Gripla - 20.12.2009, Síða 207

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But original skaldic poetry continued to be composed by poets of the
12th and 13th centuries and the significant contribution to be found in
Nordal’s book is a meti cu lous study of how the practice, transmission and
study of this poetry was shaped and transformed by an intimate knowledge
of grammar, versification and rhetoric, as these disciplines were taught in
cathedral schools and universities all over Christian europe. In this, she
brings to light an interesting dynamic that one also sees evidence for in
other aspects of Icelandic medieval culture: structures, ideas, and practices
current elsewhere in Western Christendom being borrowed and put to use
by the dominant groups within Icelandic society (laymen and clerics) for
specific cultural practices and for the creation of a distinct local culture on
which this society based its identity.
Another Icelandic scholar, Ármann Jakobsson, has written two books
in recent years in which he considers another cultural product of medieval
Iceland, the sagas of kings or royal biographies, in the context of the com­
mon culture of europe in the High Middle Ages.19 Indeed, the earliest
prose narratives that we call sagas are biographies of kings of Norway and
Denmark which date from the second half of the 12th century. The interac­
tion between oral story-telling and learned models of history writing is
particularly interesting to study within this genre. A series of texts have
been preserved which can be used to show how a form which in its begin­
ning adhered to clerical conventions for writing history evolved into lively
and complex biographical narratives of the lives and times of past kings.
the kings’ sagas or konungasögur bloomed fully as a genre in the first half
of the 13th century, notably in Snorri Sturluson’s famous Heimskringla, a
history of the kings of Norway from mythological times to the second
third of the 12th century. Ármann jakobsson also contends that a slightly
earlier kings’ saga, called Morkinskinna, is equally sophisticated. He has
written a doctoral dissertation devoted to the saga in which he shows that
in many ways, its aesthetics betray knowledge and appreciation of develop­
ments in the art of narrative in southern europe.20 By so doing, he deep­
19 Ármann jakobsson, Í leit að konungi. Konungsmynd íslenskra konungasagna (Reykjavík:
Háskólaútgáfan, 1997) and Staður í nýjum heimi. Konungasagan Morkinskinna (Reykjavík:
Háskólaútgáfan, 2002). A briefer presentation of his position can be found in “Royal bio­
graphy,” his contribution to the already cited Blackwell Companion to Old Norse­Icelandic
Literature and Culture, 388–402.
20 See Ármann jakobsson, Staður í nýjum heimi, 61–107.
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