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ety in the early middle ages, and it goes without saying that any settler
could become part of it by abiding to the law. Icelandic society was inclu
sive, as Roman society had been. At the dawn of Icelandic history there are
no specific claims to a distinct Icelandic culture, only to a shared law. In
those few contexts where a distinct ‘we’ is pertinent, the diacritical feature
is one of language. thus, to be a member of any court, a person had to be
a native speaker of dönsk tunga (Grágás Ia, 38). This is well known of
course, but we may reassess its significance in view of the civilising project;
the law cannot be spoken in barbarian babble.
The first notion of the Icelanders as a distinct people is owed to Ari inn
fróði, whose Íslendingabók launches an idea of historical continuity from
the settlements until the time of writing, between 1122 and 1130. ‘The
Icelanders’ emerged as an ethnic category – with retrospective application
from the settlements (Hastrup 1990b). A shared history is what connects
them; the formal legal entity is supplemented by a substantial, if implicit
reference to what Herodotus said about ‘the common ways’ of the Greek.
This was further substantiated with the advent of the First Grammatical
Treatise (c. 1140), which is singular in its being the only known grammati
cal work in a vernacular language of the period. The author states that he
was prompted to write the treatise because reading and writing had become
common by then, and he wanted to facilitate the reading and writing of
“laws, genealogies, religious works, and the learned historical works, which
Ari has written with great acumen” (Hreinn Benediktsson, ed. 1972, 208–
209).2 Demonstrating the inadequacy of Latin letters for expressing the
sounds of Icelandic, he subsequently suggested an alphabet for ‘us, the
Icelanders’ (Ibid., 21). the distinctiveness of the Icelandic language is fully
recognised – even if it was not until c. 1400 that the deep affinity to west
Norwegian seems to have dissolved, judging from the fact that the export
of Icelandic books to Norway had come to a complete stop by then (Stefán
karlsson 1979).
The first civilising move had occurred with the landnám itself, however
much it was only retrospectively identified as made by ‘Icelanders’. The
tradition established by Íslendingabók, Landnámabók and the Icelandic
sagas provides a detailed and vivid history of the settlements as personal
2 “... lǫg ok áttvísi eða þýðingar helgar eða svá þau hin spaklegu fræði, er Ari Þorgilsson hefir
á bœkr sett af skynsamlegu viti.” [Spelling normalized by editor]
noRtHeRn BARBARIAnS