Where the Middle Ages Begin
The relationship between friendship and politics in medieval Europe can appear to be fundamentally different from that experienced in modern societies. Friendship has, for some time, been recognised by medievalists as having an integral place in the formation of social bonds and political groupings and as contributing to the creation and maintenance of political order…
My reflections are part of a broad stream of inquiries into the world of medieval rituals which has proved to be very fertile during the last two decades, but which also has its limits. For more than twenty years now, medievalists have discovered and analysed the importance of personal relationships for the organization of societies before the existence of states in a modern sense of the word.
A major goal of this thesis is to not only interpret the representations of women from these sagas, but also to place these representations in the context of the time and the writers. Icelanders wrote these sagas a couple centuries after the Viking age ended and are based nearly entirely on oral tradition.
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