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Íslendingabók. Kristni Saga Xxxv Ch

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Íslendingabók. Kristni Saga Xxxv Ch VIKING SOCIETY FOR NORTHERN RESEARCH TEXT SERIES GENERAL EDITORS Anthony Faulkes and Alison Finlay VOLUME XVIII ÍSLENDINGABÓK — KRISTNI SAGA THE BOOK OF THE ICELANDERS — THE STORY OF THE CONVERSION For Sunniva and Benjamin ÍSLENDINGABÓK KRISTNI SAGA THE BOOK OF THE ICELANDERS THE STORY OF THE CONVERSION TRANSLATED BY SIÂN GRØNLIE VIKING SOCIETY FOR NORTHERN RESEARCH UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON 2006 © Siân Grønlie 2006 ISBN-10: 0-903521-71-7 ISBN-13: 978-0-903521-71-0 The illustration on the cover is a detail from the aerial photograph of fiingvellir on the reverse of the map of fiingvellir published by Landmælingar Íslands in 1969, © National Land Survey of Iceland, Licence no. L06080007. The figures relate to the sites of booths (shelters used to accommodate chieftains who attended the Alflingi each summer and their followers). Many of these only date from the 18th or 19th centuries, and the identifications of the medieval booths are guesses from about 1700; there is no contemporary evidence for them. The supposed owners are listed below. 6 Gestr Oddleifsson 30 Gizurr hvíti (the White) 8 Snorri go›i fiorgrímsson 31 Valgar›r grái (the Grey) 11 Víga-Skúta 32 Egill Skalla-Grímsson 12 fiorgeirr flatnefr fiórisson 33 Ásgrímr Elli›a-Grímsson, fiórhallr 13 Hjalti Skeggjason Ásgrímsson 17 Gu›mundr ríki (the Powerful) 34 Mƒr›r gígja, Mƒr›r Valgar›sson 19 Skagfir›ingar 35 Njálsbú› 23 Vatnsdœlingar 37 Flosi fiór›arson 24 Langdœlingar 38 Eyjólfr Bƒlverksson 25 Vatnsfir›ingar 39 Skapti fióroddsson 26 Hƒskuldr Dala-Kollsson 40 Sæmundr fró›i 28 Geirr go›i 41 Snorri Sturluson 42 fiorgeirr Ljósvetningago›i Printed by Short Run Press Limited, Exeter CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................ vi INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................vii CONVERSION AND HISTORY-WRITING ..................................vii ARI’S ÍSLENDINGABÓK .................................................................ix Ari’s Life and Work ...................................................................... x Íslendingabók as Family History ................................................ xiv Íslendingabók as Ecclesiastical History .................................. xviii History and Myth-Making ........................................................ xxiv A Note on Íslendingabók, Prose Style and the Family Saga .... xxviii KRISTNI SAGA ............................................................................... xxx Date, Authorship and Sources ............................................... xxxii Kristni saga and Iceland’s History ......................................... xxxv Kristni saga as Missionary History .......................................xxxvii Conversion and Politics ............................................................. xlii CONCLUSION ................................................................................ xlv NOTE ON THE TRANSLATIONS ...............................................xlvi DATES IN THE HISTORY OF EARLY ICELAND .................. xlvii LAWSPEAKERS OF THE EARLY COMMONWEALTH .......... xlvii MAP OF ICELAND .................................................................... xlviii THE BOOK OF THE ICELANDERS ....................................... 3 NOTES TO THE BOOK OF THE ICELANDERS.......................... 15 THE STORY OF THE CONVERSION .................................. 35 NOTES TO THE STORY OF THE CONVERSION ....................... 57 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................... 75 INDEX OF PERSONAL NAMES ............................................ 86 INDEX OF PLACES AND PEOPLES .................................... 94 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS During the years that I have been working on this book, I have received help and advice from many people. In particular, I would like to thank Thomas Charles-Edward, David Clark, Richard Dance, Alison Finlay, Judith Jesch and Carolyne Larrington (who first suggested this project to me), Sally Mapstone, Heather O’Donoghue, Ólafur Halldórsson, John McKinnell, Carl Phelpstead, Matthew Townend, and many others fló at eigi sé rita›ir. Thanks are also due to my colleagues at St Anne’s, Matthew Reynolds and Ann Pasternak-Slater, for their encouragement and support. Finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Anthony Faulkes for his many helpful suggestions, meticulous corrections and editorial expertise. Any errors that remain are my own and, as Ari said about possible inaccuracies in his work, flá es skylt at hafa flat heldr, es sannara reynisk. Siân Grønlie Oxford St Michael and All Angels, 2006 INTRODUCTION CONVERSION AND HISTORY-WRITING Christianity, it has been said, is ‘a religion of historians’, both because its sacred books are works of history and because it provides a historical framework—between creation and judgement—within which all human history unfolds.1 For the Icelanders, as for the other Germanic peoples of early medieval Europe, Christianity was also a religion that made possible, for the first time, the writing down of oral history: it was the advent of Christianity to Iceland in the year 999/1000 which brought writing to that country and perhaps it is not surprising that, when the Icelanders began to write themselves, one of the first subjects they chose was their own conversion to Christianity. Ari’s Íslendingabók is the oldest and most famous account of the moment of conversion in Iceland, accom- panied by a brief description of the much longer process of Christianisation that followed it.2 But the story of the conversion is retold in a number of later Icelandic texts written between the end of the twelfth and the fourteenth century, as well as being included in Norwegian synoptic histories, principally Theodoricus’ Historia de Antiquitate Regum Norwagiensium and Historia Norwegie.3 As is typical with conversion narratives, it appears in different contexts and genres and therefore in different guises: as a key moment in the history in the Icelandic people (in Íslendingabók), as a successful missionary effort on the part of the Norwegian king Óláfr Tryggvason (in both Oddr Snorrason’s and Snorri Sturluson’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar and in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar in mesta) and as a focus for the ‘historical fiction’ of many of the family sagas, most famously Njáls saga.4 Kristni saga is the only work in which 1 Bloch 1992: 4. 2 The terms ‘conversion’ and ‘Christianisation’ can be used in different ways, but the practice I follow here is to use ‘conversion’ for the ‘moment and act’ whereby a decision in favour of Christianity is made, and ‘Christianisation’ for the longer process of institutional change which follows it (Abrams 1996: 15); for uses that distinguish between the ‘conversion’ of an individual and the societal process of Christianisation/acculturation, see Sawyer, Sawyer and Wood 1987: 21–2; Russell 1994: 26–31; Muldoon 1997: 1–4. 3 Theodoricus 1998: 15–16; HN 21. 4 Íslendingabók, pp. 7–9 below (ch. 7); Oddr Snorrason 1932: 122–30; ÍF XXVI 319–20, 328–33, 347; ÓTM I 149–50, 168, 280–301, 308–11, 358–76, II 145–66, 177–98, 305; ÍF XII 255–72. viii Introduction the missions to Iceland form the main subject of the narrative and the organisational principle of the whole; it shares with Bede’s Ecclesiastical History the distinction of being one of the few works in the Middle Ages which can justly be described as ‘missionary’ history.5 Conversion had a central place in historical writing in the early Middle Ages, as the newly converted Germanic peoples sought to fit themselves into the new Christian world and to ‘reinvent’ their pasts on the model of biblical history, divided into two by the coming of Christ.6 Bede, as is well known, modelled the pagan Anglo-Saxons on the Israelites of the Old Testament, God’s chosen people with their own ‘Promised Land’, and it has been argued that Ari does the same for the Icelanders.7 Yet what continues to astonish about early Icelandic histories is less their affinity with Latin European Christian literature than their resilient secularism, witness surely to a strong oral tradition which survived the conversion and passed into a new literate world, giving rise to literary genres not found elsewhere in medieval Europe. Although conversion to Christianity comes at the centre of Ari’s Íslendingabók and is treated at most length, it is continuity rather than change which Ari emphasises as he describes the key stages in the development of a new and unique political system by the Icelanders. His avoidance of miracle, religious rhetoric and moral exempla can be contrasted with Kristni saga’s greater dependence on hagiography in its account of the early missionaries, and yet Ari’s distinctive style and methods are still, arguably, the greatest inspiration for the author/editor/compiler of Kristni saga and possibly also a model for the larger historical compendium of which Kristni saga may have been part.8 In this introduction, I would like to address the difficult question of what kinds of history Íslendingabók and Kristni saga represent, an issue often tied, rightly or wrongly, to their disputed reliability as historical sources. To what extent are they influenced by 5 On the rarity of missionary histories in the Middle Ages, see Sawyer, Sawyer and Wood 1987: 17–18 and Wood 2001: 25, 42–3; on Bede, see especially Rollason 2001: 15–23. 6 Smalley 1974: 55; Weber 1987: 98–100. 7 See p. xxi below. On the Anglo-Saxon myth of origins, see Howe 1989. For Ari’s adoption of the same migration myth, see Sverrir Tómasson 1988:
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