Gripla - 20.12.2016, Page 68

GRIPLA68
author’ that characterised much saga scholarship up until the late twentieth
century, when the move towards ‘new’ or ‘material’ philological approaches
began to gain pace.48 there is some discussion of ‘historicity’ in Þórhallur’s
analysis (e.g. of Harðar saga and the likelihood of Hörður being a fictional
character) but his approach, however, puts the landscape in the foreground
and rather than trying to explain instances of landscape-narrative mis-
match, his discussion underlines the complex, reciprocal and processual
relationship between place-names, natural features or other distinctive
places, and the reception of narrative anecdotes bound to specific places.
the ways in which the sagas, too – especially once they were in writ-
ten form – had an influence on the landscape (specifically, the cultural
con struction of the landscape over time, ever increasing and deepening
the palimpsest-like qualities of the land), is drawn attention to as well in
Þórhallur’s discussion and in the footnotes about place-names through-
out his edition. Bárðarskip – the ship-like rock in the middle of Dritvík
bay – has already been mentioned, but there are numerous others. as is
well known, it can often be difficult to establish when a place-name might
have come into existence. In cases where place-names that are associated
with Íslendingasögur characters or events exist but are not mentioned in
the texts of the sagas, it is not unlikely that the written transmission of
these narratives was a stimulus for the place-names’ creation (although the
possibility that they existed prior to the writing of any respective saga but
were either deliberately not used, or not known of, cannot be discounted).
the creation of these younger names may thus be seen to represent a kind
of landscape-related reception or reader-/listener-response to the saga,
an impulse to further write the saga into the landscape and into people’s
everyday experiences of it.
Real-and-imagined Íslendingasögur places
the overlap between the world and landscapes portrayed in the written
Íslendingasögur texts, and that/those familiar to the individuals and com-
munities who participated in the transmission of the Íslendinga sögur from
medieval to modern times (whether by producing new manuscript copies
48 See references in fn 2 above.