Further information
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol Hoggart is a PhD candidate in the Schools of Humanities and Social and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, Perth. She is currently writing her thesis on characterisation of ‘Vikings’ in history and fiction. Her research interests include narrative theory, historical novels, and the conjunction of history and fiction in academic and popular publications.
Share this page
A Layered Landscape: How the Family Sagas Mapped Medieval Iceland
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 thirteenth- or 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.
Full Article
University information
CRICOS Code: 00126G
