This work seeks to delve beneath the chaos and brutality of the Norse world to discover a complex interplay of ordering and disordering impulses. William Miller's readings of ancient Iceland's sagas and extensive legal code aim to reconstruct and illuminate the society that produced them.[...]

In the opening pages of this irresistible book, William Ian Miller warns, 'the general themes...may strike some as glum and grim'. Yet humour leavens each page as he confronts old age, its humiliations, and its undeniable hardships. Taking an entirely original approach - using personal reflection, s[...]

William Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes; eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Dis[...]