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Scandinavian Journal of History

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The Sagas and the Reversed
Retrospective Method

Professor Knut Dørum

a

a

Høgskolen i Telemark , N-3800, Bø, Norway

Published online: 24 Jun 2009.

To cite this article: Professor Knut Dørum (2009) The Sagas and the Reversed Retrospective
Method, Scandinavian Journal of History, 34:2, 205-207, DOI:

10.1080/03468750902909281

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DEBATE

THE SAGAS AND THE REVERSED

RETROSPECTIVE METHOD

A reply to Hans Jacob Orning

In Scandinavian Journal of History (no. 2, 2008) I reviewed Hans Jacob Orning’s
unpublished doctoral dissertation, which in the same year was translated into English
with the title ‘Unpredictability and Presence. Norwegian Kingship in the High Middle
Ages’. Orning has chosen to reply to my review, but his reply in SJH (no. 3, 2008) is
only to a limited extent a defence of his own dissertation and of the conclusions he has
reached in the dissertation. A great part of his reply, instead, is a critique of what he
thinks are the weaknesses of the reviewer’s doctoral dissertation. This is indeed a
strange way of replying to my review of his dissertation, and it serves necessarily to shift
the focus away from the main issue: Orning’s own dissertation.

It must be emphasized that Orning has written a valuable dissertation. With several

examples from the Sverris Saga and the Ha´konar Saga Ha´konarsonar he showed that the
physical presence of the king was important for the control over and in part for the
disciplining of various geographic areas of Norway in the High Middle Ages, and that
there was a culture of reconciliation in the circles of the king and also of the aristocracy
that could produce sudden shifts in the relations between political participants. This is in
contrast to a royal ideology that attaches great importance to loyalty to the king, while at
the same time there has been found evidence of definite limitations to the king’s exercise
of power, at least in the first part of the 1200s.

The problem with Orning’s method is, however, that he mostly uses examples

from the sagas from the period prior to 1240, even though his study covers the kingdom
of Norway in the High Middle Ages until 1300. He motivates his reply to my review by
stating that his main perspective is ‘the mental aspects of the state formation’.
Furthermore, according to Orning it is through the sagas that the political culture can
be studied. The laws should mainly be considered normative and ideological, and
therefore unsuitable for his purpose.

It is most uncommon that researchers almost totally omit to use sources from

important parts of the period which the analysis is supposed to cover. It is of course not
unreasonable to imagine important traits of continuity throughout the whole of the
1200s with regard to the kings’ range of action and the conceptions of his person, in
spite of the fact that there was a considerable institutional development of the

Scandinavian Journal of History Vol. 34, No. 2. June 2009, pp. 205–207
ISSN 0346-8755 print/ISSN 1502-7716 online

ª 2009 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/03468750902909281

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Norwegian kingdom in this period. In my opinion this is a fruitful and useful approach. It
is, however, a quite different matter when Orning concludes that there is a strong
continuity without having studied more systematically what conclusions can be drawn
from the dominant sources from the late 1200s and the beginning of the 1300s,
especially from the royal ordinances and letters produced by different legal proceedings.
As is well known, the Saga Age in Norway ended in the 1260s.

Several royal ordinances from the years around 1300 contain information that

reveals that the government had problems getting its officials to comply with tax claims
and other orders. These traits of continuity thus reveal the range of royal exercise of
power throughout the 1200s. On the other side several legal documents reveal that in
the course of the century it became more important to people to take advantage of the
authority represented by the royal judicial administration. Later sources have thus given
quite different answers to the questions raised by Orning.

Royal ordinances and regulations in the Middle Ages often convey more informa-

tion than the programmes, objectives and intentions that the legislators may have had.
The background for the new law is often referred to, and the background reveals
interests and conflicts mentioned by the laws. Thus the laws are often very interesting
and suggestive sources, also about mentalities and common norms and values concern-
ing the king and his exercise of power. In addition to the royal ordinances and
regulations we also have several letters from various legal proceedings that give
examples of solutions of conflicts and exercise of power on many different levels in
society. In quite a few cases we meet men from the aristocracy and in the king’s service
with different functions and roles. In many cases letters of testimony and letters of
judgment render statements and argumentations from the various parts.

Orning has in fact, in a discussion article in Historisk tidsskrift, argued that his method

represents a kind of reversed retrospective method, and he refers to the fact that
Norwegian historians have used documentation from the 1500s and 1600s to draw
extensive conclusions about the social conditions in the 1300s.

1

When Norwegian

historians have used later sources in the studies of Norway in the 1300s, they have
used them, not instead of contemporary sources, but as a supplement in order to
compensate for the scarcities and lacunas of the older primary sources. The main
principle of the retrospective method in a Norwegian context has been to compare
known facts at two different points of time in order to make suppositions or calculations
beyond what can be directly documented at the earliest point of time. Orning’s method
implies that one should both abstain from the use of important contemporary sources
and presume that his findings from the first part of the 1200s should have validity also for
the last part. Furthermore, Orning relies on a very limited number of examples from
the sagas.

One of the few concrete points from his own dissertation that Orning discusses is to

what extent statements about and descriptions of the conflicts in the Sverris saga and the
Ha´konar Saga Ha´konarsonar should be taken as expressions of an ideology that the authors
of the sagas have written into their narratives, or whether they should be interpreted as
expressions of contemporary thoughts and assessments of the conflicts. Orning main-
tains that when great magnates were repeatedly denounced and so-called disloyal
behaviour was not punished and had no visible consequences, then it would be
misleading to invoke a norm of loyalty. What Orning in my opinion in these cases
seems to ignore, are the possible motives the contemporaries could have for considering

SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF HISTORY

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certain actions as deceit and disobedience, instead of assuming that it is the authors of the
sagas who, out of ideological motives, posteriorly construed the condemnations. In my
review I have given several examples showing that Ha´kon Ha´konarson could have good
reasons for perceiving certain magnates as disloyal and deceitful. Furthermore, as I see
it, Orning underestimates the relative strength of power of king and magnates. When
the king was reconciled with hostile magnates, this tells us more about the king’s limited
powers and need of the support of powerful magnates than about mentality and culture.
On the other side the saga texts are often scant and incomplete and not always easy to
interpret. They are seldom open to clear and unambiguous text interpretations.

Orning finds my objections inconsistent and unreasonable, and he suggests that my

assessments or wrong assessments spring out of my background as an agrarian historian.
To this I can reply that my objections to Orning’s dissertation on important points
concur with the conclusions that Sverre Bagge presented in the printed version of his
contribution on the occasion of Orning’s defence of his doctoral dissertation. And Bagge
has a professional background quite different from mine. Orning’s unreasonable, strong
limitation of sources, his strong underestimation of the institutional development of the
kingdom, and furthermore his tendentious method of concealing the political practice of
the period and the influence of the near past on the posterity are pointed out by Bagge as
weaknesses in Orning’s dissertation.

2

P

ROFESSOR

K

NUT

Dø

RUM

H

øgskolen i Telemark

N-3800 B

ø, Norway

[e-mail]

Notes

1

‘H. J. Kongemaktens lokale grunnlag i middelalderen. Svar til Knut Dørum’,
Historisk tidsskrift

3 (2006): 675–84.

2

S. Bagge’s review of Hans Jacob Orning’s dissertation, Historisk tidsskrift 4 (2005):
641–8.

THE SAGAS AND THE REVERSED RETROSPECTIVE METHOD

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