Gripla - 20.12.2005, Page 145

KRISTNI SAGA AND MEDIEVAL CONVERSION HISTORY
Jón Hnefill A›alsteinsson (1999:55-57) and Dag Strömbäck (1975:18-25)
both stress Ari’s authoritative status and the secondary nature of the other
sources, and the most recent attempt at reconstruction by Jenny Jochens
(1999:646) mentions later versions of fiangbrandr’s mission only in order to
illustrate ‘the accretion of information and the increased theological so-
phistication of the authors’. Ari, it seems, has a monopoly when it comes to
reliability, and other sources are considered trustworthy only in so far as they
substantiate his account.
A minority have gone so far as to question even Ari’s reputation as a
historian, noting among other things his emphasis on the role played by his
own family and friends in the conversion (Hallr of Sí›a and the Haukdœlir)
and his apparent disregard for Celtic Christianity. Sawyer, Sawyer and Wood
(1987:72-73) accuse him of exaggeration and oversimplification in his de-
scription of how Iceland was converted, while Jónas Gíslason (1990:250)
describes his work as a ‘particularly one-sided source’. The shaping role of
literary convention has been further identified as detrimental to the historicity
of his conversion narrative: Richard Fletcher (1997:398), for example, de-
scribes it as ‘too good to be true’, and many scholars have emphasised Ari’s
possible debt to European religious literature (see, for example, Líndal 1969,
Sveinbjörn Rafnsson 1979, Sverrir Tómasson 1984, Weber 1987, Mundal
1994, Duke 2001).
The current caution about using written sources to reconstruct conversion
history is expressed most succinctly by Peter Foote (1993a:107) in his article
‘Conversion’ in Medieval Scandinavia: an Encyclopedia. There he states that,
among the many medieval Icelandic texts, ‘a few contain a limited amount of
what must be judged authentic information about the progress of Christianity
in Iceland from about 980 to 1120’. The problem lies in working out where
exactly this ‘authentic information’ is to be found. Like most other scholars,
Foote distinguishes between Ari and all later conversion narratives, conclud-
ing that Ari’s account, ‘as far as it goes’, has ‘unassailable authority’ both be-
cause we can trace its source and transmission and because of its uncon-
ventionality. The value of the other texts, consisting at least in part of ‘in-
ferential embroidery’ and ‘literary construction’, is more difficult to judge, but
Foote does note that missionary sermons on St Michael ‘might rest on genuine
reminiscence’ and that the most noteworthy additions are ‘some skaldic
stanzas in which the hostility that Christian preachers might meet from Ice-
landers appears to be authentically reflected’. Here the encouraging words
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