1. 1. See Thomas Bredsdorff, Chaos and Love: The Philosophy of the Icelandic Family Sagas, (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2001), pp. 60–72.
2. 2. On the adaptive virtues of violence in contexts such as that of the Viking Age, see Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai, Virtuous Violence (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015); on the prosocial needs of post-landnám Iceland, see Jesse L. Byock, Viking Age Iceland (London: Penguin Books, 2001).
3. 3. See Emily Lethbridge, “Gísla saga Súrssonar: Textual Variation, Editorial Constructions and Critical Interpretations,” in Creating the Medieval Saga, ed. Judy Quinn and Emily Lethbridge (Odense: Univ. Press of Southern Denmark, 2010), p. 130.
4. 4. On “sociohistorical transition,” see Viðar Pálsson, “Heroism,” in The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas, ed. Ármann Jakobsson and Sverrir Jakobsson (London: Routledge, 2017), ebook; on “psychological mystery,” see Jeffrey Turco, “Gender, Violence, and the ‘Enigma’ of Gísla saga,” JEGP, 115 (2016), 279.
5. 5. See Theodore M. Andersson, The Growth of the Medieval Icelandic Sagas, 1180–1280 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2006), p. 81.