Gripla - 20.12.2009, Page 199

toRfI H. tuLInIuS
tHe SeLf AS otHeR
Iceland and Christian Europe in the Middle Ages
the society and culture of medieval Iceland have two characteristics
that make them a very interesting and stimulating object of study for the
historian or literary scholar. On the one hand, the society was original,
especially in the way it was organized. On the other, its culture was very
rich, at least when we consider the amount of texts that remain and were
composed in this comparatively small society that evolved in a land far
away from any other European country, literally at the periphery of
Christian europe.1 However, for a long time scholars did not usually think
about the culture of medieval Iceland in terms of its relationship to the rest
of Christian Europe. On the contrary, for the country was considered to be
a sort of repository. up there in the far north, the original culture of the
Germanic peoples – or at least of the Scan di navian or northern Germanic
peoples – was cultivated and preserved in the isolation of the North
Atlantic. Interestingly enough, this point of view on Iceland’s medieval
culture is not the Icelandic one originally. even though some Icelanders
have adopted it, it is more correct to say that it is the point of view of the
continental Euro pean, that is, of someone at the centre who is looking at
the periphery.
It is not necessary to view medieval Iceland in this way. And in fact,
over the last half a century at least, a considerable number of scholars have
established new ways of considering the country’s relationship to the rest
of Christian europe in the medieval period. Progressively over the years, a
1 An attempt at comparative quantification has been made by Gunnar karlsson in his
Goðamenning. Staða og hlutverk hinna fornu goðorðsmanna (Reykjavík: Heimskringla, 2004),
423–434. When compared to what is left of medieval texts from all other Scandinavian
countries, the difference is staggering. for a description of the large Icelandic corpus, see
for example kurt Schier, Sagaliteratur (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1970).
Gripla XX (2009): 199–216.