Gripla - 2020, Page 258

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Several aspects that trauma theory posits as characteristic of traumas
can be identified in the Íslendingasögur. While the sagas allow audiences a
level of insight into the legal discussions and juridical decisions concerning
arbitrations and compensation payments, they do not give much attention
to the physical and mental implications of fights. Instead, audiences are
presented with short, fragmentary descriptions of injuries and impair-
ments rather than with a coherent narrative. The sagas hardly ever offer
a glimpse of how saga characters supposedly feel after having suffered an
injury or impairment, more often the narratives make do with famously
succinct phrases that reveal little more than brief details of what a character
has been through. Typical sentences in this context include the following:
‘Þá lét Gyrðr auga sitt’81 [Then Gyrðr lost his eye]. ‘[Þormóðr] var jafnan
ǫrvendr síðan, meðan hann lifði’82 [from then on (Þormóðr) was left-
handed as long as he lived]; ‘ok varð Helgi Ásbjarnarson þegar óvígr’83 [and
Helgi Ásbjarnarson immediately became unable to fight (or: dis/abled)];
and ‘Gunnarr hjó hǫnd af Óttari í ǫlbogabót’84 [Gunnarr cut off óttarr’s
lower arm at the elbow]. In these sentences, the characters involved suffer
serious injuries that bring about crucial changes to how they experience
their lives, and which in some cases lead to dis/ability, yet such conse-
quences are addressed in detail neither when the incidents happen nor in
later narration. I suggest that this is because such experiences represent
too severe a blow, both for the individual and their community, for them
to discuss at length.
The characters and the narrators of the sagas thus resort to a fragment-
ed silence on the matter, in which they are unable to embed the traumatic
experience into a narrative. What remains are the scars, the missing limbs,
the compensation payments, and the nicknames that stand as constant re-
minders of what happened, but that do not allow for individuals or society
itself to verbalise a narrative that could break the pervasive silence.
81 Eyrbyggja saga, 176.
82 Fóstbrœðra saga, 167.
83 Droplaugarsona saga, 162–163.
84 Brennu-njáls saga, ed. by Einar ól. Sveinsson, íslenzk fornrit 12 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka
fornritafélag, 1945, repr. 2010), 159.
THE SILENCED TRAUMA IN THE Í sLEnDInGAsÖGUR