Gripla - 20.12.2009, Page 184

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call Imago mundi (“world picture”), namely not just a physical picture of
the world, but a concept of everything that concerns man, including God’s
role in the world; some examples between the 12th and 14th centuries
include Honorius Augustodunensis’s Imago mundi (the first version fin­
ished before 1110), the Image du monde by Gautier de Metz (ca. 1245), and
the Imago mundi by Pierre d’Ailly (ca. 1390).
I know that Sverrir has loaded his usage of the term world view with at
the same time more and less. More in the way that the world view includes
also the individual or group distinctions from other groups, but that of
course makes the term world view a relative term and therefore also less.
Less because it thus has no overall validity and may therefore be held only
by a very small group of, say, 13th century Icelandic “nationalists”, if such a
term had existed in the Middle Ages, which it did not.
I use the term world view in a much wider sense, insofar as it is the
concepts described above held by the majority of those people who actually
had an opinion and verbalized that opinion in a way still accessible to us,
namely via the parchment. These Icelanders were, however, educated and
literate and certainly knew the term Imago mundi, probably even beyond
its use as a book title, as can be shown by a well-known passage from the
manuscript AM 685 d 4to (31 r):
Svo segir imago mundi at heimurinn se uæxinn sem egg & suo sem
skurn er utan um eggit sva er elldr umhuerfiss heimenn & sva sem
skiall er næst skurni sva er lopt næst elldi & hid huita ur eggi þat er
næst skialli sva eru uotn næst lopti & svo sem id rauda er j eggi sva
er iordin lukt j þessum hofud skepnum (my italics).4
This Icelandic passage answers roughly to a passage by Honorius
Augustodunensis (Imago mundi I, 1)
Mundus dicitur quasi undique motus. est enim in perpetuo motu.
Huius figura est in modum pilę rotunda, sed instar ovi elementis
distincta. ovum quippe exterius testa undique ambitur, teste
al bumen, albumini vitellum, vitello gutta pinguedinis includitur. Sic
mundus undique cęlo, ut testa circumdatur, cęlo vero purus ether ut
4 Rudolf Simek, Altnordische Kosmographie, 387.