The domestication of anxiety – Handling contingency in medieval Icelandic literature

Medieval Icelandic literature, saga literature in particular, is often said to be composed along predefined structural and thematic patterns, which would reflect the actual nature of society in the medieval North. Saga scholarship has tried to demonstrate how the observing of certain rules in society and politics, or their breaking, would entail a predictable outcome—and predictability, after all, seems desirable.

However, closer inspection highlights a peculiar ambiguity and even ambivalence: the behavior of many saga characters, and thus their implied impact on society both within and beyond the narrative, seems to be triggered by a deep-rooted feeling of uncertainty rather than any manmade regulations.

This uncertainty becomes apparent in social interaction but is even more significant in the confrontation of man and nature: many events turn out differently than what the saga characters (or the recipient) expected, often due to simple but relentless natural conditions, so much so that at a certain point narration itself seems to become unreliable, with the only rule being unpredictability.

Arguably, this contingent state of being entails a high degree of anxiety among saga characters, resulting in actionism as well as paralyzation, but it may also reveal how medieval Icelandic society itself was goverened by anxiety: saga literature attempts to tame this unsettling feeling through narration, but this domestication, at the same time, inevitably entails the cultivation of anxiety. This indelible ambivalence of hope and fear in human existence, as displayed in and through saga literature, is at the core of my research project.

SOCIETAL IMPACT
The Anxiety Culture Project understands anxiety as a central dynamic in societies of the globalized world. With that said, anxiety is a human constant that has shaped culture throughout time, and this historical dimension has a major share in our understanding of current tendencies as well as possible future developments of anxiety in its interdependency with society. The affiliated project "The domestication of anxiety – Handling contingency in medieval Icelandic literature" aims at analysing the ambivalence of approaching anxiety through narration in a relatively small but with regards to literature extremely productive society in the medieval past. Ever since its comparatively late settlement, Iceland has been a Northern melting pot for indigenous traditions with influences from the East, the South, and the West. Iceland and its particularly rich medieval literature can thus serve as an excellent case study of how anxiety can shape the formation of society throughout history.