Barbarians in the Sagas of Icelanders

Homegrown Stereotypes and Foreign Influences

William H. Norman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000415803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria medieval y moderna temprana

This book explores accounts in the Sagas of Icelanders of encounters with foreign peoples, both abroad and in Iceland, who are portrayed according to stereotypes which vary depending on their origins. Notably, inhabitants of the places identified in the sagas as Írland, Skotland and Vínland are portrayed as being less civilized than the Icelanders themselves. This book explores the ways in which the Íslendingasögur emphasize this relative barbarity through descriptions of diet, material culture, style of warfare and character. These characteristics are discussed in relation to parallel descriptions of Icelandic characters and lifestyle within the Íslendingasögur, and also in the context of a tradition in contemporary European literature, which portrayed the Icelanders themselves as barbaric. Comparisons are made with descriptions of barbarians in classical Roman texts, primarily Sallust, but also Caesar and Tacitus, showing striking similarities between Roman and Icelandic ideas about barbarians.

1 Ancient Icelandic Other

The Barbarian

The idea of the barbarian runs throughout history and across cultures. Ever since the first literary societies developed, people have created identifying labels to distinguish themselves from the Other and have assigned behaviours and lifestyles to the Other that mark their differences. For millennia we have charted human history through the rise and fall of civilizations, but the very idea of being civilized can exist only in a world where others are uncivilized. Civilization exists in opposition to barbarism, from, to and by which it rises, returns and is surrounded. There is a universalism to this tension between barbarian and citizen that has endured from the earliest literature through to today and can be found all around the world. The universalism of these ideas reveals something instinctive in human nature and society, a desire to identify ourselves and build unity in opposition to other groups, to mark ourselves apart.

Universal though this instinct may be, we live in awareness of the Others around us, and the Others before us, and we build our own assumptions about the world on the back of that engagement. Our parents and ancestors pass down their preconceptions about civilization and barbarism to us, as do the authors of the past, so that we model our own worldview on the adaptation of those inherited assumptions that best suits our present. The Sagas of Icelanders, or Íslendingasögur, exemplify this, for they are rooted in the experiences of their authors living in Iceland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and yet they also reflect, absorb and occasionally challenge ideas of civilization and barbarism that originate in medieval and ancient Europe.

The line between these inherited classical and European ideas about barbarians and universal expressions of Otherness is not always clear-cut, as both naturally subvert what is normal in the primary culture in their portrayal of the secondary culture, and the one is an expression of the other. How, therefore, can we distinguish between the classical and the universal to say that the Icelanders are othering based on classical ideas as opposed to their own instinctive expression of universal ideas? This is a challenge, but it is not as insurmountable as it might first seem, because while classical othering is in accordance with the greater universal laws of othering for its own time and societies, it is not always in accord with the medieval Icelandic experience.

For example, when it comes to diet one might expect the Icelanders, were they writing in an isolated bubble, to assume that their own primarily pastoral and hunter-gatherer lifestyle was the standard of civilization. Instead we find sensitivity, even embarrassment about the traditional Icelandic diet, and aspirations to agriculture (and in Vínland – North America – viticulture) which echo not the native Icelandic experience, but classical ideas about what a civilized diet looks like, along with contemporary European prejudices. There are some areas where the Icelandic experience echoes that of the ancient Romans, where one must weigh equally the likelihood of universal othering being the driving force in similarities between the two worldviews, but there are huge divergences also; wherever we find Icelandic texts othering based on ideas that appear to represent foreign experiences more than their own, we can infer influence.

Traditionally, Icelandic exceptionalism – the idea that Icelandic literature was born spontaneously out of a sudden flowering of unique Northern culture – has been influential in reading the sagas. Though it no longer carries the same currency as in the early twentieth century, the uniqueness of the sagas in some respects can still make it tempting to ignore the fact that they were written in the Latin alphabet, by authors who in all probability spoke, read and wrote Latin. Given the similarities which this study will explore, there is every reason to think that the way medieval Icelanders saw the world around them was influenced by classical ideas about barbarians – certainly, every other European society with a Latin-based education system and access to Roman texts has been.¹

The popularity of the word ‘barbarian’ speaks to the universality of its meaning, which is vague enough that it can be applied to almost any meeting of cultures, but powerful enough that it has always appealed to cultural observers. This is partly because the word has a range of associations that allows it to adapt its meaning to many contexts. Etymologically speaking, it indicates ‘a foreigner, one whose language and culture differs from [that of] the speaker,’ but it also has connotations of roughness, wildness and a lack of civilization, as well as an absence of culture, literary or otherwise. Historically, it was used by the Greeks to refer, without necessarily any negative connotation, to non-Greeks. It was the Romans who first added a pejorative element by specifically associating it with people who they perceived as being of a lower level of civilization than themselves; in Christian societies it has been used with similar intent for non-Christian societies.²

The word itself is of Greek origin and onomatopoeic, from the incomprehensible baaing sound of foreign speech to the Greek ear. It was adopted into Latin by the early Romans, and over the course of the last two thousand years has insinuated itself into every European language and language group. An irony in titling this book Barbarians in the ‘Sagas of Icelanders’ is that Icelandic adopted its word barbari much later than other European languages, not until the eighteenth century, and as a result it is not used in the literature of medieval Iceland, of which these Sagas of Icelanders are part.³ There is only one equivalent generic term used (just once) in the Íslendingasögur, which is óþjóðarfólk (un-people-people), translated as ‘savages’ by Katrina Attwood in the comprehensive volumes of translations edited by Viðar Hreinsson; ‘barbarians’ would also be a fair figurative translation.⁴ In works of Old Norse literature based on foreign texts the Latin adjective barbarus is often translated as heiðinn (heathen).⁵ Even when directly confronted with the noun barbaros, such as when translating texts from Latin into Old Icelandic, medieval Icelandic writers found alternative forms of phrasing, typically by using a proper noun instead, either of an individual or a people, as in Rómverja saga (Saga of the Romans), Breta sögur (Sagas of the Britons) and Alexanders saga (Saga of Alexander), three Icelandic works of history based on foreign texts.⁶

This Latin word barbaros was not without significance in Iceland, however, being specifically discussed by the scholar Óláfr Þórðarson in his Third Grammatical Treatise in a translation of Donatus’ text on Barbarismus (the ‘corruption’ of Latin by foreign languages). Adapted around 1250 for an Icelandic readership, here the background of captured slaves who mixed their own foreign vocabulary with Latin is explained:⁷

þeir [Rómverjar] nefndv allar þioðir barbaros næma girki ok latinvmenn. barbari varu kallaðar fyrst af lǫngv skeggi ok líotvm bvnaði þær þioðir, ær bygðv a háfvm fiǫllvm ok i þykcum skogum, þviat sva sæm asiona þeirra ok bvnaðr var ofægiligr hia hæverskv ok hirðbvnaði romveria, slikt sama var ok orðtak þeirra otogit hia mals greinum latinv snillinga.⁸

They [the Romans] named all peoples barbarians except Greeks and Italians. They were called barbarians first for the long beards and ugly dress of those peoples who dwelt in the high mountains and thick woods, since just as their appearance and dress was unhandsome among the well-mannered and well-dressed Romans, so too was their speech inelegant beside the language of the eloquent Italians.

Despite this introduction to the word, the Icelanders seem to have been content to continue without their own direct equivalent for several centuries after this. However, although the word itself did not enter Old Icelandic, it is apparent from the definitions discussed above that every connotation of the word would have had meaning in a medieval Icelandic context, and particularly for descriptions of Icelanders encountering foreigners. Though the word itself may have remained familiar but foreign, the idea of the barbarian certainly did exist in medieval Iceland. Indeed, examples of barbarian characterization are a recurring feature of the Íslendingasögur, as this work will show; it is just that they are not signposted with that label. Instead, each foreign people is labelled on almost every occasion with their own distinctive name. Some of them, like Írar (Irish) and Skotar (Scots), are the Old Norse equivalent of the same names the people under discussion used, while names such as Skrælingar (First Peoples and Inuit) and Finnar (Sámi) were labels applied by the Icelanders.⁹

It follows from this refusal to generalize in the nomenclature that there is a limit to how far the authors of the sagas generalize in their portrayal of foreign peoples. Just as they give various ‘barbarian’ peoples their own names, they also give them their own independent, though often overlapping, sets of characteristics. As a result, this work is not a discussion of the treatment of ‘The Barbarian’ in the Íslendingasögur, for there is no single generic ‘barbarian.’ However, there are, by any modern, medieval or ancient definition of the word, many ‘barbarians,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Ancient Icelandic Other
• 2 Barbarians
• 3 Food and Diet from Iceland to Vínland
• 4 Prestige and Prejudice: Material Culture
• 5 The Barbarian’s Guide to Battle
• 6 Meeting the Other
• 7 Conclusions
• Appendix: Barbarians in the Íslendingasögur
• Bibliography
• Index