by Jeffrey J. Cohen and
Stephanie Trigg
As you know, Stephanie Trigg and I have been collaborating on an essay on "Fire" for a forthcoming issue of postmedieval on "Ecomaterialism."
Because we have a few weeks before a final version is due, we decided to post the draft here at ITM. We're eager for your comments ... though with the caveat that we've already exceeded the word allotment, so the piece's fate is to be condensed rather than expanded. We both agree that we could have written a book together on the topic, it so ignited our interests ...
Fire
O for a Muse of fire that would ascend / the brightest heaven of invention, etc.
A traveler, well versed in the old law and
the old writings of distant countries, set out in the summer season with his
family and traveled so far and so swiftly to the southern lands that winter
still held. He met a fellow traveler and her family, and she was also versed in
the old law and the old writings of other countries. The travelers spoke
together of two islands, Iceland and Australia, both girt by sea, as the old
song says[i]
— and both criss-crossed with fire, and with stories of fire.
A Story of Fire
Twelve men warm themselves round flames in a tempest-battered hall. A troll
bursts through the door, his garments made of ice. They attack the creature
with sticks pulled from the blaze. The next morning where the hall once stood
was seen only “a huge pile of ashes, and in the ashes were many human bones.”[ii]
A Second Fire Story
Convinced
by his companions, merchants who fear they will die without fire, Grettir
strips to his tunic and swims across a stormy harbor towards a blaze. Encrusted
in icicles, he enters with a tub to convey some logs, and is attacked
immediately. The straw on the floor ignites. Grettir returns. When the
merchants sail to seek their benefactors the next day, they find only “a huge
pile of ashes, and in the ashes were many human bones” (Grettir’s Saga 38).
This
diptych of narrative perspectives was kindled by dual points of view resident
within a fourteenth-century Icelandic text. Grettir’s
Saga is an intricately interwoven story of a warrior who had the misfortune
to be born as the Viking Age dwindled into homesteads, mercantile endeavors,
and scuffles over driftage rights. Grettir is from his youth exceptional in
size and strength. The son of a farmer, he finds himself too large to be
contained by a pastoral frame. As skilled in fashioning incendiary verse as in
brawling, Grettir is also a loner who too late learns the strength that inheres
in family and companionship. At home neither among men nor monsters, he is as
sympathetic as infuriating. The unknown author of the saga nestles the two
narratives of Grettir stealing fire within each other, textual matryoshka. The episode unfolds shortly after
Grettir has defeated the revenant Glam, who every winter invades a farmhouse to
shatter the bones of any foolish enough to slumber within. Through the eyes of
the twelve men on the Norwegian shore, icy Grettir bursting into their revel is
Glam at Thorhallstead. Only the next day will Grettir realize what he and the
fire have sparked. Thorir of Gard, the father of two of the incinerated men,
prosecutes Grettir relentlessly, has him pronounced outlaw, and then strives to
bring about his death. Grettir’s decapitation on the lonely island of Drangey
is the culmination, almost twenty years later, of the chain of events sparked
by his stealing fire in Norway. His doom comes about when fire is needed during
a storm, when a shelter by the sea has its door broken by a hall invader – only
this time it is Grettir who has built the flame and dwells inside, and Grettir
who perishes.
Grettir’s saga unfolds with slow precision and intricate
perspectivism. Stories recur with subtle changes or are retroactively
transformed as they become the fabric of the past. Few details go to waste. The
saga intertwines brooding with exuberance, innovation with the return of the
same, beauty with brutality. Yet despite the capaciousness of its geographical,
historical, and diegetical ambits, Grettir’s
saga reveals the anthropocentric limits of all texts. The tale of the
stolen fire is narrated from Grettir’s point of view as well as from that of
the men within the besieged hall. As Skapti the lawman says before rendering
judgment on Grettir’s deed, “a story is always half told if only one side
speaks” (46, p. 123). But isn’t there a third side, a nonhuman one? What about the jetties of land that anchor the narrative, the
rocky places of refuge without which the men would have been swept to a cold
death? What of the sea that swells and pummels, the ice and hail that
immobilize through relentless bombardment? The perturbed air that with its
gusts menaces one group, and cannot lessen the merriment of another, secure
from its bite? What of the fire that shimmers across the harbor,
that warms and consumes the hall, the flame transported across the waves?
No less than incinerated sailors, tiresome merchants and unlucky
warriors, fire possesses and generates its own story as it moves through the
narrative frame. Flames that reduce timbers to ash and men to bone exert
material as well as narrative agency: as the transmutation of substance; the
combustive vanishing of alternative endings, of stories that might have been;
as the ignition of narrative chains that will end in Grettir’s death. Human
actors in the saga jostle with a swarm of nonhuman characters: glaciers,
blizzards, oceans, ships, whales, swords, spears, horses, mountains, sheep,
stark islands. Even humans become objects of a sort, sometimes walking in
death, moving like animals, forming their uncanny alliances with subterranean
spaces or the shimmer of the moon behind winter clouds. These objects and
elements are active, effective, affective, powerful. They have tales to tell.
Fire History
Émilie Hache and Bruno Latour have asked what would happen if “storms,
heat waves, and glaciers taking shape or changing shape before our eyes” – all
the elements that roil our ecologies – had the power to “compel us to remix
science and politics,” to rethink with slow care our relations to materiality,
this time with less anthropocentricity, less moral certitude (Hache and Latour
323)? When the world is figured as a wilderness of forces and substances alien
to us, a collection of resources for mastery and profligate consumption, then
its elements become that against which we build a house and hope the door holds
firm. Yet if through and with these same forces we devise modes of deliberative
coinhabitance, we will better discern and esteem the relations that bind us to
the destructive and creative powers of the nonhuman, especially the elements. An
environmental ethics is best fostered not by certainty and prescription but through
hesitation and tentative connection, a carefulness cultivated through
multifarious rather than comfortably anthropocentric narratives. Even a force
as seemingly insubstantial as fire burns with a power to illuminate this material
domain.
Earth, air and water are easy elements for story. Durable
collections of molecules, minerals and other composites, their materiality is
blunt. Fire is a fleeting element,
seldom stubborn, never tangible. Ardent
signifies burning, desirous, fervent. Texts incised upon rock endure epochs,
but the lesson of the Ashburnham House blaze of 1731, which incinerated the
Cotton library and singed the Beowulf
manuscript, is that fire consumes more easily than conveys story. Flame
signals a change in materiality and is not itself substantial. The combustive
release of heat, light and sooty byproducts via rapid oxidation, fire is a
chemical process, an action. Its sibling elements possess ample depths: the
long ethereal rise from troposphere to exosphere, slow delve through lithic crust, mantle, core; crushing
marinal descent to the hadopelagic. Fire, however, is all surface. Different
kinds exist (bushfire, campfire, house fire, hearth), with variations in
intensity or origin or use, but there is little profundity to flame. In extreme
conditions its touch reduces houses and forests to a flatness of ash as it
passes through. Fire’s intensity is as mesmeric as it is ephemeral.
Narratives of fire might therefore seem doomed to tracing
mere aftermath. Yet Stephen J. Pyne has composed what he calls “fire history,”
a mode of ecological analysis attentive to material and biotic relations from
the deep past in order to reimagine contemporary modes of ecological
inhabitance. In a comprehensive series of volumes dubbed “The Cycle of Fire,”
Pyne shows how landscapes that seem natural (that is, seem to be autonomously
balanced systems that prefer their own solitude) have been so profoundly
altered by human-fire-biome confederation that to imagine they exist outside of
such dynamic relation is to invite catastrophe. Early British settlers in
Australia assumed Aboriginal people were setting fire to the bush with careless
disregard. Expelling these communities from the lands that they cultivated
through controlled burns left the land vulnerable to severe wildfires. The
Aborigines knew that the phoenix-like eucalyptus seeks immolation by shedding
its bark. To foster a sustainable ecoscape it is better to collaborate with its
arboreal desires than to indulge them.
Only after the bush was catastrophically ablaze did English settlers realize
that the land they moved across was already being managed, through a
companionable collusion among humans, fire and vegetation that engendered
fairly stable biodiversity.[iii] Fire
history illuminates the intimacies among humans, the elements, and living
ecosystems, stressing that the alliances constitutive of such expanses come
about through the agency of all involved. Fire history cannot be
anthropocentric because anthropogenic fire is only one participant, one
perspective within this multifaceted tale. Pyne’s apolitical critical method
does not distinguish all that well among humans, scleromorphs like the
eucalyptus, and fire: all are self-adaptive and promiscuously symbiotic agents,
acting in uncannily similar ways within the ecomaterial possibilities and
constraints of the environment in which their actions unfold.
A fire history of Grettir’s
saga starts with the fact that despite the preponderance of other elements
in the story, flame impresses itself upon the narrative repeatedly. The text’s
landscapes are sweeping because they lack trees, an absence which once
recognized renders the textual ecology of fire even more dramatic. By the time
the story was written the island had long been deforested.[iv]
Icelanders depended on firewood as a gift from the ocean, and driftage rights
were (as the story stresses) worth killing to maintain. Fire is tangibly
present. Its zeal for collaboration with humans and its power to radiate warmth
determines the architecture of the many halls and houses where Grettir dwells.
Fire is the gravitational force around which sleeping arrangements are
organized and the daily progress of domestic chores arranged. Fire is integral
to the structuration of inhabited spaces and the social relations that unfold
within them.[v]
Fire burns repeatedly throughout the text, frustrating or intensifying
narrative action. A supernatural flame directs Grettir to the grave-mound of
Kar the Old, the undead walker through whom he will gain his beloved short
sword (18). A homely flame guides Grettir back to a farm he has rescued from
berserkers, suddenly illuminating his early heroic potential (19). As Grettir
awaits the arrival of the revenant Glam, a fire burns through the night. The
fight that follows is a choreography of shadow and luminosity, culminating in
Glam’s curse that Grettir forever fear the dark (35). Fire must be his constant
companion to make life bearable. Glam’s body meanwhile is incinerated to “cold
ash” so that he will not return. Grettir’s theft of fire from the startled
seafarers is the saga’s pivotal moment, and the crime that two decades later
will cause his death (38). He is supposed to prove his innocence through the
ordeal of carrying glowing iron, but Grettir’s fiery disposition ruins the
chance (39). He is outlawed for his crime of “house-burning” for twenty years
(46). We are not often told what Grettir carries besides his beloved short
sword, but we do once glimpse him moving house with a kettle and fire flint
(61). Both the troll-plagued farm at Sandhaugar and the cave where the monsters
dwell are lit by blazes. Despite their dining on human flesh the trolls possess
a startling domesticity that connects them back to the homestead, which they
are farming for its meat. Fire illuminates a disturbing similarity between the
habitations.
Grettir spends his last days on the island of Drangey. The
foster mother of one of his enemies inscribes runes upon “a tree trunk with the
roots attached” (79) and reddens those letters with her blood. The driftwood
makes its way against the current to the island, vividly demonstrating the
agency of objects in this saga. Each time Grettir pushes the log back to sea it
beaches itself on Drangey again. During a storm his slave gathers the
importunate tree as firewood, and Grettir chops at the limb without
recognition. When his ax glances off its side and slashes his leg, he knows a
curse has been activated. Not long afterward, weak with fever, Grettir is attacked
in his home. His enemies burst through the door, murder him and sever his head
(82). All the elements that
attended Grettir's initial crime of house-burning return at a death that in
some ways replays the scene.
Fire is a quiet principal in Grettir’s saga. The relations flame forms and fosters enables the slow unfolding of an environmental
awareness in which humans are not lonely actors or even masters of the
ecosystems they inhabit. Human relationships with active materialities engender
complicated narratives of living together in a difficult world, one in which
the future may not be easy to discern but the prospects are numerous: an ethics
of composition rather than imposition. This perspectivism is so potentially
multiple, in fact, that fire must retain an ultimate mystery: our narratives
can barely domesticate or control its wildness. Once we recognize this
incapacity, it is easier to acknowledge the limitations of our attempts to make
a coherent narrative about our world–making activities. Graham Harman observes
that “No one sees any way to speak about the interaction of fire and cotton,
since philosophy remains preoccupied with the sole relational gap between
humans and the world.”[vi] We have a
difficult time imagining a world that does not exist for us, one in which
objects enjoy their own relations, or withdraw into unreachability. Yet there
must remain a story of fire that Grettir’s
saga can never tell, since narrative
cannot capture flame in its inhuman fullness, only in those combustive parts
made known through the relations we discern. Although fire’s story largely
depends upon human survival and human narrative (Grettir and the merchants read
a tale from ashes and bone after combustion’s vanishing), fire also moves
through a world of nonhuman relations that render it more than a simple
chemical process or anthropocentric story. Life-sustaining as well as perilous,
alliance-seeking and diffident, fire is complicated, ambivalent, contradictory.
The Icelandic word for fire (eldr) is the same as the past participle of
the verb for having grown old, while eldi is the term for procreation
and birth; eldr is used in designations for dawn as well as lightning; a
hall or its sitting room is eldhús (fire-house); eldibrandr is
firewood, eldsuppkváma a volcano's eruption, and eldtinna is
flint. There must remain in fire stories and possibilities unknown to those who
play with it: potentials never exhausted, concealed spaces where fire smolders
or flares indifferent to a world of warriors and merchants and driftwood and
curses, where fire remains fiercely itself.
As the unintended blaze ignited by Grettir makes clear, left to
its volition fire will seek unceasing incendiary relation. Fire will not necessarily
remain encompassed by the hearth’s circle. Fire spreads, engendering
transformative and often lethal connection. We inhabit our world through
ancient and new alliances with fire, yet human intentions and human stories can
never circumscribe flame, even if they may domesticate its intensity for a
while.
A Story of Burnt Njal
Then they came with fire and started a great blaze in front of the
doors.
Skarphedin said, “Building a fire, boys? Are you going to cook
something?”
Grani answered, “That’s right, and it’ll be as hot as you need for
baking.”
Skarphedin spoke: “This is how you reward me for avenging your
father — you’re the kind of man who places greater value on a lesser
duty.”
The women then poured whey
on the flames and put them out (219).[vii]
A Second Story of Burnt Njal
They took the chickweed and set fire to it, and the people inside
did not notice it until flames started coming down all over the hall. Then
Flosi and his men started big fires in front of all the doors. The women inside
started to suffer badly.
Njal spoke to them: “Bear this bravely and don’t express any fear,
for it’s only a brief storm, and it will be a long time before we have another
like it. Have faith that God is merciful, and that he will not let us burn both
in this world and in the next.” (220).
Starting fires. Just as our essay begins with several blazes from Grettir’s saga, then loops around the
world, so too this second half also begins with fire stories from Njal’s saga, and will bring discussion
back to some recent debates about Australian fire history and management. The
“starting” of fire (when, where, why, and by whom?) thus becomes a key theme in
this joint meditation on fire’s agency. Jeffrey has evoked the lambency of
fire, its ephemeral materiality. One of the signs of that ephemeral quality is
the difficulty of identifying the temporal or narrative point at which any
given fire begins. Even the most traumatic fire in the Old Norse sagas, the
most debated, the most clearly foreseen, and the most deliberately lit — the
burning of Njal’s house — has already begun, off stage, when Flosi’s men bring this fire from one that is already
alight: “… they came with fire and started a great blaze.”
The fire that burns Njal, his house, and his family, is rehearsed
many times before Flosi’s men start it in retribution for the killing of
Hoskuld. In the first half of the saga, for example, Gunnar’s house is burnt
down in a way that links the two parts of the narrative. Several omens also presage
the second fire. Hildiglum, for example, witnesses a “witch-ride” (gandreið): a vision of a man riding
a grey horse through a ring of fire, and throwing his burning torch into the
mountains, whereupon “such a great flame sprang up that he could no longer see
the mountains” (215). The man speaks a verse that concludes: “Flosi’s plans are
like a flung torch. Flosi’s plans are like a flung torch.” Even this vision
cannot show an unequivocal starting-point for fire. The man carries a flaming
torch; he rides in a ring of fire; he
sings of a flung torch; he flings his own torch and yet the fire itself,
grammatically, still claims its own paratactic agency: “such a great flame
sprang up” (hlaupa upp eldur mikill).
This prophetic vision, causing Hildiglum to swoon for a long time, nevertheless
takes place on the night of the Lord’s day: fire is framed but uncontained by a
range of pagan, Christian, natural and domestic contexts.
All summer long, too, an old woman who can foretell the future has
been scolding and abusing the pile of chickweed lying next to the house,
predicting it will be used to burn Njal and her foster-daughter Bergthora,
nagging everyone that it should be put in water or burnt, or brought inside.
Skarphedin laughs at her, and invokes fate: if it’s not the chickweed,
something else will be used to light the fire. Yet in light of the old woman’s
reprimand it is difficult not to see the chickweed, like the driftwood log in Grettir’s saga, as an active participant
in a story with a fatal culmination.
In contrast, when Njal speaks to comfort the women as the house
fills with smoke, he evokes the flames they are about to endure in terms
borrowed from a heroic ethos that underplays suffering: “Don’t express any fear;
it’s only a brief storm.” Njal then makes a swift transition from this
understated approach of heroic stoicism to the terms of Christian eschatology:
if we suffer burning here, God will hardly send us to hell. Njal and his family
have recently converted to Christianity, after Olaf Tryggvason’s missionary,
Thangbrand, has travelled to Iceland from Norway. One of the most successful
events of Thangbrand’s mission to Iceland was to bless a fire that a mad
berserk was then unable to pass through (179). Icelandic fire is consistently
coded as domestic, or as a marker of threshholds, but this story is another
indication of fire’s capacity to act as a kind of hinge, or switching-point,
between different cultural and religious regimes, a feature it shares with Australian
fire. Flosi says explicitly that burning the house
would be “a great responsibility before God, for we’re Christian men. Still,
that is the course we must take” (219). Before setting out on the fateful
journey, he asks all his men to go to church with him to pray (215). In these
complex layers of fatalism and Christian responsibility we can hear several
centuries of historical change, and several competing cultural contexts, the
multiple temporalities of eleventh-century events composed and recorded in the
fourteenth century.
A further exchange between Flosi and Njal’s family, quoted above,
juxtaposes the domestic and the “heroic” use of fire. Skarpedin and Njal’s
other sons are already in the house; and Flosi’s men must now be careful to
surround it in case there is a secret exit, “otherwise it’s death for us,” as
he warns his men against the Njalssons’ revenge (218). Skarpedin teases them
with insolent abuse about their misplaced domesticity: “Are you going to cook
something?” Grani returns the threat, but Skarphedin instantly changes register
and accuses Grani of unethical and
unwarranted behaviour. The dispute is then returned to more practical
domesticity, as the nameless women quench the flames with whey. As an older man, Njal takes no part in the
fighting (like the sons of Thorir in Grettir’s
saga, his sons are furiously throwing burning beams as a mode of attack).
Flosi offers Bergthora, Njal’s wife, safe passage from the burning house, but
she refuses.
Bergthora spoke: “I was young when I was given
to Njal, and I promised him that one fate should await us both.”
Then the two of them went back in.
Bergthora said, “What are we to do now?”
Njal answered, “We will go to our bed and lie
down.” (221)
Bergthora
tells her grandson Thord, the son of Kari, who will escape and pursue
vengeance, that he should leave, and in turn he reminds her of her promise that
they will never be parted “and so it must be, for I think it much better to die
with you.” Njal tells the foreman to cover the three of them in the bed with
the skin of an ox, and they lie down together, the boy in the middle. “They
crossed themselves and the boy and were heard no more.” Skarpedin sees this and
says, “Our father has gone to bed
early, which is to be expected – he’s an old man” (222).
After the fire, when Flosi and his men go through the burnt house,
they find Njal’s body unburned, and his countenance “radiant” (230), or bjartur, as if his body, saint-like, has been preserved from the flames:
“They all praised God for this and thought it a great miracle.” At the same
time there is a material or domestic explanation in the oxhide coverlet. The
little boy, however, had stuck his finger out from under the hide and it was
burnt off.
Skarpedin’s death similarly cathects heroic and Christian ideals
of deaths. He ends up jammed against the gable wall when the roof collapses,
and when his body is found afterwards it is burned up to the knees, with the
rest unblemished, with the exception of two crosses, on his chest, and between
his shoulder: “people thought he had probably burned these marks himself”
(230). His eyes are open, resolutely facing his death, and perhaps his
God.
These and other episodes illuminate the contradictory cultural
affiliations of fire in the saga. At a narrative level, moreover, they reveal
the disparity between the dramatic immediacy of a fire in the text’s récit and the ongoing appearance and
disappearance of fire, of this fire, of all fires, in the text’s histoire, as the fire is so clearly
foreshadowed, and also leaves its burnt scars on the bodies and minds of those
who live through the trauma or who mourn the dead. As we have seen, the starting of fire can be hard to
pinpoint. The ending of fire seems
clearer, when, for example, the women inside pour whey on the flames and quench
them, or when the house has cooled sufficiently for the bodies to be brought
out and identified. Nevertheless, fire lives on, in trauma, in memory and in
rhetoric. Flosi suffers nightmares after the event. Kari, who escapes the burning
of his father’s house, can no longer sleep:
Sleep shuns my eyes, Ull
Of the elm-string, all night;
I recall the man
who craved shields set with rings.
In autumn the blazing
sword-trees burned Njal at home;
since then the harm done me
has dwelt in my mind. (232)
Here yet
another source of the fire is mentioned, in “the blazing sword-trees”.
“Sword-trees” — brandviðir brenndu — is a kenning for “warriors” but they themselves are characterised
as blazing, perhaps as they bring fire to the house.[viii]
The saga “world” we read about here is constituted by layers of
cultural, social and religious understanding and affiliation. Fire has a
similarly uncanny capacity to transform and be transformed; to be both subject
and object; and to move, if not live, beyond the moments when it burns most
brightly. It burns usefully in the hearth, offering comfort and security, but
it burns balefully in the roof; it is thrown into the mountains, yet seems to
start itself; it generates fearful anticipation and traumatic aftermath; it is
the sign of Christian martyrdom and sanctification; it is the medium of fate.
To consider the agency of fire, then, means considering its material,
historical and cultural conditions, as well as the narrative structures that
hold these things together.
This layered and mixed understanding finds a curious parallel, as
we have suggested, in the unlikely comparison between Icelandic and Australian
fire. We acknowledge that a comprehensive history of fire in both countries is
beyond the scope of this essay, but we think that contemporary debates about
fire management and the historical interpretation of fire in Australia can help
us draw some conclusions about the historicity and the cultural specificity of its
material agency. Pyne’s Burning Bush
shows how indigenous fire practice exercised a degree of control and
understanding over what seemed to European settlers an almost uncontrollable
environment. Bill Gammage’s recent study, The
Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, makes an even
stronger argument, proposing that Indigenous people used different kinds of
strategic burns to move animals, to encourage and discourage certain kinds of
plants in “mosaic” patterns, region by region, according to terrain, climate,
and vegetation. Gammage’s thesis, signalled by his seemingly anachronistic title,
is contentious, as it implies a kind of fire-management plan, a universal
Indigenous system structured by social and regional groups and religious,
totemic affiliations with flora and fauna, and extending harmoniously over the
entire landmass — the jarring “estate” of the title renders all of Australia an
enclosure — despite the many different tribal and language groups. This form of
management that “made” the landscape as European settlers found it in 1788,
would also have extended temporally, over hundreds of years, given the long
life-cycle of the eucalypts. Gammage comments:
This system could hardly have land boundaries. There could
not be a place where it was practised, and next to it a place where it wasn’t.
Australia was inevitably a single estate, albeit with many managers.[ix]
The
implications for fire-management in Australia are profound, and fiercely
contested in an era of observable climate change.
Not all agree that
Indigenous fire-practices were so systematic or uniform over the last fifty
thousand years, however. Scott Mooney’s recent study of fossilised charcoal —
one of fire’s long term material traces — suggests that fires were more common
28,000-70,000 years ago; that they decreased until 18,000 years ago, at the
height of the last ice age, and then dramatically increased again about 200
years ago, after European settlement.[x] Mooney suggests that Australia’s fire history is
influenced more by global fire and climate change than Indigenous practice.
However, in the same article in Australian
Geographic, Scott Heckbert suggests charcoal may not be a reliable
indicator, as it picks up traces only of largescale fires, not the smaller spot
fires associated with traditional Aboriginal practice. As we write, there is
further debate about how to manage burn-offs, and whether, for example, the
target of 5% bush burnoff in the state of Victoria (about the size of England)
is even possible, let alone suitable to be applied overall.
These historical debates possess policy dimensions
that stretch across ecology, ethics, criminology and religion. Their most
contentious issues are concerned with motivation and agency. Which authority
should take responsibility for fire-management, either for back-burning to prevent fires, or to manage emergencies?
How do we balance the need to protect houses, farms and people while protecting
the natural environment? Can people be forced to evacuate in an emergency? To
what extent has climate change made a difference to fire patterns? Given fire’s
propensities, and the number of environmental variables, and the inherent
mesh-like intricacy of every ecosystem, can fire ever really be managed? Against
the best intentions of civic and state authorities, how can fire management
practices mitigate against either natural forces such as lightning, or
mechanical forces like sparks from angle-grinders or backfiring vehicles that
start fires; or indeed, the familiar phenomenon whereby fires are deliberately
lit through malice or indeed, an even darker motive. Sometimes fires are
started by attention-seeking volunteer fire-fighters who then leap into action
to defend communities they have put at risk. Like the fire in Njal’s saga, bushfires leave behind
terrible trauma, while a marked increase in domestic violence, in families of
victims and fire-fighters alike, has recently been observed in the wake of the
Black Saturday fires of 2009. Most fires in Australia, however, largely burn
beyond human control.
In Australia questions about fire management —
when to start a fire — also open up deep anxieties about race-relations,
and the uneasy tension between Indigenous spirituality and the different ways
different ethnic and cultural groups feel “at home” in this country. Who knows
the country best, traditional custodians or scientific advisers? Debate about
fire-practices is inevitably played out in the conflicted context of Indigenous
and settler history. These contexts clash most visibly in the “welcome to
country” that is increasingly offered by Indigenous leaders or elders on state,
parliamentary, sporting, and academic occasions. This “welcome” often finds
resistance from those who reject any sense of Indigenous custodianship of the
land. “We are all immigrants,” is the common complaint, “no matter when we
arrived here, fifty thousand or fifty years ago.” The welcome to country often
involves a smoking ceremony, as leaves are burned to create purifying smoke:
sometimes the smoke is simply wafted towards the people assembled; other times
everyone walks through it, bringing the smoke into themselves as a
purification.
Whether across the Norse sagas or through Australian
history and politics, fire blazes with contested agency. Its apparent
timelessness and continuity as an ecomaterial phenomenon is inescapably conjoined
with competing cultural, social and spiritual regimes. Yet still fire burns, creating and
destroying, composing and challenging, transforming and instituting. Through alliance
with this element humans have transformed the world. Eden is supposed to be
guarded by a fiery sword, but paradise turns out to have been always already
reconfigured by flame. With fire we must imagine more just ways of coinhabiting
the earth, and through these stories attend with slow care to the bonds that
ally us with every element of which the world’s vastness
is composed.
Acknowledgment
Our thanks to Katrina Burge and Grace
Moore for their advice and suggestions.
About
the authors
Jeffrey J. Cohen is Professor of
English and Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at the
George Washington University. He is the author of Of Giants (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Medieval Identity Machines (University
of Minnesota Press, 2003), Hybridity,
Identity and Monstrosity (Palgrave 2006). He is currently editing a
collection entitled Prismatic Ecologies:
Ecotheory Beyond Green for the University of Minnesota Press (2014).
Stephanie Trigg is Professor of English
Literature at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from
Medieval to Postmodern (University of Minnesota Press, 2001) and Shame and Honor: A Vulgar History of the
Order of the Garter (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). She is a
founding member of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for
the History of Emotions. Her research for the Centre is founded on emotions,
the face, and the cultural histories of stone and fire, from medieval Europe to
modern Australia.
References
Ashwell,
Ian Y. and Edgar Jackson. 1970. “The Sagas as Evidence of Early Deforestation
in Iceland.” Canadian Geographer / Le
Géographe canadien 14: 158-166.
Byock,
Jesse, trans. 2009. Grettir’s Saga. Oxford,
Oxford University Press.
Cleasby,
Richard and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An
Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874), accessible electronically at http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/texts/oi_cleasbyvigfusson_about.html
Cook,
Robert. 2001. Njal’s Saga, trans.
with intro. and notes. London, Penguin Books.
Gammage, Bill. 2011. The
Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Sydney, Allen and
Unwin.
Harman, Graham. “On Vicarious Causation” Collapse II (2007):187-221.
Pyne, Stephen J. 1991.
Burning Bush: A Fire History of
Australia. New York, Henry Holt.
Short, William R. 2010. Icelanders
in the Viking Age: The People of the Sagas. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and
Co.
Thorrson, Örnólfur, ed. 1994. Grettis
saga. Rekyavik, Mál og menning.
http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/aboriginal-burn-offs-didnt-increase-fires-study-suggests.htm
February 26, 2012
[i] Australians
all let us rejoice,
For we are young and free;
We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil;
Our home is girt by sea;
Our land abounds in nature’s gifts
Of beauty rich and rare;
In history’s page, let every stage
Advance Australia Fair. National Anthem of Australia, Peter Dodds McCormick,
1878, rev. 1984.
[ii] Grettir’s Saga, Byock 2009 chapter 38
(p.110); further references by chapter number. For the Icelandic see the
edition of Thorrson 1994.
[iii] See Pyne
1991. Quotation is from p. 80; treatment of Aboriginal removal and decline of
the native biota, p. 126.
[iv] See Ashwell
and Jackson 1970 158–166 and Short 2010 121-22.
[v] To give an
early example, when Grettir is experiencing his troubled childhood we are told
“It was the custom on the farms to build large longhouses, and in the evenings
people sat on both sides of the central long fire. Tables would be set up for
eating, and afterwards, people slept alongside the fires. During the day it was
here that the women worked wool” (chapter 14). The Icelandic word for this long
house is eldaskáli (“fire-hall”) or eldhús (“fire-house”). See Cleasby and Vigfusson
1874.
[vii] All
translations from Njal’s Saga are
from the translation by Robert Cook.
[viii] Kemrat,
Ullr, um alla,
álmsíma, mér grímu,
beðhlíðar man eg beiði
bauga, svefn á augu,
síð brandviðir brenndu
böðvar nausts á hausti,
eg er að mínu meini
minnigr, Níal inni.
[x] http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/aboriginal-burn-offs-didnt-increase-fires-study-suggests.htm
February 26, 2012
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