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is often closely associated with perceived moral transgressions and seems
to have “informed the saga readers of the conflicting emotions of the saga
protagonists who were recognized as flouting certain social norms.”13 She
goes on to suggest that, “whatever its emotional aspects, eye pain was also
a disease, and a moral one, that affected the well-being of the individual
and suggested inferiority of character in the sufferer.”14 While this may
be the case for some or all of those examples cited above, there is little to
suggest that the augnaverkr and subsequent loss of vision Þorsteinn hvíti
experiences should be associated with any perceived moral transgression
nor that the saga’s contemporaneous audience would have viewed him as a
man of inferior character on this account. In fact, Þorsteinn may stand out
as an exception among several other “nasty old men” in the sagas who seem
to “lash out in fury against their destiny,” which might include the onset of
vision loss or other infirmities.15
Þorsteinn’s vision loss is, nevertheless, a crucial aspect of his story.
However, it does not seem to invite social stigma, affect his social status,
or preclude Þorsteinn from seemingly continuing to live what might be
considered a “good and normal life.”16 Certainly, his vision loss requires
him to take certain steps to adjust to his new reality, mainly by enlisting
his son Þorgils to assist him with or perhaps even take over the running of
(Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1991), 170; Einar ól. Sveinsson (ed.), vatnsdœla saga,
íslenzk fornrit VIII (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1939), 95–96.
13 Kirsi Kanerva, “‘Eigi er sá heill, er í augun verkir’: Eye Pain as a Literary Motif in
Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century íslendingasögur,” ARv – nordic Yearbook of Folklore
69 (2013): 10. On the occasional connection between dreams and the onset of augnaverkr,
see Christopher Crocker, “Disability and Dreams in the Medieval Icelandic sagas,” saga-
Book 43 (2019): 42–54.
14 Kanerva, “‘Eigi er sá heill, er í augun verkir’,” 25; see also Annette Lassen, Øjet og blindheden
i norrøn litteratur og mytologi (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2003), 52–55.
15 Ármann Jakobsson, “The Spectre of Old Age: Nasty Old Men in the Sagas of Icelanders,”
journal of English and Germanic Philology 104 (2005): 325; see also Jón Viðar Sigurðsson,
“Ageism and Taking Care of the Elderly in Iceland c. 900–1300,” Youth and Age in the
Medieval north, ed. by Shannon Lewis-Simpson (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 227–42; Thomas
Morcom, “After Adulthood: The Metamorphoses of the Elderly in the Íslendingasögur,”
saga-Book 42 (2018): 25–50; Gareth Lloyd Evans, Men and Masculinities in the sagas of
Icelanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 78–83.
16 Benjamin Haas, “Dis-/ability and Normalism: Patterns of Inclusion in Romance
Literature,” Culture – theory – Disability: Encounters between Disability studies and Cultural
studies, ed. by Anne Waldschmidt, Hanjo Berressem, and Moritz Ingwersen (Bielefeld:
transcript, 2017), 225.
NARRATING BLINDNESS