The Horror of Vínland: Topographies and Otherness in the Vínland sagas

Grænlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða, the so-called Vínland sagas, relate the Norsemen’s encounters with a foreign geographical space around the year 1000. While early studies of the two sagas most often have had an interest in historical fact, in recent decades, research has increasingly investigated the literary characteristics and the cultural significance of the sagas at the time they were written, the thirteenth century, and beyond.¹ This article will deal with literary plotting of geographical space, and it will argue that the topographies in the Vínland sagas are tightly intertwined with the construction of Vínland as a place of otherness. The Vínland sagas are stories about exploring, that is, they deal with the leaving of familiar spaces and the quest for new opportunities in a distant location (Dubois 2017b, 412). They have been compared with medieval and early modern travel literature (e.g., Larrington 2004; Williamsen 2005), and it has been argued that the situation of traveling to and exploring unknown space generated ideas among the Norsemen about otherness and prompted the view that their own culture was intellectually and technologically superior (Frakes 2001). Inspired by, and expanding on, such arguments, this article will show how the Vínland sagas describe encounters with a foreign space and foreign people with a rhetoric that from a modern perspective can be recognized as colonial (see Spurr 1993). It appears that the sagas in question establish a structural dichotomy between civilized and uncivilized, and they are organized around tropes that bring with them a degradation of the other and an affirmation of self.

In relation to, and elaborating on, such a perspective this article will argue that the Vínland sagas share concerns with colonial literature and anticipate much later literary developments. More specifically, it will be suggested that (from a reader-reception, not a generic, perspective) Joseph Conrad’s influential 1899 novel Heart of Darkness offers a relevant literary context for coming to grips with the rhetoric and the convoluted relationship between topography and otherness in the Vínland sagas. Heart of Darkness is set in the era of European imperialism and is centered around the British merchant seafarer Charles Marlow’s story about his journey along a river into the unknown African landscape. The novel “has acquired the status of a modern myth addressing the nature of evil, in which [the] voyage upriver is fashioned . . . as a ‘night journey into the unconscious’” (Simmons 2015, 15, with reference to Guerard 1958). The comparison of the two sagas with Conrad’s novel home in on a few selected similarities among several differences. The historical-specific imperialist background of Conrad’s novel is obviously very different from the background of the medieval sagas, which deal with the family stories of Eiríkr rauði Þorvaldsson (also known as Eirikr the Red) and other individuals who explore new land-areas and travel beyond European frontiers. Also different are the narrative devices used in the medieval and the modern sources. The narrators and persons in Heart of Darkness elaborate their experiences in the foreign space at great length, disclosing their motivations and the implications of their (exploitative) colonial attitudes, whereas such actions are only laconically, if at all, reflected on in the sagas.²

Nevertheless, as I will show below, there are several similarities between the texts, and using Heart of Darkness as a literary context for reading the Vínland sagas will make it possible to see new dimensions of these medieval narratives, in particular how they transform, shape, and imbue geographical space with imagination and ideology. One obvious similarity between the two sagas in question and the novel from a much later point in literary history is their shared interest in unexplored areas. Conrad’s novel centers its focus on “blank spaces” in the world (Conrad 1994, 11), and the sagas deal with regions that are uninhabited (úbygðir) and seen as a desert (eyði-mörk).³ Moreover, the literary topographies of both the novel and the sagas reveal...