Society and politics in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla (review)

Reviews 183 (1978), and East-West trade in the medieval Mediterranean (1986)]. It contains nine studies on the economic andtechnologicaldecline of the Muslim Near East in the Later Middle Ages, on Italian economic expansion, on Jews in late medieval commerce, and on the industrial and technological advance of the West. Perhaps the most original and stimulating of the studies presented here is number VI: "Levantine alkali ashes and European industries" (1983). Here Ashtor joined forces with an applied chemist to investigate the production of alkali ashes (sodium and potassium carbonates) for soap and glass making from the plants salsola soda, salsola kali, and hammada scoparia: small bushes which grew in the Middle East on saline soils. The ashes were exported all over the Western Mediterranean in the thirteenth tofifteenthcenturies for the soap and glass industries, particularly to Venice for the glass industry of Murano. This was an innovative and stimulating article. So also was number III: "Levantine sugar industry in the later Middle Ages—an example of technological decline" (1977). This looked at the technological and economic decline of sugar production in the Levant as a result of failure to keep pace with technological innovation in the West. It also remarked on the similar decline of the Levantine textile and paper industries. This theme of the economic and technological stagnation of Egypt and Syria in the Later Middle Ages was developed in three general studies published in 1981 and 1983: numbers I, II, IV. Much of what Ashtor wrote about this phenomenon has now become widely accepted, although the impression made upon him by the sheer volume of surviving evidence in the archives of Western Europe probably led him to underestimate the vitality and survival of some sectors of the Levantine economy, particularly its maritime commerce and shipping technology. John H. Pryor Department of History University of Sydney Bagge, Svene, Society and politics in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 1991; cloth; pp. ix, 339; US$45.00. Heimskringla is a collection of sagas about the kings of Norway from Haivdan the Black (850-860) to Magnus Erlingsson (1161-1184) written around 1230 by the Icelandic poUtician and scholar Snoni Sturluson. In this important study, the Norwegian historian Svene Bagge examines Heimskringla in the context of European historiography, exploring Snorri's place in the Scandinavian tradition of compilation manuscripts of kings' sagas (Morkinskinna, Fagrskinna) and his relation to continental secular literature of his period, as weU as Snorri's own background as a politician and author. Through a detailed reading of the 184 Reviews sagas, Bagge analyses Snorri's presentation of conflict and society, treating in particular his attitude to morality and human character. Reviving the work done earlier this century by Halvdan Koht and refining the social analysis of Gudmund Sandvik, Bagge reassesses the received view that Heimskringla described an institutional struggle between the aristocracy and the monarchy. H e finds that Snorri's description of society is tripartite, with the crucial stratum between the king and the people occupied by 'magnates' (hersar), a category that is broader, and less well defined, than the aristocracy (p. 125). Bagge reads the conflicts in the sagas more as feuds between powerful and influential individuals than as constitutional conflicts reflecting a rex-iustusideology (p. 75). Bagge considers Heimskringla to be 'one of the best examples of the "heroic" and "objective" tradition in storytelling and saga writing' (p. 204), objective in the sense that the sagas display no consistent party bias. Arising out of oral traditions, he argues, this mode of story-telling expressed shared values and operated in a society where aUegiances tended to be temporary and not institutionalized. The fact that particular families tended to be favoured is taken by Bagge not as a sign of the cultural context of the writing of the sagas but as a reflection of oral traditions where fame and honour were established 'before the "objective tribunal" of the drinking parties' (p. 204). The apparent lack of ideological bias in Heimskringla is also seen as a consequence of its Icelandic provenance, since the conflicts of Norway and the rise of the monarchy there had no parallel in the political history...