Kumlbúa þáttr, an Eschatological Event: The Traumatic Ontology of Being in Time in Medieval Iceland

Abstract

The summary of Kumlbúa þáttr runs nearly as short as its actual content. This brief thirteenth-century text presents an account of a man who removes a sword from a mound, is confronted in a dream by the sword's owner, and thereafter attempts to return the sword but fails due to his inability to find the mound again. Once part of the Vatnshyrna manuscript codex, a late fourteenth-century compilation of Íslendingasögur and Íslendingaþættir that perished in the great Copenhagen fire of 1728, the þáttr owes its textual transmission to the diligent efforts of Árni Magnússon, who made copies of its content.1Despite Kumlbúa þáttr's intriguing brevity and inconclusiveness, it remains largely neglected in saga scholarship, having only been explored at length in four studies to date.2 John Lindow has recently interpreted the ambiguous dream-apparition in the þáttr as the pagan past intruding and manifesting in the Christian present of the story's narrative time frame. His interpretation juxtaposes the past versus the present as linear opposites and assumes tension between the two as a point of departure. A reading like this, in effect, explains away the ambiguity of such scenes, to the point where their haunting eeriness somewhat loses its edge. If the pagan past intrudes into the Christian present, does it not then subvert the very notion of presumed linearity of time? Such intrusions only imply that the past is not limited to “the past” at all, and their lingering reverberations in the present blur boundaries of chronological divisions, suggesting the medieval experience of temporality to be fluctuating and more unstable than it appears from a modern perspective.This article offers a phenomenological reading of Kumlbúa þáttr, contending that its depiction of strange events triggered by its protagonist's haphazard interactions with the world around him offers auspicious grounds to investigate medieval experiences of situated temporality. By taking a closer look at how the text constructs, narrates, and performs the experience of temporality, I bring it into dialogue with continental medieval philosophical and theological discourses, not as a search for influences or borrowings but to demonstrate the liveliness and creativity of these cultural encounters in the medieval Icelandic milieu. Turning to the þáttr's (and, more broadly, Íslendingasögur's) performance of the experience of temporality, I argue that time was depicted not as a linear progression of events, but as discrete and non-linear emergences, manifestations, and glimpses. This view allows for a reconceptualization of paranormal experience in the sagas not as experience of beings or entities, but as traumatic and overwhelming events exceeding the capacity to be understood.The fluid concept of temporality in critical theoretical discourse has come to largely replace the static term “time,” underlining the latter as a historically negotiable construct rather than any kind of absolute unit. However, there remains a relative dearth of its applied usage in saga studies.3 As the dynamics of temporality are predicated upon subjective experience and historical consciousness, “self-knowledge was inextricably bound to the individual's relationship to time—past, present, future, and the hereafter,” as Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño recently observed in their effort to reopen the questions of medieval temporality and eternity to new revaluations. “To understand the human experience,” they go on, “involved understanding the flow of time and the ways in which this flow affected people,”4 underpinning the link between the two, as well as the value which the study of one provides for shedding light upon the other. The present inquiry is thus concerned not only with the temporal as premodern structuring of worldly processes, but with the elusive and problematic experience of subjectivity in medieval Icelandic ontological orientation: elusive for the terse reticence of medieval Icelandic texts, and problematic for the apparent inadequacies of modern critical theoretical apparatus in engaging such perishable and historically multidimensional concepts. It is posited that the critical theoretical apparatus presently employed in engaging these dynamics of temporality may itself serve as a case study in the dialogic entanglement between phenomenologically-grounded methodology and the medieval philosophical foundations from which it stems.A good starting point to broach these ontological questions is to begin with a central concept in medieval thought concerned with the nature of being and existence: that of natura. In early medieval discourse, the Latin word natura encompassed reality at large as conceivable by intellect, both physical and metaphysical, pertaining to generative potentiality inherent in all matter. John Scotus Eriugena's ninth-century Periphyseon, a vastly influential work of Neoplatonic theology centering around the concept of natura, opens with establishing it as “omnium quae sunt et quae non sunt ” (the totality of all things which are and which are not).5 Elucidating that “Nihil enim in uniuerso cogitatioibus nostris potest occurrere quod tali uocabulo ualeat carere” (nothing at all can come into our thought that would not fall under this term),6 he qualifies that Saepe mihi cogitanti diligentiusque quantum uires suppetunt inquirenti rerum omnium quae uel animo percipi possunt uel intentionem eius superant primam summamque diuisionen esse in ea quae sunt et in ea quae non sunt, horum omnium generale uocabulum occurrit quod graece ϕyςις, latine uero natura uocitatur.(As I frequently ponder and, so far as my talents allow, ever more carefully investigate the fact that first and fundamental division of all things which either can be grasped by the mind or lie beyond its grasp is into those that are and those that are not, there comes to mind the general term for them all is what in Greek called ϕyςις and in Latin natura.)7Natura thus emerges as a general term for reality at large, insofar as the human mind can experience it or imagine any of its potentialities. Eriugena approaches the category of being from the position of intelligibility: what falls under this category is everything that can be understood, imagined, or encompassed by human cognition. It is thus not an issue of what does or does not exist, but concerns only what is mentally comprehensible. Crucially, by situating the mind as a reference point in this definition, the term natura refers more precisely to a situated, perspectival reality of human experience, that which is accessible to the senses and mental faculties. We may find the same phenomenological idea of the limitation of human experience in Boethius: “omne enim quod cognoscitur non secundum sui uim sed secundum cognoscentium potius comprehenditur facultatem” (everything that is perceived is grasped not according to its own force but rather according to the capability of those who perceive).8As has been repeatedly pointed out, Eriugena's influence on medieval philosophical currents was considerable up to and through the twelfth century. His reception of Augustinian tradition as well as his own rearticulations in its transmission became authoritative for shaping the flow of subsequent speculative discourse.9 Augustine's earlier depiction of time in spatio-cognitive terms as distentio animi (extension of the mind) established the notion of temporality as relative to the situated perspective of the experiencing consciousness, as time appears to emerge through the very act of contemplating it.10 In its capacity as potentiality of all imaginable things, the concept of natura extends into the temporal dimension as well: the wholeness of time. The universe in this cosmological orientation was seen as a plenum: a wholeness without void, where all potentialities converged. Similarly, medieval typological readings of history and the natural world regarded natura “in and as the fullness of time,” in which past, present, and future were simultaneously encompassed.11Bearing in mind these conceptualizations of natura, particularly its radical difference and all-encompassing vastness in contrast to present colloquial usage of terms such as “nature” and “the natural,” it becomes possible to consider the Latin prefix super. Remarkably, no discrete category for “supernatural” existed in the early medieval period, pointing perhaps not so much to a lack of necessity for establishing it as to the very notion of such a discrete category being problematic. Instead, early medieval conceptualizations of what a modern reader might call supernatural phenomena were summed up in a formula employed by Augustine and Isidore of Seville in their discussions of miracles and portents: “non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura” (not contrary to nature, but contrary to what is understood about nature).12 As natura denoted all generative potential contained in imaginable reality at large, what extended beyond (super) reality was not any less real, but simply beyond the human experience of reality. It was not a dialectical either-or, but instead a matter of multidimensionality, to borrow conceptual imagery from theoretical physics which is not amiss in illustrating this cognitive dynamic. Just as the observable night sky forms a mere fraction of the incomprehensible vastness of the surrounding universe, the early medieval ontological orientation of natura builds up on the scale of nonanthropocentric magnitude. Postulating certain phenomena as beyond or above natura is a nonanthropocentric formulation that leaves open a discursive space for the unexplained, or as yet undiscovered, underpinning the finitude and limitation of human experience and comprehension concerning the workings of the world.It was only in the thirteenth century that a discrete adjectival term supernaturalis came into usage, made popular by Thomas Aquinas in his theory on miracles where he devised a hierarchy to rank them.13 To this day, some saga studies engaging the medieval concept of the supernatural still lean upon Thomistic scholastic categorizations of miracles and theological boundaries between what is and is not “supernatural,” as if representing an established doctrine for the medieval mentality as a whole.14 Yet the rich complexity, and indeed inconclusiveness, of medieval learned speculative discourses concerning being and reality is seldom problematized. Indeed, such concepts were far from uniform, and their interpretations far from stable. The intellectual landscape of Western Europe underwent changes and developments in the so-called twelfth-century Renaissance, attesting to the vibrancy and complexity of its ontological debates.15 It must be reemphasized that the medieval matter of portents, miracles, and wonders was not segregated to theological treatises and hagiographies but formed an integral part of medieval ontological orientations at large. Semantic associations between wonder and miracle are discernable throughout the medieval period.16 Scholastic categorizations of miracles thus emerge not as enforcing static delimitations on the boundaries of the real, but rather as themselves participating in this dynamic spectrum by seeking to articulate it in a diversity of structures and hierarchies.From early theological formulations concerned with the manifestation of miracles there developed a broader medieval aesthetic surrounding the unknown and the ineffable, extending into literature and art. Both learned and vernacular traditions sought to articulate reality's unknowability and the limits of human experience in ways and means accessible to them. As literacy and book culture flourished in medieval Iceland in the wake of its tenth-century conversion, so did its cultural contacts with Europe.17 The growth and development of medieval Icelandic saga literature unfolded in tandem with these cross-cultural mediations and textual exchanges. The sagas’ clerical context was not an obstacle but an aid in preserving and building upon medieval vernacular worldviews. The sagas’ narrative content of supranormal experiences may have provided additional draw for their scribes to collect them, as such content resonated with their ontological paradigms and aesthetics of the ambiguities that lurk in the interstices of human experience. Medieval mystery was not a matter to be solved and explained, but a profound wholeness of potentialities that could only be glimpsed in its very ineffability. “What is mysterious about mystery,” writes David Williams, “is its paradoxical relation to understanding,” of wanting to know yet wanting to preserve its unintelligibility, attraction to its enigma and simultaneous repulsion by its incomprehensible otherness.18Shifting the focus to the Vatnshyrna manuscript compilation from the late fourteenth century, it becomes possible for us to gauge the interests of its compilers by the content it featured. There was a pronounced preoccupation with dream visions, paranormal manifestations and apparitions, which evidenced curiosity about the more-than-human world surrounding saga protagonists. Vatnshyrna featured texts with abundant paranormal content, such as Eyrbyggja saga, Flóamanna saga, Kjalnesinga saga, and Bergbúa þáttr, as well as displaying pointed interest in dream-visions by its inclusion of Laxdæla saga, Stjörnu-Odda draumr, Þorsteinns draumr Síðu-Hallsonar, and Kumlbúa þáttr itself.19Vatnshyrna's sister manuscript, the so-called Pseudo-Vatnshyrna, which was compiled contemporaneously with the former in the late fourteenth century and parts of which survive, additionally contained Gísla saga and Barðar saga Snæfellsás alongside all the above-mentioned texts, further corroborating the compilers’ fixation on dream visions and supranormal occurrences.20 The contrasting inclusion of Landnámabók in the very same manuscript codex served to situate these sagas in a shared historical context, with their contents not perceived as any less real, and not any less historical, than the documented records of Iceland's settlement.21 The textual material commanding the attention of Vatnshyrna's and Pseudo-Vatnshyrna's manuscript compilers is abundantly supernatural in character. Supernatural, that is, according to this term's original, early medieval definition, which has less to do with doctrinal formulations of religious structures and more with a broader ontological orientation of experiencing reality, colored as it was by early medieval philosophical theology with its nonanthropocentric localization of human experience in a nonlinear ocean of historical spacetime.The idea of time as a plenum without void (bearing in mind that natura is also temporal), an everpresent infinitude in which past, present, and future are contained in simultaneity, gave rise in the early Middle Ages to concepts of astronomical time and eschatological time. The human being was regarded in medieval natural philosophy in relational terms vis-à-vis the world as a microcosm to the macrocosm, reflecting its fluctuations and stirrings.22 Just so, temporal events of any era were open to interpretation and allegorical readings in relational terms vis-à-vis the great historical epochs spanning from the world's creation to the apocalyptic threshold of eternity.23 No matter how mundane, this opened the door to any historical moment containing within it a nested potential of the whole. No matter how minute, any event could thus become a fragmented rupturing in the fabric of time, a phenomenon—literally, manifestation—yielding a limited glimpse of a greater historical meaning too vast to be seized in its entirety. The supernatural, in its original early medieval conceptualization, is thus inherently temporal. Its manifestation is not an “otherness” of being, but an excess of being as well as of meaning: an event exceeding the capacity to be understood.Conceptualization of temporality as nested layers on the microcosmic and macrocosmic scale—where history echoes the ages of the world—does not at all promise that future events may be predicted or calculated according to this model. In fact, it is quite the opposite: there was emphatically no guarantee as to any regularity or ordered patterning in the temporal layers of historical stages. Augustine cautions that human attempts at calculations will be thwarted,24 and Bede extrapolates that none of the great macro-epochs bears strict conformity to millenarian quantifications,25 leading Ælfric in the tenth century to remind his sermon audiences that “Seo geendung þyssere worulde cymð þonne men læst wenað” (the ending of this world will come when men least expect it).26 What this amounts to is that eschatological tensions never ceased to hover over medieval imaginations, and the much built-up apocalyptic crescendo toward the year 1000 proved but another plateau in an ever-escalating series of turbulences, crises, and catastrophes.27 This ever-present plenum of situated temporality spelled out that something world-shaking may erupt at any given moment, even if masked by innocuous circumstances. Medieval interest in, and indeed obsession with, portents, signs, and miracles attains a new layer of meaning in this context: it is symptomatic of watchful vigilance attuned to signals of what is to come, straining to catch potential ramifications of these unpredictable and chaotic historical eruptions. Each event, no matter how miniscule, thus becomes a limited glimpse of something far greater.Martin Heidegger engages this medieval ontological orientation of layered temporality in his reconceptualization of truth as a process of unfolding, portraying it not as an absolute given but as a dynamic state of continuous becoming.28 Retranslating the Greek word for truth, ἀ-λήθɛια, in its literal meaning as “uncovering,” he paints the interpretative act as a struggle for meaning: Truth (uncoveredness) is something that must always first be wrested from entities. Entities get snatched out of their hiddenness. The factical uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery. Is it accidental that when the Greeks express themselves as to the essence of truth, they use a privative expression – ἀ-λήθɛια?29This articulation implies that any claimed essence of truth remains inherently perspectival, for wresting truth from entities can only result in situated manifestations predicated upon their own disclosure. “Assertion is not the primary ‘locus’ of truth,” Heidegger goes on to note, “on the contrary . . . ‘truth’ is the ‘locus’ of assertion; it is the ontological condition for the possibility that assertions can be either true or false—that they may uncover or cover things up.”30 Like the proverbial cat in Erwin Schrödinger's thought experiment, truth is the metacognitive condition in which, just as the state of the cat as either alive or dead, it remains “zu gleichen Teilen gemischt oder verschmiert” (mixed or smeared in equal parts) until the moment of observation directs this fluctuating state toward one particular outcome, the interpretative act collapsing all other potentialities.31 In other words, reality is inherently greater than the sum of its observable parts, a formulation that remarkably echoes the above-considered medieval ontological paradigms of decentralizing human cognition as the sole locus of the real.32 Assertions are themselves perspectival, for they are grounded solely on what is accessible (uncoverable) at that moment in time; all truth is thus relative to the interpreter's situated temporal position.33It is the same dynamic that allowed medieval audiences to interpret and read a multiplicity of meanings into the same text or historical event, at no exclusion of other possibilities. A multiplicity of textual variants, etymological discrepancies, and the absence of standardized orthography in medieval texts resulted in an inexhaustible variance of interpretative possibilities. This polysemous aspect of medieval hermeneutics was not regarded as cause for epistemological crisis, but as invitation to participate in discovering new layers of resonances, appropriating found meaning as pertinent to the context that prompted the search, be it historical, social, or informed by other preoccupations. These interpretative modes were thus fitted to, and in large part governed by, contextual needs. A scene or event depicted in a saga may carry allegorical resonance for its medieval Icelandic audiences, and yet one allegorical reading poses no obstacle for the same text to contain multiple other, even contradictory, layers of significance for its medieval interpreters. Mikael Males points out that “a fragmented mode of reception” of texts was prevalent in medieval Iceland, and thus “no single model of interpretation should therefore necessarily be expected to account for the character of a work as a whole.” Insofar as secular vernacular literature is concerned, “a vague, allegorical double-mindedness may carry more explanatory force than stricter definitions of allegory.”34 Just as the supernatural content in Íslendingasögur and Íslendingaþættir may be read in light of lingering memories of the pagan past still haunting post-conversion audiences and thus still very much present among them,35 so too the same supernatural content may be read in light of eschatological anxieties pertaining to the encroaching future with its promise of turmoil and terrible upheavals. If the past-which-is-not-past is the pagan phantom of settlement-era Iceland, then the future-unfolding-in-the-now is the temporal monstrosity of Sturlungaöld in whose context many of these texts were composed. While both periods were characterized by social instabilities and threats of violence, it was the tumultuous thirteenth-century Age of the Sturlungs that catapulted Iceland into social collapse and full-on civil war.It may be asked, what prompted late-fourteenth-century compilers of Vatnshyrna and Pseudo-Vatnshyrna to make new arrangements of old sagas with strong supernatural content? Among various sociohistorical factors contributing to the period's tensions, the Black Plague was emerging on the European continent, sparing Iceland in the 1340s but hitting late, and hitting hard, at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, a catastrophe of terrifying magnitude wiping out more than half of Iceland's population. This is not meant to claim that fourteenth-century editorial decisions around those codices are somehow related to this. I raise it only as an observation that one era's atmosphere of looming crisis is bound to impact its own reception, and perception, of crisis narratives from a different era.It is now opportune to give Kumlbúa þáttr closer scrutiny in light of the above-posited observations. This þáttr was not always known by its current name. In fact, the title “Kumlbúa þáttr” is relatively new, appended only in 1860 by Guðbrandur Vígfússon in his first print edition of this text.36 In older manuscript variants, it was alternately known as Þáttr af Þorsteini Þorvarðssyni or, more colorfully, Draumr Þorsteins Þorvarðssonar, remarkably shifting the spotlight onto the human protagonist and his own subjective experience.37 The “dream” version of the title essentially ghosts the story's supernatural apparition by relegating it to mere ephemeral dream content, yet a detail like this is intriguing for the glimpse it yields of what may have commanded the attention of the þáttr's earlier audiences. A mere change of the label “on the cover” results in imaginal reconfiguration of the entire text, as each title reframes the narrative in a somewhat different light. What was once an account about Þorsteinn Þorvarðsson, or a tale drawing attention to his subjective experience, may turn into a mere ghost story by its titular advertisement of a mound-dweller who is never in fact depicted as dwelling in a mound.We may now turn to the clerical connections attested within Kumlbúa þáttr itself. Its main protagonist Þorsteinn is married to a sister of Þorfinn Þorgeirsson, the latter an abbot at the Augustinian (Benedictine) monastery at Helgafell from 1188 to 1216 and a direct descendant of Snorri Goði.38 This historical context puts the þáttr in closer proximity to Samtíðarsögur and well outside of the Íslendingasögur's chronological scope. Kumlbúa þáttr appears to have been grouped with the latter solely on the basis of its narrative dream content. Þorsteinn's verbal report of the happenings warranted enough interest to record and preserve his account. The family was, furthermore, closely related to the Sturlung clan, a detail which infuses the seemingly happenstance occurrences of the tale with another layer of significance: suddenly, this small story may be read as the zeitgeist of an entire epoch.A strange object manifests itself on the landscape—a sword, which Þorsteinn picks up and carries home. It is both an instrument of war and a status symbol of power, yet it is also something more. The exotic rarity of swords in medieval Iceland turns them into paranormal objects in their own right, infused as their stories often are with alleged supernatural craftsmanship.39 Old Norse poetry is rife with imagery of swords painted in portentous, eschatological terms, not least in the dream-stanzas inserted into the Sturlunga saga compilation.40 “Nú er in skarpa skálmöld komin” (now comes the sharp sword-age), proclaims a dream-apparition visiting the sleeping human protagonist on the brink of a looming battle.41 It almost comes to the point where the Sturlung-age violence may itself be collectively associated with a drawn, naked blade.42Let us now trace what happens to Þorsteinn throughout Kumlbúa þáttr and how these experiences affect him. John Lindow notes the seemingly extraneous details in the þáttr's opening lines as crucial for establishing Þorsteinn's mental state when the story begins. Þorsteinn was having an affair and cheating on his wife (who was related to the abbot, it may be remembered), and these happenings no doubt contribute to the narrative tension by illustrating Þorsteinn's distraction; his mind is preoccupied elsewhere, perhaps with pressure of guilt or anxiety of being discovered. On his walk home, his perception of the space around him is already colored by his subjective inner state: “En þá er Þorsteinn var í órum þessum, þá var þat eitt sinn, a hann gekk heim sið um aptan, ok bar þá fyrir hann sýn kynliga. Þá gekk hann í dalverpi lítit ok fann þar kuml manns. Þar þreifaði hann niðr fyrir fœtr sér ok fann þar í mannsbein ok sverð hjá. Þorsteinn tók sverðit ok hafði með sér ok ætlaði at koma þar til um morginnin”(And when Þorsteinn was in these troubles, there was one time when he went home late in the evening, and happened upon a strange sight. He went into a little valley and found there a human mound. Then he groped around under his feet and found human bones there and a sword. Þorsteinn took the sword and kept it with him, and intended to come [back] there in the morning.43The narrator's remark that the scene about to unfold is “sýn kynliga” (a strange or wondrous sight) is a rare subjective qualifier in the otherwise terse and impartial Íslendingasögur and Íslendingaþættir. It is plausible that this sense of bewilderment or perplexity colored the anecdote's oral report on which the recorded þáttr was based. Indeed, this anecdote may have well drawn clerical interest precisely due to being a supra-normal experience.44 That it was recorded in a clerical setting is suggested by the narrative allusion to, and familiarity with, canonical hours. Þorsteinn and his wife retire for the night after “náttsǫng um kveldit” (cantus nocturnus, or compline), leading John Lindow to posit the site of this þáttr's recording as the same Helgafell monastery where Þorsteinn's abbot kinsman was installed, as “it would seem likely that the canonical hours were better kept in monasteries than Icelandic farmhouses.”45In light of narrative content, it may be noted that the titular mound (kuml) is not a pristine burial structure such as those depicted in numerous mound-robbing saga scenes, but is more accurately an eroded grave whose contents lie exposed to the elements, blending with the surrounding landscape. As Þorsteinn stumbles upon this kuml, it is already a distressed and weathered site, showing ravages of time as skeletal remains protrude from the ground. What Þorsteinn sees before him is no static object, but a culmination of several centuries’ worth of dynamic processes, a veritable panorama of metamorphosis and decay. That this grave is from the pagan period may be inferred not only by its state of degradation but also by its location. It is not an unlikely scenario for a medieval Icelander to stumble upon an older grave site, for the þáttr's description conforms to archaeological data related to pagan burials in Iceland from the settlement period. The settlement-period burial patterns favored placements in the open landscape, not infrequently making use of natural topographic rises and mound-like formations.46 Interestingly, there is no indication as to whether the eroded grave's contents were exposed naturally or were already manually disturbed. Given Þorsteinn's discovery of this site on his way home, a certain degree of proximity to traversable terrain may be posited. Furthermore, the very fact of this grave's discovery points to the deceptive nature of the open Icelandic landscape, where any step may defy its presumed familiarity.47Þorsteinn's own haphazard archaeological excavation yields an artifact he appears to pick up almost absent-mindedly, carrying it home as one would a curiosity. As if cognizant of his ecological violation, he is deeply troubled in his sleep. He has a dream in which he sees the sword's owner, the titular Kumlbúi (mound-dweller), who appears to h