Reading Sacred Places: Geocriticism, the Icelandic Book of Settlements, and the History of Religions

10.3726/78000_67

Matthias Egeler Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich

The description of a place does not reproduce a referent; it is discourse that establishes the space. […] The process evolves in the strange in-between where we move from the localiza- tion of mythic places to the mythification of proven reality.

Westphal, 2011, p. 80.

Geocriticism and Religion

One of the more recent developments in literary theory is the emergence of a particular paradigm focusing on the relationship between literature (in the broadest possible sense of the term) and specific places: the paradigm of geocriticism. The genealogy of this paradigm is deeply indebted to a number of important French theorists, including Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel Foucault;1 its most detailed programmatic book – Bertrand Westphal’s La géocritique – likewise stems from the French tradition (Westphal, 2007; Westphal, 2011), though the paradigm has now, with some adaptations, also been popularised for an Anglophone readership by Robert T. Tally (Tally, 2014; Tally, 2013; Tally, 2011; Westphal, 2011; Tally, 2009). At the core of Westphal’s concept of geocriticism is a shift of focus from author to place: his approach is ‘geocentred’ in that it does not analyse the œuvre of a writer, but works regarding a specific geographical unit. By shifting the focus from the perception (and/or imagination) of a single author to the way in which a single place has been perceived by a wide range

1 For a detailed overview cf. Tally, 2013, pp. 112–145.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 67–90 68 Matthias Egeler of writers, Westphal’s approach aims to achieve a deeper, pluralistic image of the places studied in a synchronic as well as diachronic perspective. It is central for the geocritical approach that this understanding is not a purely literary one: Westphal never tires to emphasise the interconnected- ness between fiction and reality, how the literary treatments of places are never completely separable from their physical reality but at the same time influence our perception of this reality so much that they in turn constitute a major factor in the way that perceived ‘reality’ is constructed. (One can travel to Paris and appreciate the cathedral of Notre-Dame ‘physically’ as a gothic building, but never quite without having Hugo’s Quasimodo and perhaps Dumas’ Three Musketeers tugging at the back of one’s mind.) At the centre of geocriticism are inhabited places, places that are lived-in and experienced, the question of how they are experienced, and how this experience is reflected in and influenced by texts. Or in other words: geocriticism is not about texts, but about the interaction between texts and the physical places that humans experience; an experience for which mental concepts (as reflected in and influenced by texts) are just as important as the physical, ‘objective’ properties of a space. The most central methodological tenets of Westphal’s geocriticism, which he proposes in order to grasp this interaction between text and place, are multifocalisation, a stratigraphic vision, and intertextuality. Of these, the principle of multifocalisation is a formulation of the ‘geocentered’ approach which does not focus on the single author but on the multitude of perspectives that a variety of authors have on a single place. Instead of focusing on one individual presentation of a place, the geocritical approach aims at forming a composite picture based on a range of different presenta- tions to gain a more balanced understanding of the way in which the place in question is conceptualised. If one includes such multiple, multifocal perspectives, the result of the enquiry will never be a simple, monolithic image of a place. Rather, one will obtain a highly stratified image of a place. One that has a stratigraphy built up from the many different views on this place which have been expressed in the course of time – views which frequently stand in intertextual relationships to each other and to other traditions. Appreciating and studying this stratigraphy, and the intertextual relationships which partly constitute it, will again contribute to a more holistic perception of a place in all its complexity and help to avoid sim- plistic stereotypes (Westphal, 2011, esp. pp. 111–147; Westphal in Tally, 2011, pp. xiv–xv).

For the historian of religions, it is striking how close the language of geocriticism frequently comes to the language used in current theorising in the comparative study of religions. This is manifest, for instance, when Tally summarises geocriticism as an attempt at “working with real and fictional spaces, to make sense of the ways we make sense of our world, of our places in the world, and of our various and complex mappings of those worldly and otherworldly spaces”, and to “engage with the spaces that make life, through lived experience and through imaginary projections, meaningful” (Tally in Westphal, 2011, p. xii; cf. Tally, 2014, pp. 6, 11, 14; Tally in Tally, 2011, p. 8). Such a focus on ‘meaning’ – including explicitly spiritual meaning – is not only seen in Tally’s work, for it is found just as strongly in Westphal’s own writing. On the very first page of his Geocriticism, Westphal draws on the geographical-spiritual voyages ascribed to the early medieval Irish saint Brénaind moccu Alti (or anglicised: Saint Brendan):2 Westphal quotes the monastic tale of the Voyage of Saint Brendan to illustrate his point that “space has always been subject to symbolic readings” (Westphal, 2011, p. 1). Such statements as well as Tally’s concise, meaning-focused summary of the main objective of geocriticism evoke the way in which Jürgen Mohn described the function of religion at nearly the same time at which the original French edition of Westphal’s Geocriticism appeared (Mohn, 2008, p. 90):

Religiöse Symbolsysteme schaffen kontinuierliche Wahrnehmungsräume, die der Selbstreproduktion ihrer Weltdeutung als Handlungs- und Orientierungsraum für diejenigen, die ihr anhängen, dienen. (Religious systems of symbols create continuous spaces of perception which serve the self-reproduction of their world interpretation as a space of action and orientation for those who adhere to it.)

According to Mohn, the (or at least one) function of religion (“religiöse Symbolsysteme”) is to create a means of orientation for its followers, shap- ing and conceptualising the space in which these followers move in such a way as to facilitate a constant perpetuation of this orientation.3 Mohn, Tarry, and Westphal all share an emphasis on spatiality, on orientation and

2 Cf. the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, ed. Selmer, 1959; transl. O’Meara, 1978. 3 The larger context of this approach lies in a (predominantly German) discourse within the comparative study of religions about the aim, methods, and programme of ‘religious aesthetics’; for overviews of this debate cf. Egeler, 2014, pp. 14–19; Wilke & Guggenmos, 2008, pp. 206–232. Fundamental is Cancik & Mohr, 1988.

“making sense of our world”, and on how human spaces are spaces full of symbols. There is no indication that the religious and the literary theorists are directly dependent on each other, yet in their shared emphasis on space charged with meaning they clearly echo each other, reflecting a shared participation in the ‘spatial turn’ of the humanities and social sciences.4 Foucault does not seem to have been so wrong when he suggested that the present era might best be understood as an ‘epoch of space’ (Tally, 2013, p. 119; Foucault, 2006 [1967], p. 317). In the present context of the inaugural issue of Philology, however, the parallels between geocriticism and current theorising in the comparative study of religions are not so much of interest for their own sake, but rather because they point towards one (among many) points which show how widely relevant philological research, broadly understood, can be: the close parallelism between (some aspects of) geocriticism and the scholarly study of religions suggests that, just possibly, geocriticism might be an approach that could also have some bearing on our understanding of the history of religions, providing an access to sources which otherwise pose considerable problems for a methodologically sound and theoretically grounded approach.

The Book of Settlements

The Icelandic “Book of Settlements” (Landnámabók) is one of the most unique historical works extant from the European Middle Ages.5 It gives a detailed account of the first settlement of Iceland in the periodc. 870–930 AD by describing – in a strictly geographical order – which settlers were the first to take land, to build farms and to name places in the different parts of the country and thus established their claims to the land and the distribution of space that was to be valid from this time onwards. In addition to recounting the founders and founding families of the earliest farmsteads, the Book of Settlements also contains a considerable amount of genealogical

4 Cf. Hermann & Mohn, 2015; Mohn, 2007. For other examples of the ‘spatial turn’ in the comparative study of religions cf. Dippel, 2013; Corrigan, 2009; Knott, 2005. 5 Ed. Jakob Benediktsson, 1968; transl. Hermann Pálsson & Edwards, 1972 (Sturlubók recension).

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 67–90 Reading Sacred Places 71 information about the earliest settlers as well as a multitude of anecdotes. The anecdotal passages of the Book of Settlements vary greatly in length, ranging from simple statements that a settler immigrated to Iceland after falling out with the Norwegian king to extensive narratives that can almost be considered to be miniature sagas. Short or long, this anecdotal material is just as much part of the ‘land-taking’ (landnám) of the Norse settlers as the naming of places or bare-bones descriptions of geographical demarca- tions. By filling the geographical space with stories, the Norse settlers and their descendants appropriate it, ‘take’ it, inscribe their claims to the land into its narrative associations and legitimate these claims.6 Thus, questions of power and possession form an important undercurrent of the narrative ‘land-taking’ performed by the Book of Settlements. (The present article, however, will focus on a slightly different aspect of the narrative material of Landnámabók.) The transmission of the Book of Settlements is highly problematic. The ‘original’ Book of Settlements is lost. It has sometimes been assumed of this lost original version that it was written by Ari ‘the Learned’ and Kolskeggr Asbjarnsson in the first half of the 12th century.7 The earliest extant recension, the Sturlubók recension, is from more than a century later than the lost original text. It was probably compiled between 1275 and 1280 and is trans- mitted in a 17th century manuscript. Other extant medieval versions are the Hauksbók recension, probably dating to AD 1306–1308, and the Melabók recension, which in all likelihood was compiled in the early 14th century but is extant only in an extremely fragmentary state. Two further recensions of the Book of Settlements were written as late as the 17th century.8 Individual passages of the Book of Settlements can vary considerably between these different extant recensions, and it is not necessarily possible to determine which is the ‘original’ version of the narrative, or, for that matter,

6 Cf. Gunnell, 2009, p. 311; Barraclough, 2012, pp. 83, 85, 91, 94. On place-names and naming the land from the perspective of landscape theory cf. Barraclough, 2012, pp. 80–81. 7 Simek & Hermann Pálsson, 2007, p. 242; Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson, 1999, pp. 11, 146, 150; Jónas Kristjánsson, 1994, p. 130; Hermann Pálsson & Edwards, 1972, pp. 3, 4–5; cf. Sveinbjörn Rafnsson, 2001, p. 614 (dating of the first Book of Settlements to c. AD 1100, but without attempting to identify its author). 8 Cf. Simek & Hermann Pálsson, 2007, pp. 241–242; Sveinbjörn Rafnsson, 2001, pp. 614–615; Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson, 1999, pp. 11–12; Hermann Pálsson & Edwards, 1972, pp. 3–5.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 67–90 72 Matthias Egeler whether the narrative in question was at all part of the ‘original’ Book of Set- tlements. Furthermore, there is a considerable amount of overlap in narrative material between the Book of Settlements and the Sagas of Icelanders. The Sagas of Icelanders are a very large genre of high medieval Icelandic narratives that tell of the fates of important early Icelandic families in a fashion not entirely unlike that of historical novels. The overlap between the Book of Settlements and these ‘historical’ sagas implies a complex problem of literary and oral relationships. Sometimes, accounts in the Book of Settlements read like a short version of exactly the same narrative that we also find in one of the Sagas of Icelanders;9 does this mean that the Book of Settlements draws on the saga, that the saga draws on the Book of Settlements, or that both the saga and the Book of Settlements independently draw on the same oral or written tradition? In other cases, accounts in the Book of Settlements and in a saga contradict each other. Are such instances simple ‘mistakes’, or have ‘historical facts’ or traditional narratives been adapted differently to fit different political, religious, or literary agendas in such cases (cf. Sveinbjörn Rafnsson, 2001, p. 615)? Independent contemporary sources that could serve as touchstones for assessing the historical reliability of the material in the Book of Settlements are largely non-existent, making it extremely difficult to disentangle the complex history that has led to the genesis of the extant versions of the Book of Settlements. In fact, research to date has repeatedly – and rightly – emphasised that the problem of the date and origin (let alone the author) of much of the anecdotal material in the Book of Settlements has to be considered unsolvable (Sveinbjörn Rafnsson, 2001, p. 616; Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson, 1999, p. 13; cf. Wellendorf, 2010, pp. 8–9). The different versions of the Book of Settlements, falling apart into a multitude of arguably (or seemingly) unrelated and predominantly undatable anecdotes organised along a geographical trajectory like pearls on a string, are more reminiscent of a haphazard library of pamphlets than of a unified work of literature; and it is a very problematic question indeed as to how many of these pamphlets are rooted in ‘authentic’ Settlement Period traditions (cf. Egeler, 2015; Jakob Benediktsson, 1966–69). Thus, when dealing with the Book of Settlements, we are talking about an (at best) late-13th/early-14th century version of a text originally com- posed almost two centuries earlier and recounting events that (reputedly) happened another two centuries before that. If one wanted to use the Book

9 Cf. the account of the settlement of the valley Vatnsdalur (below p. 76 with note 13).

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 67–90 Reading Sacred Places 73 of Settlements as a source for the religious history of the time period it claims to talk about, this situation would be a source critical nightmare. An approach asking what the author’s intentions were in writing the Book of Settlements faces equally large problems, because we are just as unable to pin down an individual author as we are unable to pin down the exact relationship between the anecdotes recounted in the Book of Settlements and the historical reality of the Settlement Period. Any question that would attempt to take into account or enquire about the point of view of the author would always face the challenge that the composite nature of the Book of Settlements makes it a reflection of a multitude of ‘authors’ and story- tellers, very few of whom can be dated, almost none of whom can be named, and all of whom have left some imprint on the text as a whole. Given such problems in approaching the Book of Settlements, it is not surprising that this text is among the least-discussed works of the core-can- on of Scandinavian Studies.10 Too few are the fixed points of departure and too great is the internal heterogeneity of the work, which lacks the unified narrative perspective that characterises the great sagas. At the same time, as a historian of Norse religion one cannot help but marvel at the extreme richness of the religious traditions described in the Book of Settlements: again and again, the anecdotes contained in this text come to speak of religion, beliefs, rituals, and the supernatural – ranging from funerary rites to outright divine miracles, both pagan and Christian. Reading the Book of Settlements, one is left with a strong impression that religion and the supernatural are one of the great leitmotifs of this text, inseparably woven into its fabric and recurring throughout its treatment of the Icelandic landscape (cf. the overview map on p. 85). Thus, in order to overcome the methodological problems which the Book of Settlements poses for source-critical or author-focused approaches and to tap its full potential as a source for the Icelandic religious history that this text is so strongly focused on, the Book of Settlements requires a new, innovative methodological approach. One such approach is offered by Westphal’s concept of geocriticism, whose concerns so strikingly parallel concerns voiced in current theorising in the comparative study of religions. Indeed, Westphal’s geocriticism is so well suited to the Book of Settle- ments and its specific problems that it comes as something of a surprise

10 Cf. the bibliographies in Islandica 1 (1908), 24 (1935), and 38 (1957), and the Rep- ertorium fontium historiae medii aevi 7 (1997), pp. 124–126.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 67–90 74 Matthias Egeler that Westphal never mentions this text and seems to have developed his theory entirely independently of it. At its heart, Westphal’s geocriticism is ‘geocentred’, it focuses on specific places – just as the Book of Settle- ments, whose one core focus is Iceland as an inhabited space, as a place. As a consequence of this ‘geocentrism’, geocriticism eschews focusing on a single author – which seems a methodological premise tailored to the Book of Settlements, which is a compilation of narrative traditions from different times and from different parts of Iceland, a ‘library of pamphlets’ for which no single author can be grasped. The geocritical core tenet of multifocalisation is thus already inherent in the structure of the Book of Settlements, which assembles a multitude of anecdotes, all of which have their individual, distinct foci.11 Equally inherent in the Book of Settlements are the geocritical core points of a stratigraphic vision and intertextuality. The ‘stratigraphy’ presented by the Book of Settlements is a dual one: it recounts happenings in specific Icelandic places in a diachronic perspective, building up a stratigraphy of narratives projected onto the land, but it has also itself undergone a process of stratigraphic growth by the inclusion and re-working of more and more material into the different redactions that were written since the ‘original’ Book of Settlements was committed to parchment (even though more often than not we have no way of sorting out the chronology of this growth of the text). And a dual one is also the ‘intertextuality’ of the Book of Settlements. There is a clear ‘internal’ intertextuality between the different extant recensions of the Book of Settlements, which select, remove, and add material in different ways on the basis of a shared textual core, and thus offer gradually different interpretations of the same Icelandic landscapes; but there is also an ‘external’ intertextuality between the Book of Settlements and the Sagas of Icelanders (or the oral storytelling traditions underlying them, or both?), which frequently recount the same stories that also appear in the Book of Settlements – though not necessarily in the same way. While geocriticism does not offer a solution to

11 By proposing this application of the methodological tenet of multifocalisation, I am, admittedly – and consciously – taking a certain liberty with Westphal’s approach, since Westphal might argue that the ‘library of pamphlets’ that is the Book of Settle- ments still forms a single text and that an approach focusing on it is therefore not multifocal enough to qualify as truly geocentred rather than text-focused (cf. Westphal, 2011, pp. 112–114, 126, 128–129 et passim; Prieto, 2011, pp. 20–21, 25). In taking this liberty of applying geocriticism to the different versions and multifocal compo- nents of a single text, I follow Tally, 2014, p. 10; cf. Tally in Tally, 2011, pp. 2–3.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 67–90 Reading Sacred Places 75 the problems that previous research on the Book of Settlements had to face, it offers a theoretically grounded way to approach the Book of Settlements without being incapacitated by the problems that this text poses for more traditional historical or author-focused approaches. Geocriticism therefore presents us with a way to tackle the Book of Settlements both as a work of literature and as a testimony to Icelandic religious history, a way which allows us to use its rich potential without having to ignore the fundamental methodological aporias raised by this text. This, in any case, is the theory. But how could a geocritical approach to the Book of Settlements look in practice? Perhaps the best way to an- swer this question is to present some concrete examples of the treatment of Icelandic sacred places by the Book of Settlements.

Taking and Sacralising Land: the Vatnsdalur and the Patreksfjörður

The valley Vatnsdalur in Northern Iceland.

According to the Book of Settlements, one of the preeminent settlers in Western Iceland was Ørlygr Hrappsson, who took land on the Kjalarnes peninsula (S15, H15, cf. Kjalnesinga saga ch. 1).12 The Hauksbók recension

12 Kjalnesinga saga ed. Jóhannes Halldórsson, 1959. For a discussion cf. Barraclough, 2012, pp. 93–94, 95; Wellendorf, 2010, pp. 13–16; Clunies Ross, 2002, pp. 32–33; Sayers, 1994, pp. 137–138; Young, 1937, pp. 119–120.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 67–90 76 Matthias Egeler of the Book of Settlements tells about Ørlygr that he was the foster-son of a bishop named Patrick who had his Episcopal see on the Hebrides. When Ørlygr decides to sail to Iceland, he asks his clerical foster-father for guid- ance. Patrick gives him timber, a plenarium, a gold penny, and an iron bell for building a church, as well as consecrated earth which Ørlygr is to put under the corner posts of the church building; this church he is to dedicate to St. Columba. Furthermore, the bishop gives Ørlygr a detailed description of where he would settle down, apparently based on a prophetic vision of the land. Thus equipped, Ørlygr now puts to sea. On reaching Iceland, however, he is caught in a storm. As the situation threatens to turn ugly, he invokes bishop Patrick and vows to name the place after him where he would reach firm land again; this happens at the fjord in the West Fjords that has born the name Patreksfjörður (“Patrick’s fjord”) ever since. (Meanwhile, a second ship, whose captain invokes the pagan god Thor, fares somewhat less well, although its crew survives as well.) The following spring, Ørlygr sails on, until he reaches his prophesied place of settlement. When he comes within view of his destination, the bishop’s iron bell (strangely) falls over board and sinks; but on Ørlygr’s destined place of settlement, the iron bell is found lying on the shore. Now Ørlygr settles down and builds his farm and church. This settlement narrative imbues the site of Ørlygr’s ‘land-taking’ (land- nám) with deep religious meaning: as land which is promised to the settler by a divinely inspired ecclesiastic, it becomes a Promised Land, arguably with all the spiritual implications of the term; the miracle of the iron bell which is washed ashore at the settlement site merely serves to drive home the message that Ørlygr’s ‘Promised Land’ is indeed a divinely blessed land, a land which – as the site of a miracle – partakes of the holiness which is inherent in the occurrence of any divine intervention. Iceland becomes a holy land. Curiously, the strategies we meet in the Christian sanctification of Ør- lygr’s settlement are not restricted to the settlement narrative of this Chris- tian settler. Another chapter of the Book of Settlements (S179, H145) tells the tale of the settlement of Ingimundr ‘the Old’ Þorsteinsson.13 Ingimundr was an unwilling settler, who had never intended to move to Iceland. Yet in his younger days a seeress had prophesied to him that he would settle in an as yet undiscovered country in the west. As proof of this, she quoted

13 Cf. the parallel account in Vatnsdæla saga, esp. chs. 8–15 (ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, 1939), and cf. Wellendorf, 2010, p. 8.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 67–90 Reading Sacred Places 77 that a silver image of the god Freyr, which Ingimundr used to carry in his purse, had vanished and would not be found again until Ingimundr dug the post holes for his highseat pillars in the new land. In the following years it becomes increasingly clear that Ingimundr is indeed unable to settle down happily anywhere. Finally, he hires two shamans from Lappland to under- take a magical journey to Iceland and to look for the image of Freyr. They find it, but are not able to retrieve it; yet they give Ingimundr a detailed description of his future place of settlement in the Vatnsdalur valley in the north of Iceland. Ingimundr goes to Iceland, recognises his destined settlement site from the description of the Lapps, builds his house and temple there, and finds the image of Freyr in the course of the building work. Thus, it becomes clear that Ingimundr’s ‘land-taking’ in Iceland was indeed his divinely decreed fate, and that the land he takes is blessed by one of the great pagan gods of the North. The account of the settlement of Ørlygr Hrappsson describes the settlement of a Christian, while the account of the settlement of Ingimundr ‘the Old’ describes the settlement of a pagan; but in spite of this ‘denominational’ difference, both accounts follow a strikingly similar narrative pattern:

1) A religious specialist with no first-hand knowledge of Iceland (bishop/ seer/shamans) gives a detailed and apparently visionary geographical description of the settler’s place of settlement; 2) A sacred object (bell/image of Freyr) is lost, but inexplicably reap- pears at the predestined settlement site; 3) The settler recognises the settlement site on the basis of its description by the visionary religious specialist; 4) He settles down there, builds his farm, and raises a cult building (church/temple).

In both of these accounts, religious elements are equally crucial and follow directly comparable patterns – but the ‘denomination’ within which these religious elements are located is as different as it can ever be within the Icelandic settlement context. This raises interesting questions about the rep- resentation of ‘religion’ in these accounts: is the account of Ørlygr’s settlement based on a pagan pattern? Or is Ingimundr’s settlement account based on a Christian pattern (cf. Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson, 1999, p. 23)? Or did this, for a high medieval Icelandic audience, even matter at all? Is it perhaps more important for the author(s) or redactor(s) of these tales to show that

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 67–90 78 Matthias Egeler the Icelandic landscape and the powerful men who ‘take’ it in the course of the ‘land-taking’ are favoured by the supernatural powers than it is to make a point about which powers it are exactly that favour Iceland?14 One thing which can be stated for sure, however, is that we are not dealing with a simple historical tradition here. In the account of Ørlygr’s settlement, a bishop Patrick of the Hebrides plays the central role of the religious specialist – but at the time in question, there lived no such bishop Patrick (Jakob Benediktsson, 1968, p. 52 [note 2]). This shows that the very core of the story is fictional in one way or another, and that it therefore has to be interpreted narratologically, as fiction. More likely than not, the origin of the tale (or at least of the person of “bishop Patrick”) is the place name Patreksfjörður in the West Fjords. This name probably is an expression of a dedication of this fjord to Saint Patrick of Ireland by the (unknown) historical first settler in this fjord; the author of the account in the Book of Settlements, however, spun a completely new person out of this toponym. Further evidence for the primarily fictional character of Ørlygr’s settlement narrative is provided by Irish hagiography. Just as the narrative of Ørlygr’s settlement, this ecclesiastical corpus also knows the motif that a church bell drifts over the sea and comes to land on the spot where a Christian settlement is to be established (Young, 1937, p. 120); the recurrence of this peculiar motif in Ørlygr’s settlement narrative suggests that this narrative has its ultimate source in Irish hagiography rather than anything approaching historical fact or even ‘traditional’ Norse fiction. Thus, the high medieval presentation of the religious history of the Settlement Period in the narratives of the Book of Settlements shows a complex stratification of real religious toponyms, their later Christian re- interpretation (in the present case, one is tempted to speak of a ‘Chris- tian re-Christianisation’), the Norse reception of Irish hagiography, and the sharing of narrative patterns between ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’ settlement accounts. All these elements have to be considered to reach a full understanding of how medieval Icelandic literature created an imaginary construct of the Icelandic landscape, and of how this imaginary construct worked. At least in the present instance, all these elements appear to point

14 The protagonists of the Book of Settlements are indeed predominantly male: women are strongly underrepresented in this text. This appears to be due to their more restricted legal and social role in Norse society and the Book of Settlements’ focus on the legitimisation of the distribution of property: Sayers, 1994, pp. 130–131.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 67–90 Reading Sacred Places 79 in the same direction: the Icelandic landscape is sacralised. And, strikingly, there do not seem to be any religious or ethnic prejudices in the strategies that are chosen to implement this sacralisation. (Purportedly) pagan and Christian, Norse and Irish narrative strategies are employed indiscrim- inately to bring home the point that Iceland is a holy and a Promised Land.

Water Teeming with Fish: the Ísafjarðardjúp and Ásólfsskáli undir Eyjafjöllum

The Ísafjarðardjúp in the West Fjords.

Close correspondences between the treatment of Christianity and paganism, and the way in which both relate to the land, can also be seen else- where in the Book of Settlements. A certain settler by the name of Ásólfr is described as a devout, even fanatical, Christian (S24).15 After arriving in Iceland, he first takes land in Ásólfsskáli undir Eyjafjöllum in the southern

15 For a discussion of the story of Ásólfr cf. Wellendorf, 2010, pp. 11–13; Clunies Ross, 2002.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 67–90 80 Matthias Egeler part of the country. There, however, he refuses to have any contact with his pagan neighbours. At some point these neighbours get curious and start to wonder how this Christian recluse is supporting himself. When they come to his house, they find that the stream by the house is teeming with fish beyond anything that any of them has ever seen.16 After this, they drive Ásólfr away in order to have the fish for themselves. After Ásólfr is gone, however, the fish are gone too: they are now found at the place where Ásólfr has built his new house. This pattern is repeated twice: Ásólfr’s neighbours get envi- ous of Ásólfr’s fish; Ásólfr is driven away; and his abundance of fish accom- panies him. Since he cannot live in peace with his pagan neighbours, Ásólfr finally moves to Western Iceland where he settles down under the protec- tion of a relative of his. The account in the Book of Settlements concludes by noting that Ásólfr’s burial place is the place where “now” the church is standing, and that Ásólfr is considered “the holiest man” (en helgasti maðr). In the story of Ásólfr, a fish-miracle appears as a sign of Christian holiness. Fish-related miracle-working, however, is also connected with a pagan settler in the West Fjords (S145; cf. Böldl, 2011, pp. 247–248): this settler is Þúriðr ‘Channel Filler’, who took land at Bolungarvík on the Ísafjarðardjúp (the “deep sea of the Ísafjord”). Þúriðr had acquired her so- briquet “channel filler” (sundafyllir) from her ability to fill every channel with fish by “working witchcraft” (seiða), which enabled her to avert fam- ines. She also established the fishing grounds in the Ísafjarðardjúp, taking a heifer as payment from every farmer there. It is striking to see how fish miracles can be ascribed to both a Chris- tian and a pagan ‘religious specialist’. The pagan helps her community and is remembered for it, while the Christian treats the people around him with contempt until he is treated with the same contempt in return – but never- theless, in the end he is “the holiest man” and his grave is the focal point of a church building. Thus, Ásólfr constitutes a strong contrast to Þúriðr before the conversion, but after the conversion he achieves the same positive standing in the community that Þúriðr is said to have held in the earlier period. Or in other words: in the (literary construction of the) perspective of the Settlement Period, the pagan and the Christian religious specialist have an utterly different position (being the supporter and the spurner of

16 Cf. Egils saga ch. 29 (ed. Bjani Einarsson, 2003), where Skallagrímr allots a place be- side a salmon-river to a hermit in order that this hermit should guard the salmon-fishing there (cf. Barraclough, 2012, pp. 84–85).

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 67–90 Reading Sacred Places 81 society respectively); yet seen from the perspective of the time in which the narratives in the Book of Settlements were told, they shift into the same functional slot, both being venerated miracle workers in the centre of their communities. In this diachronic perspective, it is again notable how the (seemingly?) pagan and the Christian settlement narrative are assimilated to – or at least closely parallel – each other. In a way, both narratives contribute towards the construction of a continuous history of miracle workers who, by respectively having marked out the Ísafjarðardjúp fishing grounds and by being venerated for a fish miracle in a dedicated church, are both made present in the cultural conceptualisation of the Icelandic landscape, and who both inscribe this literary landscape with a promise of abundance and salvation (cf. Hermann, 2009, p. 304).

Thor and the Cross: the Krossá in Þórsmörk

Þórsmörk (“Thor’s Forest”) and the river Krossá (“Cross River”).

Another instance of an ambiguity, or ambivalence, between an ascription of a pagan and a Christian meaning to the land is found in the account of the settlement of Þórsmörk in Southern Iceland (S343):

Ásbjörn Reyrketilsson ok Steinfiðr bróðir hans námu land fyrir ofan Krossá fyrir austan Fljót. […] Ásbjörn helgaði landnám sitt Þór ok kallaði Þórsmörk. (Ásbjörn Reyrketilsson and his brother Steinfiðr took land above Cross River, to the east of Fljót. […] Ásbjörn dedicated his ‘land-taking’ to Thor and called it Thor’s Forest.)

What is striking about this passage is the toponymy of the valley Þórsmörk. On the one hand, the valley as such is called “Thor’s Forest”, a name which the account in the Book of Settlements explains as a dedication of this piece of land to the god Thor by the first settler; but on the other hand, the river which flows through “Thor’s Forest” bears the name Krossá, “Cross River”. What does it mean that the river which flows through the forest of the pagan god is the river of the Christian cross? If one were to assume that paganism and Christianity are antagonistic, mutually exclusive entities, then one might suppose that the naming of the river Krossá constituted a kind of exorcism which was intended to break the dominance of the pagan god Thor over the valley through which the river Krossá is flowing. When the river was named, this may or may not have been the intention of whoever first gave the river Krossá this name. However, within the cosmos established by the anecdotes of the Book of Settlements, the pattern seen in the ‘land-takings’ of Ørlygr Hrappsson and Ingimundr ‘the Old’ and of the Christian saint Ásólfr and the pagan practitioner Þúriðr ‘Channel Filler’ suggests a different interpretation. Here, it seems that pagan and Christian sanctity are not so much mutually exclusive but rather complementary manifestations of a deep-rooted conceptualisation of the land as holy and blessed. In this literary context, the coexistence of pagan and Christian sanctity seems no internal contradiction but a (conscious or unconscious) parallelisation of two (almost) equivalent concepts of sanctity. Adding a “Cross River” to “Thor’s Forest” here seems to be not so much an exorcism as a layering of blessings, an additive rather than a contrastive strategy to embed holiness in the land.

Concluding Remarks

The preceding pages have outlined three examples in which parallel strategies in ascribing Christian or pagan sanctity to Icelandic places suggest

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 67–90 Reading Sacred Places 83 that Christian holiness and pagan holiness were treated not so much as something contradictory, but rather as complementary ways of sanctifying the land. Of course this does not imply that what is presented as ‘pagan holiness’ in the accounts of the Book of Settlements is necessarily an accu- rate reflection of the historical paganism of the pre-Christian period, rather than merely what a Christian story-teller thought – or wanted his audience to think – that this paganism was like, but this reservation does not affect the point that the overall tenor of the Book of Settlements appears to be remarkably open for pagan (or ‘pagan’) strategies of sacralising the land, and that it was apparently acceptable to present pagan and Christian as- criptions of holiness to the land in exactly parallel ways.17 Having said this, it is now time to turn back to where this article be- gan: to Westphal’s geocriticism and his argument that there is a two-way interaction between literature and ‘reality’, that the physical reality of a place influences its literary treatments, but that the literary treatments of a place equally influence how a place is perceived by the people living in and moving through it. In a way, one could go so far as to argue that a place as it is perceived by the people which encounter it is fundamentally formed by the stories and mental images attached to it. In Westphal’s own words from the beginning of this article (2011, p. 80): “The description of a place does not reproduce a referent; it is discourse that establishes the space.” If this is so, then the religious anecdotes in the Book of Settlements and their specific tendency to privilege the ascription of holiness over questions of ‘denominational affiliation’ could be taken to imply that the narrative material collected in the Book of Settlements not only reflects, but also con- tributes to creating and perpetuating an Icelandic attitude to Iceland which imbued the very land with holiness – and at the same time was supremely unconcerned with issues of orthodoxy or the need to emphasise (or construct? or recognise?) a fundamental break between the Christian present and the pagan past of high medieval Iceland. To slightly rephrase the initial quotation: places associated with mythical happenings and mythical fig- ures were localised in the landscape, and in the course of this process the tangible landscape was turned into a place of myth. If the narratives of the Book of Settlements allow any inferences about the way in which medieval

17 From different perspectives on strategies of a positive integration of the pagan past into the cultural memory of the Christian Middle Ages cf. Wellendorf, 2010, pp. 18–21; Hermann, 2009, pp. 295, 298–305 passim.

Icelanders perceived their country (and since it is a much-redacted and therefore obviously a much-read Icelandic text, such inferences must be possible, at least for some Icelanders), then it seems that the Iceland that medieval Icelanders moved through was indeed a place of myth. Thus, the Book of Settlements allows us a glimpse of a lived experience, an experience in which the land, the people, and the myths of two religions seem to have been inseparably intertwined.18 Geocriticism is an example for how working with literary texts and using literary theories can open up perspectives reaching far beyond the confines of literature and literary studies and allow insights which could otherwise easily have been missed. The case of the Icelandic Book of Set- tlements illustrates how a geocritical approach can help to deepen our understanding not only of a literary text, but also of the religious environment which formed the context in which this text was generated (it is tempting to say ‘written’, but since parts of its complex genesis are likely to have been oral, it seems preferable to use a more neutral term). Geocriticism provides a theoretically grounded way of approaching this text without getting lost in (ultimately unsolvable) methodological problems of authorship and historical accuracy, but still exploiting the text’s potential as a testimony to a particular religious attitude to the Icelandic landscape which sees the land as a place of holiness without making much of a distinction between the sources of this holiness. Such an attitude is not self-evident, runs counter to our modern expectations of a fundamental antagonism between paganism and Christianity, and has (to the best of my knowledge) never before been chosen as a central theme of research into Icelandic religious history. Here, the application of geocriticism to a medieval Icelandic text allows new insights by means of a creative transgression of disciplinary boundaries between the study of literature as literature and the history of religions. It is such a creative transgression between the study of literature and other fields of the humanities that Philology hopes to provide a forum for.

18 It should perhaps be emphasised that this sacralisation of the Icelandic landscape, which is such a prominent feature of the Book of Settlements, should not be understood in the Romantic terms of the 19th century, but is closely tied up with the claims to power that follow from claims to land ownership (cf. Barraclough, 2012, pp. 94–95): the owner of sacralised land directly partakes in the sacrality of his property, gaining elevated status and claims to leadership (cf. the semantic development of the Old Icelandic term goði from ‘priest’ to ‘chieftain’); the sacralisation of the land is thus closely entangled with questions of political power.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 67–90 Reading Sacred Places 85 ); places which have both pagan and both pagan have ); places which ). This map does not include mere mentionings of ‘priests’ This map does not include mere mentionings of ‘priests’ ). ), the appearance of Christian motifs by hatched circles ( ), the appearance of Christian motifs by century). th ), of genealogical relationships to later holders of ecclesiastical offices, or appearances of persons for which a Christian faith can be relationships to later holders of ecclesiastical offices, or appearances persons for ), of genealogical goði recension). The appearance of recension). distribution of religious and supernatural elements in the Book of Settlements ( Sturlubók The ‘geographical’ circles ( black by motifs is marked pagan ( for all bearers of Irish names, since Ireland had been and probably (as it is the case for all Irish slaves but is not stated explicitly assumed, Christian since the 6 Christian associations are marked with circles half hatched and half black ( with circles half hatched and black Christian associations are marked

Acknowledgements

I owe thanks to Stefanie Gropper, Katja Jakob, and Bernhard Maier for their critical remarks and helpful suggestions, which contributed much to improving this text, and to John Henry Levin for manifold corrections to my English style and grammar. As a matter of course, any mistakes of fact or interpretation that may remain in this text are mine alone. The map of Iceland which forms the basis for the map on p. 85 is © Landmælin- gar Íslands (, 14/08/2014), used by permission. The copyright for all photographs lies with me. This research was supported by a Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme.

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