Interpreting the Nordic Past: Icelandic Medieval Manuscripts and the Construction of a Modern Nation

Abstract

‘My object in visiting Iceland was twofold’, wrote the 28-year-old English schoolteacher Sabine Baring-Gould in the opening of his account of a trip to Iceland during the summer of 1862: ‘I proposed examining scenes famous in Saga, and filling a portfolio with water-colour sketches.’1 For the young Englishman, the journey was like a pilgrimage to a holy place, because Icelandic medieval literature had fascinated him for years. Baring-Gould, who is best known today for his hymn ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, had even taught himself to read the sagas in Old Icelandic, translating excerpts from them for his students.2 ‘It must be remembered that the Sagas from which I draw my extracts are not mere popular tales’, he claimed, ‘they are downright history.’ To support this assertion, Baring-Gould quoted ‘our highest English authority on the subject’, George Webbe Dasent, professor at King’s College London and assistant editor of The Times. Dasent, who made his name as the first English translator of the best known Icelandic family saga, Njáls Saga, placed the sagas among the finest historical chronicles in Europe; much ‘passes for history in other lands on far slighter grounds’, Dasent wrote in the introduction to his translation published in 1861, ‘and many a story in Thucydides, Tacitus, or even in Clarendon or Hume, is believed on evidence not one-tenth part so trustworthy as that which supports the narratives of these Icelandic story-tellers of the eleventh century’.3