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world depicted in Þorsteins saga and in other Old Norse literature where
the visual is often taken for granted as a means through which the world is
most naturally engaged with, but it is also often explicitly privileged as, if
not the sole, then certainly the primary seat of knowledge generation and
motivation. Pernille Hermann has demonstrated that the faculty of sight
was intimately entwined with thought and memory in medieval Norse
culture.39 This is the case too, for example, for paranormal experiences
such as dreams and, naturally, waking visions as well, the vehicle of which
is predominantly visual imagery. Like other Indo-European languages,
Old Norse is also highly dependent on a variety of explicit and occluded
terms, metaphors, and other idiomatic phrases associating seeing and the
visual with knowing, remembering, and thinking.40 Yet, by giving way to
this small but striking detail, Þorsteins saga confronts the hegemony of vi-
sion, if only momentarily, by relating the experience of blindness not as an
empty other but as an experience that involves its own means for knowl-
edge motivation and generation. Moreover, rather than an obstacle, the
saga presents vision loss and blindness as something capable of generating
its own narratives, including the story of sightedness’ common inability to
see itself as a norm about which everything, including stories, is typically
constructed.41
The acknowledgement of Þorsteinn’s atypical sensory experience, in-
deed, seems to entail a subtle and perhaps rare shift from the kind of ex-
Experience: A sourcebook in the Anthropology of the senses, ed. by David Howes (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1991), 30; Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of
vision in twentieth-Century French thought (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994), 34–45; Edward Wheatley, stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions
of a Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 14–18; Béatrice Caseau,
“The Senses in Religion: Liturgy, Devotion, and Deprivation,” A Cultural History of the
senses in the Middle Ages, ed. by Richard G. Newhauser (London: Bloomsbury, 2014),
89–91; and Pekka Kärkkäinen, “The Senses in Philosophy and Sciences: Mechanics of
the Body or Activity of the Soul?” A Cultural History of the senses in the Middle Ages, ed. by
Richard G. Newhauser (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 118–20.
39 See Pernille Hermann, “Memory, Imagery and Visuality in Old Norse Literature,” journal
of English and Germanic Philology 114 (2015): 317–40; Pernille Hermann, “The Mind's Eye:
The Triad of Memory, Space and the Senses in Old Norse Literature,” European journal of
scandinavian studies 47 (2017): 203–17.
40 On the pervasiveness of ocularcentrism in Indo-European languages, see Stephen A. Tyler,
“The Vision Quest in the West, or What the Mind’s Eye Sees,” journal of Anthropological
Research 40 (1984): 23–40.
41 Michalko, the Mystery of the Eye, 156–67.
NARRATING BLINDNESS