Saga - 2015, Page 47

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Abstract
v i lhelm v i lhelms son
NARRATIve AND CoNTeXT
IN THe (De-)CoNSTRUCTIoN oF CoURT TeSTIMoNy
The records of Icelandic county courts offer historians vast but largely untapped
source material. The National Archives contain over 700 volumes of interroga -
tions, sentences and other judicial documentation dating from the early 17th to
20th centuries. Besides information about details of everyday life, these sources
supply testimonies of numerous people found nowhere else in historical sources,
providing a veritable gold mine for research into the lives of "ordinary people". A
National Archives project which is cataloguing the contents of these judicial vol-
umes and building a searchable online database will probably soon heighten the
interest in studying such records.
This development calls for a theoretical discussion of court testimony as a his-
torical source, since its contents cannot always be taken at face value. Thus this
article discusses some of the epistemological and methodological issues in
analysing such testimonies, including how interrogations were carried out in the
late 18th and 19th centuries; who can be deemed the author of the text; how fact
and context are related in historical analysis; how events and experiences are nar-
rated in court settings or in the creation of autobiographical memories; and, con-
sequently, what "truth value" court testimonies may possess. Finally, this theore -
tical treatment is applied to two recent Icelandic analyses of testimonies of the
accused in the early 19th-century murder of Natan ketilsson, which became a
famous case concluding in 1830 with Iceland's last public execution. Both analyses
are found to lack methodological and analytical nuances, as well as regard for lim-
itations inherent in the sources and subsequent interpretations.
The main argument of the article is that any analysis of court testimonies must
take into account the creative process of constructing them, including the dis -
course and dramatic performance involved in trial proceedings. other factors to
be taken into account are the pre- and re-construction of narratives as well as the
communicative intent of their authors, the intentions of the scholar reading and
analysing the material and, finally, the contextualisation of each testimony or court
case.