The Beginning of the Icelandic Church in the Old Icelandic Chronicle Hungrvaka
Russian State University for the Humanities
For citation: Gvozdetskaya, Natalya Yu. The Beginning of the Icelandic Church in the Old Icelandic Chronicle Hungrvaka // Graphosphaera. 2023. Vol. 3. № 1. P. 11–28. URL: http://writing.igh.ru/index.php?id=2023-3-1-11-28
DOI: 10.32608/2782-5272-2023-3-1-11-28
Abstract: The paper discusses ways of representing the beginning of the Icelandic church in the chronicle of the 13th century Hungrvaka (‘Awakening Hunger’), which includes ‘portrait’ biographies of the first five bishops of Skálholt, a farmstead in the south of Iceland, where the first church diocese arose. The prologue to the chronicle reveals the cultural atmosphere in which the anonymous author worked, and the motives that prompted him to write his work. Written fixation acts for him as a means of preserving knowledge acquired through oral tradition. The main motives are the desire to introduce young people to the history of Christianity, to show the remarkable qualities of its adherents in Iceland, as well as to instill in his audience a love for literature in the Icelandic language. The Anonym is guided not only by didactic, but also by aesthetic goals. It should be noted that in his narrative there are only a few miracles and biblical allusions, but mythic and epic notions can be traced sometimes. As for the attitude of the Anonym to his work, one can see different stages of the evolution of literary consciousness in it. The topoi of medieval hagiographic literature are used only sporadically, and the history of the Skálholt diocese is presented more like a history of the ‘ancestral nest’ and its inhabitants with their numerous relatives, which brings this work closer to the family sagas. Along with the foreign relations of the Icelandic hierarchs (their relations with popes, continental archbishops and Norwegian kings), much attention is paid to the relationship of bishops with the Icelandic leaders, so that church history is considered within the framework of local history. The biographies of the bishops contain realistic details of everyday life, although there is also an attempt to link human existence with the events of Sacred history. At the same time, the correlation of the Icelandic bishops with their foreign contemporaries shows that the Anonym considers the history of the Icelandic church not only in a local perspective, but as part of world history, in which his compatriots have a significant place.
Key words: early history of the Icelandic church, Skálholt, bishops, Hungrvaka, chronicle, family saga, hagiographic topoi, biblical allusions, narrative techniques
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