Gripla - 20.12.2009, Qupperneq 77

GunnAR kARLSSon
WAS ICeLAnD tHe GALAPAGoS
of GeRMAnIC PoLItICAL CuLtuRe?
I
behinD the presumptuous title of my talk is an attempt to deal with the
question of whether the political system of medieval Iceland, before its
submission to the Norwegian kingdom in the 13th century, should be con­
sidered as being of its own special kind, rather than just a variant of a
medieval European political system. First of all, though, I should draw
attention to three limitations. Firstly, I work on the assumption that there
once existed something which could be called a Germanic political culture
although our knowledge about what it was really like is of course very lim­
ited. I will only go as far as searching for traces of such a culture in early
Iceland. Secondly, I must inevitably work with a drastically simplified
model of the medieval European political system. I am aware that there
were immense local variations in European politics in the middle ages, and
Iceland was far from being the only society practically without royal
power. I am not going to treat it as unique in a strict sense, but as anoma­
lous to the most usual and best-known model. For obvious reasons I shall
particularly view Iceland in comparison with Norway, and within Norway,
particularly with the law district of Gulaþingslög. My third reservation is
that the comparison in the title of my paper between Iceland and the
Galapagos is of course an exaggeration. Whether or not any considerable
amount of exclusively Germanic political culture existed in Iceland, obvi­
ously, I do not argue that it lived there in a perfect isolation as the tortoises
or lizards of the famous archipelago do.
II
Running the risk of being too basic and stating the obvious, I will begin by
describing explicitly the political system of Iceland which is the subject of
my discussion.
Gripla XX (2009): 77–91.