Gripla - 20.12.2009, Page 185

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albumen, etheri turbidus aer, ut vitellum, aeri terra ut pinguedinis
gutta includitur.5
However, in my definition I not only exclude that part of the population
about whom we have no factual knowledge but also sources that are, in
some cases, impossible to interpret. Here, I have in mind not only cryptic
texts but also certain symbols in 12th­century french church sculpture, for
example, whose meanings are now lost to us unless there is some written
text to unlock the meaning. My use of “world view” is therefore closely
connected to the history of the mentality of educated Medieval Icelanders,
and it encompasses the worlds of:
Religion & History (Heilsgeschichte);
the Scholarly World, especially the natural Sciences;
everyday Life, and Literature.
Because I do not subscribe to Sverrir’s more hermeneutic and also proces­
sual definition of world view, I shall not claim to establish the world view
of all Medieval Icelanders, but rather those at a given period in time, in my
case the 12th century, a period particularly prone to the outside influences
because of the massive changes happening in intellectual life across
Western Europe, known as the Renaissance of the 12th Century.
That the world view is never ahistorical is obvious, but history is
something that permeates all aspects of the world view given above: for the
religious aspect it is the Heilsgeschichte of the world, for everyday life it is
genealogies, family history and local history, for the scholarly aspect both
time in the astronomical sense and the continuities of (secular) world his­
tory, and in literature the preservation and continuation of stories of old.
But seeing that educated Medieval Christians studied much the same
books all over Western Europe, it follows that much of the world view
throughout Western Europe will also be consistent, of course allowing for
local traditions, superstitions and even mythologies that may preserve ele­
ments important to peoples’ identities on a lower level than their humanity
and Christianity. However, many of these lower concepts may never make
it into writing and thus present a certain problem to the modern scholar.
5 “Honorius Augustodunensis Imago mundi,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen
age, 57 (1982): 49.
tHe MeDIevAL ICeLAnDIC WoRLD vIeW