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Yet, unlike a number of other elderly men in the sagas, some of whom
also experience vision loss or other infirmities associated with aging,
Þorsteinn hvíti does not simply retire out of the vengeance game – often
ritualized through the act of literally retiring to bed – in which he never
really seemed to take part anyway.52 Vengeance, of course, is not the only
viable option, but the elder Þorsteinn is equally defiant in refusing finan-
cial compensation. His refusal to do so once again seems to demonstrate
a keen awareness of the pitfalls of the social structures within which he
and his younger namesake are operating. Þorsteinn’s defiant refusal to
“carry his son in a purse” may speak to his awareness that taking such a
payment in lieu of blood vengeance could make him the object of shame.53
Moreover, as William Ian Miller contends, while financial compensation
may appear to serve as a mechanism to thwart violent conflict, the purse
itself can just as easily act as a token or reminder of the corpse for whom
it was paid, creating a situation in which the violence it was meant to avert
is ironically hastened.54 The depth of Þorsteinn’s desire to prevent further
violence is apparent when, after the saga jumps several years ahead, he
encourages Þorsteinn fagri to leave Iceland when he suspects that Þorgils’s
orphaned son, Brodd-Helgi, who has now come of age, might begin look-
ing to avenge his father’s death.
Returning to the poignant encounter between the two Þorsteinns,
with the traditional mechanisms for conflict resolution seemingly having
been exhausted, the elder Þorsteinn opts for a radical method of conflict
resolution such that his younger namesake becomes “like a son” to him,
filling in for the son he has lost. This solution allows the elder Þorsteinn
share not only an intertextual connection but also an ideological one, she suggests that the
encounter between the two Þorsteinns should be viewed as conveying a similarly posi-
tive Christian message as the one found in Vápnfirðinga Saga; see Sigríður Baldursdóttir,
“Hugmyndaheimur Vopnfirðinga sögu,” 81, 99–100.
52 On the common trope of “retiring to bed” and, thus, out of the vengeance game in medieval
saga writing, see William Ian Miller, Losing It (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011),
129–40.
53 Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking, 190.
54 William Ian Miller, Eye for an Eye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 106–
07; see also, for example, Guðni Jónsson (ed.), Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, íslenzk fornrit
VII (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1936), 80; Otto J. Zitzelsburger (ed.), the two
versions of sturlaugs saga starfsama: A Decipherment, Edition and translation of a Fourteenth
Century Icelandic Mythical-Heroic saga (Düsseldorf: Michael Triltisch, 1969), 15.
NARRATING BLINDNESS