Gripla - 20.12.2009, Page 9

9IntRoDuCtIon
are brought out in the present volume, although the interpretation of writ­
ten sources with a primary emphasis on Iceland prevails in most of the
articles. Anyone attempting to interpret written sources of the past will be
faced with the perennial difficulty that the written sources are frequently
not recorded by direct witnesses to the events and circumstances they
relate. The time which elapses between the date of an event and the writ­
ten recording of it, and the circumstances of the moment of writing, are
inherent parts of the text. this problem presents itself immediately to all
those who wish to use Icelandic texts from the thirteenth century as sourc­
es of information about the viking Age; academics‘ attitudes to this meth­
odological difficulty and how it is approached by different disciplines, can
vary. Archaeology differs from the study of texts in that precisely dated
material phenomena bear unequivocal witness to specific times and places,
but they are seldom easily interpreted or contextualized. When archaeolo­
gists have the opportunity, therefore, they frequently must rely on the
testimony of written sources to make sense of the material picture; inter­
pretative problems arise in all avenues of historical research.
It is virtually unavoidable that discussion about the civilisation of the
Scandinavian countries taking place in Iceland, at the initiative of
Icelanders, will be coloured by an Icelandic perspective: consciously and
unconsciously, the literary culture of the Icelanders in the Middle Ages and
history as recounted in Icelandic books—in sum, the picture of civilisation
that they present—is taken as the norm. this is obvious in the greater part
of the articles which are published here. In fact, the wealth of medieval
Icelandic sources and scholarly tradition has led, and continues to lead, not
only Icelanders but many others to rely on Icelandic texts as the founda­
tions for research into investigating what was distinctive about the civilisa­
tion of the Scandinavian countries during the viking Age and the Middle
Ages. With one exception (the Rök stone), all of the texts which are ana­
lysed in this volume are Icelandic. Despite the considerable extent to which
this perspective circumscribes the meaning of the phrase ‘nordic civilisa­
tion’ in the conference-title, the selection of scholars that were invited to
Skálholt may be seen as an attempt to prevent discussion on the subject
being dominated by the Icelandic perspective. In the nineteenth century
and on into the early decades of the twentieth century, most scholars
believed that the Icelandic prose narratives and the old poetry about the