Gripla - 20.12.2016, Page 81

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Conclusion: narratives and navigation
Whether reading from a manuscript indoors, or mentally recalling and
rehearsing material that is found in written form in the manuscripts while
moving around the landscape outdoors, the reader chose different paths
through the narrative(s), collecting and linking anecdotes or motifs to-
gether. the etymology of the Icelandic verb ‘að lesa’ (‘to read’), reflects this
idea, deriving from Latin ‘legere’, ‘to collect, gather together’.80 In Iceland,
from the medieval period to modern times, parchment and landscape
always operated in tandem as material media (and vehicles for narrative)
around and through which people navigated, both physically and men-
tally. the anthropologist tim Ingold argues that human lives “are not led
inside places but through, around, to and from them, from and to places
elsewhere”.81 Ingold uses a compound word which happens to have an old
norse etymological pedigree, ‘wayfaring’ (on ‘vegr’, ‘way, path, road’ +
‘fara’, ‘to go, travel’), to describe “the embodied experience of this peram-
bulatory movement” that characterises human existence in the world.82
Human existence unfolds along paths rather than being bound to
places; the paths forged or followed by humans meet, intersect and are
entwined. “Every entwining”, writes Ingold, “is a knot, and the more
that lifelines are entwined, the greater the density of the knot. Places,
then, are like knots, and the threads from which they are tied are lines of
wayfaring”.83 furthermore, knowledge of places is “forged in movement”,
and “every place, as a gathering of things, is a knot of stories”.84 The ety-
mology of ‘text’ fits nicely here, suggesting a knitting or knotting together
of elements to create a narrative of one kind or another: ‘text’ derives from
the Latin ‘texere’, to weave or thread together and ‘textus’, that which is
woven.85 returning to the metaphor of landscape as text introduced to-
80 Íslensk orðsifjabók, ed. Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon (reykjavík: orðabók Háskólans, 1989),
557–58.
81 Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London and new York:
Routledge, 2011), 148.
82 Being Alive, 148.
83 Being Alive, 149.
84 Being Alive, 154.
85 Oxford English Dictionary, compact edition (oxford: oxford university Press, 1994), 2034–
35; see also Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London and new York: routledge, 2007).
THE ICELANDIC SAGAS AND SAGA LANDSCAPES