Kungalängder och historieskrivning: Fornsvenska och fornisländska källor om Sveriges historia

Abstract

King lists and historiography: Old Swedish and old Icelandic sources on Swedish history

The article discusses historiography of the 13th century about the history of Sweden with a focus on king lists. It analyzes and establishes the relationship between the Icelandic and the Swedish lists of Swedish kings, written in the 13th century. The accepted opinion among scholars has been that the Icelandic Langfeðgatal, which includes a list of Swedish kings, is dependent on the Swedish king list of the so-called Uppsala type. Here this idea is rejected and the article argues that the king list in Langfeðgatal – as well as the similar list in Hervarar saga – is independent of both of the two types of Swedish king lists, the Uppsala- and the Västgöta type. The article further argues that there is an influence from Langfeðgatal on one of the later versions of the king list of the Uppsala type, which is preserved in ms C92, where some additions seem to be directly influenced by the Icelandic work. The last part of the article investigates what kinds of sources 13th-century Icelandic historians had for earlier Swedish kings and Swedish history. It argues that Langfeðgatal is mainly based on written Norse works (kings’ sagas etc.), but also that there existed a vital oral tradition on Iceland about the history of Sweden and its kings. This is supported by the evidence of Yngvars saga, an Icelandic work from ca 1200. Yngvars saga treats events in 11th-century Sweden that feature in inscriptions on contemporary rune stones but were never recorded in Swedish written sources. Knowledge of these events must have been transmitted orally until they were written down, for the first time ever, on Iceland ca 150 years later. How this oral transmission worked is discussed by an analysis of Skáldatal, a mid-13th-century work where Icelandic skalds from the Viking Age to the 13th century are listed in connection with the kings and jarls they praised. One part of Skáldatal concerns the skalds of Swedish kings. The article argues both that Skáldatal is evidence of the oral tradition about Swedish kings that existed on Iceland independent of Swedish written sources and that it provides one explanation of the sources of Icelandic knowledge about Swedish kings and history: the many skalds in Skáldatal’s list are continuously active informants, from the Viking age to the 13th century, with knowledge direct from the Swedish court.