Diplomatarium Islandicum as an Archaeographic and Historiographic Phenomenon

This article presents an overview of Diplomatarium Islandicum, a sixteen-volume series of medieval documents concerning Iceland, and the possible uses of the materials included. This series of volumes was compiled and published first in Copenhagen and then in Reykja-vik from 1857 to 1972. The publisher of the first volume, Jón Sigurðsson, played a significant role in the development of the series. The documents included in Diplomatarium Islandicum cover the 9th to the 16th centuries and are written mainly in Old Norse and Latin. The article, using as an example sources from the period when Árni Þorláksson was bishop (1269–1298), examines the types of documents that are presented in Diplomatarium Islandi-cum, the structure of the publication, some of its practices of transmission of spelling (using the ex-ample of a comparison of a document presented in Diplomatarium Islandicum with the texts of two copies of this document, on which the publisher of the volume relied) and inaccuracies (primarily in dating). Diplomatarium Islandicum, despite certain shortcomings, has re-tained its importance for many decades and is still actively used in many studies.