individual identity, community reflection 167

HEROIC VIOLENCE, INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY, AND COMMUNITY REFLECTION

ANDREW COWELL

In one of his longest and most interesting articles, entitled “Heroes, gods and laughter in Germanic poetry,”1 Aron Gurevich addresses the issue of heroic poetry, specifically that of the pre-Christian Scandinavians. In this article, one of his central concerns is the extreme violence which occurs in many of the Old Norse heroic lays, and even more importantly, the fact that this violence seems so often unmotivated and gratuitous. Furthermore, it is often socially-internal violence, directed not against “outsiders,” but against the neighbors, friends, and even family of the heroic characters who pursue it. The article makes several key claims which seek to explain—if not “rationalize”—the violent actions of the heroic figures in the lays. Behind this effort at explanation lies an awareness that the literature in question, and by implication the culture that produced it, have often been seen by literary critics and historians as “barbaric,” “prim- itive,” “irrational,” and, to put it most bluntly “violent.” The question of apparently gratuitous violence is perhaps the first one which any scholar or teacher who seeks to redeem this type of literature and culture for a modern audience must confront. This redemptive explanation is necessary because, despite the vast violence of Western history during the modern, “Enlightenment” era, modern critics take a persistent ideological position that violence, while common in our society, remains condemnable or at least regrettable and is never valorized for its own sake, except by socio- paths and the like. Thus when a literary tradition such as that of the Old Norse heroic lays—or the larger epic tradition of the Middle Ages—appears to embrace unnecessary, gratuitous violence and cru- elty as a central component of the behavior of heroic figures, the modern reaction has almost inevitably been to portray the individu- als and culture in question as “primitive.” As a corollary, much effort

1 Aron Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, Jana Howlett, ed., (Chicago, 1992), 122-76. 168 andrew cowell has gone into showing how such cultures became “civilized” or how they “evolved” over the course of western history, particularly under the influence of the Christian church.2 Part and parcel of the suspicion of primitivism is a view that indi- viduals in such violent cultures lack the self-analytic reflexivity often associated with modern, Western culture—though of course many post-modern theories have called such classical notions of individual consciousness into question more recently. While Gurevich addresses Old Norse heroes most specifically, characters of the Old French chanson de geste have typically been seen in a similar manner: In The Song of Roland, the protagonist has often been understood as a cul- ture hero for bravely following the dictates of his own culture to their ultimate limits, but this admiration has been tempered by the fact that the dictates seem inflexible. Roland seems unable to react cre- atively to the unfolding situation, so he is trapped in a rigid culturally unreflective framework. Many other readings condemn him as an excessively prideful individual, unable to reflect adequately on his own conduct and its implications, too constrained by notions of honor and vengeance, and ultimately redeemed, ironically enough, only by the proto-crusading hosts of Charlemagne, who turn Roland’s death into a larger victory for the forces of Christianity.3 These very forces of redemption have been associated with notions of penitence, confession, and the supposed origins of individual reflexivity which give birth to the modern “individual.”4 Moreover, these forces were

2 See for example Pieter Spierenburg, The Broken Spell: A Cultural and Anthro- pological History of Preindustrial Europe (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991). Chapter seven focuses on violence. In it he suggests not only that people were quicker to anger in the past, but that this was due to “suddenly infuriated passion” (195); nevertheless there was a gradual “taming of violence” (197). While later in the chapter Spieren- burg goes on to address the issue of honor, and violence as a strategy within honor systems, his overall viewpoint is quite “evolutionist,” though it is more focused on the cultural rather than the religious processes in that evolution. 3 A good survey of past readings of Roland, which was also written roughly at the same time as Gurevich’s article appeared, is Robert Francis Cook, The Sense of the Song of Roland (Ithaca, 1987). The book focuses specifically on the question of indi- vidual and cultural consciousness, especially Part 2, Chapter 2, and the Introduction (x-xi) provides extensive references to the past readings. For additional discussion, including of the era since 1987, see Andrew Cowell, The Medieval Warrior Aristoc- racy: Gifts, Violence, Performance and the Sacred(Cambridge, UK, 2007), 80-86. 4 Classic and widely cited studies are Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individ- ual 1050-1200 (London, 1972) and Marie-Dominque Chénu, L’Eveil de la conscience dans la civilisation médiévale (Montreal,1969). Louis Dumont, Essays on Individual- ism (Chicago, 1986) makes broadly similar points. Gurevich stresses his own general