Gripla - 20.12.2016, Side 58

GRIPLA58
Place-names as a source for saga writing
In the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, when the written composi-
tion and transmission of the Íslendingasögur was initiated, place-names
around Iceland – in conjunction with oral anecdotes about the settlement
age that had accreted around these place-names – must have been an im-
portant source for those who took quill in hand and cast (or recast) the
sagas in writing. for each written saga, the extent to which existing place-
names may have been used as a source alongside other sources by the per-
son responsible for determining that saga’s written composition or form
must have varied. these other sources would have been both oral in form
(material such as genealogies, laws, or other traditions) and written, with
the latter comprising such vernacular texts as existed (e.g. Landnámabók)
and foreign or learned material (e.g. ecclesiastical texts).16
It is moot whether those who put the Íslendingasögur together in writ-
ten form collected pre-existing, ‘genuine’ oral traditions that were associ-
ated with specific places and place-names and worked them up in writing,
or alternatively took certain place-names and used them as the spark of
anecdotal inspiration, creating characters and events out of them and
moulding these anecdotes into bigger and more coherent wholes. Most
likely, a combination of the two approaches was utilised, perhaps in dif-
fering proportions from one saga to another. the same holds for what we
might surmise about the role of place-names as a source for material we
find in Landnámabók. and in an attempt to consider the ways in which
the Icelandic landscape might have contributed to and shaped the written
Íslendingasögur, Landnámabók – as an example of early historical writing
– can give us useful insights into how knowledge about historical figures
and events was organised first and foremost on a spatial basis in conjunc-
tion with genealogy.17 the manner or rhetoric by which individual settlers
16 See further Carol Clover, ‘Icelandic family Sagas (Íslendingasögur),’ in Old Norse-Icelandic
Literature: A Critical Guide, ed. Carol Clover and John Lindow (Ithaca: Cornell university
Press, 1985. reprinted 2005), 239–315.
17 See Margaret Clunies ross, ‘the Development of old norse textual Worlds: Genealogical
Structure as a Principle of Literary organization in Early Iceland,’ Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 92 (1993): 372–85, and ‘textual territory: the regional Dynamic of
Medieval Icelandic Literary Production,’ New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 9–30. See also
Margaret Clunies ross, ‘Land-taking and text-Making in Medieval Iceland,’ in Text and
Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia tomasch and