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stories were read directly out of the landscape.14 Later, these topograph-
ically-anchored anecdotes were remediated in writing. Jürg Glauser has
drawn on cultural memory theory in considering what influences the “an-
cient stories” were subjected to in the process of their “recording, codifying
and theologizing”:
“the semioticization of the landscape, previously empty and
undescrib ed, and therefore meaningless and without sense, proceeds
in a manner not dissimilar to modern stories and legends. In the
Icelandic sagas … one constantly finds at crucial points a ‘mapp-
ing’, a descriptive record of the landscape and of nature … By
narrative means, a place-name is thus established to whose literary
description the fiction immediately following it can refer repeatedly.
[the excerpt from Egils saga] also shows how a transformation of
nature into culture occurs, in that nature – in the concrete form of
the Icelandic landscape surrounding the community – is ‘described’
by the sagas, i.e. endowed with signs and so filled with significance.
this ‘locating’ of culture, a semioticization of the landscape … forms
a trope of memory”.15
narrative was thus a central dynamic in the appropriation, dissection and
mapping of the landscape, and in its being imbued with historical, cultural
and political significance.
‘the Long Prose form in Medieval Iceland,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 101
(2002): 380–411; articles in Oral Art Forms and their Passage into Writing, ed. Else Mundal
and Jonas Wellendorf (Copenhagen: Museum tusculanum Press, 2007); Gísli Sigurðsson,
The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method, trans. nicholas
Jones (London and Cambridge Ma: Harvard university Press, 2004).
14 It is worth pointing out here, too, that the landscape itself is far from static and passive, and
often imbued with significant agency in the sagas and in other narratives or accounts of the
settlement (e.g. Landnámabók), actively influencing the settlement paradigm.
15 ‘Sagas of the Icelanders (Íslendinga sögur) and þættir as the Literary representation of a new
Social Space,’ in Old Icelandic Literature and Society, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross, 209. Other
studies which deploy memory studies in tandem, directly or indirectly, with the role that the
landscape played in the creation and storage of cultural memory include Pernille Hermann,
‘Saga Literature, Cultural Memory, and Storage,’ Scandinavian Studies 85 (2013): 332–54;
other articles in this special issue of Scandinavian Studies (edited by Pernille Hermann and
Stephen Mitchell); and essays in Minni and Muninn: Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture,
ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen Mitchell and agnes arnórsdóttir (turnhout: Brepols,
2014). See also Kirsten Hastrup, A Place Apart: An Anthropological Study of the Icelandic
World (oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
THE ICELANDIC SAGAS AND SAGA LANDSCAPES