Language, Society and Identity in Early Iceland Stephen Pax Leonard (2012)
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Sociolinguistic ISSN: 1750-8649 (print) Studies ISSN: 1750-8657 (online) Review essay Language, Society and Identity in Early Iceland Stephen Pax Leonard (2012) [Publications of the Philological Society, 45] London: Wiley-Blackwell. Pp. 198 ISBN 978-1-118-29496-3 Reviewed by Kendra Willson 1 Introduction The Icelandic language is famous for its morphological and lexical conservatism and for the dramatic success of puristic efforts in modern times. Iceland is also noted for the intensity and continuity of its written tradition starting in the twelfth century CE. The first written records, from the 12th century A.D., postdate by only a few hundred years what has been thought – notwithstanding a few potentially older archaeological finds – to be essentially the first human settlement of the island, by settlers from Norway (many coming via the British Isles) in the 9th century A.D. A similarly striking but less discussed feature of Icelandic is the nearly complete lack of dialectal variation observable in the modern language or in the 900-year written record, although Icelandic’s closest living relatives, Norwegian and Faroese (the latter reflecting another insular settlement from a similar time period), show substantial variation. Stephen Pax Leonard sets out to explain the unity of the Icelandic language, as an instance of ‘the problem of accounting for linguistic homogeneity ... in a tabula rasa situation’ (52). He mentions a partial analogue in the much later New Zealand English (71) (cf. e.g. Trudgill, Gordon, Lewis and MacLagan, 2000), which shows little dialectal variation, although New Zealand had more continuous immigration and social stratification than early Iceland and an indigenous Maori population. Affiliation University of Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] SOLS VOL 8.2 2014 315–326 doi : 10.1558/sols.v8i2.315 © 2014, EQUINOX PUBLISHING 316 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES The second goal of Leonard’s study is to reconstruct the role of language in the establishment of social and political structures and the emergence of an Icelandic linguistic identity. In this context, he addresses a few specific areas, such as Icelandic social and legal structures and associated vocabulary (91–115), the terms dönsk tunga ‘Danish tongue’ and norræna ‘Norse’ as language labels (121–124), pronoun use in legal texts (128–136) and spatial reference (136–143). Leonard has published separate articles on some of these topics. He takes care to distinguish this early Icelandic linguistic identity from a ‘national’ identity in the modern sense, emphasizing that ‘any notion of statehood at the time is likely to have been based on the single person of the monarch’ (102). Although Iceland’s famous kinglessness until the union with Norway in 1262 suggests a different type of identity formation, the degree to which this can be viewed as ‘national’ is a discussion which Leonard carefully sidesteps. The conservatism of the Icelandic language and the long written tradition, with an emphasis on the medieval heritage, are central to Icelandic national identity in modern times (as summarized by Leonard on p. 11). He says ‘the dialectal homogeneity of Icelandic became subsequently an identity factor in itself’ (32) without specifying when this occurred. The work is in implicit dialogue with the modern discourse of linguistic purism and identity in Iceland. Leonard strives to avoid anachronism by focusing on the early period, but the relationship with the modern situation is also interesting. It is refreshing to see the subject treated by a non-Icelander with respect for Icelandic culture but some distance from the ideology. 2 Reasons for Icelandic homogeneity According to Leonard (88), a decisive factor in the unity of Icelandic is the settlement pattern of isolated farmsteads, unlike the villages which emerged in Norway and the Faroes (cf. also Helgi Guðmundsson, 1977:319). In addition to ecological circumstances, formation of towns was deterred by the anti-vagrancy law vistarband (‘obligation for annual farm employment’) which originated during the commonwealth period (930–1262 A.D.) and lasted into the nineteenth century (Einar Laxness, 1995:vol. 3, 130–132); it required those who did not own sufficient property to qualify as independent farmers to affiliate themselves with larger farms as tenant farmers or seasonal workers. (The first towns were officially founded after the repeal of the trade monopoly in 1786–7.) In the absence of villages, children’s linguistic socialization is largely in the hands of older adults, which has a conservative effect, and there is no local peer group to mold young people’s linguistic usage. REVIEW ESSAY: WILLSON 317 Leonard suggests that ‘it is difficult to find plausible contexts for the movement of large numbers of adolescents…around Iceland’ (76). There was a practice of fostering (cf. Hastrup, 1985:98–99, which Leonard does not discuss specifically) but it is not clear what fraction of children were fostered. The fostering contract lasted until the child reached the age of sixteen; in most instances the relocation probably occurred long before adolescence (Hastrup, 1985:98, gives age four as a hypothetical example). Some adolescents and young adults did circulate among farms as farmhands hired for seasonal employment (vist), though the number of such workers at any given farm would of course have been small. (In the nineteenth century, hired farmhands comprised 25% of the population [Gísli Gunnarsson, 2002]; I am not aware of statistics for the earliest period.) Another Icelandic institution which Leonard does discuss (100–101) is the hreppr, a local district which functioned as a unit for poor relief (paupers would be redistributed to other households). This institution seems to have evolved early in the com- monwealth period (Einar Laxness, 1995: vol. 1, 208) and persisted into modern times. This would have circulated people among households, although locally. Leonard says (77) that marriage matches were local (contra Sandøy, 1994:41) and hence could make only limited contributions to dialect mixing. Archer (2009) has examined the geographical distances between the households involved in marriage matches mentioned in sagas and found that they tend to be regional but not maximally local. However, it is not clear how representative these data are of the situation as a whole. Leonard suggests (76) also that since the legal age of majority in early Iceland was twelve, teenagers would not display the linguistic behaviors associated with adolescent identity formation in modern cultures. This is an interesting claim but could use substantiation from studies of present-day traditional societies. Leonard argues that dialect mixing must have occurred prior to the settlement, as the pattern of isolated farmsteads would not have been conducive to dialect leveling, but more to maintaining an existing situation of low diversity. He points out the apparent uniformity of the language stages represented in early Norse runic inscriptions, despite the high degree of orthographic variation. Runologists have tended to view differences in written forms as reflecting different ortho- graphic solutions or diachronic stages; ‘the possibility of regional differences [in runic Norse] is hardly admitted’ (59). However, this may reflect the assumptions made by runologists in the face of a sparse corpus as much as the linguistic reality. Apart from this interesting point, the section on runic sources (58–62) feels somewhat oblique to the thesis of the book, as the author concludes (62) that runic evidence is basically irrelevant to his project. There are a couple of runic inscriptions from Iceland older than the 1200 date Leonard gives for the earliest 318 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES (58), including recent finds that postdate Leonard’s research (Þórgunnur Snædal, 2011). Earlier scholars (Leonard [77] cites Kuhn, 1935:29–30; see also Helgi Guðmundsson, 1977:321) have also claimed that the alþing assembly, which brought together a few percent of the total population every summer, had a standardizing effect on the language. Leonard (77) is skeptical, as this two-week summit would probably not have engendered sustained contacts of types that would have influenced language development. However, the special importance of laws as verbal artifacts in Iceland’s kingless state may have contributed to conservatism, as the laws became, along with skaldic poetry, ‘a solid, immovable and largely immutable “lump of language” in the middle of Icelandic’ (84) well before they were committed to writing. The importance of written culture from early on and the comparatively high literacy rate in Iceland from an early date are also commonly cited as contributing factors to the conservatism and uniformity of the Icelandic language (cf. Helgi Guðmundsson, 1977:322–323). Leonard does not emphasize this as much, as he is interested in reconstructing factors shaping language practice in the period before writing became widespread in the twelfth century, although, as with most research on early Iceland, he bases his inferences largely on texts recorded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 3 Use of sources Leonard’s use of the Old Icelandic written sources shows a solid grounding in Norse philology and history and consideration of the texts’ cultural contexts. His readings of the laws seem particularly skillful and insightful. I agree with his assessment that the early Icelandic laws are mainly ‘concerned with maintaining social stability’ (102) rather than with ‘democratic justice’ (102) and like his thoughts (102–103) about the function of the búakviðr ‘panel of neighbors’, a type of jury, in forming community. In addition to the ‘lump of language’ (84) notion mentioned above, an interesting point of linguistic relevance is that the law ‘made linguistic identity a legal issue’ (133) by specifying that a person who had not learned dönzk tunga [the ‘Danish tongue,’ i.e., Old Norse language] in early childhood could not be appointed to a jury until he had lived in Iceland for three years. This might reflect an estimate of the amount of time needed for an adult to master a second language and become integrated into society or established as a likely permanent resident.