Negotiating the past in medieval Iceland, c. 1250-1500 : cultural memory and royal authority in the Icelandic legal tradition

Abstract

This thesis examines the memorial meaning attributed to royal power in the Icelandic legal tradition, as it is textually negotiated in sources extant from the period c. 1250-1500. It discusses the significance and functions of the Norwegian king’s legal authority as part of the Icelanders’ collective remembrance of their country’s legal past (spanning the years c. 870-1302), and as a defining element in the creation of the Icelandic identity as a community of law. The scope of analysis covers thirteenth- to fifteenth-century legal sources (sections of law-books and legal texts preserving legal arrangements between Iceland and Norway made in the eleventh century and in the period c. 1260-1302), and a fourteenth-century account of the Norwegian king’s involvement in a settlement dispute in ninth-century Iceland. These main sources are analysed against the background of several auxiliary sources (saga narratives, diplomas) from a New Philological perspective and scrutinised using the methods developed in cultural memory studies. This provides a novel perspective on the primary sources, filling a gap in recent scholarship on cultural memory in Old Norse literature and historiography. Both categories of texts, drawing on oral and written traditions of law-making and story-telling, are vehicles for multi-faceted culturally meaningful and often contradictory memories of the Norwegian king. The Icelandic laws preserve provisions bestowed upon the Icelanders by the Norwegian monarchs, whereas the sagas convey semi-mythological images of the monarchs, who act as legislators, negotiators of legal agreements with the Icelanders, and as law-keepers. By analysing the memorial functions of royal power in the primary sources, the thesis argues for the complexity of the Icelanders’ self-definition as a kingless community of law, who nevertheless incorporate and actively engage with royal power, which shapes the collective memory of the country’s legal tradition.