Landscape, Tradition and Power in Medieval Iceland, c.870-c.1262.

这个项目旨在挑战我们对冰岛社会从北欧海盗时代的殖民到12世纪60年代挪威王室的正式终结的理解。它将通过提供两个地区性案例研究来做到这一点，一个侧重于冰岛西部，另一个侧重于冰岛北部，这些地区拥有最丰富的来源(各种不同类型的传奇故事、宪章和编年史，对于北部，还有考古学)。中世纪的冰岛不同寻常，因为它是北大西洋上一个以前无人居住的大岛上的一个成功的、永久的北欧殖民地。同时，它以冰岛人传奇的形式提供了一种独特的证据，直到最近几十年，历史学家一直忽视这一点。传奇中的冰岛社会似乎相对平等主义，没有国王。取而代之的是，只有地方和地区的酋长，他们的权力往往是短暂和微弱的，因为他们依赖于与他们的支持者--冰岛农庄的负责人--的成功合作。其结果是，在没有中央权威的情况下，世仇似乎变得异常重要。冰岛在1000年成了名义上的基督徒，但可能是因为权力结构的分散--即使在13世纪，与其他欧洲国家相比，教会似乎也相对较弱。这项研究旨在总结冰岛社会过去的方法。冰岛历史学家倾向于在所谓的当代传奇(写于他们描述的12世纪和13世纪的事件之后不久)中强调。在公元前900年至公元1262年期间，他们看到了酋长的重大变化，首先，酋长的数量减少了，但权力更大了，然后在相互竞争时变得依赖挪威国王的支持。他们假设政治集中化正在发生--酋长人数的减少--并试图估计这一过程首先在哪里发生，以及在多大程度上发生。外国学者对中世纪冰岛的社会和政治变化持更不可知论的观点。对他们来说，冰岛人的传奇(描绘了10世纪和11世纪的事件，但写下的时间要晚得多)虚构了一个遥远的过去；当代传奇过于明显地带有偏见，无法告诉我们什么是真正的政治变革。取而代之的是，他们使用了这两种类型的传奇来研究不需要了解事情发生的时间和地点的问题。他们对文学采取了更人类学的方法，调查了世仇的过程(酋长之间的关系，法律程序，调解人的角色)，性别角色和其他社会历史问题，而没有试图评估历史变化或地理环境的重要性。这个项目结合了博士论文中的研究，将利用这两种知识传统的优势，并将阐明佐贺文献中描绘的社会和政治行为背后的经济和土地关系(庄园、交换模式和个别农场的资源)。像这样的研究，使用编年史学派的方法，在任何时期的冰岛历史上都没有尝试过。区域焦点将允许对这些区域的所有证据进行批判性评估，并产生一项研究，首次使冰岛社会更容易与中世纪西欧的其他部分相比较。

This project is designed to challenge the way we understand the evolution of Icelandic society from its Viking Age colonisation to its formal cessation to the Norwegian crown in the 1260s. It will do this by presenting two regional case studies, one focused on the west and the other on the north of Iceland, regions for which there is the richest array of sources (various different kinds of saga narratives, charters, and annals and, for the north, archaeology). Medieval Iceland was unusual in being a successful, permanent Norse colony of a large and previously uninhabited island in the North Atlantic.At the same, it provides a unique kind of evidence in the form of the Sagas of Icelanders which, until the last couple of decades, has been ignored by historians. Icelandic society in the sagas seems relatively egalitarian, with no king. Instead there were only local and regional chieftains whose power was often fleeting and weak because it was dependent on successful co-operation with their supporters, the heads of Iceland's farmsteads. The result was a society in which, in the absence of a central authority, feud seems to have been unusually important. Iceland became nominally Christian inlOO0 but perhaps in consequence of the decentralised power structure -the church seems to have been relatively weak in comparison with other European countries even in the thirteenth century.This research aims to bring together past approaches to Icelandic society. Icelandic historians have tended to emphasis in the so-called Contemporary Sagas (written soon after the events they describe from the twelfth and thirteenth century). They see significant change over the period c.900 to c.1262 with chieftains, first, getting less numerous but more powerful and then becoming dependent on the support of the Norwegian king in competing with one another. They have assumed that there was a move towards political centralisation -a reduction in the number of chieftains - and have tried to gauge where that process took place first and to what degree. Foreign scholars have taken a more agnostic view on social and political change in medieval Iceland. For them, Sagas of Icelanders (depicting tenth- and eleventh-century events but written down much later) fictionalise a distant past; Contemporary Sagas are too overtly biased to tell us about 'real' political change. Instead, they have used both genres of saga to look at issues which do not require an understanding of when and where things happened. They have adopted a more anthropological approach to the literature, investigating the process of feud (relationships between chieftains, legal processes, the role of mediators), gender roles and other social historical issues without any attempt to assess historical change or the importance of geographical context.Drawing on the research incorporated in the PhD thesis, this project will draw on the strengths of both intellectual traditions and will also elucidate the economic and tenurial relationships (of manors, patterns of exchange, and the resources of individual farms) which underlie social and political action depicted in saga literature. A study like this one, using the methods of the Annals School, has not been attempted before for Icelandic history in any period. The regional foci will allow for a critical appraisal of all of the evidence for those regions and produce a study which, for the first time, will make Icelandic society more readily comparable with other parts of medieval Western Europe.