What do a pagan chieftain from the Faroe Islands and a sixteenth-century Catholic bishop from Iceland have in common? Maybe not all that much, at first glance. However, upon closer inspection, the two historical figures have played rather similar roles in the collective memory of their respective peoples. In this lecture, I will examine, from a comparative perspective, the link between the cultural memory of conversion events (such as Christianization and the Protestant Reformation) and modern national identity discourses of Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
With the rise of secular ideologies (notably nationalism) in the course of the nineteenth century, political values such as national self-determination and authenticity oftentimes trumped the traditional values and religious ideals of previous generations. In this presentation, I will explore the multiple (and often paradoxical) ways in which the ideological rewriting of the past, in the new genre of ‘national history,’ radically transformed the normative value attributed to these national narratives’ protagonists and antagonists. Especially the ideological inversion of medieval and early modern conversion narratives (Christianization and the Protestant Reformation, respectively) has led to the refashioning of heathen villains and heretics into national heroes and freedom fighters, with the traditional heroes of these stories (saintly missionaries and reformers) now serving as the destroyers of national authenticity, usually in the name of a foreign and power-hungry monarch. Especially in the modern cultural memory of smaller cultural communities such as Iceland and the Faroe Islands, the ‘traumatic’ loss of independence in the Middle Ages, as well as the strengthening of foreign control in the wake of the Reformation, are intimately intertwined with the memory of the religious transitions of those periods.
To illustrate this historiographical transformation of ‘good guys’ into ‘bad guys’ and vice versa, I will offer a comparative analysis of two case studies, namely the pagan chieftain Tróndur í Gøtu (Þrándur í Götu in modern Icelandic), who (according to Færeyinga saga) forcefully resisted the Christianization of the Faroe Islands from Norway (c. 1000 AD), and the Icelandic bishop Jón Arason, who defended Catholicism against the Lutheran Reformation imposed by the Danish authorities and was consequently beheaded in 1550 AD. Paradoxically, this Catholic martyr would later be hailed by Icelandic nationalists as a hero of their Lutheran nation, and a defender of Iceland’s autonomy and authenticity.
