The Icelandic Saga Writer's Silence: Why Medieval Chroniclers Never Explained Motives
In 13th-century Iceland, chieftain Snorri Sturluson compiled stories of blood feuds, political maneuvering, and family betrayals. Yet something is conspicuously absent from the sagas: psychological explanation. When Egil Skallagrímsson murders a man over a drink, we get the sequence of events but never "Egil felt slighted" or "he acted from wounded pride." The saga writers simply refused to interpret their characters' inner lives.
This wasn't primitive writing. These were sophisticated legal scholars who could parse Byzantine property disputes. Their silence about motivation was deliberate—a recognition that claiming to know why someone acted was both arrogant and dangerous. The sagas operated on a principle: you can witness what happened, but you cannot witness why.
Modern workplaces have abandoned this wisdom entirely. We've become compulsive motive-readers, constantly generating narratives about why colleagues do what they do. "She's undermining me because she wants my role." "He's quiet in meetings because he doesn't respect the team." "They asked that question to make me look bad." We don't just observe behavior; we perform instant psychological autopsies, treating our interpretations as facts.
The Norse had a relevant concept here: wyrd, often mistranslated as fate. Wyrd wasn't predetermined destiny but something closer to "the accumulating weight of consequences." Your wyrd was the sum of all previous actions—yours and others'—creating the situation you now inhabit. The Old English poem "The Wanderer" describes how wyrd "turns the world under the heavens," not as a puppeteer but as an accumulating pattern.
Crucially, wyrd made speculation about hidden motives functionally irrelevant. Whether your colleague harbors secret resentment or acts from pure practicality, the consequences unfold the same way. Your responsibility isn't to decode their interior landscape but to respond to observable actions and shape what comes next. You add your thread to the pattern; you don't need to understand every other thread's origin.
This has profound implications for workplace conflict. When we assign motives, we typically choose the most threatening interpretation available. This isn't paranoia; it's threat-detection machinery doing its job. But it creates a peculiar problem: we respond to our interpretation, not the actual behavior. Someone schedules a meeting without you, and you respond to your narrative of deliberate exclusion rather than to the concrete fact of the scheduling.
The saga approach offers a radically different path. Describe the observable behavior with the stark precision of "Then Gunnar rode to the assembly with twelve men." Note the consequences: "The project timeline was affected." Consider your response based on what actually happened, not on your theory about interior motivation.
This isn't naive trust. The sagas are filled with treachery and violence. But the saga writers understood something we've forgotten: you can protect yourself against actions without claiming to understand souls. When Njáll sees his enemy approaching with weapons, he doesn't speculate about rage or jealousy. He observes the weapons and responds accordingly.
The wyrd perspective adds another layer. You cannot control your colleague's motives—even they may not understand them. But you can observe patterns of behavior accumulating over time. Not "why did they do this?" but "what pattern is forming, and how do I want to shape what happens next?"
This isn't about being passive. It's about relocating your agency. Stop spending energy on psychological interpretation you cannot verify. Start spending it on clear observation and strategic response to actual events. The saga writers knew that behavior unfolds in observable sequences, and you can participate in shaping those sequences without needing to perform therapy on everyone involved.
Reflection Exercise:
Choose one current workplace tension where you've assigned motives to someone's behavior. Write two accounts: First, your interpretation-heavy version. Then, write it as a saga chronicler would—pure observable sequence, no psychological explanation. Now ask: what concrete responses become possible when you drop the interpretation and work only with witnessed behavior? What could you add to the pattern of wyrd unfolding between you?
This wasn't primitive writing. These were sophisticated legal scholars who could parse Byzantine property disputes. Their silence about motivation was deliberate—a recognition that claiming to know why someone acted was both arrogant and dangerous. The sagas operated on a principle: you can witness what happened, but you cannot witness why.
Modern workplaces have abandoned this wisdom entirely. We've become compulsive motive-readers, constantly generating narratives about why colleagues do what they do. "She's undermining me because she wants my role." "He's quiet in meetings because he doesn't respect the team." "They asked that question to make me look bad." We don't just observe behavior; we perform instant psychological autopsies, treating our interpretations as facts.
The Norse had a relevant concept here: wyrd, often mistranslated as fate. Wyrd wasn't predetermined destiny but something closer to "the accumulating weight of consequences." Your wyrd was the sum of all previous actions—yours and others'—creating the situation you now inhabit. The Old English poem "The Wanderer" describes how wyrd "turns the world under the heavens," not as a puppeteer but as an accumulating pattern.
Crucially, wyrd made speculation about hidden motives functionally irrelevant. Whether your colleague harbors secret resentment or acts from pure practicality, the consequences unfold the same way. Your responsibility isn't to decode their interior landscape but to respond to observable actions and shape what comes next. You add your thread to the pattern; you don't need to understand every other thread's origin.
This has profound implications for workplace conflict. When we assign motives, we typically choose the most threatening interpretation available. This isn't paranoia; it's threat-detection machinery doing its job. But it creates a peculiar problem: we respond to our interpretation, not the actual behavior. Someone schedules a meeting without you, and you respond to your narrative of deliberate exclusion rather than to the concrete fact of the scheduling.
The saga approach offers a radically different path. Describe the observable behavior with the stark precision of "Then Gunnar rode to the assembly with twelve men." Note the consequences: "The project timeline was affected." Consider your response based on what actually happened, not on your theory about interior motivation.
This isn't naive trust. The sagas are filled with treachery and violence. But the saga writers understood something we've forgotten: you can protect yourself against actions without claiming to understand souls. When Njáll sees his enemy approaching with weapons, he doesn't speculate about rage or jealousy. He observes the weapons and responds accordingly.
The wyrd perspective adds another layer. You cannot control your colleague's motives—even they may not understand them. But you can observe patterns of behavior accumulating over time. Not "why did they do this?" but "what pattern is forming, and how do I want to shape what happens next?"
This isn't about being passive. It's about relocating your agency. Stop spending energy on psychological interpretation you cannot verify. Start spending it on clear observation and strategic response to actual events. The saga writers knew that behavior unfolds in observable sequences, and you can participate in shaping those sequences without needing to perform therapy on everyone involved.
Reflection Exercise:
Choose one current workplace tension where you've assigned motives to someone's behavior. Write two accounts: First, your interpretation-heavy version. Then, write it as a saga chronicler would—pure observable sequence, no psychological explanation. Now ask: what concrete responses become possible when you drop the interpretation and work only with witnessed behavior? What could you add to the pattern of wyrd unfolding between you?