Árni ÞORLÁKSSON (1237-1298)

Árni Þorláksson (1237 – 17 April 1298) was an Icelandic Roman Catholic clergyman, who became the tenth bishop of Iceland (1269–1298). [1]

He served in the diocese of Skálholt . Árni had orders from his superior in Norway to take control of local church property away from secular chieftains. [2] He was largely successful in this.

Árna saga Þorlákssonar (AM 122 b fol 25r)

During the Commonwealth period the institutions of the Icelandic church were controlled by the same noble families which dominated the island’s secular politics, and nearly all of the early bishops were either related to chieftains or held chieftaincies themselves. Árni Þorláksson was very much of this breed – his paternal uncle was a previous bishop-elect, his grandfather on the same side was the powerful chieftain Guðmundur gríss Ámundason, and he was also related to no fewer than three of Iceland’s five most powerful clans, including the Haukdælir for whom the see at Skálholt was practically a family possession. Árni was born in 1237, and the years of his childhood and early adulthood coincided with the climax of the Sturlung Age and the end of the Commonwealth. He was educated in Iceland at the Augustinian monastery of Þykkvabær, the abbot of which was Brandr Jónsson, a member of the powerful Svínfelling clan (and thus a distant kinsman of Árni’s). In 1263 Brandr was summoned to Norway to be consecrated Bishop of Hólar, and Árni accompanied him on the journey and was himself consecrated a priest. Unfortunately Brandr died shortly after his return to Iceland, and after a three-year interregnum Jörundr Þorsteinsson was appointed to succeed him in 1267. By this time the other Icelandic bishop, Sigvarðr Þettmarsson, had occupied his see for twenty-five years and was growing too old and weak to discharge his episcopal functions, so Jörundr took charge of both dioceses and appointed Árni as his deputy in Skálholt. When Sigvarðr died Árni was therefore well-placed to succeed him as bishop, and Jörundr and several other Icelandic luminaries wrote to Archbishop Jon recommending him for the post. Árni conveyed the letter to Jon in the summer of 1269 and was consecrated by him a couple of months later. Árni’s episcopate, which would prove to be almost as long as Sigvarðr’s had been, was dominated by his persistent attempts to reform the Icelandic church and to end secular interference in its affairs. In particular he sought to end the practice whereby many of the richest and most important church estates in the country were held not by the Church itself but by local landowners. The bishop’s efforts were of course resisted by these men, and the resulting dispute, known in Icelandic historiography as the staðamál (from staðir , the term used to describe such church estates in temporal ownership) subsequently simmered away for several decades. Its course was closely dependent on the state of relations between church and crown in Norway – in 1273, when Archbishop Jon and King Magnus were on good terms, Árni was able to rely on the former to enforce the confiscation of the staðr at Oddi in 1273, but Magnus’s death in 1280, swiftly followed by the accession of his son Erik ‘Priest-Hater’ and the banishment of Jon, gave the Icelandic magnates an opportunity to seize back many of the staðir which Árni had taken from them. The conflict was finally resolved in 1297 with the Settlement of Avaldsnes, which transferred most of the staðir to ecclesiastical control, but guaranteed secular control of the others as ‘farmer’s churches’ and also placed restrictions on the frequency with which the bishop could conduct visitations within his diocese. One important consequence of Árni’s crusade to gain control of the staðir was that it enabled him and his colleague Bishop Jörundr of Hólar to institute a beneficial system in Iceland for the first time, thereby giving the bishop’s office unprecedented powers of patronage and enabling a class of wealthy elite clerics to arise in the fourteenth century. The other great achievement of Árni’s career was the passing of a new church law for Iceland in 1275, replacing the ‘Christian Laws Section’ of the Grágás law-code which had been used under the Commonwealth. However it is for his prosecution of the staðamál that Árni is best remembered by historians today, albeit in part because that is what Árna saga Þorlákssonar , an account of his life written shortly after his death, is principally concerned with. The saga was probably written by Árni’s nephew Árni Helgason, who was also his direct successor as Bishop of Skálholt. It is perhaps apt, given Árni Þorláksson’s role as one of the great reformers who regularised the Icelandic church and ended its idiosyncrasies, that he and his namesake were to be the last of the old breed of bishops drawn from the Icelandic secular aristocracy – Árni Helgason was succeeded on his death by the Norwegian Grímr Skútason, and there would subsequently be just one Icelandic bishop in Skálholt in the next hundred and fifty years.