Gripla - 20.12.2009, Page 146

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Íslendingabók made the Lawspeaker Thorgeir argue that: “We should
rather mediate the matters so that each party gets some part of what it
desires.”3 this may be taken not as the essence of the historical event but
rather as the essence of the political mentality that prevailed in “republican”
Iceland.
*
Because of the general premise of the three original ethnicities, the state
formation period in Scandinavia is usually viewed as a merely political uni­
fication of the hitherto ethno­culturally uniform lands. therefore, it is
interpreted as the final giving of some centrally controlled “law and order”,
and thus just one more step in the long history of the original existence of
the three great nations. from such an evolutionistic perspective, early
kings acted as natural “unifiers” who only invigorated the already present
process, not as “creators” who triggered and promoted internal unification
and external differentiation while striving for the reinforcement and
enlargement of their dynastic spheres of political and economic interests.
Scandinavian historiography of the early Middle Ages does not easily
acknowledge the theory that in most cases it was the execution of “egois­
tic” dynastic interests and monopolistic strategies that led to the establish­
ment of the early Mediaeval states and subsequently resulted in the “pro­
duction” of political nations. The nineteenth and early twentieth century
nationalists “…constructed or even re­invented modern nations, but did so
on the historical foundations of older ethnies with specific myths, memo­
ries, symbols, and values as inspirational sources. In this process the con­
sciousness of a former ethnicity was re-discovered and re-vitalized, and
thus formed the roots or origins of the nation…” (Fewster 2006, 401).
A nationalistic reading of early written sources is not, of course, unique
to the nordic part of europe and such an attitude has been, and still is,
typical for many “national” historiographies that more or less consciously
respond to dominating political needs to “dig up” the possibly ancient roots
of modern nations and states. neither is the opportunistic manipulation of
the past a modern invention. the process of shaping “national” ethnicities
can already be discerned in medieval scholarship. This is well represented
in Saxo who ca 1200 in his Gesta Danorum formulated the idea of a Danish
3 translation in theodore M. Andersson 2003, p. 91.