests, however, that the service to the
> king was not held to be unconditional, but was contextual, depending
> on the extent to which the king was thought to be upholding the law.
> He argues that the "ideological change" of the king being "well on
> the way to becoming a God within his own realm" was "far from being a
> societal reality" (p. 101). This conclusion is in itself difficult to
> find fault with, but I found the argumentation in this part of the
> book quite unsatisfactory: a quantitative analysis of the use of
> particular terms for service and loyalty across texts written over a
> hundred-year period and including historical narratives (sagas),
> laws, homilies, and the genre of _Konungs skuggjá_ (King's Mirror),
> is not really very revealing about the meaning of any of these terms,
> and often the incidence of their use is too slight in any single
> corpus to provide enough interpretative evidence. (I should note too
> that _servitia_ has many more shades of meaning than only those
> adduced by Orning; it would have been worth citing the definitions
> provided by J. F. C. Niermeyer et al., and some of the vast
> scholarship on change in meaning of this word, such as the discussion
> of Hans-Werner Goetz. [1])
>
> The more substantial second part of Orning's study, although not
> without its own methodological problems, presents a far more
> satisfactory, detailed examination of the depiction of conflicts
> between kings and retainers (the "hird"), magnates, and peasants in
> two sagas: _Sverris saga_, written in the years around 1200 (the date
> has been a matter of considerable debate), at least in part by the
> Icelandic bishop, Karl Jónsson; and _Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar_,
> written by the Icelandic chieftain and poet Sturla Þórðarson in
> 1264-65. The author is well aware of the dangers of using narratives
> compiled for royal patronage as a means of judging the relationship
> between the king and those persons and groups he came into conflict
> with, and tries to get around this problem by comparing what he
> defines as the ideological perspective (what is said about conflicts
> and relationships, in the voices of the saga authors or the kings)
> with the practical perspective (what the sagas show people as doing).
> Detailed analyses of the descriptions of many conflicts are the
> foundation of Orning's arguments, and he is able to show, to my mind
> convincingly, that while the kings in the sagas often seem to
> enunciate a notion of kingship based on absolute loyalty to the king
> and founded on law, in fact retainers, magnates, and peasants are
> depicted as having conflicted and shifting loyalties, which the king
> must in every case actively strive to retain. While the kings often
> appear to claim absolute loyalty, magnates and peasants are depicted
> as surprised and recalcitrant when faced with such claims; in many
> cases, they dispute kings' accusations of disloyalty, claiming that
> they never really did anything conflicting with the kings' interests.
> From the sagas' own narratives of the conflicts between the king and
> his various client groups, it becomes obvious that despite claims to
> a legal (and by the end of this period, also divinely sanctioned)
> title over all of Norway, kings had to engage in the often rather
> messy politics of patronage, and in the case of peasants, of threats,
> plunder, and pillage, in order to ensure the military and financial
> support of their people. This support was constantly under debate, as
> other potential contenders for loyalty were present at each level.
> Magnates, for example, could transfer their loyalty to another king,
> who might claim equal legitimacy; peasants might be more interested
> in how the local--and therefore more often present--magnates would
> treat them, than in the demands and threats of the normally distant
> king. Thus, the king constantly had to enforce his claims to
> rulership by means of punitive action against the recalcitrant, but
> also by showing his magnanimity.
>
> It was a difficult line to walk: excessively harsh measures would
> turn people away, but exaggerated mildness could lead to a lack of
> fear and an erosion of support. After all, potential clients would
> see no reason to pay taxes or provide military support to a king
> thought incapable of doing anything to those who did not favor him. A
> similar conflict arose in situations of war: the king had to permit
> his men to plunder, both for food but also for booty, as enriching
> oneself by looting was one of the main incentives to fight, and
> forbidding it would undermine the king's support among his own men.
> On the other hand, allowing excessive plunder could lead to such a
> high level of resentment among the plundered that the region would
> never properly come under the king's control. The narratives studied
> by Orning show how Sverrir and Hákon dealt with these conflicting
> claims, and Orning is able to demonstrate effectively that the sagas
> present Sverrir as generally attempting to take a less compromising
> and more forceful approach, though he always had more conflicts to
> deal with, whereas Hákon is shown as facing less trouble at home,
> where he tended to have his will enforced without much opposition.
> However, he follows Sverrir's harsher methods abroad. Both kings
> often had to concede much ground to their opponents, and Orning is
> right to point out that the sagas' portrayals of the kings' clemency
> in fact betrays "not so much an expression of [their] all-embracing
> power as a sign of [their] lack of power" (p. 192). Despite the
> claims made on behalf of the kings in the sagas, which made magnates
> and peasants culpable for disloyalty, "in practice the kings did not
> act on the basis of a dichotomous and absolute model of loyalty
> whereby loyal supporters were included and disloyal men were
> excluded" (p. 225). The kings had to take what they could get, and
> compromise, even with those they had accused of being disloyal, if
> they wanted to maintain their power.
>
> On the whole, Orning's work is sound, as far as his exposition of the
> narratives of the sagas is concerned. Nonetheless, a number of
> methodological problems arise because he is not content with simply
> showing what the sagas say, but also intends to arrive at some
> conclusions regarding the actual evolution of the institution of
> kingship in Norway in this period. Orning points out himself that in
> _Sverris saga_, Sverrir is shown as facing many more conflicts and
> revolts than Hákon in _Hákonar saga_; the reason is that the author
> wants to depict Sverrir as providentially favored to the extent that
> he can overcome all opposition, whereas Sturla, the author of the
> later saga, wanted to present Hákon as an idealized _rex iustus_ who
> faced very little opposition. Both sagas were written in support of
> the respective kings; few other narrative sources survive concerning
> the reigns of Sverrir and Hákon. Furthermore, the extant Norwegian
> laws date largely from after Orning's period, as does the _King's
> Mirror_. In order to assess the actual level of conflict, the extent
> to which magnates and peasants opposed the kings by stepping outside
> the bounds of the law, and the ways in which kings dealt with
> conflicts, Orning is dependent almost exclusively on texts that one
> could justifiably read as propaganda instruments for those very
> kings.
>
> An example of Orning's own difficulty in dealing with the biases of
> the sources occurs at pp. 135-36, where he says that the different
> presentations of the relationships between king and followers in the
> two sagas stem from the biases of the saga authors: "For Karl
> Jónsson it was a matter of exaggerating the opposition that Sverre
> encountered, because this opposition was a matter of his shrewdness.
> For Sturla Þórðarson, on the other hand, opposition to Håkon was
> a sign that he was not entitled to be king, and this consequently had
> to be minimized" (p. 135). But on the very next page, referring to
> the two kings' difficulties in gaining support, Orning says that "the
> fact that such situations occurred less often during Håkon's reign
> than in Sverre's is a sign that Håkon was more securely in power
> than Sverre had been" (p. 136). But, as Orning himself had pointed
> out on the previous page, the depiction of Hákon as more secure
> itself stems from Sturla's specific purposes in writing his saga; we
> cannot claim, then, on the basis of the differences between the two
> sagas, that the later king was in fact more secure in his rule, as
> Orning seems to do here. This tension between an understandable
> desire to arrive at some sort of conclusions regarding actual fact
> and the constraints imposed by the nature of the source material is
> never fully resolved by Orning (see, for example, pp. 152-53, 160,
> 181, 183, 193, 197-98, 286, 326-26, and 336-42, for further examples
> of Orning's difficulties with the problem of reconciling the bias of
> the sources with "fact"), and his conclusions are somewhat undermined
> by the fact that the sagas do not actually present any clear
> ideological statements regarding absolute loyalty to the king. Even
> the analyses from what Orning calls the "practical perspective" do
> not really help us to get behind the saga authors' intentions. The
> ideological perspective that Orning examines consists largely of the
> saga authors' reports of what service and loyalty the king believes
> is due him, and the saga authors' occasional statements regarding
> justice can only be read as reflecting the perspective of (or at the
> very least, firmly in support of) the king. No objective and
> independent concept of kingship exists against which one can judge
> the narratives presented in the sagas with a view to assessing what
> sort of notion of monarchy was actually present in thirteenth-century
> Norway. The intentions of the saga authors are, to put it very
> plainly, simple enough. In both cases, the authors wished to show the
> respective kings as powerful and legitimate rulers, who, despite
> opposition from various quarters, successfully quashed conflicts and
> managed to rule vigorously over Norway. It is more than possible that
> certain conflicts were exaggerated in order to glorify the kings'
> achievements in overcoming them more effectively, and others were
> quietly swept under the carpet; we have no independent witnesses for
> most of the events discussed. If the king is shown as sometimes harsh
> and sometimes magnanimous, this portrayal does not necessarily mean
> that his actions were actually so unpredictable. After all, the
> narrative is shaped by the author of the relevant saga, whose purpose
> is to show how the king manages to gain the upper hand. In fact, it
> seems to me equally possible to conclude from these sources that the
> king was more harsh when he could get away with it (that is, against
> peasants in peripheral regions and less powerful magnates), and
> magnanimous when his opponents had considerable power.
>
> For example, Hákon's harsh reaction to Snorri Sturluson's departure
> from Norway without royal permission (according to the narrative of
> the saga) is justified, from a purely pragmatic point of view, by the
> fact that Snorri was embattled at home in Iceland; the king would
> have relatively little to fear from him. On the other hand, when
> Sverrir was magnanimous towards Bishop Nikolas, he must have taken
> into account not only the latter's close connections to other
> powerful men in Norway, but also the fact that going against a bishop
> could be--and for Sverrir had been--potentially harmful in terms of
> relations with the increasingly powerful clergy, and also the papacy,
> which was taking a greater interest in the northern provinces of the
> church than ever before. If the king could use the rhetoric of
> religious justification for his rule, he would have been aware that
> his opponents could also use similar arguments against him if he were
> seen as attacking the church. Thus, the "unpredictability" of the
> king was probably dependent on careful calculation; the same
> calculations could and would have been made by others, too, and the
> saga authors probably underplay the extent to which the kings'
> actions were in fact determined by forces literally out of their
> control, but in the control of magnates. In other words, even if the
> sagas depict the kings' actions as often "unpredictable" (and I am
> not fully convinced that this is the most useful way of describing
> the sagas' portrayals of royal behavior), this portrayal does not
> mean that the kings were in fact "unpredictable." Certainly
> "presence," the second part of Orning's title, was a key factor in
> enforcing royal power--and it must have been so in a premodern
> society with often very limited communications and little historical
> tradition of strong vertical hierarchies. Orning is right to point
> out that in the sagas, conflict more often breaks out in the
> peripheral regions, where the kings spent less time; it occurs
> because of the lack of the kings' presence, which led to less ability
> on their part to engender a sense of loyalty. Once more, though, it
> seems to me possible that in fact more conflict took place, even at
> the center, than is depicted in the narratives--though in this case,
> given what we know of the technologies of travel and communication in
> this period, it is indeed most likely that the sagas' perspective of
> greater royal control at the center and looser bonds in the regions
> where there was less frequent royal presence does indeed reflect
> reality.
>
> A further problem, not really given much consideration by Orning, is
> that both works were composed by Icelanders. Iceland, settled by
> Norway many centuries earlier, was increasingly coming under the
> domination of the Norwegian king, and by Sturla's time, it had
> effectively become a part of Norway. But Icelandic magnates gained
> status in Iceland not least by stressing their honorable reception in
> Norway; it was in their interests to cultivate good relations with
> the kings, even if back home, the Norwegian kings were viewed rather
> differently from the perspective adopted by their Icelandic
> biographers at court. Orning makes some acknowledgement of this
> constellation of relations in his discussion of the relationship
> between the king and the Icelandic magnates, for which he draws also
> on a section of _Sturlunga saga_, which was, like _Hákonar saga_,
> composed by Sturla Þórðarson, and shows far less concern with
> stressing loyalty to the king. In it, the king appears more as one
> factor in the internal politics between the Icelandic magnates in
> Iceland, and less as the driving force behind political events. Since
> he has two independent and somewhat divergent sources for the same
> events, Orning is able here to adopt a far more critical stance with
> regard to the factuality of the saga accounts, and this section of
> the study is indeed quite illuminating in showing the difference
> between an Icelandic and a Norwegian perspective on loyalty to the
> king. Nevertheless, more attention could perhaps be given to the
> function of Icelanders as the producers of Norway's royal history,
> and the consequences of this pattern in our assessment of the
> historical veracity of the sagas of Norwegian kings; after all, as
> Orning himself notes, _Íslendinga saga_, the section of _Sturlunga
> saga_ that he compares with _Hákonar saga_, was also composed by
> Sturla. What does it mean when the same Icelandic author gives us an
> "Icelandic" and a "Norwegian" perspective on kingship in different
> texts? Orning responds to this quandary by writing that Sturla was
> "Icelandified" when he returned to Iceland, and that "when Sturla
> wrote as the king's chronicler he adopted the king's perspective, but
> when writing as one of the Icelandic chieftains, he depicted events
> from their standpoint" (p. 255). Surely more remains to be said about
> this, at the very least on the implications such a
> quasi-schizophrenic mentality has on notions of authorship,
> authenticity, and historical truth--and on how much of the sagas we
> are willing to accept as trustworthy.
>
> Orning's view, that the relationship between the kings and the
> Icelandic magnates was very similar to that between the kings and the
> Norwegian magnates, also needs to be tempered by awareness that
> Iceland had been independent for centuries, ruled by a conglomerate
> of magnates assembling annually in the parliament (Allthing), for
> which there was really no equivalent in Norway. It is thus quite
> likely that Icelandic magnates had a far greater perception of their
> own independence from royal interference than did their Norwegian
> counterparts. The Icelandic perspective on kingship, as expressed not
> least in the sagas Orning analyzes, could be a reflex of the fact
> that Icelanders might have managed to maintain their independence at
> least in part by building up considerable status in the Scandinavian
> world through their function as court retainers who preserved
> (flattering) histories of kings. To what extent, one might ask, was
> the independence of the Icelanders dependent on their success as
> royal panegyrists (the skalds) and biographers (the saga-authors)?
> With the annexation of Iceland, the production of Icelandic works on
> Norwegian history also draws to a close: is it worth asking,
> therefore, whether Icelandic authorship of the sagas in question
> contributed to the view of kingship, and of the Norwegian (as opposed
> to Icelandic) magnates opposed to the kings?
>
> These many concerns notwithstanding, Orning's monograph is certainly
> a useful and often insightful analysis of the way the institution of
> kingship is depicted in _Sverris saga_ and _Hákonar saga
> Hákonarsonar_; it is, to my mind at least, of somewhat less value as
> a window into actual processes of state formation in Norway in this
> period, and does not really do much in the way of integrating the
> study of Norwegian political history with that of the rest of Europe,
> or of making real links between the vast scholarship on the growth
> and nature of kingship in (especially) medieval England and France
> and developments in Norway. It should also be noted that the work has
> not been copyedited very well--even the blurb on the back contains a
> grammatical error, and a number of similar mistakes can be found in
> the text. I could also detect no consistent logic behind the author's
> decisions as to when to cite the primary source along with a
> translation, and when just the translation alone; in a number of
> instances, I would have wished to see the original as well (though
> the translations from Old Norse that are given are unproblematic).
> Finally, the publisher's Web site notes that the map printed in the
> volume is incorrect; a correct map may be downloaded from the
> following link:
> http://www.brill.nl/downloads/Map-Unpredictability-and-Presence.pdf .
>
> Note
>
> [1]. J. F. C. Niermeyer, C. van de Kieft, and J. W. J. Burgers,
> _Mediae Latinatis Lexikon minus_ (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Hans-Werner
> Goetz, "Serfdom and the Beginnings of a 'Seigneurial System' in the
> Carolingian Period: A Survey of the Evidence," _Early Medieval
> Europe_ 2 (1993): 29-51.
>
> Citation: Shami Ghosh. Review of Orning, Hans Jacob,
> _Unpredictability and Presence: Norwegian Kingship in the High Middle
> Ages_. H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2009.
> URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24881
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.
>
>