Gripla - 20.12.2009, Qupperneq 126

GRIPLA126
had been converted, slaves freed, and criminals outlawed according to the
canon; and in the colonising of Greenland (and the voyages to vineland and
Markland), the Icelanders expanded Northern civilisation into a new and
apparently empty territory that had to be textualised accordingly. As inti­
mated by the author of Konungs skuggsjá, it was now Greenland that was
located on the absolute edge of the land (Konungs skuggsjá ch. xix; cf. Bagge
2004). With the discovery of new territories, the unknown was translated
into the known, and the canon was stretched to incorporate new knowledge
(cf. Paine 1994:2). the horizon shifted but the canon remained in place.
However, in these new lands, the Icelanders met with people who
defied every notion of civilisation, namely the skrælingar. the others by
law (the Icelandic converts and outlaws) once again were measurable
against the Other by nature. The civilised Self was further cemented with
the new-found knowledge of a truly savage people. In a paradoxical way
these savage people confirmed the canon of civilisation; by definition, a
canon is exclusive and impregnable to the possibility of critique (Paine
1994:5). This is in contrast to – say – modern scholarship, which was
founded on a principle of doubt in the enlightenment and an idea of refer­
entiality, rather than canonicity. In canon­governed circumstances, the
unknown is closely linked to the known, either by incorporation or by
refutation. the skrælingar are an example of the latter.
the etymology of skrælingar is not entirely clear, but probably it is
related to skræla, ‘skrante’, and to skrælna, ‘to shrink’ (kLnM Xv, 715; de
Vries 1977). The general bearing of the term is a small person, and a weak­
ling. Others have suggested that it refers to a howling creature, reminding
us of the original use of the word barbarian as an adjective, denoting an
incomprehensible speech.
the earliest source for the Skrælings is, again, Ari’s Íslendingabók:
Eiríkr and the first settlers in both east and west found remains of skin-
boats and stone-smithies ‘... from which we may understand that the peo­
ple who built Vineland and whom the Greenlanders called skrælingar had
gone there.’ (Íslendingabók. Landnámabók 1968, 13–14).4 Interestingly, here
it is suggested that the people of vineland had originally populated
4 ‘... af því má skilja, at þar hafði þess konar þjóð farit, es Vínland hefir byggt ok Grœnlendingar kalla
Skrælinga.’ — Where no translated edition is referred to, the translations are the author‘s
own.