Antipolygynous bachelorhood in Icelandic sagas.

Abstract

Henrich (2020) accounts for how the modern world was underpinned by a psychological-institutional coevolution set in motion by the Church's Marriage and Family Practices (MFPs). Among these was the prohibition of polygyny, which had driven a zero-sum mindset of violence and risk-taking-to the detriment of social trust and self-regulation. Raffield et al. (2017a) use evolutionary theory to argue that the Viking Age was driven by how elite woman-hoarding had deprived low-status males of access to the mating market. Norse men in the Late Iron Age suffered a fate common throughout humanity's agricultural period: to be relegated to lifelong bachelorhood. After the Viking Age, one Germanic tribe still resisted feudalism. With their 13th-century saga production, Icelanders use fiction to convince themselves to submit to European normalcy under the Norwegian king. The Christian authors aggrandize their Viking ancestors, but in a way that whitewashes Germanic sexual practices while promoting new MFPs. The European transitions to lifelong monogamy took centuries, as not only high-status males, but females too, are biased toward polygyny in many environments. This article shows how sagas commonly use their very narrative structure to convince men to restrict their bachelor phase to only a few years of wealth and status amassment-before they settle down and marry one woman for life. The social dysfunction that results from large numbers of men being unmarried had ingrained a deep cultural stain on prolonged bachelorhood, which is used as a thematic analogy to how kinship societies drive similar dysfunction.

Anticipating the modern mating moralities in Holberg’s comedies.

“…Whichever morality will come to replace confluent love, its norms and values need not be grounded in objective truth. Heroic love justified men's violence and women's submission during an era of intertribal conflict (Larsen, 2022a). Courtly love was a top-down ideology that gave a false impression of human love and sexuality, but which instilled the imperative of female consent, promoted the necessity of monogamy, and conveyed the prosocial morality of modernity (Larsen, 2022b).…”

An evolutionary case for polygyny to counter demographic collapse

“…Viking MFPs are often omitted, whitewashed, or mentioned apologetically. In the actual Viking Age, high-status males typically would have hoarded females, but the sagas try to convince thirteenth-century Icelanders that such morality belongs to a foregone era ( Larsen, 2022c ).…”

European movements for confluent love: Revealing romantic delusions with the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough and Comedy Italian Style

“…Scandinavians were thus uniquely positioned to untangle and adapt to gender implications of the Darwinian revolution. They had a rich tradition of using written fiction to discuss changes in mating regimes which goes back to the sagas (Larsen, 2022c). Their culture prepared avant-gardes for abstracting gender to the extent that they could envision women as sexual and professional equals – and eventually convince regular people of the same proposition.…”