Burial Practices as Sites of Cultural Memory in the Íslendingasögur

Abstract

This paper is based on an investigation of references to and descriptions of burials in all forty of the Íslendingasögur. The sheer number of burials mentioned in these sagas makes them an enlightening example of how their authors/compilers remembered their ancestors in writing. They are shown as taking place along a timeline that extends from ‘pagan’ (pre-950) to early Christian (post-1000). The adoption of Christianity in the year 1000 is perceived as a point of rupture, possibly one involving considerable trauma, in social praxis. The descriptions of burials become key reference points in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelandic cultural memory of this distant past. In their textual instantiation, these descriptions can be regarded as ‘sites of memory’ just as surely as the physical burial mounds and graves themselves.