Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 129
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the cold is indomitable ... and ... it kills in number. Winter lasts
nine months without rain ... The richest protect themselves ... by
fire; others by rubbing their feet and others by the warmth of the
caves in this earth ... All this land is full of cruel bears with which
the inhabitants wage continual war. There are also ... if what they
say is true – unicorns. they hold that there are men called pygmies
. . Pygmies have, it appears, a human form, hairy to the tips of the
fingers, bearded to the knees, but brutish, without speech or reason,
hissing in the manner of geese” (Quoted by Malaurie 1956, 30).
the little people, the trolls, the skrælingar or whatever the prototypical oth
ers had been named so far, are here joined by the Pygmies. they are located
in a mythical nature, populated also by ‘unicorns’ (probably narwhals that
had become larger-than-life). Whatever trace – genetic and otherwise – the
Norsemen had left, they were no longer visible. Civilised life in Greenland
had proved too far out.
the general point of this section is that once a true canon of civilisation
is established, other ways of life cannot find a place within it – as ‘other’
that is. Canonicity turns thought into ideology, and either ‘the other’ is
incorporated into the known as ‘same’ or must remain homeless and law
less within the civilised world as perceived. The others, however, remain
necessary as accessories to self-perception and to ward off doubt about the
canon by their very otherness.
Shifting horizons of civilisation: urtexts
As is well-known, Icelandic civilisation declined after the Black Death in
1402–04. This is not simply an external, pejorative observation, it was also
a decline by Iceland's own canonical standards (Hastrup 1990a), even if the
foreigners were more outspoken. Internally, there were endless battles
against fishermen refusing to take up residence as farm labourers, against
flakkarar (vagrants), útilegumenn (‘outliers’) and others who did not fit the
scheme of proper sedentary life. even the humble practice of distant herd
ing on sel (shielings) was given up, in the interest of keeping the shepherd
esses at home. While before, the boundary had been drawn between lawful
noRtHeRn BARBARIAnS