Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 44
GRIPLA44
jakobsson 1997, 318), and that none of them can therefore be regarded as
more or less royalist than the others, seems onesided. In the first place,
the abovementioned distinction between kingship as an imaginary signifi
cation and monarchy as a historical institution may be relevant to this
issue. A cluster of values and virtues associated with kingship represents
the enduringly attractive side of monarchy, but the record as a whole does
not suggest that its appeal – due to the reasons noted above – led to an
unreserved embrace of the monarchic alternative. Moreover, the ability to
distinguish between different “images of sovereignty” (Richard Gaskins)
and contrasting ideals of rulership reflects a detachment that precluded
identification with a given order. The very fact that it has proved difficult
to identify clear preferences for one model as against another (does
Heimskringla favour peasant or warrior kings?) indicates an ongoing con
frontation that could only be sustained at a distance from monarchic rule.
Last but not least, I find theodore Andersson’s argument about the shift
from kings’ sagas to Icelanders’ sagas persuasive. It was precisely at the
moment when absorption into the Norwegian monarchy became an
increasingly likely possibility that the Icelanders turned to “a belated
redefinition of their own traditions in their native sagas” (Andersson 1999,
934). the same author notes “a vein of antimonarchism in the sagas of this
period, and a will to identify what is peculiar to Icelandic institutions,
Icelandic law, and Icelandic character” (Ibid., 933).3
3 the interpretation of Morkinskinna has emerged as a major issue in the debate on Icelandic
attitudes to monarchy. Ármann jakobsson argues that this text “fuses the loyalty to
tradition with the ideal of a new society” (2002, 286; my translation, J.P.A.). The claim
could not be phrased more strongly: this “didactic history with an ideological purpose” (337;
author’s english summary) proposes a return to the monarchic fold, and more precisely
to the court society of the Norwegian kingdom at its most ambitious and expansionist.
theodore Andersson reads Morkinskinna as a “condemnation of Norwegian expansionism
on the part of an Icelandic writer and a forceful recommendation that Norwegian kings
should devote themselves to social progress within Norway” (1994, 58). By comparison,
Heimskringla can, for all its ambivalence, be seen as a royalist readjustment, and egils saga
as a reminder that one should try to see both sides of the argument. When two uncontested
experts disagree in this massive way, a non-expert can only conclude that the message of
the text must be very ambiguous indeed. The present writer feels tempted to add that the
most accessible sections of Morkinskinna (the þættir, which both interpreters see as integral
parts of the work) do not – to put it mildly – read like monarchist sermons.