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GRIPLA80
i ally, as George Landow notes, “In a hypertext environment a lack of
linearity does not destroy narrative. In fact, since readers always, but par-
ticularly in this environment, fabricate their own structures, sequences,
and meanings, they have surprisingly little trouble reading a story or read-
ing for a story”.77 the scenarios outlined above for reading and accessing
Íslendingasögur narratives fit this hypertext model very well, especially if
one takes both media – manuscript and landscape – that the Íslendingasögur
were transmitted via into consideration simultaneously. the reading modes
sketched out are process- and performance-orientated, collaborative, non-
linear or fragmentary (without affecting knowledge or ability to grasp the
‘whole’ story) as well as sequential, and open-ended.
In both the manuscript and the landscape contexts, place-names are the
equivalent of hyperlinks.78 Places and place-names were receptacles for sto-
ries, prompts and vehicles for the telling of them, and as such, place-names
served both practical and functional purposes and more ideological ones,
being an expression or manifestation of cultural identity and belonging or
ownership, as well as suggestive indicators for perceptions of the environ-
ment. as a kind of hyperlink, place-names represented the explicit and
immediate points of departure for anecdotes about characters and events,
enabling and inviting connections between defined, written saga narratives.
they were also implicit or deferred points of reference which fed into a
system or world beyond written saga texts and that took in other types of
textual tradition (e.g. folk-tales or narrative rewritings in other media).
Jerome McGann notes that the library is the oldest hypertextual structure
in the world.79 a strong case could be made for the landscape-story-text
matrix being a yet older hypertext model or articulation.

77 Hypertext 3.0, 234.
78 In some new media/digital text studies, arguably too much emphasis is placed on the
con ceptual break between print media and electronic media with regard to the structural
continuity versus fragmentation of textual units, and the passivity versus participation and
dialogic engagement of the reader with these textual units. Medieval manuscript culture,
on the other hand, can be fundamentally characterised as being both dynamic and shaped
by reader-text dynamics, not least through the re-oralisation of texts in certain contexts,
and also in enabling texts to be accessed by readers in both a continuous and a segmented
or fragmentary mode.
79 Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (new York and Houndmills,
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 72.