Icelanders and the Kings of Norway. Mediaeval Sagas and Legal Texts. By Patricia Pires Boulhosa. The Northern World, 17. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Pp. xv + 256. EUR 115, $164.

A young Brazilian woman trained as a lawyer in her native country and as an Old Norse specialist in Cambridge, England, has recently detonated a bomb in Icelandic scholarship. Her book, published in 2005, caused an immediate sensation in the Icelandic media. It may take years before its contents are fully understood, but it will undoubtedly provoke debate. Briefly stated, her accomplishment consists in subjecting the legal texts that allegedly describe the sudden submission of the Icelanders to the Norwegian king in the mid-thirteenth century to the same scrutiny that the sagas have been exposed to by literary scholars for more than a century. Just as the narratives are no longer considered as trustworthy descriptions of ancient Iceland, but rather as reflections of the society of their thirteenth- and fourteenth-century authors, in the same manner, Boulhosa now proposes that the available legal documents do not describe the crucial events of the submission to Norway in the mid-thirteenth century, but better fit the situation of both Iceland and Norway in the fifteenth century. The two genres, sagas and legal texts, therefore, share the problem of lacking a historical content from the time they purportedly describe, a condition that has long been acknowledged for the legal documents as well.

Jenny Jochens
Baltimore; Paris