Gripla - 20.12.2016, Side 54

GRIPLA54
In what follows, the role of the landscape in the creation of the sagas
will be examined first, with a focus on how place-names were a source for
saga-writing, and on the complex relationship between ‘saga places’ and
places in the ‘real’ landscape that are identified as saga places.5 Next, in-
door and outdoor contexts for saga reading or retelling in Iceland from the
medieval to the modern period will be discussed, with the parallel trans-
mission of saga narratives in both environments being stressed. Finally,
hypertext literature and reading modes will be looked to as a theoretical
model for better understanding the ways in which Icelanders in the past
navigated around the worlds of these narratives, and – with these narra-
tives to hand – their own world.
Landscape as the first saga manuscript
fundamental to the argument of this article is a consideration of the
parallels between landscape and manuscript as vessel or channel for the
communication of narrative material, and the ways in which landscape
can be ‘read’ as intertextual narrative. It is worth noting at the outset of
this study that the term ‘landscape’ is widely acknowledged as being a far
from neutral term: rather, it is a cultural, political and ideological construct
whose meaning or significance is constantly undergoing reconfiguration
and reinterpretation.6 the metaphorical idea that landscape can be ‘read’
is not a new one, and is central to disciplines such as historical geography,
5 the narrative function or role that the landscape plays in the written Íslendingasögur them-
selves will not be considered here, though this is a field rich with possibility and much
remains to be done building on existing studies such as Paul Schach, ‘the anticipatory
Literary Setting in the old Icelandic family Sagas,’ Scandinavian Studies 27 (1955): 1–13;
Helen Damico, ‘Dystopic Conditions of the Mind: toward a Study of Landscape in
Grettissaga,’ In Geardagum: Essays on Old English Language and Literature 7 (1986): 1–15;
Ian Wyatt, ‘narrative functions of Landscape in the old Icelandic family Sagas,’ in Land,
Sea and Home: Proceedings of a Conference on Viking-period Settlement at Cardiff, July 2001,
ed. John Hines, alan Lane and Mark redknap (Leeds: Maney, 2004): 273–82; Eleanor
Barraclough, ‘Inside outlawry in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar and Gísla saga Súrssonar:
Landscape in the outlaw Sagas,’ Scandinavian Studies 82 (2010): 365–88 and ‘naming the
Landscape in the landnám Narratives of the Íslendingasögur and Landnámabók,’ Saga-Book
of the Viking Society 36 (2012): 79–101.
6 See, e.g., Denis Cosgrove’s seminal monograph Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape
(Madison: university of Wisconsin Press, 1984), also Matthew Johnson, Ideas of Landscape
(Malden: Blackwell, 2007) for further discussion and references.