Investigating Iceland‘s lost literary history reveals a fascinating story of religious upheaval, literary ingenuity, and even forgery hidden within the recycled pages of the Nordic island’s storied past, according to a researcher from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) scrutinizing the country’s historic documents.
Common in the Middle Ages, palimpsests are works written on calf hide vellum pages, where the earlier ink has been scraped off and replaced with new writing. While some underlying text can occasionally be made out with the naked eye, technologies such as infrared bring to light words that were lost centuries ago.
Iceland, The Island of Books
Every holiday season, we can count on seeing at least one piece about Jolabokaflod, or “Christmas Book Flood,” the Icelandic tradition of giving books as presents on Christmas Eve.
Despite its small size, Iceland is a literary stronghold. There may only be 380,000 inhabitants, but one in ten will publish a book in their lifetime. Icelanders’ keen interest in the written word is no modern phenomenon either; it goes 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.
“The Icelanders were part of a common European culture, and Iceland has been a great knowledge society for a long time.”
Iceland Preserved The Viking Sagas
Iceland’s connections to Scandinavia led to some of the most well-preserved information from the Viking Age, including an overview of Norway’s royal lineage through the death of Magnus V Erlingsson in 1184. The islands’s ancient poets, known as Skalds, were highly sought after across the Norse world. Norwegian kings employed storytellers to record their feats in Skaldic poems, one of the two major strands of Old Norse literature.
Skaldic poems began as oral traditions before the Icelanders transcribed them in Latin and Old Norse. Those sagas were first recorded in the 13th century, ending with the work of Snorri Sturluson.
“In addition to sagas, eddic poems, and skaldic verse, scientific literature and political treaties were also written in Iceland during the Middle Ages,” said Lorenz.
Book Reuse in Medieval Iceland
Skalds wrote exclusively on vellum, a type of parchment made from calfskin. Just one book required dozens of skins, making production costly and time-consuming. Therefore, Icelanders often reused vellum if a book wore out or became obsolete, sometimes as entirely different items, such as the miter headgear worn by the bishop of Skálholt in Iceland. Commonly, Icelanders would scrape and polish the text off of the vellum so that it could be reused, creating 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.
Intriguingly, the palimpsests were also utilized in printed books following Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of the print press, a uniquely Icelandic practice.
“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.
Accounting For Icelands Palimpsests
Within two decades of the Protestant Reformation, Iceland followed the general northern European trend of abandoning the Catholic Church’s Latin in favor of the common vernacular. They even went so far as to scrape the original Latin text away to create Bibles and liturgies written in the Icelandic language with Lutheran theology.
Religious changes weren’t the only reason, though. Lorenz found several examples of forgers using the process to create false documents. By only scraping away portions of the text and leaving intact official seals, the forgers could create convincing fakes, such as in one sixteenth-century case involving disputed farm ownership.
Well after the conversion to Lutheranism, Nordic people rediscovered their past. Beginning in the 17th century, the Old Norse works took on a new importance in coalescing national identity. Icelandic archivist Árni Magnússon (1663-1730) worked in Denmark to gather Medieval Nordic documents while Iceland was under Danish rule. Magnússon took much of Iceland’s medieval literature to build the Arnamagnæan Collection, now part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program.
“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.
The Challenge In Locating Icelandic Latin Works
Complicating his efforts, though, is the great difficulty in locating preserved palimpsests.
“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. “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.”
While collecting Iceland’s literature, Árni Magnússon’s interest was primarily in works written in Old Norse over those in Latin. He went so far as to use Latin parchments as book covers for Old Norse books. The book covers were removed in the early twentieth century and largely ignored until recently.
Now, Lorenz is using them in his search for hidden writings. Of Magnússon’s 3,000 book collection, half was returned to Iceland between 1917 and 1997, housed at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík. The rest of the known collection resides at the Arnamagnæan Institute in Copenhagen, although Lorenz continues to hunt Norway, Denmark, and Sweden for any stray Icelandic material.
Lorenz’s work has slowly revealed the theological and liturgical texts in circulation in medieval Iceland and Icelander’s participation in European intellectual culture.
Fundamentally, investigating Iceland’s medieval palimpsests reveals a rich tapestry of literary ingenuity, religious transformation, and European intellectual exchange, showcasing how resourceful Icelanders preserved their cultural heritage through reused manuscripts and hidden texts.
The new paper, “Recycling and Recontextualisation in Medieval and Early Modern Icelandic Palimpsests,” appeared on December 16, 2024 in the journal Gripla.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.