Audun and the polar bear

"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 has 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."--Jacket.