Gripla - 2020, Page 235

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to unlock the silence of the Íslendingasögur regarding embodied difference
that saga characters experience and suffer through their participation in
combat. I argue that this silence has deeply personal implications for the
impaired characters concerned and can potentially be understood as an
expression of trauma connected to a loss of symbolic capital, in the sense
articulated by Pierre Bourdieu.
When a saga character becomes impaired, three different but inter-
related responses by the saga character, saga society, and the saga narra-
tive can be identified. Saga characters, mostly men, who are wounded in
combat and suffer an impairment, hardly ever voice their attempts to cope
with the situation and remain silent. They are left alone to work through
this traumatic experience and come to terms with the impairment and its
potential implications for their social standing and reputation – that is, the
loss of symbolic capital through the impairment becoming a disability. Saga
society, is not interested in the feelings or the personal and social implica-
tions of an impairment. For saga society, the body is primarily of interest
as a valuable asset that is used for negotiating peace agreements and defin-
ing compensation payments; in part, these discussions aim at redressing
the impaired character, but their greater purpose is the restoration of social
equilibrium. Once negotiations have successfully come to a close, neither
the saga character nor the impairment are of societal concern any longer,
and any social reaction fades into silence.
The silence on the intradiegetic level is also mirrored on the extradie-
getic level, where the narratorial voice tends to mention injuries and im-
pairments inflicted in battle only in passing and expresses these details us-
ing an unemotional and matter-of-fact tone. The saga narrative itself thus
resorts to a fragmentary depiction of impairment in order to maintain an
ostensibly objective stance. In refraining from dealing with such traumatis-
ing experiences, saga narratives employ the device of narrative prosthesis.
Modelled on the idea of a material prosthesis, the concept of narrative
prosthesis refers to the use of textual elements and modes to disguise or
distract attention from potentially unsettling embodied difference in or-
der not to disturb an audience.5 Hence, the silence in the Íslendingasögur
5 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies
of Discourse, Corporealities: Discourses of Disability (Ann Arbor (MI): The University of
Michigan Press, 2003), 3–8.