Conference Paper entitled:
Boreal Authorities: The Icelandic Humanists’ Program of Scandinavian and North-Atlantic History
Abstract: The Icelandic humanists Arngrímur Jónsson (1568–1648) and Þormóður Torfason or Torfæus (1636–1719) were unique among early modern historians in writing authoritative and seminal works on North-Atlantic history, i.e. the history of Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and Orkney Islands. Arngrímur Jónsson became widely known throughout the Republic of Letters for his books on Icelandic history (published in Copenhagen, Hamborg and Amsterdam), while Torfæus, who was probably the most productive Neo-Latin author of Scandinavia, was well into the 19th century the unchallenged authority on the whole of Scandinavian and North-Atlantic history. The reason for these humanists’ authority on the boreal past was not so much a rhetorical or polemical adroitness, although they were not free of such talents, nor a penchant for inventing historical fables where reliable sources held up, e.g. in the style of the inimitable Johannes Magnus, but on the contrary a unique access to extremely rich but so far unpublished Icelandic vernacular sources from the 12th to the 14th centuries, and a solid familiarity with the contents of these sources. This paper argues that both humanists followed a program that was largely circumscribed by the contours of their main Icelandic sources on the history of various geographical areas of the North, and that the latter continued and realized the unfulfilled ambition of the former, the foundations of which were arguably laid by medieval historiographers in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. Yet, if the sources of these humanists were decisive in shaping the subjects of their works, their successes were also partly owed to their skill in mediating vernacular history in accordance with early modern sensibilities and a certain respect for the political expediencies of their royal employers.