Magic and Kingship in Medieval Iceland: The Construction of a Discourse of Political Resistance by Nicolas Meylan (review)

In Magic and Kingship in Medieval Iceland, Nicolas Meylan offers interrelated analyses of a variety of discourses of magic found mainly in medieval Icelandic texts, with a focus on how these interact with matters of power, politics, status, and “national” identity. The book’s arguments center around how magic is deployed in texts to rationalize failures by, explain the successes of, and offer symbolic/discursive resistance to holders of political and social power, especially kings. Meylan’s study sits at the intersection of the history of religions and medieval Scandinavian studies, and should interest those working in either or, especially, across both disciplines.

The book contains six chapters and a brief, summarizing conclusion. Chapter One, “Theorizing Magic,” is largely dedicated to a discussion of the category of magic. It addresses much older and recent scholarship in the field of Germanic or Norse studies (e.g., by Dag Strömback, Clive Tolley, and Stephen A. Mitchell), as well as in broader anthropological or history of religions circles, with a focus on such classic theorists as James George Frazer, Marcel Mauss, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Although Meylan criticizes past scholars for reproducing a Christian polemical distinction between magic as coercion versus religion as entreaty of superhuman forces, this seems not entirely fair. Many scholars, including some of those he mentions (perhaps most notably and influentially Frazer), have used this way of separating magic from religion to undermine Christian claims that their signature practices are by definition nonmagical. What is more, the definition of magic, or of “medieval Scandinavian magic,” that Meylan proposes—that it is “a set of discourses that predicates powers and knowledges construed as extraordinary and illegitimate on particular individuals” (p. 18, italics removed)—seems actually to rely, if an appropriately distanced fashion, on the chief Christian emic criterion for differentiating magic and religion, namely whether the source of one’s unusual power is legitimate (God, and sometimes nature) or illegitimate (the Devil/demons, and sometimes nature). Meylan also seems to undermine his own definition as he gradually seems to abandon legitimacy as a defining criterion of magic, in particular when discussing an “Icelandic text-producing elite [who] recoded magic in positive terms and applied it to their textual proxies” in their symbolic protests against kings (p. 198). Meylan characterizes this as a repurposing and revaluing by Icelanders of “magical powers whose efficacy had been so conveniently documented for them by the condemnatory discourses produced by and for royal circles” (p. 198), but he does not directly address how this process impacts, or whether it negates, his suggestion that magic is, by definition, “construed as . . . illegitimate.”

Chapter Two, “The Vocabulary of Old Norse Magic,” provides a detailed survey of the emic terms that have been regarded as translatable by and/or as overlapping with the English word “magic.” Such terms already figured in Chapter One’s discussion, and the first two chapters probably could have been combined into a single, more concise one.

Chapters Three through Six each offers a detailed examination of a set of texts that Meylan takes to represent a distinct discourse of magic. Chapter Three, “Magic, Discourse of Invective,” looks at how texts such as Grettis saga, Vatnsdæla saga, Heimskringla, and the synoptic histories of Norwegian kings use magic to explain why those who are socially and politically, and therefore usually materially and symbolically, dominant are sometimes bested by their inferiors. Chapter Four, “Magic, Discourse of Power,” shifts focus to what Meylan characterizes as texts that offer less judgmental accounts of magic’s use. Part of what makes this possible is relegation of magic to the pre-Christian past, especially in texts that seem to treat it as a talent based in innate or natural powers rather than the aid of demons. Meylan includes in this category, rightly I think, Heimskringla’s Ynglinga saga, Snorri Sturluson’s Edda...