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a text. the resulting map is an apparatus that allows a visual representation
of the interpretive links a knowledgeable reader – or thoughtful writer –
would have been mentally engaged in while navigating a text. the resulting
map can then be analyzed for patterns after the act of reading is over. Saga
studies have begun to take note of mapping as a tool for understanding
how the sagas interact with environmental, gender, historical, and political
changes, and includes important work by Christopher Callow44 and an
ambitious mapping project described in an article by Emily Lethbridge and
Steven Hartman.45 this paper builds on these efforts but with a greater
emphasis on the intimate, phenomenological sense of lived landscape that
the original, engaged reader/audience would have had in mind while listen-
ing to the saga.46
for the original medieval audience, a two-dimensional representation
of real space – a map – was neither needed nor utilized. Instead, local
people familiar with the landscape of the saga would carry with them a
mental map that was not an abstract aerial depiction but rather an eye-level
immersive sensory memory.47 Perhaps they had traveled the same route as
Þórður, perhaps they knew someone who lived at a farm named in the text.
they would therefore be able to visualize the saga events in ways scholars
and readers unfamiliar with the landscape can only approximate. for those
sagas like Þórðar saga hreðu that have a limited geographic sensibility, the
saga-teller was anticipating that the intended local audience would have
that level of knowledge; in other words, it was part of its generic modus
operandi.
44 Chris Callow, “Putting Women in their Place? Gender, Landscape, and the Construction
of Landnámabók,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 7 (2011): 7–26.
45 Emily Lethbridge and Steven Hartman, “Inscribing Environmental Memory in the Ice-
landic Sagas and the Icelandic Saga Map,” PMLA 131 v. 2 (2016): 381–391.
46 My work is directly inspired by Gillian overing and Marijane osborn, Landscape of Desire:
Partial stories of the Medieval Scandinavian World (Minneapolis: university of Minnesota
Press, 1994).
47 See Howard n. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place
World (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 2nd edition, 2009) and Tim Ingold, Being
Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description (London and new York: routledge,
2011).