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enced by classical authors, and among them Virgil who spoke so elabo­
rately about thule (friis­jensen 1975). What is more significant in the
present context is Saxo’s reverence for the Icelanders’ historical writings,
which are important sources for his own work. The Icelanders, so to
speak, fast all the year round because of natural scarcities, but they use
their days to collect and expand knowledge of their own and other people’s
ways of life; “they make up for their privations by means of their art”
(Saxo 1941, 34). Saxo gives a hint of another measure of civilisation here:
artistic expression may compensate for material wants. The irony is that all
the time that they were (re-)claiming European civilisation for themselves,
the Viking descendants had to live with increasingly pointed European
literature, which derided their achievements and once again portrayed
them as the true villains of Europe, merging them with Saracens and other
‘others’ who were presented as waiting (in vain, as it happened) to destroy
the virtue of Christendom (Levy 2004).
Looking back at Icelandic literary activity from a broad perspective,
however, there is no doubt that it contributed to an accelerating process of
self-objectification through writing. It is not a simple matter of technology
and I am not making a universal statement of writing in itself being civili­
sational; studies of literacy have made us aware that it is not so simple (e.g.
Bloch 1989). Even in ancient Greece, writing itself was not liberating
(Andersen 1989). I am more concerned with textualisation, understood as a
“double process which consists in a society’s adopting writing as a social
usage, and, as a consequence of that, understanding and construing social
life, and society considered as a whole, as a text” (Meulengracht Sørensen
2001, 309). This was what made it possible for the Icelanders to write
themselves (and their fellow Norsemen) into European history and – in
the same move – to do so from a peculiar Icelandic perspective. the
Icelanders’ artistic activities did not simply make up for material wants,
they placed Iceland solidly within European civilisation on the basis of an
autonomous canon.
Relocating the Barbarians: Canonicity
the creation of a distinct textual canon of (a northern) civilisation almost
immediately co-produced a new counterpoint. In Iceland itself, heathens
noRtHeRn BARBARIAnS