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

• Main Author: Miller, Marta Agnieszka
• Other Authors: Woolf, Alex, University of St Andrews. 7th century Scholarship, Gibson-Sykora Trust, University of St Andrews. School of History Language Bursary
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of St Andrews 2018
• Subjects: Cultural memory; Old Norse; Icelandic laws; Óláfslög; Hauksbók; Gamli sáttmáli; Gizurarsáttmáli; New Philology; Kingship; Norway; Iceland; Legal relations; DL355.M5; Collective memory > Iceland > History > To 1500; Group identity > Iceland > History > To 1500; Nationalism > Iceland > History > To 1500; Iceland > Relations > Norway; Norway > Relations > Iceland
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/16474

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.