Gripla - 20.12.2009, Side 33

33A MutAtInG PeRIPHeRy
poses, literary – products of Icelandic culture, and especially those to
which we may want to attribute a civilizational meaning, must also be
understood as attempts to cope with discontinuity and maintain an over­
arching tradition. this latter point has been stressed in recent scholarship
on the sagas (e.g. vésteinn ólason 1998, Meulengracht Sørensen 1993).
from settlement to state formation
the third of the abovementioned turning­points is the most crucial. More
precisely, the Icelandic mode of conversion explains both sides of the con­
stellation that prevailed during the first quarter of the second millennium
CE: a unique situation within Western Christendom and an ability to
relate to the pre-Christian past in unorthodox ways. As Gunnar Karlsson
(2004) has emphasized, the distinctive historical phenomenon of
Christianity without monarchy is the key to the cultural achievements of
medieval Iceland. But it was the peculiar structure of the pre-Christian pol­
ity that made the Icelandic separation of Christ and king possible, and this
will be the main theme of the following discussion. As for the first land­
mark, there has been much speculation about the characteristics and conse­
quences of the settlement, but for present purposes, the main point is that
the settlers took a particularly circuitous road back to the long­term pat­
tern of European state formation. The first step was, as Meulengracht
Sørensen (2000, 21) put it, a “re-formation, which took a different direc­
tion from the evolution of society in Scandinavian and British lands.” the
resultant socio-political regime was, as he adds, “both more innovative and
more archaic than those of the old countries.”
In what sense was the re-formation a new beginning of state forma­
tion? Rather than taking that for granted, we should pause to consider the
problems involved. Can we speak of a state where there is no governmen­
tal apparatus, no executive authority backed up my means of coercion, and
no central taxation? The difficulty with labelling the Icelandic regime a
state is not unlike the more frequently cited case of the ancient city­states
(although the latter were mostly endowed with more salient attributes of
statehood); and the problem can, in my opinion, be solved in the same
way: through a flexible use of Max Weber’s political sociology. As the very