Saga - 2011, Qupperneq 145

Jón Jóhannesson later expanded on this hypothesis, arguing that
Ólsen „sýndi fram á, hver væri hin rétta ársetning þess“.35However,
Ólsen does not „prove“ that the correct dating was 1306 — he pro-
poses an explanation for the existence of the documents based on a
number of other hypotheses which also involve the emendation of
the text of some of the agreements. One would also need to conjec-
ture that Icelanders wrote letters to the king with legal clauses no
longer binding (perhaps as an act of defiance?). Although this may
be possible, I would argue that my theory is also very plausible, per-
haps all the more plausible because it is based on the unaltered
texts, with their contradictions, problems and anachronisms, none
of which are solved by moving the dates of the documents around.
Any analysis of the agreements must not concentrate on the pos-
sibility or plausibility of one or another clause. Rather, if these doc-
uments were not fifteenth-century fabrications, all their clauses
should stand up, as a whole, to scrutiny. Moreover, given the his-
torical and historiographical circumstances which saw their sudden
appearance in the fifteenth century, all the documents must also be
considered as part of a whole movement, what I have called an
effort on the part of Icelanders to produce a coherent and conve-
nient narrative of the submission. Their suddenness relates not only
to their actual recording in the fifteenth century, but to the appear-
ance of a number of legal rights which are not recorded in the extant
of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
A particular characteristic of several Icelandic legal manuscripts
is their apparent completeness, that is, their owners and recorders
seem to have striven to record as many laws and amendments as
possible. None of the manuscripts which contain the agreements, for
example, seem to be intended to record a fixed body of texts. They
contain legal texts of a diverse nature, generally Jónsbók, Kristinn
réttr Árna biskups, church statutes and several réttarbætr. The réttar -
bætr included codified laws issued by the king, but also pieces of
legislation or royal ordinances. It seems that the transcription of
texts was subject to the availability of copies or taste; new material
was added at intervals most probably corresponding to successive
generations of owners and keepers. This characteristic of the pro-
duction and circulation of legal manuscripts in Iceland makes it dif-
ficult to suggest that a copy (or a few copies) of an important legal
a response to „gamli sáttmáli …“ 145
35 Jón Jóhannesson, Íslendinga saga II, pp. 273–74.
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