The Weather in the Icelandic Sagas: The enemy without by Bernadine Mc-Creesh (review)

In recent years, scholars applying eco-critical theory to medieval literature have shown how analysing portrayals of the natural world can illuminate our understanding of the cultures and environments in which the works under scrutiny were produced. Medieval Icelandic studies has lagged behind other medieval disciplines and though important work has been published, contributions to scholarship hitherto have almost entirely taken the form of book chapters or journal articles (e.g., Carl Phelpstead's seminal 2014 article on ecocriticism and Eyrbyggja saga). Bernadine McCreesh's new monograph, The Weather in the Icelandic Sagas: The Enemy Without, is therefore a welcome contribution to this emerging field. Her subject-matter—the presentation and function of weather and weather-related events in the sagas—has been touched on before but not at length. Together with a book by Christopher Abram (Evergreen Ash: Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature, 2019), the publication of The Weather in the Icelandic Sagas marks an important milestone for the study of the natural world and human engagement with it as presented in the medieval Icelandic textual corpus.

McCreesh has combed a wide range of works for references to weather "in its broadest sense" that encompass "not only weather and climate" but also "the consequences of meteorological events, such as floods and landslides," as well as volcanic eruptions and celestial phenomena (pp. 2–3). Her study is divided into two sections. The first section is entitled "Historical and Anthropological Approaches to the Weather" and opens with a short introduction that presents summary information about historical climatology and the evidence for warming and cooling trends in the North Atlantic area in the ninth to fifteenth centuries (chapter 1, "The Meteorological and Historical Background"). Analysis of works often assumed to have more reliable "historical" source value dominates initially, with chapter 2 ("The Weather in Historical Writing") and chapter 3 ("The Weather in the Bishops' Sagas") considering, respectively, weather-related material in Landnámabók, Icelandic annals, and Sturlunga saga on the one hand, and in biskupasögur on the other. The focus in this first section is then broadened to include Íslendingasögur and other works which are discussed in chapters 4 ("The Weather as a Vehicle for Christian Teaching"), 5 ("Anachronistic Weather"), 6 ("Pagan Gods and the Weather"), and 7 ("Witches and the Weather"). Particularly in the latter half of this first section, McCreesh usefully reminds us of the central role that religious belief played in shaping the world-view of those who produced and consumed the written works under consideration. She asserts early on that Christianity influenced medieval Icelanders' ideas about the weather directly (e.g., p. 22, pp. 24–25) and, concomitantly, their presentation of it in narrative texts, and she argues that authors of biskupasögur and also, in some cases, Íslendingasögur, used the weather to underline religious or ideological viewpoints or agendas.

In the book's second section, "Literary Approaches to the Weather," Íslendingasögur constitute the primary source material though examples drawn from this genre are supplemented with material from Sturlunga saga and Guðmundar saga Arasonar. The overall aim of this section is to illustrate how different types of weather are used to different narrative ends by different authors. Chapter 8 ("The Weather as a Literary Device") introduces the idea and contains a cursory (and patchy) overview of previous scholarship on the subject. Other chapters discuss the narrative functions of stormy weather (chapter 9, "Describing Stormy Weather"), of fine summer weather—which can be more dangerous than winter weather as far as personal safety of characters is concerned (chapter 10, "The Weather as Antagonist"), and how weather is used to highlight the protagonists' heroism or foolhardiness (chapter 11, "Heroes and the Weather"). Weather is also used by some saga authors as a means of structuring narratives: McCreesh argues persuasively in chapter 12 ("The Weather as a Structural Device...