Minor knowledge. Microhistory, scribal communities and the importance of institutional structures...

QUADERNI STORICI 140 / a. XLVII, n. 2, agosto 2012

MINOR KNOWLEDGE

MICROHISTORY, SCRIBAL COMMUNITIES, AND THEIMPORTANCE OF INSTITUTIONAL STRUCTURES

xThe authors interpretation of the manuscript exchange – the scribal com-

munity – as a sociocultural network places a large question mark against thetraditional view of the development of literacy and education in the world. Inrural Iceland, formal institutions of the kinds that modern historians tend toconcentrate on were only one of the channels through which the popular de-sire for knowledge was served – and in most cases not even the most importantone. Set against this were these groups of lay scholars – barefoot historians –,and it seems fair to see them, and in fact the scribal culture as a whole, as aninformal institution, at least on a par with the official institutions. This insti-tution provided ordinary people with the opportunity to obtain knowledgeand seek entertainment, to organize and document their lives, to express theirfeelings and opinions, and to communicate and maintain relationships. It isargued in this article that the activities of the popular scribes of Icelandic peas-ant culture were an essential factor in the education and culture of the peopleof Iceland, working in parallel to the institutions that ostensibly directed theseareas of society, with each influencing and being influenced by the other.

xLocal knowledge

Where does knowledge come from? How does it arise? Under whatcircumstances do people acquire the skills and competences needed todeal with life and how is this knowledge passed on from generationto generation? These are questions that lie close to the very heart ofsciences like history and other disciplines of human sciences. Part ofour job as historians is to identify and account for the methods thatordinary people have developed to come to terms with everyday lifeand the institutions on which it is founded. In this paper we attemptto suggest answers to some of these questions in a particular historicalsetting, while also considering the theoretical implications that theseattempts have had for historians.

496 Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, Davíð Ólafsson

This article takes as its subject an almost extreme example of «loc-al culture», the production, dissemination and consumption of hand-written material in Iceland in the second half of the 19th century. Indiscussing how this literary exchange operated we shall look at the so-cial relationships among the people that participated in it and the in-teraction it involved between individual agency and formal institutions.The picture that emerges, we believe, helps to shed light on certainaspects of historians’ attitudes towards the institutions that are viewedas fundamental in the regulation of human society. So we believe thereis advantage to be had in looking outside the conventional frameworkof historical research and considering new material, material that wechoose, in a spirit of irony, to name «minor knowledge». By this wemean material that, by international standards, is perceived as trivialand inconsequential, material that has barely been touched by, andhas had absolutely no influence on, «the global perspective». Once webreak out of the traditional boundaries and standardised processes ofscholarship into unexplored areas of «local knowledge», we may hopeto come across material that can shed new light on institutional struc-tures, that may force us to question our received and accepted notionsof them. As we see it, this is where microhistory can make its greatestcontribution to modern scholarship, by moving out beyond the con-ventional framework of historiography into areas where knowledge hasflourished that has remained relatively unknown to the world at large.

The society we are looking at, rural Iceland in the 19th century,was uncomplicated, uniform, conservative, and small in population –in the year 1900 the country numbered only around 78,000 inhabit-ants. We shall discuss the structure of this society and the main factorsthat shaped it, and look at how the formal institutional frameworksupported its form and functions. We will draw special attention tothe importance within this society of the interaction between educa-tion and everyday life and the forces at play that motivated each ofthem.

Social and cultural historians in Iceland are immensely fortunatein having at their disposal a great wealth of first-person sources andother handwritten material that has come down to us from the pens ofordinary working men and women of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.The production of these sources and the motives that lay behind thisproduction will form a central part of this paper since they provide uswith unique evidence of people’s experience of the social structuresby which their lives were shaped at the times in question. We needto consider what kinds of sources this culture produced, how theyhave been preserved, and what motivated impoverished working people

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to endnotes vast amounts of time and effort into building up privatecollections of this material1.

Finally, we will look at what we call the «barefoot historians». Thiswas a loose group of lay peasant «scholars», largely self-educated andself-motivated, each working independently in his own part of the coun-try with his own particular areas of interest, but collectively formingan informal network that had a great influence over popular culturein the rural regions of Iceland. Its members exchanged correspond-ence and material and shaped each other’s thinking in various, oftenunpredictable, ways. The activities of these men (for most were men)had immeasurable significance for the society in which they lived byensuring that many if not most homes in the country had access tocultural material that would otherwise have been completely outsidetheir range of experience. We shall attempt to draw up a definition ofthe phenomenon we call «minor knowledge» and how it worked onpeople’s thinking in 19th-century Iceland.

xSociety and the structure of the educational system

The most obvious feature of Icelandic society in the 18th and 19thcenturies is the sparse and scattered nature of its settlement. In socialand cultural importance the local farming districts (sveitir) reigned su-preme, dwarfing in influence the little pockets of urban settlement thatstarted to build up during the period, largely at fishing centres aroundthe coast. The land was poor and its inhabitants were entirely subjectto the vagaries of the weather. Through much of the country farmingconditions were extremely hard throughout the 18th century and thingsonly started to improve after around 1820. Thereafter changes in livingconditions, working practices and culture began to gather pace. Thenew conditions that emerged in most areas of life in the 19th centurylaid the foundations for the even greater changes that were to occur inthe century that followed2. Up to the turn of the 20th century, however,Iceland remained underdeveloped in most respects and its infrastruc-ture primitive. The country was almost entirely rural, with farmsteadsscattered usually at long distances throughout the lower lying areas.Communications were rendered difficult by the total absence of roadsand bridges and a terrain dominated by mountains, ice and fast-flowingrivers.

The political structure too was relatively uncomplicated. There werebasically three formal power groups in the country, but with consider-able crossover between them: firstly and secondly government officials


and the clergy, and thirdly, farmers – both landowning farmers andtenant farmers, exercising their power through the local administration.The power behind the first two groups was derived ultimately from theking of Denmark, but the third one depended on economic wealth ofindividual farmers and their social status.

The formal structure of Icelandic society in this period was alsoextremely simple, with at its heart the participation of legally competentmales, chiefly landowning farmers and tenant farmers, plus ministersof the Church and public officials. These groups were generally con-servative and in favour of state controls in secular affairs. They wereresponsible for local administration and exerted effective control overwork opportunities and the social position of those outside their groupthrough the system of annual contracts of service. The influence of thisarrangement, whereby landless labouring folk committed themselves towork at a particular farm for a year at a time, stretched out into justabout every area of society, including education and culture in general.

Education in 18th and 19th-century Iceland came in two separ-ate but complementary forms. Until the 20th century there were fewschools and children received the elements of formal education fromtheir parents at home under the general supervision of the Church. Thisformal education at home covered reading and, later, the rudimentsof writing. The material used was entirely religious in content and de-signed to prepare children eventually for confirmation at the age offourteen. After learning the alphabet children usually went on to rotememorisation of the Kverið, an annotated version of Luther’s MinorCatechism. This proceeded relatively slowly: up to the age of ten, chil-dren were expected to cover only a few sections a year and thereafterbuild up steadily from this. Even though most of our contemporarysources complain about having to learn these texts, it seems never tohave occurred to them simply to refuse. In this there were strong socialpressures at play: to be officially admitted into the adult world, and soto have a chance of moving forward in life, a child had to be confirmed,and parents were therefore very anxious to ensure that their childrenmastered their catechism3.

There were other factors that made it relatively easy for parents tomotivate their children to learn their lessons, most notably dread of thepastoral inspections. Every farm was visited by a minister of the Churchonce or twice a year, principally to ensure domestic rectitude and tocheck on the children’s educational progress. As Pétur Pétursson, his-torian and professor of theology at the University of Iceland, puts it, the«moral standard of each household was a part of pastoral care and thepastor was to use his influence and authority to improve the discipline

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and spiritual well-being of the people»4. Parents were well aware that iftheir children failed to come up to the pastor’s expectations this wouldreflect badly on their own reputation within the community. Similarly,children feared disappointing the pastor, since his displeasure wouldjeopardise their desire to be treated as responsible adult members of theChristian community, a potential sanction that was generally enoughto ensure that they put in the time and effort required to learn andmemorise their texts5.

For all its shortcomings, this statutory primary education receivedby (almost) all children in Iceland had a profound influence on societyand culture. But can these forces really explain why most children in19th-century Iceland learned to read and write from a relatively earlyage? And more importantly, does the increased level of basic literacy ex-plain why Icelanders, in their poor and underdeveloped society, actuallyread, and wrote, so much. Historians of literacy throughout the worldhave found themselves faced with similar questions. In Scandinavia, forexample, the concerted campaign introduced by Church and state atthe beginning of the 18th century to improve literacy has often beencited as being instrumental in explaining why the overwhelming major-ity of the public managed to learn to read with little aid from formalschooling; and that this advanced level of culture was the product offorces that emanated from within the formal and recognised structureof society, namely priest, parents and children, together with the socialpressure created by the interaction of these forces6.

This argument can be accepted up to a point: under the formalsystem, parishes had a statutory duty to attend to the intellectual andspiritual development of their residents: the pastor had a supervisoryrole; parents and guardians had an instituted responsibility to educatetheir children; and the children could not become full members of sec-ular or spiritual society without achieving the required level of educa-tion. But this alone cannot explain the uniquely high level of literacy inIceland and the kudos accorded to people whose literary abilities ex-ceeded the norm – poets, for example, or those with fine handwriting.Even though social pressures in Iceland and Scandinavia supported theofficial policies, there was no guarantee that people would see themthrough into practice unless they felt they had good reason to do soand circumstances made this possible7. We still have to explain exactlywhat it was in Icelandic society at the time that made this particularcampaign by Church and state so successful.

Crucially for attitudes in Iceland, alongside and largely independentof the statutory system there operated an informal educational systeminextricably linked with and heavily influenced by everyday farm life.


This informal educational system was unstructured and its benefitsvaried from person to person and according to circumstance. Althoughamong devout families it too might have a strong religious content,it was primarily secular in nature. In essence, what we have are twodifferent types of educational practice: one that was compulsory andrigid, and another that was fluid and fuelled by a desire for knowledgeand entertainment and rooted in popular culture.

Central to social and cultural life in Iceland was the tradition of thekvöldvaka (lit. «evening wake»), held on farms during the long winterevenings8. The entire household, including servants and children, wouldgather in the main room and entertain each other while getting on withtheir work (carding, spinning, making and repairing implements, etc.).The scene is described by Pétur Pétursson:

On those occasions the entire household gathered on winter evenings inthe largest room (sometimes the only living room) of the farmhouse for variousindoor activities, including the telling of stories, folk sagas and fairy tales.Ballads, the so-called rímur, were also recited on these occasions. Popularisedversions of traditional narratives about old Nordic heroes and the sagas wereoften a part of the entertainment. Over the years they had been memorisedand converted into popular ballads9.

The entertainment was usually largely literary in nature, especiallyreading aloud, but it could also include singing, word games, extem-porising verses, etc. The gathering usually ended with a húslestur, «ahouse-reading», i.e. a reading from printed sermons by popular preach-ers, followed by the singing of hymns. The whole activity was a welcomedistraction for most people in rural Iceland, not least the children. Vir-tually all the Icelandic autobiographers testify to it having been in thesetting of these gatherings that they developed their first real taste forculture and education.

The key to the dramatic rise in literacy in 18th- and 19th-centuryIceland, as we see it, lies in the working practices on Icelandic farms, andin particular in the fact that work did not preclude education and evenpromoted it10. One important function of the winter-evening gatheringswas to provide a forum for children to «do their homework». An estab-lished part of the activities was getting the children to read, for instancefrom their Catechism, correcting them and giving them directions asrequired. This the adults could do while still fully occupied on theirworking tasks. The element of entertainment involved (for the adults atleast) helped to ease the tedium of the domestic chores and so served toincrease productivity. And productivity was all-important! Had it not

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been possible to combine work and education, had children not hadthe opportunity to practise their reading without interrupting the workflow of the adults, it seems reasonable to suppose that all attempts at im-proving children’s education would have fallen by the wayside becauseof total lack of formal educational resources within the social structure.

The kvöldvaka was also of inestimable importance to cultural de-velopment and continuity in another way. As noted, a major part inthe entertainment consisted of one member of the household readingaloud to the others as they worked. In general, people were not partic-ularly selective about what they read; they read whatever was to hand.Most families in the latter part of the 19th century owned or had ac-cess to a certain amount of printed secular literature, most often thesagas, newspapers and magazines, poetry and novels in translation11.But overall, printed material available to ordinary people was fairly dryand uninspiring and limited in quantity – certainly insufficient to main-tain the fertile kvöldvaka culture that, judging from the comments ofthe Icelandic autobiographists, provided many people with their mosttreasured moments in life.

With print material so scarce, the demand for varied, exciting orinformative reading was filled from other sources, sources that havehitherto been largely overlooked by professional historians. Operatingamong the isolated farms of Iceland was a loose and informal institutionthat we may call «the People’s Press» – men and women who dedicatedmuch of their (limited) spare time to copying by hand texts passed downfrom earlier ages. The vast majority of these copyists lived in grindingpoverty under punishingly harsh conditions, yet did not flinch fromdevoting large parts of their lives to this work. Many of them managed tobuild up extraordinary collections of texts and sources, some of whicheventually in the 20th century found their way into public archives.

xScribal communities and vernacular literacy

The term «scribal community» derives from the work of the Aus-tralian bibliographer Harold Love in the early 1990s. In his ground-breaking study Scribal publication in seventeenth century England Lovedefines scribal communities as «groups ... bonded by the exchange ofmanuscripts». Manuscript transmission, according to Love, had the im-portant function of «bonding groups of like-minded individuals intoa community, sect or political faction with the exchange of texts inmanuscript serving to nourish a shared set of values and to enrich per-sonal allegiances»12. The British literary scholar Jason Scott-Warren has


since used the concepts «manuscript network» and «manuscript com-munity» to describe similar phenomena: «Communities are brought in-to being through shared practices … a manuscript community is a groupof people who bond through the exchange of handwritten texts»13.

Love’s and Scott-Warren’s ideas are directly applicable to the ex-tensive relations between scribes and their clients in 19th-century Ice-land, between readers and their audiences, between the lenders andborrowers of texts, between poets and anthologists, between mastersand their apprentices and not least among the informal networks ofprivate enthusiasts we in an earlier joint paper from 2002 describedas «barefoot historians»14. In this paper, after discussing the apparentdisparity between the weak state of institutional literacies and the vig-orousness of the vernacular literacies, we suggested that there mightbe something in between the two worth investigating, some kind ofinformal institutional structure15. By abandoning the conventional in-stitutional approach to the history of education and literary activity andlooking at the phenomenon rather from the point of view of individualpractitioners and their personal histories and records, we argued thatthese autodidacts and lay scholars – the barefoot historians – playeda leading role in maintaining the vigorous literary culture that existedamong the popular classes of Iceland.

Since we wrote in 2002 things have moved forward, in two ways.Firstly, our continuing research, the main findings of which are sum-marised in the final part of the present paper, has lent further support tothe hypothesis set out in the earlier article of the centrality and import-ance of these barefoot historians to popular culture in 19th-century Ice-land. And secondly, our findings have been reflected in large numbersof studies of similar activities from around the world, studies which haveled to a re-assessment of the status of manuscript circulation between1500 and the present day. This on-going re-assessment of the scribalculture of recent centuries has been conducted on the borders betweena number of different academic disciplines – literary history, the historyof the book, bibliography, philology, and the new cultural history. Wehave attempted to introduce microhistory into the equation, with whatwe feel are interesting results. Much of the important early work onscribal culture centred on the literature of early modern England but inthe last few years the field has widened considerably with the publica-tion of studies along similar lines that have provided revealing insightsinto manuscript exchange in areas such as France, Spain, Italy, Ireland,Scandinavia, Japan and China16. In an article from 2007, the Frenchcultural historian Roger Chartier summarises the current state of know-ledge in the light of recent research from around the world as follows:

Minor Knowledge 503

With the work dedicated to manuscript production in England, Spainand France over the past decade, no one today would argue that «this» (theprinting press) killed «that» (the manuscripts) ... In short, it is now recognizedthat printing, at least in the four centuries of its existence, did not lead to thedisappearance of handwritten communication or manuscript publication17.

One of the most marked features of this «manuscript turn» amongresearchers into textual transmission is a shift of emphasis from bigsystems like printing to smaller units and slower-operating systems inwhich individual agency plays the central role.

As we see it, 19th-century Iceland provides an unusually good test-ing ground to analyse the workings and importance of the kinds ofconnections noted above, especially as in Iceland these connections in-volve the general working population, in contrast to what we find inmost other parts of the world. In the next sections we shall look at twoforms in which this exchange took place, on the one hand local scribalcommunities based on geographical and/or political boundaries, forinstance the district or commune, and on the other hand networks thatlinked active participants irrespective of where they lived. We shall startwith Sighvatur Grímsson Borgfirðingur (1840-1930), who represents anexcellent example of a self-educated scholar, writer and copyist whofound an outlet for his passions and abilities in both forms of scribalcommunity18.

Sighvatur Grímsson’s multifarious connections with the vernacularliterary practices of the communities in which he lived over the courseof his life, from childhood to old age, are immensely revealing on botha cultural and an institutional level. Sighvatur was an inveterate writerthroughout his long life. He scratched out this first letters at the age often using models he had collected for himself, and committed his lastwords to paper eighty years later as he lay on his death-bed approachingthe age of ninety. The sheer quantity of output in Sighvatur’s hand al-most beggars belief and now occupies 200 shelf numbers in the archivesof the Manuscript Department of the National and University Libraryof Iceland (hereafter NULI) – all produced while fully employed work-ing on or running farms19. His papers constitute an extraordinary richsource of information on the nature of manuscript circulation in 19th-century Iceland. They provide us with a detailed picture of his element-ary education as a child and of the interplay between print culture andmanuscript culture during his lifetime. The picture we receive raisesfundamental questions about the levels of literacy in a culture that op-erated three parallel modes of text transmission: oral, manuscript andprint. It also testifies to the crucial role played by manuscript culture


in people’s efforts to educate themselves in a nearly schoolless society,particular in what we learn of Sighvatur’s activities in his adolescentyears and early twenties. Once he had established his reputation asa writer and copyist, Sighvatur fulfilled various functions within thecommunities in which he lived – general supplier of texts of all kindsand in all forms, reader of sagas and reciter of rímur, tireless collectorof material to be lent for reading or copying, scribe commissioned totranscribe and compile texts, letter writer, and occasional poet.

It is first and foremost two works that capture the attentionof scholars interested in the life and works of Sighvatur GrímssonBorgfirðingur. First, Sighvatur’s diaries hold a special place among the300 or so diaries by Icelanders preserved from the 18th, 19th and firstdecades of the 20th century20. Firstly, these are the longest continuousdiary writings to have come down to us from the hand of an Icelander.The first entry is dated 1 January 1863, when Sighvatur was just over22 years of age and in service as a farmhand, and the last a few daysbefore his death in January 1930, almost exactly 67 years later. Second,the physical format and textual history of the diaries is interesting: theyare to a large extent preserved in duplicate, with the fair copy attract-ively bound. Third, the diaries are notable for how precisely they re-cord Sighvatur’s literary activities over these almost seven decade, des-pite the daily entries being neither long nor detailed. Thus the diariesprovide a great deal of information on literary culture and especiallymanuscript circulation in the communities in which Sighvatur lived atany time.

The other work that has more than anything else served to keepSighvatur’s name alive up to the present day is his biographical registerof ministers of the Icelandic church, Prestaæfir. These «brief lives»were Sighvatur’s true life’s work, a vast compilation extending to justunder 15,000 pages. He started collecting the material for them around1870 and worked on them more or less his entire life, or for around60 years21.

In addition to these two multi-volume works, Sighvatur’smanuscript collection contains an enormous variety of handwrittentexts of all kinds, ranging from traditional popular literary genres suchas the sagas of Icelanders, romantic sagas (riddarasaga) and metricalromances (rímur) to learned and educational material, scientific writ-ings, travel books and devotional literature. Mixed together withinthe collection are old and new texts, transcripts and original compos-itions. The material is both Icelandic and foreign, secular and reli-gious, learned and popular, elevated and homespun. Taken in total,Sighvatur’s manuscript remains therefore provide excellent testimony

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of the nature of manuscript exchange in the second half of the 19th cen-tury – the collection and dissemination of knowledge, entertainment,personal expression, recording of events, correspondence and person-al contact, etc. – while also containing information on the powerfulnetwork of connections and communications among those who wereactive in the scribal communities around him.

Sighvatur Grímsson was born in 1840 into a poor fisherman’s familyin the village of Akranes in western Iceland. His father died when hewas ten, and after the death of his mother in 1859 Sighvatur moved awayfrom the village. He worked for a decade as a farmhand and fishermanin the lands around Breiðafjörður, the great bay on the west coast ofIceland, before obtaining a tenancy on a meagre croft called Klúka alittle to the north in Strandasýsla in 1869. After four years at KlúkaSighvatur moved with his family to the farm of Höfði in Dýrafjörður onthe northwest coast, where he remained for the rest of his long life.

Sighvatur’s childhood surroundings in Akranes were the scene ofthe little formal education he received and played an important partin the self-education he managed to acquire through grit and determ-ination. In his fragmentary autobiography, written in 1892, Sighvaturgives a brief description of how he, like most other children at the time,learned to recognise the letters and put them together into words andsentences22. At the time he was seven years old and his teacher washis mother.

Around the middle of the 19th century there was a move in Icelandaway from the use of the traditional Gothic print to Roman. Sighvaturlearned his letters from his mother from a book printed in Gothic let-tering just as she had learned it herself. Sighvatur goes on to describehow, shortly afterwards, he managed to get hold of a two-page spreadin Roman type and immediately set about comparing the different letterforms and so, by his own account, was able to read any printed materialthat came his way within a few months. At the time printed books werestill few in number and to a large extent limited to religious content;secular and instructive reading material was available, but almost en-tirely in manuscript form, passed around from person to person. Inorder to have access to this fund of handwritten texts Sighvatur appliedhimself to learning to read hand-scripted books, using the same methodas before23.

Once Sighvatur was able to read both printed and handwrittentexts, he set about learning to write. His mother, like the great major-ity of working women in the middle years of the 19th century, was inall probability unable to write and his unpublished autobiography hasnothing to say on the subject concerning his father, who died around


this time. Sighvatur mentions that he received no instruction in writ-ing in his family home nor elsewhere in Akranes, though by Icelandicstandards this was a comparatively big place24. But while he complainsthat there was no one to actually teach him to write, it also appears thateven in his childhood he had little difficulty getting hold of handwrittenbooks from various sources, first when learning to read and later asmodels when learning to write. Here we have evidence of the informalways open to children and young people with a taste for reading toeducate themselves in literacy skills and the literary culture that flour-ished under these primitive conditions.

Sighvatur’s account of his early autodidactic endeavours allows usan insight into the local availability of handwritten texts as well as theirplace in society more generally. He mentions that he made use of atranscript of Guðmundur Berg+órsson’s Rímur af Eiríki víðförla [Rímurof Eiríkur the Far-travelled] in the hand of a local poet and scribe,Lýður Jónsson (1800-1876), when trying to extend his competence inreading from print to hand script. The name of Lýður Jónsson is nowcompletely forgotten, but in his time he was a well-known popular poetand his works achieved a wide currency despite never finding theirway into print25. NULI preserves around 80 manuscripts directly asso-ciated with his name, most of them hand copies of his verse from theperiod 1825-1925 plus some autograph manuscripts. Sighvatur collec-ted Lýður’s verse in his youth and continued to produce copies of hiswork later in his life, as well as works by other poets from Lýður’s tran-scripts26. In many of Sighvatur’s later verse anthologies we find otherremnants of the local poetry he had grown up with four decades earlier,including verses of his own and by his father and the works of severalpoets of the Akranes area27.

Most of what Sighvatur copied up in his adolescent years he ob-tained from people in his immediate vicinity. In a short and ratheropaque paragraph in his autobiography he mentions that while still atAkranes he had begun to transcribe some of the sagas for himself whenhe found someone he could borrow them from, but that at the timethere were few copies available28. Here Sighvatur may be referring tosome of his earliest material in his archive, three sagas and one shortertale that he transcribed at the age of eighteen29. Even earlier than this,however, are some transcripts of Sighvatur’s in a miscellany of severalrímur cycles and other material, dating from the mid 1850s30. The fi-nal section of this miscellany, in particular, bears impressive testimonyto the educational aspect of scribal culture in early modern and mod-ern Iceland – a text of just over 70 pages headed «The book of know-ledge, transcribed from a manuscript composed by the late Revd. Snorri

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Björnsson of Húsafell»31. Snorri’s original manuscript, now in NULI,was in the 1850s in the possession of a grandson of the scribe, SnorriJakobsson, a farmer at Klettur in Borgarfjörður, not far from Akranes,and it seems most likely that Sighvatur borrowed it from him32. Theseemingly transparent heading of Sighvatur’s transcript is in fact some-what misleading and properly applies only to certain parts of the text:Sighvatur’s text includes only selected parts of Snorri’s monograph,combined with material from other manuscripts, and with a certaindegree of rearrangement of the material used.

The scribal community in which Sighvatur Grímsson grew up inAkranes provided him with an important forum for his first forays in-to the world of books and texts. But there is nothing to suggest, sofar as literary activity and attitudes to literature and learning are con-cerned, that there was any significant difference between this particu-lar community of farmers and fishermen and others like it around thecountry. It seems a reasonable to hypothesise that the sheer drabnessof the Icelandic farming society, with its dearth of external variety andstimulation, produced conditions that encouraged interested writers todevelop their crative skills along lines established, however indistinctly,by predecessors with similar interests. The stimulus for their writingsindubitably came from their environment – the demand for material forreading aloud at the winter-evening gatherings and the desire amongordinary people for escapism from the toils of daily life by immers-ing themselves in an imaginary world of poetry and stories. Certainly,Sighvatur Grímsson took his scribal enthusiasm to unusual lengths, aswe shall see later; but people like him turn up in all parts of the countrywho responded to the call of the times in a similar way, if not alwayswith the same degree of intensity. In order to understand why and howthese people emerged and their links with the formal institutions ofeducation and culture that prevailed in the country at the time we mustlook at their working methods and the personal connections that boundthem together – that is, at the scribal culture as it flourished outside theconventional channels of society.

The young Sighvatur set about developing his literacy skills andlater his familiarity with literary culture and scholarship with single-minded determination. Ahead of him lay a period of ten years as a farmlabourer, which in Sighvatur’s case was also to be a period of extendedself-education in scribal practice. Sighvatur’s life course followed, inbroad terms, the prescribed route defined by the social and econom-ic structure of 19th-century Iceland. In his nineteenth year his officialstatus changed to that of serving farmhand and he worked in this capa-city in various households for nearly a decade; then, in his late twenties,


he married and took over the tenancy of a small farmstead. But while,so far as official social and economic status was concerned, SighvaturGrímsson diligently followed the recognised path from childhood toadulthood – a period of apprenticeship in service on farms under an-nual contracts of labour, followed by acquisition of a tenancy on whichhe could set up independently – his literary inclinations led him also toseek alternative paths in life. Just as the period of farm service might beconsidered a comprehensive practical training for farmers-to-be, onemight view the scribal culture during the same life stage as a forum fora secondary literary education for those who wanted it. And this wasthe educational path that Sighvatur Grímsson chose to follow.

Three years into his farmhand period Sighvatur Grímsson relocatedto Flatey, the largest inhabited island in the bay of Breiðafjörður. Amonghis fellow residents was an elderly lay historian, poet and copyist namedGísli Konráðsson. Despite an age difference of more than half a century,the two autodidacts became close friends, with a shared passion forliterature, history and learning. In his autobiography (written in thirdperson), Sighvatur expresses his appreciation to Gísli for his part in hiseducational development and describes how Gísli took him under hiswing in a kind of master/pupil relationship:

It was in these years that he became fully acquainted with GísliKonráðsson, who lent him one manuscript after another, as fast as Sighva-tur could copy them, and taught him and guided at every step. Gettingto know Gísli, it was as if a new world opened up for Sighvatur. Andthough Sighvatur was a serving labourer and had little time, he diligen-tly used his every free moment, both day and night, copying Gísli’s sto-ries and books of historical learning. Every day he could spare on Flateythey spent together, from morning to night. And though Gísli was a mostcheerful man even in his old age, he was frequently very sad when theyhad to part and said so often. This is how it was through all the yearsthey knew each other: Sighvatur had free access to the vast treasures ofGísli’s studies, to Gísli’s great delight. And when Sighvatur was away atthe fishing stations he collected all he could find for Gísli: news of variousevents, old and new, accounts of accidents, additions to genealogies, andso on33.

From this passage and other contemporary records we can infer thatthe scribal relations between Sighvatur and Gísli were of various kindsand operated on various levels. First, Sighvatur appears to have actedas a kind of assistant to Gísli, collecting material for him and in someinstances carrying out transcriptions for him34. Through this, Sighvaturwas able to learn the methods and procedures of scribal transmission

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from an experienced master. Second, the relationship put at Sighvatur’sdisposal a unique library of handwritten texts that he could copy fromand thus build up his own collection and expand his historical andliterary horizons. Copying and compiling texts from a variety of sourcesand media became an important feature of Sighvatur’s ever-growingliterary repertoire through his twenties; indeed, it was a prerequisite ofhis role as a «broker» of texts. Both Sighvatur’s diary and the contentsof his manuscript collection bear witness to the extent to which GísliKonráðsson’s personal archive became the fundamental resource forSighvatur’s transcripts, either for his own use or for projects on com-mission. Their relationship was thus absolutely central to Sighvatur’sprogramme of educational advancement.

Sighvatur Grímsson’s literary activities in the Breiðafjörður regionin the 1860s amounted to more than a purely personal attempt to satisfyhis apparently unquenchable thirst for knowledge. He was also an activeparticipant in a network of textual communications, circulated throughvarious channels and involving print, manuscript, and as we will see, oraltransmission. Over the course of a decade of intensive self-educationwithin the fertile cultural milieu of Breiðafjörður, Sighvatur slowly butsteadily came to take on the role of semi-professional community scribe.The tasks he undertook for others during this period were usually fairlyminor – writing correspondence and occasional poetry and the like forneighbours and friends. This role as community scribe comes to thefore in the subsequent stage of his life, the four years he spent as atenant farmer in the Kaldrananeshreppur commune.

Sighvatur arrived at Klúka in Kaldrananeshreppur with his wife andyoung son in June 1869. Getting his own farm after almost a decadeserving on others did not by any means bring an end to poverty andhardship. For the four years the family lived at Klúka life remainedin most ways extremely tough. But this was simultaneously a highlyproductive period in Sighvatur’s scribal career. His autobiography givesthis condensed portrait of life at Klúka:

There he [i.e. Sighvatur] lived for four years in straitened circumstancesand much discomfort in a harsh place and earned his living mostly by writingfor others. There he copied the Great History of the Jews by the historianJosephus, on 846 pages of folio in very small script, for Jón Guðmundsson ofHella, for which he received nearly 60 dalir. He also transcribed Bastholm’sJewish History for Einar Gíslason, carpenter of Sandnes, who fostered one ofhis children for a whole winter, the travel book of Jón [Ólafsson] Indíafari,and much more besides for various people, genealogy and miscellaneousbooks, but little for himself...35.


Here Sighvatur notes some (but not all) of his major commissionsduring this period, their purchasers and what he was paid. He alsomakes more broad reference to other smaller jobs and gives the gener-al impression that the greater part of his income came from writing,despite – at least so far as official status was concerned – his beingfirst and foremost a farmer and fisherman. His diaries from the Klúkayears provide vivid evidence of a vigorous exchange of manuscripts andprinted material between him and substantial proportion of his loc-al community, including private individuals, families and households,men, women and adolescents, well-off farmers, poor resident labour-ers and farmhands. Studying the diaries in detail, we become aware ofa huge interest in reading in most households, fuelled and providedfor by Sighvatur’s indefatigable input. It should, however, be stressedthat the movement of manuscripts was by no means solely one way,from Sighvatur to the community, and that the act of transcriptioncould be the result of a series of agreements and transactions withinthe manuscript network.

Sighvatur’s scribal work during the Klúka years falls into two maingroups, for himself and for others. Each type must be viewed in thecontext of the scribal community in which he lived and operated at anytime and the supplies of texts, writers, readers and audiences he wasassociated with, directly or indirectly. In the transcripts he producedfor himself Sighvatur collated material from older manuscripts, printedtexts and occasionally from oral performance, which were then passedon again as loans or copies. Little by little Sighvatur managed to amassa large library of manuscript material, the essential basis for his abilityto serve his community as a source of information and entertainment.

A revealing example of the interaction between these two aspects ofSighvatur’s work occurs in his genealogical output. As with many otherliterary and historical/antiquarian genres, genealogy had moved frombeing a purely upper-class pursuit, aimed at legitimating wealth andpower, and been taken up enthusiastically by popular and vernacularaudiences. This democratisation of genealogy in the 19th century wasserved by the rise of a group of semi-professional genealogists special-ising in drawing up family charts for individuals and families at all levelsof society. This genealogical work took place primarily within the worldof manuscript culture, though occasionally it found its way into print.In the case of Sighvatur and many others, genealogy formed one aspectof much wider historical and literary interests. His genealogical writingscan be divided broadly into two main types. The first one consisted ofthe general amassing of genealogical information from the time of thesettlement of Iceland up to his own time. Sighvatur’s collections contain

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several manuscripts of this type, either written by Sighvatur himself orcollected by him. The largest of these is a comprehensive six-volumecompilation produced around the end of the century, the final fruitsof decades of untiring searching out and analysis of information froma wide range of sources36.

Sighvatur’s expanding genealogical collection provided the basis forhis second type of work in this area, the drawing up of personal ancestrallineage charts on commission for friends and neighbours. On thesecharts Sighvatur would trace the ancestry of the purchaser (and usuallytheir spouse) some centuries back in time, often to the settlements andbeyond. Such charts were among Sighvatur’s most sought-after scribalproducts during his time at Klúka. His diary entries record details ofeighteen of them: eleven made for neighbours in Kaldrananeshreppur,five more for people in a nearby district, and two that Sighvatur hadstarted earlier and finished at Klúka. One of the most striking thingsabout these lineage charts, apart from the popularity of the product, isthe social range of the customers, which included farm labourers andsmall crofters as well as well-to-do landholding farmers, and womenas well as men.

Two general conclusions can be made concerning the scribal com-munity in Kaldrananeshreppur and Sighvatur’s part in it. The firstis that even if, as a popular scholar, Sighvatur was not unique in19th-century Iceland, his contribution to his local literary communitywas immense and varied. He brought with him a substantial libraryof manuscripts and printed books, the skill to read and transcribethem for others, and an unstinting dedication to the cause of circu-lating these texts and seeking out new ones. The second is that theKaldrananeshreppur community offered fertile soil for such activity.The daily entries in Sighvatur’s diaries reveal a brisk and enthusiasticdemand for transcripts and original writings, poetry and books on loan,both in manuscript and in print. Within this milieu Sighvatur servedas a kind of multifunctional «cultural institution». His mastery of thetrade of scribe and lay scholar can only have been helped by the factthat he lived in a community with a vibrant literary network that seemsto have warmly embraced people with such skills.

In many ways – in the kinds of work he undertook, his relationshipswith his neighbours, and his functions within the local community –Sighvatur’s life continued along similar line during his long residence atthe farm of Höfði in Dýrafjörður, from 1873 until his death in 1930. Butwith a difference: we know that, as Sighvatur’s reputation as a scribeand scholar grew, so did his network of literary contacts and his sourcesof work and materials. In this section we have focused mainly on the


scribal community as a unit existing within and forming part of a form-al administrative community and serving its local needs. But this over-simplifies matters so far as people like Sighvatur Grímsson were con-cerned. Like many others of these barefoot historians of rural Iceland,Sighvatur went on to build up networks of scribal relations that exten-ded far beyond his local community. As his reputation for diligence anderudition became established, his intellectual circle expanded to takein not only local poets and lay scholars like himself but also numerousformally educated scholars, both within Iceland and beyond.

xManuscript networks and barefoot historians

Having looked at local scribal communities, we now need to con-sider the more nebulous networks of scribes, writers and collectors thatextended beyond communal boundaries. Rather than being circum-scribed by formal or informal geographical limits, networks of this kindwere built up around personal contacts and the shared interests of in-dividuals. At the heart of such groups lay the exchange of manuscripts,whether literary texts, historical or other informational material, or evenpersonal writings. Letters, which themselves form a significant part ofthe scribal culture of the 19th century, were the primary medium forthese communications, alongside deliveries of manuscripts and person-al meetings among those who belonged to the network. In 1913, ÞórðurÞórðarson Grunnvíkingur, labourer and fisherman at Ísafjörður in theWestfjords, wrote to Níels Jónsson, farmer and fisherman at Gjögur onthe other side of the peninsula. His letter starts as follows:

Sincerest thanks for your letter of the 3rd of this month. It was one ofthe best two letters I have received in my life, the other being from SighvaturGrímsson Borgfirðingur. Most of my other letters I rate as more or lessworthless. People who write generally open with a salutation, then start offabout cows, horses, dogs, etc. This usually takes them 4-5 lines, after whichthey have come to an end of everything that is on their mind. So the letters areusually over at this point, to the irritation of most everyone that receives them,if they are anything like me. The worst of it is that you are not going to geta reply from my hand that does yours justice. I liked your letter enormouslyin every way, with all it had to tell me about the lately departed Halldór. SoI copied the letter out word for word into my diary, with notes on anythingI felt was needful. I mentioned Halldór this winter to Dr Jón Þorkelsson,keeper of the national archives, along with various other notable people. Also,Samúel Guðmundsson, farmer from Miðdalsgröf [Halldór’s father-in-law],has asked me to come to an agreement with Dr Jón over the sale of Halldór’s

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books, may he rest in peace, but this I do not want to do. Other than this, thatI promised Samúel that I would write to Dr Jón and let him know that thiswas an interesting and learned collection of manuscripts. They can fight it outover the sale themselves; I want no part in it. I have recently received a letterfrom Dr Jón, very friendly. In it Jón says he has written to Dr Finnur Jónssonin Copenhagen and mentioned me to him. It is not unlikely that I shall hearfrom him. So I am now become a recognised ‘scholar’, which will probablybe the only mark of distinction I shall get from the Icelandic nation for myworks – small as they are, though not small when you consider the reasons. Ihave now collected annals in 3 volumes, both old and new ones according tocircumstance, as well as 7 volumes of miscellaneous learning…37.

At the time of the letter, Níels’s brother Halldór had recently died,drowned in a fishing accident just off the coast of the Westfjords, only42 years of age, leaving a wife and five young children. Níels had earliersought Þórður’s advice on how best to get the documents Halldór hadproduced over the years into the hands of the right people at the publicarchives. The material he had built up was vast in size, consisting of 24years of diaries and journals, poetry transcripts filling 15 volumes, someof them of up to 500 pages, and large amounts of other miscellaneouswritings. Also preserved were letters he had received from friends andcolleagues, together with copies of his own letters.

An interesting feature of Þórður’s letter is that it refers, on equalterms, to both popular writers and self-educated scholars like himselfand to some of the leading recognised academics and archivists in thecountry. Of the first type, in addition to Þórður, Níels and Halldór, weget men like the ubiquitous Sighvatur Grímsson Borgfirður, all of themactive lay scribes and manuscript collectors of the second half of the19th century. But more or less in the same breath, we find mentions ofFinnur Jónsson, professor of Scandinavian studies at the University ofCopenhagen and (by far) the leading scholar of Old Norse of his day,and Dr Jón Þorkelsson, then head of the National Archive in Reykjavík.All these men were united in some kind of spiritual union, regardlessof whether they conducted their activities in the halls of universitiesand public institutions or in the turf cottages of the impoverishedpeasantry in isolated corners of the country. This short letter thus castsan unexpected light on how Icelandic culture hung together, on theconnections between the great and the lowly on the cultural tree, aswell as giving us an insight into the close links that existed among theuneducated popular scholars. The work of these people was generallycarried out unobtrustively, without fanfare and without attracting muchnotice from the world outside. And at times they resented the lot that


fate had dealt them. For example, in his letter to Níels, after giving afairly detailed run-down of his writing activities Þórður touches on hispersonal experience of the world of scholarship: «This all comes fromsome penniless lightweight that most people have had little opinion ofand looked down on with scorn. But what is all this nonsense to me?Sooner or later they will have to experience their shame, and maybe soin the eyes of the nation»38.

Þórður copied Níels’s letter into his diary, which is why we still haveit. It starts as follows:

Dear and admired friend! I thank you sincerely for the letter from nowin April and the cutting, namely the article or epitaphy to my late brotherHalldór. You were the first person to let it be heard that what we had losthere was something more and better than the ordinary. In doing so youdemonstrated your perspicacity, that your mind was clear and serious in this,so you could not hold back from speaking. You were the first to recognisethat this was a man of ability, you had your own independent opinion, as ofcourse everyone knows that knows your name and are men of honour anddecency. I wished that you had had there with you 4 written books in hishand that are now here with me. There is much of note in them, of variouskinds and on many subjects, both in verse and in prose39.

Níels goes on to describe the contents of these books at some length,before adding:

Then there is one of his Compilation (miscellanea) books of over 400pages here with me. It contains a multitude of things. There is a lot by youfrom the autumn you were at Gjögur, not badly edited, spelling and so on withthe touch of his genius. That was the one autumn when our spiritual powersfound free rein and the vitality of the soul was alive at Gjögur. Oh my friend,now I might wish that you were here to look at these books, so beautifully havethey been produced and with countless varieties of miscellaneous material.These book are now to be dragged from my hands and it grieves me. Sincewinter I have not gone through them sufficiently well. They are so big. All hiswritten books are now on the point of being moved south to Reykjavík andprobably to the National Library. I am not sure but I know that they wrote tohis widow and made an offer and a request for them […] It always grieves meto think of how you were more or less forced away from here solely for lack ofmeans, the sunbeams of the soul dismissed as worthless, however much someday they will be judged more justly in this world. What could become of youif money had been sufficient to see you to an education? It is a deplorablethought, how the best souls disappear, so to speak, into the depth of time,without finding a way to show their worth, all for the sake of poverty. Myfriend! it makes me glad to hear how well you are received wherever anyone

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comes to know you. It is the attainments of the soul that fire the attentionor originality, even if it is often misunderstood, the mass only notices whatis like tiny bubbles on the ocean of time40.

We can hardly wonder that Þórður found this letter one of thebest he had ever received. But its personal nature should not deflectus from recognising the background against which it was written,and that author and recipient take entirely for granted: the worldof the Westfjord scholars was small but robust and vigorous, withimprobably good connections to both high and low, not just locallybut extending far out around the country and beyond. Its memberssupported and encouraged each other, exchanging materials and ideason all possible occasions. The thirst for knowledge among these peopleand the importance of their activities to the community at largecan hardly be overestimated. Although they were without exceptionworking people, their lives bound by the daily routines of their familyfarms, every spare moment of their lives seems to have gone intointellectual activity – reading, writing, calculating and speculating ontheir surroundings. Men like Sighvatur Grímsson, Þórður Þórðarssonand Níels and Halldór Jónsson owned and handled quantities of booksand manuscripts that almost beggars belief given their poverty andisolation. When necessary – when faced with material they had not seenbefore or that they feared might be lost to the community – they wouldtake time off work to write it up. It was often an expensive, arduousand time-consuming occupation, and the gains were neither obviousnor certain. One has to wonder why they took all the trouble.

As we have seen, these barefoot historians of northwest Iceland didnot operate alone and in isolation. The informal network they built up –exchanging material and information, getting together to meet and dis-cuss, sending each other letters of mutual support and encouragement –perhaps allow us to speak of a «Westfjord Academy» that flourished inthis northwest corner of Iceland in the final decades of the 19th centuryand beyond. As we have also seen, at times their connections reachedout to established scholars at «official» centres of learning. Probablymore significant, though, was the contribution of these networks to thegeneral populace of the country, by whom they were frequently held inhigh regard and for whom they functioned as a sort of informal instituteof cultural affairs. Without their efforts, without the supply of readingmaterial they provided, cultural life in rural Iceland would have beenseverely impoverished.

The following passage, from the diary of Magnús Hj. [Hjaltason]Magnússon (1873-1916), another self-educated scribe and scholar from


the northwest, provides a vivid insight into the methods of these layscholars and the breadth of their activities:

Fair weather, clear skies and no wind. This month I copied out the Rímurof the Infancy of Jesus Christ, or Maríu Rímur, written in 1654 by the Revd.Guðmundur Erlendsson, pastor at the farm of Fell in Sléttuhlíð in the districtof Hegranes. This poem is hard to come by: in this county [Ísafjörður] I knowof only two copies, one of them in the possession of Sighvatur [Grímsson]at the farm of Höfði, the other being the one I have copied. Originally alsoin the possession of Sighvatur, it now belongs to Sveinbjörn Kristjánsson,labourer from the village of Flateyri. Sveinbjörn is a little over thirty years ofage now. By birth he was a man of fine mental and physical attributes butas a young man, living in Dýrafjörður, he lost his way in a snowstorm andspent the night out in the open without shelter. He eventually made it onhis knees to a farmhouse but suffered serious frostbite and had to have hisright arm amputated at the elbow as well as the tips of the fingers on hisleft hand. Since then he has been one-handed but he is still extraordinarilyskilful at many tasks41.

As we can infer from the passage, one of Magnús’s conscious aimsin his literary endeavours was to save rare material from being lost,in this case a little-known religious poem from the 17th century. Thepassage also provides further testimony of the centrality of SighvaturGrímsson to the manuscript world of the Westfjords. We also meet anobscure farmhand, Sveinbjörn Kristjánsson, whom Magnús evidentlyheld in high regard. There is nothing remotely romantic or fancifulabout Magnús’s attitude to the activities of these scholars; he appreci-ates their contribution with a clear eye to the often arduous conditionsunder which it was performed.

In an entry a few days later, for 5 March 1899, Magnús writes asfollows: «On leaving Lambadalur I headed back out to Höfði to visitSighvatur the scholar Grímsson (Borgfirðingur) and stayed there thenight. I shared a bed with Sighvatur himself and there was much we hadto talk about»42. The scholars evidently got on well and it seems thatthe pair of them were unwilling to forgo one moment of the time theyhad together! It was a tight-knit group for whom Magnús had nothingbut the deepest respect. He was never happier than when some scholarcame to visit. When a member of the group died he was rememberedwith warmth and affection, and almost veneration, as in the followingdiary entry from 1910: «This spring died in Önundarfjörður JúlíusSesar Þorsteinsson of Breiðafjörður, a great copyist and writer, born 12July 1841. He was a tall man, of imposing countenance, intelligent andlearned, always easy to be with and a man of his word. He had not been

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taught to write as a child but taught himself this art around the age ofthirty, at a time when he was working on the fishing boats south underthe glacier [Snæfellsjökull]. After that he wrote a huge amount, mostlyrímur and sagas, making him among the greatest in this field. He wrotewith a fine, clear hand»43.

Magnús’s entry for 31 October 1912 records the death of HalldórJónsson, mentioned earlier, and then notes that the scholar JónBorgfirðingur had also died that month:

On the 20th of this month died in Reykjavík the renowned scholar JónBorgfirðingur, 86 years of age. He was one of the greatest champions of rímurpoetry, and he is thus sorely missed by all who love such work of genius. Jónthe scholar was a small man but with a noble countenance to him. I saw himonce at Höfði in Dýrafjörður in the summer of 1895. I was visiting SighvaturGrímsson Borgfirðingur, scholar from Höfði. Jón Borgfirðingur turned upthere to see Sighvatur, but he could only stay a short time as he was travellingby steamer which had put in briefly at Þingeyri44.

Here as before, Magnús speaks of these friends a deep fondnessand appreciation. To him, poets and scholars are pure heroes and thefinest men of their district. The overwhelming impression we get fromreading these entries is a sense of the profound admiration and respectthat Magnús felt for education and literature and those who made ittheir life’s work to uphold and propagate them.

All these men – Magnús, Halldór, Níels, Þórður and Sighvatur –kept diaries over the course of many years. Magnús began his in 1893when he was 19 and kept it up until his death in 1916, altogether 24years. The diary fills 4351 pages of quarto, in excellent handwritingand containing exhaustive details of his daily toils over these years, plushis reflections and poetry. The diary is interesting not only becauseMagnús maintained it so scrupulously and used it to record his opinions,attitudes and feelings for people and animals but because it reflects alife course that was constantly strewn with thorns. Magnús stood, in asense, on the cusp between the old world and the new. There are aspectsof his life that recall manners and customs that strike modern readers asinconceivable. Human rights that we nowadays take for granted weremore or less unknown to Magnús and his peers at the end of the 19thcentury and the start of the 20th. In his childhood he had been in receiptof poor relief because of his parents’ poverty and his own ill health anddestitution. As a result, later in life he was legally barred from marryinguntil he had paid off his debt to the commune. This he was never able todo and so was forced to live in unconsecrated cohabitation to the end of


his life. With his wife he fathered six children. Most died young and onlytwo reached adulthood. Magnús’s diaries, and those of the other majorparticipants in the scribal community we have been describing, all casta very clear light on the sharp contrasts between the harsh conditionsof life and the cultural enterprise these people used to counter it.

The scribal networks described here raise a number of questions.The output and sheer energy of their participants is undeniably remark-able and deserves our admiration. But, when all is said and done, howimportant were they? And what was their true role in and influenceon the society in which they operated? Were they isolated groups ofeccentrics who lived in a sealed-off world of literature and learning,on the margins of society at large? Were they viewed in some way as adanger to children and young people, their values a threat to the workethic that held peasant society together? Or were they regarded as ex-amples to be emulated? Are we perhaps justified in seeing in them a signof increased specialisation within rural society, men who were able tomake at least a part of their living out of a specialist skill, filling a publicneed for reading material, almanacs, bookkeeping and letter writing forboth private and public purposes? And if so, did they possibly impedethe spread of literacy, either as negative examples to be avoided or byremoving the need for others to develop their own literacy skills?

Icelandic popular culture at the time was too complex and multifa-ceted to allow categorical answers to these questions. Opinions doubt-less differed. But one thing is certain: it was the barefoot historianswho were responsible for the fact that there were supplies of writtenmaterial available to just about every household in every part in thecountry, and for this, in many instances, they won the respect, gratit-ude and friendship of their communities. This was often all they won.Many of these men sat and copied manuscripts day in day out – notonly on their own initiative but on commission – material that was laterhanded on from person to person, home to home. And for many, bothrich and poor, this material became the principal source of learning,knowledge and entertainment in a country where print publishing wassmall-scale, limited in scope, and beyond the financial means of mostof the population.

xMinor knowledge and the microhistorical approach

In Iceland the «acclimatisation» of microhistory and the re-evalu-ation of the scribal culture of later centuries have to a large extent gonehand in hand. The enormous and varied accumulation of handwritten

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material preserved in the Icelandic archives provides direct access tothe life and work – the ideas and culture – of thousands of individualsfrom all walks of society. Their meaning and importance still needs tobe analyzed in greater depth than we have done here in this article.The share magnitude of the scribal material is though indisputable.These individuals collectively make up families, groups and communit-ies that are connected by bonds of common interest with or competein struggles for power against other individuals, groups or institutions.The handwritten material that passed through the hands of the ordinarypeasant farming class in former centuries thus tells us more than simplyabout the history of literary culture in the country and its transmission;it opens ways of exploring the cultural and social history in general,providing us with a window on the ways of thinking and means ofexpression of the ordinary people, their communications and relation-ships, the symbolic meaning of the culture, and many other facets oftheir daily lives.

The origins of the Icelandic School of Microhistory (ISM) can inlarge measure be traced to an increasing appreciation among Icelandichistorians of the wealth of popular sources at their disposal, in particularautobiographies, diaries and collections of correspondence from the18th, 19th and 20th century, and it was to this material that most of theirearly attention was directed. From the start a central interest in thesesources centred on how they reflect on the educational and culturalhistory of the country.

The writings of men such as Sighvatur Grímsson Borgfirðingur andthe other barefoot historians described in this article are characterisedby what we have called «minor knowledge». By this we mean materi-al that has been largely ignored by the international academic world,which has tended to work primarily with sources that bear directly onthe formal institutions of society45. Even when the focus has been onordinary people and their lives, most of the attention has generally beendirected to the formal framework that encompassed these lives46. It isdifficult to accommodate Sighvatur and his fellows into work done withthese kinds of research emphases – to find the right pigeonholes underwhich to file the products of their minds, the right names to put tothe categories into which they might fit. Even in the context of «localknowledge», on their own home soil, they proved troublesome and in-scrutable to the academic world, since the knowledge to be found there,when all is said and done, was classified and understood on the basisof the grand narrative – on the basis of emphases and analytical modelsthat came from the international perspectives of traditional historicalscholarship.


What precisely are we to make of sources produced by ordinaryworking men and women who seem to have been driven by an urgeto record their observations on life and existence or copy out materialthat in some way gave their lives meaning, like the barefoot historianswe have been looking at in this paper? That, at heart, is the questionwe have been faced with47.

The research methods applied by microhistory have providedopportunities for discussion about the past on the level of what mightbe termed «in-between spaces» – grey areas that open up between theinstitutions themselves and the people connected with them. Ratherthan simply assume that communications between the two are always«one way», from the institutions to the people, who as a result becomealmost passive tools in their hands, devoid of will, we can identify a«discourse» within society that takes place within these «in-betweenspaces». Using this approach we feel we have managed to distinguishways that made it possible for ordinary people to exert a genuineinfluence on the workings of the institutions through their ideas andactions48. This is what we have tried to show in this article – that theactivities of the popular scribes of Icelandic peasant culture were anessential factor in the education and culture of the people of Iceland,working in parallel to the institutions that ostensibly directed these areasof society, with each influencing and being influenced by the other.Without the unique contribution of these people, which was based onunremitting toil and dedication to their self-appointed functions, wefeel it inconceivable that Icelandic peasant culture would have been ableto operate and flourish in the way that it did. The networks of contactsthese independent peasant scholars built up extended far and wideand created much deeper and more varied connections within societythan emerge from a purely institutional approach to the developmentof Icelandic society.

Our interpretation of this manuscript exchange as a socioculturalnetwork places a large question mark against the traditional view ofthe development of literacy and education in 19th-century Iceland. Inrural Iceland, formal institutions of the kinds that modern historianstend to concentrate on were only one of the channels through whichthe popular desire for knowledge was served – and in most cases noteven the most important one. Set against this were these groups ofbarefoot historians, and it seems fair to see them – and in fact thescribal culture as a whole – as an informal institution, at least on a parwith the official institutions. This institution provided ordinary peoplewith the opportunity to obtain knowledge and seek entertainment, toorganise and document their lives, to express their feelings and opin-

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ions, and to communicate and maintain relationships. For the major-ity of people, especially children, there were compelling psychologic-al factors that motivated the desire to broaden intellectual horizons.Reading and education provided an emotional release, a way of copingwith the emotional stress that constituted part of daily life, and becamean important tool in many people’s strategies for mental and spiritualsurvival. Without the network of barefoot historians and the «People’sPress» they established there would have been no way of satisfying thispopular hunger. The activities of these peasant farmers, farmhands andlay scholars probably do more than anything else to explain the steeprise in literacy in Iceland in the late 19th century and helped to createa working class most of whom took great pride in their ability to readand write, and in many cases to produce texts – diaries, autobiograph-ies, letters, both personal and public – that can stand up to the mostexacting modern scrutiny.

Our primary aim in this article has been to present a portrateof the activities of the barefoot historians of Iceland – the kindsof materials they worked on, how the networks that linked themoperated, and how they and their work was received among theircontemporaries. As yet, we are only scratching the surface of thisremarkable scribal culture; there is still a very long way to go. Beforeus lies the task of identifying this «minor knowledge» and analysingwhat it has to offer, the kinds of knowledge it encompasses, and whateffects it may have had on human life in the areas where it flourished.Continuing research will allow us to look further and more preciselyinto the influences the manuscript reading material had on people’sthoughts and actions. We anticipate that it will be possible to specifyin much greater detail how this informal institution of scribal cultureoperated and how it interacted with popular culture in Iceland ingeneral. This line of research promises to be particularly rewardingsince, at this point in the history of Iceland, the formal institutionsof education and culture were peculiarly weak. This weakness leftroom for another, informal structure to operate, a structure that wasmore closely shaped by and adapted to the people that came incontact with it. Working together and feeding off each other, the two– the official and the unofficial – managed to engender an unusualcultural ferment in a society that was almost entirely lacking in formalinfrastructure.xx

SIGURÐUR GYLFI MAGNÚSSON, DAVÍÐ ÓLAFSSON


Note al testo

1 It is to these sources that the Icelandic School of Microhistory (ISM) owes its greatestdebt, and their use by Icelandic historians will be described and how they have affected theirviews and their methods of research into the history of their country.

2 For an overview of social and economic changes in Iceland during the period in question,see G. HÁLFDANARSON, Historical Dictionary of Iceland. European Historical Dictionaries XXIV2nd ed., London 2008; S.G. MAGNÚSSON, Wasteland with words. A social history of Iceland,London 2010.

3 See L. GUTTORMSSON, The development of popular religious literacy in the seventeenth andthe eighteenth centuries’, in «Scandinavian Journal of History», 15 (1990), pp. 7-35.

4 P. PÉTURSSON, Church and social change: a study of the secularization process in Iceland,1830-1930, Vanersborg 1983, p. 53.

5 See S.G. MAGNÚSSON, From children’s point of view: childhood in nineteenth centuryIceland, in ‹‹Journal of Social History››, 29 (1995), pp. 307-17.

6 E. JOHANSSON, Literacy campaigns in Sweden, in R.F. ARNOVE, H.J. GRAFF (eds), Nationalliteracy campaigns, New York 1987, pp. 65-98; L. GUTTORMSSON, The development of popularreligious literacy cit., pp. 15-35; T. MUNCK, Literacy, educational reform and the use of print in18th-century Denmark, in «European History Quarterly», 34 (2004), pp. 275-303.

7 On parental resistance to middle-class educational reforms and the institution of com-pulsory schooling, see for example M.J. MAYNES, Taking the hard road. Life course in french andgerman workers’ autobiographies in the era of industrialization, Chapel Hill 1995.

8 As a cultural phenomenon, the kvöldvaka has certain similarities to the French veillée: seefor example E. WEBER, Peasants into frenchmen. The modernization of rural France, 1870-1914,Stanford, Ca. 1976, pp. 413-8.

9 PÉTURSSON, Church and social change cit., p. 56. Descriptions of gatherings of this kindappear in the majority of the more than a thousand autobiographies published in Iceland fromthe period: see references in the final section of this paper.

10 See S.G. MAGNÚSSON, The continuity of everyday life. Popular culture in Iceland 1850-1940, doctoral thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, 1993; S.G. MAGNÚSSON, D. ÓLAFSSON,Barefoot historians: education in Iceland in the Modern Period, in K-J. LORENZEN-SCHMIDT,B. POULSEN (eds), Writing peasants. Studies on peasant literacy in early modern northern Eu-rope, Århus 2002, pp. 175-209; MAGNÚSSON, From children’s point of view cit., pp. 295-323.

11 The íslendingasögur («sagas of Icelanders» or «family sagas») comprise about forty texts,the longest being of similar length to a modern medium-sized novel. Most of the best appearto have been written in the 13th century but are clearly based on older material, either writtenor oral. They deal with Icelanders who lived in «the Saga Age» – the generations from thesettlements in the late 9th century up to around 1030 – and in particular their feuds and disputes.The entire corpus is available in English translation in V. HREINSSON (ed.), The complete sagas ofIcelanders, 5 vols., Reykjavík 1997. However, many of the most popular sagas in later ages werenot «sagas of Icelanders» in the strict sense: medieval Iceland produced several other genres,e.g. chivalric sagas and lives of kings and bishops. In particular, we know from contemporarycomments and manuscript counts that the heroic and legendary sagas set in the pre-IcelandicViking Age (fornaldarsögur) often rivalled or exceeded the classical sagas in popularity in latertimes. Many sagas of all types preserved large quantities of verse which was also cultivated forits own sake. On Icelandic literature in general, see D. NEIJMANN (ed.), A history of icelandicliterature, Histories of Scandinavian Literature V, Lincoln-London 2006.

12 H. LOVE, The culture and commerce of texts: scribal publication in seventeenth centuryEngland, Amherst 1998, p. 177. The book was originally published in England five years earlieras Scribal publication in seventeenth century England, Oxford 1993.

Minor Knowledge 523

13 J. SCOTT-WARREN, Reconstructing manuscript networks: The textual transactions of SirStephan Powle, in A. SHEPARD, P. WITHINGTON (eds.), Communities in early modern England.Network, place, rhetoric, Manchester-New York 2000, p. 19.

14 MAGNÚSSON, ÓLAFSSON, Barefoot Historians cit., pp. 175-209.15 The concepts «vernacular» and «institutional» literacy are taken from D. BARTON, M.

HAMILTON, Local literacies: reading and writing in one community, London-New York 1998.16 For this «manuscript turn», see for example F. MOUREAU, La plume et le plomb: Espaces

de l’imprimé et du manuscrit au siècle des Lumières, Paris 2006; F. BOUZA, Corre manuscrito.Una historia cultural del Siglo de Oro, Madrid 2001; B. RICHARDSON, Manuscript Culture inRenaissance Italy, Cambridge 2009.

17 R. CHARTIER, The printing revolution: A reappraisal, in S.A. BARON, E.N. LINDQUIST,E.F. SHEVLIN (eds.), Agent of change: print culture studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Amherst2007, p. 398. See also R. CHARTIER, Inscription and erasure: literature and written culture fromthe eleventh to the eighteenth century, Philadelphia 2007, pp. 74-6.

18 Borgfirðingur means «from Borgarfjörður», the fairly densely settled, low-lying regionaround the bay of the same name in the west of Iceland. For further details of the life and workof Sighvatur Grímsson, see D. ÓLAFSSON, Wordmongers: post-medieval scribal culture and thecase of Sighvatur Grímsson, Ph.D. dissertation, University of St Andrews, Scotland, 2008.

19 Each manuscript number can cover anything from a few sheets up to multiple volumes.The Manuscript Department of NULI contains around 15,000 manuscripts and documents.

20 NULI. Lbs 2374-2377 4to. Diary of Sighvatur Grímsson, 1863-1930. The original of thefirst half of the diaries (1863-1893) is catalogued under Lbs 2322 8vo.

21 NULI. Lbs 2358-2373 4to. Prestaæfir á Íslandi. Lives of the ministers of the Church inIceland, from 1000 to 1930, 16 volumes. Volume 17 is an appendix indexing the names of theministers and the years they served. The entire work is bound into 22 thick volumes.

22 NULI. Lbs 3623 8vo. Autobiography of Sighvatur Grímsson. The autobiography wasfirst published in 1965: see S. GRÍMSSON, Æviágrip Sighvats Grímssonar Borgfirðings fram til 27.des. 1892 eftir sjálfan hann, in «Árbók Landsbókasafns Íslands 1964», 21 (1965), pp. 91-9.

23 NULI. Lbs 3623 8vo, [p. 2].24 NULI. Lbs 3623 8vo, [p. 2].25 F. SIGMUNDSSON, Rímnatal II, Reykjavík 1966, p. 102.26 See for example NULI. Lbs 2289 4to. Hít. Miscellany 1891-1892.27 NULI. Lbs 2291 4to. The document is a collection of poetry and letters in verse collected

and transcribed by Sighvatur Grímsson in the period 1890-1891.28 NULI. Lbs 3623 8vo, [p. 3].29 NULI. Lbs 2312 8vo. Compilation of sagas and poetry transcribed by Sighvatur Grímsson

in 1859-1865.30 NULI. JS 435 8vo. Rýmna bók Innihaldandi Rímur Eptir Íms Skáld (Book of rímur

containing rímur by various poets). A compendium compiled by Sighvatur in 1856.31 NULI. JS 435 8vo.32 In a biographical account of the life of Snorri Björnsson, Sighvatur mentions that he

had once seen this manuscript in the possession of Snorri Jakobsson in 1855. See S. GRÍMSSON,Snorri Björnsson prestur á Húsafelli, in J. GUðNASON (ed.), Merkir Íslendingar I. Nýr flokkur,Reykjavík 1962, p. 87.

33 NULI. Lbs 3623 8vo, [p. 7].34 See NULI. Lbs 1123 4to. Compilation of annals, biographies, verse, etc., written in

three hands, 19th century.35 NULI. Lbs 3623 8vo, [p. 9].


36 NULI. Lbs 2265-2270 4to. Collection of descendant lineage charts, six volumes, compiledand written up by Sighvatur Grímsson at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

37 NULI. Lbs uncatalogued. Letter from Þórður Þórðarson Grunnvíkingur to Níels Jónsson,written at Ísafjörður, 15 May 1913. Halldór Jónsson (b. 1871) was Níels’s younger brother anddrowned in October 1912. Níels Jónsson was born in 1870 and died in 1934. Þórður was afisherman and bookbinder, a skilled popular poet and lay scholar. His epithet, Grunnvíkingur,means ‘from Grunnavík’, near Ísafjörður in the Westfjords. Þórður was born in 1878 anddied in the same way as Halldór, drowned in a fishing accident in September 1913 only fourmonths after his letter to Níels. All three men came from the same social background, i.e. thenon-landowning farming peasantry.

38 NULI. Lbs uncatalogued. Letter from Þórður Þórðarson Grunnvíkingur to Níels Jónsson,15 May 1913.

39 NULI. Lbs uncatalogued. Diary of Þórður Þórðarson Grunnvíkingur.40 NULI. Lbs uncatalogued. Diary of Þórður Þórðarson Grunnvíkingur.41 NULI Lbs 1673 4to. Diary of Magnús Hj. Magnússon, 28 February 1899. Magnús

eventually came to national notice after his death as the model for one of the characters in theIcelandic Nobelprice winner Halldór Laxness’s epic novel Heimsljós [The Light of the World].Magnús’s diary was one of Laxness’s main sources in the writing of his novel.

42 NULI. Lbs 2218 4to. Diary of Magnús Hj. Magnússon, 5 March 1899.43 NULI. Lbs 2226 4to. Diary of Magnús Hj. Magnússon, 19 August 1910.44 NULI. Lbs 2229 4to. Diary of Magnús Hj. Magnússon, 31 October 1912.45 For examples of new trends in archival research, see A. BURTON (ed), Archive stories.

Facts, fictions, and the writing of history, Durham-London 2005.46 This matter has been widely discussed in works dealing with historical methodology: see

for example N.J. WILSON, History in crisis? Recent directions in historiography, Upper SaddleRiver 1999.

47 On the use of personal sources in Iceland, see S.G. MAGNÚSSON, Fortíðardraumar:Sjálfsbókmenntir á Íslandi [Dreams of things past: life writing in Iceland], Sýnisbók íslenskraral+ýðumenningar 9, Reykjavík 2004; and S.G. MAGNÚSSON, Sjálfssögur: Minni, minningar ogsaga [Metastories: memory, recollection, and history], Sýnisbók íslenskrar al+ýðumenningar 11,Reykjavík 2005. These monographs are based on the results of research into all the writtenremains that might be classified as life writing in Iceland from the start of the print publicationof such material in the second half of the 19th century up to the year 2004.

48 For an excellent example of this kind of discourse between differing «groups» or«areas», see L. WHITE, Speaking with vampires. Rumor and history in colonial Africa, California2000.

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