Abstrakt
Researchers have mostly treated Sturlunga saga as a source of factual information, rather than viewing it in context of the medieval Icelanders' cultural memory. While other Old Norse texts, such as Íslendingabók, Landnámabók, the sagas of Icelanders, or the kings' sagas, have already been studied from the perspective of cultural memory, and their image of the medieval Icelanders' identity has been re-evaluated, Sturlunga saga has been neglected in this respect.
Some of the few existing studies of Sturlunga saga as a narrative discourse deal with its depiction of individual morals, rather than discussing it as a part of the society's cultural memory. Others are formed by the assumption that the text presents the society's downfall, and that Iceland's union with Norway in 1262 was regarded as a tragic loss of national independence.
This opinion is based on anachronistic concepts, and new approaches to Sturlunga saga can lead to a better understanding of how the events depicted in it were evaluated at the time of its creation. The objective of the paper is to present Sturlunga saga as an image of the thirteenth-century Icelanders' identity and their relationship with other lands, especially Norway.
The approach is based on an analysis of how recent historical events were transformed into a narrative discourse, in which they were connected to a more distant past that formed the medieval Icelandic society's cultural memory. That way these events themselves became a part of this society's cultural memory, and the given historical knowledge was endowed with specific meanings, which were not inherently present in the knowledge itself, but were based on its contextualization.