ABSTRACT
The notion of the laconic, emotionally repressed hero of the sagas of Icelanders is a cliche if there ever was one. William Reddy posited the existence of what he termed ‘emotional regimes’, which in a given, often stable, political setting describes ‘the set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them’. The humoural theory of emotions persisted throughout the Middle Ages and was known in Iceland, with an explication of it appearing in the fourteenth-century manuscript Hauksbok. William Ian Miller important contribution towards the study of emotions in saga writing began to appear in earnest with the publication of his article ‘Emotions and the Sagas’ in an anthology on the medieval sagas with a decidedly anthropological bent, published in 1992. Miller’s work on emotions was placed within a framework that was at once historical as well as anthropological, seeming though to refer to wider cultural trends and ideologies than to particular historical events.
