Gripla - 20.12.2009, Qupperneq 204

GRIPLA204
from southern europe is the magnate from the Westfjords, Hrafn Svein­
bjarnarson. The saga which tells his biography emphasises his travels to
France and Spain. It also dwells at length on his abilities as a physician,
describing in detail some of his methods of curing ailing individuals.
Hrafns saga even describes how its protagonist removes a kidney stone
which had been obstructing the urethra of one of his neighbours. Scholars
have shown that the medical acts that Hrafn is said to have accomplished
are quite in keeping with what was being taught in the new schools of
medicine in 12th­century europe.9 As for the law, this type of knowledge
would have been very useful to the lay chief tain, enabling him to gain sup­
port from his underlings who would be indebted to him for medical serv­
ices rendered, in the same way that they depended on his ability to uphold
their rights in lawsuits.
If clerical learning was useful, the ethics and morals of the Church were
also exercising their sway over the hearts and minds of medieval Icelanders
and by the time the sagas were written, they had been Christian for four to
six generations. even though some traces of paganism probably survived
marginally, it is not likely that the Christian ethic was just a superficial
veneer. In fact, the sources show evidence of deeply Christian behaviour
among the people of Iceland in the 12th and 13th centuries, both clerics and
laymen. there is no reason to believe that by the year 1200 the behaviour
or minds of Icelanders were any less (or more) shaped by Christianity than
in other parts of europe.10
What may interfere with our perception of this deeply Christian men­
tality is that the best known Icelandic texts from the period are the sagas of
Icelanders. Written in the 13th century (at least most of the important
ones), they tell of the ancestors who settled the country at the end of the
ninth century and their descendants until the country was converted to
Christianity in the year 1000. each and every one is a sort of history of the
establishment of the society, not only as a Christian one, but also about
how political power was acquired through settlement and noble ancestry.
One could say that one of the roles of these sagas was to establish through
9 See Guðrún P. Helgadóttir, ed, Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar (oxford: Clarendon Press,
1987), xciii–cviii and 4–6.
10 For an exhaustive study of what the sources tell us about religious life in Iceland during this
period, see Régis Boyer, La vie religieuse en Islande 1116–1264. D’après la Sturlunga saga et les
sagas des évêques (Paris: fondation Singer­Polignac, 1979).