Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 42
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traditions of these civilizations. Finally, and in close connection with the
last-mentioned aspect, we can – following Carlier – distinguish between
the institution of monarchy and the imaginary signification of kingship;
Greek elaborations of the latter, articulated through a variety of cultural
genres, had a lasting impact on later ways of theorizing and justifying
monarchy.
After this brief comparative excursus, let us return to the Icelandic
Freestate. Its deviation from the monarchic mainstream was muted by
several factors. the settlers, or at least the most significant part of them,
came from a country on which they remained dependent in various respects
and with which they continued to identify, in a way that seems to have
been compatible with a sense of being a separate community (cf. Kirsten
Hastrup’s model of a multilayered Icelandic identity). they had migrated
overseas, removed themselves from the orbit of monarchies competing for
territorial possessions, and military conflict with a monarchic enemy was
never a likely possibility. on the other hand, the resistance to monarchic
aspects of the civilizational current coming in from Western Europe was
remarkably stubborn. As noted above, the power elite of the Freestate
engineered a conversion to Christianity without submission to monarchy.
After conversion, the Church was organized in a way that set strict limits
to the influence of the rising papal monarchy. Descriptions of the first
bishops as kinglike figures should not be taken at face value: they reflect
the official selfimage of a Church that had more control over textual pro
duction in the first stage of literacy than in the closing decades of the
freestate. In this respect Sigurður nordal’s analysis of the early bishops as
partners in an oligarchic coalition seems realistic.
If the institutional resistance to monarchy is beyond doubt, what about
the cultural and ideological domains? Did the culture of the freestate
articulate the complex attitudes to monarchy mentioned above in connec
tion with other cases? The problem must be posed with proper regard to
the cultural genres that come into question. Medieval Icelanders did not
theorize about monarchy; they wrote sagas about kings. Images of king
ship, including contrasting models of an ideal ruler, figure prominently in
these narratives. A certain optical illusion seems inherent in the genre:
when kings take centre stage in a story, their presence and their preten
sions tend to overshadow other sides of the picture. And in light of the