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after her hand is cut off; it is not clear whether she accompanies her hus-
band Þórarinn svarti when he is made to leave Iceland, but in any case her
impairment is not mentioned again.
7. The Silenced Trauma
The manifest silence of the Íslendingasögur regarding injuries and dis/abil-
ity can also be interpreted on a psychological level as a manifestation of
trauma.66 The term trauma as used in modern psychology is ambiguous
in as much as it refers to three different aspects of traumatic experiences:
first, a disturbing event that causes a psychic response; second, the emo-
tional shock that the event causes; and third, the psychosomatic impact that
this experience has on a person.67 Trauma theory conceptualises life as a
continuous narrative and suggests that it is possible to process and verbally
narrate most of our experiences in life as such. In the case of a traumatic
experience, however, the individual is overwhelmed by the sudden emo-
tional intensity of an incident and does not have the necessary mental ca-
pacities to deal with the situation adequately. Being caught off guard by an
unsettling event, individuals can find themselves unable to put into words
their experience, and hence often resort to silence. To verbalise the experi-
ence and transform it into a stringent narrative proves painful and difficult,
even impossible in some cases. Thus, trauma evades the individual’s con-
trol and remains in a state of fragmentary, non-verbalised memory, which
hinders the individual in coming to terms with the traumatising incident:
it cannot be defused and integrated into the continuous biographical nar-
rative of the patient’s life, leaving them to be haunted by it.68
66 On the value of psychological approaches to Old Norse saga literature, see Ármann
Jakobsson, “Empathy.” On the application of the trauma framework to the Íslendingasögur,
see Torfi H. Tulinius “Honour, Sagas and Trauma: Reflection on Literature and Violence
in 13th Century Iceland,” Literature and Honour, ed. by Aasta Marie Bjorvand Bjørkøy
and Thorstein Norheim (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2017), 81–94, and “Skaði kennir mér
minni minn: On the Relationship Between Trauma, Memory, Revenge and the Medium
of Poetry,” skandinavische schriflandschaften. vänbok till jürg Glauser, ed. by Klaus Müller-
Wille, Kate Heslop, Anna Katharina Richter, and Lukas Rösli (Tübingen: Narr Francke
Attempto, 2017), 129–135.
67 Donna Trembinski, “Comparing Premodern Melancholy/Mania and Modern Trauma: An
Argument in Favor of Historical Experiences of Trauma,” History of Psychology 14.1 (2011):
82.
68 Fabian Hutmacher, “Vom Unsagbaren sprechen. Trauma in Psychologie und Literatur am