ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the nature and dilemmas of medieval Icelandic friendship in the context of big man-follower relationships, focusing on the constraints and characteristics of voluntary ties in the absence of a state. The practice of crafting a friendship with gifts resonates with Smart's argument that instrumentality and unconstrained sentiment represent potentially interrelated phases in the nurturing of friendship. There is relatively little evidence of female friendship, but this may be due to the patriarchal bias of the sagas and the impact of the literary genres and rhetoric of medieval Europe which focused on male bonding. Many saga accounts of friendship resonate with ethnographic descriptions of personal relationships in other stateless societies 'governed' by big men and chieftains. Anthropologists have a tendency to take the role of kinship for granted and to force such 'structural' relations upon their ethnography, anxious to see order in, and make sense of, the seamless flow and chaotic nature of everyday life.
