In this study I intend to discuss how genre can contribute to our understanding of medieval Norwegian and Icelandic political processes, or their ‘body politic’. How did the socio-political structures of the medieval North influence the development of literary genres? On the one hand, the development of genres can be viewed as a reflection of politics, constituting its ‘superstructure’. On the other hand, genres also contribute to the shaping and changing of politics through their function as vehicles for formulating ideologies that frame the ways in which politics is conceived and conducted. In Old Norse society, the growth of literacy in the Roman alphabet and state formation were parallel and interconnected processes. From the first Norwegian king Haraldr hárfagri (r. c. 872–930) onwards, various genres – both spoken and written – were utilised to formulate and legitimise their power and position in society. The same is true of other participants in the body politic, such as the secular and clerical elites. In this chapter, I will briefly trace the main trends in how kings and elites utilised various genres to establish and reinforce their authority and power from the Viking Age (c. 800–1050) throughout the high Middle Ages (c. 1050–1300) in Norway and Iceland, with a shorter section on the late Middle Ages (c. 1300–1500). Since this is a vast topic, emphasis will be placed on the saga genres and on the main ideological developments in Old Norse society. My hypothesis is that there was a shift towards more explicit definitions of genres and ideologies, and that these processes were interrelated, but that both genres and ideologies remained elusive concepts that were implicitly defined using overlapping and indistinct boundaries.

Norway

Skaldic poems were probably the most important vehicles for transmitting and celebrating royal successes until the late twelfth century. In this predominantly oral society, skalds functioned both as preservers of memorable deeds and as embellishers of their patrons’ – mostly kings’ – feats in particular. The stability of the poems over time and their reliability as historical sources have been fervently debated, but there is a broad consensus on their pivotal role in formulating a type of heroic royal ideology.

How did royal authority manifest itself on a local level in the Middle Ages? In my book Unpredictability and Presence: Norwegian Kingship in the High Middle Ages, I tried to demonstrate what happened in the king's physical presence in high medieval Norway. My argument was that in spite of a well-developed royal legislation, administration and ideology, kings frequently appealed to a variety of other cultural norms, the most important being their demand for respect in a public political arena highly sensitive to honour and demonstrative gestures. Struggles and negotiations concerning such signs are what medieval sources often circle around.

The next historical challenge lies in retrieving what happened when the king was absent, and how it was possible for him to govern at a distance, considering that norms of obedience were hardly internalized. Late medieval Iceland provides an excellent example for studying absentee authority, since the king never set foot on the island after it became part of Norway in 1262/64. This signalled the end of the king-less Free State period (930–1262/64), and henceforward Iceland was ruled by bailiffs and law men appointed by the Norwegian king. Nordic integration went a step further from 1397, when Denmark, Sweden and Norway formed the Kalmar Union. Iceland now became a Nordic periphery instead of a Norwegian one.

This article will focus on fifteenth-century Iceland. This period has suffered from a particularly bad reputation among Icelandic historians, partly since Iceland was finally hit by the plague (in 1402–4 and 1494–5), partly because the lack of central power led to discord of all kinds, and partly because of the source situation: contemporary sagas were long-since gone, annals were not written after 1430 (until c. 1550), and we retain very few diplomas. Yet, politically speaking, this was a golden century in Icelandic history, as English merchants and fishermen started sailing to Iceland in large numbers, placing the island in midst of a power struggle in the North Atlantic and earning the period the label ‘The English Century’. Moreover, though the period was marked by violence and homicide, these struggles show some regularities that are not concomitant with lawless chaos, as pointed out by Helgi Þorláksson.

‘In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined’. This important insight of Benedict Anderson has usually been embraced in studies of modern nations, but it applies equally well to other forms of communities, such as premodern ones (see also Wojtek Jezierski's introduction). Such communities are imagined in being limited, sovereign, and communal. Whereas the concept of sovereignty is a post-medieval one, it directs attention to the theme of order, which, as with the principle of communal interests, is as relevant to a medieval as to a modern setting. The limits of communities point to the problem of border and the decisive presence of the other from which a community needs to separate itself.

In this chapter, I shall discuss the role of the Baltic in the late medieval Icelandic manuscript AM 343a 4to, which was written at the large estate Möðruvellir fram in Eyjafjörður in northern Iceland around 1450. The Baltic, as a border zone to an imagined Nordic community, plays a surprisingly large role in this manuscript. After having placed the manuscript in its literary and historical setting, I shall explore how the scribe tried to construct a Nordic community vis-à-vis others. The Baltic Rim is particularly interesting in this respect, since it was a place that belonged to the centre and simultaneously had close contact with the periphery. I shall argue that the need to draw firm boundaries reflected a vulnerable centre which was dependent on the periphery in a variety of ways. The imagined Nordic community of AM 343a 4to could be socially defined as an elite community, with an edge towards peasants as well as kings. In the final section, I will relate this textual community at Möðruvellir fram to the historical context in which the manuscript was written in order to elucidate how Icelandic nobles in the mid-fifteenth century viewed the Baltic as part of a Nordic community.

The Literary and Historical Context

AM 343a 4to is the largest manuscript produced in Iceland in the late Middle Ages. It contains fifteen sagas: nine fornaldarsögur, five fornsögur suðrlanda, and one ævintýri (moral fable).