Gripla - 20.12.2009, Síða 119

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and revision of the image of thule, the mental map turned into a tenacious
metaphor that was itself remapped every time the horizon shifted. The
horizon moved but metaphors still informed the maps by which people
oriented themselves in space. Thule remained on the edge of the world –
as Adam of Bremen articulated so well. For a long time, Iceland fitted this
image very neatly.
In a general way, the Scandinavians of the Middle Ages accepted that
they were, indeed, peripheral. They lived ‘on the far edge of the dry land’
(Bagge 2004); as testified to by Konungs skuggsjá, the learned Scandinavians
knew that their lands bordered on the outer sea. Yet at the time, these
lands were increasingly affected by the literary impulses reaching them
from the centre in the shape of translations or adaptations of european
books; and within the northern world a new elite emerged, defined as such
because of their having incorporated the literate culture of the larger
Christian civilisation. As Sverre Bagge has it, the very position as elite
depended on the definition of Scandinavia as peripheral; Bagge continues:
In this situation, two strategies were possible: (1) [to] try to become
as similar as possible to what was understood as the ‘common
European culture’, or (2) [to] cultivate one’s own originality and
show that one’s own traditions were equal to those of the rest of
europe. Both strategies are found all over Scandinavia, but generally
the first approach is more common in Denmark and Sweden, and
the second in Iceland, with Norway in an intermediate position
(Bagge 2004, 356–357).

Thus while Saxo Grammaticus – writing in Latin in compliance with the
Danish view of what should be done to match European Christendom –
complains that the Danes have only a poor knowledge of Latin, clearly
implying that they were still rather uncivilised, the Icelanders take great
pride in devising a vernacular literature that is both singular and on a par
with southern traditions. By means of both strategies the northern lands
gradually became integrated into european civilisation (Adams and
Holman 2004).
for Iceland (and for the norse tradition in general), it has been sug­
noRtHeRn BARBARIAnS