Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana. Supplementum - 01.08.1967, Page 141

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nearest town. The people who gave employment to the wood-carvers were the farmers themselves,
officialdom, and the church. Apart from parts of buildings (barge boards, for instance) and quite a lot of
church furniture, the wooden objects decorated by carvings were pieces of domestic furniture and utens-
ils. There is a relatively small number of recurring standard types. The traditional Icelandic farmstead,
with its short-lived turf houses and simple working life, neither required nor permitted much variation
in equipment. The living room («baðstofan», figs. 2 and 3) had fixed beds built along the walls, and people
used to sit on the edges of their beds both for meals and for working at handicrafts.
Literature concerning decorative Icelandic wood-carving is not voluminous. A list is given on pp. 18-20.
Surveys, in particular, will be seen to be brief.
Among the motifs in the wood-carvings, the purely ornamental are the most frequent, and among these
plant motifs are the commonest. Only one of the twenty medieval items has no plant ornamentation. Of
the items that have been preserved from later periods, about two-thirds seem to have plant ornamentation,
mostly in bas-relief. The remaining third are decorated partly with geometrical designs, partly with
inscriptions (mostly in «höfðaletur», an Icelandic type of script, in bas-relief, based on Gothic minuscules),
and, relatively rarely, with representations of human beings and animals. A combination of the motifs
is not infrequent.
II. The Catholic period.
1. Plant and animal motifs up to 1200.
Iceland was made officially Christian in the year 1000. As in the other Nordic countries, the new religion
was followed by a change of style in art. To a large extent, plant motifs replaced the old animal ornament-
ation. Of the large quantity of monumental works of art in wood which must have been created in Scandi-
navia and Iceland in the viking period and early middle ages, hardly anything remains. The few items
that have stood up to the wear and tear of time are the more valuable, particularly in view of their high
quality. The woodwork in the viking-ship finds at Oseberg and Gokstad, and in the Urnes stave church,
must be peaks of achievement. And, chronologically, the gap between Gokstad and Urnes can be bridged
by the Möðrufell and Flatatunga fragments, Icelandic links of inestimable significance.
The carved panels from the farms Möðrufell in Eyjafjörður and Flatatunga i Skagafjörður (figs. 35-39)
are decorated in «viking style» and are thus set apart from the rest of the medieval items with their more
Romanesque stamp. The incised ornamentation of the Möðrufell panels seems to be a particularly close
approach to the younger Jellinge style, in the strictest sense of that term (about the year 1000). On the
other hand, the top designs in relief are strongly reminiscent of motifs on Swedish runic stones from the
middle of the eleventh century and later, and also bear a certain resemblance to the palmets of the«Ringerike
group». The incised plant ornamentation on the four fragments of wainscoting from Flatatunga, found
during the pulling down of the old farm-buildings in 1952, are in typical Ringerike style, and are the only
samples of woodwork known to us that are quite unmistakably in that style. They have been attributed
to the first half of the eleventh century (Kr. Eldjárn).
The fragmentary remains of decoration from Hrafnagil in Eyjafjörður (figs. 41-47), one board and six
pieces of posts or thick planks, are decorated with interwoven vines and animals in relief. Both these and
the church door from Valþjófsstaðir in Fljótsdalur, East Iceland (fig. 48), call to mind carved Norwegian
stave church portals. We may regard them as the merest glimpses of Icelandic wood-carving from about
the year 1200.