Gripla - 20.12.2016, Blaðsíða 77

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in Latin (sometimes with a translation). this does not have to be a
reference. the citation is a link to the whole passage known by the
reader. By supplying the initial words the medieval writers did in fact
link to the reader’s knowledge, to his or her mental library”.69
If we return to the metaphor of the Icelandic landscape as a kind of manu-
script, a medium through which the Íslendingasögur narratives were ac-
cessed and communicated, then place-names might be said to have served
a comparable kind of mnemonic referential or linking function to the
‘analogue links’ or keywords in the manuscripts discussed by Carlquist.
Moreover, place-names and the saga-narrative-anecdotes or characters as-
sociated with them gave structure and order to the landscape, helping to
make places memorable and to fix their relative, topographical positions
in people’s minds and thus aid physical (as well as ideological) navigation.
Place-names might thus be seen as being the equivalent of the enlarged
capital letters or red-inked rubrics that mark narrative structure in the
manuscripts and make the written texts navigable, whether read chapter-
by-chapter or in a non-linear or chronological fashion.
Medieval and modern hypertexts
In the quotation above about ‘analogue linking’, Carlquist refers to the
‘mental library’ of those who used the Vadstena abbey manuscripts he
discusses. His article, which is called ‘Medieval Manuscripts, Hypertext
69 Carlquist, ‘Medieval Manuscripts, Hypertext and reading,’ 109–10; see also Jessica
Brantley, ‘Medieval remediations,’ in Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Hu-
mani ties in the Postprint Era, ed. n. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman (Minneapolis:
university of Minnesota Press 2013), 201–20. a parallel may be identified in medieval
Icelandic manuscripts: particularly in manuscripts that contain texts of konungasögur (as
well as those with Íslendingasögur), the quotation of skaldic verse is frequently encoun-
tered. these verses serve different functions (evidential, rhetorical, dramatic etc). In some
cases, longer skaldic poems have been broken up and individual verses are cited at different
points, in other cases, a longer poem is referred to in the narrative and its title (and perhaps
circumstances of composition) given, but only the first verse is quoted. It may be that the
remainder of the poem was not copied out in full because the first verse was enough to
trigger recall of the rest for those who were familiar with the poem; this has been argued
for the first-verse quotation of longer poems in Egils saga (see, e.g., Judy Quinn, ‘“ok er
þetta upphaf”: first-stanza Quotation in old norse Prosimetrum,’ Alvíssmál. Forschungen
zur mittelalterlichen Kultur Skandinaviens 7 (1997): 61–80).
THE ICELANDIC SAGAS AND SAGA LANDSCAPES