Matthias Egeler, Atlantic Outlooks on Being at Home. Gaelic Place-Lore and the Construction of a Sense of Place in Medieval Iceland (original) (raw)
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This paper explores the accounts of Norse Greenland in the medieval Icelandic sagas, looking past the Vínland sagas to examine ways in which Greenlandic settings are employed in the 'post-classical' saga-tradition and other texts. The style and content of these tales varied over time, but the recurrence of certain conventional patterns indicates that stories set in Greenland retained important thematic continuities for Icelandic saga audiences. From as early as the 12th century, Icelandic writers identified Greenland as a peripheral space in the Norse world, connected with Iceland, but markedly distinct and remote. This marginalization is evident in the Vínland sagas and developed further in the post-classical tradition, which made Greenland a place of exile in which Icelandic heroes were tested by extreme adversity in the settlements and wilderness. Embodying the preoccupations of Icelandic writers and audiences, these writings tell us little about historical realities in Norse Greenland; but they do show how details of geographical and historical lore were subsumed and transformed in the Icelandic narrative tradition.
A Layered Landscape: How the Family Sagas Mapped Medieval Iceland
Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies, 2010
The Icelandic Family Sagas – Old-Norse prose narratives written during the 1200s – inscribe in retrospect a process by which the unknown terrain of late ninth-century settlement Iceland is ‘mapped’ through association with human story. Space begs history: family sagas locate past deeds in a present landscape. At the most evident level, sagas explain how places received their names by reference to the people who had lived there. Another layer of meaning is created by the movement of stories and journeys over this named geography. Furthermore, the saga landscape thus constructed is shown to have continuing relevance: the sagas link past and present, with physical evidence of saga action still evident in thirteenthor even twentieth-century Iceland. Yet family sagas do not claim that all responsibility for this construction of landscape lay with the early settlers. The land too is shown to have had agency, so choosing its people and history.
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In this essay, I examine the similarities between the Lake District in England and Iceland. Both places have tales of a Norse past and settlement, but these settlements were much more closely linked than has previously been discussed. Using place-name studies, I was able to compare almost identical names in both Iceland and the Lake District. I used some of the essential work of Gillian Fellows-Jensen, as well as newer scholarship by Ryan Mark Foster and Martina Domines Veliki to establish historical and onomastic links. Both locations share a distant Norse background with Ireland, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man. Though the Lake District has very little documentary evidence, especially in comparison with Iceland, using place-names, contemporary sources and Landnámabók, I was able to connect activity in Irish Sea to the settlement period of Iceland. What first alerted me to these similarties was W.G. Collingwood’s nineteenth century work, A Pilgrimage to the Saga-steads of Iceland. Hailing from the Lake District, Collingwood visited Iceland to venture through the Icelandic landscape and to witness firsthand the farms and features the sagas described. In his account, he often compares parts of the Icelandic countryside to landscape features back in the Lake District. Literary tourism was originally born in the Lake District as people followed in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth. This literary tourism that Collingwood brought to Iceland, however, was revolutionary in transforming how people interacted with the sagas and with the Icelandic landscape. This study aims at answering some questions as to why some Norse place-names went out of use in Iceland and how two very different places were eventually defined by their later literary output.