Paranormal Encounters in Iceland 1150–1400

Ármann Jakobsson, Miriam Mayburd

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501513619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe médiévale

This anthology of international scholarship offers new critical approaches to the study of the many manifestations of the paranormal in the Middle Ages. The guiding principle of the collection is to depart from symbolic or reductionist readings of the subject matter in favor of focusing on the paranormal as human experience and, essentially, on how these experiences are defined by the sources. The authors work with a variety of medieval Icelandic textual sources, including family sagas, legendary sagas, romances, poetry, hagiography and miracles, exploring the diversity of paranormal activity in the medieval North. This volume questions all previous definitions of the subject matter, most decisively the idea of saga realism, and opens up new avenues in saga research.

Part I: Experiencing the Paranormal

“I See Dead People”: The Externalization of Paranormal Experience in Medieval Iceland

Ármann Jakobsson

Abstract

Every paranormal encounter involves at least two people: the human whose experience is being narrated and an intended listener. A third figure could be the paranormal entity sighted in the encounter, but in this study it is suggested that the impulse to direct attention towards what the humans see during a paranormal encounter should be resisted. An example from Njáls saga is used to suggest a new focus.

Troll Space and the Realistic Reader

Every paranormal encounter ever recounted involves at least two people: the human whose experience is narrated and an intended listener who needs to be told about the encounter. A third figure could be the paranormal entity sighted in the encounter. The scholarly impulse throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been to accept the artistic illusion of these narratives and to direct attention towards what humans see during a paranormal encounter. One result of this approach is that the scholarly organization of the material is based on a relatively zoological taxonomy of paranormal beings such as we see in the great folktale collections of Iceland—and elsewhere—that were published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹ In Iceland, children born in the latter part of the twentieth century learned to think of folktales as tröllasögur (troll stories) and draugasögur (ghost stories); the paranormal apparitions figure strongly in this definition, and the human observers take second place, so humble as to often fade into invisibility.²

Confronted with this tradition, it becomes tempting to ask: what happens if the paranormal figures seen by humans are ignored, and the scholarly gaze is instead directed towards the humans themselves? Thus the focus shifts onto the people who have paranormal experiences, the question becoming not what they see, but how and why. Departing from the traditional scholarly tendency to accept the externalization of danger in paranormal figures also involves a stronger acceptance of the unreality of the paranormal. Paranormal beings are not real, so why should our gaze be directed towards them and away from those humans whose experiences include these phenomena?

And yet, by not treating paranormal figures as a part of the natural fauna of the world and thus moving the focus from the external to the internal, the unreal paradoxically becomes real again. Instead of unreal paranormal apparitions external to humanity, our subject is an internal experience that must be examined as real in the mind of the witnesses and, presumably, of the narrators. Thus internalized, each paranormal figure becomes a perichoretic part of the human consciousness, becomes integral to humanity. Each elf and troll, so categorically alien, is in reality an essential part of us—residing within us like a glamorous or menacing double, or an uncanny ancestral core.³

It might at first be tempting to locate the space of the trolls somewhere in the landscape or geography of the natural world, for example in mountains or caves, of which there is no shortage in Iceland. This would mean that we have accepted that externalization is used in traditional narrative to deal with the recesses of the mind.⁴ Another approach is to locate this space within the human consciousness as an expanse of danger, as an existential crisis that can be externalized in the form of monsters but is essentially internal. Troll space exists within the human witness, and indeed within the narrative’s entire audience. The troll they see, whatever its origins, is as such an enemy within their own psyche. Troll space is a psychological rather than a geographic entity—and as a consequence studying the trolls certainly does not entail leaving humanity behind. The quest for troll space is unusual in that it is apparent from the beginning that its boundaries must remain essentially elusive. Thus, troll space is real. However, it is not independent of human consciousness. Man and troll are inextricably intertwined. Like the Holy Trinity, they are the same and yet altogether different entities.

The realization that troll narratives are existential narratives only leads to a brief ‘eureka moment’ since, on closer inspection, all narratives are, albeit with varying subtlety, existential in that their primary function is to ‘make men,’ as Davíð Erlingsson has phrased it; in fact, this general and metaphorical aspect of narrative has always been fundamental to the structuralist study of literature.⁵ However, this existential approach may have a transformative effect on the study of troll narratives within the field of Old Norse studies, which has tended to highlight the specific with the consequence that the general is often dismissed as trivial or superfluous. The notion that troll narratives are mainly concerned with the human condition need not be a dramatic discovery, yet it provides troll studies with an important critical stance that will be further utilized in this study.

The sagas’ realism has often been highlighted by saga scholarship. While it is true that the sagas are realistic, especially in their fairly direct relevance to the realities of their medieval audience, the trope of realism has two inherent dangers: one is the constant use of the term realism defined according to modern scientific notions of the real, and the other is a negation of the symbolic value of the fantastic that may be damaging to saga interpretation.⁶

A case that comes to mind is the Fóstbrœðra saga, a biography of the two early eleventh-century blood brothers and poets Þorgeirr and Þormóðr. The modern reader’s instinct would be to treat these figures like actual flesh-and-blood humans, but that method leaves them strangely elusive. It seems more fruitful to think of them in terms of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in that the contrasting characters of the two men essentially make sense only if the audience thinks of them as one composite personality, the extremes of which are externalized in the form of two separate characters. This realistic impulse is, of course, not as potent when it comes to paranormal entities, and yet it is far from absent—however unreal they are perceived to be, the tendency to see paranormal entities as a part of the world’s fauna is still marked.

Reading through a realistic prism does not do all narratives justice. In saga studies, this approach has led to a disregard for paranormal events; indeed, they often fall outside the scope of a realistic interpretation. Of course it is natural to admire the subtle realism, for example, of the legal intricacies of Njáls saga and their close links with the emotions of the characters, which are all vividly portrayed.⁷ An interpretation of these matters will often exclude all paranormal events in the saga by simply failing to mention them. And yet Njáls saga is full of paranormal events, and the artistry of the paranormal passages in this narrative are no less than what we see in those parts of the saga that are more easily framed as realistic by a modern audience. I will use this saga as an example of how paranormal encounters are represented in medieval Iceland.

A Teenager Sees a Witch-Ride

Shortly before the climactic burning of Bergþórshváll in Njáls saga, Hildiglúmr Runólfsson walks out of his home in Reykir at Skeiðar on a Sunday.⁸ It is never stated in the narrative how old he is, but—given both the complexity of his later testimony and the fact that he seems to be able to journey between farmsteads on his own, contrasted with his apparent dependency on his father—it is hard to imagine him either as a young child or as a fully-grown adult. It may be safest to envision him as between the years of twelve and eighteen. Hildiglúmr has no function in the narrative of the saga except to witness what he sees on that particular Sunday.

His vision is related as follows:

Hann heyrði brest mikinn, ok þótti honum skjálfa bæði jǫrð ok himinn. Síðan leit hann í vestrættina, ok þóttisk hann sjá hring ok eldslit á ok í hringinum mann á grám hesti. Hann bar skjótt yfir, ok fór hann hart; hann hafði loganda brand í hendi. Hann reið svá nær honum, at hann mátti gǫrla sjá hann; honum sýndisk hann svartr sem bik ok heyrði, at hann kvað vísu með mikilli raust:

Ek ríð hesti,

hélugbarða,

úri...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Paranormal Encounter
• Part I: Experiencing the Paranormal
• Part II: Figures of the Paranormal
• Part III: Literature and the Paranormal
• Index