Gripla - 2020, Page 245

GRIPLA244
cal treatment of their injuries and impairments. Second, there is a paucity
of emotional response to injuries from both the impaired persons and
society at large. Third, the potential medical and social consequences of
injuries and impairments are not openly addressed. Fourth, the saga does
not return to previous cases of injuries and impairment, but rather moves
on after incidents leading to dis/ability. At this point, of course, these four
aspects could only be thought of as tendencies; whether they apply more
generally within the corpus of the Íslendingasögur will require further re-
finement on the basis of exhaustive and detailed discussions well beyond
the scope of this article. Yet they are useful here as a brief sketch of some
key ways in which saga narratives are generally silent when it comes to
matters of injuries and impairments.
The episode from Eyrbyggja saga depicts neither the injured characters
nor the community as paying attention to wounds, to the extent that such
impairments seem to go entirely unnoticed. The Þorbrandssynir only seem
to acknowledge publicly their injuries when they experience difficulties
with everyday actions; otherwise, it suffices for the narrator to mention
their injuries in passing by employing stereotypical and unspecific formu-
lations and terms.35 In a fight against a group of the Norwegian king’s fol-
lowers, Egill Skallagrímsson receives multiple wounds that are described
in a rather superficial manner, with the saga saying of him only that he
had ‘mǫrg sár ok engi stór’36 [many wounds, but no serious (literally ‘big’)
ones]. It is similarly said of the eponymous protagonist of Þórðar saga
hreðu that he ‘hafði fengit mörg sár ok stór’37 [had received many serious
wounds] from a fight against three attackers. Yet neither Egill nor Þórðr is
fated to die at this point in his saga, and there is presumably no narrative
benefit to be gained in being more specific about their injuries.
Of course, there are exceptions to this general tendency, as in the case
of Auðr, the wife of Þórarinn svarti Þórólfsson, in Eyrbyggja saga. When
Auðr tries to separate two groups in battle, her hand is cut off, perhaps
accidentally; Þórarinn notices the incident only after the attackers have
35 It can often be observed that those wounds that either do not cause a character to become
óvígr ‘unable to fight’ or that prove fatal often remain unspecified in the Íslendingasögur.
36 Egils saga skalla-Grímssonar, ed. by Sigurður Nordal, íslenzk fornrit 2 (Reykjavík: Hið
íslenzka fornritafélag, 1933, repr. 2012), 237.
37 Þórðar saga hreðu, in Kjalnesinga saga, ed. by Jóhannes Halldórsson, íslenzk fornrit 14
(Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag 1959, repr. 2007), 197.