Time, Space, and Narrative in Medieval Icelandic Literature

Ben Allport, Alison Finlay (eds)

Pages: approx. 418 p.
Size:156 x 234 mm

Language(s):English
Publication Year:2026

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ISBN: 978-2-503-61223-2
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A new, multi-faceted collection of studies of the structural, narrative, and symbolic functions of time and space in the literature of medieval Iceland.

Subject(s)

BIO

Ben Allport is a researcher on the ELITES project at Instituttet for arkeologi, konservering og historie, Universitetet i Oslo. He is interested in the creation of community in narrative sources.

Alison Finlay is Emeritus Professor of Medieval English and Icelandic Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. She writes on Poets’ sagas and skaldic verse, and has translated many saga texts into English.

Summary

From the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, Icelanders were a responsible for a vast output of literature, extending well beyond the Sagas of Icelanders for which they are most well-known. These varied widely in style and subject, composed in different contexts by different members of society for differing purposes. Time and space formed central thematic and structural pillars in many of these texts as they explored the profound effects wrought on their society over time and reconciled their peripheral position in relation to the world’s perceived Mediterranean centre.

How did these medieval Icelandic authors understand time and space? How did they portray, employ, and manipulate these concepts in order to craft their narratives? By bringing together genre-spanning articles from a broad range of Norse scholars, this collection offers a comprehensive treatment of these questions. Exploring genres ranging from the Sagas of Icelanders to hagiography and from Eddic poetry to ecclesiastical history, the contributions gathered here apply varied theoretical frameworks, digital methodologies, and episodic analyses to draw new conclusions and shed new light on this intriguing corpus.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction
Emily Lethbridge, Ben Allport, and Alison Finlay

Living on the Edge: Mikhail Bakhtin's Chronotope and the Sagas of Icelanders
Siân Grønlie

Limen to Maturity: The Wild Forest of Romance in Icelandic Sagas
Védís Ragnheiðardóttir

The Immanent Saga of Places and Place-names
Jack Threlfall Hartley

The Dawn of the Christian Age and its Contexts in the Versions of Færeyinga saga
Andreas Schmidt

Human, All Too Human: Space, Time, and Beyond in Benedicts Saga
Mauro Camiz

Narrative Strategies in the Old Norse Versions of the St Sunniva Legend
Alessia Bauer

The Original Angst: Marvels and the Annihilation of Time and Hunger in Medieval Icelandic Literature
Andrea Maraschi

Hvamm-Sturla Reweaves his Web: How Saga Networks Change over Time
Richard Gaskins

Character Introductions: Positioning Personality in Time and Space
Joanne Shortt Butler

Timing/Taming Grettir’s Temper: A Distributed Reading
Slavica and Miloš Ranković

Living on Borrowed Time: The Spatiotemporal Aesthetic of the Outlaw Saga
Sarah Harlan-Haughey

The Space of Narration in Völuspá and its Implications on Time and Space
Lukas Rösli

Time, Space, and Narrative Patterning in Martinus saga byskups
Rory McTurk

Chronological Structure of Íslendingabók and its Legacy
Ben Allport