Monday, May 16, 2011

Cultural differences

[This post got out of order, due to issues related to the Blogger outage last week.]

It occurred to Narfi that it was not a good idea to keep the killing secret and so be guilty of murdering the man.... (Saga of Ref the Sly)

4 comments:

Leo said...

I'm somewhat confused: how does telling people about your murder exculpate you? Or am I misreading the passage?

Dan Lower said...

I am so confused right now...

Alexander R Pruss said...

From my reading of sagas, according to the Norse the difference between a permissible killing and a murder consisted in two things: a permissible killing wasn't secret and the killer paid appropriate material compensation. That is a very different view from ours.

Dan Lower said...

...Yes.