Gripla - 20.12.2009, Side 191

191
nor did the learned Icelanders of the 12th and 13th centuries stop at
just taking over or borrowing from continental sources, but just like their
european colleagues the foundations of their learned culture (perhaps
monastic and academic but nevertheless very lively) were so secure that
they could play with and develop novel ideas from learned roots. A good
example is the unique Icelandic table of fabulous creatures in BL Add.
11250 which does not rest directly on a continental source, but presupposes
a knowledge of high Medieval teratology which then was used in a playful
way elsewhere, like in the margins of Flateyjarbók or in copies of Jónsbók.
Iv.
All of these examples have been taken from the world of scholarship,
which formed only one aspect of the world view as defined above. As the
purely religious aspects of the Medieval world view, apart from the local
variations of popular religion, were not likely to vary too much in the
book-based religion of Christianity, this leaves two more aspects to inves­
tigate, namely everyday life and literature. the former is, for all accounts
and purposes, out of our reach as it is visible to us only through literature
for one thing, and may well, to some extent, be even out of the reach of
literature, as the banal occurrences of everyday life were not the topic of
literary elaboration even in the pseudo-realistic Icelandic sagas. Thus we
are left with the world of literature to establish any significant deviations
of Iceland, in terms of the world view, from the rest of the Western world.
As all three major genres of Icelandic literature, namely sagas, skaldic
poetry and eddic poetry, have no direct formal counterpart in european
literature, it may be worthwhile investigating whether these genres may
not be deceptive and whether similar types of literature were not repre­
sented on both sides of the north Atlantic as far as themes and topics are
concerned. The following table should thus serve as a tentative experiment
to look at literary genres as far as their protagonists are concerned, some­
thing that has traditionally been done with the subdivision of Icelandic
saga literature.
tHe MeDIevAL ICeLAnDIC WoRLD vIeW