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appearance and quality of tracts of land have been altered, and settlement
patterns.57
the relationship between the landscapes and places described in the
sagas, those that the saga-authors knew, and those that others have known
and experienced since (up until the present day), is thus a complex one. It
is this merging and overlapping of ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ worlds that makes
the subject such an interesting one to study though. Better defining the
nature of the reciprocal and recursive relationship between saga narrative,
narrative stage, and the known or ‘real’ world in which those who first put
the sagas down in writing lived and knew, and subsequently, those who
copied or retold or listened to the sagas existed in, is a challenging but
worthwhile enterprise. not least, this requires broadening our understand-
ing of what it meant to ‘read’ a saga text.
Indoor and outdoor contexts for Íslendingasögur reading
and transmission
the appearance and what is known of the provenance of a number of med-
ieval parchment manuscripts that preserve texts of the Íslend ingasögur (in
quarto size, with economical use of parchment, making use of rubrication
in red (and sometimes green) ink but without lavish illuminations) suggests
that they were produced for domestic use rather than primarily as display
items or to serve explicit ideological functions (e.g. lawbooks), although
the cultural capital implicit in owning books may have played into the
commissioning of a book with a specific text or set of texts.58 the contents
of these compilation manuscripts (especially the late medieval ones) are
57 Landnámabók notes a number of instances of landscape change between the time of the
settlement and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as a consequence of volcanic activity or
other natural phenomena; references to farms being abandoned or renamed are also found
in the Íslendingasögur. In post-medieval times, other eruptions such as Öræfa and Hekla,
and erosion caused by the grazing of domestic livestock over large areas, laid great stretches
of previously inhabited land to waste. See further, e.g., Elín Ósk Hreiðarsdóttir, Guðrún
alda Gísladóttir, Kristborg Þórsdóttir and ragnheiður Gló Gylfadóttir, ‘abandoned
Settlements at the foot of Mt Hekla: a Study Based on field Survey in rangárvellir,’
Archaeologica Islandica 11 (2015): 33–56.
58 See, e.g., Stefka Georgieva Eriksen, Writing and Reading in Medieval Manuscript Culture:
The Tranlsation and Transmission of the Story of Elye in Old French and Old Norse Literary
Contexts (turnhout: Brepols, 2014).
THE ICELANDIC SAGAS AND SAGA LANDSCAPES