Gripla - 20.12.2016, Page 118

GRIPLA118
to Vidvík, a place called Garðshvammur, close to the farm at Viðvík’].76
that the text repeats twice that this encounter is taking place near Viðvík
does bring the audience’s attention to the place-name as such. and this
place-name does echo another place-name involved in the Örlygsstaðir
battle: Víðivellir. While not identical names as in the case above, there is
a poetic resonance between them, which the audience would likely have
noticed given the native Icelandic skaldic poetic rules that emphasize initial
consonants and the repetition of consonants. there is also similarity in
that Þórður’s battle is near the farm, not at the farm, which is also the case
with Örlygsstaðir vis-á-vis Víðivellir.
and one could also point to the character of Özurr, the chieftain in
Skagafjörður who relentlessly pursues Þórður but is otherwise unknown
from any other saga or source. In chapter 6 of the saga, he is introduced
as Özurr from Grund, but later in the saga he is identified as Özurr from
Þverá. Both of these farm names are very common in districts throughout
Iceland. Interestingly, however, a major chieftain of the Sturlungaöld,
Sighvatur, after taking over the goðorð of his son, moves to Grund in
Eyjafjörður, and later there is a battle at a farm nearby to Grund, Þverá in
Eyjafjörður. It is possible that the audience of the saga, when hearing the
farm names Grund and Þverá associated with a chieftain, would have first
thought of Grund in Eyjafjörður. Such mental gymnastics may appear to
us unlikely, but because Özurr is a fictional construct, not known from
any other source or saga, an engaged local audience would have little else
to link him with than a real chieftain with whom he has certain parallels,
including relentlessness in obtaining his objective.
these oblique and tenuous textual references, combined with a vir-
tual blackout of the geographic area associated with the events of the
Sturlungaöld, present a very intriguing possibility. Perhaps what we see
in the Complete version of the saga is an example not of cultural memory
being created, but of directed cultural forgetting.77 the process of re-
membering is always accompanied by the need to forget; it is a selective
76 “Þórðar saga hreðu,” 201.
77 for a discussion of social forgetting, see Elena Esposito, “Social forgetting: a Systems
theory approach,” in Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Erll et al., 181–190. for a discussion of
the role of landscape in dealing with social trauma, see Elizabeth anderson et al., Memory,
Mourning, Landscape.