Dreamworlds, Storyworlds: Narrative Proliferation and the Case of Stjörnu-Odda draumr
2022-01-01

All texts, all narratives project storyworlds, and the medieval Icelandic sagas and þættir are no exception to this rule. This capacity of especially the Íslendingasögur—their worldbuilding—has often been invoked in scholarship, and references to a “world of the sagas” or “saga world” abound. Thus, we learn that this world is “overwhelmingly male dominated,” defined by “feuding and vengeance,” and “stratified by class, age, economic position, and gender”: in short, a world “in which individuals confront one another.”1 Moreover, this world has been tied to the idea of the immanent whole,2 with Emily Lethbridge writing that the Íslendingasögur are conceptualized not “as discrete entities but rather as flexible and often overlapping constituent parts of a bigger whole or narrative world, the immanent saga world.”3 Similarly, Gísli Sigurðsson and Joonas Ahola also engage with concepts of world in the context of the oral tradition underlying many (but not all) saga narratives.4 Ahola thus defines his use of “saga world” as “[t]he totality of the conceptions about the past regarding the aspects that were relevant to the production and interpretation of the saga literature, the ‘unspoken context’ for the saga texts.”5 This world, the narrative world of the Íslendingasögur, thus emerges as a somewhat vague set of attitudes, rules, and themes that informs both the construction and interpretation of a particular group of sagas.Similar issues arise in the scholarship on the fornaldarsögur that has tried to deal with their world(s). Influenced by the structuralist approaches of folkloristics, scholars assume that there is a more or less binary opposition between a “real,” “Scandinavian” world, “This World,” and a “magic” or “Other World.”6 However, this conceptualization of narrative worlds does not accord with narratological approaches to storyworlds—or indeed with those derived from scholarship of the worlds built by fantastic literatures. As we will see, one text can contain several worlds, but this tends to work through embedding and nesting, rather than the chronological or parallel sequencing of worlds.7 Moreover, sagas of all genres can employ portals between worlds, for example in travel episodes that require the passage of a liminal space (in fog, forests, storms at sea, and the like), and especially in the dream sequences discussed below.8 But the fornaldarsögur tend to undermine this perceived dichotomy, for example by featuring heroes who are associated with the “Other” themselves, as in the so-called Hrafnistumannasögur. A somewhat different approach was offered by Carl Phelpstead, who applied Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope to the fornaldarsögur, suggesting: A fornaldarsaga can be defined chronotopically as an Old Icelandic prose narrative set in the Viking or “northern” world and in a time that is not so much chronologically distant as qualitatively different from the present: not so much a saga of ancient times as a saga set in a different kind of time, a different world, in which adventures happen.9Phelpstead's approach, like those quoted above, again touches on the idea of a saga “world” but leaves it undefined, open, and vague.This vagueness is perhaps explained by the fact that, despite the ubiquity of references to “saga worlds,” few scholars have engaged with the theoretical concepts of possible, fictional, or secondary worlds advanced both by narratologists and scholars of the fantastic.10 Both Torfi Tulinius and Fulvio Ferrari draw on early work on possible and fictional worlds by Pavel, Eco, and Doležel to discuss the Íslendinga- and fornaldarsögur, respectively,11 but more recent approaches by scholars such as Marie-Laure Ryan, David Herman, and Mark Wolf have apparently not had much of an impact on saga scholarship. Ryan's observation that, “[i]n earlier days, ‘world’ was a totality of meanings associated with authors or with genres. Critics would speak of ‘the world of Proust’ or ‘the world of Kafka’ or even ‘the world of epic poetry’, meaning by this a distinctive set of values, themes, or objects of thought,”12 can thus also be applied to saga scholarship. However, Massimiliano Bampi recently called for research on the construction of saga worlds: a major task for future research in this field will be analyzing the semantics of the fictional worlds in the sagas along the lines drawn by recent studies. . . . The study of how various fictional worlds are constructed will also contribute towards defining a repertoire of primary and secondary features associated with saga genres.13The aims of this article are therefore twofold: first and foremost, the article's first section will offer a first foray into theories of possible, fictional, and secondary worlds. Here I develop an approach to such worlds that can then be applied to the storyworlds constructed, projected, or built by saga narratives.Secondly, and as a case study for the practical application of the theorical approach to storyworlds developed in the article's first part, I will suggest a new reading of Stjörnu-Odda draumr.14 This þáttr, commonly described as one of the so-called “dream þættir,”15 tells the story of Stjörnu-Oddi Helgason's strange dream, which operates on many levels and eventually transports him into a fornaldarsaga-like world. With its various nested narratives which, as we will see, partake of different narrative worlds, it presents a particularly poignant example of medieval Icelandic engagements with worldbuilding and world proliferation. As a late medieval narrative, it has perhaps been affected by the same biases that have also impacted scholarship on the “post-classical” Íslendingasögur, late fornaldarsögur, and indigenous riddarasögur.16 For this reason, the þáttr has only recently started to attract some critical attention, with four studies appearing within the last decade alone. O'Connor takes an expansive view and not only discusses the þáttr's potential fictionality, but also its narrative structure and literary and cultural context, and for this reason, I will occasionally draw on his arguments in the development of my own.17 Andrén tries to date the þáttr by connecting it to events in late medieval Gotland. This approach is problematic, however, as the setting of the fornaldarsaga within Stjörnu-Odda draumr—which O'Connor refers to as Dagfinns saga—is Gautland rather than the island of Gotland.18 Jonathan Hui traces legendary elements and innovations in this portion of the story.19 Finally, Elizabeth Ashman Rowe discusses the þáttr as a case study for the larger category, or genre, of þættir in medieval Icelandic literature.20 These studies, however, tend to perpetuate some of the same ideas that have plagued scholarship on other late medieval Icelandic narratives. Thus, both O'Connor and Rowe highlight the þáttr's “ironic stance” and its “satirical rather than serious” dreamworld, respectively.21 Both also consider it “escapist entertainment,”22 while Allard, in an earlier piece, goes so far as to call it “a self-conscious parody of many saga conventions.”23This kind of reading, in which modern scholars relegate narratives that do not fit into existing models of analysis and interpretation to the status of satires or parodies, is common with the kind of late medieval material Stjörnu-Odda draumr probably belongs to. Indeed, several of the late Íslendingasögur, among them Króka-Refs saga, Bárðar saga, and Hávarðar saga,24 have also been referred to as parodies or satires by previous critics, and since this predominantly affects sagas dated to the late medieval period, this assessment goes hand in hand with other pejorative readings of such “post-classical” material.25 However, it is quite unlikely that most of the literature written in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Iceland was supposed to be read as parodies, or as mere “escapist entertainment” without any deeper meaning26—especially if this attitude is contrasted with the dominant view of “classical” Íslendingasögur as profound literature containing insights into Icelandic attitudes towards both the settlement past and the medieval present. Thus, rather than reducing texts in an attempt to fit them into existing models, it is more productive to develop new models, new approaches, that may yield a better understanding of the complex literatures of medieval Iceland.In this study, I therefore propose a new theoretical approach for reading medieval Icelandic saga literature. For this reason, it is necessary to outline a theory of narrative worlds that draws on notions of narrative, ontological, and world proliferation, and which can be productively applied in this context. I will then suggest a reading of Stjörnu-Odda draumr based on this narratological approach, a reading which draws both on existing scholarship of the þáttr and comparative material drawn from the corpus of medieval Icelandic literature. Aiming to situate the þáttr in its larger narrative context, I discuss its characters, settings, paranormal elements, and the inclusion of poetry before turning to other sagas and þættir that share similar worldbuilding strategies. I conclude by suggesting that, rather than being a solitary island of fictionality in a sea of historiography, Stjörnu-Odda draumr instead constitutes the high point of medieval Icelandic engagement with the proliferation of worlds. Ultimately, this storyworlds-focused reading can allow us to come to a fuller understanding of the primary-world sociocultural context from which this þáttr derives its secondary-world concerns.Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir notes that “despite the illusion of social, historical, and topographical reality, the world of the Íslendingasögur is an imagined space.”27 However, since in the context of saga literature it is impossible to decide where oral tradition and cultural memory end and imagination sets in—even when talking about the fornaldarsögur which will be at the heart of the discussion below—the frequently employed terms “fictional world” or “imaginary world” are perhaps less appropriate.28 Instead, I propose to use the more neutral term “storyworld.” In the words of Marie-Laure Ryan, “storyworld is a broader concept than fictional world because it covers both factual and fictional stories, meaning stories told as true of the real world and stories that create their own imaginary world, respectively.”29 Using this term with reference to saga literature thus removes the contested element of invention from the discussion of the worlds the sagas create.Storyworlds may be defined as “totalities that encompass space, time, and individuated existents that undergo transformations as the result of events.”30 This means that storyworlds are dynamic and “undergo global changes.”31 Another approach is offered by the author Arkady Martine. Drawing on David Herman's narratological work, she writes: A “storyworld” can be defined as a possible world constructed by, not only the narrative on the page, but the cognitive results of the process of comprehending the story, cued by the author and experienced and completed by the reader. It is bigger than any one narrative. It is a sort of “mental model” of a universe, containing all of the events, persons, places, and interactions that make up the narrative, plus all of the possible events, persons, places, and interactions which might exist in a world where the narrative-as-perceived also exists. A storyworld is thus a co-created world between author and audience, bound by mutually held-in-common rules of causality and verisimilitude.32While access to possible worlds and storyworlds is granted through “semiotic channels” like speech, writing, or images,33 the worlds themselves thus exist outside of or away from these channels: “Stories are transmitted by texts, but, since they remain inscribed in our mind long after the signifiers have vanished from memory, their nature is much more mental than verbal.”34 The narrative artifacts then serve as mere “blueprints for the creation and modification of such mentally configured storyworlds.”35 Thus, storyworlds arise out of a dialogue between a narrative and its audience: they are experiential, both for the characters within the world who experience the changes it undergoes and for the audience whose experiences and prior knowledge help create and shape the world.36 In this context, the audience refers to any recipient who interacts with a story, regardless of their temporal proximity to or distance from it.In order for this dialogue to be possible, and thus for an audience to enter into what one might call the contract of worldbuilding, several conditions have to be fulfilled. Firstly, the audience has to become immersed in the world through a process that J.R.R. Tolkien, in his early study of worldbuilding in fantasy and fairytale, calls “secondary belief”:37What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken: the magic, or rather art, has failed.38Tolkien thus also stresses the cognitive side of worldbuilding and the mental dimension of worlds. In order for a world to be immersive, however—in order for it to generate secondary belief—a second condition has to be fulfilled.This relates to a storyworld's connection to and dependence on the primary world. Storyworlds, even fictional worlds, cannot simply be imagined in isolation, as free-floating entities that bear no resemblance to the primary world. In order for the audience's participation in worldbuilding to work, mental models on which the audience can draw in building an image of this world have to be available. These prior experiences and knowledge are then used in constructing the world. This means that storyworlds, even those of nonrealistic genres like fantasy or science fiction, draw on known models of the universe and import primary world data into the secondary world. This is what Tolkien refers to as “subcreation”: not creation ex nihilo, of which (in his perspective) only God is capable, but creation, worldbuilding, on the basis of knowledge derived from the primary world. According to Wolf, it is therefore “not surprising that secondary worlds will in many ways resemble the Primary World; not only because it is the source of material, but also because it is this familiarity that lets us relate to the secondary world, especially to its characters and their emotions.”39 The connection between storyworld and primary world also implies that “when a text mentions an object that exists in reality, all the real-world properties of this object can be imported into the storyworld unless explicitly contradicted by the text.”40 This refers both to objects and to historical people, whose biographical data is also imported into the storyworld. Such data import can strengthen the bond between the primary and secondary world. If this bond of familiarity, of relatability, cannot be formed, for example because the world is too alien or contradicts itself, the world will probably fail—the contract between narrative and audience on which the world's existence relies remains unfulfilled.41 In this context, “audience” refers to any recipient who interacts with a story, regardless of their temporal proximity to or distance from it, although some audiences might find immersion easier than others. The dependence of secondary worlds on the primary world in fact accounts for some of the problems modern readers might encounter when reading medieval texts, as they may lack important knowledge derived from the primary world which they require to access and become immersed in a storyworld. Reading medieval literature through the lens of storyworlds thus enables us to gain a new understanding of the sociocultural context from which medieval audiences approached the storyworlds projected by the literature they were familiar with—a context that binds a storyworld to the actual world. I will return to this observation in the conclusion.In narratological parlance, the bond(s) between the actual world and the possible worlds that surround it is referred to as “accessibility relations.”42 Ryan identifies nine accessibility relations based on, for example, shared objects, chronologies, natural laws, or linguistic properties that connect the actual world to any possible worlds, thus making the latter accessible to anyone who possesses the relevant knowledge of the actual world properties that are shared by the possible world.43 These accessibility relations thus act as a kind of anchor to prevent the secondary or storyworld from being the impossible, free-floating entity described above. Through this transuniverse anchor, audience involvement in worldbuilding is initiated—the mind has entered the world and secondary belief is possible. It is for this reason that I refer to this mechanism as anchoring, and the way it operates in a saga context will be demonstrated in the discussion of Stjörnu-Odda draumr below.The cognitive approach to the creation of storyworlds as something that relies on a dialogue between narrative and audience has two major consequences. Firstly, if worlds exist outside of or away from the semantic channels that project them, this allows for world–text and world–story relations that are not, as was long suggested, one world–one text–one story.44 Instead, since worlds are bigger than any one narrative, one world–many texts–many stories models are also possible, and these texts or stories can even extend across different media. Secondly, while human minds supply information drawn from their own experience in order to flesh out the storyworlds they encounter, there is one fundamental issue with these worlds: “A necessary consequence of the fact that fictional worlds are human constructs is their incompleteness. It would take a text of infinite length to construct a complete fictional world. Finite texts, the only texts that are of are bound to create thus contain and the audience can about them that cannot be However, such are not a of possible worlds, but a source of narrative and worldbuilding since worlds to be can and perhaps to be thus engagement with the us to the issue of proliferation, or the of the different ways in which worlds, texts, and stories can be Ryan of such narrative, ontological, and The first of narrative proliferation, a one world–many stories in which stories are told about the same world, so that from one story to does not require This makes it possible that can the image constructed previous to the same world and therefore at in the storyworld from the of new of this of world–story are not only the of but also the narratives for medieval Similarly, Ryan notes that narrative proliferation of the oral It is by of the same story or or by and stories about the same Thus, this kind of also accounts for the of sagas in their that these stories take in the same world because they common These common elements, such as settings, characters, objects, and events for can all serve to that this world is and this familiarity in secondary the world to be proliferation rather instead of a one world–many stories we find many worlds many within one It is by “a text that its readers into many other worlds than the primary fictional world, where the embedding story takes and the fact that we an embedding story for this of proliferation to work is particularly for the discussion of Stjörnu-Odda proliferation to have been especially in the like The The and The are all of this of world–text however, narrative that or nested stories told by their characters of this of worldbuilding, as narrative in constructs its own storyworld. As Ryan is . . . necessary to the world as it is and by a story from the world as it exists that the world as perceived to be from the primary this is true also of the stories told by characters within a larger storyworld. Moreover, the mental worlds of these characters with and shape the this world like a of and for this reason, even stories told by characters example about their project the most even by characters within a story can create worlds, in of proliferation, proliferation, may at first to from narrative proliferation, as both a world with many The as the may indeed of the fact that proliferation a one world–many texts while narrative proliferation tends to refer to the same or various of the same text in the case of oral tradition and proliferation has also been referred to as or more and it is by of fictional entities across different This is the of modern like or the In all different stories are told in different and so they all relate are set and shape the same larger narrative This is through one of new stories to the modification a different of the same and the story in a different is the one most frequently in the context of as it the only one that the of the makes use of the by a world's or parallel stories while the properties of the world in other Thus, of characters refer to the same the by the other texts are and the storyworld on the basis of the whole is of . . . characters the same the same since they the same of Such characters, but also settings, objects, or events, can then be used within the world to connect different stories in order to their within the same larger narrative they connect the different through by an of characters, events, and and it be that saga literature does Indeed, the many of a “saga world” that we are with a universe that texts, stories, and perhaps even World proliferation was therefore a medieval were to some or However, narratives like saga a late that of elements known from suggest that the of saga and worldbuilding be This also up for reading texts such as Stjörnu-Odda whose complex and engagement with worldbuilding and has scholars in the we assume that on a cognitive the creation of storyworlds relies on a contract between text and audience, and that this the proliferation of worlds across texts and stories, worldbuilding can perhaps be to The idea of fictionality, especially within medieval has a of attention, and a of the various lines of that have been would the of the However, most recent scholars to to the so-called of fictionality, which is demonstrated for in of as a of literary text which, although it may also events that were to have an of events that not have events that, although possible, not take and which, in the audience to be to what would be as to thus relies on the of fictionality by both the author and the audience of a is thus in concept relies on medieval theories of literary as into and that to models, and which only the of medieval literatures. have therefore their to what calls of these theories also their or the of any one of them to be a of fictionality, of or to the of medieval literary this fictionality emerges as a process that across and not a that is out of historical and it is therefore perhaps more conceptualized as a of rather than a this and idea of fictionality as an and much of fictionality as the invention of worlds which are in or for the and of These in that the by these texts or artifacts are predominantly and rather than historical or we thus also find a to the of the way in which the concept of is used to make of how by its to project fictional but a study is to can be applied to medieval Icelandic literatures. For it has been that in order for an audience to enter into this or of fictionality have to be present. The example of such a to be the and even of however, the how a similar contract be in the case of saga literature, in which such tend to be is on the basis of a understanding of fictionality that O'Connor approaches Stjörnu-Odda In his study, O'Connor the þáttr in its and context, and its complex and in especially on this he that draumr the dream to on, and the between narrative and This then results in the þáttr to the modern concept of than in medieval Icelandic Ultimately, he “This and a to the of a fictional saga without Stjörnu-Odda draumr is . . . a for first work of legendary For the þáttr is therefore an from the and he stresses this even in with other dream However, if one the notions of storyworlds and narrative and world proliferation to Stjörnu-Odda it can be that, rather than being an it is instead perhaps the most poignant example of a engagement with ideas the