Medievalist scholarship on both emotions and gender has been flourishing since the turn of the millennium. In the Norse row of the academic orchard, these two branches are well represented by Sif Ríkharðsdóttir and Gareth Lloyd Evans. In this book, a revised version of his Oxford DPhil thesis, George Manning, indebted to both but in thrall to neither, explicitly identifies his work as “a kind of fusion” (vii) of the former’s masterful synthesis (Emotion in Old Norse Literature 2017) and the latter’s groundbreaking masculine turn (Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders 2019). Manning sets out to portray anger, that most obstreperous of emotions, as constitutive of manliness in the saga world.
After an Introduction providing working definitions, the remaining eight chapters fall into three thematic sections. Part I, “‘Ferreting Out’ Anger,” focuses on how to tell a saga character is ticked off by observing various somatic and behavioral tics. Part II, “Anger and Masculinities,” axial to the argument and longest by page count (sixty-nine), addresses the intersection of the emotion with notions of manliness and with women’s incursions into men’s social territory. Part III, “Anger and Other Identities,” longest by chapter count (four), discusses anger in the contexts of old age, berserkir, and sovereign might, with a Conclusion mostly staking out future research paths. There are no functional visuals—maps, figures, illustrations—but the bibliography (eleven pages in a tight font) and index are robust, and typos are rare throughout; only one or two (“he” referencing Hrappr rather than Hákon, 199; Andersson alphabetized under “Theodore,” 224) struck me as even remotely significant.
Manning’s prose style is generally clear and direct; it occasionally struggles to hold in tension the convoluted niceties of high theory (such as an account of habitus that seems to reduce it to mimesis, 15) and rarely aspires to literary stylishness (though we do learn that Njáll’s sons apply “follicular fertilizer” to their faces, 82, a turn of phrase sure to make every reader’s heart sing). The author’s own (or adapted) English translations accompany Old Norse quotations, both in the body of the text itself—an honest, responsible organizational choice.
Manning knows his Íslendingasögur inside and out, gliding easily from text to text and from broad generalizations to close-ups on individual words or scenes. His extensive (if almost entirely anglophone) secondary bibliography includes—besides an impressive array of Nordicist scholarship—works in psychology, sociology, political science (183n13 stands out), and gender studies. Even readers immersed in the sagas will benefit from Manning’s haul: that more than a third of all corpus attestations of reiðr (and related lexemes) refer to the anger of kings and jarls was news to me (208). Such suggestive insights into the saga authors’ craftwork indicate that Manning controls a substantial database, apt to be mined for further nuggets—both raw stats and useful contextual and proximal associations. Quantitative analysis mostly occurs offstage, however, in Manning’s notes and in the scholarship he references (such as Edel Porter and Teo Manrique Antón’s extensively mined “Flushing in Anger” 2015). In the present text, he is more interested in qualitative interpretation, and here—there is no easy way to say this—he is just not as proficient.
The book’s basic thesis ties anger to “sociocultural identity [:] different groups of characters grow angry in different ways, adhering [to] different emotive scripts” (211). At this level of abstraction, the thesis strikes me as fairly unobjectionable. My perceptive colleague, the late Paul Hyams, would have pricked up his ears at the word “script,” however. To him, it flagged an inclination towards mechanistic explanation, reducing complex social behavior to predictable coding sequence: the very antithesis of the context-specific nuance that is the soul of humanistic scholarship.
Manning deduces a baseline script of male anger—what he, with Evans, dubs “hegemonic masculinity”—from Skarpheðinn’s famous retort to his mother’s goading, [e]kki hǫfu vér kvenna skap...at vér reiðimsk við ǫllu, “we do not have the disposition of women, that we become angry over everything” (Njáls saga cap. 44; 81). He takes this injunction, pretty much at face value, as an extension of hóf, “moderation,” which Andersson long ago diagnosed as a virtue (some) sagas extoll (87). Manning thus paints the male paradigm as rejecting, suppressing, or transcending anger. Various subscripts flow from this idealized default: men aspire to stoicism when provoked; getting angry, let alone showing it, is emasculating; and vengeance, ideally served cold, can buff out dings to one’s manliness (as per Grettir’s no-less famous proverb, [þ]ræll einn þegar hefnisk, en argr aldri, “only a slave takes vengeance immediately, but an [effeminate coward] never,” Grettis saga cap. 15; 92). To account for the substantial incidence of men who do not live up to this stoic ideal (without however plunging irrevocably into an abyss of emasculation), as well as for quite a few women who do, Manning comes up with further subscripts: female masculinity (channeling Jack Halberstam more than Evans, 114); the “senescent masculine ideal” (152, perhaps paralleled by a juvenile variant, 213); berserksgangr (defined as a distinct emotion, related to anger but not identical with it, 168); and a regal mode equated with Gerd Althoff’s “rulership practice” (182). Though not exhaustive, these alternatives allow for plenty of tinkering.
Unfortunately, Anger in the Sagas of Icelanders bears out Hyams’s suspicions about scriptural readings. Rather than treat the subtypes as a palette from which to mix characterization hues and shades, Manning handles them as a set of black-and-white binaries for voting individuals and groups in or out of absolute categories: such-and-such “demonstrate their adherence to emotive scripts unique to their sociocultural identities” or “are excluded from pursuit of the hegemonic masculine ideal” (148, 179, emphases added). The result is a digital, pixelated rendition of stand-alone social rubrics, where an analogue continuum is called for to allow them to intermingle, overlap, and smudge into each other.
Having rejected nuance, Manning repeatedly misreads both medieval and scholarly texts. Silent fuming is mistaken for even-headed calm (e.g. 83); when “the author does not describe Grettir as growing angry, and emphatically states” that he kills a man with a single blow, Manning takes it as indication of Grettir’s “emotional self-restraint” rather than of prodigious strength (95). When an irate sailor braut skipit við klett, “wrecked the ship on the rocks,” the active-voice verb is taken as confirmation that rage drove him to suicide (99); similar constructions are in fact commonplace (e.g. Njáls saga cap. 159: þeir...brutu þar skipit allt í span, en þó varð mannbjǫrg, “they wrecked the ship to slivers there, but all aboard were rescued”). Where Helga Kress makes a defensible argument for reading a ship as an ersatz penis in the context of legendary narratives of giantesses sinking male-piloted vessels (“Taming the Shrew” 2002, 85), here, this identity hardens into an absolute, even when context makes it nonsensical (145). Misunderstanding performativity—which, in Judith Butler’s well-known formulation, means that a supposedly internal essence does not pre-exist its expression but is manufactured through the very gestures in which it is expressed (Gender Trouble 1999, 185)—Manning takes Roderick Dale to be arguing that berserkir “deliberately willed [an] exaggerated or feigned emotionality as a means to an end” (172); the latter, in fact, speaks of the berserksgangr as akin to “a Maori haka...with a clear effect of bolstering the confidence of the performer while intimidating the opponent” (The Myths and Realities of the Viking berserkr 2022, 150). Manning moreover routinely conflates anger with aggression (50, 52, 57, 73), reads diverse negative interactions as emasculating (130-31, 177-78), and glibly glosses any and every thing—a sword (but also a spear and Þórr’s hammer), a beard, an augur, but also the womblike ship it might drill into—as phallic symbols (144-45; elsewhere also a staff and crutches, 84, 153). Freud rejoices.
The thread common to all these missteps is an inability or unwillingness to allow for contextual variability and gradation. Categories should be tools of convenience, calibrated (or swapped) to fit the task at hand; for Manning, they become straitjackets. Emotions may surely be put on or dialed up for show—“performance” in Manning’s theatrical sense—but they can also be equivocal, fluid, undecided (even for the emoting person herself), and subject to circumstantial engineering, willed or involuntary, by self or others. Manning’s conceptualization of gender provides the clearest illustration of his unfortunate rigidity. To vie for hegemonic masculinity, men must disavow anger; if they cannot, the best they can reach for is some secondary masculine script. Women, in contrast, “are privileged insomuch as they can oscillate between different emotive scripts” (148). Bizarrely, then, Manning is led to conclude that saga women could access the full range of emotions—were fully human, in other words—while men had to remain siloed within their narrow, mutually exclusive normative scripts. Such a typology simply does not accord with the rich, subtle, and variegated portraits the sagas furnish us with, of both remarkable women and memorable men—let alone with lived experience.
The outcome is at times self-contradiction: Kveld-Úlfr and his kin are at the same time berserkir (178) and similar to, but distinct from, berserkir (174-75). Other outliers are just exceptions: Guðrún Ósvífsdóttir defies categorization because her “emotional sobriety is unusually sustained and consistent” (142). But even when the system coheres, it is at best simplistic: binary emotions can only be either authentic or simulated (e.g. 59, 69, 179), never complicated, and social scripts can only either permit or prohibit them (e.g. 111, 160, 204), never debate their propriety. There is all the difference in the world between William Ian Miller’s glossing of Grettir’s proverb as saying that “hasty vengeance was [considered] vulgar” (Bloodtaking and Peacemaking 1990, 193) and Manning’s that “taking vengeance immediately is cowardly” (93). Déclassé behavior is publicly frowned upon by those who consider themselves above it, but it is not therefore abandoned; let him who has never picked his nose at a traffic light cast the first stone. To call a practice “vulgar” is to grudgingly recognize its expedient allure; for Manning, however, craven conduct peremptorily rules out partaking of hegemonic masculinity. At worst, Manning’s vision of emotional life verges on Ptolemaic: “Where female characters...typically goad male characters by emasculating them, the queen instead opts to impugn the king’s authority, thereby corroborating that kings, already in a hegemonic position, are not held accountable to the dictates of the hegemonic masculine ideal like other men” (190). This doubled contortion first pries opprobrium apart from whetting to deny its emasculating edge, then also denies kings access to the dominant behavioral script, precisely on the grounds that they already have dominion to spare. Manning has added enough epicycles to (arguably) rescue the theory, but has shed little light on the enigmatic saga episode under discussion.
Examples could be multiplied, but the overall picture would not change much. The wrath of Skarpheðinn, sweating bullets as he claps feeble misogyny back at his vicious mother, must be rendered as equanimity, else the construct of a paradigmatic anger script might implode. Guðrún, meanwhile—performing the same stiff upper lip, just far more convincingly—must be sequestered from the rest of womankind as an anomaly, else the hegemonic script’s gendering might be questioned. Setting her performance of emotion alongside that of her beloved showcases how little difference there might actually be between feminine and masculine behaviors; see e.g. Laxdœla saga cap. 44: Kjartan...spyrr nú gjaforð Guðrúnar ok brá sér ekki við þat; en mǫrgum var á því kvíðustaðr áðr, “Kjartan now hears of Guðrún’s marriage and had no reaction to it, though many had previously been anxious about it,” andGuðrún talaði fátt til þessa efnis, en þat var auðfynt, at henni líkaði illa, “Guðrún spoke little about this matter, but it was easily seen that it displeased her.” Grand masters of the genre—like Hyams, Althoff, Miller, Carol Clover, Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, or Stephen D. White—wield theoretical concepts with contextual agility to produce keen close readings and inspiring interpretative models. (White’s brilliant “The Politics of Anger” 1998 is only quoted once, as best I can tell, 208n157, and on a fairly banal observation at that. White, too, uses the language of scripts or schemata, but is doggedly flexible in how he conceives of them: “the scripts have many variants, are subject to change over time, and can be ironic or humorous as well as dramatic or tragic,” 1998, 142.) Manning, in contrast, strips away all the contextual cues that make interpretation plausible or indeed possible, rushing instead to infer generalized norms from sui generis anecdotes. The resulting platitudes do justice to neither theory nor text (e.g. 109-10, 151, 194-95, 200-2). A definitive study on anger in the sagas remains to be written.