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Chapter 4 examines a selection of the most admired and most widely studied sagas of Icelanders. It demonstrates how the source traditions discussed in chapter 2 and the thematic concerns examined in chapter 3 come together in narrative explorations of identity. Themes of gender and sexuality, family, human and non-human relations, friendship, and more are explored in brief yet thorough overviews of these Icelandic stories. The texts discussed in detail include: Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka (“The Tale of Audun from the West Fjords”), the poets’ sagas (skáldasögur), Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, the Vínland sagas, outlaw sagas (Gísla saga and Grettis saga), Laxdæla saga and Njáls saga.

In the ninth century AD, the Norse settled first in the Faroe Islands, and then in Iceland, where they built a farming and fishing economy. The Norse culture created in the Faroes and Iceland was chronicled in the Icelandic sagas. Icelanders and other Norse sailors traveled to Greenland, where they built a civilization patterned on those of Iceland and Norway. They also sailed to North America ("Vinland") but stayed there only a few years. By the twelfth century the Icelanders had begun to consider Icelandic a language independent from its ancestor language Old Norse, while Faroese would be considered a dialect of Icelandic until centuries later.

Aided by American antiquarians, the Royal Society of Northern Antiquities of Denmark produced Antiquitates Americanae (1837) which argued Vinland of the Norse sagas was in southern New England. Editor Carl Christian Rafn published a borderline fraudulent interpretation of Dighton Rock that turned it into a Viking inscription. A colonial windmill in Newport, Rhode Island was misinterpreted as the ruin of a Christian Norse church. An Indigenous burial near Dighton Rock at Fall River was miscast as Norse or Phoenician and immortalized by Henry Longfellow in “The Skeleton in Armor.” This chapter argues Antitquiates Americanae and the RSNA’s Mémoires represented an elaborate exercise in transatlantic Gothicism. White Tribism also factored in Rafn’s analysis, as he made Norsemen the improvers of ancestral Native Americans.

This chapter discusses the life and work of Jack Donovan, one of the American Right’s most innovative and influential new thinkers. He was an adherent of the Alt Right for years, yet unlike most alt-rightists Donovan has always treated race as secondary to his focus on men. Donovan first became known for advocating “androphilia,” meaning love or sex between manly men, while rejecting gay culture and justifying homophobia as a defense of masculinity. However, his larger ideological contribution is the doctrine of male tribalism, which evokes the classical fascist ideal of male bonding through warfare. Rejecting the Christian Right’s emphasis on the patriarchal family, Donovan calls for reorganizing society based on “the gang,” a small, close-knit band of fighters in which men can most fully realize their innate masculinity.

This chapter seeks to account for the nearly complete absence of warfare from medieval Iceland and its sagas. It argues that a single logic dictated both the embrace of feud as a socially constructive idea and the rejection of war as an abomination. Drawing on anthropological examples and analyses, war is defined by contrasting it with feud; the bond between war and state-formation is emphasized. War presupposes political centralization and differentiation, which Icelanders, committed to the reciprocal logic of feuding, resisted. According to the sagas, ideological opposition to war manifested itself in abortive attempts at political consolidation within Iceland, in confusion and substitution in the face of war elsewhere (in Norway, England, and North America), and in failure to contend with burgeoning warlike activity in thirteenth-century Iceland. Tensions between state-centric warfare and state-resistant feuding existed in historical reality, however, not only in saga accounts of this history; and in reality, tensions could not always be resolved. Uchronia provided a tool for creative, retrospective textual resolution of problems that could not be overcome in practice. As demonstrated by the Icelandic law code, Grágás, the past thus became the path-dependent product of the future. Uchronic ideology worked to emend any perceived historical ‘errors’: any symptoms of war that could not be suppressed in reality were, instead, overwritten and repressed in text