Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Famously, the skalds of Iceland successfully took over the mantle of court poet in tenthand particularly eleventh-century Norway (and to an extent in England and other centers of Scandinavian diasporic populations as well). In this way... more
Famously, the skalds of Iceland successfully took over the mantle of court poet in tenthand particularly eleventh-century Norway (and to an extent in England and other centers of Scandinavian diasporic populations as well). In this way they sustained a partial livelihood. In this paper I am going to propose that we can detect a sense of Icelandic (and to a lesser extent Orkney) identity in some of their verses. These markers might already have been symptomatic of an emerging ideology, to be more explicitly expressed in later prose texts, where “ individual Icelanders, especially upwardly mobile young Icelandic men, are, on a case-by-case basis, represented as better, cleverer, and more gifted than any individual Norwegian, except perhaps the Norwegian king, against whom they frequently measure themselves. Their special talent thus enables them as individuals to be successful in Norwegian society, even though they come from the cultural margin.” 1 That the sense of a community identi...
