Gripla - 20.12.2005, Page 41

STYLISTICS AND SOURCES OF THE POSTOLA SÖGUR 39
Iceland, and could perhaps help to provide a better understanding of some
topics concerning medieval Icelandic culture that warrant further investiga-
tion: the reception and dissemination of manuscript collections of foreign ec-
clesiastical literature in Iceland (one subcategory here would be the investiga-
tion of the presence and possible influence of Byzantine and other non-Latin
hagiographical traditions, since in some places the early texts do show signs of
being derived from such traditions), the methods of grammatical training of
Icelandic clerics and the practices of the teaching, transmission, and pro-
duction of literature in the Icelandic church schools,48 the connections that Ice-
landic church schools had with their counterparts in Europe, and the theo-
logical concerns or trends that informed the medieval Icelandic church and
presumably sifted into Icelandic culture through contacts between ecclesiasti-
cal and secular entities (for instance through the reading of saints’ lives and
homilies during church services).
A reminder of the transformation of Iceland from a pagan society that cele-
brated its cultural heritage in oral literature to what was essentially the most
highly book-literate culture in medieval Scandinavia, dedicated (at least in
word), as Ari fiorgilsson tells us, to law, peace, and Christianity, and preserv-
ing its own heritage and that of parts of Scandinavia in its written sagas, is
ever present in the earliest translations of sagas of apostles and saints, in both
their outright emphasis on conversion (addressed directly at times to the gods
of pagan Scandinavia) and in their combination of Latin and native Icelandic
grammar and narrative idiom. As is the case with medieval Iceland’s imported
cultural institutions (in particular the church), it is difficult to tell just how
much the one entity reshaped the other, but the combination of both certainly
helped to provide, in the medieval Icelandic saints’ and apostles’ lives, literary
forms that are just as unique as early medieval Icelandic culture (that flourish-
ed „unbelievably“ without a king) and the medieval sagas of Icelanders.
48 Again, the reader is directed to Sverrir Tómasson 1988 and Collings 1967 for detailed studies
of the teaching and use of rhetoric in medieval Iceland.