The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2008, Side 21

Vol. 62 #1
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
19
princess. Nevertheless, her son has to suffer
in Iceland for his ignoble mother! If this
was the case with royal persons from
Ireland who were captured into slavery,
how much more so for slaves of less noble
status. Can we expect them to be men-
tioned at all?”
Whether instances of this kind of bilin-
gualism in Iceland were either few or
many, no one really knows, but Celtic
dialects in the country seem to have disap-
peared early and left behind only a small
number of names of people and places, and
a few other words of Celtic origins.
Nevertheless, memories of these people
lived on and influenced some of the major
13th-century Icelandic Sagas, notably the
ones that were set in the south-west part of
the country, Laxdada Saga being a good
example of the preservation of such ancient
memories.
About the turn of the 13th century,
one detects a certain kind of what might be
called restricted bilingualism in Iceland, in
that it mainly occurred in written works.
Lately, this topic has not received much
attention. Nevertheless, the highly
esteemed scholar Sigurdur Nordal, in sev-
eral of his brilliant works from the early
20th century, called attention to two differ-
ent schools of thought reflected by the use
of language in early Icelandic historical and
literary works. Professor Nordal saw these
two trends as being in direct opposition.
According to him, learned brethren or
monks at the monastery of Lingeyrar in
northern Iceland concentrated, for a short
period of time, on the writing of historical
works or chronicles in Latin. At almost the
same time, two other centres of learning in
southern Iceland, at Haukadalur and Oddi,
embarked upon a much broader spectrum
of literary and scholarly activity in works
which were written in Icelandic and
marked the dawn of vernacular writing in
Iceland and throughout the Scandinavian
countries. These date back to the first half
of the 12th century and became an impor-
tant foundation of Iceland's classical litera-
ture and history. In addition, they secured
for Icelandic, the language in which they
were recorded or written, a unique position
within the family of the Nordic languages
comparable to that of Latin in southern
Europe. This accounts, at least in part, for
the subsequent evolution of the Icelandic
medieval classics and makes clear the fact
that Iceland became and still remains
almost the only storehouse of Northern
history and literature from the Middle
Ages. Furthermore, it explains to some
degree a strong continuity in language and
literary activity throughout the entire his-
tory of the country.
The claim that those who used their
mother tongue in their writings prevailed
in a kind of contest with Latinists from
their monastic community is perhaps too
simplistic a deduction in regard to this kind
of bilingualism. In the Middle Ages, and
for a long time afterwards, Latin, i.e.,
medieval or vulgar Latin, was the lingua
franca among the European upper classes,
and the people of Iceland used Latin simi-
larly.To a considerable extent, it was
through Latin that they established in the
beginning and then maintained a strong
link with cultural movements on the
European continent. This in turn protected
the authors of scholarly and literary works
against isolation from some of the main-
streams of civilization and enabled them to
reach a remarkably high professional level
in a remote part of the world. They under-
stood that for Europe to extend as far north
as Iceland more was necessary for intellec-
tual stimulus than the north wind alone.
Throughout the centuries this link has
proved to be an enduring one indeed. Born
in Iceland in 1568, Arngnmur Jonsson the
Learned, a strong proponent of humanism
and a classicist, published in his day no
fewer than eleven books or booklets in
Latin. Some of them were intended to be in
defense of Iceland, where Jonsson severely
criticized foreign authors who out of mere
ignorance had written somewhat entertain-
ing but nonetheless slanderous works
about Iceland and the Icelanders.
Nevertheless, these same works also served
as an introduction of the Old Icelandic lit-
erary heritage to the outside world and
gradually attracted the attention of the
European scholarly community. To quote
a learned comment on Jonsson, he “played
a formative role in the development of