Saga - 2014, Page 77

Abstract
“WAS ICELAND A COLONY?”
In recent years, scholars inspired by postcolonial theories have criticised Icelandic
historians for not recognising Iceland’s colonial status in the past. This criticism
is, it is argued here, based on a misunderstanding of both Iceland’s constitution-
al status in the Danish monarchy and the 19th-century political debates on
Iceland’s relations with Denmark. Thus, neither the Danish authorities nor advo-
cates of Icelandic nationalism saw Iceland as a colony, as the former treated
Iceland as an integral part of the Danish state while the latter viewed it as an
equal partner in a composite monarchy. This does not mean, however, that
Iceland was untouched by 19th-century colonialism, because colonialism was not
only a military and political strategy, but also a system of cultural power based
on accepted norms of knowledge. In this system the world was divided into
“civilised” and “uncultivated” parts; or into “us” and “them”, “Europe” and the
“other”. This happened through various discursive schemes, including travel
accounts of visits to exotic places. There European tourists and explorers
described the living conditions and behaviour of “uncivilised” peoples to their
European readers, confirming at the same time the civility of those who were seen
as really European. Here two 19th-century travel accounts are used to demon-
strate how Iceland was treated in literary works of this kind. One was written by
the Austrian globetrotter Ida Pfeiffer, who visited Iceland in 1845, the other by a
French traveller, Victor Meignan, who traversed the country sometime in the
1880s. Their descriptions of Iceland and Icelanders are quite similar, as they both
contrast Iceland to the “civilised” world — or to “Europe” — while they compare
the Icelanders to well-known “rude” peoples such as Bedouins and Greenlanders.
In the colonial dichotomy, Iceland was therefore classified as a colony, whatever
its actual political status was.
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