Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 183
RuDoLf SIMek
tHe MeDIevAL ICeLAnDIC
WoRLD vIeW AnD tHe tHeoRy
of tHe tWo CuLtuReS
I.
sverrir Jakobsson postulates that Medieval Icelanders, or at least the
writers whose thinking is accessible to us through the written word, did
not have a world view in our modern sense of the world, because they did
not have a concept of the term “world view”.1 He goes on then to define
what he understands as “world view”, namely something that “provides
meaning to events in the given surroundings, placing them in the context
of things known and tangible.”2 In this abstract and hermeneutic meaning,
he may be right that as such, the concept did not exist, but I would like to
show that we may very well detect a world view in the Middle Ages gener
ally and in Medieval Iceland in particular.
I define the term world view as something more universal than Sverrir,
whose book otherwise seems to augment in most respects my own study,
Altnordische Kosmographie, by using some nonLatin based sources.3 I,
however, would call the given world view of a people at a certain time “the
sum of all our concepts of the physical and spiritual world which allows us
to come to terms with all the eternal human questions”, such as who made
this world and in what shape? where do we go after death? and why does it
rain so much? to name just a few, but we could also add: where do we come
from and who are our ancestors?
Educated Medieval Icelanders were good Christians and as such had
read their Latin books in school, as people still do in the Christian world,
and therefore they would have had a concept of what many Medieval texts
1 Sverrir jakobsson, Við og veröldin (Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan 2005), 363.
2 Ibid.
3 Rudolf Simek, Altnordische Kosmographie. Studien und Quellen zu Weltbild und Weltbe
schreibung in Norwegen und Island vom 12. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert. ergänzungsbände zum
Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 4 (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1990).
Gripla XX (2009): 183–198.