The Intellectual Complexion of the Icelandic Middle Ages Toward a New Profile of Old Icelandic Saga Literature

conventions of Western chronological thought and the inheritance of the Christian religion, with which we are all familiar even though we may not believe in it, have taught us to consider the approach of millennia as significant markers of change, whether changes of significance actually take place then or not. Equally, the approach of a millennium induces retrospective review of the past and prognostications of future developments. In this millennial spirit, then, practitioners of Medieval Studies have been looking back over recent years at the history of their academic discipline. We now have a branch of Medieval Studies that we call medievalism, that is, the historiography of the medieval, which embraces a range of issues including the renewed interest in medieval culture from early modern Europe through to the nineteenth century; the development of Medieval Studies as an academic discipline; the influence of religion, history, politics, law, nationalism, romanticism, and other movements upon Medieval Studies and its influence on them. Medievalism now has its own journal, Studies in Medievalism (1979-) and recent contributions to a number of other journals in the field are also medievalist in character. Discussion of past practices inevitably leads us to think of the present and the future (cf. Van Engen), especially in the current climate of economic rationalism that is affecting universities around the world. Disciplines such as Medieval Studies, which are not obviously well adapted to improving a nation's economic performance, which are regarded by some as obscure and hence less likely to attract as many bums on seats among the undergraduate population as various relevant contemporary studies and which require a long, slow process of acquisition of linguistic, paleographical, literary, and other skills are highly vulnerable to cuts and even extinction by financially embarrassed university administrators. Such circumstances, combined with the millenial spirit that is upon us, lead to serious navel-gazing, and we practitioners of the discipline are bound to ask ourselves whether we have got it right so far and, if so (or, indeed, even if not), where we will be taking the discipline from here on. Where do Old Norse-Icelandic Studies stand in all this? As the topic of this discussion is The Intellectual Complexion of the Icelandic Middle Ages I shall address the critical question of the extent to which modern scholars of Old Icelandic, from the late sixteenth century to the present, have been able to assess the of medieval Iceland and where we may move in the future, rather than take on the question of how the study of Old Icelandic, marginal as it has always been in the academy outside Scandinavia, may be saved from academic extinction, though one might hope without too great naivety that a vigorous discipline such as I think ours is might of itself attract the support of academic administrators and funders of research. Rather than talk very generally about medieval Icelandic culture and its intellectual complexion, I want to confine my remarks here to saga literature, which is the most varied and prolific, as well as the most idiosyncratic, kind of Icelandic text to have been composed in the Middle Ages. It has come to seem almost natural to twentieth-century people to think of the sagas of Icelanders or family sagas as central to the stud,y of the intellectual complexion of medieval Iceland. Yet, if we scrutinize the history of scholarship in Old Norse-Icelandic studies, both within and outside the academy, it is only in the last one hundred and fifty years or so that the passion for sagas of Icelanders over other saga sub-genres has dominated both popular taste and the research interests of scholars. If we go back to the beginnings of serious scholarship in Old Icelandic studies in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries (Benediktsson 1981; Seaton 1935; Blanck 1911), the focus of scholarship and popular interest was far more on poetry than on prose literature and, within the prose repertoire, far more on Snorri Sturluson's Edda, on historical writings, both legendary and realistic, and romances (what we have come to call konunga sogur, fornaldar sogur and riddara sogur) than on Islendinga sogur. …