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agreement was kept away, for almost two centuries, from the
knowledge of the owners, recorders and keepers of these manu-
scripts. If there were written agreements between the king of Nor -
way and the Icelanders which created legal rights and obligations
for both parties in the thirteenth century, it is to be expected that the
agreements as a whole, or at least their individual clauses, would
have been recorded in the fourteenth-century manuscripts.
This historiographical phenomenon and the circumstantial evi-
dence that comes from the historical contextualization of the clauses
of the agreements are the main support of my thesis. I have sug-
gested that the documents represent the Icelanders’ desire to pro-
duce a narrative of their submission to the Norwegian crown in the
thirteenth century that could enable them to negotiate with the
Norwegian crown in the fifteenth century. They were not straight-
forward falsifications; in other words, I am not suggesting that a
group of Icelandic lawyers and officials sat down with the sole
intention of producing a false agreement. Rather, I suggest that, by
piecing together textually- and orally-transmitted accounts of the
submission, Icelanders — possibly owners of legal manuscripts —
motivated by contemporary concerns (e.g., the nationality of royal
officials working in Iceland and trade and fishing regulations), pro-
duced documents which were thought to represent what was
agreed, or should have been agreed, between Icelanders and the
king in the thirteenth century. The documents were not intended to
be sent to the king, but they provided Icelanders with a confident
platform from which to deal with the crown in the fifteenth century.
Research on these documents, though, is far from complete.
Future research needs to address the following questions:
✓ I have argued that officials working in Iceland would benefit
from the existence of a document which clearly set the rights
of Iceland with regard to the crown.36 Can we recognize a
group, or groups, with a common interest which was in -
volved in making, preparing, and disseminating the docu-
ments? What was the nature of the relations between this
(these) group(s) and the crown?
✓ How did the crown view their power and control over Ice -
land? How did the crown respond to Icelandic pressure for a
less-controlled trade and political administration in the fif-
patricia pires boulhosa146
36 Patricia Boulhosa, Gamli sáttmáli: Tilurð og tilgangur, pp. 79–82.
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