When Norwegian royal pedigrees fired Icelanders' collective imagination

So far, the earliest archaeological remains of human settlement in Iceland, some of which lie almost directly upon the "landnám-tephra" dated within two years of 871, trace a North-Atlantic culture focussed around dairy production whose impact upon the Icelandic biosphere was unsustainable above a certain demographic threshold. Settlers' techniques of animal husbandry required timber for the construction of winter shelter for both man and beast (during the most archaic stages, home and byre were polarized areas within the same structures), while open pastureland often came at the expense of the Icelandic native woodlands. In the absence of a social organization capable of mitigating human impact, Icelanders ran the risk of ecological collapse. Norse cultural requirements for timber suitable to building homes and ships soon denied Icelanders any option of economic autarchy. Norway appears to have offered Icelanders the most attractive timber market, especially as the British Isles and the Baltic coasts became increasingly deforested during the Middle Ages. Indeed, Norse settlements in Greenland appear to have preferred Norway to Markland, as source for such commodities. Yet the costs of geographic isolation threatened Icelandic traders with economic dependence to, rather than interdependence with, their exchange partners. As narrated in Ári Þorgilsson's Íslendingabók, Icelanders' needs to call at Norwegian ports gave Óláfr Tryggvason leverage to wrest from them sovereignty in questions of religion: exigencies of material culture became the Trojan Horse whereby the Catholic Church of Rome could extend its influence over Icelanders. Yet unlike its Imperial Roman, or even Carolingian, predecessors, the Church of Rome did not enforce its hold through direct force: as a transnational organization centred amid the most technologically developed area of the region, it allied its ideological and material demands with an assortment of local interests, to whom non-core functions, like policing, could be selectively outsourced. Wherever suitable candidates for entering into such partnerships were wanting, the Church had the means and know-how to facilitate their generation. Political submission to the Church of Rome can be viewed historically as a prelude to Iceland's eventual capitulation to the Norwegian crown, whereby King Hákon's conquest came at no effective risk of military engagement by Norwegians themselves. Between the turn of the millennium and 1262, a greater sea-change had possibly come about in Icelanders' hearts and minds than in their material lives, although climate change and environmental impact were taking their toll all along. Ári's historiography opens a tradition which will extend over the second half of this period and beyond: among his contemporaries operated the founding dynasts of the domains (ríki) which would come to rend apart the constitutional structures whose development Ári narrates. While Íslendingabók may appear to be retrospectively oriented, when a historiographer is equipped with the ideology of an omnipotent god working his design in the providential fabric of the universe, history can but thrust into the future. The reconstruction of the past is not the logical task of unwinding casual sequences of contingencies when the course of events must be bearing down on destiny. Conditioned through the revelation of prophetic certainty, historical method can leverage an awareness of the future to more effectively interpret the inescapably fragmentary knowledge of the past. Cultural memory can be aligned to match expectations: Iceland could only be evolving so as to assume her place among the satellite handmaidens in the grand scheme of a universal theocracy on Earth, as in Heaven. Íslendingabók further offers an unprecedented vantage upon a tradition evolving to incorporate the technology of writing into its communicational repertoire. Just as Ári came to be cited by subsequent historiographers, his work builds upon predecessors which can now only be reconstructed indirectly. Such subjectivity in historiography opens an avenue to reconstruction. Whatever its factual basis, Ári's pedigrees for Norwegian royalty, which underpin Heimskringla and the greatest sagas of the two Óláfar, can be shown to legitimate a son of Haraldr harðráði Sigurðarson as exclusive royal claimant within the framework of Norwegian hereditary law. This indicates the reign of Óláfr hinn kyrri Haraldsson as pivotal in the formation of Norse historiographical imagination, while the corpus of poets who enjoyed Haraldr harðráði's patronage substantiates the mnemonic deposits quarried in formulating such a vision for the kingdom's foundations. The presentation aims to document the legal basis for proposing Óláfr hinn kyrri as a paramount beneficiary from the construction of a Norwegian monarchy founded upon the personage of Harald hárfagri. In contrast to the largely prosaic transmission of this genealogical framework, evidence from the scaldic encomiasts will be explored, which testifies to the sway over Norway's political identity theretofore held by the Hlaðajarl dynasty. Thus, in their sifting of poetic heritage according to the exigencies of their patrons' political agenda, court poets like Sigvatr Þorðarson and his immediate successors can be seen as creative fosterers for royal historiography in Iceland and beyond.