When one man (or one woman) meets another calculations begin: how should I treat this person? Are we equals, or is he my social inferior? Or perhaps he is my social superior? How do I let him know what my social status is, and how should I respond if he does not take the hint? Is this person worth an insult? A fight? What are the consequences of letting things slide? What are the consequences of refusing to do so? The thread that weaves through each of these (and indeed the sagas as a whole) is the politics of social life. His obsessions are by and large theirs: Disgust, Courage, Humiliation, Faking It, and so forth. If you are at all familiar with the sagas, it is easy to detect their influence on in the titles of his later works. Miller’s earliest books were on medieval Iceland’s law and literature. Tolkien, Thomas Schelling, a good dose of dead-pan humor, a pinch of the morbid, and then shook them up together in a bottle, Mr. William Ian Miller’s Eye for an Eyedid not make it into my “top ten books I read this year” list for 2017, but it was one of the more thought-provoking things I read last year. Miller is an unusual creature: part law professor, part medievalist, Miller is equally comfortable discussing ancient Hittite legal decrees, the etymology of old Norse runes, the tropes of Elizabethan Drama, and modern tort law.
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