Gripla - 20.12.2009, Síða 130

GRIPLA130
and lawless people, in the centuries following the Black Death which were
gradually more marked by decline in many ways, the boundary was
redrawn: people who did not fit the local standards, as set by the farmers,
were simply deemed inhuman – ómennskir. they abounded in the six­
teenth and seventeenth centuries.
for 16th­ and 17th­century travellers from other parts of europe, Ice­
land had (once again) turned barbarian. Gories Peerse, a German observer,
left no doubt about the savage nature of the Icelanders. thus: “ten or
more of them sleep together in one bed, and both women and men lie
together. They turn heads and feet towards each other, and snore and fart
like pigs under the homespun” (Sigurður Grímsson, ed. 1946, 27); Peerse
also noted how “many priests and clerics make only two sermons a year”
(Ibid., 25). So, beastly habits were accompanied by a notable laxity towards
matters of religion. the latter is testified to in other contemporary sources;
thus the critical observer Dithmar Blefken noted about the Icelanders that
they “are all prone to superstition and have demons and spirits in their
service. Some of the men with luck in fishing are woken up at night by the
devil to go fishing” (Sigurður Grímsson 1946, 37). In a different manner,
this is also the implication of the stóridómur of 1564, in which heresy of all
kinds is banned (Lovsamling for Island I, 84–90). Probably, Iceland was
hardly faring any worse than other European peasant communities, but
when measured against the medieval self-perception as embodied in the
literature, the one­time flourishing part of, and contributor to, european
civilisation had certainly come down in the world.
the allegation of barbarism once again spurred a textual response. just
like the author of Melabók had once sought to redress the external assump­
tion of Icelandic descent from scoundrels, so Arngrímur Jónsson now
sought to improve the image of Icelandic society as essentially savage. In
his Brevis Commentarius (1593, 1968) Arngrímur explicitly wanted to
redress the negative image that had been bestowed upon Iceland, notably
by Münster’s cosmography. He wanted learned European contemporaries
to know about Iceland’s true geographical position (that the island is not as
far off as assumed), and to convince them that if Thule was once seen as
barbarian and inhabited by ‘Skriðfinns’, this has no bearing on the
Icelanders who are Christians and live in proper houses. A significant fea­
ture in the present context is his wide use of classical points of reference,