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THE POWER OF INSULT Ethnographic Publication and Emergent Nationalism in the Sixteenth Century DAVID KOESTER In 1599 readers of English geographer Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation may well have been astonished to encounter a text in which an Icelandic bishop railed against the poetry of a “German pedlar” in language that was as vituperative as it was irate. Offended by what he took to be ethnic slurs, Bishop Guðbrandur þorláksson criticized not only the author of the poetry, Gories Peerse, but equally the Hamburg-based publisher, Joachim Löw, for greed and irresponsibility. There came to light about the yeare of Christ 1561, a very deformed impe, begotten by a certain Pedlar of Germany: namely a booke of German rimes, of al that ever were read the most filthy and most slanderous against the nation of Island .1 Neither did it suffice the base printer once to send abroad that base brat, but he must publish it also thrise or foure times over: that he might thereby, what lay in him, more deepely disgrace our innocent nation among the Germans & Danes, and other neighbour countries, with shamefull, and everlasting ignominie . So great was the malice of this printer, & his desire so greedy to get lucre, by a thing unlawfull. And this he did without controlment, even in that citie [Hamburg], which these many yeres hath trafficked with Island to the great gaine, and commodity of the citizens. His name is Joachimus Leo, a man worthy to become lions foode. (Jónsson 1904:93–94) 8 David Koester is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks . His doctoral research focused on historical consciousness in Iceland. He is currently working on a life history of Tatiana P. Lukashkina, an indigenous educator of Kamchatka, Russia. 1. This spelling (“Island”) for Iceland is taken directly from the Latin original, in which the Icelandic word Ísland (“ice-land”) is not translated. About this time English was gaining an s in Bishop Guðbrandur’s comments appeared as preface to “A Briefe Commentarie ,” a critique of writings about Iceland that appeared first in Latin in 1593 and then in English in 1599. The author of the “Commentarie” was Arngrímur Jónsson, an Icelandic clergyman who later gained recognition as a historian and expert on Icelandic antiquities and became known as Arngrímur the Learned. He was not, however, the bishop’s first choice for the task. Icelandic historian Jakob Benediktsson notes that Bishop Guðbrandur’s interest in defending Iceland went back at least to 1588, when he recommended to the Icelandic national law assembly, the Alþing, that Oddur Einarsson be named bishop of Skálholt. Oddur had trained in Denmark and was for a time a student of Tycho Brahe. Guðbrandur recommended him in part because he wanted a man “who has the training and learning both to preach the word of God and also to answer the many libels which have been published, and which may be published, on our fatherland” (quoted in Benediktsson 1957:33). Oddur agreed to undertake this task, but his Qualiscunque descriptio Islandiae, written in 1589, was, for unknown reasons, not published until 1928 (Benediktsson 1968:vii). After Oddur, Guðbrandur turned to Arngrímur, who was a grandson of the bishop’s aunt and who had been under the bishop’s foster care for a number of years (Benediktsson 1957). Explaining in the introduction to the “Commentarie ” that he was writing at the bishop’s request, the young parson offered examples of ancient warriors who had given their lives to defend their country. He admitted that it was not his intention similarly to “undergoe voluntary death” but that he was prepared to accept any envy and criticism that might result from his efforts. He argued that readers should not find fault if he took up his pen to defend Iceland and Icelanders against the slanders of poets and correct the lessthan -complimentary writings of cosmographers and historiographers. Coming one hundred years after the printing of Columbus’s journals and an intervening century of explosive growth in publications about the world at large, this event in the history of ethnopolitical critique provides us with an unusual window on nationalism, emerging in specific relation to the publishing of ethnographic and geographic (then cosmographic) writings. Positioned in time two hundred years before the romantic and modernist nationalisms of mainland Europe, Arngrímur’s work displays a broad and...

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