How did education flourish in medieval Iceland, a land without cities or universities? Discover how Icelanders nurtured their intellectual heritage through informal fosterage and cathedral schools, shaping some of the most renowned sagas and poems of the medieval world.
By Ryder C. Patzuk-Russell
Iceland was an island without cities or towns, even at the end of the Middle Ages – conventionally dated to 1550, when the last Catholic bishop was beheaded and the country became formally Lutheran. In this rural landscape dotted with farms and churches, people nonetheless taught and learned, not only spreading the religious teachings and Latin literature of the Church, but composing and writing the great sagas and poems that have made Old Norse culture and literature so famous around the world. These sagas and poems were also vital cultural capital even among their contemporaries: many texts were shared across the Nordic world, especially the Norwegian royal court. So, at a time when late medieval cities were filling with urban grammar schools and an increasing number of universities, where and how did the people of this little island learn to read and write? And what is it exactly that makes something a ‘school’ in such a place and time?
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What is a school in the Middle Ages?
The Latin word schola, from which English ‘school’ derives, has a long history of use. In classical Rome, it could be used to mean a ‘school’ in the modern sense, but was generally more associated with a teacher than a particular place or building. At the same time, it could be understood as the place for adolescent preparation for public life, the opposite of the forum, the place where adults disputed in public life. Cicero sometimes used schola to refer to a spoken or written speech or argument, and scholae could even be regiments or groups in the Roman military.
Medieval writers took up this range of ideas and adapted them for their own purposes. St Augustine wrote about the whole Church as the schola Christi (school of Christ); the renowned sixth-century author Cassiodorus took up this metaphor and ran with it, conceiving of formal Christian education happening at the schola Christi, which would then produce soldiers of Christ. Cassiodorus thus rather cleverly managed to envision a schola that combined the senses of a school, a military order, and the Church! Scholae could also describe different groups of learners – more like a ‘class’ than a ‘school’ – or even different disciplines: you could have the schola of grammar, rhetoric, or even singing.
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It is worth noting that universities, which appeared in Europe around the beginning of the thirteenth century, were not actually referred to as scholae. The term for a medieval university was a studium generale, meaning something like ‘universal place of learning’, referring to their distinctive feature of drawing students from many different regions and countries. While many notable Icelanders did travel abroad for education, and at least a few of them – especially in the very late Middle Ages – went to university, there were no universities in Iceland until 1911, and medieval universities probably had a smaller impact on the island than they did on most regions.
Learning in Iceland: Where Were Medieval Schools?
Old Norse made the same borrowing from Latin as English, and we hear of skólar (schools) in many sources from medieval Iceland. But the word is only used to describe education in two places: cathedrals and monasteries. In northern Iceland, the skóli at the cathedral of Hólar is mentioned very early: the Saga of Bishop Jón tells an idealized story about a skóli being built on the cathedral grounds, the only time in the whole corpus we hear of a skóli being a specific place. In other references, the term appears to be more tied to a particular teacher, or the activities of a student or group of students.
This narrow use of skóli makes a certain kind of sense. The cathedral schools were the only place that consistently maintained a professional teacher with a title, the schoolmaster or skólameistari. In the Saga of Bishop Laurentius, we hear of how at one point the protagonist – a disgraced former skólameistari – is stripped of his rights as a priest and instructed to teach in the monasteries of Iceland. Moving between different monastic houses for several years, he starts a skóli at each one. These passages do not imply that there was no education happening at the monasteries before Laurentius arrived, but rather that with the arrival of a new teacher, a new skóli is formed: the school of Laurentius and his students. In late medieval education contracts, cathedrals and monasteries are again described as places with skólar where students pay to be taught, especially to train to become priests.
Outside the great religious houses, the situation is more complicated. Several important men, including a future saint, were educated at the farm of Oddi in the twelfth century – one of the wealthiest farms in southern Iceland, run by the powerful and influential Oddaverjar clan. However, there is no reference to a skóli at Oddi. So what was happening there?
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Oddii, a farm, church and parsonage in South Iceland. Photo by Bromr / Wikimedia Commons
Fosterage: A Learning Tradition of Iceland
The probable answer is known as fóstri (fosterage). Going back to the times when the island was first settled, the Icelanders had multiple ways of recruiting foster parents to help raise their children. One method was to simply send a child to be raised in another household. If that household had the capacity to teach important skills to their foster-children, that could be a major benefit to sending a child there, and a motivation for parents to do so. If enough children were sent to that household, drawn by the education being offered, we might start to think of such a place as a school. In the Sagas of Icelanders, though they were written centuries after Christianization, we read stories of fosterage relationships like this taking place, at least for individual students. Most famously, the great legal expert of Brennu-Njáls saga, Njáll, fostered children and taught them law. A particularly intriguing example appears in the lesser-known Víglundar saga, where an aristocratic woman named Ólof is carefully trained in hannyrðir (fine needlework/embroidery) in Norway, and when she moves to Iceland, she is specifically sought out by a man named Hólmkell, who wants his daughter to be fostered by her and learn hannyrðir.
In the context of such apprenticeships being a basis of education, probably since Iceland was first settled, it becomes unclear what to call a school, and any definition we propose is going to be a bit arbitrary. When the first Icelandic bishop, Ísleifr Gizurarson, is described in the earliest Icelandic historical text, Ari Þorgilsson’s The Book of Icelanders, he is said to have obtained such an excellent education while living abroad, all the most important chieftains in Iceland sent their sons to him to be educated. This is clearly a very idealized image, but whatever actually happened, it must have had some similarity to both a cathedral school and traditional fosterage. We would probably say that Ísleifr ran a school, but at the same time, he and his peers probably did not think of it as all that different from the fosterage that had been practiced in Iceland for generations.
Things are similarly confusing at the farm at Oddi. Clearly, it was a center of learning: St. Þorlákr Þórhallsson was educated there before travelling abroad for higher learning, and the great author and poet Snorri Sturluson was fostered there – it was probably at Oddi that Snorri learned about the mythology that he set down in his Edda and forms the basis for so much of what we now know about pre-Christian religion in the Nordic world. Yet Oddi is never called a skóli, and the teachers there were not professional teachers in the sense of a cathedral skólameistari. Rather, the local priest or other learned chieftains educated their foster-children, probably in their free time, or as part of other responsibilities. We have no evidence that there were groups of students there, and people like St Þorlákr and Snorri Sturluson may have been solitary foster-sons, or part of groups of only two or three.
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What Makes a ‘Good’ Education?
Deciding what we think of as a school or not a school is not just a question of terminology. It determines what we think of as formal and informal education, what we think of as good or bad education. One rather polemical Icelandic author writing c. 1600, describing the education on the island before the coming of the Lutheran faith about a half century before, decried the poor state of schooling his home country had had in Catholic times. For him, there had been no true schools in medieval Iceland, just a few abbots and bishops taking on apprentices. In this view, the informality of medieval Icelandic education is fundamentally tied to the falsity of Catholic beliefs, in contrast to the formal and correct learning provided by the Lutheran grammar schools of early modern Iceland.
Modern scholars, of course, do not have the same prejudices regarding religion, but we can have similar unconscious ideas about formal and informal education. For some scholars, describing twelfth-century Oddi as a ‘school’ – despite it probably not being viewed as a skóli by its contemporaries – is not about any particular definition of what a school is: it is about the importance of arguing that Oddi provided high-quality education, that Snorri Sturluson and St Þorlákr were learned intellectuals on par with any of their peers in other parts of Europe.
Education in medieval Iceland was unusual in many ways, but not unique. The particular circumstances on this island between its settlement and the beginning of the modern era provide a perfect case for us to think about what a ‘school’ is. We can question what our assumptions about schools – and about ‘formal’ vs. ‘informal’ education – cause us to assume in turn about the state of intellectual life, different cultures, and different time periods, including the Middle Ages as a whole.
Ryder C. Patzuk-Russell is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Silesia in Katowice. This research is part of the project No. 2022/45/P/HS3/02670 co-funded by the National Science Centre and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 945339.
How did education flourish in medieval Iceland, a land without cities or universities? Discover how Icelanders nurtured their intellectual heritage through informal fosterage and cathedral schools, shaping some of the most renowned sagas and poems of the medieval world.
By Ryder C. Patzuk-Russell
Iceland was an island without cities or towns, even at the end of the Middle Ages – conventionally dated to 1550, when the last Catholic bishop was beheaded and the country became formally Lutheran. In this rural landscape dotted with farms and churches, people nonetheless taught and learned, not only spreading the religious teachings and Latin literature of the Church, but composing and writing the great sagas and poems that have made Old Norse culture and literature so famous around the world. These sagas and poems were also vital cultural capital even among their contemporaries: many texts were shared across the Nordic world, especially the Norwegian royal court. So, at a time when late medieval cities were filling with urban grammar schools and an increasing number of universities, where and how did the people of this little island learn to read and write? And what is it exactly that makes something a ‘school’ in such a place and time?
What is a school in the Middle Ages?
The Latin word schola, from which English ‘school’ derives, has a long history of use. In classical Rome, it could be used to mean a ‘school’ in the modern sense, but was generally more associated with a teacher than a particular place or building. At the same time, it could be understood as the place for adolescent preparation for public life, the opposite of the forum, the place where adults disputed in public life. Cicero sometimes used schola to refer to a spoken or written speech or argument, and scholae could even be regiments or groups in the Roman military.
Medieval writers took up this range of ideas and adapted them for their own purposes. St Augustine wrote about the whole Church as the schola Christi (school of Christ); the renowned sixth-century author Cassiodorus took up this metaphor and ran with it, conceiving of formal Christian education happening at the schola Christi, which would then produce soldiers of Christ. Cassiodorus thus rather cleverly managed to envision a schola that combined the senses of a school, a military order, and the Church! Scholae could also describe different groups of learners – more like a ‘class’ than a ‘school’ – or even different disciplines: you could have the schola of grammar, rhetoric, or even singing.
It is worth noting that universities, which appeared in Europe around the beginning of the thirteenth century, were not actually referred to as scholae. The term for a medieval university was a studium generale, meaning something like ‘universal place of learning’, referring to their distinctive feature of drawing students from many different regions and countries. While many notable Icelanders did travel abroad for education, and at least a few of them – especially in the very late Middle Ages – went to university, there were no universities in Iceland until 1911, and medieval universities probably had a smaller impact on the island than they did on most regions.
Learning in Iceland: Where Were Medieval Schools?
Old Norse made the same borrowing from Latin as English, and we hear of skólar (schools) in many sources from medieval Iceland. But the word is only used to describe education in two places: cathedrals and monasteries. In northern Iceland, the skóli at the cathedral of Hólar is mentioned very early: the Saga of Bishop Jón tells an idealized story about a skóli being built on the cathedral grounds, the only time in the whole corpus we hear of a skóli being a specific place. In other references, the term appears to be more tied to a particular teacher, or the activities of a student or group of students.
This narrow use of skóli makes a certain kind of sense. The cathedral schools were the only place that consistently maintained a professional teacher with a title, the schoolmaster or skólameistari. In the Saga of Bishop Laurentius, we hear of how at one point the protagonist – a disgraced former skólameistari – is stripped of his rights as a priest and instructed to teach in the monasteries of Iceland. Moving between different monastic houses for several years, he starts a skóli at each one. These passages do not imply that there was no education happening at the monasteries before Laurentius arrived, but rather that with the arrival of a new teacher, a new skóli is formed: the school of Laurentius and his students. In late medieval education contracts, cathedrals and monasteries are again described as places with skólar where students pay to be taught, especially to train to become priests.
Outside the great religious houses, the situation is more complicated. Several important men, including a future saint, were educated at the farm of Oddi in the twelfth century – one of the wealthiest farms in southern Iceland, run by the powerful and influential Oddaverjar clan. However, there is no reference to a skóli at Oddi. So what was happening there?
Fosterage: A Learning Tradition of Iceland
The probable answer is known as fóstri (fosterage). Going back to the times when the island was first settled, the Icelanders had multiple ways of recruiting foster parents to help raise their children. One method was to simply send a child to be raised in another household. If that household had the capacity to teach important skills to their foster-children, that could be a major benefit to sending a child there, and a motivation for parents to do so. If enough children were sent to that household, drawn by the education being offered, we might start to think of such a place as a school. In the Sagas of Icelanders, though they were written centuries after Christianization, we read stories of fosterage relationships like this taking place, at least for individual students. Most famously, the great legal expert of Brennu-Njáls saga, Njáll, fostered children and taught them law. A particularly intriguing example appears in the lesser-known Víglundar saga, where an aristocratic woman named Ólof is carefully trained in hannyrðir (fine needlework/embroidery) in Norway, and when she moves to Iceland, she is specifically sought out by a man named Hólmkell, who wants his daughter to be fostered by her and learn hannyrðir.
In the context of such apprenticeships being a basis of education, probably since Iceland was first settled, it becomes unclear what to call a school, and any definition we propose is going to be a bit arbitrary. When the first Icelandic bishop, Ísleifr Gizurarson, is described in the earliest Icelandic historical text, Ari Þorgilsson’s The Book of Icelanders, he is said to have obtained such an excellent education while living abroad, all the most important chieftains in Iceland sent their sons to him to be educated. This is clearly a very idealized image, but whatever actually happened, it must have had some similarity to both a cathedral school and traditional fosterage. We would probably say that Ísleifr ran a school, but at the same time, he and his peers probably did not think of it as all that different from the fosterage that had been practiced in Iceland for generations.
Things are similarly confusing at the farm at Oddi. Clearly, it was a center of learning: St. Þorlákr Þórhallsson was educated there before travelling abroad for higher learning, and the great author and poet Snorri Sturluson was fostered there – it was probably at Oddi that Snorri learned about the mythology that he set down in his Edda and forms the basis for so much of what we now know about pre-Christian religion in the Nordic world. Yet Oddi is never called a skóli, and the teachers there were not professional teachers in the sense of a cathedral skólameistari. Rather, the local priest or other learned chieftains educated their foster-children, probably in their free time, or as part of other responsibilities. We have no evidence that there were groups of students there, and people like St Þorlákr and Snorri Sturluson may have been solitary foster-sons, or part of groups of only two or three.
What Makes a ‘Good’ Education?
Deciding what we think of as a school or not a school is not just a question of terminology. It determines what we think of as formal and informal education, what we think of as good or bad education. One rather polemical Icelandic author writing c. 1600, describing the education on the island before the coming of the Lutheran faith about a half century before, decried the poor state of schooling his home country had had in Catholic times. For him, there had been no true schools in medieval Iceland, just a few abbots and bishops taking on apprentices. In this view, the informality of medieval Icelandic education is fundamentally tied to the falsity of Catholic beliefs, in contrast to the formal and correct learning provided by the Lutheran grammar schools of early modern Iceland.
Modern scholars, of course, do not have the same prejudices regarding religion, but we can have similar unconscious ideas about formal and informal education. For some scholars, describing twelfth-century Oddi as a ‘school’ – despite it probably not being viewed as a skóli by its contemporaries – is not about any particular definition of what a school is: it is about the importance of arguing that Oddi provided high-quality education, that Snorri Sturluson and St Þorlákr were learned intellectuals on par with any of their peers in other parts of Europe.
Education in medieval Iceland was unusual in many ways, but not unique. The particular circumstances on this island between its settlement and the beginning of the modern era provide a perfect case for us to think about what a ‘school’ is. We can question what our assumptions about schools – and about ‘formal’ vs. ‘informal’ education – cause us to assume in turn about the state of intellectual life, different cultures, and different time periods, including the Middle Ages as a whole.
Ryder C. Patzuk-Russell is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Silesia in Katowice. This research is part of the project No. 2022/45/P/HS3/02670 co-funded by the National Science Centre and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 945339.
Ryder C. Patzuk-Russell is offering an online course on Medieval Education: From Schools to Universities - click here to learn more about this course.
Top Image: Reconstructed farm with church from the time of the Icelandic Commonwealth (c. 930–1262). Photo by Simaron / Flickr
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