‘The Freedom (Frelsi) that our ancestors lost in the thirteenth century has now been returned to us’, declared Þorleifur Guðmundsson Repp (1794–1856) to his countrymen on the eve of elections to an Icelandic constitutional assembly convened by the Danish government in the wake of the 1848 revolutions. ‘Freedom’, the Copenhagen-based philologist continued, was nothing less than ‘the art or virtue of the people to govern itself’. ‘The free man’ within ‘the free state (res publica)’ should ‘obey only laws in whose framing he participates’. Yet, Repp was sombre about ‘resuscitating Freedom, where it has been suppressed for a long period’. He argued that the European upheavals had revealed that ‘no contemporary nation understands Freedom, except for the English and their descendants in North-America and the Hungarians and certain tribes in India’. Wherever peoples had long been reduced to ‘the slaves of a king’, the ‘nature of violent government’ had rendered them ‘incapable of freedom’. At the end of absolutism in Denmark, Repp’s manifesto distilled the concerns of a career dedicated to using the new science of comparative-historical philology to recover the Indo-European genealogy of the ‘vita politica’. A disciple of Rasmus Rask, one of the discipline’s principal founders, and a former assistant keeper of books at the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh, Repp insisted that liberty was not a modern discovery but an ancient, pan-Gothic inheritance. He concluded that, to re-create the free state under modern conditions in 1848, ‘I would like to propose to Icelanders, as I have also proposed to the Danes, that we resurrect the ancient laws of Iceland and further adopt modern English laws, which are descended from the very same source.’Footnote 1
This article argues that Gothic republican ideas of liberty – defining freedom politically as independence and active participation in lawmaking within the ‘free state’ believed to have existed among the ancient Gothic peoples – formed an overlooked intellectual background to debates within the Danish composite state during the revolutions of 1848.Footnote 2 Focusing on Repp and his circle of Copenhagen-based Icelandic philologists, I argue that they mobilized the emerging discipline of Indo-European philology not as an instrument of nationalism, with which it is usually associated,Footnote 3 but as a means to recover the idea of the Gothic republic. Combining the new philological methods with a uniquely non-Roman source base in Icelandic medieval manuscripts, Repp gave a distinctive cast to Gothic republican ideas. First, he shifted the genealogy of republican liberty away from both the Graeco-Roman polis and the German forest, locating the origins of Gothic liberty, via Scandinavia, in the Indo-Persian highlands. This led him to identify common institutional forms among other descendants of the Thracian-Scythian tribes, including the peoples of contemporary Hungary and India. Second, he grounded Gothic liberty in an enduring partnership between nobility and people, a vision substantively indebted, in modified form, to Jean-Louis de Lolme’s account of the English constitution.
With absolutism hanging in the balance across Europe, the Copenhagen philologists derived from their analysis a concrete political programme that directly opposed the national projects unfolding around them: a return to the ancient Gothic institutions in which freedom had been most purely embodied – open-air assemblies, medieval treaties and law codes, and trial by jury within the Danish conglomerate state – combined with an updating of these institutions through their modern and most sophisticated expression in the British constitutional system, where the same Gothic liberty had supposedly been shielded from ‘Latin’ despotism across the centuries. Tracing lines of descent from an ancestral Gothic form in Asia through medieval Iceland to its political manifestation in contemporary Britain, Repp and his collaborators sought to recover ancient liberty, even within a single Gothic polity encompassing the north Atlantic.
This article questions conventional narratives within national historiographies, which have situated the events of 1848 predominantly within the frameworks of nationalism and liberalism.Footnote 4 Indeed, republican ideas have largely been absent in Danish and Icelandic scholarship alike, and with them the figure at the centre of this article – Þorleifur Repp – has been almost entirely forgotten.Footnote 5 The exception is Andrew Wawn’s biographical study of Repp’s philological career in 1830s Edinburgh.Footnote 6 Yet, as this article shows, Repp was a well-known and influential figure in his own time, recognized by his Copenhagen peers such as Rask as extending Indo-European philology beyond the history of language into legal history; by the Danish nobility and Icelandic farmers as a leading political scientist; and by Vormärz intellectuals in Germany as an authority on the Nordic genealogy of British liberty.Footnote 7 Building on archival manuscripts and published works, I therefore offer the first analysis of some of Repp’s key works, written in Latin, Danish, Icelandic, and English, as well as those of his closest collaborators at the University of Copenhagen.
The article explores the works of Repp and his circle, not simply to recover overlooked thinkers beyond the traditional canon,Footnote 8 but as a lens to reconsider the broader fate of republicanism in the nineteenth century.Footnote 9 By showing how philology provided tools to reinvent Gothic republican ideas in the Nordic region, it challenges the widespread view that such themes, which scholars have shown were pervasive in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were absorbed into either nationalism or racialized Teutonism.Footnote 10 In so doing, it contributes to recent scholarship expanding the study of republicanism through ‘exchanges’ not only across disciplinary contexts between philology and political thought but also chronologically into the nineteenth century and geographically across national and cultural boundaries. Whereas this scholarship has illustrated how republicanism took on a new complexion in the nineteenth century through the democratic politics of artisans, workers, and women in Anglo-American, French, and Dutch national contexts,Footnote 11 this article shows that republican ideas also flourished in peripheral regions such as Denmark and Iceland during the revolutionary spring of 1848 – and that they could take aristocratic, ancient, and anti-centralizing forms, opposed as much to nationalism and democracy as to absolutism. Furthermore, these exchanges were not straightforwardly from centre to periphery. Writing from Edinburgh as well as Copenhagen, and even advising the British home secretary Sir Robert Peel, Repp recast the genealogy of English liberty itself. As J. G. A. Pocock, Mark Goldie, and others have shown, the derivation of English liberty from the free institutions of the Anglo-Saxons described in Tacitus’ Germania was among the most durable themes in English political thought.Footnote 12 Repp, by contrast, traced the origins of those free institutions to Norse Scandinavia. Entering debates over the origins of British liberty in Britain, Germany, and Iceland simultaneously, he illustrates how figures operating from the margins could influence republican ideas more broadly.
Recovering the multi-faceted character of republican thought in the mid-nineteenth century helps us call into question modernist narratives that cast nationalism and liberalism as the sine qua non of modern politics.Footnote 13 Repp’s case is particularly revealing in this context. Where contemporary figures like the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm repurposed philological innovations for a Herderian-nationalist project of recovering an essential Germanness,Footnote 14 the argument made here is that Repp turned his mentor Rask’s sophisticated methodology, applied to a uniquely non-Roman source base in Icelandic medieval manuscripts, to reconstructing the Gothic free state within a modern political framework. In his view, what the study of grammatical structure and sound shifts revealed was not national essences but the common ancestry of free institutions. Repp’s writings combined a rejection of both ‘inequality of nations and races’ and Rousseauian ‘equality of individuals’.Footnote 15 Instead, he maintained that Gothic liberty was rooted in ‘the inequality of families’, requiring for its endurance a hierarchical partnership between the nobility and the people against the encroachments of monarchy. This vision was substantively indebted to de Lolme’s account of British liberty, which Repp used to counter widespread narratives in Denmark, Norway, and Iceland of an ancient liberty grounded in an alliance between the monarch and the people against the nobility. But where de Lolme had presented the noble–popular partnership as the contingent product of the Norman Conquest, Repp traced it philologically to a ‘unity of principle’ that had persisted across historically divergent forms – from Gothic antiquity through the chieftaincies (goðorð) of the medieval Icelandic republic to its modern expression in the British constitutional system.
The article opens by contextualizing Repp’s intellectual formation in Copenhagen and Edinburgh, where he adapted Rask’s comparative philological method to the history of law and political institutions, introducing Indo-European perspectives into British debates on the origins of liberty. Sections two and three explore his understanding of Gothic liberty and the constitutional, legal, and social programme he proposed for reconstituting it within the Danish composite state in 1848, with particular attention to his critical appropriation of de Lolme’s account of the English constitution. The concluding section examines the influence of Repp’s thinking among the Danish nobility and his Icelandic disciples, who extended these ideas in the years that followed.
I
Born into a family of priests in southern Iceland, Þorleifur Repp studied at the elite Latin school at Bessastaðir before continuing his studies in Copenhagen in 1814. There he turned to philology and quickly distinguished himself, winning two university prize essays. His talents drew the attention of leading scholars of Scandinavian antiquity, notably Rasmus Rask, Grímur Thorkelín, and Finnur Magnússon.Footnote 16 The three men were internationally recognized and well connected in Britain, and were thus able to open to Repp elite scholarly and social circles abroad. Before completing his doctoral dissertation in Copenhagen on the origins of language, as well as a Latin translation of Laxdæla saga, Repp spent two years in London and Germany, after which, thanks to Rask’s glowing recommendation of him as ‘a gentleman of eminent learning’, he received a coveted post at the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh.Footnote 17
Repp’s intellectual development took shape within the scholarly and political debates of early nineteenth-century Copenhagen, marked by a renewed interest in the Nordic past and the rise of historical-comparative philology. The revival of the North as a distinct civilizational space had begun half a century earlier, when the Swiss historian Paul-Henri Mallet published a history of Denmark drawing on Old Norse sources. Mallet and his successors recast the Danish monarchy as the heir to Gothic liberty through a monarch–people alliance against the nobility, a vision that from the 1770s was adopted by the crown and its learned officials to legitimize reforms undermining the aristocracy, including the break-up of noble estates and the creation of freehold farms.Footnote 18
In the early nineteenth century, this debate was transformed by the emergence of philology, which sought to uncover systematic relationships among languages through the comparative analysis of grammatical structure and sound shifts. The new philologists overturned the long-standing authority of Greek and Latin as the privileged foundations of European civilization. Instead, they traced all European tongues back to a common, lost ‘Indo-European’ ancestor, a view developed at Danish and German universities, which became the hotspots for the new science.Footnote 19 At the forefront of this revolution stood the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask, together with the brothers Grimm. Rask’s pioneering study on the origins of the Old Norse or Icelandic language (1818) was foundational in defining the methodological parameters of the new discipline. His systematic comparison of Icelandic, Gothic, and Germanic forms established the sound correspondences later formulated as ‘Rask’s and Grimm’s Law’.Footnote 20
Focusing on Old Norse – or Icelandic – Rasmus Rask argued that the Gothic languages derived from Thracian-Scythian roots in Indo-Persia, independent of Greek and Latin. He wrote his seminal treatise in Iceland in 1813–14, describing Icelandic as ‘the most valuable remainder of Gothic antiquity’, as it preserved the systematic features of the ancient Asiatic tongue.Footnote 21 Rask’s comparative framework, rationalist in spirit, placed languages from India and Central Asia to Europe and the Americas within a single analytical field.Footnote 22 He and his collaborators believed that their indigenous, non-Latin sources, combined with these powerful new methods, granted them unparalleled access to Gothic antiquity – an advantage lacking in both the classical and the Tacitean–German traditions. Furthering this research agenda, Finnur Magnússon applied Rask’s methodological framework to Norse mythology and religion in the Eddas, tracing its origins to the ‘Indo-Persian highlands’ of Asia.Footnote 23
The brothers Grimm, who read Rask and Magnússon closely, to the point that the two latter men accused them of plagiarism, appropriated Rask’s linguistic methods within a Herderian Volksgeist narrative of German unitary essence.Footnote 24 If philology was, for the Grimms, about excavating nationhood, an essential Germanness, Repp, by contrast, redirected his mentor’s philological insights toward reconstructing an alternative genealogy of liberty rooted in the Gothic North. He explicitly framed his own project as building on Rask’s and Magnússon’s Indo-European agenda by extending the historical-comparative analysis beyond language and religion to the history of law and political institutions.Footnote 25
After 1826, from his post at the Advocates’ Library, Repp introduced these Indo-European perspectives into British political and constitutional debates. Since the seventeenth century, English antiquarians and political thinkers had revered the Anglo-Saxon past through two idioms: ancient constitutionalism, emphasizing the continuity of common law; and Saxon republicanism, tracing liberty to the self-governing Saxon tribes. As scholars have shown, drawing on Roman sources such as Tacitus’ Germania, these thinkers celebrated the virtues of the Germanic peoples beyond the Roman frontier, who, as Tacitus described, made their laws and chose their princes collectively. In Montesquieu’s famous phrase, English liberty was born in the German forests.Footnote 26
Repp’s contribution to the British debates on the Saxon republic was both methodological and conceptual. First, he was among the first to bring the new philology to bear within a British context, criticizing British scholars for a lack of scientific rigour. He railed at their dependence on Latin authorities like Tacitus and Caesar in reconstructing the Anglo-Saxon past – a charge also levied against Jacob Grimm. Snorri Sturluson, in Repp’s view, ought to replace Tacitus. In Edinburgh, he advanced with missionary zeal the message that the Gothic world should be examined through the philological study not of the Latins but of its true original language – Old Icelandic – preserved in medieval manuscripts.Footnote 27 This was crucial, he argued, because language was the medium through which law and liberty – not national essences – were preserved across time, carrying a ‘unity of principle’ (principii unitatem) that could be philologically deciphered underneath changing outward forms, thus revealing hidden connections. If Rask had traced cognate languages (and Magnússon religion) back to a common ancestor by identifying systematic correspondences in their grammatical structure, Repp sought to trace cognate political institutions back to a common Gothic origin.Footnote 28
Second, Repp sought to reorient the genealogy of English liberty itself. His opportunity came when the British home secretary, Sir Robert Peel, solicited his advice on whether unanimity was historically required in Anglo-Saxon jury verdicts.Footnote 29 Applying Rask’s comparative method to a wide range of ancient Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, and Saxon sources, Repp traced ‘the fountainhead’ of Gothic liberty to Norway – the gateway through which it had entered Europe from Asia – and concluded that the Anglo-Saxon jury originated not in Germany but in the North. ‘The Anglo-Saxons, and their descendants, the English’, were ‘part of the Northern or Gothic family’, and ‘all Teutonic law’, including Anglo-Saxon, could be traced to ‘its northern origin’. Turning the tables on prevailing German-centred accounts, he argued through close textual analysis that Anglo-Saxon law derived from Norse kings like Harald Bluetooth rather than Carolingians, before being carried to Britain and consolidated through subsequent waves of Viking settlement. The Norman Conquest, in Repp’s view, was the culmination of this process, for the Normans were the very same people who had given laws to the Saxons and settled Iceland in the ninth century. The medieval Icelandic republic thus represented the purest expression of the Gothic ur-constitution from which the institutions of the Angles and Saxons were derived. English juries were Norse in origin, and the Icelandic manuscripts preserved the most authentic record of their historical roots, his conclusion being that majority, not unanimity, was the original principle.Footnote 30
Repp’s treatise made him perhaps the earliest proponent of a view that would enjoy a spectacular career later in nineteenth-century Britain: that English liberty rested on northern (or Viking) heritage, setting it in a new, non-Latin source base and detaching it from its German moorings.Footnote 31 As the British legal scholar William Forsyth noted approvingly in 1851, Repp was the first to ground the English jury in Scandinavian origins.Footnote 32 The treatise earned him a European reputation, proving quite influential in German universities, where it quickly became an authority on the English jury in Staatswissenschaften debates among leading Vormärz intellectuals. The Freiburg law professor Franz J. Buss published a German translation in 1835, prefacing it with an endorsement of Repp’s central argument. In his 1845 edition of Staatslexikon, the principal reference work of the period, Carl T. Welcker cited Repp as his principal authority on the subject, drawing on him, as Buss had done, to advocate the reinstatement of juries in Germany. Another leading figure, Friedrich Dahlmann, in his 1846 essay on the history of the English jury, acknowledged Repp as the only scholar to have attempted the argument. While criticizing Repp’s methods, Dahlmann nevertheless adopted Repp’s core thesis that the jury originated in Scandinavia, although he sided with his friend Grimm against Repp (and Rask) in insisting on a Germanic rather than a distinctively Norse basis for Norwegian law codes.Footnote 33
Yet, despite Repp’s support for the Gothic-liberty–Latin-despotism binary, he resisted the racialization that came to dominate later versions of this narrative. Following Rask, he sought to uncover ‘the shared general principle’ across legal and linguistic formations rather than emphasizing difference, mocking biological explanations from ethnology and phrenology as pseudo-sciences and rejecting the Herderian–Fichtean fusion of language with national or racial essence.Footnote 34 ‘Gothic’, in Repp’s usage, denoted shared political and linguistic structures. Directly contesting Herder, he replaced the link between language and nation with a republican link between language and liberty. ‘The character of language’ was derived from ‘the political life of the people’. Those living under ‘tyranny use the language of slaves’ whereas, in ‘the aristocratic commonwealth (civitate aristocratica)’, the language of those who discussed ‘the public affairs (res ad publicam)’ in the open air became ‘free and noble, ut Romani’.Footnote 35
After returning to Copenhagen in 1838, Repp broadened his historical account of liberty through a philological study of the Hungarian language. He was struck by the nobiliary–republican character of the Hungarian reform movement within the Habsburg empire and by the ancient constitutionalism embodied in figures such as István Széchenyi and Miklós Wesselényi, who traced Hungary’s ‘ancient liberties’ to the Bulla aurea of 1222.Footnote 36 Repp argued for Hungarian linguistic and institutional affinity with Old Norse and Icelandic – not as a derivative, but as the result of the ‘intellectual influence’ of the Hungarians (or their allegedly Hunnic ancestors) upon the Goths. Dedicating his ‘Magyar discoveries’ to Széchenyi himself, Repp took the shared linguistic and institutional roots of the Norse and Hungarians as the common inheritance of the Scythian conquerors of the Indo-Persian highlands, carried westward into Europe. He thus imagined a transhistorical Indo-European world bound by linguistic and institutional kinship, extending from Scandinavia and northern Germany to the Low Countries, Iceland, Scotland, and England, yet descended from a common Indo-Persian heritage stretching from Hungary to India.Footnote 37
With the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848, Repp seized the opportunity to advance his vision of the Gothic republic. In response to news that the newly established government of the so-called national-liberals was preparing a constitution, he published his own constitutional proposal, hitherto unexamined.Footnote 38 His chief aim was to preserve the Danish composite monarchy by restoring its ancient, pre-absolutist framework and modernizing it after the British model. He rejected the national-liberals’ push to replace the monarchy’s composite structure with a unitary nation-state, warning that this would erase the historic and legal distinctions among the crown’s provinces, including Schleswig, Holstein, and Iceland. Repp then founded a bi-weekly newspaper, Tiden (The Times) in October 1848, using it to mount a sustained attack on what he mocked as the ‘Casino government’ of the national-liberals and their chief organ, Fædrelandet (The Fatherland).Footnote 39
After the national-liberals secured their unitary constitution in 1849, Repp opposed it from an Icelandic perspective. Since returning to Copenhagen from Edinburgh in 1838, he had become a central figure in the Icelandic community as vice-president of the Icelandic Literary Society, official translator to the Danish monarchy, and lecturer in English at the University of Copenhagen.Footnote 40 He mentored a younger generation of philologists and political thinkers, including Jón Sigurðsson, soon to lead the independence movement; Gísli Brynjúlfsson, who founded Norðurfari (The Northerner) in 1848 and later co-edited Ný félagsrit (New Magazine) with Sigurðsson; and Arnljótur Ólafsson, usually credited as Iceland’s first economist.Footnote 41 Brynjúlfsson’s 1848 diary records their near-daily meetings during the revolutionary spring, studying the classics (Cicero, Livy, and Polybius), English poetry (Lord Byron and Walter Scott), and political economy, discussing unfolding revolutionary events across Europe, and attending political meetings in Copenhagen.Footnote 42
Repp himself stood for election to the Icelandic constitutional assembly convened in 1851 to ratify the Danish constitution for Iceland, winning the highest share of votes in Reykjavík. Contemporary correspondence suggests he was regarded as one of the leaders of the emerging ‘Freedom Party’ and as the foremost authority on ‘political science’.Footnote 43 Indeed, no other Icelander of the period could claim to have shaped debates over political institutions across Denmark, Germany, and Britain. Jón Sigurðsson captured the excitement surrounding Repp’s election, noting extravagant rumours circulating in Copenhagen that the islanders had proclaimed a ‘socialist and democratic republic’, and had ‘appointed Repp as king’.Footnote 44
II
Repp greeted the revolutions of 1848 with excitement at the fall of absolutism but also with apprehension. He never described himself as a ‘liberal’, reserving that term for the anti-aristocratic party. Instead, he regarded himself as ‘an authentic republican (Ægtig Republikaner)’, espousing the principles of ‘the true republic (Rigtig Republik)’.Footnote 45 His principal political category was freedom, understood not as an individual or natural right but as independence or self-government within a ‘free state’. ‘Freedom’, he wrote, ‘is the art or ability of the people to govern itself.’ Yet a people long reduced to ‘the slaves of a king’ could not easily move from slavery to liberty, since centuries of despotism had instilled servility into their very ‘soul and mind’. Hence, ‘more is required for the restoration of freedom, where it has been suppressed for a while, than to write and pass in law that men are now free’. Reflecting on the European upheavals in 1849, Repp believed that the French had founded republics with ‘even less freedom than before’; the Germans were ‘no freer, all revolutions notwithstanding’. The problem, he argued, lay not only in institutions but in ‘the spirit of the laws’, which remained absolutist. The fall of monarchy would merely replace one despotism with another in democratic guise – which he termed ‘ochlocratic absolutism’ – marked by violence and continuous revolution.Footnote 46
Repp argued that freedom within the republic was neither a modern discovery nor a Graeco-Roman legacy but derived from a Gothic ur-constitution formed in ancient Scandinavia and most purely codified in medieval Iceland. The Norse tribes, he maintained, had practised freedom as self-government grounded in virtue and courage, excelling in participatory institutions – especially legislative assemblies and juries – whose traces were preserved in medieval Icelandic law codes, such as Grágás (‘Grey Goose’), and the sagas. Gothic liberty stood in direct contrast to Latin absolutism embodied in Roman law, emanating from southern Europe but gradually engulfing France, Germany, and even Scandinavia. Crucially, Repp did not object to Danish rule in Iceland because it was Danish – he stressed that medieval Danish and Icelandic laws were essentially identical – but because modern Danish institutions were ‘saturated with Latin absolutism’. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, he observed, ‘German absolutists made law for them [the Danes] in place of their free laws; they received inquisitorial judicial systems and governments for unfree men and slaves.’Footnote 47
At the heart of Repp’s conception of Gothic liberty stood the ancient jury within the Þing or parliament. By relocating the origins of British liberty from Germany to the North, he opened up a new source base, unavailable for a Germanic past, with which to reconstruct the political and legal institutions of the Norse on their own terms. He used this material to give his genealogy of British liberty decisive content, adapting the thesis of Jean-Louis de Lolme, who had argued in his 1771 account of the British constitution that Britain had developed free government because the strong monarchy imposed by the Norman Conquest forced the nobles to band together not only with each other but with their vassals and even the people. Unlike the continent, where the nobles were powerful enough to overwhelm both king and people – leading to endless wars and eventually an alliance between absolutist kings and the people to crush the nobility – in Britain the people and the nobility became ‘partners of public liberty’.Footnote 48
Scholars have begun to show how influential de Lolme’s account was across the nineteenth century.Footnote 49 His noble–popular partnership was also the lynchpin of Repp’s argument, but the latter recast it in Gothic and aristocratic terms. De Lolme had dismissed the Anglo-Saxon origins of British liberty in favour of a structural explanation rooted in strong monarchy after the Norman Conquest. Repp insisted instead on ancient Norwegian origins. This move did more than extend the chronology; it removed strong monarchy as the key explanatory variable. Where de Lolme’s causal logic ran from monarchy to liberty – the crown’s power effecting a noble–popular union – Repp reversed the priority. For him, it was the character of the aristocracy that determined whether a polity tended towards liberty or despotism. An aristocracy that drew the people into partnership produced freedom; one that oppressed them invited tyranny. He used this reversal to displace widespread antiquarian readings of ancient liberty in Denmark that were grounded in a partnership between the monarchy and the people, underscoring instead the aristocracy as the social basis of the Gothic institutional order.Footnote 50 While dismissing de Lolme’s causal explanation, Repp thus adopted and deepened the content of the aristocratic–popular partnership, in which the aristocratic element took the lead.
This noble–popular partnership found its institutional expression in the Gothic past, namely the Þing. The Þing combined legislative and judicial functions – hence the Icelandic term for the assembly, lögrétta (‘correction of the law’), and the title of its members, ‘law-amending men’. It was the centrepiece of Gothic liberty, the institution in which free men collectively made and judged laws for themselves. Trial by jury, Repp wrote, was ‘the palladium of liberty’ and an essential element of ‘the physiology of the vita politica’. He drew close parallels between ‘the legal systems of the Greeks and the Goths’, noting that ‘both Northern and Athenian juries consisted not of professional lawyers but of free citizens’. Both jury types ‘combined the power of making and interpreting the law; both judged under the open sky … and both decided by majority vote’. Yet Repp conceded that the Athenians ‘surpassed the Goths’ because they involved a greater number of citizens in both the making and the judging of laws: ‘their entire constitution was more democratic’.Footnote 51
Unlike the Greeks, Gothic liberty was thus rooted in an aristocratic–popular partnership. In the Gothic jury, the role of the nobles (Goðar), was much greater, constituting ‘an aristocratic republic’. It was through the goðorð – the institutional mechanism by which aristocratic leadership operated within the assembly – that this principle took concrete form. Codified in Grágás, the goðorð had been the basic governing unit of the medieval republic – literally the ‘authority’ or ‘word’ of the chieftain (goði). It centred on the authority of the noblest chieftains, wealthy men of distinction who maintained communal halls (hof) for assemblies and pagan rituals. Every free landowner was required to affiliate with a goði, but could freely choose which one. The goðorð were hereditary, passing from father to son, and tied to ‘wealth and fortune’, since only those with means could sustain the temples. The Goðar nominated freemen, who could include all householders, to the assembly and jury. For Repp, Gothic liberty thus rested on an aristocratic partnership with the people in which the former took the lead, by mediating the people’s participation through hereditary noble authority.Footnote 52
If the purest expression of this constitutional form had been medieval Iceland, the reason was that its Norwegian settlers constituted ‘the flower of the Norwegian aristocracy’, chieftains fleeing the tyranny of Harald Fairhair to preserve their ‘independence’.Footnote 53 It was to ‘the uncommon quality of the settlers’ that Repp attributed the supposed fact that ‘their laws were far superior to those of neighbouring nations’. For him, this superiority stemmed not from any national traits, as later nationalist writers would claim, but from the aristocratic–popular partnership itself. In a reference to Rousseau’s famous treatise, he observed that much had been written on inequality among men (‘Sur l’inégalité parmi les hommes’). Inequality certainly existed, he insisted, but less between ‘races or nations’ than between ‘particular families’ – a rejection of both Herder and Rousseau. It was the intellectual and moral distinction of these families – the aristocratic principle – that had carried Gothic liberty to its highest medieval expression. If Rask had traced Norse language and Magnússon Norse religion to a common Indo-Persian source, Repp suggested that liberty’s origins also lay there, depicting the Goths, alongside the Huns, as Europe’s conquering nobility. The Goths, and especially the Norse, were ‘in themselves an aristocracy’. As the Norse, their Gothic brethren, and the Huns spread across the continent, they left behind in nearly every European nation, from Iceland to the Magyars of Hungary, the Anglo-Saxons of Britain, and the Vandals and Visigoths of Aragon and Andalusia (or ‘Vandal-usia’, as Repp styled it), the foundation for a true aristocracy, a pan-European rampart against Latin despotism.Footnote 54
Repp was explicit that he sought to ‘resurrect’ the same freedom and the same free institutions that ‘our ancestors lost in the thirteenth century’ and to adapt them to modern conditions. His programme was twofold: first, to reintroduce the medieval laws preserved in Grágás, as well as medieval legislative and judicial institutions like the Þing and the jury at its original site at Þingvellir; and, second, to model constitutions and government on contemporary Britain, which had supposedly gradually developed the principles of Gothic freedom. If most existing laws in Iceland and Denmark were, as Repp put it, ‘incommensurable with freedom and not appropriate for free men’, they had to be thoroughly reformed once a new constitution was in place. ‘Once a people pass from absolutism to freedom,’ he wrote, ‘it becomes absolutely necessary to remake all laws and adapt them to the needs of a free state.’Footnote 55
Repp was more optimistic about this prospect for Iceland than for Denmark, since the former had not been equally enthralled by Latin absolutism. Whereas the Danes had allegedly become deeply enmeshed in it, Icelanders – by virtue of their distance from Copenhagen – had been only partially ‘corrupted’. While there was no legally distinct noble caste in Iceland, the late eighteenth-century land policies undermining the Danish nobility had been largely resisted by the landowning elite in Iceland, and no peasant movement demanding freeholds had taken root.Footnote 56 As a result, Repp believed that ‘unfreedom has never so completely pervaded the hearts and souls of Icelanders … and many of the laws that were made by free men for free men are still in place’. Having read and even practised Grágás, they were, ‘according to the psychology of Plato, the Greek Master’, better equipped to ‘re-study the Freedom that our ancestors knew before’.Footnote 57
As an early advocate of restoring the Alþingi – initially as a provincial diet in 1839–45, then after the end of absolutism in 1848 – not in Reykjavík but at its ori-ginal site, Þingvellir, Repp envisioned no mere Romantic revival but a constitutional transformation.Footnote 58 The Alþingi, he argued, should exercise both legislative and judicial authority, the latter concentrated in a remodelled ancient jury. Building on the old goðorð, Repp envisioned intermediary spring assemblies for consultation and trials, culminating in the Alþingi as the supreme or ‘universal’ assembly. Held in the open air and with popular participation, it would unite legislative and judicial powers in the same deliberative body – displacing the independent judiciary and its ‘professional lawyers’ that had emerged under absolutism, in favour of ‘free citizens’ making and mending their laws.Footnote 59
The constitutional framework for Iceland’s position within the Danish monarchy after the fall of absolutism was provided, in Repp’s view, by returning again to ancient liberties – that is, the Gamli sáttmáli (‘Old Covenant’) of 1262 between the Icelandic nobles and King Hákon the Old of Norway – an argument first articulated by Jón Sigurðsson in 1848.Footnote 60 Under this compact, Repp underscored, Iceland retained legislative and judicial autonomy under Grágás, while owing only tribute to the crown. He claimed that the Icelandic nobles even inserted a right of resistance, inviting parallels with other thirteenth-century liberty charters, namely Magna Carta, the Oath of the Aragonese, and the Hungarian Bulla aurea. Repp then extended this historical argument by invoking the British empire, tapping into arguments about its role in fostering autonomy and self-government among its colonies and provinces. He proposed that Iceland’s (and Schleswig-Holstein’s) relation to Denmark be modelled on Britain’s with its northern isles – Orkney and Shetland – thus providing a constitutional framework for provincial self-rule within the Danish polity. Repp did not believe that Iceland – containing ‘sixty thousand men and equally many horses’ – could ‘stand alone’, and he even entertained its explicit incorporation into the British empire as an isle alongside Orkney and Shetland.Footnote 61
III
In Denmark, Repp believed the challenge to be greater, for the country had been more deeply marked by absolutism, even though it too possessed medieval law books codifying laws ‘made by free men for free men’. In addition to re-adopting these ancient codes, he proposed a mixed constitution based on the British one. Mixed government, he argued, was the true form of the res publica – and Britain, despite its peers and monarchy, was ‘the greatest republic’.Footnote 62
Repp believed that the chief defect of the post-medieval political order was the elimination of the aristocracy from constitution-making. The aristocracy had first been attacked in the name of monarchical absolutism and later destroyed in the name of pure democracy (or ‘ochlocracy’) – two forms of the same despotism, ‘the one a false idol, the other a hydra’. More moderate constitutions since 1789 had sought to combine monarchy and democracy, but the result was always ‘the same as under Caesar or Cromwell’: the two powers fought until one triumphed and despotism re-emerged.Footnote 63 The crucial problem of 1848 in Denmark, as across continental Europe, was the absence of a genuine aristocracy. Absolutism had transformed ‘the political nobility into a court nobility’, servile to monarchical favour and dependent on titles and offices, while promoting ‘social levelling’ through its alliance with the people against the nobility, breaking up great estates and eroding the economic basis of aristocratic independence. Repp believed that, apart from France, few countries had carried this process further or more disastrously than Denmark, a theme he developed extensively in Tiden.Footnote 64
Unlike many contemporaries who shared this analysis, Repp argued that the solution was not to abandon the mixed constitution but to restore and re-create the aristocratic element wherever it had disappeared: ‘Where it is not politically active, it must be activated.’ This went far beyond creating an upper chamber appointed by the monarch or elected on different terms. The true ‘political role model’, especially for small states, was Britain. The United States, though lacking hereditary nobility, had cemented, in Repp’s view, a natural one in its senate, embodying the aristocratic function within a republic.Footnote 65
The aristocracy’s historical role was ‘to lead and guide the people on the path to freedom’, but this required ‘an organic fusion of the aristocratic and democratic elements within the people itself’, as supposedly achieved in England.Footnote 66 Here Repp again adopted de Lolme’s aristocratic–popular partnership – also citing the historian Henry Hallam – to explain the structure of British liberty, and, since that partnership was rooted in Gothic antiquity, applied it to contemporary Denmark. In his view, the English nobility’s role was purely political, and the hereditary privileges were centred on individuals, not families. With the exception of the peers, ‘who possess certain privileges but none that oppress others, every class in the state … has the same rights and is subject to the same laws’. The British constitution thus achieved an ‘equality of civil rights – this isonomia – which Greek philosophers sought in their democratic republics’. The partnership operated by the nobles taking the lead, educating the people through the establishment of schools and associations, and providing the knowledge and judgement needed to refine the people’s will. Engaged in acquisitive pursuits, the people possessed neither the leisure nor education to study public affairs, while the monarch could not engage in debate or shape public opinion. The aristocracy alone had the time, training, and independence to subordinate private interests to the public good. His succinct formula captured the point: ‘Without aristocracy, no true democracy; without both, no freedom.’Footnote 67
Based on the House of Lords, Repp developed a concrete scheme for the upper chamber. The existing nobility would retain hereditary status in a purely political capacity. Through a layered process of election and royal appointment, eighteen peers drawn from the nobility and eighteen ennobled commoners would form the upper chamber, with eligibility requiring a university education and fluency in English, French, and German. The hereditary upper chamber could not initiate legis-lation or veto the budget, serving only to revise laws passed by the lower chamber. The lower chamber, by contrast, would hold absolute authority over the budget and sole right to propose legislation. Repp demanded universal male suffrage (for the lower chamber) for all men over twenty, without property qualifications, taking sides with the radicals against the national-liberals, sharply criticizing the latter for seeking to raise the age to thirty.Footnote 68
However ingenious, constitution-making alone could not re-create a genuine aristocracy. Citing Tocqueville, Repp maintained that the stability of political institutions depended on the social distribution of property.Footnote 69 He therefore proposed new inheritance laws modelled on English and Scottish practice – primogeniture and entail – to prevent the fragmentation of estates and secure the landed independence necessary for the nobility’s public virtue. Absolutism, he argued, had destroyed these conditions by redistributing estates among peasants, reducing the nobility in Denmark to a ‘Chinese aristocracy’ of officials, ‘levelled by absolutism’, thus undermining the noble–popular partnership necessary for liberty.Footnote 70
Repp drew here on the political economy of J. R. McCulloch, who, though often seen as a popularizer of Adam Smith, broke with Smith’s critique of primogeniture and entail.Footnote 71 His denunciation of the French revolutionary laws of equal succession, which required estates to be divided among heirs, fragmenting landholdings and deepening poverty, had resonated widely among conservative and liberal thinkers, from Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant to Tocqueville.Footnote 72 If Tocqueville warned that the erosion of intermediate social orders threatened liberty,Footnote 73 Repp’s path lay in actively re-creating ‘the English model’ by reviving a landed aristocracy through primogeniture and entail.Footnote 74 To drive home his point in Tiden, Repp amended Oliver Goldsmith’s famous lines from The deserted village. If the first sentence remained ‘Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey’, Repp substituted Goldsmith’s familiar ‘Where wealth accumulates, and men decay’ with his own twist: ‘Where lands are parcelled and lords decay’.Footnote 75
In Repp’s view, de Lolme’s noble–popular partnership had obtained ‘a new foundation’ through agricultural development. If the subdivision of land in France had led to impoverishment – holdings becoming too small to sustain the families inhabiting them – Britain provided a model of remarkable agricultural progress through the same aristocratic–popular partnership that underpinned its constitution. The stakes were high in Denmark, where the peasant movement was pressing to convert all remaining copyholds into freeholds, threatening to fragment the remaining estates. Repp argued that British experience demonstrated the opposite lesson. Larger estates were necessary for agricultural improvement, revealing ‘the intimate connection that exists between the most important interests of the landed nobility and of the rural population’. The nobles took the lead by educating peasants’ sons, establishing agricultural associations, and providing the capital for scientific research and technological development. Thus there were ‘nowhere in England any “friends of the peasantry” who teach the smaller landowner to revile the nobility’. British tenants, Repp maintained, did not seek to acquire their holdings as freeholds but to lease larger plots, sustaining the great estates and the partnership on which improvement depended. English prosperity rested on the ‘partnership and combined co-operation of greater and lesser forces toward a common goal’, where ‘the less well-to-do brings labour and experience; the richer man brings capital and scientific insight – and both gain by the union of these factors’.Footnote 76
IV
Repp’s message proved influential in Denmark in mid-1848, when his constitutional treatise was brought to the attention of Hans Rasmus Carlsen, a leading member of the aristocratic Association of Landowners (Godsejerforeningen). The Danish landowners had mobilized since 1843 to press political demands, particularly against the Friends of Peasants and their national-liberal allies. Like Repp, Carlsen and fellow ennobled landowners such as Jacob Brønnum Scavenius and Christian Frederick Zeuthen argued in 1848 for an upper chamber based on hereditary nobility, looking to British models in the hope of forestalling the redistribution of property. Carlsen circulated Repp’s treatise among the landowners, who rallied behind him. In the constitutional debates that began in the autumn of 1848, the association funded two newspapers as its mouthpieces in the press, one of them Repp’s Tiden. Over the next two years, Repp found a ready reception among the aristocracy, helping to shape their agenda both in the press and in the constitutional assembly itself.Footnote 77 Similarly, his writings were frequently discussed (and criticized) in the pages of the mainstream Danish newspapers, including Fædrelandet and Berlingske Tidende (Berling’s Times), although, in the end, his constitutional programme was dismissed.Footnote 78
Repp’s Gothic republicanism became a more influential idiom in Icelandic political thought after 1848. He himself had set the parameters of this debate in his 1849 manifesto to his constituents, reiterating the ideas first formulated in a Danish context: that Icelanders should return to the ancient liberty of the Goths by reviving their ancient Alþingi at its original site, the Gamli sáttmáli, law codes, and social structures, while moderating them through contemporary English models. At this time, he collaborated with Gísli Brynjúlfsson, Arnljótur Ólafsson, and Jón Sigurðsson in translating medieval Icelandic manuscripts relating to English history, notably on Edward the Confessor, Oswald of Northumbria, and Tristam and Isolde, revealing the intertwined histories of Iceland, Scandinavia, and the British Isles.Footnote 79
These younger philologists adopted Repp’s arguments and developed them systematically in the leading Icelandic-language journals, elaborating a comprehensive programme for restoring ancient treaties, law codes, juries, and governing units as the basis for reorganizing Iceland’s internal constitution and its relationship to Denmark. In 1848–9 essays in Norðurfari, described as ‘capturing the spirit of 1848 better than anyone’, Brynjúlfsson cast the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848 as a struggle between ancient liberty and Latin slavery.Footnote 80 The Norse had been ‘the source of all government in England and in the United States … much more than the ancient Anglo-Saxons’.Footnote 81 Continental Europe, since the French Revolution, had been trapped in an endless cycle of revolution and counter-revolution, born of a misguided conception of liberty. Britain, by contrast, had ‘never corrupted their laws’ with ‘Roman law, the Byzantine, Caesarean directives’, but had ‘retained the ancient and free laws of their ancestors and only improved them’. Even though ‘the French call their country res publica’, Brynjúlfsson concluded, ‘it is still among the greatest tyrannies’, whereas ‘England is the truest res publica, even though the chief magistracy is inherited’.Footnote 82
Surveying the European revolutions, Brynjúlfsson reproduced Repp’s comparative genealogy of Gothic liberty, adopted de Lolme’s aristocratic–popular partnership, citing the Swiss author explicitly, and applied them to explain the successes and failures of 1848. The partnership was the decisive factor in determining whether freedom had endured or collapsed. ‘Countries with an existing aristocracy’, he wrote, ‘have been in a better position, where the aristocracy has been able to resist absolutism and elevate the people, rather than the opposite, where one man has been able to reduce everyone equally to slavery.’ While ‘the democrats might not like this view’, he insisted – quoting Repp’s constitutional treatise – ‘they hate the aristocracy more than they love freedom’. Where this noble–popular alliance failed, liberty perished. If in France the nobility had been eradicated, in Prussia they had sided with the monarchy against the people, with disastrous results; in England and Hungary, by contrast, the union of aristocratic and popular forces had preserved freedom. Since 1222, this alliance had made the Magyars ‘the freest people on the continent’, upholding the Bulla aurea, ‘this Magna Carta of the Magyar’. Drawing a series of explicit parallels between the Magyars, the Icelanders, and the British, Brynjúlfsson concluded that the Hungarian struggle of 1848 likewise sought ‘to resurrect the ancient freedom of the people’. Indeed, it was ‘the same and unbroken freedom’ from antiquity that propelled the Icelanders to flee Norway, that the English and North Americans enjoyed in the present, and that ‘now gives strength to the Magyars to rise all as one against oppression and slavery’.Footnote 83
In Ný félagsrit, the most prominent Icelandic-language periodical at the time, Brynjúlfsson further pressed this case in an 1852 essay explicitly dedicated to the topic of the liberty of the ancients and the moderns. He criticized those who praised the excellence of Gothic antiquity only so long as it remained buried in the past, rather than reclaiming it as a living model for the present. Though he lamented that social equality had increased, he held that ‘the same foundation that the ancients built on still exists in the Icelandic countryside’. Mocking those who dismissed ancient institutions as obsolete, he urged that it should be the ‘main policy’ of Icelanders ‘to utilize the ancient age in the present era … by reawakening the true spirit of antiquity … to become free men, Icelanders should look to antiquity as a role model, especially by creating free local governments’.Footnote 84
To show how ancient liberty might be restored in practice, Brynjúlfsson published an extensive essay in Ný félagsrit in 1853, proposing to revive the aristocratic goðorð – the basic governing unit of the medieval republic – as the foundation of local self-government.Footnote 85 Drawing on the authors of the medieval Eddas, he deepened the social analysis of the Icelandic goðorð in de Lolme’s terms by elaborating on the noble–popular partnership. He outlined a tripartite social order rooted in ‘the difference between slaves, free men, and noble men’, each defined by its origin and role within the Gothic polity.Footnote 86 Free men tilled the soil with the help of slaves, while the noble class devoted itself to war, the arts, writing, and literature. The goði combined priestly and martial authority in the same figure, a configuration Brynjúlfsson compared to Indian and Persian caste systems, noting that, unlike the Brahmin, the Norse chieftain’s fusion of roles prevented religious despotism. The chieftains were guardians of liberty, convening parliament and appointing free men to make, amend, and judge laws.Footnote 87
To revive the goðorð system as the foundation of a renewed Icelandic republic, Brynjúlfsson proposed that free men in each locality would elect chieftains from the ranks of the wealthiest landowners in their localities, who would rebuild the ancient camps at Þingvellir at their own expense, forming the basis of successive assemblies – local, provincial, and national – culminating in the Alþingi as a combined legislative and judicial body. Since landownership in Iceland remained highly concentrated, Brynjúlfsson believed that this partnership of the landowning elite (or ‘chieftains’) and the people could be restored. Though both hierarchical and paternal, this was a participatory civic vision – an alliance between the noble and the free against centralized despotism – in which legislative, judicial, and even executive power would return to the people themselves, rather than remain with ‘the bureaucrats’ and ‘king-slaves’ of the centralized administration.Footnote 88
Arnljótur Ólafsson, another young Copenhagen intellectual, extended this vision into the realm of economic improvement. Heeding Repp’s call to adopt English and Scottish agricultural associations as a model, Ólafsson argued at length for founding such bodies in Iceland under the leadership of the wealthiest landowners. In what were the very first essays dedicated to ‘political economy’ in Icelandic, he put at the centre Repp’s argument about how the noble–popular partnership, which had served as the ‘bulwark’ of English liberty, had also provided the basis for agricultural progress. Dismissing the Friends of Peasants movement and freeholds, Ólafsson maintained that prosperity in Iceland depended on the same co-operative structure according to which large landholders supplied education and capital, with peasants-tenants contributing labour and practical experience.Footnote 89
Finally, Gothic liberty influenced the major argument of the Icelandic autonomy movement: Jón Sigurðsson’s articulation of Iceland’s constitutional status through the Gamli sáttmáli.Footnote 90 In 1848, Sigurðsson argued that, with the fall of absolutism, Iceland’s relationship to Denmark should revert to a 1262 compact between the Icelandic chieftains and the Norwegian king, retaining the ‘freedom to govern itself’ ensured in the ‘ancient treaty’ rather than being integrated into a Danish unitary state. Though the restoration of the goðorð or the parliament at Þingvellir never happened, this appeal to ‘ancient historical rights’ became the dominant idiom and leading demand of the Icelandic movement until 1918. Its intellectual origins have long puzzled historians, who have noted that Sigurðsson did not employ the language of nationhood, thus tending to subsume his arguments under liberalism.Footnote 91
Though not previously recognized as such, Sigurðsson’s argument effectively grounded Icelandic claims in the language of ‘ancient liberties’, taking up a well-known line of argumentation of the nobility and provinces from the pre-1662 period across the Danish realm. In contrast with the national-liberals’ unitary state, he highlighted the ‘privileges’ of ‘the parts of the realm’ derived from historical compacts within the composite state.Footnote 92 This invites obvious comparison with the contemporary invocation of the Bulla aurea in Hungary, the Oath of the Aragonese in Spain, and, more clearly still, Friedrich Dahlmann’s defence of the constitutional autonomy of Schleswig-Holstein in terms of the 1460 treaty of Ribe.Footnote 93 Repp and Brynjúlfsson enthusiastically endorsed the Gamli sáttmáli position, incorporating it into their republican framework.Footnote 94 While Sigurðsson envisioned a more modern administration centred on Reykjavík – dismissing Repp’s attempt at ‘reproducing a barbaric golden past’ as ‘ludicrous’ – his conception of Iceland’s relation to Denmark via the Gamli sáttmáli belonged to a well-established European tradition of invoking ancient compacts and corporate autonomy that Repp and Brynjúlfsson had recovered.Footnote 95
V
This article has shown that the rise of Indo-European philology, conventionally linked in the scholarly literature to nationalism, inspired a reorientation of the idea of the Gothic republic from both classical Graeco-Roman and Tacitean–German sources. Repp and his circle adopted a classical conception of liberty rooted in self-government, but gave it a different cast. Working from a uniquely native, non-Roman source base in Icelandic medieval manuscripts – Snorri Sturluson, not Tacitus, Livy, or Cicero, was the leading authority – they turned both these sources and Rask’s comparative method to a republican rather than a nationalist purpose, thus tracing common political institutions, via Scandinavia, to Indo-Persian antiquity. The aristocratic–popular partnership at the heart of this vision was substantively indebted to de Lolme’s account of the English constitution but re-grounded in the Gothic past. Where de Lolme had presented the collaboration of nobles and people as the contingent product of the Norman Conquest, Repp traced it as a ‘unity of principle’ persisting across historically divergent forms from Gothic antiquity through the Icelandic goðorð to the British parliament. On this intellectual basis, he, his philological circle, and his aristocratic allies constructed a comprehensive political programme – restoring ancient treaties, open-air assemblies, a hereditary upper chamber, law codes, and juries, while upgrading them through a mixed constitutional framework modelled on Britain. The republican idiom was thus mobilized in 1848 not only against absolutism but also against the national-liberal state that sought to replace it.
The Repp case thus shows how Gothic republican themes, so pervasive in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were not seamlessly absorbed in the nineteenth century into either nationalism or racialized Teutonism. Through the evidentiary and conceptual resources of philology, the aristocratic republic was revitalized as an idiom of anti-nationalist and anti-democratic revolt in peripheral regions resisting both autocratic and nationalist consolidation. At its most expansive, Repp’s vision counterposed an ancient Indo-European liberty stretching from Hungary to Britain, buttressed by a noble–popular partnership, to a Latinized despotism, levelled and bureaucratic – illustrating how the upheavals of 1848 were experienced not as national revolts but as profoundly European events.Footnote 96 Writing from Copenhagen and Edinburgh, Repp imagined an interconnected regional order stretching from Denmark and Norway through the Faroes and Iceland to the British Isles and across the Atlantic. His goal was not only to unite ancient liberty and its modern refinement but to recover a lost north Atlantic world in which the histories of the Nordic lands and the British Isles were woven together in a common Gothic tapestry.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers of the Historical Journal, Jón Kristinn Einarsson, and participants in the economic and social history seminar at the University of Iceland for careful readings, helpful comments, and discussion.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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