Tuesday, 13 October 2020

Attitudes And Explanations

"The Man Who Came Early."

"'I'm not staying near a man under a curse!' yelped Sigurd, and started to run away.
"'Come back!' I bawled. 'Stand where you are or I'll cleave your louse-bitten head.'
"That stopped him,..." (p. 190)
 
Why?
 
"...for he had no kin who would avenge him..." (ibid.)
 
So, otherwise, Sigurd might have kept running in the hope that the threat of vengeance would restrain Ospak? Just as we can usually assume that the threat of legal consequences restrains our contemporaries from violence?

The temporally displaced man had been out in a thunderstorm and there had also been a great thunderstorm the previous night in 998. It seems appropriate to hypothesize that there was some kind of transtemporal link between the two storms. And Ospak finds a plausible explanation:

"'Maybe Thor's hammer knocked you from your place to here.'" (ibid.)

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Yes, the laws and customs of Ospak's time and ours would sometimes restrain the peoples of those times. In differing ways, of course.

Ad astra! Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

The Lex Talonis of blood vengeance is the default state for humanity. It works but not really very well.

State-level systems essentially “nationalize violence” — with the usual result for nationalization; there’s less, and it costs more.

IIRC, pagan Norsemen also believed that if not avenged the ghost of someone killed will ‘walk’ and be unquiet.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Mr. Stirling!

And the Icelandic version Lex Talionis was breaking down by AD 1180, as the Sturlung Age began, bitter factional strife and feuds between rival chiefs and their clans.

Your last comment reminded me of Anderson's "The Tale of Hauk," set not long before the unification of Norway by Harald Fairhair. Albeit, the "walking dead" man had not been slain but died embittered and resentful of his "straw death."

Ad astra! Sean