thinkuhi
Icelandic Literary Landscapes and the Onomastic-semiotic gap: What Do You Do With Esja in Kjalnesinga Saga?
In Kjalnesinga saga, Esja looms large in both narrative and landscape, but the character Esja is not the same as the geographic Esja. The mountain range that dominates the Icelandic capital does not itself appear in the saga. This paper is concerned with the semantics of narrated medieval personal and place names. The reader has a range of choices for negotiating these names, but there is a clear semiotic gap between the name as it appears in the narrative, and the options available for interpreting such a name which seems to be embed the saga in the geography of today. How does a saga relate to the modern landscape, and what do we make of Esja, the wealthy Hebridean widow, when we take into account Esja, the mountain range? .
