Publisher's description:
Audun's Story is the tale of an Icelandic farmhand who buys a polar bear in Greenland for no other reason than to give it to the Danish king, half a world away. It can justly be listed among the finest pieces of short fiction in world literature. Terse in the best saga style, it spins a story of complex competitive social action, revealing the cool wit and finely-calibrated reticence of its three main characters: Audun, Harald Hardradi, and King Svein. The tale should have much to engage legal and cultural historians, anthropologists, economists, philosophers, and students of literature. The story's treatment of gift-exchange is worthy of the fine anthropological and historical writing on gift-exchange; its treatment of face-to-face interaction a match for Erving Goffman.

Reviews
“a virtuoso display … Miller's analysis draws out strand after rich strand from this fine yarn … Complicated? Thought provoking? Yes, and more: this comes pretty darn close to sublime ... Miller's is likely to be the last word for a long while on this crafty little tale”, Oren Falk in The Medieval Review, 11 March 2009
“The book should amply succeed in its objective—to interest a readership both within saga studies and in the wider fields of legal and cultural history, anthropology, economic ethnography, sociology, and philosophy. The þáttr at its centre should with Miller's advocacy acquire the wider audience it deserves; it of course needs no advertisement where saga aficionados are concerned. … In sum, we can be grateful to Miller for his acumen, his learning, his tenacity, and (all-important) his clarity in demonstrating that so apparently simple a story can accommodate such a wealth of meaning.”Review by Russell Poole, University of Western Ontario In Scandinavian-Canadian Studies 20 (2011) 120-123

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
The Story of Audum from the Westfjords (Audun's Story)
Part One The Close Commentary
The Commitment to Plausibility
Helping Thorir and Buying the Bear
Dealing with King Harald
Giving the Bear to Svein: The Interests in the Bear
Saying No to Kings
Eggs in One Basket and Market Value
Rome: Self-Impoverishment and Self-Confidence
Repaying the Bear
Back to Harald: The Yielding of Accounts
Part Two Extended Themes
Audun's Luck
Richness and Risk
Motives
Gaming the System: Gift-Ref
Regiving and Reclaiming Gifts
Gifts Upward: Repaying by Receiving and Funny money
Of Free and Closing Gifts
Coda: The Whiteness of the Bear
Bibliography
Index