Gripla - 20.12.2016, Qupperneq 12

GRIPLA12
especially foundational histories.14 Both countries turned to Iceland and its
historical treasures, in which they saw preserved the records of their an-
cient glory.15 Manuscripts began to leave Iceland for Danish and Swedish
libraries, and scholars followed them. Fornaldarsögur, particularly those
dealing with Swedish history, began to appear in print.
Historians trying to write the early history of Scandinavia faced the
same dilemma as their British counterparts did when having to deal
with the problem of the “History of Britain” as found in Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniæ. As Robert Mayer
demonstrates, the fact that doubts had been cast on the reliability of
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history from its initial appearance did not pre-
vent narratives from the tradition being included as part of English history,
disclaimers and all, until well into the eighteenth century, because not to
use it would be to leave the early history of the country a blank.16 If histori-
ans of early Scandinavia did not use sources such as the fornaldarsögur, then
they too would be faced with having no material with which to address
the period before the year 1000. this dilemma is clearly demonstrated
in the magnum opus of the Danish Historiographer royal, the Icelander
Þormóður Torfason, his Historia rerum Norvegicarum. In this work, which
appeared in 1711 in four volumes and which covered the history of norway
from its mythical beginnings until 1387,17 Þormóður used every fornaldar-
14 on the political use of the Icelandic sagas in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden,
see Kay Busch, Grossmachtstatus und Sagainterpretation - die schwedischen Vorzeitsagaeditionen
des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, Vol. 1: Beschreibung, unpublished Dissertation, universität
Erlangen-nürnberg, Philosophische fakultät II – Sprach-, und Literaturwissenschaften,
2002. for a revised electronic version which appeared in 2004, see http://www.opus.
ub.uni-erlangen.de/opus/volltexte/2004/51/index.html
15 When the medieval historian known as Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1140–c. 1220) composed his
history of Denmark, the Gesta Danorum, he too relied upon Icelandic sources (“Præfatio,”
I.6, Saxonis Gesta Danorum, ed, J. olrik and H. ræder, 2 vols. [Copenhagen: Levin and
Munksgaard, 1931–1957], 1: 5; “Praefatio,” 1.4, Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum. The
History of the Danes, ed. Karsten Friis-Jensen, trans. Peter Fisher, 2 vols., Oxford Medieval
texts [oxford: Clarendon Press, 2015], 1: 6–7).
16 Robert Mayer, History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe,
Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and thought 33 (Cambridge:
Cambridge university Press, 1997), 34–53.
17 Þormóður torfason. (tormod torfæus), Historia rerum Norvegicarum in quatuor tomos
divisa. In qua, præter Norvegiææ descriptionem, Primordia gentis, instituta, mores, incrementa;
& inprimis Heroum ac Regum ..., (Copenhagen: Joachim Schmitgen, 1711). See the complete
translation into norwegian: tormod torfæus, Norges historie, ed. Torgrim Titlestad, trans.