Gísli Sigurðsson

This volume is an introduction to Sturla Þorðarson (1214-1284), a leading figure in thirteenth-century Iceland. Sturla Þorðarson is one of only a handful of thirteenth-century Icelandic historians to be known by name, and he is certainly one of the most significant. In addition to his role as author and compiler, he was in his day one of the most powerful men in Iceland and served as court poet, liegeman and lawman over the course of his life.

ABSTRACT: To date it has mostly been overlooked that the illusion in ‘Gylfi's Illusion’ is based on a metaphor, where what we can literally see in the sky is transformed into mythological phenomena through the magic of storytelling. By taking this idea at face value it becomes possible to look at the sky as a memory tool for the world of the gods. Thus everything we have above us in the sky has a mythological name and often a story attached to it, making it easier to remember all the details of the mythology as well as knowing your way around the sky. This approach to the mythology of Gylfaginning puts us on firm ground as we read it for what it is: a reflection of contemporary and traditional terminology about the sky as it was known to northern peoples from long before Christianity. RESUME: Hidtil er det blevet næsten overset, at illusionen i ’Gylfis illusion’ er baseret på en metafor, hvor det, vi bogstaveligt talt kan se på himlen, forvandles til mytologiske fænomener gennem...

The medieval texts of Iceland, written in the 12th-14th century tell both of the presence of Irish papar in the country, prior to the first settlement from Norway during King Haraldr hárfagri's reign (late 9th century), and that some of the settlers in the country came from the British Isles, as well as from Norway. The two major versions of The Book of Settlements, Sturlubók and Hauksbók, where written in the 1270s and early 1300s respectively and it is interesting to observe that in the later version (Hauksbók) Haukur Erlendsson feels free to add information about the Irish origins of the settlers that he does not seem to have had in the written sources available to him. In the article I compare the two versions from the perspective of how they present the Irish connection in the distant past, and discuss how they may have "remembered" that particular aspect of the origins of the first settlers.

To date it has mostly been overlooked that the illusion in 'Gylfi's Illusion' is based on a metaphor, where what we can literally see in the sky is transformed into mythological phenomena through the magic of storytelling. By taking this idea at face value it becomes possible to look at the sky as a memory tool for the world of the gods. Thus everything we have above us in the sky has a mythological name and often a story attached to it, making it easier to remember all the details of the mythology as well as knowing your way around the sky. This approach to the mythology of Gylfaginning puts us on firm ground as we read it for what it is: a reflection of contemporary and traditional terminology about the sky as it was known to northern peoples from long before Christianity.

The eddas and sagas are literary works written in Iceland in the 13th and 14th centuries but incorporating memories preserved orally from preliterate times of (a) Norse myths, in prose and verse form, (b) heroic lays with common Germanic roots, (c) raiding and trading voyages of the Viking Age (800–1030 CE), and (d) the settlement of Iceland from Norway, Britain, and Ireland starting from the 870s and of life in the new country up to and beyond the conversion to Christianity in the year 1000. In their writing, these works show the influence of the learning and literature introduced to Iceland from the 11th century on through the educational system of the medieval Church. During these centuries, the Icelanders translated the lives of the principal saints, produced saga biographies of their own bishops, and recorded accounts of events and conflicts contemporary with their authors. They also produced conventional chronicles on European models of the kings of Norway and Denmark and large quantities of works, both translated and original, in the spirit of medieval chivalry.

The eddas and sagas, however, reflect a unique and original departure that has no direct analogue in mainland Europe—the creation of new works and genres rooted in the secular tradition of oral learning and storytelling. This tradition encompassed the Icelanders’ worldview in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries and their understanding of events, people, and chronology going back to the 9th century, and their experience of an environment that extended over the parts of the world known to the Norsemen of the Viking Age, both on earth and in heaven. The infrastructure that underlay this system of learning was a knowledge of the regnal years of kings who employed court poets to memorialize their lives, and stories that were told in connection with what people observed in the heavens and on earth, near and far, by linking the stories with individual journeys, dwellings, and the genealogies of the leading protagonists. In this world, people here on earth envisaged the gods as having their halls and dwellings in the sky among the stars and the sun, while beyond the ocean and beneath the furthest horizon lay the world of the giants. In Viking times, this furthest horizon shifted little by little westwards, from the seas around Norway and Britain to the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, and eventually still farther south and west to previously unknown lands that people in Iceland retained memories of the ancestors having discovered and explored around the year 1000—Helluland, Markland, and Vínland—where they came into contact with the native inhabitants of the continent known as North America.

This paper argues that the two opening lines of Njáls saga provide a prelude to the saga by evoking all its major themes through a traditional reference to a well known oral narrative (a version of which is known in the Book of Settlements) about an escalating feud that starts with a disagreement about seating arrangements, leading to killings and revenge, urged by a woman (ending in a house burning) – and reconciliation by marriage, mediated by Mörður, involving the parents of Gunnar á Hlíðarenda.

This chapter argues that Snorri Sturluson was an innovative author in the modern sense in the way he restructured the oral traditional knowledge from his training as an oral skaldic poet and story teller in the new written book format of his time. Both the Prose Edda and Egils saga, which is very likely written under his supervision in some way if not directly dictated by Snorri, are highly innovative works in the way they bring together oral mythological lore (attached to the sky) and local secular lore (attached to the land and family) and the technique of structuring systematic knowledge and narrative in writing for the first time; tentatively compared with the achievements of Steve Jobs in our time.

Here I discuss the mental map of the British Isles (including Ireland) as it is presented in the Icelandic Sagas. I have previously argued that the sagas’ mental map of the lands south and west of Greenland corresponds rather well with the general outlines of the east coast of Canada and perhaps even the northeastern corner of the United States. This I have explained with one of the social roles of oral storytelling about remote places and voyages to faraway lands: Namely that stories inform the audience of the world’s geography, that is in which direction people can sail and which features can be expected to be outstanding to the seafarer’s eye when he comes up to previously unknown coasts. One way to experiment with this line of thought is to analyse stories in Iceland about characters who are in or visit the British Isles: Do these stories draw up or reflect a comprehensive mental map of the area and if so, could that map serve as a realistic background for the travels and movements described and thus be of informative value for those who have not visited this part of the world themselves? For this purpose it is irrelevant whether or not the stories reflect a profound knowledge of the historical reality in the British Isles (as Magnús Fjalldal has discussed), which narrative function the landscape may have (as Ian Wyatt has written on) or if supernatural phenomena (which belong to the world of fantasy in our thought) play a considerable role in the stories. The important question is if the stories can be regarded as an encyclopedic medium of traditional geographical knowledge about the British Isles in the minds of the Icelandic audience.

I have tried in various publications to apply the learning derived from oral studies to the Old Norse Eddic poetry. I have not found it fruitful to focus on the formulaic language as such but rather to apply the comparative approach and use the idea of variation in an oral and manuscript culture. The variation reflects the interests, knowledge and talent of all involved in a performance – and as a result: the problems associated with the textualisation of a primarily oral text.

The scholarship around Eddic poetry has been based on the idea that these poems, which all agree were written down from oral tradition in the 13th-century, can and should be dated to differrent centuries from the 9th-century onwards, based more or less on circular arguments and differences in language, style, form and content. Even though the difficulties, if not impossibilities, of dating are dawning on more and more scholars, many have been reluctant to take the full oral comparative approach which would suggest that all these differences could be much better explained with different individual preferences of the singers and their audiences, based on their sex, social status, geographical surroundings and other factors. When applying the oral approach we can thus explain the differences in the poems with the oral variation as a result of the conditions around their performance and writing, rather than as the product of a Darwinian literary development of taste in static and fixed poetic texts that were composed by an individual at some point in time and then put to imperfect memory of preservers until the time of writing. If we read the written poems from the thirteenth century as the products of an oral culture (as opposed to seperate works of authors in different ages that were memorised verbatim), we see before us a variation of the main heroic stories or themes based on different perspectives that can be attributed to different interests of women and males as I demonstrate here, some focusing on the heroines and their emotions and others thinking more about the male heroes and their physical activities in a male dominated warrior context, still others reflecting special interests in the lower social classes, even showing some geographical preferences and so on. From that oral perspective we can classify and understand the similarities and differences between the poems in light of a multivoiced variation that is likely to have been alive at the time when these texts were written – rather than as the product of many different but singlevoiced time periods, each with their stylistic and thematic preferences.

Hvilket budskap har islendingesagaene til vår tid som kan rettferdiggjøre et slikt kjempeløft som å oversette dem til alle skandinaviske språk? Middelalderlitteratur om høvdinger, bønder, frie menn og treller i den første tiden etter at Island ble bebygget? Om folk midt i vikingtiden med røtter i Norge, Irland og De britiske øyer, noen kanskje bortført eller kjøpt på trellemarkedet i Dublin eller andre steder, og som sammen skapte et samfunn på en til da ubebygd øy midt i Nord-Atlanteren, et samfunn som ikke hadde forbilde i den gamle verden. Ingen konge, ingen byer eller landsbyer, bare bygder med høvdingseter med mindre gårder i nærheten. Med den nye samleutgaver av islendingesagaene feirer vi trollspeilet som innbyr alle inn i dette universet som er en stadig påminnelse om hvordan enkeltpersoners oppfinnsomhet, samfunnets drivkraft, henter inspirasjon i kunnskap, øvelse, lærdom og i møtet mellom ulike kulturer, i middelalderen som i våre dager.

In this paper I discuss the mental map of Greenland as it is presented in the Icelandic Sagas. I have previously studied the sagas’ mental map of the lands south and west of Greenland as well as of the British Isles. This I have discussed in view of historical memory and contemporary knowledge with emphasis on one of the social roles of oral storytelling about remote places and voyages to faraway lands: Namely that stories inform the audience of the world’s geography, that is in which direction people can sail and which features can be expected to be outstanding to the seafarer’s eye when he comes up to previously unknown coasts. Still another way to experiment with this line of thought is to analyse stories in Iceland about characters who are in or visit Greenland: Do these stories draw up or reflect a comprehensive mental map of the area and if so, could that map serve as a realistic background for the travels and movements described and thus be of informative value for those who have not visited this part of the world themselves? For this purpose it is irrelevant whether or not the stories reflect a profound knowledge of the historical reality in Greenland, which narrative function the landscape may have or if supernatural phenomena play a considerable role in the stories. The important question is if the stories can be regarded as an encyclopedic medium of traditional geographical knowledge about Greenland in the minds of the Icelandic audience.

We do not know whether the Icelanders share a sense of national identity. But we do know that the Icelanders are officially presented as a united nation, speaking the same language, with a common religious and historical background in the country. In that presentation we see very little of contemporary life in Iceland; of contemporary art for instance, or of the life style of the haddock-chicken-hamburger-and-pasta eating Icelander who spends his time watching television, perhaps skiing on good weekends in the winter, and travelling to British and Irish – even North-American – cities for Christmas shopping, or to the Mediterranean beaches for his summer holidays. We hear nothing of the recent additions to the cultural scene, with immigrants from other parts of the world who have already changed the eating habits of the natives even though they have not as yet become very visible in politics and public life. What we find served up is, on the one hand, a romantic nationalistic view of the uniqueness of everything Icelandic, and on the other we see a one-sided view of pure nature to be sold expensively to the paying tourist. The one reflects the interests of Icelandic state officials who have to meet their colleagues on an equal footing, and the other shows the interests of the tourist industry. Neither tries to present modern life in Iceland as a whole.

ABSTRACT One of the central issues for those who try to scrutinize medieval texts is to contemplate how these texts can be used to think about still older times. For the present purposes, that would mean texts that were written long after the coming of Christianity to Iceland, but telling of events that are set in the earlier pagan times. In recent decades, scholarship has become more and more aware of how problematic this can be. Field-workers in folkloristics have even realized that all things people have to say about the past should first and foremost be treated as comments about the present, as Stephen Mitchell (2013) outlines in this issue with his discussion of the “performative turn” in folkloristics. Everything we have to say, both as scholars and persons in the real world outside academia, orally or in writing, reflects on our present conditions, interests, points of view, and so on. An older generation today can, for example, still tell their grandchildren stories about what it was like to grow up in a world before radio, television, and computers, making the present role of radio, television, and computers central to their restructuring of their own past—even though that past was by no means defined in its own time by the lack of these relatively recent technological phenomena, discoveries of the future yet to be made from the perspective of the narratives. This was fundamentally no different in the medieval world, but it takes a long time and much reflection to rethink all the conceptions and misconceptions that have come down to us as an integral part of received and accepted scholarly wisdom that shapes our understanding and reading of medieval texts. Before we engage in a debate about the historical authenticity of the medieval texts from Iceland as sources about much earlier pagan times, it can therefore be said with reasonable authority, without reading or analyzing anything in particular, that all the available texts should first of all be treated as sources about the time when they were written. Having said that, we cannot and should not ignore the fact that the same texts may also contain important information and be informative about their own pasts—just as the present generation of grandparents is able to mediate some information about the recent past, information they insist is authentic, correct, and historically accurate. But still, they mediate that information for reasons that are relevant in the present—and so the carousel continues. Bearing all of this in mind, we can then start to proceed slowly with comparative material from other cultures and disciplines, in order both to understand the oral performative aspects of traditional stories and poetry, and how the religious and mythological ideas that we find in these writings can be put into some cultural context and practice, using other sources and the living frame from fieldwork in order to create our own ideas about the pagan past that is so vividly portrayed in the texts. One of the main received frameworks for our reception and interpretation of the medieval texts is the scholarly obsession with the binary opposition Pagan/Christian. It is no doubt possible to uncover historical reasons for this and, perhaps, these reasons could even be traced back to the time of the original writing of the texts. Some of these texts were written by people who clearly had an agenda favoring the presentation of a historical view of a new and superior religion taking over from earlier paganism. That view leaves our attention fixed on the two main labels for historical eras: Pagan and Christian. But just as the opposition between oral and written has been modified in thinking about the oral background of written texts, so the ideas about the effect of a dominating religious idea on everything in the culture must be modified. We must therefore be very cautious in our initial approach when we present the problem of past awareness in the medieval Christian environment. What is meant by past awareness is hopefully not so problematic, but what is meant by Christian is not very clear at all. One may ask...

Reading Sturla’s version of Landnáma as a possible construction of his own vision of the past for purposes in the present reveals a highly personalised way of remembering the settlement era and presenting it in a fashion that could elevate and secure Sturla’s political and social status in the present (and in the future) – at the expense of his most influential political adversaries: The Haukdælir family. Such a tendency should not come as a great surprise to students of memory in oral cultures, where it is customary to use the tradition for one’s own benefit in the present. How much more so when people have mastered the art of writing and can fix their own version of the past and thus affect the memory of the following generations in a new and unprecedented manner.

It can be demonstrated, from celestial observations in 19th century Icelandic tradition, that certain ideas in Old Norse mythology referred directly to peculiar celestial phenomena, beyond the obvious idea of the bridge Bifröst being a mythological interpretation of the rainbow. In view of the actual proof from the 19th century it should be worth discussing the possibility of taking that idea a step further and read the entire Snorri's Edda as a mythological interpretation of the world as it appears to the naked eye: The earth below and the sky above where the stars and other heavenly bodies move around, as well as up and down, some in a clearly regular pattern and others less so, day and night. This approach changes radically all our discussion about systematic thought behind the individual myths as well as about their source value as reflections of pre-Christian ideas in the north.

This work explores the role of orality in shaping and evaluating medieval Icelandic literature. Applying field studies of oral cultures in modern times to this distinguished medieval literature, Gísli Sigurðsson asks how it would alter our reading of medieval Icelandic sagas if it were assumed they had grown out of a tradition of oral storytelling, similar to that observed in living cultures.

Sigurðsson examines how orally trained lawspeakers regarded the emergent written culture, especially in light of the fact that the writing down of the law in the early twelfth century undermined their social status. Part II considers characters, genealogies, and events common to several sagas from the east of Iceland between which a written link cannot be established. Part III explores the immanent or mental map provided to the listening audience of the location of Vinland by the sagas about the Vinland voyages. Finally, this volume focuses on how accepted foundations for research on medieval texts are affected if an underlying oral tradition (of the kind we know from the modern field work) is assumed as part of their cultural background. This point is emphasized through the examination of parallel passages from two sagas and from mythological overlays in an otherwise secular text.

Icelandic culture stands out as a unique phenomenon among the Nordic peoples in the Middle Ages in terms of its literary activities. Icelanders were the only Nordic nation at the time who wrote literature in the vernacular, and almost all the identifiable court poets in Scandinavia came from Iceland. Several theories have been proposed to account for the strength of this oral tradition of verbal art, among them the suggestion that this emphasis on the art of poetry and story telling was largely due to the cultural influences from Ireland and Scotland during the Viking age.
Iceland was first visited by Irish anchorites (papar), sometimes towards the end of the 8th century, but permanent settlement in the country cannot be established until about 870 onwards. Many of the settlers at that time came directly from Norway but a considerable number came from Norse colonies in the British Isles where many had married local women. It was also common practice to bring slaves, in all likelyhood bought on the Irish slave market which flourished during the settlement period in Iceland. Recent genetic studies have now confirmed this Gaelic contribution to Icelandic culture, concluding that about 60% of the original female population was of Irish and Scottish ancestry and about 20% of the males. When we add to that all the Norsemen who came to Iceland from their recently established colonies in the British Isles we have a substantial cultural contribution from that part of the world which has largely gone unacknowledged up to now.  Many of the people coming from the British Isles were Christian, while the purebred Norwegians were heathens. Therefore, from its very beginnings, Iceland had a mixed population, forming and creating a different culture from the neighbour countries of Norway, Scotland, and Ireland.
It is a well known fact that the Irish and Scots had developed a much higher standard of literary entertainment than was known in Scandinavia in the Viking age. Even though the Norsemen may have come into contact with that culture in the British Isles it is more likely that in order to have a profound influence in Iceland we have to look at the people of Gaelic extraction who settled in Iceland, either as free settlers, wives of Norsemen, or as slaves -- who are often referred to in the Icelandic sources, but rarely receive much attention.
Gaelic influence in Iceland is also to be detected in several old place names and loan-words but the reason why these are not more numerous than they are could be that: 1) the Gaels did not introduce any new working technique into the mainly Norse society, 2) their work was supervised by Norsemen, 3) the slaves were renamed with Norse names, and 4) the language of the slaves was probably not popular with their masters. The low social status of most of the Gaels in Iceland could also explain why named Gaelic heroes do not appear in Icelandic works even though numerous instances have been traced of similar motifs and ideas that are attributed to Gaelic influence on Icelandic tradition.
The professional art of court poetry, skaldic poetry, fits well into this picture. It was mainly practised by Icelanders and most named poets came from areas where Gaels are known to have been among the first settlers. There is evidence to suggest that the art of skaldic poetry was acquired through special training, though this seems to have been confined to certain families rather than acquired at professional schools as in Ireland. Moreover, skaldic metres differ considerably from older Germanic and Scandinavian metres but show similarities to those found in Old Irish poetry.
Most noteworthy also is that one of the major achievements of the Viking Age, the discovery around the year 1000 of the North American continent west and south of Greenland, a land the Vikings  called Vínland (the land of grapes), can largely be credited to people whose families are traced both to Norway and the Gaelic world, thus allowing us to speak of the Hiberno-Norse voyages to Vínland.

The Gaelic people contributed substantially to the culture in this “First New Society” which was emerging in Iceland in the late 9th and early 10th centuries, both in the fields of folklore, by telling stories and composing/reciting poetry at a much higher professional and artistic level than the Norsemen had developed at the time, and by teaching their children about Christianity in a society that was ruled by heathen Norwegian male-chieftains—whose language dominated in the official culture—but which was largely run by Irish and Scottish wives and workers, even slaves from the thousands that were traded on the Dublin market during the settlement period in Iceland according to the Irish annals. These people left their mark not only on the genes of the modern Icelanders but also in loan words, place names, personal names, literary motifs in the Icelandic medieval sagas as well as on the folklore and folkbeliefs of more recent times, for example about elves and the hidden people that settled in Iceland with the more visible settlers from Ireland, Scotland and the Isles.
We have therefore here a case of a major contribution to a national culture which has been suppressed, largely because it can mostly be traced to people of relatively low social status or to women who have not enjoyed their fair share in history due to their gender. Both social groups however are likely to have had a major impact on the upbringing of young story tellers and poets who later made a name for themselves in the world of kings and chieftains.