Off the Map: Modes of Spatial Representations in the Indigenous Icelandic riddarasögur

Until relatively recent times, the late medieval Icelandic romances, or frumsamdar riddarasögur (indigenous riddarasögur) have been considered to be of little critical value. Some of the defining features of the genre, such as exotic settings, supernatural beings, and unrealistic plots have prevented a full understanding of the texts as important expressions of their time. The success that the riddarasögur enjoyed in the Late Middle Ages and their abundant use of foreign narrative modes have often been associated with the Icelanders’ need to retreat into escapism and fantasy after the loss of political independence between 1262 and 1264. In the past decades, however, new critical perspectives have encouraged a positive re-evaluation of the genre. This project intends to contribute to the valorisation of the riddarasögur by investigating the modes of representation of fictional space in the earliest extant romances dating back to the fourteenth century. Foreign inspirations and entertainment are only two sides of Icelandic romances, which are in fact much more complex literary products and witnesses to the Icelanders’ continuous commitment to the business of storytelling. A focus on the medieval sources will facilitate the analysis of the historical background in which the riddarasögur were produced as well as the formulation of hypotheses about their function in their parent culture. The fundamental premise of the thesis is that learned Icelanders actively contributed to the great material and cultural exchanges that characterised late medieval Europe despite the political disappointments of the late thirteenth century. The centrality of travels and world descriptions in the texts has encouraged my methodological approach, which focuses firstly on the question of whether Western Europe shared a logic, a common pattern of conceiving and organising space as one of the most meaningful dimensions of the human experience. After addressing Henri Lefebvre’s general spatial theory, the basic parameters that guided the production and interpretation of space in medieval Christian Europe shall be defined on ideological grounds, especially through the works of St. Augustine. Then, the fictional space of three selected case studies (Sigurðar saga þögla, Ectors saga, and Nitida saga) will be investigated alongside their possible sources, both learned and popular, local and foreign. A careful analysis of the texts will confirm the adoption in Iceland of a paradigm of spatial thinking that was widespread in religious and highly learned environments, showing an interest of Icelandic intellectuals for complex and allegorical compositions only partially destined to the entertainment of the readers. In fact, the creative engagement of Icelandic authors with new literary trends will reveal their partaking in the ii vibrant cultural scenario of the Late Middle Ages thereby finally exorcising the ghost of literary divertissement.