A mutation periphery: medieval encounters in the far north

Abstract

This essay discusses the question of civilizational approaches to the medieval Nordic world, and in particular to Icelandic history between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Attempts to reconstruct the cultural profile of a pre-Christian Scandinavian civilization, achieving its last flowering in Iceland (as argued most forcefully by Arnold Toynbee), have proved unconvincing. But there are also weighty arguments against the “pan-Christian” view that portrays the medieval North as a wholly assimilated part of Western Christendom. The most plausible interpretation stresses the dynamics of marginal regions marked by more or less resilient pre-Christian cultures and integrated into Western Christendom during its expansionist phase. As the case of the Nordic region shows, this process could involve an intercivilizational encounter with a pre-Christian world and an intracivilizational differentiation within the framework of Western Christendom. The result was, particularly in Iceland, a very distinctive variant of Western Christian civilization. This general interpretation must, however, be combined with an account of the main landmarks in medieval Icelandic history: the tenth-century foundation of a non-monarchic political order, Christianization, the thirteenthcentury political breakdown, and integration into the Norwegian kingdom.