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

该项目旨在挑战我们对冰岛社会从维京时代殖民到1260年代挪威王室正式停止的演变的理解。为了做到这一点，本书将介绍两个地区的案例研究，一个集中在冰岛西部，另一个集中在冰岛北部，这两个地区拥有最丰富的资源（各种不同的传奇叙事、宪章和编年史，而北部则是考古学）。中世纪的冰岛不同寻常，它是北欧人在北大西洋一个以前无人居住的大岛屿上成功的永久殖民地。同时，它还以冰岛人的传奇故事的形式提供了一种独特的证据，直到最近几十年，这种证据一直被历史学家所忽视。传说中的冰岛社会似乎相对平等，没有国王。相反，只有地方和地区的酋长，他们的权力往往是短暂的和微弱的，因为它依赖于他们的支持者，冰岛农场的负责人的成功合作。其结果是，在一个缺乏中央权威的社会中，世仇似乎变得异常重要。冰岛在1999年成为名义上的基督教国家，但也许是权力结构分散的结果——即使在13世纪，与其他欧洲国家相比，教会似乎相对较弱。这项研究的目的是将过去对冰岛社会的研究方法结合起来。冰岛历史学家倾向于强调所谓的当代传奇（在他们描述的12世纪和13世纪的事件之后不久写的）。在公元900年到1262年期间，他们看到了重大的变化，首先，酋长的人数越来越少，但权力越来越大，然后在相互竞争中变得依赖挪威国王的支持。他们假设有一种政治集中化的趋势，即酋长数量的减少，并试图评估这一过程首先发生在哪里，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为不可知论的观点。对他们来说，冰岛人的传奇（描绘10世纪和11世纪的事件，但很久以后才被记录下来）虚构了一个遥远的过去；当代传奇故事过于明显地偏向于告诉我们“真正的”政治变革。相反，他们使用这两种类型的传奇故事来看待不需要了解事情发生的时间和地点的问题。他们对文献采用了一种更人类学的方法，调查世仇的过程（酋长之间的关系、法律程序、调解人的作用）、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背景的重要性。在博士论文的研究基础上，该项目将利用知识传统的优势，并将阐明saga文学中描述的社会和政治行动的经济和权属关系（庄园，交换模式和单个农场的资源）。像这样的研究，使用编年史学派的方法，在冰岛历史的任何时期都没有尝试过。区域焦点将允许对这些区域的所有证据进行批判性评价，并产生一项研究，这将第一次使冰岛社会更容易与中世纪西欧其他地区进行比较。

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.