Gripla - 20.12.2009, Page 25

25A MutAtInG PeRIPHeRy
What was the distinctive spirit of the civilization that lost its bearings
so completely? What can justify the reference to twelfth- and thirteenth-
century Iceland as attaining the “highest tension and finest harmony” of
the “original Scandinavian ethos”? Antiquarianism alone cannot answer the
question. When Toynbee finally tackles the issue, his view turns out to be
a variation on a very widely shared topos: the secular rationalism and
unsentimental realism of medieval Icelandic literature. But he introduces
this theme through a very wide detour. The supposedly obvious affinities
between medieval Icelandic prose and poetry on the one hand, Homeric
epic on the other, are taken to reflect a similar civilizational condition; but
it is an in-between situation, a mindset characteristic of cultures that have
moved out of one world without as yet fully settling into another one:
“Both these young civilizations are distinguished by a freedom from the
incubus of tradition, which gives them a precocious freshness and original­
ity, and by a freedom from the incubus of superstition, which gives them a
precocious clarity and rationalism. Their members are fully aware both of
the extent of their human powers, and of these powers’ limitations...”
(toynbee 1951, 356). As used here, “tradition” and “superstition” are rub­
bery notions, but the context helps to clarify toynbee’s point: he is com­
paring societies that were no longer primitive but not yet at the level of
full­fledged civilizations. In the Greek case, the ethos of the transitional
phase was incorporated into an exceptionally productive and powerful
civilizational pattern (Toynbee suggests as much when he links Herodotus’s
conception of history to the Homeric epics); in the Icelandic case, it was
In an appendix on what might have happened if the Vikings had won (one of the wildest
speculations to be found in A Study of History), toynbee suggests that Icelandic culture
might have become the centre of a much larger world, and that “its aesthetic sensibility and
intellectual penetration would have been of a rare quality”, but he adds the very significant
caveat that “its religious temperature would have been sub-normal” (441). Given the increas­
ing importance of religion to toynbee (it caused his project to explode in midstream), this
must have appeared as a disqualifying handicap in a world that already knew universal
religions. toynbee is not as dependent on assumptions about oral tradition as nordal
claims (antiquarian scholarship is not synonymous with unbroken links to orality), and
his chronology, although objectionable by today’s standards, is not wildly off the mark: he
refers to the period between 1150 and 1250 as the heyday of Icelandic culture, and does not
propose a more detailed dating for the sagas. that said, nordal’s main objection to toynbee
is convincing: the whole scenario is simply incoherent. If the Icelanders capitulated to an
alien civilization 1000 AD, where did the resources for a century-long Kulturkampf come
from, one hundred and fifty years later?