Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana. Supplementum - 01.08.1967, Page 140

PLANT ORNAMENTATION
IN ICELANDIC WOOD-CARVING
A STUDY IN ITS STYLISTIC HISTORY.
S u m m a r y .
I. Introduction.
Iceland can look back on a native wood-carving tradition that is a thousand years old. It may seem
paradoxical that woodwork was so keenly practised in a country with hardly any trees of a suitable quality,
but the explanation must be that the Icelanders brought wood-working traditions with them when they
first settled their country. These traditions could be maintained thanks to the large amounts of drifting
timber heaped up along the beaches. The native forests seem to have been no more than thickets of
stunted birch, and as the supplies both of this and of the drifting timber diminished, dependence increased
on wood imported, first from Norway and in later centuries from Denmark. The wood-carvers had to be
economical, but they knew how to make even the smallest odds and ends of wood serve their purpose.
Most of Iceland’s original population came from Norway, at a time when wood-carving there was
flourishing, as the viking-ship finds at Oseberg, Gokstad, and Borre amply demonstrate. The so-called
Borre style was the dominant one in the period of colonization when Iceland was first settled (from the
870s until about 930). But the earliest examples of woodwork found in Iceland date from the subsequent
period and are monumental, in the younger viking style.
According to accounts in medieval Icelandic sagas (from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), wood
carvings for magic and cultic purposes and carved depictions of figures of epic content existed both in the
period of settlement and in the first century thereafter(the heathen period). In contrast, no mention has been
handed down of purely ornamental decoration. Yet ornamentation is the dominant feature of the oldest
wood-carvings we have.
Some of the samples of decorative Icelandic woodwork from the period between the viking era and the
Reformation are very interesting, a few of the items being quite unique in the Nordic countries. They are
few, however: only about twenty sets or items. These comprise mainly posts, panels, and smaller boards,
a church door, and some chairs. These few things represent a long period: five centuries stretch between
the earliest and the latest of them, or practically the whole period of Catholic faith (from the eleventh
century to the middle of the sixteenth).
The vast majority of the objects that have been preserved date from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and
nineteenth centuries. Many are privately owned, and at least 1700 items are in various museums, Ice-
land’s national museum, Þjóðminjasafn fslands, alone having about 1000. Only very few of these preserved
items are painted. A large proportion of the work is peasant art, domestic handicrafts, although the work
of more professional wood-carvers must always be taken into account. But Iceland did not have craftsmen
in the usual European sense. We are dealing with an agricultural community with no towns and, con-
sequentlv, no guilds of craftsmen and no middle-class citizenry. It was even a long way from Iceland to the