[SCA-AS] [Fwd: TMR 08.03.05 Gronlie, Islendingabok-Kristni Saga (Davis)]

Tue Apr 15 14:49:54 CDT 2008

This may be of interest to those in the Viking area:
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Subject: TMR 08.03.05 Gronlie, Islendingabok-Kristni Saga (Davis)
From:    "The Medieval Review" <tmrl at indiana.edu>
Date:    Fri, March 7, 2008 4:06 pm
To:      tmr-l at indiana.edu
         bmr-l at brynmawr.edu
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Gronlie, Sian, trans. Islendingabok--Kristni Saga "The Book of
Icelanders"--"The Story of Conversion". London: Viking Society for
Northern Research, University College London, 2006. Pp. xlix, 97.
ISBN-13: 978-0-903521-71-0 (pb).

    Reviewed by Craig R. Davis
         Smith College, Northampton, MA
         cradavis at email.smith.edu

Islendingabok, "The Book of Icelanders," was written between
the years 1122-33 by Ari Thorgilsson (ca. 1068-1148). It is the first
extant text in vernacular Old Icelandic and contains the earliest
account of the settlement of Iceland by Norse people after the year
870 and their foundation ca. 930 of an island-wide government based
upon assemblies of chieftains and their followers, rather than the
rule of kings. It also offers the first Icelandic witness to the
further settlement of Greenland and discovery of the New World in the
late tenth century. Ari's focus, however, is the formal conversion of
his fellow-countrymen to Christianity in 999 or 1000 at the annual
Althingi, "National Assembly," and their subsequent
Christianization under native bishops. His account is "quite unique"
(xvi) in medieval historiography for the clarity with which he
specifies the direct personal communications he received from several
long-lived informants, who remembered their baptism as children or
were born soon after the turn of the millennium. His models were
possibly Bede's Eccesiastical History of the Nation of Angles
or Adam of Bremen's History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-
Bremen, but unlike those authors, Ari concentrates rather narrowly
upon the secular and political aspects of the change of faith, with
minimal reference to affairs of the Church abroad or even its interest
in earlier missions to Iceland. Gronlie argues that Ari's book about
"the Icelanders" (the first use of that collective designation)
suggests that his work should be interpreted not as a national or
ecclesiastical history per se, although it contains elements of both
genres. Rather, Islendingabok represents a distinctively new
kind of "constitutional history," where the author follows closely the
development of a legal system in which challenges and changes to its
operation form the author's "main structuring device" (xxviii).

Even though Ari is proud to trace the lineage of leading families back
to their distinguished origins in Norway and favors the victory of the
Christian party, the sense of affinity he expresses in
Islendingabok is neither dynastic nor ethnic nor even
religious, like other national histories he might have used as models.
Instead, Ari describes a polity of competitive leaders whose identity
as a group is defined by their participation in the legislative and
judicial processes of the Althing, an institution that enjoys its
authority and bestows its benefits for peace by their collective
assent. Respect for the Althing was a principle honored in the breach,
of course, never threatened more dramatically than during the crisis
engendered by attempts to evangelize Iceland, when the Christian and
pagan parties renounced their community of laws. Gronlie thus
implicitly follows Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1939) and Richard Tomasson
(1980) in finding the constitution of the Icelandic Commonwealth as
described by Ari in Islendingabok the first attempt to create a
new nation on new principles in the "New World." In fact, the gorge at
Thingvellir where the Althing met, the Almannagja depicted in
an aerial photo on the cover of the book, is the cleft of the Mid-
Atlantic Ridge separating Europe and America. Iceland's attempt to
maintain this oligarchic form of representative government failed in
the century after Ari wrote when the Althing submitted to the
Norwegian crown in 1262-64 and lost its independence as a law-making
body until the twentieth century.

For a more religious perspective on the evangelization of Iceland, one
that draws upon traditions from other parts of the country than the
southwest, we must turn to a source most scholars believe was composed
in the mid-thirteenth century, when the Althing was seriously weakened
by the violence and factionalism that would soon initiate its demise.
The anonymous author of Kristni Saga, "The Story of
Conversion," is also much more heavily influenced by European
traditions of hagiography with their stress upon pagan resistance and
persecution of missionaries. The author illustrates the violent
reaction provoked by the missions more dramatically than any other
source, yielding a total "body count" of eighteen, plus some memorably
abusive language (xxxviii). The author of Kristni Saga further
uses miracles to dramatize the conversion of key leaders and God's
protection of the missionaries. Many of these stories serve
simultaneously to display the potency of "Christian rites--
ecclesiastical chant, the sign of the cross and the use of incense"
(xxxvix)--over the power of pagan incantations, skaldic poetry and
sacrifice to the old gods. Episodes are sometimes constructed
symbolically, as when the pagan champion Kjartan is submerged three
times in his swimming match against King Olafr Tryggvason in Norway,
then given a cloak by the king, in a distinct foreshadowing of his
later baptism and robing at that Christian monarch's instance.
Iceland's history is thus bifurcated into chronologically balanced
before-and-after halves of about 130 years apiece, in which three
preparatory missions by Thorvaldr, Stefnir, and Thangbrandr pivot upon
the momentous Althing of 999-1000, followed by the consecration of the
first bishop Isleifr and the establishment of sees at Skalaholt in the
south in 1082 and Holar in the north in 1106.

Even with this strong ecclesiastical bias, however, Kristni
Saga differs from other medieval missionary narratives by
including many pagan poems from the conversion era. These verses are
full of poetic circumlocutions or kennings based upon myths of
the old gods; they depict popular pagan divinities like Thor smashing
the ships of hapless preachers, whose own God is nowhere to be found:

Before the bell's keeper [= the priest Thangbrandr] (bonds [=
gods]
destroyed the beach's falcon [= his ship])
the slayer of giantess-son [= Thor]
broke the ox of seagull's place [= ship].
Christ was not watching, when
the wave-raven [= ship] drank at the prows [= sank].
Small guard I think God held
&#8212;if any&#8212;over Gylfi's reindeer [= ship]. (44)

Gronlie comments: "These verses are forceful enough to need watering
down within the Christian prose: when describing the shipwrecks, the
author feels compelled to add that Stefnir's ship was 'not much
damaged' and that Thangbrandr's was later 'repaired'. The voice given
to paganism here, perhaps even its own voice, is unique to Old
Icelandic literature" (xli). One reason for the inclusion of this
pagan perspective may be that many thirteenth-century Icelandic
readers of Kristni Saga would have been able to trace their own
family histories back to leading figures of various persuasions during
the crisis of conversion, so that the author is careful to depict in
his otherwise polarized narrative many unbelievers of good sense and
good will: "Then the heathens thronged together fully armed and it
came very close to them fighting, and yet there were some who wished
to prevent trouble, even though they were not Christians" (48). The
author also seems to harbor a sneaking regard for some of the more
hostile figures, like the pagan poetess Steinunn, at least for her
talent and colorful personality. There is also a touch of dry humor: a
few pagans accept baptism cheerfully enough once it becomes clear they
can be immersed in nearby hot springs rather than cold water (50).

And the violence depicted in the saga, while serious and sectarian, is
still not so very impressive by continental standards. We find no
martyrdoms, no relapses, no backlash apostasies, but rather faults on
both sides. The vengefulness and rapine of some Christian missionaries
like Thorvaldr and Thangbrandr are explicitly disapproved by other
figures. These men kill in response to highly implausible libels--such
as that Thorvaldr fathered nine children on Fridrekr, an insult
charitably shrugged off by that foreign priest himself. The
missionaries are outlawed from Iceland "not because of their faith,"
but for homicide (xliii). Hjalti Skeggjason receives the lesser three-
year outlawry for "blasphemy," a category of crime the pagans learned
from the Christians and managed to prosecute only with great
difficulty. Hjalti had uttered a satirical quip at no less solemn a
place than the Law-Rock, where legal judgments were pronounced and
changes of law proclaimed: "I don't wish to bark at [= criticize] the
gods; / It seems to me Freyja's a bitch" (44). The author thus views
the conversion very much as did Ari before him, more as a secular
conflict than a confrontation between the forces of good and evil.
When Olafr Tryggvason is angry at the treatment of his agent
Thangbrandr, the king's Christian Icelandic friends Gizurr the White
and Hjalti himself point out that the Saxon bishop's killing of their
fellow-countrymen was something that self-respecting Icelanders could
hardly be expected to put up with from a foreigner (46). They offer to
go and try themselves. Indeed, a certain amount of national pride and
"anxiety about Norwegian intervention" in the affairs of his country
may be the reason the author of Kristni Saga seeks to separate
the evangelization of Iceland as much as possible from the political
interests of the king of Norway. The king's mission is shown as
counter-productive. In fact, the author begins his account with a list
of godar, "priest-chieftains," from the pre-Christian era and
stresses that the first initiatives to preach the gospel in Iceland
came from native Icelanders rather than foreign kings or prelates. The
author finishes his account with the deaths of the Icelandic
missionaries Thorvaldr and Stefnir, completely ignoring the fate of
the Saxon Thangbrandr, and concludes with the triumphant progress of
the early church in his country without any reference to outside
interests at all, except that Icelandic bishops encouraged by popular
acclaim go abroad to receive their pallia: "The conversion
effort is firmly attributed to Icelandic chieftains: they are among
the first to be converted and the first church-builders, they provide
the first two bishops of Iceland and "most men of high rank," the
author tells us, "were educated and ordained priests even though they
were chieftains" [53]...[Kristni Saga] is a fitting tribute to
the success of those chieftains who negotiated the political threat
from Norway and brought Iceland into the Christian world" (xliv-v).

In addition to a full and informative introduction, summarized here,
Gronlie offers a close, clear translation into Modern English,
surprisingly detailed and useful notes to the translated text which
coordinate persons and events with references to them in other
sources, a full up-to-date bibliography of modern scholarship in both
English and Icelandic, a chronology, map, and index of persons and
place-names. At least for scholars whose access to and fluency in
reading Modern Icelandic scholarship is limited, this slim volume
offers an invaluable starting point for all further study of these
texts and the period of medieval North Atlantic history they treat.

-- 
-- Jenne Heise / Jadwiga Zajaczkowa
jenne at fiedlerfamily.net