Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 172

KURT SCHIER
ICELAND AND THE RISE OF LITERATURE
IN ‘TERRA NOYA’
Some comparative reflections
Iceland—as is generally known—is a country where literature
takes an important place in everyday life and where people are in-
terested in problems of the older or newer literature to a very high
degree. Where else for instance could the return of two old manu-
scripts be celebrated as an official ceremony as well as a festival for
the whole country, as happened only a few years ago, when the
Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda and the Flateyjarbók came home
to Iceland? And now try to imagine the consequences of finding in
England a new manuscript of the Beowulf, or if in Germany Walther
von der Vogelweide could be identified as the author of the Nibelun-
genlied—such a discovery would mean a sensation to a few scholars
only and the majority of the people probably would not take notice
of it at all. Now in spring 1973 it happened in Iceland that the
largest newspaper, Morgunblaðið, published an article on the front
page concerning a manuscript of the Njáls saga, which was said to
have been discovered in the Vatican Library and in which Snorri
Sturluson himself was attested to be the author of the Njála. In addi-
tion to this article the director of the Stofnun Áma Magnússonar,
Jónas Kristjánsson, wrote a commentary, expressing his excitement
about the discovery.—It was a joke, of course, an excellent joke on
Foolsday, April First; however, a joke of this kind could only be
effective, if the majority of the readers could be expected to under-
stand and laugh at it. And really, many people understood and laughed.
It seems to me that such a joke is impossible in any country but
Iceland.
If one asks why literature in Iceland has such an extraordinarily
important place in the Icelandic society, it is very difficult to find an
answer of some plausibility. The simplest answer would be that Ice-