Gripla - 20.12.2016, Qupperneq 74

GRIPLA74
(in the manner in which they are serialised on national radio today in
Iceland), nor chapters read consecutively in the order they are found in
the manuscripts. In contrast to the codex’s predecessor, the volumen or
scroll, whose contents could only be read continuously and consecutively,
the design of the manuscript book made discontinuous reading as well
as continuous reading possible, with blocks of text broken into smaller
divisions and made navigable by means of rubrics and prominent capital
letters or initials.63 Someone reading from a manuscript (whether aloud
or silently) could therefore flick backwards and forwards with (relative)
ease and excerpt passages from different parts of the same saga, or from
different texts. Comparable kinds of reading scenarios have been envis-
aged for manuscripts containing legal texts or ecclesiastical material but
not for manuscripts containing literary texts which were intended for use
in a secular context.64
Especially in cases where manuscripts contained a selection of sagas
and other material, a scenario might be imagined whereby at the beginning
of or during the kvöldvaka, the assembled audience might put in ‘requests’
to hear particularly entertaining passages or sections from one or several
sagas and other texts, or decide on a theme (legal material, monster fights
or encounters with the supernatural, ambush and death scenes, journeys,
genealogical material) that determined which chapters or passages would
be read aloud. as well as mood, such demands and performative excerpt-
ing depended to some extent too on the collective contents of any single
manuscript, and what kind of thematically-determined motifs or strands
might happen to be emphasised as the result of the combination of texts
included therein.
furthermore, the extent to which the Íslendingasögur narratives were
likely to have been generally known without recourse to the written texts
(arguably constituting a kind of collective/community national and local
63 See, e.g., Malcolm Parkes, Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West (aldershot: Scolar Press,
1992); Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford
university Press, 2000); William a. Johnson, ‘Bookrolls as Media,’ in Comparative Textual
Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, ed. N. Katherine Hayles and
Jessica Pressman (Minneapolis: university of Minnesota Press 2013), 101–24.
64 See Jonas Carlquist, ‘Medieval Manuscripts, Hypertext and reading. Visions of Digital
Editions,’ Literary and Linguistic Computing 19 (2004): 105–18, at 108–109 on legal and
ecclesiastical material.