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gas that engage with issues of place differently would help scholars analyze
the various avenues available in this corpus for making meaning. regional
sagas could be understood as those sagas that need to be read in the context
of their local landscape to be meaningful. Such an understanding might
allow scholars to contribute to theoretical concerns outside of saga studies
about the relationship between human beings and their environmental mi-
lieu, how it has changed over the last 1000 years, and the role of literature
in that process.
But classifying Þórðar saga hreðu as a regional saga is not simply an aca-
demic exercise. there is also evidence that throughout the life of the saga,
the saga tellers and composers themselves may have understood Þórðar
saga hreðu as a regional saga, one concerned with defining the identity of
residents of the area. the prevalence of key turning points in the saga, like
Þórður’s speech, taking place at important boundary markers suggests that
throughout the transmission of the saga, a relationship between the nar-
rative and the landscape was fostered. the saga tellers over time may have
used these prominent and politically important places in the landscape to
construct the saga, not so much in a fictional literary sense but rather in
an organic anthropological sense. anyone who walked or rode horseback
through Miðfjörður and into Skagafjörður would have had occasion to
remember and retell a story or two about Þórður. that the halls and ferry
system Þórður is credited with building also were still visible in the land-
scape into the fourteenth century would have provided additional sites of
memory. I would argue that as the saga circulated, Þórður came to func-
tion at a level not unlike landnámsmenn or others credited with naming,
shaping, and enculturating the landscape. By linking his personal narrative
with symbolically laden places in the landscape, he became a symbol of that
region, more mythical and less of a historical character,80 which might also
explain why the saga originators did not feel the need to make his character
particularly complex. If there was less to think about him as a person, his
actions in the landscape would get more attention.
Whether or not the various audiences of the saga over time in northern
Iceland understood, in a generic sense, that it was a regional saga is much
80 See Pernille Hermann for the process of mythologizing, “founding narratives and the
representation of Memory in Saga Literature,” ARV/Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 66
(2010): 69–87.