Tag: Geography in the Middle Ages

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A Layered Landscape: How the Family Sagas Mapped Medieval Iceland

In this paper I discuss three ways in which the family sagas inscribed cognitive maps over Iceland: firstly, sagas explain how places received their names through the people who lived and acted there; secondly, saga narratives traversing the named landscape act to imprint it further with human meaning; and finally, Íslendingasögur refer us to physical evidence of saga action in the landscape, asserting it can ‘still be seen today’.