Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 24

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boils down to two episodes. The description of the first is taken from Axel
Olrik’s work on Viking civilization: the “spirit of militant reaction…
embodied… in the heroic figure of Starkad the old” (Ibid., 351) represents
a civilization on the defensive, and the final betrayal committed by the
protagonist symbolizes an inevitable failure. this is a very tenuous founda­
tion for arguments about an intercivilizational encounter, and it tells us
nothing about positive beliefs, virtues or achievements of the losers. the
second episode – the Icelandic Kulturkampf, as toynbee describes it – is
more revealing. In AD 1000, the Icelanders “capitulated” to an “alien civi­
lization” (358), but the conversion was followed by a long-drawn-out rear­
guard struggle, The main line of defence was “backward-looking scholar­
ship” (358), an antiquarian effort to reconstruct a lost world with intellec­
tual tools borrowed from Christian culture and turned against its spirit. In
this context, Toynbee seems to regard saga writing as nothing more than
an imaginary extension of scholarship and an integral part of the antiquar­
ian project. It is, in his view, highly significant that the period portrayed by
the sagas does not extend beyond the immediate aftermath of conversion.
He shows no interest in the particular kind of narratives developed in
medieval Iceland, nor in the different directions taken by stories about the
Icelandic past and about the Scandinavian world.
the Kulturkampf ended with an utter and irreversible defeat. In the
fourteenth century, “the paralysis of the Icelandic genius is complete”
(Ibid., 358). In fact, toynbee seems to think that the Icelanders simply
went bananas. His quotation from Olrik is worth reproducing in extenso:
“The nation that once had so sharp an eye for the world of reality falls into
slumber – politically, aesthetically, economically – and sleeps its sleep of
centuries, full of disturbing dreams, while the elves shriek their shrill
laughter from all the cliffs and the giants from all the rocky caves, while the
earth quakes, and the fire­mountains shine, and souls fly about the crater
of Hekla like black birds” (Ibid. 358, quoting olrik 1939, 192). the finale,
then, was not only a cultural annihilation, but also a “stupefyingly outland­
ish” (Ibid., 358) mental regression.1
1 Follwing Olrik, but with added emphasis, Hauksbók is singled out as an exemplary cult­
ural disaster. In his brief discussion of toynbee, Sigurður nordal (1993, II, 65–68) rightly
takes him to task for this complete misjudgment. But some other points seem less obvious.
Toynbee’s view on the relative superiority of Scandinavian civilization (compared to ninth-
and tenth­century Christianity) is more nuanced than nordal appears to have thought.