Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1957, Page 74
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INTRODUCTION
AJ has gone his own way, however, in his account of the
history of the Icelandic Commonwealth. The nature of his sourc-
es permitted him to write neither a connected history nor a
chronicle in annalistic form. He chose therefore the simpler
expedient and gave an account, with no true cohesion, of the
most famous characters of the saga-age, based directly on the
sagas themselves. He attaches special importance to showing
their noble descent and the honour they received at the hånds of
foreign kings—or, alternatively, that they could, when the oc-
casion demanded it, hold their own against a monarch. At the
end of the second book, AJ gives a kind of apologia for his
method. He points out that no connected history of Iceland from
the beginning is available and that he has therefore been forced
to make use of these disconnected narratives; further, Icelanders
have never engaged in war or been involved in serious conflict
with other nations; finally, there are many examples of other
authors who have adopted the same procedure. We can see from
this that AJ, in the hest humanistic style, counts political history
as the most important of the historian’s themes. But since he was
not in a position to write such a history of the Icelandic Common-
wealth, and since moreover there were no Icelandic kings in that
period to be glorified, his chief subject had to be the stories of
individual families and chieftains. This agrees also with AJ’s
view of the Icelandic Commonwealth which, in accordance with
the terminology of the humanists, he calls aristocratia.
AJ’s view of the political character of the Icelandic Common-
wealth has borrowed more from the humanists than the term
aristocratia alone. The basic premise of his history rests on their
theories, not least on Bodin’s Methodus. AJ’s central idea is the
classical doctrine of society’s predestined cycle from one political
form into another, which the humanists had resuscitated and which
is found, for example, in concentrated form in ch. VI of Bodin’s
Methodus. AJ also uses Bodin’s terminology when he speaks of
“conversio rerum publicarum”, and says that the Icelandic aristo-
cratia degenerated into “pessimam oligarchiam”1, which Bodin
reckons far worse than the despotism of an individual2. With
1 See II 164.
s See Bodinus, Methodus (1576), p. 273.