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  • The Interplay of Pagan and Christian Traditions in Icelandic Settlement Myths
  • Jonas Wellendorf

Medieval Icelanders took pride in their cultural inheritance and descent. They knew that being a new nation was something out of the ordinary, and they cultivated a remarkable literary tradition about their past. They preserved tales of the distant heroic Scandinavian past as well as of more recent Icelandic events, but the tradition that concerned the events connected with the landnám or settlement seems to have been cultivated with a particular interest. This is understandable since the settlement is equated with the foundation of their nation, and the event that had made them Icelanders. Tradition has it that many prominent settlers threw their high-seat pillars overboard when they caught sight of Iceland, and settled at the place where they landed. In this essay I shall discuss the stories about settlings where this course of events is described and present some parallels from Latin hagiographic narratives. The Icelandic sources present both Christian and pagan versions of this ritual and appear to applaud both. I conclude by tentatively suggesting how a contemporary audience might have interpreted these myths in light of their Christian faith.

When reading about events that took place in the settlement period of Iceland, traditionally dated between 870 and 930, but not recorded in writing until the twelfth century at the very earliest, scholars have often been compelled to address the question of the historicity of certain customs, beliefs, or anecdotes mentioned in the texts. One example of this is a brief article from 1988 by Hermann Pálsson.1 He analyzed an anecdote about an Icelandic settler by the name of Þórir Grímsson who, as a prophecy foretold, settled at the location where his mare lay down. Hermann Pálsson adduces two parallels to this story. The first is quite obvious and concerns the legendary or mythological Greek hero Cadmus and the founding of the city of Thebes. The second requires a bit more goodwill on behalf of the reader and involves the prophecy that Aeneas should found the future Rome at the location where a white sow was seen suckling thirty newborn piglets. These two stories of Classical antiquity have been retold numerous times and vernacular Old Norse versions exist [End Page 1] as well. Hermann Pálsson goes on to present two instances of what he calls "striking verbal similarities" between the story of Þórir on the one hand and Cadmus and Aeneas on the other. Even if he has some reservations about the precise source of the Old Icelandic anecdote about the settler—and not all readers would find the verbal parallels as striking as Hermann Pálsson does—he concludes that the story "owes its origin to foreign learning rather than to a genuine native tradition" (p. 28).

It has been quite symptomatic of scholarship on Old Norse literature and culture to make such a sharp distinction between "foreign learning" and "native tradition." The foreign element is called "learning" and thus evokes books and clerics or monasteries and other non-native elements. This is contrasted with a local innate element described in a more advantageous way as something handed down from time immemorial, the undiluted tradition of pagan times before the "Church" began to exert its influence on the Old Norse people. In outlining this opposition between learned and native tradition, it becomes too easy to forget that this "native tradition" in the Old Norse language would have been termed and thought of as frœði. This term, which means 'learning' and was applied to all kinds of knowledge, derived from tradition as well as bookish learning.2 Hermann Pálsson was of course not a scholar who was generally unsympathetic to elements in Old Norse literature that derived from what he called "learned tradition"; rather the opposite, which may explain why he termed the Icelandic anecdote a myth in the title of his article. "Myth" is after all a term that has positive connotations in scholarship on Old Norse literature because of the prominence given to myth in the two Eddas, the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda.

The story of Þórir Grímsson was...

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