Ancient, repurposed parchments reveal hidden and forgotten traces of Iceland’s history.
Iceland has a long and rich literary tradition. With its 380,000 inhabitants, Iceland has produced many great writers, and it is said that one in two Icelanders writes books. The literary tradition stretches all the way back to the Middle Ages.
“Previously, the theory was that Iceland was so dark and barren that the Icelanders had to fill their lives with storytelling and poetry to compensate for this. But Icelanders were certainly part of Europe and had a lot of contact with Britain, Germany, Denmark, and Norway, among others,” said Tom Lorenz, a PhD research fellow at the Department of Language and Literature at NTNU. He is hunting down hidden and forgotten pieces of the island of the Sagas’ literary history.
“The Icelanders were part of a common European culture, and Iceland has been a great knowledge society for a long time.”
Royal lineage
The Icelanders deserve credit for preserving much of our understanding of Norway’s royal lineage, spanning from the early Viking Age to the death of Magnus V Erlingsson in 1184.
Icelandic skalds were skilled and sought after, and Norwegian kings engaged skalds to ensure that their story and their feats would be told and passed on. Skalds were poets who composed one of the two kinds of Old Norse poetry in alliterative verse, the other being Eddic poetry. Skaldic poems were traditionally composed to honor kings.
In the Middle Ages, the Icelanders wrote down these oral traditions both in Latin and in Old Norse. Snorri Sturluson was the last and most important in a long line of saga writers who wrote down the kings’ sagas in the 13th century.
This is how the kings’ sagas were preserved.
“In addition to sagas, eddaic poems, and skaldic verse, scientific literature, and political treaties were also written in Iceland during the Middle Ages,” said Lorenz.
Valuable vellum
Books and texts from this period were written on parchment, which is animal skins that have been carefully processed so they can be written on.
In Iceland, only exclusive calfskin was used to make parchment. Calfskin parchment is called vellum, and it took dozens of calves to create enough vellum for one book.
Vellum was a very valuable material. If a book became worn out or obsolete, the parchments were reused. Among other things, some were used to make tools, and one fragment that has been preserved was made into a miter – a type of headgear worn by the bishop of Skálholt in Iceland.
In addition, many parchments were reused as covers for new books.
Unique to Iceland
A common method for reusing old manuscript pages was to remove the original text by scraping and polishing so that the parchment could be used to create new books and manuscripts.
This is called a palimpsest.
“Palimpsests were common in the Middle Ages across Europe, and were particularly widespread in Iceland. Although literarily rich, Iceland was a poor country. The supply of expensive parchment was limited, while the demand was high because the Icelanders had much they wanted to communicate,” said Lorenz.
In Iceland, parchment was also reused for printing books after Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century.
“The fact that there are printed palimpsest books in Iceland and not just handwritten palimpsest parchments is unique in a European context, and this has not been studied before!” Lorenz emphasized.
Abandoned Latin in favor of the vernacular
In Iceland, as elsewhere in Europe, texts and books were written in Latin during the Middle Ages, especially liturgical texts used in ecclesiastical contexts. Latin was the predominant written language of Catholic Europe.
But then came the rebellious priest Martin Luther, the man who started the great protest movement against the powerful Catholic Church.
In the wake of Martin Luther and the Reformation in 1517, many northern European countries converted to Protestantism, including Iceland between 1537 and 1550.
The Reformation brought an end to ecclesiastical manuscripts and books being written in Latin. The language of the common man was now to be used.
Latin script was scraped off existing parchments so they could be used for new texts written in Icelandic, and these became palimpsests.
The old text shines through
“In documents and books made from palimpsest parchments, fragments of the old, original text can sometimes be seen beneath the new text,” said Lorenz.
The texts and words that have been scraped away can also be retrieved using modern techniques, such as infrared rays, but quite a lot of the old text can often be read with the naked eye.
And it is in the hidden remnants of old Icelandic parchments written in Latin that Lorenz is searching for hidden and forgotten pieces of history.
He examines the preserved fragments from these ancient books and also studies the different forms of parchment recycling and reuse.
“My goal is to create virtual reconstructions of some of the ancient fragments that have survived to shed new light on previous eras’ culture and society,” said Lorenz.
However, this involves finding the remnants of the palimpsests, and they are few and far between.
“Hardly any Latin books from medieval Iceland have survived. Due to their rarity, recycled parchment from disassembled Latin books is one of our most important sources in the history of medieval Icelandic books,” said Lorenz.
Drained Iceland of medieval literature
“I follow Latin traces from Icelandic manuscripts, but the Latin written material has been forgotten. Previous research has focused mostly on texts in Old Norse in Icelandic manuscripts,” he said.
From the 17th century onwards, Old Norse texts became important in the building of identity, national pride, and power in the Nordic countries.
In Denmark, the Icelander and archivist Árni Magnússon (1663-1730) was tasked with collecting medieval documents from both Iceland and the rest of the Nordic countries. At this time, Iceland was under Danish rule in the absolute monarchy of Denmark-Norway.
Árni Magnússon was particularly interested in texts about Icelandic history. He scoured the market, almost draining Iceland of medieval literature, and built a large collection of handwritten books, the Arnamagnæan Collection.
The collection is now part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme.
Tracking down unknown text fragments
However, Árni Magnússon was most interested in books written in Old Norse, not in Latin. He used parchments from the Latin books as covers for the Old Norse books.
In the early 20th century, the book covers were removed and stored separately, and few people have shown much interest in them – until now.
These ancient book covers are among the parchments that Lorenz is studying in his search for hidden and forgotten fragments of history.
Between 1971 and 1997, half of Árni Magnússon’s book collection was returned from Denmark to Iceland, and half of the original collection of 3000 manuscripts is now back in its country of origin.
However, some medieval manuscripts are still located in archives and museums in Norway, Denmark, and also Sweden. So, Lorenz’s search has taken him on a journey through the nooks and crannies of many archives.
“I have identified several previously unidentified Latin fragments related to Iceland. These new discoveries contribute to greater knowledge about which theological and liturgical texts were in circulation in medieval Iceland. The texts show that medieval Icelanders followed and participated in European intellectual culture,” said Lorenz.
The text fragments he has found include hymns, prayers, sermons, hagiographies, and church music.
It started with the Vikings
Lorenz is from Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, which used to be part of Denmark-Norway. He developed an interest in the Viking Age and saga literature at an early age, which led him to study Nordic languages in Kiel.
He is now a PhD research fellow at the Department of Language and Literature at NTNU’s Centre for Medieval Studies. He has also chosen to learn Norwegian Nynorsk in addition to Norwegian Bokmål.
“I am fascinated by small phenomena and therefore chose to learn Nynorsk when I started my studies in Norway. It is probably also why I became fascinated and intrigued by the fragments of history that might be contained in the small, hidden, and forgotten palimpsests that have remained unknown until now,” said Lorenz in fluent Nynorsk.
Reference: “Endurvinnsla og endurnýting í íslenskum uppskafningum frá miðöldum og á árnýöld” by Tom Lorenz, 16 December 2024, Gripla.
DOI: 10.33112/gripla.35.1
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