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canon, albeit more or less widely at different periods of time) meant that
for a kvöldvaka audience, narrative chronology and causality were not
prerequisites for following or enjoying the whole, if only implicitly rather
than explicitly. Carol Clover has used the term ‘immanence’ to describe
the over-arching familiarity with material about characters, events and
places presented in the sagas.65 a kind of excerpted, non-linear or thematic
reading of the kind suggested above would have been possible because
audiences possessed the framework of the immanent saga or saga world
within which to fit in individual episodes that might be selected for reading
aloud at any point in time. Importantly, command of this immanent saga
world also entailed an implicit appreciation of the intertextuality of saga
narratives, not least on the basis of overlapping characters, geography, and
events described. this intertextuality is one of the corpus’s defining char-
acteristics – but again, is something that is less obvious to modern readers
and critics when the sagas are approached on a text-by-text basis.66
a base-level familiarity with or knowledge of any saga narrative
(whether from direct access to manuscript texts via reading/listening, or
via impromptu oral retellings) meant that in outdoor contexts, these nar-
ratives would have been present in people’s consciousness too, to varying
degrees, as they existed in and moved around the landscapes in which the
saga narratives are set. Here the recalling (and perhaps retelling) of narra-
tive material was first and foremost determined by the landscape, rather
than the order in which events are presented in the written texts, so people
would have ‘read’ the sagas in a non-linear and fundamentally intertextual
fashion by necessity. Movement, coupled with mental recall or retelling of
material written out in full in the manuscripts, could be of different kinds.
It might be of the eye looking over an expanse of landscape and focusing
on one place or landmark after another, each in relation to the others.
alternatively it could be more active and physical, involving covering
65 Carol Clover, The Medieval Saga (Ithaca: Cornell university Press, 1982). See also Gísli
Sigurðsson, The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition; Jamie Cochrane, ‘Síðu-Halls
saga ok sona hans: Creating a Saga from tradition,’ Gripla 21 (2010): 197–234.
66 Where the intertextual character of the sagas has been studied, it has generally been framed
in the ‘rittengsl’ debate, either specific references to other sagas being focused on or pas-
sages that seem to be shared by two sagas being analysed in order to determine which saga
may have been the ‘lender’ and which the ‘recipient’. See theodore M. andersson, The
Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins: A Historical Survey (new Haven Ct and London: Yale
university Press, 1964); Carol Clover, ‘Icelandic family Sagas (Íslendingasögur)’.
THE ICELANDIC SAGAS AND SAGA LANDSCAPES