Audun and the Polar Bear

Audun's Story is the tale of an Icelandic farmhand who buys a polar bear in Greenland for no other reason than to give it to the Danish king, half a world away. It can justly be listed among the finest pieces of short fiction in world literature. Terse in the best saga style, it spins a story of complex competitive social action, revealing the cool wit and finely-calibrated reticence of its three main characters: Audun, Harald Hardradi, and King Svein. The tale should have much to engage legal and cultural historians, anthropologists, economists, philosophers, and students of literature. The story's treatment of gift-exchange is worthy of the fine anthropological and historical writing on gift-exchange; its treatment of face-to-face interaction a match for Erving Goffman.

William Ian Miller is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. In addition to books on the bloodfeud in the Icelandic sagas and on the lex talionis, he has also published several books on the risks, miseries and triumphs of routine social interaction, among which are The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), The Mystery of Courage (2000), and Faking It (2003).