Commentary on the Establishment of a Printing Press in Iceland, Copenhagen (1688)

Magne Klasson
Division of Book History, University of Lund, SE

Please cite as: Klasson, Magne (2024) ‘Commentary on the Establishment of a Printing Press in Iceland, Copenhagen (1688), in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org

Summary

The rescript of 1688 granted the bishop and superintendent Theodorus Thorlacius (Latinised form of Þórður Þorláksson) permission to print Norwegian and Icelandic historical and antiquarian works, demonstrating the growing interest in Old Norse culture in the Scandinavian countries in the seventeenth century. The printing of Icelandic histories illustrates not only the growth and importance of printing, but also of the central role of the Church. In terms of copyright history, the license shows that the concept of authorship was of no importance in the policy of Denmark-Norway regarding the privileges and permissions that were granted to printers and their heirs.

Commentary

Iceland had been under foreign rule since 1262, first under the Norwegian kingship and later as part of the Danish-Norwegian dual monarchy. With no proper towns or cities, the country was highly decentralised until the end of the eighteenth century. The first census in 1703 put the population at around 50,000. Within this small community, the two dioceses of Hólar and Skálholt were the largest institutions. They claimed a quarter of the annual land tax and each ran a Latin school, making them the two most densely populated areas, where around 100 people lived together.[1]

The first printing press in Iceland was established around 1530 by the Swedish printer Jón Matthíasson at the behest of the Catholic bishop Jón Arason. While Protestantism was officially introduced in Denmark-Norway in 1537, it was not fully established in Iceland until the 1550s after much turmoil. The new Protestant clergy, the first of whom was Gudbrandur Thorlaksson, took full control of the printing press. Printing had at that point in time only been introduced in Denmark some fifty years earlier, so the technology came to Iceland relatively early compared to other parts of the dual monarchy, such as Norway, which did not have a permanent printing press until the mid-seventeenth century.[2] This early introduction can be attributed to the considerable linguistic differences between Icelandic and Danish, which meant that printers in Copenhagen could not easily supply Icelandic texts. In addition, the professors at the University of Copenhagen who presided over the censorship of books to be printed had little or no understanding of the Icelandic language. There was also the issue of distance; granting a degree of autonomy to the Icelandic clergy and printers seemed the only viable solution to the logistical problems caused by the great distance between the mainland and the periphery. As a result, the otherwise highly centralised Danish-Norwegian state allowed the Icelandic clergy to print and distribute locally printed Protestant texts in the vernacular.

It was against this background that Theodorus Thorlacius became the sole printer in Iceland in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Thorlacius had been appointed bishop of Skálholt in 1674. His royal printing licence was confirmed in 1685 and brought about the most significant logistical change in Icelandic printing since its introduction in the sixteenth century. The 1685 licence allowed him to move the press from Hólar to Skálholt, away from the diocese where his grandfather Gudbrundur Thorlaksson, Iceland’s first Protestant bishop, had operated the press. Thorlacius’ claim to the press was based on the argument that it was family property. He was directly related to the previous bishops, which would make him the rightful heir to the press. The royal grant confirming his ownership also made extensive reference to Thorlacius’ family tree, implying that ownership of the press as a material object was based on hereditary rights. When Thorlacius’ rightful ownership of the presses was confirmed, the printer’s wife and her heirs were also included. This suggests that the ownership of a printing press and the associated right to print were usually permanent, and that the renewal of the privilege was a mere formality. Ownership of a printing press was a personal right and, unless specified in the royal grant, was not limited in time.

With the press at the heart of his diocese, Thorlacius began to print practical and religious books, just as his predecessors had done before him.[3] However, in addition to the general printing licence of 1685, Thorlacius was granted a special licence in 1688 to print historical and antiquarian works. This permission reflected a wider interest in Old Norse culture among Scandinavian scholars at the time, which served to bolster the legitimacy of the two major states in the Nordic region, Denmark-Norway (which included Iceland) and Sweden (which included Finland).[4] The study of Icelandic manuscripts was highly controversial, with Danish and Swedish scholars making different claims. Danish scholars used the manuscripts to argue that Iceland belonged to Denmark-Norway, while Swedish scholars used the Icelandic material as an introduction to the earliest history of Scandinavia, bypassing the main source used at the time, the Gesta Danorum written by the twelfth-century bishop Saxo Grammaticus (Saxo’s work, written in Latin, was an attempt to establish the historical lineage of the Danish king; it was first printed in Paris in 1514).[5]

The importance attached to the study of the past in the second half of the seventeenth century was demonstrated by the establishment of a historical institute by the Swedish authorities, who set up an ‘Antiquarian College’ (Antikvitetskollegium) in 1667 to provide an institutional framework for antiquarian scholarship. Meanwhile, Denmark-Norway employed a royal antiquarian (kongelig antiquarius) to conduct studies of Icelandic manuscripts, often with the help of Icelandic scholars or amanuenses.[6] In 1687, a year before Thorlacius received his licence, a royal rescript urged every bishop in Denmark, Norway and Iceland to collect pre-Reformation documents and books in their dioceses and send them to the royal antiquarian Thomas Bartholin the Younger in Copenhagen. The permission granted in 1688 for Thorlacius’s ventures as a printer should be seen in the light of these developments, and as a way for the Danish authorities to stimulate further interest among Icelandic scholars in a subject that could ultimately be used by the state in its quest for legitimacy.

Although in principle the permission to print was not an exclusive property right, as we would see in copyright today, in practice it created a monopoly on the printing of certain works. Not only was Thorlacius the only one with a printing press, but he also seems to have interpreted his exclusive permission as a privilege that prohibited other printers from publishing the same material. This is evidenced, for example, by the fact that in his first printed work, a saga, he had the standard phrase Cum gratia & Privilegio Seremissimae Regiae Maiestatis Daniae et Norvegiae printed on the title page. And, as was customary for the normal printing privileges granted in Copenhagen, he also reproduced a full transcript of the royal licence on the first pages after the title page.

The focus on the 1688 licence in Iceland also shows that the purpose of exclusive ownership was not to reward the intellectual creativity of the author, who in the case of the Icelandic sagas was long dead, but to promote material that was in the interest of the state. The economic benefit of the privilege must have been nil, since there was no other printing press in Copenhagen to compete with the printing of Icelandic texts. The point was rather to control and promote the dissemination of relevant historical material. Even works that had been handed down for centuries and had long been in the public domain were thus taken out of free circulation and used exclusively for specific purposes. The 1688 licence shows not only how the Danish-Norwegian press developed in the periphery, but also that the local clergy of the time saw no contradiction between promoting ecclesiastical interests and antiquarian scholarship.

 

Endnotes

Literature

Hermannsson, Halldór. Icelandic Books of the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell            University Library, 1918). 

Rian, Øystein. Sensuren i Danmark-Norge. Vilkårene for offentlige ytringer, 1536-1814 (Oslo:     Universitetsforlaget, 2014).

Skovgaard-Petersen, Karen. “Historical Writing in Scandinavia” in The Oxford History of Historical Writing. Volume 3: 1400-1800, ed. by Rabasa, José, Masayuki Sato, Eduardo           Tortarolo, and   Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 449-472.

--------. “Early Print and Northern Exploration in the Service of the Church: On Archbishop          Erik Valkendorf’s Activities as Writer and Editor” in Literary Citizenship in    Scandinavia in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. by Hemstad, Ruth, Janicke S. Kaasa, Ellen Krefting, and Aina Nøding (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2023), 20-36.

Weduwen, Arthur der and Barnaby Cullen, “A Nordic Press: The Development of Printing in       Scandinavia and the Baltic States before 1700 from a European Perspective”, Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture, 13, no. 1 (2022), 1–30.