The Fulbright Program provides a wide variety of grants to American and foreign scholars and to U.S. institutions to promote the international exchange of ideas. It is considered the “flagship international exchange program” of the United States. The program was created by Congress in 1946 through legislation introduced by Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and was designed to “increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.” The program is administered on behalf of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES), a nonprofit organization founded in 1947 by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Academy of Sciences, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council on Education. Since 1996, the CIES has been a division of the Institute of International Education (IIE), a nonprofit created in the aftermath of World War I by Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler, former Secretary of State Elihu Root, and Stephen Duggan, Sr., Professor of Political Science at CCNY. The Fulbright Program is funded by an annual appropriation from Congress—the appropriation for FY 2008 was over $215 million—and by contributions from foreign governments, which recently totaled about $60 million.
The Fulbright Program is vast, and it offers many different types of awards. A helpful list and description of its grant categories can be found here (scroll down) and here. A list of its programs designed solely for scholars from the United States can be found here. Of the 7,500 total grants the program awards annually, about 800-1,100 send individual Americans like me abroad to conduct teaching and research as part of the traditional Fulbright Scholar Program. This is the program one generally has in mind when one hears about academics “getting a Fulbright,” and it is the one that will be of most immediate interest to readers of this blog. Just what opportunities will be available for teaching and research through the scholar program is determined within the 125 host countries in which the program operates, generally through binational commissions and foundations, such as the Iceland-United States Educational Commission. The next cycle of awards, for 2011-12, will be announced beginning this coming February, and you will be able to find a list here (click “catalogue of awards,” but make sure keep checking back as new awards are announced on an ongoing basis). That’s also the link you should use as your portal to investigating the program generally and entering its on-line application site.
As awards are announced, you’ll see that they come in many shapes and sizes. Some last for a semester, others for a year. Some are purely for teaching, whereas others are for research—and others, like the one I received, combine the two. Most important to bear in mind is that advertised awards are usually content specific. Some foreign universities do send out a “calling all cars” announcement, but typically they are looking for Americans to teach in specific subject areas. The host institutions of course can’t be too particular about this, and so award announcements typically call for applications from academics in the fields of, say, “American history or literature,” or “foreign relations or comparative public policy,” but they are limited all the same—and probably only a handful will be appropriate for any given applicant. So pay close attention to the list, and check back from year to year. Of the awards for which you’re potentially suited, you’ll be able to list three, in order of preference, for which you’d like to be considered in your application. When I applied, for example, I listed the award I currently hold as my first choice (the University of Akureyri had advertised a teaching/research award in the field of constitutional law), and then as my second and third choices I listed awards given to scholars of history and cultural studies in Germany and Austria. Most of the advertised awards do not require any proficiency in the foreign language of the host country, though some do.
Once you’ve found a set of awards that interest you, take some time to examine how the program describes how to construct a good application, here. For awards involving research, you will need to write a five-page project statement and include three letters of recommendation; for teaching awards, you will need course syllabi, two letters of recommendation, and an evaluative teaching report. Some awards require a specific letter of invitation from a host institution. I spent a couple of days putting together my project statement, and it took a couple more days to fill in the application and gather all the necessary application materials. A Fulbright award, by the way, will not make you rich, especially if you are bringing along a spouse or a family. My own award provides $3,300/month for the two of us, in a country where we recently paid seven dollars for a single tube of dental floss (don’t feel too bad: yesterday we bought three large pieces of haddock for about $4.50). Fortunately, Fulbright awards are prestigious, and it’s very much in the interest of universities to have faculty who hold them, so many schools, certainly research institutions, have salary programs that supplement the award and enable you to live above a student level. Here is an example of such a program from my own institution, Rutgers—to be shown to any Dean or Provost who thinks about cutting you off entirely while you’re abroad.
Two caveats regarding time. First, once you’ve applied for a fellowship, be prepared for a very, very long wait. Applications go through an extended review process in host countries and in the United States, and it can take many months to hear any direct word from the program. I applied in the summer and didn’t know for sure that I received the award until the middle of the spring (in the late fall I received an ambiguous letter that could have been read as indicating that it was possible I’d receive an award, but it wasn’t anything on which I was going to plan my future). Naturally, the long wait can create real problems for Associate Deans looking to schedule courses for the following year, so keep them apprised. Second, if you do receive an award, you may need to establish residency in your host country, and that can be very time consuming—make sure to get on top of the application right away and work with a sense of urgency at every stage. Establishing Icelandic residency, for instance, required me to get fingerprinted at my local police station, send the fingerprints to the FBI for a background check, send the background check statement to the Secretary of State of West Virginia for an authentication seal, order an original copy of my marriage license from the town hall in New Haven and send it to the Connecticut Secretary of State for further authentication, purchase Icelandic health insurance for my wife, make a special visit and numerous phone calls to the Danish consulate in New York—not to mention fill out numerous unfamiliar bureaucratic forms and send them snail mail to Iceland. In the end, our visas arrived with just two weeks to spare.
Is it worth it? Without question. Speaking personally, the Fulbright Program has given me the opportunity to expand my intellectual horizons in a fundamental way, and I expect it will result in a profound, long-term reorientation and internationalization of my research interests. Since arriving in Iceland, my status as a Fulbrighter has enabled me to meet a wide variety of scholars who haven’t hesitated for a moment to make me feel welcome when I indicate why I’m visiting their country, and it’s already opened numerous doors. It’s also been just an incredible amount of fun. After spending a couple of days at a fascinating conference on law and policy in the Arctic (whose attendees included, among others, the President of Iceland and the ambassadors of Russia and France), I spent the other morning hiking in some nearby hills and picking wild blueberries with my wife—after which we spent some time soaking in a crystal-clean geothermal hot tub in one of Akureyri’s marvelous public pools—after which we stood in the sun for half an hour by the fjord and watched two bottlenose whales playing about three hundred feet away—after which we bought some amazing fresh cod from a blond-haired descendant of Vikings in a deli located two minutes from our apartment—after which we cooked a New England chowder and hosted dinner for a local corporate lawyer and part-time law professor, who after promising soon to show me the nearby courthouse stayed until a boozy midnight talking animatedly about the ways in which the sagas illustrate the niceties of medieval legal procedure. For a legal historian, what’s not to like?
I want to thank everyone again for your emails in response to my earlier posts. I really appreciate your responses, and I send you all warm wishes from the far north. I also want especially to thank Mary for the invitation to be a guest blogger. I haven’t always appreciated the intellectual utility of blogging, but now I’m a complete convert. For that, I tip my hat to her.
Best wishes from Iceland ...
What does this have to do with public legal memory? One important source of economic stability in Iceland over the long term lies in the development of its tourist economy, and cultural tourism is bound to play an important part in that growth. Right now, this country is a destination of choice for nature lovers, but many Icelanders hope that in time its extraordinary history and heritage also will come to play a substantial role within the nation’s tourist profile. This is to say that as part of its effort to get its economic house in order, Iceland will increasingly sell its past, including its unique legal history, to outsiders. As this development proceeds, the challenge faced by public educators will be how to present Iceland’s legal past to tourists given that the relation between law and land at the heart of that history, and at the heart of Icelandic identity, is mediated by an illusive and quickly fading folk memory.
With Thingvellir, the burdens of that challenge will weigh most lightly. Thingvellir is as much a structure as a place. No artifacts exist as tokens of the chieftain assemblies which took place there a thousand years ago, and which distinguish the legal history of this Germanic nation from that of Anglo-Saxon England, but it’s very easy to imagine what took place. You don’t need to be William Collingwood to picture the assembly circles, the cloth-covered booths, and the mediation of disputes occurring within the craggy setting of a grand tectonic fissure. The landscape is architectural in a way that seems positively to invite the visualization of a human presence.
But the sites of Skálholt and Reykholt point to greater, and more common, pedagogical difficulties. These are places of tremendous symbolic importance to Icelanders, but in both places the landscape offers few tangible clues of that significance. The church at Skálholt is a modern building, and the landscape itself seems totally empty (at left below, on the road to Skálholt).
An uninformed visitor would never guess that this was once the epicenter of all Icelandic learning, the heart of its intellectual and cultural life, and the administrative hub of the church. But the place is packed with historical memories actively nurtured and treasured by Icelanders. Similarly, everyone knows that Reykholt was the seat of the great Snorri Sturluson, and every summer tens of thousands of people visit the bathing pool of the man whose family gave its name to the civil war through which Iceland lost its independence in 1262. Yet the pool and its environs have a completely mundane air about them—for the outsider, certainly, not sacral but utilitarian. In both sites, moreover, artifact remains are scant, and any significant pieces seem to be in the possession of the National Museum in Reykjavik. Finally, the exhibitions at Skálholt and Reykholt have been mounted, almost as a matter of necessity, by the most important institution on the two sites, namely the church, and they are housed in church basements, cut off from view of the land in which the cultural significance of the place is lodged. The museum at Reykholt, which celebrates the life of Iceland’s single most important author, a man whose work is part of the cultural patrimony of all Europe, is mounted in a room that also is used for funeral receptions.
As Stephanie and I have followed the sight-seeing path marked out by the Iceland Saga Trail Association, we’ve been struck by the various ways in which far-flung curators across Iceland have sought to address the difficulty exemplified by Skálholt and Reykholt: the land is filled with memories, and the land is empty. Some curators have been remarkably successful in meeting that challenge. The Settlement Exhibition in Reykjavik surrounds a Viking-age turf longhouse excavated in the center of the city with a 360-degree image of how the land likely appeared in the tenth century, and the excavation itself can be viewed from above ground through a street-level glass enclosure—a beautiful architectural metaphor for the proximity of the medieval past here.
The exhibition accomplishes through fine curatorship what Thingvellir does naturally, maintain the sense of place that grounds Icelandic history. Similarly, the Settlement Center in Borgarnes relies on multi-media installations to bring the visitor into the land outside the exhibition hall. (The center currently is developing an exhibition about the Althing.) The Saga Center in Hvolsvöllur tells the story of Njal’s Saga through a carefully scripted audio guide before sending visitors, at least theoretically, out to a host of local sites associated with the man known for his forbearance and wise legal council (Njal's farmstead is pictured at right below).
To bring out the cultural and historical significance of the land, a significance that so often sounds in law and society terms—that’s what the most incisive museums and history centers here seek to do.
These are worthy efforts, but there are worrying signs for those concerned about the future of Icelandic public legal memory. Throughout the country, one naturally encounters the kitsch which will only proliferate with increasing tourism—the kind of stuff that, in its mass produced quality, seems to define itself against historic and geographic particularity. But I don’t worry much about this kind of thing, which after all is a presence in any country that attracts a significant number of travelers. The best response to a plastic Viking helmet, or to the “cultural theme hotel” in Reykholt, with its loftily-named restaurant, is to laugh.
More troubling, and more revealing, are certain trends within the popular culture consumed by Icelanders themselves, especially tendencies to celebrate hyperviolence or, more pointedly, the subversion of law. One recent incarnation of that tendency is a controversial music video released by the group Berndsen, which involves a carnivalesque overturning of law, and life, in the symbolically charged setting of the Icelandic countryside. In the video, a group of young people come upon the scene of a car crash and play bloody and perverted games with the bodies of the victims. A discussion of the controversy, with a link to the video, can be found here. The video expresses a deep cultural anxiety about the association of land, law, and community that has defined Iceland for generations. We are a long way from a land knit together by the common legal identity established at Thingvellir in 999/1000; we are in a subculture whose ironic self-consciousness is characteristic of a nation torn within a generation from its communitarian folk roots and the law that sustained it.
The Berndsen video engages the same cultural dynamic as the legal history sites we visited on our tour, and it is as much a part of the future of Icelandic legal consciousness and legal memory as the harsh light that academic history will throw on popular antiquarianism. Like new efforts in public history, the video responds to circumstances that are putting pressure on the link between legal memory and the environment in an age of global capital flows and European economic integration. In this respect, those concerned about the future of the public understanding of law on this remote island in the Atlantic will have to wait and see whether Icelanders, who have modernized their nation so boldly and admirably since World War II, can advance a vision of development that is not only environmentally but also culturally sustainable.
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Note: My next post, about applying for a Fulbright and what opportunities exist for legal historians, will be my last. Thanks to all of you who have written with your comments and questions!
If you wish to gaze into the future and see one of the paths public memory of medieval law and society in Iceland will take in coming years, you could do worse than to share a morning cup of coffee—or, this being Iceland, two cups of coffee—with Adolf Fri∂rickson, Chair of the Institute of Archeology in Reykjavík. I did so on a drizzly Wednesday morning about three weeks ago, two days after my wife and I touched down at Keflavík Airport.
We met in a shiny, modern coffee shop at the heart of downtown, within close view of some of the oldest, most quaint buildings in the city and a major construction site. I had called Fri∂rickson because in preparing for my stint as a Fulbrighter, I had read his call to arms Sagas and Popular Antiquarianism in Icelandic Archeology. The book contains a chapter on administrative and legal sites, such as the assembly sites my wife and I hoped to visit on our trip, and when I contacted Fri∂rickson and indicated I was a Fulbright fellow interested in his work, he immediately agreed to get together.
Fri∂rickson argues that archeology here has yet to overcome the ideological tinge of its birth during the age of nineteenth-century nationalism, even though archeologists have long been critical of their intellectual forebears in the Archeological Society—especially their willingness to view the sagas more as transparent documentary records of settlement-era history than achievements of the literary imagination. Fri∂rickson believes one important cure for archeology’s ills lies in the deployment of new scientific methods, such as the study of archeological phenomena across sites rather than the more traditional examination of whole sites individually. Should archeologists fail to advance methodologically, he asserts, they will continue to echo Icelanders’ own highly active folk knowledge about medieval historic sites, their “popular antiquarianism.” This folk memory often implicitly guides archeological work, most notably by tempting archeologists to use common place names as a record of a site’s historical significance. Without new scientific methods, Icelandic archeologists will remain in the grip of a popular knowledge which, like nineteenth-century nationalist science, is itself deeply rooted in a thirteenth-century saga literature that reveals as much about the thirteenth century as the Viking age it depicts.
Fri∂rickson is every inch the skeptical scientist (one of his most common replies to my questions was “we don’t yet have enough evidence to say”), and one story he told about his own self-questioning struck me as revealing of the substantive change a scientific approach can bring to historical knowledge—in this case, knowledge about how land in medieval Iceland was settled and divided. There is a popular view of the settlement of Iceland as a rather neat, orderly process. That view is drawn from the thirteenth-century Landámabók (The Book of Settlements), which describes in extraordinary detail who the original settlers of Iceland were and where on the island they made their homes. The depiction of the settlement as a rational process of immigration and land-claiming served the interests of powerful thirteenth-century chieftains who sought to legitimate their rule through warped history, and the myth they created stuck—and it stuck not simply regarding which specific land claims were made during the settlement, but more generally in the view of the settlement as almost deliberative in nature. Fri∂rickson called my attention to an image he thought put this view into pictorial form: the cover of an edition of Landámabók which depicts a happy Viking nuclear family in a ship, smiling merrily on their way to a new land.
Fri∂rickson admitted that, unwittingly, he had once been in the grip of a misconception rooted in this very myth. In his case, the misconception concerned settlement-era burial sites. At present, Icelandic archeologists have uncovered about 330 burial sites in about 160 separate places (about 40 of these sites were previously undisturbed, “closed finds”). The majority of these burials are located a good distance away from settlement-era farmsteads, at the edge of ancient property lines between farms and near well-worn medieval paths. Individuals in these graves are bigger than those in the other graves archeologists have found on the island, and the graves include more women and children. Then there are graves of a somewhat different type, a minority of the finds. Individuals in these graves are poorer and, most notably, the graves are located quite near the main farm activity areas and away from ancient paths. Why the difference?
When Fri∂rickson first decided to study the graves comparatively, he believed he would find that the more distant burials, those along property-line boundaries, were older. He reasoned that when a family settles in a new place they bury their kin at the border of the property they have claimed, in part to assert their ownership of the land. Graves would serve as markers of possession. “You might think you would put your parents and grandparents at the edge of what you consider to be yours,” he explained, sipping his coffee. But what he found was contrary to his hypothesis: the distant graves were younger. And this fact about burial sites pointed to a very different view of the settlement: not the “neat” process depicted both in Landámabók and in popular culture, but rather something potentially “savage.” Picture not a smiling Viking family on a boat making its new home, but instead a group of hard men living in deep anxiety, huddled near their farmsteads, not wishing to venture far beyond the immediate area where they had settled. Imagine the settling of land as guided by force, uncertainty, and fear. This was a place, after all, where every social institution had to be restablished. Only later, once property was secure, could graves be put at its margins.
A similar process surely took place not only regarding property but regarding law more generally. This is a remote place, and what authority applies here has been a persistent question in Icelandic history. What was law? Whatever it was, it wasn’t initially created in rational, deliberative conditions (though it later may have been codified under them).
In any case, what interests me about Fri∂rickson’s approach to archeology is how it promises to overturn folkloric conceptions of the meaning of the land—including the meaning of the assembly sites we visited on our trip. In Fri∂rickson’s view, popular antiquarianism is a continuation of the way Icelanders have “done” history for centuries: by telling stories about the landscape they so intimately inhabit (a landscape in which, because of the harsh environment, there are almost no historic man-made structures to be seen and to verify historical facts). When a farmer or a community knows that a particular hill has long been called “Willard Hurst Hill,” for example, some historical event may well have taken place there, but it’s equally possible that the hill bears absolutely no relation to Hurst the Wise of saga fame. It’s also possible that no historical event took place there at all. Under scrutiny, much vernacular understanding of the landscape will be shown to be but an echo of some thirteenth-century need as voiced through nineteenth-century nationalist history. Science historicizes with a hammer.
In time, that hammer will fundamentally transform the landscape of legal memory here, perhaps severing many of the bands of vernacular legal remembrance which for generations have linked Icelanders to their environment. The landscape of Iceland will be emptied of ancient legal memories, to be replaced by facts ascertained by specialists. Icelanders’ relation to their land will be mediated by the knowledge of an international class of academic historians and social scientists. There is no need to be nostalgic for the world of popular legal history that will vanish. But it will be important in the distant future to remember that it has. It also will be important to understand that science is not acting in an intellectual vacuum. Just as today we view the work of the nineteenth-century Archeological Society within the context of an Icelandic nationalism that partook of a larger European moment, so too the transformation of popular legal memory in Iceland is but one component of the engine of economic and political integration of contemporary Europe. The idea that blood can still be seen on the execution-block stone near an ancient assembly site, as described in my previous post, will disappear in the face of the cultural and intellectual forces that ground the new constitutional entity Iceland doubtless will shortly join. Academic science will demystify the cultural basis of the nationalism which Europe seeks to overcome politically through its Kantian aspirations, at the same time that the popular memory of law will change as a consequence of the new legal order being created here through the slow force of political will.
Or at least that’s part of the future story. Because there are other futures of the landscape of legal memory in Iceland—futures of a rather different kind, at least in relation to the question of nationalism (after all, it takes but an hour watching the European Football Championship to make a person radically skeptical of the universalist claims of European bureaucrats and civil servants). But these thoughts will have to wait for another time. Right now, it’s time for my wife and I to read Journey to the Center of the Earth out loud and enjoy a Friday night in our new home.
August 23, 2009
It’s now our second week in Iceland, and our exercise in legal history tourism is rapidly drawing to a close. Tomorrow we arrive in Akureyri, where we’ll settle into our apartment and I’ll eventually teach a course on U.S. constitutional law to Icelandic law students. Stephanie and I will be glad to give our heroic car a rest and to be in one place for a while. It’s been very exciting to get to know this fascinating country in the intensive way we have—our cultural modus operandi has been not simply to burn the candle at both ends, but to grasp the candle and thwack it relentlessly on the pavement—but if we eat one more lunch of salami and gouda on rye crackers while huddling by the side of a gravel road we may reach some kind of psychological tipping point. In any case, before writing about the mechanics of applying for a Fulbright and what fellowship opportunities exist for legal historians, I wanted to begin to wrap up the line of thought I’ve been developing about public legal history by turning attention back to three sites we visited toward the start of our journey: Thingvellir, Skálholt, and Reykholt—the site of the national chieftain assembly, the historic seat of Icelandic Catholicism, and the home of the great chieftain and historian Snorri Sturluson.
There are two ways one might understand the relation between these key places in Icelandic legal development. One is for the story they tell about central authority—a story still ongoing today as Icelanders contemplate joining the European Union, an especially attractive possibility in the face of the financial crisis. The story begins at Thingvellir, the meeting ground of the Althing during the Commonwealth Era (ca. 930-1262). The Althing often is described as a “national parliament” or, still more misleadingly, as an early democratic government, but as an assembly of 39 powerful chieftains, or go∂i, it probably bears closer relation to the various tribal jirgas or the loya jirga of Pashtun Afghanistan (which, like medieval Iceland, is a remote, ethnically homogeneous culture with a proud warrior tradition regulated by a strict code of honor and shame). It was a gathering of leading men and their followers. What’s exceptional about law and government in medieval Iceland is that the Althing boasted a sophisticated legislative and judicial apparatus, but it entirely lacked a central executive office—there was no king. Without this central mechanism for enforcing legal judgments or settlements, the resolution of disputes in Iceland always threatened to break down and become overwhelmed by the cultural logic of feud. Many of the great medieval sagas depict the gory end result when Icelanders “bargained in the shadow of the law” in the absence of a strong executive. Thingvellir represents the fragile social stability this settler society managed to achieve through its highly unusual legal structure.
The historic site of Skálholt points toward the next crucial episode in the story of Icelandic central authority. As I discussed in my previous post, Icelanders collectively adopted Christianity as part of an extraordinary legal arbitration at Thingvellir in 999/1000. Without a common religious basis for the legal order, it was clear to many that the society would descend into chaos. “It will prove true that if we tear apart the law,” announced the pagan lawspeaker Thorgeir, “it will also tear apart the peace.” The path toward conversion which Thorgeir announced in his momentous decision, described here and in Njal’s Saga, resolved this constitutional crisis by uniting Icelandic society under a single faith—one which, notably, was opposed to the pagan Germanic culture of honor and fate that underlay the blood feud. Here is a diorama of the Althing housed in the Saga Center in Hvolsvöllur that suggests just how deeply linked religious and legal unity remain in contemporary national iconography:
As the first bishopric in Iceland, Skáholt was the administrative center of the common faith Thorgeir declared—and for centuries, it was the very heart of Icelandic intellectual and cultural activity. Here is what it looks like today:
In time, from an original group of 39 chieftains, a group of six chieftain families came into dominance, leading to an era of political intrigue, feud and, ultimately, all-out civil war known as the Age of the Sturlungs (ca. 1220-1262). One of the greatest chieftains involved in this bloody business, happily, was also a historian: Snorri Sturluson (1178/9-1241), from whose family this period of history derives its name. Among Snorri’s historical works are Heimskringla, a history of Norwegian kingship, and the study of Germanic mythology known as The Prose Edda (without which, no Ring Cycle, much less The Lord of the Rings). Snorri had his seat of power in Reykholt, where there is now a medieval studies research center and a historical museum run by the parish church. According to Evy Tveter, the welcoming project manager of Snorrastofa, about 100,000 visitors come every summer to gaze upon Snorri’s bathing pool (or at least its reconstruction in a place nearish to where it might have been), and perhaps also to contemplate the fate of the Icelandic commonwealth in the wake of the bloody Sturlung era.
Snorri’s fate was telling of his times. After intriguing with King Hákon of Norway, the tables turned on him when he returned to Iceland without the King’s permission. Hákon called on another chieftain, Gissur, to kill Snorri, and though Snorri briefly eluded his assassins when Gissur broke into his home at Reykholt with a force of seventy men as Snorri was sleeping, he eventually was stabbed to death in his cellar. By 1262, the Icelandic chieftains, tired to fighting, essentially gave over authority of the island to King Hákon, and Icelandic independence remained in abeyance until 1944.
So the story of Thingvellir, Skálholt, and Reykholt is a story of the fate of a Germanic nation which failed, in contrast to Anglo-Saxon England, to develop a strong, central authority—to make the transition from Beowulf to Alfred. It’s a story that reveals that an otherwise sophisticated legal system cannot survive without an executive mechanism for containing the sort of centrifugal forces that ultimately tore medieval Iceland apart. It’s the story of law in the shadow of the feud. But there also is another way of seeing the connection between these sites, and that is for the challenge they pose to public historians. And it’s a substantial challenge they pose, because at all three sites, few material artifacts from their medieval history survive. What exists is only landscape and public remembrance. How contemporary liberal societies choose to remember their particular legal history is an essential element of the cultural foundation of the rule of law, and thus how Iceland configures the relation between landscape and legal memory is something I believe will change substantially as the nation addresses the economic and constitutional issues of its present historical moment. But as I’ve already taken your attention long enough, I’ll defer those thoughts, part of a materialist cultural history of legal memory, until next time.
know well. Here are some pictures:
Finally, today we visited the imposing waterfalls of Go∂afoss, among the greatest waterfalls of the country. The historical significance of the falls lies plainly in their name, which means roughly “falls of the gods.” In 999/1000, Iceland peaceably converted to Christianity through a legal arbitration held at the Althing. The law of the country at the time was said to be splitting into two—in part, as suggested by Jón Jóhannesson’s great work Íslendiga Saga: A History of the Old Icelandic Commonwealth, because Christians and heathen chieftains refused to recognize the legitimacy of the investiture ceremonies of the other group, thereby creating a deep rift in the country’s legal apparatus. A compromise was reached through the leadership of the pagan lawspeaker Thorgeir, who determined that the people of the country would collectively convert to Christianity, though they could continue to engage in certain pagan practices in secret. I’ll be discussing this event more when I discuss the remains of the Bishopric of Skáholt, but for now it’s enough to say that this was a legal decision which lay the course for all of Iceland’s legal, political, and cultural history. After it was made, Thorgeir returned to his farm and threw the statutes of his pagan gods into the falls near his home—hence the name of this extraordinary natural feature. To think of an American parallel, one might return to my previous post and imagine that the Grand Canyon were named the Canyon of the Constitution or Independence Gorge. 
lt, the seat of Icelandic Catholicism beginning in 1056; and Reykholt, a center of political power for Snorri Sturluson (1178/9-1241), the greatest literary figure of medieval Iceland—and, to his lasting credit, a man not only of great legal learning but a historian to boot.
dent Republic of Iceland in 1944. That such central events in the nation’s constitutional history occurred in such a truly extraordinary environment is one of the basic facts of what Iceland means to Icelanders.
From Mark Weiner
he DMV! Please sit in that sensible Ikea chair while I calmly yet efficiently take care of the business which brings you here. In the meantime, would you like a delicious cup of coffee? Espresso?” I’d like to go again next time we’re in town.Welcome to the Directorate of Immigration.
mountains and skidded along a narrow gravel road. Fortunately, we got the hang of it pretty quickly, and we expect to feel like old hands soon enough—the blog depends on it! For the moment, though, we’re quite happy to be traveling by sea. Certainly we’re looking forward to waking up in Heimaey. It seems appropriate that Heimaey should be the first stop on our journey. For one—and I write now having spent a day on the island—it is the most lucrative fishing port in all Iceland, a country where, as I believe Halldór Laxness once wrote, everything ultimately comes down to cod.
r important connections with the national past. Most notably, it was here that in the late tenth century Norwegian priests landed before setting off to the fateful meeting of the Althing at which Icelanders peaceably converted to Christianity in the course of a momentous legal arbitration—described powerfully in Njal’s Saga. In addition, as Stephanie and I learned on a wind-swept ten-mile hike today, Heimaey was the site of a raid in 1627 by Algerian pirates, who landed in this cove
