1 - Social institutions and belief systems of medieval Iceland (c. 870–1400) and their relations to literary production

Summary

OLD NORSE AND OLD ICELANDIC

In the Middle Ages the language spoken in Iceland and the other Norwegian colonies in the West was Norse, most closely related to the southwest Norwegian dialects of Hordaland and Rogaland, where the majority of the settlers in these new lands had their origin. During the settlement of Iceland, and before Norway was united into a single kingdom, the Norse language was also spoken for two or three generations in those parts of the British Isles where people from the western parts of the Scandinavian peninsula had settled. The conventional term for this common language is Old Norse. After the introduction of Christianity it developed as a written language, more or less simultaneously in Iceland and Norway and in all probability also in the Orkneys, even though an original literature from the latter has not been preserved. It is common in a national context to speak of Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic, but the differences between the two written languages are small and without any literary significance. From a linguistic perspective it is therefore natural to speak of Old Norse literature as an entity that encompasses both Icelandic and Norwegian literature from before about 1400, and this can be set alongside other linguistically demarcated literatures, for example, Old English. From a literary point of view, however, a quite different picture reveals itself.