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  • Saracen Sensibilities: Muslims and Otherness in Medieval Saga Literature
  • Sverrir Jakobsson

In popular culture, Vikings and Saracens are often portrayed as common “enemies of Christendom” with reference to ninth- and tenth-century raids.1 After the raids subsided in the early eleventh century, the two peoples, united by very little except from the perspective of hostile monastic chroniclers, went their separate ways as descendants of the Vikings became a part of the Christian Civilization. Medieval Icelanders, situated at the margins of Christianity, were as far removed from Muslims as any Christians could possibly be. Nevertheless, there are references to and portrayals of Muslims in Old Norse literature. A person who never met a Muslim in his or her life could thus form an opinion about Muslims, their faith, and their general character.

During the Middle Ages, there was indeed little interaction between the two groups, except perhaps for occasional encounters between Vikings and Arabs in the ninth and tenth centuries, about which, however, we are mainly dependent upon the testimony of Islamic scholars, as they purportedly took place before the advent of literacy in Scandinavia.2 The testimony of Old Norse sources concerning Islam and Saracens is, on the other hand, mainly secondhand and of little value pertaining to both actual events and contemporary attitudes during the time in which these encounters had taken place. Nevertheless, the material relating to Islam in more recent West Nordic sources, those that were compiled long after Christianity had taken hold in the north, from the Age of the Crusades and later, has its own particular interest. This material bears witness to a more general approach toward different faiths and religious customs, revealing how they and their practitioners were categorized and portrayed in terms of an inversion of the Christian, orthodox self. [End Page 213]

This Norse-Icelandic discourse on religious otherness did not exist in isolation. During the Middle Ages, the Christian societies of Western Europe had developed their own criteria for the evaluation and depiction of Muslims and their beliefs. Medieval Christians based their perceptions of Islam less on the practice and tenets of Islam itself than on their own preconceptions of divine history and divine geography. In order to understand Islam, they preferred time-honored authorities, the Bible and the writing of the church fathers, even if these texts were composed well before the advent of Islam.3 Prevalent Christian attitudes toward Muslims were, however, subject to change, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, during the time of the Crusades, there was an increasing awareness that Christian and Muslim beliefs rested on the same foundations, that Muslims were not akin to the infidels that had been the principal antagonists of the missionaries in Northern Europe in the Early Medieval Period. This led to a paradigmatic shift, as learned Christians began to study the Islamic religion and rather defined Muslims as closely akin to Christians, although they were regarded as having been led astray by the false prophet Muhammad. In this tradition, which originated with Peter the Venerable in the twelfth century, Muslims are depicted along the same lines as Jews or heretical Christians.4 The transition in the perception of Muslims as first pagans and then heretics originated among scholars and did not spread immediately to all other social groups.5

This recategorization of the religious faith of Muslims, which coincided with the Crusades, does not seem to have made much of an impact on Old Norse culture. In the Nordic countries, people’s ideas about Muslim beliefs were founded upon a more classical discourse wherein, rather than redefining Muslims as heretics, Christians continued to regard them as infidels that cultivated idolatry and fire worship.6 In Icelandic texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there was a prevalent image of paganism that showed little variance regardless of whether the heathens in question were Muslims or followers of a pre-Christian Nordic faith.

In the discussion that follows, the intention is to analyze some aspects of the discourse concerning Muslims and other infidels as “the other” and to [End Page 214] establish which ideas gained dominance concerning such groups within Old Norse culture. In approaching these questions, certain texts that...

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