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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2009

Margaret Clunies Ross
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
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Summary

The aim of this collection of essays is to explore the complex relationship between the development of a new society and a new polity on the island of Iceland during the Middle Ages, and the literature, in the broadest sense, that Icelanders produced in that period. The period we consider stretches from about 870, the beginning of the settlement of Iceland, to about 1400. We ask why and how a materially poor, remote part of medieval European society was able to produce such a rich and diverse literature. We pose these questions, which others have posed before us, within a predominantly social framework, and come up with some new ways of understanding Old Icelandic literature that allow us to make sense of what was, by modern standards, a truly extraordinary suite of explicatory and propagandist mechanisms developed by a small group of people to justify and explain themselves to themselves and to others, in an age well before the existence of such communicative tools as newspapers, mass media and international telecommunications.

We examine what is likely to have motivated Icelanders to preserve and modify the oral traditions that they brought with them when they emigrated in the late ninth century from mainland Scandinavia, especially Norway, and from the Viking colonies in and around the British Isles. We analyse what led to their becoming recognized specialists in poetry, myth and historiography, both of their own society and of others', especially those of Norway and the rest of Scandinavia.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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