Gripla - 20.12.2016, Qupperneq 308

GRIPLA308
alone on the ranch, hearing and watching and feeling this volcano gather
force over the hours and days. finally, to quote her, “I took my rifle, sad-
dled my horse, and rode over to where I knew Charlie was, because I didn’t
want to die alone.” When in later years they sat around telling stories about
the pioneer days, this was one of my grandmother’s classic contributions.
(and for the record, before I wrote this down, I double-checked it with my
great aunt, and she said I had it right.)
I myself grew up on one of the family ranches in that general vicinity,
and in later years I would bring my children there regularly to visit their
grandparents and great-grandparents. I said earlier that my kids loved
Iceland, and here’s a big reason why: they loved discovering that there was
some other place in the world that looked and felt (and smelled) so like
their own Mt. Lassen – with its steaming, bubbling pools of mud and of
water, and lava-beds everywhere.
So what does all this shamelessly autobiographical detail have to do
with the relation of sagas and cinema in my work (beyond the presence of
the occasional western film on my course list)? not a whole lot. But as I
say, one of my first reactions on reading the sagas was one of recognition
of the frontier origin story. and it also made me think that this species
of origin story, ancestral migrations to new-world frontiers, almost de-
mands to be remembered, retold, and, in one way or another, recorded.
the american western stories were most certainly recorded: in oral tales,
memoirs, traveller’s reports, novels, western novelty shows, movies, songs,
and the like. We all know the forms in which the stories of Icelandic set-
tlement were recorded.
as for the eruption of Mt. Lassen, the only possible connection I can
make to my topic today is that when I started studying old norse in 1963,
and first ran across the word “hraun” and looked it up, I knew exactly what
it was.
* * *
My last topic is gender, on which I worked in both the film and norse
fronts for about ten years. My interest began on the Norse side, in 1982,
when, in the course of reviewing a book on níð and masculinity in early
Iceland, I found myself resisting the author’s presumption of distinct and
opposite male and female roles – the separate-spheres account. But what,