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From: The Medieval Review
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Subject: TMR 15.02.07 Meylan, Magic and Kingship in Medieval Iceland 
(Oberlin)

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Meylan, Nicolas. <i>Magic and Kingship in Medieval Iceland: The Construction 
of a Discourse of Political Resistance</i>. Studies in Viking and Medieval 
Scandinavia, 3. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Pp. x, 232. €75.00. ISBN: 
978-250-3551-579.

   Adam Oberlin
        Universitetet i Bergen / The Linsly School
        [log in to unmask]


Nicolas Meylan develops an approach to magic in thirteenth- and 
fourteenth-century Icelandic texts as it relates to political discourses, 
particularly kingship, across six chapters: (1) Theorizing Magic, (2) The 
Vocabulary of Old Norse Magic, (3) Magic, Discourse of Invective, (4) Magic, 
Discourse of Power, (5) Magic, Kings, and Poetry, and (6) Miracles, Saints, 
and Magic. While previous studies of magic in Old Icelandic texts and 
culture have focused on ritual and practitioners, this book provides 
performative analyses of magic's role in the textual representations of 
political life. In this respect Meylan has succeeded in advancing the 
theoretical range of an old topic that generally looks either backwards from 
the period of textual composition to mythological-religious origins and 
connections, for instance, to shamanism, or forward to early modern 
Scandinavia in the age of the pan-European witch hunts.

The first chapter (<i>Theorizing Magic</i>) positions "magic as discourse" 
against the historical (and broader social-science oriented) search for 
origins, description of practices, and cataloguing and analysis of 
accusations that dominate within the larger field and in studies of the 
Scandinavian world. In this discursive sense Meylen connects the textual 
world to the political, in which magic is "a dynamic, socially constructed, 
and historically determined social practice (not to be confused with the 
putative actual practice of magic)," ultimately part of a common, shared 
definition of magic vis-à-vis religion within the medieval Scandinavian 
society (11). Turning to a survey of previous studies embedded in lexical or 
categorical approaches, the author selects the English word <i>magic</i> as 
an umbrella for the rich vernacular vocabulary presented in the second 
chapter. The sources of Old Norse-Icelandic magic employed here include 
prose (sagas of all genres and legal texts) and poetry (skaldic and eddic), 
with the exclusion of runic "texts."

From a lexical perspective the world of Old Norse magic was already highly 
developed by the time it became part of the written record, which is evident 
not only in the profusion of terms but also in their apparent gradations of 
meaning. Leaving aside the philological approach as a means to describe 
origins or practices, Meylan discusses these terms in the second chapter 
(<i>The Vocabulary of Old Norse Magic</i>) in the Christian context of their 
use and their shifting, sometimes porous boundaries, in order to situate 
them within a discourse of knowledge and power. Vernacular terms can operate 
both as glosses for much-discussed Latin terms, such as <i>maleficus</i>  or 
<i>incantatio</i> in <i>Stjórn</i>, and indigenously, but the latter only 
within the milieu already established by associations with literary language 
and later models of thought about magic. <i>Magic and Kingship in Medieval 
Iceland</i> reaches to the heart of this dense topic with an overview of the 
major terms and their stakes and offers on occasion new ideas about them 
based on brief readings of textual passages. These skeletal suggestions are 
given flesh in subsequent chapters.

Turning to the anthropological construction of accusation discourses, the 
third chapter (<i>Magic, Discourse of Invective</i>) provides arguments for 
magic as a means to explaining otherwise ignominious royal defeats and prop 
up the institution of Norwegian kingship and royal legitimacy. Extended 
readings of lexemes, events, and contexts in <i>Grettis saga</i>, 
<i>Grágás</i>, and several other texts support the notion that magic was 
used by those in power (viewed on the side of religion) as an explanation 
for setbacks from those in lesser positions (viewed on the side on 
anti-religion), and, furthermore, served as legitimization for that most 
powerful of medieval Nordic disgraces, outlawry and its attendant dishonor.

Opposite negative discourses are those of magic as power, which also appear 
in the fourth chapter (<i>Magic, Discourse of Power</i>) in first-person 
contexts apart from the implicit condemnation by association from the 
previous discussion. One example comes from <i>Raudúlfs tháttr</i> in a 
fourteenth-century manuscript of St. Olaf's saga in which one Raudúlfr 
bóndi, despite his lowly status, impresses Óláfr with his ability to make 
pronouncements about the future. A question arises of this power's origin – 
prophecy or magic – and the king decides that it cannot be magic because his 
host is a good Christian. Raudúlfr counters that his powers come from 
certain "natural" phenomena, among them dreams, astrology, and observation. 
There certainly is space within this discourse for a positive reading of 
magic as power, particularly as the power of knowledge, but this section 
appears somewhat more tenuous than the previous set of accusatorial 
invectives. The author, understanding myth in a sense that has long been 
operational (i.e., myth as living discourse and ideology within a society 
rather than a cataloguing of deity stories), considers that the situation of 
magic in the Poetic Edda may reflect a temporal distancing that removes the 
actors from Christian condemnation, which is later taken up as a speculative 
answer to power--the powerless could have constructed alternate, positive 
definitions of magic, enfranchising the inhabitants of what the Norwegians 
viewed as a remote and simple colony. There is, however, need for this type 
of speculation within Old Norse studies, particularly as they continue to 
move toward the present of composition and textual production and ever 
further away from the mythic or settlement periods.

In the fifth chapter (<i>Magic, Kings, and Poetry</i>), Icelandic reactions 
to Norwegian power are again the subject, though here in the spaces provided 
by a "slippage between [magic] and another—legitimate--category, poetry" 
(126). After a brief introduction to the history and contemporary 
historiography of Hákon Hákonarson's acquisition of Iceland and his policies 
toward it, Meylan discusses the discourses of magic present in the Prose 
Edda, <i>Egils saga</i>, and <i>Thorleifs tháttr jarlaskálds</i>. These 
texts present subversive models, for example, the deluding of a king in 
<i>Gylfaginning</i> through magic is yet an endorsement of the "power of 
persuasion" (137), also set in opposition through the illusions in the tale 
of Útgardaloki. Egill and his saga is likewise viewed through a group of 
oppositions (gender, location, use or lack of magic, etc.) with a clear link 
to poetry. The third text, <i>Thorleifs tháttr</i>, deals with an Icelander 
who exacts his revenge on a Norwegian <i>jarl</i> with a <i>drápa</i> of 
decidedly disreputable content and an itching curse, only to be killed in 
retaliation by a magical automaton of driftwood. Together, these three 
examples offer a subversive space in which Icelanders could equate 
literature with contemporary political situations and feelings of 
powerlessness, practice magic of a poetic nature and thus isolated from 
certain types of Christian condemnation, and nevertheless retain distance 
between religion and demonic or other forms of magic.

Finally, chapter six (<i>Miracles, Saints, and Magic</i>) links the 
construction of a politicized discourse of magic from previous chapters to 
the fourteenth-century Icelandic church, specifically in the creation of the 
L recension of <i>Jóns saga helga</i> as a hagiographical legitimation of 
the northern Icelanders' desired saint. Several episodes are read as 
intertextually magical, alluding to Odin, magical gestures, and other 
devices familiar to Icelanders from saga literature and eddic texts 
generally, but not overt in such a way as to arouse suspicion of Jón's 
holiness.  Answering the question of these tropes' survival as an 
ideological reflection in the affirmative, Meylan notes that the central 
opposition remains firmly against Norwegian royalty and that Jón, in the 
discursive realm of textual magic, is free to condemn sorcery as negative 
religion while exercising a saintly power reminiscent of magic in more than 
mere form.

The book provides a brief summary and conclusion, a thorough bibliography, 
and an index. While some of the readings and connections will appeal to a 
greater or lesser extent according to a reader's inclination toward 
speculation, this reader finds the whole to be a well-argued contribution to 
the world of medieval Icelandic textual composition and transmission and to 
studies of magic in the medieval North. The book stands on its own merits 
but is also a good addition to other recent works on magic in medieval 
Scandinavia. [1] The core opposition--the powerful (Norway) and the 
powerless (Iceland)--is in fact a widespread motif in disparate textual 
records and genres and takes no special pleading to serve as a viable source 
of analogy. Ultimately, Meylan has provided thoughtful reflections on the 
possibilities found in the interstices between magic and poetry, magic and 
religion, and practice and discourse.


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Note:

1. For example, Stephen A. Mitchell, <i>Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic 
Middle Ages</i> (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
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