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of real people and the practice of interpreting these sources using modern
medical criteria should hardly be seen as an endpoint of textual criticism.28
Representations in the medieval sagas of nonconformist bodies or atypi-
cal sensory experiences do not generally welcome close comparison with
modern medical understandings of these phenomena, not only on account
of cultural, historical, or social differences, but because of the nature of the
sagas themselves.
The Íslendingasögur are immensely valuable as sources of ideas, ideolo-
gies, and mentalities, if not of the period and society they purport to repre-
sent (ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-century Iceland), then of the period and
society in which they were written and received (thirteenth-, fourteenth-,
and fifteenth-century Iceland, if not even later). Adopting such a perspec-
tive toward the sagas may allow for some insight regarding the varied ways
sensory impairments such as vision loss or blindness were perceived and
how they affected the everyday life of medieval Icelanders during this later
period. Although, as discussed above, Þorsteins saga presents particular dif-
ficulties if regarded as a medieval text. In any case, scholars attempting to
flesh out specific aspects of how a given saga reflects past social realities
associated with vision loss or blindness run the risk of obscuring some of
the more interesting questions a disability studies approach can generate.
As Michael Bérubé explains, focusing solely on questions of representa-
tional accuracy or attempts to apply retrospective diagnosis “leads us away
from the grainy details and specific passages and utterances, distracting us
from what we should be asking about narratives as such.”29 In this respect,
Þorsteinn hvíti’s reappearance near the end of the saga is of particular
interest less for the sake of how his depiction might reflect broader socio-
cultural attitudes outside of the text and more with respect to how the nar-
rative invokes Þorsteinn’s atypical sensory experience to confront the kind
of ocularcentrism that commonly characterizes medieval saga writing.
28 Michael Bérubé, “Disability and Narrative,” PMLA 120 (2005): 570; Michael Bérubé,
the secret Life of stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual
Disability transforms the Way We Read (New York: New York University Press, 2016),
19–20, 27, 66; see, for example note 18 above.
29 Bérubé, the secret Life of stories, 130.
NARRATING BLINDNESS