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.

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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

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