15
about, we may be taking them more seriously
than they ever took themselves – even if, in
taking such an overly serious approach, we
follow a path well-trodden in current landscape
writing.
8
To conclude by returning to the topic of
landscape proper, the importance that the lessons
drawn from the Dwarf-Stone tale have for saga
scholarship is also illustrated by the
Þórssteinn
[‘Stone of Thor’] and the scholarly discussion
associated with it.
Eyrbyggja saga (ch. 10) and
Landnámabók (ch. S85=H73) locate
this stone
on the assembly site on the Þórsnes peninsula,
claiming that human sacrifice was performed
on it.
Eyrbyggja saga (ch. 10) furthermore
adds the detail that the stains left by the blood
of the sacrificial victims can still be seen on the
stone. Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson, again, takes
this to be a historically reliable tradition (2005:
500–501; 1999: 150–152, 194). Yet what we
are dealing with here rather
seems to be a case
that is – at least within the frame of medieval
saga literature – uniquely similar to the case of
the Dwarf-Stone by the Seyðisfjörður. On the
home-field of the farm Þingvellir [‘Assembly
Site’], to this day there lies a prominent
boulder – a boulder that already W.G.
Collingwood and Jón Stefánsson noted was
coloured by inclusions of iron, giving it the
look of a boulder spattered with blood (1899:
95–96 with Fig. 82 = Figure 4 above).
Collingwood and Jón Stefánsson may have
been the first modern writers to suggest that
this stone and its colouring “may have been
what the saga-man saw” (1899: 95); just as in
the case of the Seyðisfjörður folk tale, this
detail of
Eyrbyggja saga also seems to have
been directly developed out of (rather than
being inscribed into) the landscape. Yet
Collingwood and Jón Stefánsson were by no
means the last scholars to note this correlation;
rather, this correlation has long since become
something of a topos of scholarship (cf. e.g.
Böldl 2005: 213; Egeler 2015a: 83–84;
Lethbridge, n.d.). What is crucial to note,
however, and what is brought to the fore by the
case of the Dwarf-Stone, is that this correlation
is not a one-off occurrence, as it has been
treated in scholarship to date. We are not
dealing with an individual case here, but with
a pattern: landscape and storytelling stand in a
close dialogue with each other, sometimes so
close that storytellers simply seem to have
taken down their landscape’s dictations in
order to create an artistic interweaving
between a literary plot and its real-world
setting. We see this happening most clearly in
the case of the Dwarf-Stone, but that it also
appears in
Eyrbyggja saga with almost the
same clarity indicates that this is a pattern
Fig. 4. A topos of saga scholarship which provides an exact parallel to the Seyðisfjörður folk tale of the
Dwarf-Stone is the blood-spattered ‘Stone of Thor’ of Eyrbyggja saga
in the home-field of Þingvellir farm
on Þórsnes. (Reproduced from Collingwood & Jón Stefánsson 1899: 96, Figure 82.)