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up until the early twentieth century – albeit with their role varying and
being contingent on changing tastes in literary entertainment and other
external influences over time (such as the independence movement in the
nineteenth century).61 In the communal living and sleeping area of the
Icelandic farmhouse, the baðstofa, members of the household would work
at indoor chores each evening while one member read aloud from whatever
manuscript or other printed material was owned or had been borrowed.
In this communal, social space, the manuscript context would therefore
have certainly influenced how texts were received by those listening and
participating in the reading event. the transmission of texts preserved
in saga manuscripts was shaped to a crucial degree by performance and
re-oralisation, and by the dynamics between the individual(s) who took
on the role of the story-teller and the assembled audience. In considering
the transmission of fornaldarsögur literature, Stephen Mitchell has sug-
gested that manuscripts may have been used “as a kind of promptbook for
extemporized performative readings” rather than their texts being read
word-for-word.62
Moreover, there is no reason to assume that, during the kvöldvaka, Ís-
lend ingasögur or other sagas were necessarily always read in their entirety
61 for discussion of manuscripts being handed down within families, see, e.g, Susanne M.
arthur, ‘the Importance of Marital and Maternal ties in the Distribution of Icelandic
Manuscripts from the Middle ages to the Seventeenth Century,’ Gripla 23 (2012):
201–33. on the tradition of the kvöldvaka in different historical periods, see Hermann
Pálsson, Sagnaskemmtun Íslendinga (reykjavík: Mál og menning, 1962); Magnús Gíslason,
Kvällsvaka. En isländsk kulturtradition belyst genom studier i bondebefolkningens vardagsliv
och miljö under senare hälften av 1800-talet och början av 1900-talet. uppsala: uppsala
university, 1977); Matthew J. Driscoll, ‘the Long and Winding road: Manuscript Culture
in Late Pre-Modern Iceland,’ in White Field, Black Seeds: Nordic Literary Practices in the Long
Nineteenth Century, ed. anna Kuismin and Matthew J. Driscoll, (Helsinki: finnish Literary
Society, 2013), 50–63; Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, ‘Living by the Book: form, text and
Life Experience in Iceland,’ in the same volume, White Field, Black Seeds, ed. Kuismin and
Driscoll, 64–75.
62 Heroic Sagas and Ballads (Ithaca nY and London: Cornell university Press, 1991), 93. this
kind of flexibility is in accordance with the freedom of scribes to alter the texts they copied
from exemplars as they saw fit, whether to ‘correct’ factual information (topography, genea-
logy), update orthography and style, or improve the narrative. See also Stephen Mitchell,
‘the Saga-man and oral Literature: the Icelandic traditions of Hjörleif inn kvensami
and Geirmundr heljarskinn,’ in Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for
Milman Parry, ed. John M. foley (Columbus oH: Slavica, 1987), 395–423; Hans fix,
‘text Editing in old norse: a Linguist’s Point of View,’ North-Western European Language
Evolution (NOWELE) 31 (1997): 105–17.
THE ICELANDIC SAGAS AND SAGA LANDSCAPES