Þingvellir: An Icelandic "Lieu de Memoire"

"When each of us looks over his shoulder," wrote the French nationalist writer Maurice Barrès early in the twentieth century, "he sees a succession of indefinable mysteries, which in recent times have come to be called France. We are the sum of a collective life that speaks in us. May the influence of our ancestors be permanent, the sons of the soil vital and upstanding, the nation one."(10) According to Barrès, a nation is a bounded community of citizens that is constituted through history, in which the past and the present are linked in one collective group -- in other words, it is a two-dimensional group, operating simultaneously in the past and the present. The first of these dimensions is maintained through what can be termed as the "mystery of the daily plebiscite" or the "mystery of the volkgeist," depending on our understanding of the national community, and the second through the "mystery of collective memory" or "collective ancestry."(11) The first set of these "indefinable mysteries," to repeat Barrès' phrase, pertains to the idea that the nation forms a metaphorical individual, almost an organic person, with one soul, and one will to act.(12) The second set legitimizes the first; that is, just as all persons remember their past and are formed through their individual experiences, nations trace their collective development through time in order to explain their alleged characteristics and peculiarities in the present.
Finnbogadóttir is not alone in singling out memories and language as the most significant markers of Icelandic nationality because these factors have always played a vital role in legitimating Icelandic claims for nationhood. This emphasis on the past served Icelanders well in their struggle against the Danish "oppression" because Danes themselves valued Icelandic medieval culture very highly. Indeed, when the influential Danish Lutheran minister, politician and commentator N. F. S. Grundtvig sought consolation after the Danish defeat during the Napoleonic wars, he found the roots of the "original Nordic or Danish mind" and "the true but lost core of Danishness" in Icelandic sagas and Eddic poetry preserved in Icelandic manuscripts.(31) He had a deep admiration for Icelandic medieval society, which he called one of "the great wonders of medieval times," expressing his belief that it was there that the "Nordic Spirit" had reached its pinnacle. On this isolated island, "the enlightenment was sought in the only correct and natural way," he wrote in his Haandbog i Verdenshistorie (Handbook on the history of the world) -- in fact, Iceland was, in his words, practically "the most colossal university in the whole world."(32) Moreover, similar ideas seem to have influenced some members of the Danish royal house in the nationalistic age of the mid-nineteenth century. One can, at least, detect traces of romantic idealism in King Christian VIII's resolution of 1840, where he established a regional estate assembly for Iceland. Thus, he asked a commission of royal officials that was to meet in Iceland in 1841 to reflect on the question "whether this type of an assembly should not bear the name of `Alpingi' and, in the same way as the former Alpingi, meet at ...ingvellir and also have the same organization as the old assembly."(33)