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place-name explanation on the basis of anecdote in the Íslendingasögur is
presented in these written narratives as being motivated by practical im-
pulses, and must (prior to the writing down of the sagas, and subsequently)
have been a means of aiding physical navigation by making specific places
or landmarks more memorable and fixing the relative positioning of
places more securely in mind. Equally, several ideological dynamics are at
play: naming – and documenting the giving of these names via narrative,
whether oral or written – serves the need to establish and legitimise a con-
nection or a direct relationship with the land, not least, one that implies
or communicates ownership and thus power.90 naming, in conjunction
with movement, is the means by which – in the saga narratives, whether
communicated indoors or outdoors – the unfamiliar, previously untrod-
den and unsettled landscape was made familiar, transformed into a cultural
landscape, mapped and divided up between new settlers, and remained the
patrimony or endowment of subsequent generations of Icelanders.
In order to understand the significance of the Íslendingasögur to Iceland-
ers, locally and nationally, over time, it is crucial to define the nature of
the relationship between places, place-names and the stories that they
hold in crystalised form, and the longer written narratives that comprise
the Íslendingasögur corpus. the Íslendingasögur were transmitted orally
and in writing, and their continued transmission via manuscripts and
the landscape in turn shaped people’s continued engagement with, and
perceptions of the landscape and the articulation of these stories in their
written format. Icelanders used these narratives to navigate with, to help
them understand their place in the world physically and existentially, both
by looking backwards and remembering their ancestors and by looking
forwards – not least, in the context of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century fight for independence, for example.91
90 See Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape; and on naming as a performative speech-act in
Vatnsdæla saga and Landnámabók, see Barraclough, ‘naming the Landscape’.
91 See, e.g., Ian Wyatt, ‘the Landscape of the Icelandic Sagas: text, Place and national
Identity,’ Landscapes 1 (2004): 55–72; Jón Karl Helgason, ‘We Who Cherish Njáls saga:
alþingi as Literary Patron,’ in Northern Antiquity: The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and
Saga, ed. andrew Wawn (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik Press, 1994), 143–61 and The Rewriting
of Njáls saga: Translation, Ideology and Icelandic Sagas (Clevedon and Buffalo: Multilingual
Matters, 1999); reinhard Hennig, ‘a Saga for Dinner: Landscape and nationality in
Icelandic Literature,’ Ecozon 2 (2011): 61–71.
THE ICELANDIC SAGAS AND SAGA LANDSCAPES