Gripla - 2020, Síða 143

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Sigurðsson has pointed out, ‘[b]lómaskeið í annálaritun var hér á landi frá
því um 1630 fram yfir 1800ʼ [the heyday of Icelandic annal­writing took
place from around 1630 up to after 1800], so a better understanding of this
form of writing and the sources it made use of is all the more important if
we are to get to grips with intellectual culture after the Reformation.49
There is yet one more reason why the example of Timur in particular is
worthwhile investigating, that being that it contributes to filling out our
picture of how Icelandic authors had access to information on and adapted
materials pertaining to the east and Asia Minor (modern Turkey). In the
medieval period eastern themes appear in texts in a number of ways, albeit
particularly in religious texts, learned histories and fantastic or exoticising
accounts (these groups not being mutually exclusive). Limited contact with
peoples from the east and an absence of Jewish or Muslim communities
in Iceland played into what Cordelia Heß and Jonathan Adams have de-
scribed as their ‘absent presenceʼ, since ‘[t]he Muslims and Jews from the
Scandinavian and Baltic sources are products of the imagination, an imagi-
nation created from ignorance, maybe curiosityʼ.50 It has been well-docu-
mented how Snorri Sturluson explained the Nordic pantheon as euhemer-
ised Trojan refugees, ensuring an enduring conceptual connection between
Scandinavians and the area of modern-day Turkey. Sverrir Jakobsson has
shown how the schism between the Western and Eastern church remained
amorphous in the minds of Icelanders, and Constantinople and its emperor
retained a superlative position in the minds and hearts of Icelandic writ-
ers even after they had been associated with heresy and thus rejected by
other parts of the Roman Catholic world.51 Geraldine Barnes has described
how Icelandic romance, unlike English and French Romance which were
shaped by their national experiences of the crusades, ‘had no comparable
history of religious dispute, violated cultural taboos, military failure, ter-
as an unpublished doctoral dissertation, is Louis Pitschmann, “Þýzkalands saga: A Critical
Edition with a Philological Commentary,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1975).
49 Ingi Sigurðsson, “Þróun íslenzkrar sagnfræði frá miðöldum til samtímans,” saga 38 (2000):
13.
50 Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß, “Introduction: Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims,
Jews and Christians in the North,” Fear and Loathing in the north: jews, and Muslims in
Medieval scandinavia, ed. by Cordelia Heß and Jonathan Adams (Berlin: De Gruyter,
2015), 3–4.
51 Sverrir Jakobsson, “The Schism that Never Was: Old Norse Views on Byzantium and
Russia,” Byzantinoslavica 66 (2008): 173–88.