Gripla - 20.12.2016, Page 76

GRIPLA76
shorter or longer distances on foot or on horseback, singly or in groups, in
order to reach a specific destination such as the local or national assembly,
or to tend to livestock in a circumscribed area.
there must, of course, have been some variation in the degree of fa-
miliarity that people had with the written or immanent Íslendingasögur
corpus as a whole but presumably, they would know (or be most likely
to know) the sagas and other stories associated with their local area – not
least from hearing or learning them in the kvöldvaka context.67 they could
thus consciously correlate the narrative action and topography of any single
saga or episode within a saga with the landscapes around them and famil-
iar to them, and might also unconsciously do this too. understanding of
Íslendingasögur narratives was thereby conditioned by and filtered through
people’s first-hand experiential knowledge of the landscapes around them
– landscapes in which they were situated, and directly tied to as a result
of genealogical connections and local history. thus while the manuscripts
were the vessels indoors that contained and channelled saga narratives in
fully-developed written form, simultaneously, the landscape acted as a me-
dium through which these narratives were communicated outdoors.
Jonas Carlquist discusses a concept or technique called ‘analogue link-
ing’ in his discussion of Swedish composite manuscripts containing eccle-
siastical texts.68 Carlquist gives the example of a mention of the Latin title
of a hymn in a text about what is sung and when, found in the manuscript
Cod. Lund. Mh 20 from Vadstena abbey:
“at page 165r in this manuscript we read … ‘Whitsunday when the
sisters sing the hymn ‘Veni creator spiritus’ at the third hour Saint
Mechthild saw the Holy spirit …’. Here … the Latin quotation [is] an
analogue link to a special hymn, which was known at the monastery.
It might also be described merely as a reference, but I think that is
to simplify the problem. When a medieval manuscript discusses, for
example, a passage in the Holy Bible, only the initial words are given
67 the place of production of most medieval Íslendingasögur manuscripts cannot be ascer-
tained; some clues regarding their geographical location post-production can be found in
their provenance and ownership, but no systematic or large-scale study of the geographical
distribution of production or provenance of medieval Icelandic manuscripts has yet been
conducted.
68 Carlquist, ‘Medieval Manuscripts, Hypertext and reading,’ 109.