Research centre North West

Publications of the director.

Vilhelmsson, Vilhelm, publications

The Research Centre is home to the Halldór Bjarnason Memorial Library.

Historian Halldór Bjarnason (1959–2010) was an avid collector of books. His widow donated his collection to the University of Iceland which found a home for it in the Research Centre, where it serves as a research library specialised in Icelandic history and culture.

This research project, funded by the University of Iceland Research Fund, explores the work of arbitration committees and their societal role in 19th-century Iceland. Its focus is twofold:

First, the project conducts quantitative research into the work of arbitration committees and the people who brought their cases to seek arbitration in their affairs.

Second, it explores how arbitration was performed by all parties involved and how the system of arbitration was used by Icelanders to settle disputes through claim-staking and other means.

This project consists of creating an online database of all proceedings by arbitration committees in Iceland in the period 1798 to 1936.

Arbitration committees were established in the Danish-Norwegian state in the 1790s. Their declared purpose was to reduce the financial burden and the case-load of the judicial system and all civil cases regarding property, debt, defamation, labour relations and the legal rights of individuals or groups should first be taken to arbitration committees in order to attempt reconciliation between the conflicting parties, before being taken to the regular courts.

Arbitration committees were established throughout Iceland in the following years and many of them remained active well into the 20th century.

There are approximately 250 books of proceedings in various archives in Iceland. In this project, these will be digitized and their contents registered into an online database in order to make these important sources for the history of everyday life, legal culture and local culture in the 19th and 20th centuries easily accessible to scholars.

The five-year project started in 2019 and has received a number of grants. It has one full-time employee. It is a collaboration between the Research centre, the Icelandic National Archives and the Regional Archives of Skagafjörður in NW-Iceland.

The Research Centre works in cooperation with the municipalities of Skagaströnd and Skagabyggð on creating a website and mobile app for tourists about folklorist Jón Árnason (1819–1888) and his collection of folk tales.

Jón, the Icelandic version of the German Grimm brothers, was born and raised in the Skagaströnd region and many of the tales in his five volume collection of Icelandic Folk Tales originate from there. The website and mobile app will guide tourists to locations in the region connected to Jón and his folk tales. 

The Research Centre is involved in the COST-Action supported project Worlds of Related Coercions in Work (WORCK), which aims to link the stories of work and production with those of violence, expropriation and marginalisation by studying the persistence and transformations of coercion and bondage across gender orders, geographic regions and historical eras. Vilhelm Vilhelmsson, the director of the Research Centre, is on the central committee of the project and leads one of its Working Groups.

The project organizes conferences and workshops and coordinates various publication projects and other forms of collaboration among scholars from all over Europe (and beyond).