Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 184

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GRIPLA
very little can be proved by exact materials. Therefore, I must ask
you again to look at these thoughts as I have characterized them: as
reflections only.
Some time after the ‘landnám’, in Iceland like in other ‘terrae
novae’ a consciousness must have developed to have created some-
thing entirely new. Thus the oral traditions concerning these events
received a special emphasis and were regarded as extremely important
ones. As in Rome and Israel the establishment of laws played a signi-
ficant part. From this point of view it is certainly not by chance that
the description of legal procedures take up so much room in the ís-
lendingasogur.
Iceland displays an important difference in comparison with other
similar societies: in them the events marking the origin of a people or
state lie in the far, sometimes mythical past, whereas in Iceland only
a comparatively short temporal distance separates the authors of ís-
lendingasogur from the events of the ‘landnám’-time, a space of time
which under favourable preconditions can be bridged by oral tradi-
tion. It has already been observed that out of the turmoils of the
Sturlunga days the events of the ‘landnám’-time were seen in an ideal-
izing and glorifying light. This fits in easily with the conceptions here
exposed.
I should like to summarize the preceding reflections in short.
In Iceland as in many other newly settled regions older traditions
were conserved better than in the motherland. But already in the lOth
century the court poetry of the scalds was elaborated and severed
from its functional connexion.—I had to leave aside the question of
the coherence between this development of scaldic poetry and of Ice-
landic narrative prose.—The most vigorous impulse for the developing
of new traditions and especially for their conservation and their being
handed down I see as a ‘consciousness of initation’ among the Ice-
landers; this, however, crystallized only after some delay.
The awareness of standing at a beginning, of having created some-
thing entirely new, and the process of shaping new orders as well,
evidently had considerable psychological and sociological consequen-
ces. The strengthened selfconsciousness led to a new—and sometimes
problematical—political conception and later on to idealizing the