Landscape and Medieval Icelandic Sagas

This book focuses on the medieval Icelandic sagas, exploring the complex and dynamic relationship between these narratives and the landscapes in which their action is set. Lethbridge argues that landscape has been as important a surface for the sagas’ transmission over the centuries as the parchment and paper manuscripts that preserve written texts. She uses a new approach, eco-philology, to consider these dual material contexts, analyzing a range of sagas and themes, such as placenames and environmental memory, agriculture and the law, gender, emotion, and saga-centred travel-writing. Intersections between page and place are traced, as are the ways that readers’ engagement with these powerful stories bring narrative geographies into dialogue with experienced geographies. The result is a more nuanced picture of the place of the sagas in Icelandic cultural history, with broader significance for understandings of the symbiosis between landscape and literature.