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so much foreign literature was translated into Icelandic was because most
Icelandic audiences would not have known Latin and few Latin works
would have been available for people to read. While it is probable that the
farm communities who heard saga literature read aloud to them are not
likely to have included many – or any – Latinists, this argument does not
necessarily hold good for some educated laypeople and, in particular, for
religious communities where a great many saints’ lives, doctrinal texts,
sermons and religious poems are likely to have been composed, as well as
many sagas. These religious communities would also have provided audi­
ences for medieval Icelandic texts of all kinds. further, the evidence of the
inventories of religious houses in Iceland during the medieval period indi­
cates that some of them were relatively well supplied with books in Latin
and some other european languages, especially German and english
(olmer 1902) and many vernacular texts reveal their authors’ acquaintance
at either first or second hand with a considerable variety of Latin sources
(Lehmann 1937; Sverrir Tómasson 1988). Moreover, there is growing evi­
dence that medieval Icelandic schools may have used both Latin and
Icelandic poetic examples in their textbooks (Guðrún nordal 2001, 22–25),
and this practice is clearly reflected in the so­called “grammatical treatises”
produced between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. These unique
products of vernacularity bear witness to the transformation and appro­
priation of Latin culture and its incorporation into a cultural product that
combined Latin and traditional learning in a new synthesis (Clunies Ross
2005, 141–205; Raschellà 2007).
the phenomenon of medieval Icelandic vernacularity is part of a larger
and very gradual movement away from Latin as the mainstream language
of authoritative communication in Western europe, a movement that has
only really reached its apogee in the last two hundred years, when the ver­
nacular languages have almost completely ousted Latin in religion, litera­
ture, politics, law, science and the schoolroom. It is clear from the evidence
of medieval European societies in general, that the proportion of writing in
the vernacular (as contrasted with writing in Latin) was highest in societies
that did not speak Romance vernaculars descended from Latin and that
were most remote geographically from Rome. In these circumstances
medieval vernacularity becomes something of a statement of socio­politi­
cial and intellectual independence as much as of an inability to understand
MeDIevAL ICeLAnDIC teXtuAL CuLtuRe