ABSTRACT
Most of the references in Sverris saga to written documents reveal some information relating to the story, at the same time as they lend the narrative a certain reliability—‘this was written down in a document’, they seem to say, ‘therefore it is true’. The use of documents in Árna saga biskups, for example, is seen by scholars as a sign of the saga’s great reliability. The evidence of the Icelandic primary documents extant corroborates that of the laws: they are mostly made by the Church and largely in connection with land transactions. As literacy became more widespread and important, some fifteenth-century Icelanders seem to have felt short-changed when it came to the documentation of the past. Stefan Karlsson has shown that those who were involved in forging documents not only made official documents but also kept them, and perhaps collected them too; they were also responsible for the writing of manuscripts.
