Icelandic Culture

"Again, this is someone whose work needs to be revised in the light of recent scholarship. He treats the characters in the sagas as historical; he would maintain that much of the poetry attributed to the characters in these narratives was actually composed by those characters. That is not necessarily always the case. His point of view is very specifically Icelandic, and the book was published in 1942, shortly before Iceland gained its independence from Denmark. It is a strongly patriotic book, though the patriotism is kept for the most part under control. It’s a history of Iceland up to the time of Iceland’s submission to Norway in 1262-1264. The Icelanders were made to pay taxes to the crown of Norway at that time, and later became subject to Denmark in around 1380. In this book, yes. Nordal is giving an historical account and using the sagas to illustrate that account – sometimes in rather questionable ways. Well, one can’t always be sure that things people said in the sagas were historically accurate. He’s particularly interesting on the period of the Icelandic Commonwealth before Iceland became subject to Norway, when the Commonwealth depended for its survival on the co-existence of the chieftains, the independent farmers. This broke down as a result of some families becoming more powerful than others. There are the Family Sagas and then there are the Contemporary Sagas, which deal with feuds in the 13th century itself. Because there was no single head of state in Iceland, once some of the chieftains became more powerful than others, the question of how they were to hold on to their power arose. Many of them appealed to the king of Norway to help them in their struggles. In a way, that was just what the king of Norway wanted: they were playing into his hands."