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for walrus-hunting or other resource-gathering, and written sources such
as Íslendingabók claim that Christian hermits or ‘papar’ were present but
fled the island when the norse settlers arrived.10 Before the conversion to
Christianity and the formal, Church-sponsored or driven introduction of
book-making, early Icelandic society and culture was an oral one.11 Story-
telling (in conjunction with place-naming) would have been one important
means by which the first settlers transformed the unfamiliar space of the
new land into their own cultural landscape, and by which they and their
descendants maintained connections with their homelands.12
Stories about the settlement period and about the early settlers and
events must have been rooted in physical places, around Iceland, directly
bound up with topographical knowledge: people wrote themselves and
their stories into the landscape by claiming land, naming it after themselves
and events that happened at particular places (as well as on the basis of the
appearance of natural landscape features), and imprinting their lives upon
it (not least by introducing agricultural practices to it). In turn, by con-
necting stories and specific places together (e.g. farmsteads, boundaries,
natural landmarks), place-names (and the people or events associated with
those places) became more memorable. anecdotes were passed down orally
from one generation to another: geography, in conjunction with genealogy,
provided a robust and tangible framework around and within which to
organise narrative material.13 Thus, the first sagas or settlement-generation
10 on walrus-hunting, see Karin M. frei et al., ‘Was it for Walrus? Viking age Settlement
and Medieval Walrus Ivory trade in Iceland and Greenland,’ World Archaeology 47 (2015):
439–66. on the papar, see, e.g., Barbara Crawford, ed., The Papar in the North Atlantic:
Environment and History. The Proceedings of a Day Conference held on 24th February 2001 (St
andrews: university of Saint andrews, 2002).
11 See, e.g., Judy Quinn, ‘from orality to Literacy in Medieval Iceland,’ in Old Icelandic
Literature and Society, ed. Margaret Clunies ross, 30–60; Gísli Sigurðsson, ‘orality and
Literacy in the Sagas of Icelanders,’ in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and
Culture, ed. rory Mcturk (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 285–301.
12 With regard to the latter point, it is notable that a cluster of place-names found around the
Kjalarnes area (e.g. Esja, Melar, Garðar, akranes, Kjós, Laxá, Sandvík, Leiruvogur) have
direct equivalents on the Hebridean island of Lewis, western Scotland. See Magne oftedal,
‘the Village names of Lewis in the outer Hebrides,’ Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap
(1954): 201–24.
13 the extent to which these oral sagas were comparable to the written sagas we have pre-
served in manuscripts from the thirteenth century onwards, not least with regard to length
and style, has long been a matter of debate in saga scholarship. See, e.g., Carol Clover, ‘the
Long Prose form,’ Arkiv för nordisk filologi 101 (1986): 10–39; theodore M. andersson,