Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 13
13IntRoDuCtIon
this clearly in her title “Medieval Icelandic textual Culture”. Although
medieval Icelandic texts are both many and varied and unique in one sense
because of the dominance of the vernacular, they were not an isolated
product in her view. Rather, they were connected both to other medieval
literary traditions in Scandinavian countries and with European medieval
literary culture, as is now generally recognised. Poetry in skaldic measures
is, of course, one of the best examples of an unusual form but nonetheless
it was utilised to communicate the general European world-view in reli
gious poetry. Indigenous and foreign elements intertwine to such a degree
in medieval Icelandic texts that attempts to determine their exact propor
tions are fruitless.
Rudolf Simek discusses the Icelandic world-view in the Middle Ages,
responding to an idea that was espoused both by European and Icelandic
scholars in the first part of the twentieth century, namely that the world-
view of medieval Icelandic culture was of a dual nature. On the one hand,
there was the western European and Christian dimension in which context
men read, for the most part, the same books; on the other hand, the some
what different world-view of the farmers was supposed to have been
expressed in the writing of the country’s history. Simek rejects this and
holds only the former world-view to have influenced those who produced
texts in Iceland; we can know nothing with regard to the latter, neither in
Iceland nor in any other country. Simek does argue, however, that the
Icelanders stood somewhat apart because of the unusual knowledge they
had pertaining to two areas: firstly, pre-Christian mythology as preserved
in skaldic poetry, and secondly, geographical knowledge about the north
and the coasts beyond the Atlantic ocean.
torfi H. tulinius places a particular emphasis on the notion that
Icelandic texts were founded on European Christian culture, which is
woven into narrative accounts and poetry about the world of the past to a
greater extent than is visible on the surface; he accordingly presents some
examples illustrating this. torfi believes that ideas about purity and influ
ence are not useful when explanations for medieval Icelandic civilisation
are sought; it is more productive to apply a dynamic concept or model that
can reveal how Icelandic culture constantly redefined itself and integrated
the foreignness of the past with its contemporary secular Christian cul
ture.