Gripla - 20.12.2016, Síða 53

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Scholars have devoted considerable time to attempting to better understand
the factors that, from the early twelfth century onwards, might have moved
Icelanders to embark upon a programme of textualisation in the vernacular
language, producing texts that belong to a wide range of historical, legal
and narrative genres: “Icelanders … cultivated their own history with vig-
our out of proportion to their resources and population size”, notes Diana
Whaley, for example.3
Little attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which these
written outputs (with the Íslendingasögur in the spotlight but also sam-
tíðarsögur, biskupasögur, and þættir, although these saga genres will not be
considered in the present article) were accessed and communicated in both
landscape and manuscript contexts at once. this is, arguably, necessary
for a fuller understanding of the processes by which the Íslendingasögur,
in particular, were first composed as written narratives and have lived
subsequently in local and national consciousness for a millennium or so –
albeit as responses, initially and subsequently, to different socio-political,
economic and environmental events and contexts, that fulfilled differing
functions for different groups of people, at different times.4
3 Diana Whaley, ‘a useful Past: Historical Writing in Medieval Iceland,’ in Old Icelandic
Literature and Society, ed. Margaret Clunies ross (Cambridge: Cambridge university
Press, 2000), 161. an older but still important contribution to this debate is Kurt Schier,
‘Iceland and the rise of Literature in ‘terra nova’: Some Comparative reflections,’ Gripla
1 (1975): 168–81.
4 With respect to this (and following the suggestion of one of this article’s two anonymous
reviewers, although this is not the place to develop this idea at length), it is useful to dis-
tinguish here between three principal time periods, since in each case, the transmission
and reception of the sagas might be said to be characterised by distinct influences. firstly,
there is the period in which the sagas were initially written down and subsequently trans-
mitted (the late twelfth to fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), during which time society
and power structures underwent great change, not least following Iceland’s submission
to foreign rule with all of the consequences that ensued on a local and national level. Saga
narratives played a particular role in the ideological construction of identity and legitimacy,
and in later developments or adjustments regarding these constructions, for example.
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries constitute the second period, this being a time
when Icelanders in Copenhagen (not least those studying and working for patrons at
the university of Copenhagen, founded in 1479, arngrímur Jónsson ‘hinn lærði’ being
foremost amongst them) began to alert the wider world to the great potential of the sagas
as sources for writing national histories. this external and growing scholarly interest con-
tinued into the eighteenth century. finally, the third period spans the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, when the sagas were put to use once again in distinctive historical and
political nationalist contexts, both in Iceland and in other Scandinavian countries.
THE ICELANDIC SAGAS AND SAGA LANDSCAPES