Desiderium ex machina
:
The theme of desire in the life of Bishop Árni
Þorláksson
By Richard Cole
SCANGM99 – Dissertation, submitted 9
th
September 2011.
Illustration: Bishop from the Lewis
chessmen
Desiderium ex machina
:
The theme of desire in the life of Bishop Árni
Þorláksson
By Richard Cole
SCANGM99 – Dissertation, submitted 9
th
September 2011.
Illustration: Bishop from the Lewis
chessmen
Contents
•
Historical background and sources
pp. 3-5.
•
Árna Saga Biskups: A desire for history or a history of desire?
pp. 6-7.
•
What is desire?
pp. 8-9.
•
The (mal)function of Bishop Árni's desires
pp. 10-18.
•
The victims of the 'Árnian revolution': their fate and their desires
pp. 19-34.
•
Conclusion
pp. 35-37.
•
Bibliography
pp. 38-40.
2
Desiderium ex machina:
The theme of desire in the life of Bishop Árni
Þórláksson
“Go not after thy lusts, but refrain thyself from thine appetites. If thou givest thy soul the desires that
please her, she will make thee a laughingstock to thine enemies that malign thee.” – Sirach 18:30-31
Historical background and sources
Bishop Árni Þórláksson was born in 1237 in Svínafell, southern Iceland, and died in Bergen,
Norway, April 17
th
,
1298. On the 30
th
June, 1269, he was ordained Bishop of Skálholt, and during
the following twenty nine years of his episcopal career he was credited with confiscating most of
the land of the secular elite, the former goðar and stórbændr, in the name of the church.
death, a saga was written about him: Árna Saga Biskups (henceforth ÁBp). This text, together with
the preservation of a substantial number of his documents,
do much to figure Árni as a historical
personage. Scholars have seen the man himself as a political being, situated in time and stark reality
more than in a narrative space. The character of Árni and the saga in which he features are thus
primarily valued for historical rather than literary worth.
It is widely contended that ÁBp was written within living memory of Bishop Árni's career, possibly
by his nephew and successor, Árni Helgason. There is some consensus that the author was at least
attached to the same Skálholt literary milieu.
It is preserved in fifty manuscripts,
extent of its transmission could be due to its association with Sturlunga Saga, rather than specific
interest in ÁBp itself. Given its content, manuscript heritage, and circumstances of authorship, the
saga is generically both a biskupa saga and samtímasaga. However, in content and structure ÁBp
actually bears little resemblance to other texts of those genres. It is wholly written in prose, rather
than the usual prosimetrum of the sagas. Unlike the biskupa sögur which preceded it (Guðmundar
Saga Árasonar, Þorláks Saga Helga), ÁBp lacks a miraculum section detailing the protagonist's
various holy deeds. Indeed, in contrast to its predecessors, ÁBp is clearly not hagiographical in
purpose. So too is it incongruous among the other samtímasögur, which generally portray the unrest
1 Nielsen, Fredrik. Kirke-leksikon for Norden, vol. IV, (Århus: Jydsk forlags-forretning, 1929) p. 555.
2 Diplomatarium Islandicum, vol. 2. ed. by Jón Þorkelsson & Jón Sigurðsson (Copenhagen: Hið Íslenzka
Bókmenntafélag, 1893)
For decrees see: pp. 23-37, pp. 50-52, pp. 58-61, pp. 92-93, p. 123, p. 128.
For penitentials see: pp. 37-42.
For oaths see: pp. 43-49.
3 Þorleifur Hauksson. “Árna saga biskups” in Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia. ed. by Philip Pulsiano &
Kirsten Wolf. (New York: Garland, 1993) p. 20.
4 Þorleifur Hauksson (ed.). Introduction to Árna Saga Biskups. (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1972) p. cxii.
3
of the Sturlungaöld within a greater metanarrative culminating in the union with Norway.
of the Icelandic Commonwealth passes unmentioned in ÁBp, and the conflict powering the narrative
is not that of the Sturlungaöld but the staðamál: Árni's audacious drive to appropriate the land of
the aristocracy. The great, bellicose chieftains of the Sturlung clan and its enemies alike appear as
little more than meek, ineffectual usurpers, illegitimately but vainly attempting to hold on to that
which they wrongly believe to be theirs in the face of the ever litigious bishop. Even Jarl Gizurr
Þorvaldsson, an imposing warrior in Sturla Þórðarson's Íslendingasaga, and the author of the Gamli
Sáttmáli which unified Iceland with Norway, makes only a cameo appearance where he is quickly
forced (albeit grudgingly) to yield to Árni's will.
The language and structure of ÁBp have also done much to set it apart from other sagas, and even to
earn it some derision. As Joseph Harris notes, there are only a few literary embellishments, and that
“in general the tone is dryly official”.
In a similar vein, Rory McTurk congratulates the editor of
the 1972 Arnamagnæan edition for being “undeterred by the saga's somewhat dry subject matter”.
If the details the saga narrates are rather dense, the manner in which this is done is even more
impenetrable. Magnús and Gunhild Stefánsson note in the foreword to their Norwegian translation
of ÁBp that Biskop Arnes saga har aldri før vært oversatt fra norrønt selv om flere har hatt planer
om det. Den er da også utpreget vanskelig, innfløkt og ofte meget dunkel
never before been translated out of Old Norse, even though several people have had plans to do so.
It is also markedly difficult, complicated, and often very obscure”. Vésteinn Ólason and Sverrir
Tómasson seize upon the author's extensive code-switching and call ÁBp “a simple report full of
Latin loanwords”.
These features certainly set ÁBp apart from its generic peers, but its most idiosyncratic trait must
surely be its ending – or lack thereof. No complete text of the saga has survived to the present day.
A strictly intra-textual reading of the saga as it stands concludes with a kind of cliffhanger ending,
with Árni praying for the soul of his recently deceased nemesis, Hrafn Oddsson,
5 Úlfar Bragason. “Sagas of Contemporary History (Sturlunga saga): Texts and Research” in A Companion to Old
Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture. ed. by Rory McTurk (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007) p. 427.
6 Árna Saga Biskups. ed. by Þorleifur Hauksson (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1972) pp. 9-10.
[H
ENCEFORTH
CITED
EDITION
,
AS
ÁB
P
]
7 Harris, Joseph. ”Review: Þorleifur Hauksson, ed., Árna saga biskups”, Speculum, vol. 50, no. 3 (July, 1975) pp.
501- 502.
8 McTurk, R.W. “Hauksson (Þorleifur) (ed.), “Árna saga Biskups” (Book Review)”, Medium Ævum, 44 (1975) p. 113.
9 Magnús and Gunhild Stefánsson (trans.) Biskop Arnes Saga. (Oslo: Aschehoug & Co., 2007) p. 13.
10 Vésteinn Ólason & Sverrir Tómasson. “Old Icelandic Prose” in A History of Icelandic Literature, ed. by Daisy
Neijmann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006) p. 90.
11 ÁBp. p. 181.
4
indication that the struggles of the staðamál are close to a resolution. Strangely, there is evidence to
suggest that the saga never extended to cover the eventual triumph of its titular character, nor even
his death. Þorleifur Hauksson has noted the brevity of the ending which has been clumsily attached
in some later manuscripts
in relation to the number of leaves which the codex could have afforded,
arguing that this allows us to measure roughly how much material has been lost. It would have been
unlikely that more than a decade of detail could have been accomodated in such a limited space.
Moreover, his rigorous investigation of the relationship between annal and saga in the case of ÁBp
showed the author used only one annal – of a group now represented by the Annales regii – while
all other annals derived their materials from the saga.
Þorleifur then points out that the annals are
completely void of any reference either to Árni's final victory in the staðamál in 1297 or his death
the following year, making it highly unlikely that ÁBp ever narrated either event.
The documentary evidence is perhaps the most illuminating source on the theme of desire in the life
and work of Bishop Árni. There is no evidence that any of it is autographic, but there are extensive
manuscripts – some letters are found in nearly as many copies as ÁBp – with a reliably low amount
of variation between texts. Excluding correspondence which only mentions Árni, and which he
could have no hand in commissioning, there are three broad categories of document: a) decrees and
statutes, of which there are fifteen; b) penitentials, of which there are two; and c) oaths composed
by Árni for his flock to take, of which there are twelve. Árni is also strongly associated with the
kristinrétt section of the Jónsbók laws, however this text will not be discussed here as most of its
material is originally found in his earlier edicts.
* This is a dramatic miracle of St. Magnus which is entertaining to read but has almost no relevance to the story of
Árni, cf. the addition of Spésar Þáttr to Grettis Saga.
12 Þorleifur Hauksson, 1972. pp. cx-cxi.
13 Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir. Property and Virginity, The Christianization of Marriage in Medieval Iceland 1200-1600.
(Århus: Århus University Press, 2010) p. 88.
5
Árna Saga Biskups: A desire for history or a history of desire?
As previously stated, ÁBp has been read exclusively as a historical source, although that is not to
say that historians believe the saga to be a factually accurate and dispassionate account of events.
Vésteinn Ólason and Sverrir Tómasson note that “[ÁBp] was written in defense of the deeds of a
controversial servant of God who did all he could to protect the autonomy of the church and insisted
that all benefices should be under its rule”.
Rather, the use historians have made of ÁBp is akin to
the reasons they believe it was written; its value derives from the real people and actual events
which it attempts to describe, just as those same people and events inspired its creation. Þorleifur
Hauksson describes ÁBp as “an invaluable source of Icelandic history for the years 1270-1290”.
Magnús and Gunhild Stefansson expand this assessment to give it a transatlantic scope: [ÁBp] er ...
en hovedkilde til islandsk og norsk historie i de siste tiårene etter fristatens fall på Island. Den
fortsetter der Sturlunga Saga slutter
– “[ÁBp] is … a central source for Icelandic and Norwegian
history in the last decades after the fall of the Free State in Iceland. It picks up where Sturlunga
Saga leaves off”. Commendations in a similar vein have been offered by McTurk
and Harris.
These evaluations are perfectly sound, but they would not exist without the desire to know what
Aristotle called the “particulars” of the situation, or “what has happened”.
rooted in a desire for history.
This response is not necessarily the only option. Instead imagine a reading independent of questions
of veracity and falsification, focussing on meanings internal to the text; specifically, those which
resonate with the reader regardless of particulars, but rather because of the “universals” which
Aristotle thought to define the literary mode.
That is to say, themes common to human experience
throughout time. There are many such themes for which the life of Bishop Árni provides fruitful
ground for exegesis, e.g. property, faith, law. The one examined here is that of desire: Árni's desire,
the desires of those around him, and the changing nature of these desires. This analysis will not be
confined to ÁBp alone, but the extrapolated narrative which emerges when the literary character of
Bishop Árni Þorláksson is considered as the author of documents bearing his name. Where relevant,
other Old Norse texts roughly contemporaneous will also be examined, yet the emphasis remains on
universals rather than particulars – indeed it must, so long as we are not engaging in a discussion of
14 Vésteinn Ólason & Sverrir Tómasson, 2006. p. 90.
15 Þorleifur Hauksson, 1993. p. 20.
16 Stefánssynir, 2007. p. 10.
17 McTurk, 1975. p. 116.
18 Harris, 1975. p. 501.
19 Aristotle. Poetics. trans. by Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin Books, 1996) p.16.
20 Ibid.
6
the real Árni and persisting in a study of Árni on the page. The question of Árni's life and the role of
desire therein is not so much “what was it like?”, but “what does our impression of it mean?”
More perhaps than any other saga, ÁBp is haunted by the disparity between what the narrator says
and what any reader (medieval or modern) will suspect actually happened. It may contain very little
of the supernatural or fantastic in contrast to its peers, but it still has a remarkable propensity to
strain our suspension of disbelief. While Árni's ascent from the son of an itinerant farm labourer
(nicknamed Svin – “the pig”) to the rank of bishop is depicted plausibly enough, the reaction of the
populace to his zealous policies is often laughably improbable. In Skálholt, both clerics and laity
respond with unmitigated positivity to the news that they will no longer be allowed concubines.
The Austfírðingar are said to accept the loss of all but two of their estates liettlegar
bishop breaks up the loving marriage of Egill Sólmundarson and Þorunn Garða-Einarsdóttir, which
had issued two sons and three daughters, and yet the couple bear him no lasting animosity.
Árni
accompanies a group of dissenting Icelandic aristocrats on an arbitration trip to Norway, but they all
conveniently die within days of each other,
as did Þorleifr, the candidate orginally allotted the
bishopric at Skálholt.
And yet, the author seems to remain in denial of the inevitable suspicion this
arouses on the part of the reader. When the saga describes the man who carried out the largest land-
grab in Icelandic history with the words hans hugur sssvar giarn stort af odrum þyggia, og so harla
giarn stört af odrum veyta
– “he was of a disposition which very much preferred to give than to
receive”, the reader will be forgiven for being utterly overcome with incredulity.
It is because of this that the saga often gives the impression of telling two narratives simultaneously.
One is the ostensibly presented tale of a poor child from a lay family who becomes bishop and
tirelessly struggles to show a misguided – but generally religiously observant – society the error of
its ways. The other is the story of a bitter and tyrannical self-made man who cajoles, threatens and
excommunicates his way towards hegemony, leaving a string of broken marriages, disenfranchised
families, and eternally damned souls as he goes. For our purposes, one reading is not necessarily
superior to the other. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge the co-existence of these parallel
narratives, for sometimes one may conceal the theme of desire, while the other lays it bare.
21 ÁBp, p. 14.
22 Ibid. at p. 16.
23 Ibid. at pp. 37-38.
24 Ibid. at p. 36.
25 Stefánssynir, 2007. p. 44.
26 ÁBp, p. 11.
27 Ibid. at p. 18.
7
What is desire?
The meaning of desire as it is applied in this study should not be understood in an erotic or purely
emotional sense, but as a philosophical concept. It is anything we might wish for, be that a physical
object, an imagined state of affairs, a sensation to experience; it is even the wish itself. Desire is
constant as long as we live. Every second we want something, even if it is only to continue living.
Thus, it can be conscious or unconscious. It does not have to be at the forefront of our minds in
order to have an effect. Similarly, it can be actual or potential: hunger for a meal is actual desire, but
economic capital is potential desire, because it represents our wishes even before they have taken
form. The genealogy of this model of desire takes the form of a dialectic between four successive
thinkers on the subject.
It begins with Aristotle, who originally saw desire uninhibited by the later advent of the capitalist
distinction between “want and “need”. He pointed out that “Nothing, in fact, that is not engaged in
desire or avoidance is moved except by force”,
and thus made desire the fundamental locomotive
force in any ecology of living things. Friedrich Nietzsche, through the lens of Gilles Deleuze,
eliminated the dichotomy of “desire” and “avoidance” with his own socially kinetic conception of a
unified desiring state via “the will to power”.
Deleuze, with Félix Guattari, then posited a model of
humanity as “desiring-machines”, where desire was no longer an innate urge beginning in a subject
(man) and ending with an object (that which is desired). Instead, desire was something produced
and conditioned by external, social forces acting upon man, not a relationship between two parties
but a current within a collective experience of desire. That is to say, desires were not originated →
resolved/unresolved → gone/waiting to be resolved, but rather that the desire of each individual led
to further desires, affected the desires of other individuals, and the outcome was not attainment/non-
attainment, but simply an inevitability of further desires.
They also urged that desire should not be
seen as a vague abstract noun, but rather as an immanent force which derived its power from its
tension with reality – a relationship which means it can scarcely be seen as abstract at all: “If desire
produces, the product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and
can produce only reality”.
Thus, the synthesis of these three visions (Aristotelian, Nietzschean, Deleuzo-Guattarian) yields the
following theses of desire:
28 Aristotle. De Anima (On the Soul) trans. by Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin Books, 1986) p. 212.
29 Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 2006) pp. 74-77.
30 Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem,
Hellen R. Lane (London: Penguin Books, 1977) pp. 5-11.
31 Ibid. at p. 26.
8
1) Desire is the basic locomotive force in a society, in our case that of Medieval Iceland.
2) Desire is internal to man, as an integral part of human nature, but its aforementioned
power in society makes also makes it something external, which can be approached as
a force independent of its origin.
3) Desire is produced, conditioned and fluctuating, rather than objective.
4) Desire is also productive, thus being immanent to reality even as it alters it.
9
The (mal)function of Bishop Árni's desires
Árni's early years are marked by the economic instability of his family. Árni's father, Þorlákr “Svín”
Guðmundarson, is a landless underling of the Svínfelling clan. His epithet is not only a simple
statement of this fact, but also quite possibly a jibe at his position in society. He begins the saga in
the service of Ormr Svínfellingr, briefly owns his own land at Rauðalæk, but squanders all the
resultant income and becomes supplicant to his own son-in-law. The family are moved from one
estate to another, going through four in as many years. Indeed, Þorlákr's nearly instantaneous failure
to join the landed class when he eventually gets a chance brings to mind an Old Norse proverb
identified from marginalia by Christine Schott, oft er svín á soðinu brennt
burnt on his broth”.
Nonetheless, the first part of Árni's childhood seems quite happy given the circumstances. He is
quiet and bookish, but also quite popular:
Þesse Arne var fyrrum a unga alldre falatur, og acktade miog jmisslegar j þrotter,
hagleik og ä skurd, og allt trie smyd, ryt og boknam, og allar klerklegar lister. Var
hann af þessu ollu faskiptenn vid almenning. Enn þadann fra er Þorlakur [faðir sinn]
for fra Raudalæk, giorde hann sig liettann vid al þijdu, og atte hann alþydlega glede.
This Árni was, at a young age, sullen and studied many diverse pursuits, handicraft
and carving and all kinds of carpentry, writing and literature and all the clerical arts.
Because of all this he was quiet around people. But from the time when Þorlákr [his
father] left Rauðalæk, he became easy with the common people.
At this stage in his life, Árni seems to be in a vigorous state of desire. He is seeking a diverse array
of ways to express a tension between reality and intent, in creating physical objects (handicraft),
processing the raw materials of nature into usable commodities (carpentry), making the aesthetic
out of the natural (carving). In the final of these skills, “writing and literature and all the clerical
arts”, Árni learns the most liberating of desiring-endeavours. His more practical pursuits – those
doubtlessly more appropriate to his social station – are limited by their dependence on external,
finite resources. Yet in writing and theology, thought alone constitutes the material of desire. So too
32 Schott, Christine M. “Footnotes on Life, Marginalia in Three Icelandic Manuscripts” (unpublished MA thesis,
University of Iceland, 2010) p. 99.
33 ÁBp. p. 5.
10
is this a more autonomous desiring method. Any economy with a reasonably sophisticated tradition
of construction will generate carpenters or woodcarvers as people whose labour is to be purchased
by others. The personal desire of the artisan is thus substituted for the desire of the overseer. But in
a Medieval Icelandic context, writing was not a purely creative activity. The business of manuscript
transmission had to be done by hand, and we can imagine that some of the secular elite would have
needed to employ secretaries. However, as has been pointed out,
the art of letters in Iceland was
remarkably well developed in relation to the size of its population, and administration was never the
dominant purpose of literacy. Therefore it is easy to see how broad the scope of Árni's desires are
during these years. He may belong to a family of itinerants with little power to invest in their own
desiring instincts, but he investigates as many ways as possible to preserve this fundamental part of
his humanity. The proliferation of Árni's methods of desire is also demonstrated in the joy (lit. glede
– standardised Old Norse: gleði) which he exudes around others. Deleuze and Guattari note that
“Pleasure is an affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to 'find themselves'
in the process of desire that exceeds them”.
That is to say, there is a happiness in the multiplication
or diversification of one's desires, even as this process precludes their satiation.
But it isn't long before this strategy of “desiring in all directions” comes to an abrupt end. Peripeteia
during childhood is a motif common in the life of the ódæll maðr – an archetype known principally
from the Íslendingasögur but arguably not entirely alien to the biskupa sögur too (cf. Guðmundr
Árason). In the former genre, it is typical for such a plot development to occur when the protagonist
is enaged in a sporting event, where an attack they make on another competitor marks the beginning
of their trajectory towards the fringes of society. Consider the examples of Grettir Ásmundarson or
Egill Skallagrimsson. For Árni, who certainly grows up to be ódæll, even if he is hardly archetypal,
this model is curiously inverted:
[ok svá var þat] Hielltt þvi framm til þess, er hann var j Skal. Þa för hann til
skinnleiks j Kyrkiubæ med odrum monnum og j þejm samaleik rak hann nydur
annad knie a arin hellu, þarj stofunne, so ad sprack miog, la hann af þvi j reckiu nær
viku. Þadann af var hann alldrei ad þesskins leik nie ad danse, hvorke adur nie
sijdann, [sic] ok kende sig i þessu munde hirtann af oskinsamligre skemtan.
34 Axel Kristinsson. “Lords and Literature: The Icelandic Sagas as Political and Social Instruments”, Scandinavian
Journal of History, 28 (2003) p. 1.
35 Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. trans. by Brian Massumi
(London: Continuum, 2011) p. 173.
36 ÁBp. p. 5.
11
[and so it was] Right up until he was at Skál, going to play tug-of-war in Kirkjubær
with other people. In that same game he tumbled on his folded knee onto the paving
stone around the hearth there in the parlour, so that it broke badly. Because of that he
lay in bed nearly a week. From then on he was never the type to play or dance,
neither before nor since, [sic] and in this he felt he would be saved from foolish
pleasures.
In this case, during the skinnleikr it is not a fellow competitor who the protagonist injures, but
himself. Furthermore, it is no harmatia but actually the first step towards his complete domination
of Icelandic society. The incident seems to herald something of a 'sea change' in Árni's mode of
desire. Pleasure – skemtan – is no longer a component in its function. In accordance with our earlier
hypotheses regarding joy as the product of a proliferating 'desiring-machine', this departure seems
to be accompanied by a withdrawal from normal human contact and focussing on one aspect of his
desire: the clerical-intellectual as opposed to the practical-hedonistic. Deleuze and Guattari describe
the anatomy of this anhedonic desiring state and its progressive relationship to the kind of desire
produced by Árni prior to his accident as so: “The renunciation of external pleasure, or its delay, its
infinite regress, testifies ... to an achieved state in which desire no longer lacks anything but fills
itself and constructs its own field of immanence”.
But the reader does not need such a conscious
theoretical viewpoint to discern what is in plain sight. The transformational properties which desire
has in relation to reality mean the clarification of Árni's desiring production into a state so foreign to
that of the majority must surely have ominous consequences.
It might appear that here we find the decisive moment where Árni's struggle to dominate the elite
and reshape Icelandic society begins. After all, it is typical to associate passionate struggle in the
name of the church with asceticism. Yet this is not the neatest departure point in the narrative. Árni
is still a handyman, even if he now has his mind on higher things. His desires may be reinvented –
there has been an internal revolution. But there is nothing yet to prompt the external revolution; the
visible manifestation of change within. He is still bound to his family and his overlord. Subsequent
to the episode at Skál, ÁBp relates another moment which offers Árni a more dramatic punctuation
in the history of his desire, and also hints at the last vestiges of a desire outside of his holy vocation:
For hann j þessa alla stade [Svínafell] nockra vetur þar til er Magnus broder hans fieck
Ellisifar dottar Þorgeirs ur Hollte ... Lagde þa Arne framm allann sinn hlut, af peningum
37 Deleuze & Guattari, 2011. p. 173.
12
þejm sem fader hans vardveitte, vid hann, utann hest og jgangs klæde, riedst þa j burt
fra Svijnafelle, saker sundur þyckiss þess er vard mille þeirra frænda, mest umm
gyptingo Þorgerdar systur hans og for j Þyckva bæ til fyrrnefnds Brands abota, og batt
sig honum a hende, og giordest hans klerkur
One winter he spent there [Svínafell] entirely, because the people needed a fine
craftsman. This continued next winter, until Magnús, his brother, married Ellisif, the
daughter of Þorgeirr from Holt ... Árni gave them all of his share of the wealth which
his father had saved for him, except for a horse and the shirt on his back. Then he rode
away from Svínafell because of this turmoil which emerged between the kinsmen,
mostly concerning the marriage of Þorgerðr, his sister, and went to Þykkvabær to the
previously mentioned Abbot Brandr, put himself in his hands, and was made his clerk ...
Taking the saga author at his word, this is an act of noble magnanimity from a devout man who is
able to be generous even towards those with whom he is engaged in dispute. As seen, though, the
narrative voice in ÁBp is so extraordinarily unconvincing that this can hardly be predominant. The
explanation for Árni's moody departure from his family, his work, and his whole previous existence,
is only given after the event, and with a pitiful amount of supporting detail. Nowhere else are there
any records of a dispute over Þorgerðr Þorláksdóttir's marriage to Guttormr Shorthorn. In other
sources, he is said to have assisted the Sturlungar in an attack on the Oddaverjar, about which he
composed a competent dróttkvætt verse,
but otherwise he is lost to history. It seems unlikely that
an association with the Sturlungar would have made him unsavoury to Árni's family, whose only
clan attachment was to the Svínfellingar. As previously mentioned, ÁBp shows little interest in clan
politics, being more interested in the clash between ecclesiastic and secular power. Perhaps what the
saga is really suggesting, then, is that Árni is actually hurt not by the marriage of his sister, but of
his brother. A man renouncing all his possessions and setting off for a monastery due to heartbreak
is surely more plausible than one doing so because of potentially conflicting clan alliances. So too
would it accord with the classic motif of unrequited love driving a character to commit fantastic
deeds (also known elsewhere in Old Norse literature, e.g. Laxdæla Saga, better yet Kormáks Saga).
A conjectured infatuation with Ellisif would be the only example of Árni harbouring romantic
desires in ÁBp, and indeed make it the first biskupa saga to feature a protagonist who does so. ÁBp
has a unique liberty to give its titular character a more rounded character in this regard; unlike
38 ÁBp. p.6.
39 Sturlúnga-Saga edr Islendínga-Saga hin mikla, vol. 2. ed. by Bjarni Thorsteinsson, Sveinbjörn Egilsson, Gísli
Brynjúlfsson, Brandr Sæmundarson (Copenhagen: Hið íslenzka bókmenntafélag, 1818) pp. 216-219.
13
Guðmundar Saga Árasonar and Þorláks Saga Helga, this is not the story of a man born to be a
saint, but a very ordinary human being who rises to extraordinary heights. The transition towards
holiness and transcendence beyond humanity are thus themes which are not just possible in ÁBp,
but necessary.
While this remains conjecture, what is certain is that by the time Árni gets his first taste of episcopal
power, acting as a superintendent at Hólar c. 1237, he has developed a theory and strategy of desire
which negates his own sexuality, but is quite obsessed with the sexuality of others. The intervening
years in the Augustinian monastery at Þykkvabær may well have provided him with the time and
intellectual resources to contemplate his mission. The Rule of St. Benedict is not just a monastic rule
but also contains many thoughtful deliberations on the workings of desiring production. It would
have been required reading for Árni as a novice, even for an Augustinian, and it is evident that
copies were in circulation in Iceland from the earliest years of Icelandic literature (there is a
fragmentary translation in The Icelandic Homily Book).
The opening lines of the prologue
famously incite the reader “... to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong
and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord”.
St. Benedict later cites the epigraph given at the beginning of this essay.
We may well speculate as
to whether Árni could have seen a reflection of his old self and the multitudinous manner in which
he once pursued his own desires in the section on gyravogues, who like the formerly itinerant Árni
“[drift] from region to region … Always on the move, they never settle down, and are slaves to their
own wills and gross appetites”.
What is more demonstrably formative in The Rule, though, are the
strong exhortations it contains regarding the confiscation of property when establishing basic
control over the desires of others: “Above all, this evil practice [private ownership] must be
uprooted and removed from the monastery … especially since monks may not have free disposal of
their own bodies and wills”.
In this regard, some parts of the text seem to have influenced Árni's
later tactics as bishop specifically. Over a millennium before Karl Marx's birth, The Rule succinctly
illustrates how access to the means of production creates or undermines personal autonomy. If the
abbot wishes to control his monks, he must observe the following:
40 Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir. “Prose of Christian Instruction” in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and
Culture. ed. by Rory McTurk (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007) p. 341.
41 St. Benedict of Nursia. The Rule of St. Benedict in English. trans. by Timothy Fry. (Collegeville: The Liturgical
Press, 1982) p. 15.
42 Ibid. at p. 33.
43 Ibid. at p. 21.
44 Ibid at p. 56.
14
The goods of the monastery, that is, its tools, clothing, or anything else, should be
entrusted to brothers whom the abbot appoints ... He [the abbot] will, as he sees fit, issue
to them the various articles to be cared for and collected after use. The abbot will
maintain a list of these, so that when the brothers succeed one another in their assigned
tasks, he may be aware of what he hands out and what he receives back.
The extent to which a diligent control over tools translates to a control over people is perhaps not
immediately apparent, until one considers the noumenon underlying a tool. Tools of any kind allow
us to articulate our desires. They resolve the tension between the desiring-internal and reality-
external by facilitating a change in the latter to more closely resemble the former. It is obvious that
destroying all of an opponent's tools will lead to his desires – even the basic desires which sustain
life – being frustrated. What is more interesting, though, is to imagine a situation where one simply
takes control of his tools and then returns them with certain conditions put on their use. There
begins the possibility not just to prevent desire from meeting its object, but to alter the nature of the
subject. Indeed, as we shall see, this is exactly what Árni does with the staðir and the aristocracy.
Through an arduous campaign of legal manoeuvres, he establishes ownership over the agricultural
land of the estates, but then leases them back to those against whom he litigated. Thus, the diocese
of Skálholt becomes his monastery, the staðir its tools, the former secular elite his monks, and
himself the abbot.
St. Benedict was mindful of the role of controlling sexuality in order to control the human person,
and a similar theory of repression and dominance can be observed in the arm of Árni's project that
revolves around libidinal restrictions.
The bishop may be most known for his association with the
land disputes of the staðamál (so much so, in fact, that in modern Icelandic he is known as “Staða-
Árni”) but his first act as superintendent of Hólar was actually to prevent the wedding of a
prominent farmer/deacon named Oddi.
A sizeable proportion of correspondence and bureaucracy
is concerned with sexual prohibition – in the case of his penitentials it constitutes the majority.
There is an interesting parity between the form of Árni's own desires – as shaped by his experiences
45 Ibid. at pp. 55-56.
See also ch. 55: “A monk discovered with anything not given him by the abbot must be subjected to very severe
punishment. In order that this vice of private ownership may be completely uprooted, the abbot is to provide all
things necessary … [so that] ever excuse of lacking some necessity will be taken away” p. 77.
46 See ibid. at p. 28 & pp. 33-34.
* As an aside, it is worth noting that his predecessor, St. Þorlákr, also spent time in a monastery (being the first bishop
of Skálholt to do so), and also came up with a similar dualist strategy linking property to sexuality, fighting the
staðamál on one side and reforming marriage customs on the other. Árni is more ambitious and more successful.
47 ÁBp. pp. 8-10.
48 Agnes Arnórsdóttir, 2010. p. 88.
15
immediately prior to entering the monastery – and the revolution of desire he seeks to engender in
his recalcitrant flock. The child who grew up suffering for his family's lack of land seeks to deny
land to all others. The aforementioned “Ellisif hypothesis” mirrors this discourse: the teenager
whose romantic desires were crushed seeks to crush the romantic desires of all others.
By the time that Árni leaves the monastery and commences his episcopal career, then, it might seem
as though his own desires have become focussed solely on altering the desires of others. Indeed,
there are no examples in ÁBp of the bishop turning his will towards the personal acquisition of
anything or anyone beyond that point. That said, he is not quite the kind of ascetic, superhuman
character central to the preceding biskupa sögur, where the protagonists can often feel somehow too
numb or inscrutable to be plausible. This view is contrary to that of Vésteinn and Sverrir who, ever
critical of ÁBp, assert this to be intrinsic to the genre with no exception made in Árni's case.
the saga makes no secret of the fact that Árni did still want to be desired, or put another way, he
wished to be the object of desire even as he attempted to nullify himself as a desiring subject. In an
unusual display of vulernability, the image the narrator presents in chapter 13 is that of a man who
very much wants to be liked by people, even if he is in the process of confiscating their property. He
is said to devote much time arbitrating in the disputes of his flock, and attempting to reconcile his
defeated enemies, but all to little avail: Fieck hann af slyku mikid kalls og ann semd, og þar fiar
kostnad med. Morgum monnum syndest hann optar helldur halla giordum a klerka enn ovine syna.
– “Because of this he got much hassle and mockery, and thus it cost him money. To many people it
seemed that he would rather come down harshly on his clerics than his enemies”. The most
touching example of this trait comes later in the saga, when Árni contracts a mysterious illness and
is lying on his deathbed:
Mellti hann [Árni] við prest sinn þann er Hallr het ok var ritari hans. Hversv þickir
yðr sem skipiz sottar far mitt. hann svaraði sva sem einn firir alla. herra sagði hann.
Nu syniz oss sol var at setri komin. herra byskvp hvggleiddi orð hans ok skildi til
hvers hann męllti ok til hvers koma mvndi ok sa alla hryggia þa sem hia voro. þa
męllti byskup sva. Nv it fyrsta sinn se ek at þer elskit mig.
He [Árni] spoke with his priest, who was called Hallr and was his scribe. “How do
you think things will go with my sickness?” He answered as though he were
49 Vésteinn Ólason & Sverrir Tómasson, 2006. p. 89.
50 ÁBp. p. 18.
51 Ibid. at pp. 45-46
16
speaking for everybody, “Lord,” he said, “it seems to us now that our sun is about to
set”. The bishop reflected upon his words and understood what he had said, and what
was going to happen. And saw how beside themselves those by his bedside were.
Then the bishop spoke as so: “Now, for the first time, I see that you love me”.
And thus he has a miraculous recovery. This craving for affection raises an interesting question
about the development and function of Árni as a desiring-machine, and in doing so returns us to the
title of this section. Does Árni's visionary, insidious – and yet somehow tragic – strategy of desire
stem from traumas and insecurities sustained in the course of an economically and romantically
deprived youth? Phrased another way, is he malfunctioning? Alternatively, is Árni's campaign to
control the desires of the aristocracy actually highly functional? Rather than seeing Árni as an
embittered deviant, we could see him as a sort of Nietzschean Übermensch: a product of the engine
of history, and the inevitable consequence of every short-sighted action and belief of mankind.
Nietzsche's image of an irresistible agent of change, who is met with scorn and futile opposition,
resonates with that of Árni. The Übermensch, like Árni, constitutes the transcendence of a history
which has until then been depressingly and nihilistically repetitive.
would render ÁBp no longer incongruous with the preceding biskupa sögur, but rather their
culmination. Bishop Guðmundr and Bishop Þorlákr may have been put forward as candidates for
sainthood in their respective sagas, but both narratives do not hide the failure to achieve ecclesiastic
hegemony in general, and their inability to resolve the issue of the staðir in particular.
depicted as martyrs (even though they were not murdered; nonetheless, Guðmundr is ludicrously
compared to Thomas Becket)
but in Nietzschean terms they were merely recurring precursors to
Árni, the superman himself.
Of course, this distinction between function and malfunction and all that follows thereof is in many
ways a false dichotomy. As Deleuze and Guattari observed, “Desiring-machines work only when
they break down, and by continually breaking down”.
Trauma 'throws a spanner in the works' of
desiring-machines, causing them to produce new objects and patterns of desire. This effect is
52 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. trans. by R.J Hollingdale (London: Penguin Classics, 1984) pp. 43-
44.
53 Ibid. at p. 45.
54 Heller, Erich. The Importance of Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) pp. 12-13.
55 Byock, Jesse. “Cultural Continuity, the Church, and the Concept of Independent Ages in Medieval Iceland.”
Skandinavistik, 15, 1 (1985) p. 11.
56 Guðmundar Sögur Biskups, vol. 1. ed. by Stefán Karlsson (Copenhagen: C.A Reitzels Forlag, 1983) p. 98.
This motif is more pronounced in Abbot Arngrímur's version of the saga.
57 Deleuze & Guattari, 1977. p. 8.
17
necessary to power a narrative: the desires of its characters must diversify and divert from mundane
lines of flight. The numerous critics of ÁBp cannot deny that this is happening all the time in the
text: when Árni experiences his personal monastic revolution, when he prevents the marriage of
Oddi and Ǫlof Broddadóttir,
when he arbitrarily dissolves the marriage of Egill Sólmundarson and
Þorunn Garða-Einarsdóttir and they both end up taking new lovers (Þorunn Valgarðsdóttir and
Sigmundr Ǫgmundarson respectively),
when he confiscates land and demands oaths of fealty in
return for tenancy.
It is illuminating to point out Árni's Übermensch credentials, as it helps to place
his saga in relation to its generic peers and understand the sense of destiny surrounding his desires.
Such an analysis also serves to highlight how exceptional and contrary Árni's worldview must have
seemed to the vast majority of the Skálholt diocese. On close inspection we have seen how it is
possible to offer a biographical explanation for how Árni and his desires were produced. But it is
easy to imagine how Medieval Icelanders who, living under the philosophical dominance of hyper-
individualism which valorised personal autonomy,
would plausibly have seen their new bishop as
a radical and surprising occurrence; or in the words Nietzsche used to describe his Übermensch, as
“the lightning and a heavy drop from the clouds”.
58 ÁBp. pp. 8-10.
59 Ibid. at pp. 37-38.
60 For example, see the case of the Steinvarasynir: ibid. at pp. 21-22. No such oaths have survived in the sections of the
Diplomatarium previously cited, although there are oaths on sincerity (p. 47) and truce (p. 48).
61 This ideology is best surmised in an oft-cited quote by Peter Foote:
“...they [were] not confused by loyalties other than those naturally imposed by kinship, friendship and the free
contract they freely make … [it was] a past ideally simplified by a reduction to individual, all human, existential
terms”.
Foote, Peter. “The audience and vogue of the Sagas of Icelanders – some talking points” in Aurvandilstá. ed. by
Michael Barnes, Hans Bekker-Nielsen & Gerd Wolfgang Weber (Odense: Odense University Press, 1984) p. 55.
62 Nietzsche, 1984. p. 45.
18
The victims of the 'Árnian revolution': their fate and their desires
The fullest meaning of Árni's actions as bishop cannot be understood without anexamination of his
campaign: what he did, to whom, and the consequences thereof. While we have established that
desire is a more complex phenomenon than a simple transitivity of subject → object, the limits of
our language mean it is still sometimes helpful to discuss these two predicates as long as we are
assured that they are not definitive (as seen previously). Thus, it is still true to say that what will be
considered in this section are the objects of Árni's repertoire of desiring-interventions.
With the exception of Oddi the deacon and his fiancée, every character with whom Árni comes into
conflict appears in at least one other source. In the spirit of the Íslendingasögur, then, the author of
ÁBp is conjuring up figures of whom his audience could potentially have had a priori knowledge,
and thence comes their meaning. When Jarl Gizurr appears and is humbled by Árni, the impact
comes from a character expected to be mighty becoming impotent in his desires. Yet this does not
seem to be the mechanism which produces meaning in the case of Oddi. It is related that Oddi was
once a clergyman, although any hint that he remains active is conspicuous by its absence: hann var
diakn ad vyxlu
– “he had been ordained a deacon” … bader subdiaknum og ollum monnum þeim
sem svære vÿxlur hans fyrer boded ad kvænast
– “… the subdeacons and all those men who had
sworn the oaths of ordination were forbidden to get married”. Until Árni's ascendancy, it was also
common for promising chieftains to become deacons in little more than name, simply for posterity's
sake.
Still, Árni's assertion that he has taken holy orders is given as the reason he wishes to
prevent hid osæmelega samlag
– “this unseemly union”. Whether Oddi were active in the church
or not, it would appear that the saga author has wholly invented the episode – after all, if some
record can be found of someone as obscure as Guttormr Shorthorn, it seems strange that either a
secular leader of growing esteem or, if he really were a practising cleric, somebody intimately
associated with the rapidly bureaucratising church should be completely lost. Moreover, there is a
potent symbolism in Árni's first engagement being with a character named “Oddi”, which exceeds
impact from historicity. The legal historian and Old Norse specialist William Ian Miller provides the
following exegesis on the word, which merits quoting at length:
Odd[i] indicates the effect of adding a third point outside the line formed by the two
points that determine the line: the odd point makes of a line a triangle, an arrowhead, a
63 ÁBp. p. 8.
64 Ibid. at p. 9.
65 Byock, Jesse L. Medieval Iceland. Society, Sagas, and Power. (London: Hisarlik Press, 1993) p. 158.
66 ÁBp. p. 9.
19
spearpoint … With two parties … the fear was that what you got was what the Greeks
called stasis, a gridlock, a kind of civil war, in which each side overvalues the harms it
suffers and undervalues the harms it imposes on others … You needed an oddman
[oddamaðr] to undo stasis, not so much to break the tie as to convince each side that
they were in fact tied.
The concept of oddi was thus intrinsic to the pre-Árnian Sturlungaöld social order operating prior to
the end of the staðamál with all its attendant individualism. Little had changed for the former goðar
and their allies since the Gamli Sáttmáli, except perhaps liberation from any nominal responsibility
to the lesser bændr. The act of union took care to enshrine in writing that Íslenzkir sé lögmenn ok
sýslumenn hér á landinu, af þeirra ætt sem at fornu hafa goðorðin upp gefit.
landed stewards in the county will be Icelanders, from those families who have relinquished the
office of goði in days of yore”. Thus, when these oligarchs imagined social relations, they imagined
a line between two equal points. The suffering of one was his own concern, to be judged within a
world defined by the limits of his own body. When the erstwhile goðar or stórbændr clashed, they
did so as two individuals completely assured of their own rights and righteousness. There was no
real external power, beyond the power exerted by one that crushed another into defeat. The concept
of oddi, as embodied by an oddamaðr, was a way to moderate desire without violation of personal
autonomy. Oddi was consensual; a gentle recalibration of desiring-machines required to preserve
the sovereignty of the powerful, landed class. It allowed the desires of the goði-stórbóndi axis to
cohere as a continuum, preventing conflicting desires causing the class to self-destruct.
So when Árni's first victim is a wealthy clergyman (“[hann] atte vel peninga”),
the very architect of the Gamli Sáttmáli, Jarl Gizurr, and who goes by the name of Oddi, it can be
read as a deeply provocative polemic. The clergy are no longer to be spineless lackeys under the
sway of the secular elite, the desires of none will be preserved through wealth and station, and most
threatening of all, the doctrine of oddi will be no more. Árni intends to reconfigure the line that
Miller describes: no longer a horizontal between two autonomous points with a third party to ensure
the sanctity of both parties' desires, but a strictly binary vertical, with Árni above, managing the
desires of all below him. Indeed, as we shall see, he does not just frustrate or repress those desires
but violates them utterly, by reforming them into the likeness of his own.
67 Miller, William Ian. Eye for an Eye. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) p. 9.
68 Lovsamling for Island, vol. 1, ed. by Jón Sigurðsson & Oddgeir Stephensen (Copenhagen: Andr. Fred. Höst, 1853)
p. 11.
69 ÁBp. p. 8.
20
Never one to make empty threats, Árni's next engagement is the struggle over the estate at
Oddastaðir, perhaps signalling a move from the symbolic and representative mode into that of the
physical and present (“the place of Oddi?”). From now on, his enemies are historical entities, and
often quite formidable and esteemed ones, too. For example, the matriarch at Oddastaðir, Steinvǫr
Sighvatsdóttir, has been reckoned to be the model for Bergþóra Skarphéðinsdóttir in Njáls Saga
although judging from the vague chronology of ÁBp, Árni wisely waits until her death before
seriously escalating the conflict. Moreover, this narrative progression manifests the aforementioned
duality of his strategy, one arm reaching to control sexuality, the other to control property.
The intimate connection of libido to desire is apparent – indeed, the two words are often employed
synonymously, even if they are more properly synecdochic – but it is less obvious in the case of
property. It can be shown that property in Medieval Iceland embodied tension with reality, and was
so proximal to the desiring-machine in its function as to be a component thereof. First, though, we
must examine the external appearance of property in Árni's world. A staðr was, at its simplest, a
plot of farmland on which a church had been constructed. In Iceland, where “The Church” as an
institution had always been somewhat anaemic compared to mainland Europe, these churches had
generally been built by the secular elite.
There were many incentives for doing so. During the
twelfth century many powerful Icelanders had converted their farms into staðir because it made all
resultant income exempt from the tithe tax.
Later, owning a staðr came to confer special tax-
levying privileges too, allowing owners to generate income from anyone resident on their land.
Outside of these economic benefits, secular chieftains were able to manipulate the running of the
churches they had built, thus preventing the Church in Iceland from gaining much autonomy. It is
worth noting that Árni was the first bishop of Skálholt who had not spent his religious education at
one of these staðr-seminaries.
Karl Marx, in one of his many meditations on Hegelianism, reduced the property-desire relationship
in Medieval Europe to one of a field of operation, calling land “exclusive spheres of [the owners']
private will to the exclusion of all others”.
This is probably true of the staðir, but it does not
70 Haraldur Jónsson. “Um fyrirmyndir að persónum Njálu og hugleiðingar um höfundinn”, Lesbók Morgunblaðsins, 1
st
October, 1972. p. 12.
71 Byock, 1993. p. 93.
72 Ibid. at p. 92.
73 Ibid. at pp. 93-94.
74 Ibid. at pp. 144-145.
75 Marx, Karl. Pre-Capitalist Socio-Economic Formations: A Collection. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979) p. 184.
21
provide a full account of the situation. It is not only the case that a stórbóndi in possession of a
staðr had license within the borders of that land, but also that with the ownership came further
capital from the aforementioned taxes. This capital may not always have been in the form of
currency, although Árni does demonstrate the theory of value-abstraction which is prerequisite for
such a transaction,
but like any capital it would still have provided the bearer with an augmented
capacity for the pursuit of desire. Labour in Marx's reckoning was the sort of tension with reality
identified earlier: “[man] appropriates Nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By
thus acting on the eternal world and thus changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.
He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act on obedience to his sway.”
thus becomes an investment of this tension,
or a way to abstract desire and store it. This should be
key to our understanding of the staðr. It accords well with the illustrious Medieval Scandinavian
tradition of concealing valuable things underground in great hoards, which had remained vibrant in
Árni's time
79 –
and so we could epigrammatically characterise the staðr as desire buried in the earth.
Once more, though, we can go further than Marx in adapting his model for an Icelandic context.
Because staðir brought with them tax revenue, they also broke the link between desire and labour
for their owners, becoming pure regenerating capital without the need to produce physical products.
In this sense, then, they were not just facilitators of desire or resources for desire to consume, but a
way for desire to become disembodied (or as Deleuze and Guattari would say, “deterritorialised”).
This is curious, given that we have only just established that the staðr also gives desire a body in its
fertile earth.
The best way to understand the situation is by means of an analogy. In the late 17
th
century, the
naval strategist Lord Torrington posited the idea of the 'fleet in being'
– if a fleet were kept in a port
where it could not be attacked, it was no less of a fleet. Its existence could still affect the strategies
of enemy fleets as thought it were out at sea, behaving how we expect a fleet should. Nonetheless,
its actual behaviour (being stationary, being peaceful, maybe being unmanned or unarmed, etc.) is
still somewhat at odds with what we expect from a fleet. This is precisely how desire functions
when invested in a staðr. It is not yet committed to a particular alteration of reality, but altering
76 e.g. Árni's costing for the repair of the roof at Skálholt: ÁBp. pp. 17-18.
His penitentials also place monetary values on various sexual indiscretions:
Dipl. Isl., vol 2. p. 40, pp. 42-43,p. 59, p. 61.
77 Marx, Karl. Capital. abridged and trans. by David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) p. 113.
78 Ibid. at pp. 465-469.
79 Graham-Campbell, James. “Hoards” in Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia. ed. by Philip Pulsiano & Kirsten
Wolf (London: Garland Publishing, 1993) p. 288.
* This parallel to deterritorialisation was first suggested by the Deleuzo-Guattarin philosopher, Paul Varilio:
Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. trans. by Mark Polizzoti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986) pp. 38-41.
22
reality remains its intrinsic function. To summarise these observations, we might extend our earlier
phrase: the staðr is desire buried in the earth, proliferating tubers without nourishment from above,
waiting to be dug up.
This extraordinary mode of desiring-production could not be more opposed to Árni's experience. As
a child, Árni invested vast quantities of diverse kinds of labour, yet it brought his desires no closer
to fruition as he was but a cog in someone else's desiring-machine; he and his family were inside
the staðr, producing more and more abstracted desire for the benefit of the landed Svínfellingar.
This was the nature of these estates – they could not simply be occupied. Either one was being
sustained by the assemblage, or one was a component therein. Thus, when Árni confiscates them
and then leases them back to their former owners, their humiliation is complete. This may well be
characterised as revenge, especially when the saga author makes special note of the bishop's
appropriation of Svínafell,
but it is not simply an inversion of positions. Árni has alienated his
enemies from their own desires, and yet it is not contributing to his personal gain. It is convenient
shorthand to talk of Árni 'taking' and of things being 'yielded to' him, but only once in his saga does
he ever receive anything in his own name (a gift from King Magnús, silfur ker gillt utann og
jnnann, ormstungar ij, budk af electuario gott vid froste
– “a silver pot, gilded inside and out, two
snake's tongues, and a box of electuary which would be useful for the winter”). Appropriating the
staðir on behalf of the Church, which ÁBp always makes clear to be his intention, is an integral part
of Árni's real victory in the staðamál. He has subverted the predominant ideology of Medieval
Iceland at its most basic level. Not only have proud individuals been broken down into mere
machines, but no other individual will profit from this. The staðir, as weapons of mass desiring,
have been decommissioned.
Denying the secular elite their land, and with it no little source of income, is a brutal cauterisation of
those tendrils at the tip of desire which reach out and conjoin it to external reality. Another related
method of control Árni exercises is the threat of excommunication. ÁBp features multiple instances
of this – the bishop even excommunicates the entire congregation at Oddi's abortive wedding.
coalescing factors of Árni's confidence in using this measure and his flock's belief in his authority to
do so probably explain why he succeeded where his predecessors, Guðmundr and Þorlákr, failed. It
is important not to underestimate the force of excommunication for a medieval Catholic population.
Quite apart from any social exclusion, it promised the inevitability of an eternity spent in nothing
80 ÁBp. pp. 16-17.
81 Ibid. at p. 24.
82 Ibid. at p. 8.
23
but unimaginable torment. If the threat alone were not enough, once excommunicated any hapless
victim, and their loved ones too, would have submitted to anything in order to have the punishment
rescinded. Árni was acutely aware of this, and he takes full advantage of it in one of his decrees,
stating in § 21 that:
Ef bansettur madr deyr oleystur þa ma eingi leysa hann nema sä er ualld hafdi til at
leysa hann heilan ok osiukan ok skulu erfingiar hana allt aptur bæta þat sem hann hafdi
brotid ok se adr sannprofat at sialfr hann uilldi sæzt hafa ef hann hefde näd.
If an excommunicated man is dying un-absolved then no-one can absolve him, unless
they would have had the authority to absolve him when he was fit and healthy, and his
inheritors should repent for everything which he did wrong and it should be proven
that the man himself would have done so if he had God's grace.
Local priests – perhaps those loyal to the staðir where they were trained – would not have had the
seniority to give absolution. That power, we must presume, was herein reserved for Árni himself.
So too was it rendered completely impossible to relent only on one's deathbed, or act with impunity
during life in the hope that the efforts of one's relatives would secure a release from Hell. This
proclamation demands ones obedience now, and failing that, the deference of ones loved ones after
death. Threats like these have a more nuanced effect on desire than land confiscation. They prompt
the desiring-machine to produce a new brand of desire in addition to its previous products: that
which Aristotle would have called “avoidance”.
In doing so, they do nothing less than produce
their own oppression. So long as the desire not to be consumed by everlasting fire, or have one's
relatives do so, is stronger than any desires contrary to Árni's will, the latter will not be fulfilled.
This may seem obvious, but it is important to note the discourse at play. Losing a staðr frustrates
desire, a threat makes it a minority within one's own psyche. All that remains is the ability to
transform the desires of others from their core. In matters sexual, Árni finds the tools to do just that.
Sexual desire can be seen not as a category, but rather a form – that which desire takes when it
operates in the field of sexuality. Just as a substance adheres to different physical laws depending on
which state it inhabits, desire demonstrates diverse behaviours in its different fields. Árni himself
seems to have been aware of this distinction. His vocabulary of terms for sexual desire has been
83 Dipl. Isl. vol. 2. p. 28.
84 As previously cited: Aristotle, 1986. p. 212.
24
carefully chosen so as to convey as much disdain as possible; he writes of saurlifi
life” and frillu lifnade
– the “lifestyle of concubinage”, but his most frequently employed term is
likams losti.
We might well translate this as something along the lines of “bodily lust”, but it is
worth noting that Árni never simply uses the word losti alone to describe sexuality, even though this
was an accepted usage.
Judging from the apparent lack of interest in linguistic adornment or
writing for effect in all of Árni's documents, it seems unlikely that this is a simple case of tautology.
Rather that he was aware of the general matter of losti – “desire”, distinct from sexuality and yet
fundamental to any attempt at its manipulation.
Indeed, sexuality has an intriguing propensity to be conditioned much more thoroughly than desire
in its other forms. Michel Foucault's posthumous masterpiece, The History of Sexuality, gives a
convincing account of this malleability, rooting his study in the Middle Ages.
tendency here to picture the process of sexual reformation as the consequences of a philosophical
fallacy in which both “oppressor” and “oppressed” partook. In Árnian Skálholt, though, there is a
complete absence of agency on behalf of those who are reformed. Árni intends to recondition the
sexual conduct of his flock, and has no intention of making them party to the doctrinal deliberations
which have shaped his view. History offers many analogous situations which nonetheless left desire
strongly imprinted. In the United States, where there are legal prohibitions on homosexual activity,
and doggedly heteronormative cultures, the permitted eroticism of a masculine-feminine dichotomy
utterly suffused desiring-production, to the extent where even the lesbian underground stigmatized
relationships where lovers did not assume these gender roles.
Strict censorship laws on obscenity
in Japan are often thought to explain the consistent demand among Japanese consumers of
pornography for highly aberrant themes, such as bestiality and paedophilia, because such topics
have never been specifically prohibited.
These motifs prevail, even though the law is now
interpreted differently.
In our traditional image of totalitarian societies, the assumption is that
85 Dipl. Isl. vol 2. p. 25.
86 Ibid. at p. 26.
87 It is used in all the oaths on carnality with the exception of Eiðstafr. að maðr hafi ekki átt né reynt til að eiga
samræði við konu, where the term likamligt sambland is preferred.
Ibid. at pp. 44-45.
88 Cleasby, Richard and Guðbrandur Vigfússon. An Icelandic-English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1874) p.
398.
89 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Random
House, 1990) pp. 59-70.
90 Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky & Davis, Madeline D. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian
Community. (New York: Penguin, 1994) pp. 191-192, pp. 212-213.
91 Dahlquist, Joel Powell. Vigilant, Lee Garth. “Way Better Than Real: Manga Sex to Tentacle Hentai” in net.seXXX:
Readings on Sex, Pornography, and the Internet. ed. by Dennis D. Waskul (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004)
p. 93, p. 102.
92 Napier, Susan J. Animé from Akira to Princess Mononoke: experiencing contemporary Japanese animation (New
25
people would pursue various desires if they had the opportunity, or if they were not so afraid of the
consequences of doing so. With sexuality, though, desire reacts to stress only by changing and
consuming itself as an object. It is not that we want and cannot have, but that we want not to want.
The parameters of morality with which Árni restrained sexual conduct in his diocese may not seem
particularly radical to us, but in a Medieval Icelandic context they were cataclysmic. At the time
that Árni came to power practices such as extra-marital and pre-marital concubinage, illegitimate
conceptions, polygyny, and marriage of the clergy were all both common and permitted.
deviant still, scientific studies have confirmed something we would logically assume but which is
little attested in saga evidence; that historically Iceland's small population has engaged in an intense
level of inbreeding.
It is my view that the bishop's decrees were strategically designed to create a
mechanism of control out of each of these desiring-norms, but it is necessary to mention that there
is a scholarly opinion which sees Árni as a somewhat emancipatory figure in the history of sexuality
in Iceland. Both Jenny Jochens and Agnes Arnórsdóttir point out that Árni's kristinrétt marks the
first time in Icelandic law where a woman's consent is specified as necessary for a marriage.
However, as shall be seen, a synoptic view of his various ordinances shows that at the same time he
put so many extra restrictions on matrimony that he had in effect not elevated it to a union between
two autonomous parties, but had transformed it into a kind of ménage à trois, where compliance
with Árni became necessary not just for permission to be wed but for leave to remain so.
The bishop's various decrees are convoluted not only by the process of manuscript transmission but
also the total lack of thematic organisation. His free confusion of sexual/non-sexual misdeeds and
sexual/non-sexual penalties is another elucidation of the all-pervasive nature of desire in his mind.
As Deleuze and Guattari said, “where one believed there was the law, there is in fact desire, and
desire alone”.
For convenience, however, I have compiled the statutes which are of importance to
creating sexual control in the bishopric of Skálholt and redacted them by category. Each law is
given in Old Norse and then in translation, with a comment on its interpretation and implementation
beneath. The question of enforcement is discussed after this section:
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) pp. 64-65, p. 79.
93 Guðrún Nordal. Ethics and action in thirteenth-century Iceland. (Odense: Odense University Press, 1998) pp. 105-
107. pp. 144-145
94 Agnar Helgason et al. “An Association Between the Kinship and Fertility of Human Couples”, Science, 319 (2008)
p. 814.
95 Agnes Arnórsdóttir, 2010. p. 106.
96 Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. trans. by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1986) p. 49.
26
Rules regarding sexual conduct:
A further restriction on the clergy
ON: En ef prestur uerdur opinber at saurlifnade med barn eign þa skal han leggia
messu song þar til er hann finnr biskup sinn edr hans profast ok taki skript.
EN: And if a priest openly desecrates his life by having a child, then he may continue
giving mass until he can find his bishop or his provost and undergo penance.
∴
given that Árni's penitentials could enforce punishments as extreme as a self-funded
pilgrimage to Rome (de facto exile), this is a clever innovation beyond his self-professed
commitment
to Bishop Heinrekr's and Bishop Brandr's prohibition on clerical marriage,
allowing him an even greater degree of control over any priests still loyal to the secular elite.
On fornication
ON: Þat er ok fyri bodit. at þeim monnum se gefin þionuztu er opinberliga ero j frillu
lifnade. nema þeir handsali kenni manne fyri uattum at skilia. eptir þui sem hann bydr
eda ganga sama ella loglega.
EN: It is also forbidden to give holy service to those people who openly live a life of
concubinage, unless they have pledged to a priest to part or to get married officially as
he commands.
∴
the process of becoming sexually active is brought entirely under the bishop's control.
Either one must be celibate, or submit to Árni's marriage laws. After all, prohibition from
receiving sacrament effectively amounts to excommunication.
ON: Ef hordomr er framdur j heilagri kirkiu sua at upp liost uerdi. eda uid uerdi gengit.
eda storir auerkar. þa skal af uera uigsla af kirkiu.
EN: If it is revealed that whoredom or greatly unlawful deeds have been propagated in a
holy church, or taken place around it, then the church will be deconsecrated.
97 Dipl Isl. vol. 2. p. 25.
98 ÁBp. p. 9.
99 Dipl. Isl. vol 2.. p. 26.
100 Ibid. at p. 34
27
∴
the deconsecration of a church, if built on a staðr, would have relegated the property to
nothing more than regular farm land. Generally hórdómr means specifically “adultery”,
it can have the broader meaning of any sexual impropriety (cf. stanza 45 of Vǫluspá – munu
systrungar / sifjum spilla / hart er í heimi, / hórdómr mikill)
and this would appear to be the
case here, especially as storir auerkar seems to be acting as the kind of complementary
parallelism so common in Old Norse. The vagueness of this misdemeanour, the fact that it can
have happened in the past, and that it doesn't even have to happen in the church but merely on
the staðr would have given Árni the option of dissolving most of the staðir which he was
unable to acquire by other means.
ON: Sa einfalldann hordom dryger. sekvr. iij.
orkum uid biskup. enn vm
tuefalldann. sekr vj
orkum uid biskup ok taki skripter.
EN: If there is one instance of sexual misconduct three marks are owed to the bishop,
but if it happens again six marks go to the bishop and one should seek penance.
∴
this clause seems to be a comment on the general principle of fines going up incrementally
in relation to the rate of reoffending, as it does not list who exactly should pay the fine or
specify to which kind of hórdómr it applies. There is an arresting reflection of the desiring
abstraction machine of the staðir here. Just as the staðr generates capital-desire from the
actions of those who live on it without the need for special exertion from its owner, this
system of fines makes a staðr of the economy of desire in Skálholt, where the free production
of desire amongst Árni's flock is directed away from an internal cycle of desire → satisfaction
and is instead rerouted to the augmentation of Árni's own desiring purposes.
On inbreeding
ON: helldr og giptur madr barni til skirnar eda fermingar eda skirir hann þat eda moder
hefir skirt eda til skirnar halldit þa er barnit og sva fadir og modir barnsins j gudsifium
vid eigin konu þess manz ef þau hafa adr likamliga saman komit þui þau voru þa bæde
sem einn madr.
EN: Furthermore, if a married man has a child baptised or confirmed, or the mother has
101 Richard Cleasby & Guðbrandur Vigfússon, 1874. p. 281.
102 Haugen, Odd Einar (ed.). Norrøne tekster i utval (Bergen: Fjernord, 1994) p. 29.
103 Dipl. Isl. vol. 2. p. 60.
104 Ibid. at p. 51
28
it baptised, then the child and so the father and the mother of the child are in affinity
together with the man's unmarried woman if they have previously known each other
carnally because they are therefore like one person.
∴
in these and other following laws, Árni dramatically inflates the concept of guðsifja
(“affinity, the concept of being related by marriage”). The strangest result of this extension is
that an unmarried woman, if she has sex with a man who later fathers a child by another
woman, will become an in-law to the man, his child, and the child's mother.
ON: ... ef nockur er so vid staddr at um nockura meinbugi viti þar a uera frændsemi eða
sifskapi. þa segi presti til fyrr en brudlaup fullgiorizt ...Ecki skulu þeir menn saman
ganga er nanari se at sifivm eða frændsemi. en at fimta manni huort nema biskup uili
gefa framar orlof til.
EN: If somebody who is present has some knowledge of the sin that it would be for
them to have consanguinity or affinity, then they will tell the priest before the marriage
is completed. ... People should not come together who are closer in consanguinity or
affinity than the fifth degree, unless the bishop gives them special permission to do so.
∴
given that for most Icelanders it has only become possible to find partners more distant
than a consanguineous fifth cousin in the past century,
the enforcement of this edict would
have made all marriages in Skálholt subject to Árni's approval.
ON: Ef madr li
G
ur med fiormenningi sinum at frændsemi eda sifivm gialldi biskupi
.xij. aura ok taki skripter en syskina born halfa fimtv mork ok take skripter.
EN: If one has sex with ones fourth cousin by blood or by marriage they owe the
bishop twelve aurei and ought to seek penance and the sibling's children should pay
half a fifth mark and seek penance.
ON: Hefr madr likamlega gudsifia sinn luki .iij.
erkr hvort þeirra ok taki skriptir.
EN: If a man takes an in-law carnally then they should be fined three marks each and
seek penance.
105 Ibid. at p. 27.
106 Agnar Helgason, 2008. p. 814.
107 Dipl. Isl. vol. 2. p. 60.
29
∴
in practice these pronouncements would amount to a tax on almost all sexual relations in
Iceland except those with foreigners, as nearly everyone in Skálholt would have been at least
a fourth cousin – especially as here affinity is considered equal with consanguinity. The tax on
children born to such a union also amounts to a form of poll tax.
ON: Ef madr li
G
ur med modur sinni. dottur stiupdotter. sonar konu brodr konu. sonar
dotter systur dotter dottur dotter modur moder ok fodur moder modr systur. faudur
systur. modr konu mannz. (!) þa er hann fridlaus. ok bædi þau, þar til er þau taka skript
ok bædi hafa þau fyri giort godzi sina ollu. landi ok lausum eyri. enn ef manni fallazt
eyƒdar um slikt mal fellur til obota.
EN: If a man has sex with one's mother, step-daughter's daughter, his son's wife's
brother's wife, his son's daughter's sister's daughter's daughter's daughter's mother's
mother and father's mother's sister's mother, father's sister, or his wife's mother then he
will be outlawed and his partner too, until they seek penance and both have
relinquished all their property, land and currency, and if a man does such a thing he is to
submit to an abbot.
∴
Árni may be inspired here by earlier Norwegian laws, themselves based on Leviticus 18:
It makes sense to codify oedipal incest as a serious crime, although whether legislation
was necessary is debatable. Other degrees of kinship seem confused, but what is interesting
here is Árni's attempt to co-opt outlawry as an ecclesiastical power. Moreover, the idea that a
sexual offence outside the parameters of níð could carry that sentence is groundbreaking. It
could be argued that such a move belies a philosophical transition from the idea of crime
being against individuals or social order (i.e. a conflict of desires which has escalated beyond
acceptable limits) to that of crimes against morality. (i.e. a crime of desire itself).
On the permission to marry
ON: Ef soknar prestir situr at þeim brudlaupum. sem eigi hefir lyst uerit. fyri biodest
honum messo saungr .iij. uetur.
108 Ibid. My exclamation mark.
109 Hagland, Jan Ragnar. “Norwegians and Europe: The Theme of Marriage and Consanguinity in Early Norwegian
Law” in Scandinavia and Europe 800-1350: Contact, Conflict, and Coexistence. ed. by Jonathan Adams &
Katherine Holman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004) p. 218.
110 Dipl. Isl. vol. 2. p. 59.
30
EN:If a parish priest presides over a wedding which has not been permitted then he is
forbidden to sing mass for three years.
ON: Huer sem brudkaup giorer eda konu fær aa oleyfdum timum gialldi biskupi .xij.
aura. ok taki skript.
EN: Whosoever arranges a marriage or gets engaged at a non-approved time owes the
bishop twelve aurei and ought to take penance.
ON: Ef madr frestar brudlaupi sinu logliga til stefndur. luki biskupi .xij. aura
. xij.
manadum huerium
EN: If a man is accused of deferring his legal wedding the bishop will charge twelve
aurei and twelve marks every month.
∴
transferring control of weddings from a local church level to that of direct epsicopal
control is a bold move, and the penalty of de facto defrocking attests to Árni's devotion to this
ideal. This is part of the wider strategy to prevent priests with secular loyalties undermining
the effective function of Árni's other decrees. His insistence not just on deciding the validity
of a union but maintaining a strict control over when it can happen re-enforces the idea that it
is not enough to conform in ones desires, but that ones desires must have an exact parity with
Árni´s.
Having read these laws, it is necessary to turn to the question of whether they were ever enforced.
They seem simply so draconian as to be impossible to implement. There is no evidence from any
contemporary reports of people breaching these rules and suffering the consequences, but then
again the events of Árni's career seldom appear in the sagas outside of ÁBp, possibly because there
was little interest in reports detailing the submission of a once powerful class. There is, though,
evidence that Árni's other laws on marriage were observed.
The increasing proximity of church to
secular law, brought about with the adoption of the Jónsbók laws, would certainly imply that the
bishop was serious about his demands. Furthermore, as Jan Ragnar Hagland points out, the fact that
Greenlanders were granted a special exemption from consanguinity rules “creates the impression
that the laws on marriage prohibition were expected to be adhered to.”
111 Ibid. at p. 60.
112 Ibid.
113 Agnes Arnórsdóttir, 2010. p.439.
114 Hagland, 2004. pp. 217-218.
31
the various edicts functioned much like Árni's other litigious enterprises. Just as in the staðamál,
where Árni pressed an apparently weak legal standpoint for the church to take effective possession
of the staðir, and could succeed against weaker individuals while the exceptionally cunning and
strong minded were able to avoid compliance, we might well imagine a similar situation with regard
to these sexual restraints. Certainly the more drastic rules could not have been enforced after Árni's
death, as his strength of character must have played a considerable role in his unlikely success. He
may well have anticipated this eventuality; perhaps the emphasis on affinity in marriage was
designed to prevent the major clans maintaining power blocs along familial lines, so as to weaken
the secular elite permanently.
The recurring theme in this study is the question of how to condition desire and not just repress it.
These laws provide a sanctioned field in which Árni would permit the operation of desire, but his
ultimate goal, where desire desires to be limited to these parameters, is finally pursued in his use of
oaths. They represent a remarkable innovation in the history of normativeness in Iceland. ÁBp never
mentions anybody merely making an agreement with the bishop, rather people are always required
at sverja – “to swear”. The oaths used were not simply composed ad hoc, but they seem to have
been carefully crafted by the bishop himself, and many have survived to the present day in Icelandic
manuscripts. They cover the following diverse range of topics.
All the pledges begin with the
formula Til þess leggr þú hǫnd á helga bók... and conclude with some variant on the phrase guð sé
þér hollr ef þú heldr þenna eið, gramr ef þú rýðr. In terms of diplomatics, there is an intriguing
innovation in the use of the character
to denote “insert name here”, standing either for nafni or
nomine. A good example is the oath used to impose divorce upon the laity, presumably the same
which Egill Sólmundarson and Þorunn Garða-Einarsdóttir were forced to take:
Til þess leggr þu hond a helga bok ok þui skytur þu til guds at þu skallt hedan af vera
skildr at felagi ok likams losta vid þessa konu .
. ok eigi skalltu at bordi vera edr
innhýsis med henni um nott edr j nokkurum grunsemdar stad[.] eigi skalltu ok tala vid
hana nema j opinberum stad ok vitnum nærverandum og heyrandum ord ýkkur. gud se
115 See Dipl. Isl. vol. 2: Not having harmed a cleric (p. 43) being a truthful witness that someone did not intend to harm
a cleric, renouncing any sexual encounters with a woman, denying paternity (p. 44.) certifying that one has not had
any sexual relationship contrary to Árni's laws, asserting that one has never even intended to engage in sexual
relations with a woman (p. 45,) an oath for priests that they have forced an oath on a member of their congregation
in accordance with Árni's will (pp. 45-46.) promising to go on a pilgrimage to Rome (p. 46.) an oath that a woman is
telling the truth about the identity of her child's father (pp. 46-47). There is even an oath to attest that one believes
another's oath (p. 47.)
32
þer hollr ef þu helldr þenna eid. gramr. ef þu rydr.
For this you lay your hand on The Holy Book, and you swear to God that henceforth
you will be divorced from the company and carnal pleasure of this woman [Insert
name], and you shall not eat with her, nor be in a house with her at night or in any
suspicious place. Also, you shall not talk to her, except in public places and with
present witnesses listening to your words. God will be favourable towards you if you
hold this oath. He will be wrathful if you break it.
The reader can have no doubt that this vow does not decree a divorce for the sake of either party in
a relationship, but rather serves only to deliver their desires entirely into Árni's hands. What is
implicit in some oaths, and explicit in others, is that the promise demands veracity i orðum ok i
uerkum. ok i hugsan
– “in words and in deeds and in thoughts”. This is the crucial difference
between the sort of promise we might experience today and the kind of oath employed in Árnian
Skálholt. We may promise not to do something we would otherwise desire, but this is a discourse of
the external. Árni's vows deal in the internal: one must trúa
– “believe”, one may not produce the
desire of likams losti. The situation is surmised in the final clause of the oath, which as seen,
threatens the unquestionable certainty of divine wrath, the oath-taker must resolve to balance the
internal experience of desire with its external articulation. Put another way, the act of reciting the
oath brings the law away from its position as an external power and re-incorporates it as part of the
internal production of desire – it is an affirmation that we will police ourselves while we are still
negotiating the tension with reality that characterises our consciousness. The process of consciously
becoming the primary conditioner of one's own desiring-production is equivalent to automation.
Like Marx's worker becoming alienated from his product, one must see oneself as something
analogous to a machine; a subject that produces on behalf of another subject (more precisely,
perhaps, an indirect object). Deleuze and Guattari's “desiring-machines” are not necessarily as
anachronistic as they might seem. It goes without saying that nobody in a pre-industrial society can
have understood our “sign” of the machine in the industrial sense, but they could have understood
the phenomena which for us is signified by it. The story of
is, as previously stated, interesting
from the perspective of diplomatics, but it is also a precious artefact for exploring the archaeology
of desire in Skálholt. The relative lack of state apparatus and administration in Medieval Iceland
116 Ibid. at p. 44.
117 Ibid. at p. 49
118 Ibid. at p. 47.
119 Shippey, Thomas. “Review of Jesse Byock's Medieval Iceland”, The London Review of Books, 11, 11 (June, 1989)
33
makes it a surprising enough setting for the spontaneous emergence of this kind of bureaucracy.
However, it is the aforementioned Icelandic proclivity for individualism which makes it even more
astounding for the outside observer – and even more necessary for Árni. As we have seen, identity,
within a world-view common to the secular elite, was an inalienable and wholly ideological edifice.
This Weltanschauung had necessitated the convoluted idea of oddi, and in doing so shed centuries
worth of blood, solely to justify one idiom: desidero ergo sum. Icelandic literature is often fond of
saying that an individual could trúa á mátt sinn ok megin.
– “believe in his own might and main.”
What he believes it to do is to produce, pursue and fulfil desire. And yet Árni blithely levels all
identities into one constant:
. Regardless of wealth or social station, the pledge is the same and
one's name is just a blank space to be filled in. This kind of bureaucracy constitutes a contiguous
assemblage, with the architect of the document and his desire, the oath-taker and his desire, and the
document itself, operating as one desiring-machine in its own right. In this case there is no question
of who controls the machine, or for whose benefit it operates. The key ramification is that it will
always function according to the rules by which it was designed. For Árni, the battle is won once
previously autonomous desiring-machines have become components within another assemblage of
his making. To conclude this tale of law, bureaucracy, and desire, we may turn again to Deleuze and
Guattari, who summarise the travail of abstraction and appropriation with a characteristic sense of
poetry:
All the gears, which are in fact equivalent despite all appearances, and which constitute
the bureaucracy as desire, that is, as an exercise of the assemblage itself. The divisions
of oppressor and oppressed, repressors and repressed, flow out of each state of the
machine, and not vice versa … Bureaucracy is desire, not an abstract desire …
Bureaucracy as desire is at one with the functioning of a certain number of gears, the
exercise of a certain number of powers that determine, as a function of the composition
of the social field in which they are held, the engineers as well as the engineered.
pp. 16-17.
120 For a brief survey of how this motif permeated Medieval Scandinavian culture see:
Grimm, Jacob. Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, trans. by James Steven Sallybrass (New York: Courier Dover
Publications, 2004) pp. 6-7.
121 Deleuze & Guattari, 1986. pp. 56-57.
34
Conclusion
There can be no doubt that Árni's long episcopal career left a huge imprint on the diocese of
Skálholt. His widespread confiscation of land and his numerous legal reforms arguably curtailed the
power of the secular elite far more than the Gamli Sáttmáli ever had. Yet there is an implicit trend in
scholarship to demean Árni and the saga of his life. Perhaps this is because most commentators
have been influenced by the Icelandic buchprosa school. This tendency has roots in the thought of
Sigurður Nordal and the independence movement,
so we might expect its adherents to praise the
literature and the ideology of the Commonwealth Period, while maintaining hostility towards any
person or text that would militate against them.
However, in the case of Árni Þorláksson it is not necessarily true that critics are merely projecting
their own political feelings on to a conflict from which they are completely insulated by the passage
of time. On both a personal and collective level the frustration of desire is a traumatic experience,
but it isn't nearly as traumatic as losing the agency of one's own desire and coming to desire one's
own oppression, which does seem to be what happened in Skálholt. When desire is only 'driven
underground' by use of coercive force, then it inevitably re-emerges as soon as the threat of punitive
measures are removed. Yet the observance of Árni's statutes did not diminish completely until the
end of 17
th
century,
extending well beyond the period of generally weak foreign bishops in the
enska öld and þýska öld. We should note that if ÁBp is indeed a kirkjupólitísk landssaga sem var
ætlað að tryggja stefnu Árna biskups framtíð í Skálholtsbiskupsdæmi
tale of property which was intended to buttress the future of Bishop Árni's policies in the bishopric
of Skálholt”, there is no direct answer to its challenge during the medieval period. There are no saga
accounts of people criticising Árni's rule colloquially between themselves. In fact, manuscripts of
ÁBp continued to be transmitted as long as Árni's laws were being observed.
Without maintenance, the abstracted bureaucratic desiring-machine will eventually lose its cohesion
and release its appropriated mechanisms, but it is a very different process to that of emancipation
from external oppression. The dismissive response of many commentators to Árni's campaign can
be interpreted as the latently indignant rejection of Árnian values, so glaringly absent in the years
immediately following his death. Understanding the continuity between the staðamál and current
scholarly debate must be part of any effort to give an evaluation of the theme of desire in Árni's life.
122 Byock, 1993. p. 39.
123 Agnes Arnórsdóttir, 2010. p. 439.
124 Guðrún Ása Grímsdóttir. Biskupa sögur, vol. 3. Íslenzk Fornrit XVII (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1998)
p. xviii.
125 Þorleifur Hauksson, 1972. pp. xlv-xlvi.
35
The process of desiring-intervention could be appraised at any point along a spectrum of views. At
one pole we might see the theme of desire in Árni's life as part of a broader attempt by foreign
powers to meddle in Iceland's affairs, bringing a once harmonious
and free society closer to the
kind of bondage which characterised feudal government elsewhere in Europe.
violation of the ideal of personal autonomy would actually be a symptom of the general implosion
of Icelandic independence for which Icelanders were themselves responsible. The most fitting
opinion is probably a mixture of both extremes. As seen, Árni was certainly a product of the society
in which he grew up, rather than an outside agent who was transplanted, but on the other hand his
curious campaign to control desire was so determined and deliberate that is surely must be seen as a
pressure on the Icelandic secular elite from outside. In summary, Árni was created by forces internal
to Iceland, even if his project became an external force.
This debate brings us to the issue of how to characterise the narrative. That trauma which is felt as
the assemblage disintegrates and people are restored an independent desiring sense might encourage
the position that what Árni did was tyrannical and villainous. He threatened and persecuted the
Icelandic aristocracy into submission, and so we can only imagine what it would have been like to
be lower down the hierarchy in his bishopric, subjected to drastic laws and bound by a multitude of
oaths. However, is it really plausible that desiring-production was any freer in pre-Árnian Skálholt?
As we have seen, the staðir provided the secular elite with their own totalitarian assemblage. Árni
did not truly begin to desire autonomously until he entered the monastery at Þykkvabær. When a
monastery provides more agency in this regard than the uncloistered life, the situation outside can
hardly be called liberal.
Contrary to appearances, then, the story of desire in Árni's life is not really one dominated by dour
asceticism at all. Quite the opposite, Árni shows us what happens when the desires of a minority
proliferate completely out of control. His Übermensch-like determination and inscrutability are
affirmations of his own mechanical function: to meet the desiring capital of the elite with an equal
or greater force. Whether the audience's church gained from the staðamál, their family lost from it,
126 Note, for example, David Friedman's calculation that the murder rate in Medieval Iceland was comparable to that of
the present day United States:
Friedman, David. “Private Creation and Enforcement of Law: A Historical Case”, The Journal of Legal Studies, 8, 2
(March,1979) pp. 410-411.
127 For a thorough critique of these arguments, see:
Sigurður Líndal. “Utanríkisstefna íslendinga á 13. öld og aðdragandi sáttmálans 1262-64”, Úlfljótur, 17 (1964) pp.
4-36.
36
or they are living hundreds of years later and thousands of miles from Skálholt, there is a universal
message in the bishop's life. An oligarchy whose desiring-production was in overdrive thanks to its
dominion over the lowest echelons of society was brought down by its own creation. We might
contend that his saga does not end with his death because it was never the man himself who was
important. From his poverty as a child, to his personal revolution as a young man, to the sustained
overhaul of the means of desiring-production in his bishopric which endured long after his death,
there was nothing but the immanence of desire. In death, unlike Bishops Guðmundr and Þorlákr,
Árni would be no saint. Ironically, for a man known for his struggle against secular power, the
meaning of his life is arguably irreligious. It is a stark reminder of the fragility of human desire, and
the dramatic consequences when man is alienated en masse from his own desiring-production for
the profit of the few.
37
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