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and his explicit position as a spokesman for Iceland as civilised. In his
Crymogæa (1609, 1985), Arngrímur further describes the initiatives taken
by the Danish kings after the reformation to improve the standards of the
Icelanders. Significantly – with a view to the wave of European humanism
in the wake of the renaissance, Arngrímur wrote in Latin – this was now
the means to reinscribe Iceland into european learning. no autonomous
canon would now serve this end. Latin was instrumental to emphasizing
the oneness of european civilisation. In the case of Crymogæa, it was fur
ther burdened by bearing the Greek name for Iceland.
I shall not continue this story, only use it to note how the horizons of
civilisation shift, even if some of the parameters remain the same. the
boundaries between selves and others are constantly redrawn, but it is only
in the process of textualisation that a definite boundary towards an abso
lute Other – the radically different, or the barbarian – can be drawn. The
power of literature in the process of civilisation – which is also a process of
canonisation – is to provide a means of self-objectification; Cicero was
well aware of that when he hailed poetry as the true means to eternal
knowledge.
What happened in Iceland as well as in Greece, where the barbarians
were first born as such, was that society itself was shaped in texts – texts
that became canonical and therefore continued to frame the perception of
propriety and truth. In both cases people were favoured – at first, if later
burdened – by a set of urtexts, to which they might refer whenever self-
definition was an issue, and against which all new forms were seen as more
or less successful variants (Herzfeld 1987; Hastrup 1998). Such urtexts,
defining the urnorsemen and the ureuropeans respectively, are corner
stones in the perception of civilisation itself. Even today, we find that
Icelandic uniqueness is still claimed with reference to medieval Icelandic
history, and a purity of language, life and nature (Magnús einarsson
1996).
In Greece the classical ur-texts canonised the Ur-Europeans, while in
Iceland, the Ur-Norsemen were and often are still portrayed in terms of
medieval canonical literature. In both cases, the literature propounds the
defining features of civilisation. What connects the classical european and
the Icelandic notions of civilisation goes deeper, however, and takes us to a
profoundly European view of the world, not only textualising it, but bas
noRtHeRn BARBARIAnS