ABSTRACT
The Icelanders of the 13th and 14th centuries left an exceptionally rich archive of poetry, stories and chronicles which draw up a vivid picture of this distant island community which nevertheless remained in close contact with the rest of Medieval Europe. From 1220 to 1264 a civil war raged in the country with many traumatic events touching a considerable number of people. Close members of the same families were sometimes pitted against each other in what must sometimes seemed senseless violence, but fuelled by deep-rooted passions. The paper will explore this archive and show how this society dealt with the passions that tore it apart. It will focus especially on the different ways in which this violence and its effects were mediated in the different types of narratives from the period: historical, fictional and legendary. Poetry and its role in recovering from trauma will also be studied as well as the effects of trauma on the way the past is reconstructed through memory. Three stories will be at the centre of the presentation. The first is taken from the more or less fictional Egils saga and tells of the poet Egill’s recovery from the loss of his sons through the composition of an elegiac poem. The second is from the contemporary chronicle Sturlunga saga and is and the account of the burning down of the farm of Flugumýri and the resilience shown by survivor Gissur who lost his wife and three sons. Finally, the structure of the greatest of the family sagas, Njáls saga will be shown to have been shaped by ‘traumatic memory’ as will be demonstrated.
Torfi H. Tulinius