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editing of history.78 By directing the audience away from the Miklabær of
the Sturlungaöld towards the Miklabær of Óslandshlíð, this popular and
widely-circulated version of the saga seems to be suggesting that the events
of the Sturlungaöld were an aberration best forgotten. the only event of
the Sturlungaöld the saga is willing to allow directly into the saga narrative
is the one broken up by peace-abiding local people. for people trying to
recover from the trauma of the Sturlungaöld and move on in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, Þórðar saga hreðu was likely a useful anecdote.
10. Conclusion
the poor opinion modern scholars have had of Þórðar saga hreðu as an exam-
ple of the Islendingasögur genre may well be ameliorated if the saga’s intimate
relationship to its regional setting is understood. though all Íslendingasögur
mention real place-names in Iceland by definition, some sagas, like Þórðar
saga hreðu, may rely on this to such a degree that the saga loses meaning
without that landscape context. Instead, the saga appears vacuous and lack-
ing verisimilitude. as the above analysis suggests, robust academic attention
on the interplay between places named in the saga and the interpretation of
the saga can add significant nuance and complexity to a text.
Þórðar saga hreðu is surely not the only saga that can benefit from analysis
of this sort. other sagas that lack extensive genealogies but keep most of the
action in Iceland may be similarly “landscape-sensitive.” as a subgenre, re-
gional sagas could be thought of as those sagas that encouraged the audience
to bring into the saga their knowledge of place to complete the hermeneutic
cycle.79 If genealogies encourage the listener to extend the chronology of the
saga forward into their present, sagas without extensive genealogies may be
relying on the dimension of space rather than time to bridge the fictional
world of the saga with the real world of the listeners. that certainly seems
to be what the Complete version of Þórðar saga hreðu is doing.
and while all Íslendingasögur have some relationship with the landscape
of Iceland, likely not all sagas manage and mediate that relationship the
same way or with the same intensity. Being able to distinguish between sa-
78 Paul ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer (Chicago:
university of Chicago Press, 2006).
79 Hrafnkels saga comes to mind as a likely candidate.
COMPLETING Þ Ó R Ð A R S A G A H R E Ð U