Gripla - 20.12.2016, Qupperneq 64

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place-name is not found in written texts of Harðar saga, leading Þórhallur
to conclude that it is not a place-name incorporating the personal-name
‘Hörður’ but rather the adjective ‘harður’, an element that is common in
hill- and mountain-names.30 Þórhallur’s conclusion is that “örnefni séu
mikilvægur efniviður Harðar sögu, til þeirra hafi verið sótt nöfn margra
persónanna og atburðir hafi í ýmsum tilvikum verið lesnir út úr örnefnum”
[‘place-names are important (compositional) material in Harðar saga, the
personal names of many characters having been derived from them, and,
in some cases, events having been read out of them’].31
the treatment of and interest in place-names in Bárðar saga is com-
parable in many respects to what is found in Harðar saga. John G. Allee,
in an article on place-names in Bárðar saga, comments on “the author’s
special delight in place names” and observes that “somehow the author’s
love of places becomes contagious. thus to read Bárðar saga is to travel the
land”.32 allee puts forward arguments for Bárðar saga being, in fact, two
sagas – Bárðar saga, followed by Gests saga33 – and a discernible difference
in the distribution of, and interest in place-names in the two distinct parts
is one of his principal pieces of evidence: “different minds were at work in
Bárðar saga and Gests saga and … the different attitudes of these two minds
can be most clearly seen by studying the way place names are used”.34
not only does allee count twice as many place-names in the first part
of Bárðar saga as in the second part (Gests saga) – 101 and 50, respec-
tively – but in the second part of the narrative, the use of place-names is
“completely utilitarian”, with place-names being “useful to identify people
or routes of travel” or “real places (and historical people) [being used] to
30 Introduction, xl–xli.
31 Introduction, xli.
32 ‘a Study of the Place names in Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss,’ in Germanic Studies in Honor of
Edward Henry Sehrt. Presented by his Colleagues, Students, and Friends on the Occasion of his
Eightieth Birthday, March 3, 1968, ed. Frithjof Andersen Raven, Wolfram Karl Legner and
James Cecil King (Coral Gables, florida: university of Miami Press, 1968), 35.
33 the saga is divided in two and given two titles in the seventeenth-century manuscript BL
add. 4868: “Sagan af Bárði Dumbssyni, er kallaður var Snæfellsás” and “Sagan af Gesti, syni
Bárðar Snæfellsáss”. for references to earlier scholarship on the saga’s bipartite nature, see
Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, introduction to Harðar saga, lxxiii and
fn 9.
34 ‘a Study of the Place names in Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss,’ 16.