Sending a Message to the Future: (Deep) Time Travel in and through Medieval Icelandic Literature

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to understand how medieval Icelandic authors may have considered the possibility of speaking to the future. In the absence of explicit statements to this effect, it does this by looking at representations of time travel — or chronodisplacement — within medieval Icelandic sagas. When something from the past abruptly appears in the narrative, the past is seen as communicating with its future. The examples looked at include undead mound-dwellers, long-lived wanderers and the Icelandic version of the Seven Sleepers. The frequent association of voices emerging from the past with the underland is considered, particularly in relation to Iceland’s geology. This is also linked to the possibility for medieval Icelanders to engage with deep time. The analysis reveals that Icelandic authors were interested in the dynamic of the past speaking to its future, but chose always to represent it within a past setting. Moreover, authors seem to have been aware that speaking to a future inevitably involves changes in media and the materiality of communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Old Norse
• sagas
• time travel
• deep time
• temporality

Literature, in the many cases where it presumes an author and a reader, can be seen as communication with the future.¹ Readers or listeners who perceive time as monodirectional find themselves posterior to the act of composition. And while authors may not always conceive of their works as speaking to the future, just as readers may not conceive of texts as irruptions from the past,² this temporal relation is frequently in place. Nevertheless, the idea of literature as communication with the future is perhaps underacknowledged due to the fact that much writing is understood as being written for the author’s contemporary audience.³ Although readers come after the appearance of the writing, they fit comfortably within a brief enough temporal horizon that they can be seen as part of the “now” of writing. That “now” has vague and indistinct boundaries, but as time passes and texts become more and more out of synch with the audience’s present, new modes of reading arise. One predominant mode of reading is to understand a work within its historical context.⁴ This mode of reception accepts that one is not contemporary with the moment of writing — however extensive that moment is considered to be — but must try to understand that moment in order to be able to connect with the work. The assumption remains, therefore, that the work was intended for contemporaries, and those who are not must attempt to inhabit a historical subject position.

It is not my intention to argue against the relevance of literature in a context contemporary with its composition, but in what follows I want to consider to what extent communication with the future may run parallel to, and exist alongside, such contemporaneous concerns. Thus, this article focuses squarely on moments where distinct temporal loci — pasts and their futures — come into contact with one another.⁵ I attend, here, to works from a specific context, namely medieval Iceland. Within that broad corpus one finds few explicit statements alluding to future readership, but there are nevertheless reasons, discussed below, why medieval Iceland is particularly interesting for a study of this type. In the general absence of such explicit statements, my approach involves an analysis of what I term “chronodisplacement” as represented within literary texts from the period. The representation of chronodisplacement is thus considered an implicit statement of authorial perspectives on how one speaks across temporal divides.

Chronodisplacement is what I refer to as the presence of an object, person or message (or an object or person as message) perceived to be outside of its / their normal temporal setting.⁶ What counts as “normal” is, of course, subjective, but just as contemporary time travel stories are based around bodies moving through time in a way that the narrative signals as non-orthodox, so too the scenes I examine here afford clues that foreground chronodisplacement as deviation from a normative being-in-time. After identifying these chronodisplaced figures, I also pay attention to the means by which such chronodisplacement is enacted. Typically, in modern science fiction, since H. G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine, chronodisplacement is the result of time travel propelled by some technological means or spatial phenomena (e.g. a wormhole). Medieval texts have their own ways of dealing with such matters, for example, through various devices which could be considered “time capsules,” that is, any environment within which a person or object can be placed in order to be temporarily outside of the narrative, only to subsequently resurface in a different temporal setting. Thus, it is my contention that if we can understand how medieval Icelandic authors diegetically pondered themes of chronodisplacement, time travel, and time, then we will have firmer ground upon which to move forward with analyses that see the works themselves as speaking, potentially, to their futures.

A subsidiary aim here is to consider to what extent medieval Icelandic writers display a deep time awareness when questions of chronodisplacement arise. “Deep time” is a concept that has been the subject of much discussion recently. John McPhee (1981) introduced the term less than half a century ago in connection with geological time, while Gregory Benford expanded its applicability in Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates across Millenia (2000). According to Benford, deep time awareness and deep time messages can be both intentional or accidental. When one buries a time capsule, one is intentionally leaving something to be interpreted by future generations. An ancient shipwreck discovered by divers, on the other hand, is a message of sorts from the ancient past, but it was not placed there on purpose with an intention lying behind the message. Intentional messages of necessity, by contrast, suggest a deep time awareness: they require one to think, at least in part, about how one speaks to future generations. Deep time can be loosely contrasted with historical time, but where the boundary between the two lies is not easy to determine. Nevertheless, modern ecocritical theory has emphasized the ethical imperative of moving beyond historical time thinking to a more conscious deep time perspective, and of authors and artists taking up “the challenge of giving sensuous representation of scales in space or time that greatly exceed immediate perception” (Clark 2019, 39). It is worth bearing in mind that different cultures at different historical moments have presumably had varying ideas about what constitutes “immediate perception,” and, consequently, they have also differed as to their understanding of the opposite, namely non-immediate deep time. The distinction, it would seem, may be socio-culturally determined.

We can infer the complexities and seeming contradictions of deep time from the introductory contemplations in Robert MacFarlane’s Underland. Here, MacFarlane discusses how “our ‘flat perspectives’ feel increasingly inadequate to the deep worlds we inhabit, and to the deep time legacies we are leaving” (2019, 13). This statement once again hints at the fact that deep time awareness is something which has become more relevant, more desirable, and more urgently necessary in the anthropocene present. There is a frequently-stated moral obligation to think in terms of deep time when the effects of human activity can have implications far beyond the scale of any individual lifetime. On the other hand, discussing stories of katabasis — that is, journeys to the underworld to commune with the dead, a different sort of communication between the past and the future — MacFarlane points to the example of the nearly-four thousand year old Epic of Gilgamesh as one of numerous “similar stories [which] recur throughout world myth” (2019, 16). In his discussion of paleolithic burials and monuments too, MacFarlane gives the impression that across the world and throughout human history the underland has been a place where people have gone to communicate across deep time, a sentiment echoed by Chadwick Allen, who discusses how indigenous art makes a feature of “ancestors and descendants … through the vehicle of the burial mounds” (2022, 263). Thus, we have an impulse which is both urgently modern and thoroughly primordial, transcending such oversimplified temporal binaries.

The corpus of work that I intend to examine has been described as “the Icelandic miracle” (Tulinius 2002, 9), which refers to the surprising volume of vernacular literature that appeared within a short period of time and from a land with relatively small population and low population density.⁷ Thus, Old Norse-Icelandic texts represent a wealth of source material that may facilitate an evaluation of whether deep time awareness existed on the borders of medieval Europe and, if so, whether the perception of deep time there was distinct from contemporary perceptions. In tracing the lines of development between different perceptions, might it be possible, then, to lay out a path for moving forward, a trajectory along which certain current limited outlooks, such as the inadequate flat perspectives mentioned by MacFarlane, might become more ample?

One of the immediate and inherent contradictions of the concept of deep time, further highlighted by MacFarlane’s linking of it to the underland, is its mixing of spatial and temporal metaphors. Such mixing, characteristic of discussions of space and time more generally, may not be the product of inadequate powers of description but, rather, a response to some awareness of ontological error in attempts to separate the two dimensions. Karen Barad, for example, claims that “[s]pace, time, and matter are intra-actively produced in the ongoing differential articulation of the world” (2007, 234), a process they call “spacetimemattering.” The concept of deep time was originally conceived, however, prior to Barad’s work and in connection with geological research and penetration of the past through analysis of buried geological strata. This conceptual association of physical and temporal layers is, therefore, another reason why medieval Iceland may be a particularly fruitful venue for considerations of deep time. While intentional messages for the future, in the form of burial monuments and suchlike, are pretty thin on the ground compared to many other places, the high level of geotectonic activity on the island means that the medieval inhabitants of Iceland would have had many opportunities to consider the incommensurability of lithic lifetimes with their own. Solid lava fields, coated in the moss and lichen of centuries, could have been compared with the magma spewed from newer volcanic vents and, thus, given rise to ruminations on vastly different temporal scales.⁸

In a thirteenth-century Icelandic work telling of the island’s conversion to Christianity, Kristni saga, one can get a sense of this possibility. At the Icelandic althing (general assembly) in the year 1000, Christians, it is said, were pushing for the adoption of their religion, when a man ran up and informed the people that there had been a volcanic eruption, which was about to engulf a homestead. The heathen party saw this as a divine message and exclaimed that “eigi er undr í at guðin reiðisk tǫlum slíkum” (It is no wonder that such talk [of conversion] has angered the gods; 2003, 33). In a witty rejoinder, Snorri goði (i.e. “the chieftain”), who represented the Christian party, said “um hvat reiddusk guðin þá er hér brann hraunit er nú stǫndu vér á?” (What were the gods mad about when the lava here which we are now standing on was burning?; 2003, 33). The molten lava of the new eruption is compared with the solid rock of the ancient lava field beneath their feet. To all present, whether believers in the old gods or not, an obvious answer would have been, “nothing done by human beings.” This is because Icelanders were keenly aware that their land had been, for the most part, uninhabited, a kind of “terra nullius” prior to the arrival of settlers from mainland Scandinavia and the British Isles (traditionally dated to around AD 870).⁹ Thus, the ancient lava field was simply incommensurate with human timeframes and, consequently, the new one should not be interpreted as a response to human actions either.

The example shows how some medieval Icelanders may have wanted to assimilate tectonic shifts and geological phenomena into an anthropocentric teleology, while others resisted such thinking. The former approach is comprehensible, as recognized in Timothy Clark’s comment concerning “how impossible it is to assimilate truly vast scales in space and time without the geological scale inevitably turning into some sort of cultural-political term or argument on the human scale” (2019, 46). Thus, we should not be surprised if geologically-inspired awareness of deep time reveals itself through more human-framed metaphors in medieval Icelandic literature.

In what follows, I draw upon examples from a curated selection of medieval Icelandic texts. I start by focusing on caves and gravemounds, in their role as time capsules, before moving on to a discussion of individuals with extended lifespans as conduits between the past and future. In the last of three sections, I discuss the renowned medieval tale of the Seven Sleepers before presenting some final conclusions. In all of the examples, I focus on points of contact between past and future, where information is shared in excess of the temporally-normative channels of communication presented in the works. Knowledge is gleaned beyond the limits of what is generally deemed possible, and, in the process, what the reader considers to be normative ways of being in time may ultimately shift.

Caves and Burial Mounds as Time Capsules

Let us start with the short tale Bergbúa þáttr (The Tale of the Rock-Dweller). This brief narrative appears to have been around at least since the fourteenth century and was among the contents of a medieval codex subsequently lost, although copies survived. It tells of a man named Þórðr living in the Westfjords of Iceland. On a Christian feast day, he and his manservant set out from home to visit the nearest church. Their journey goes badly, however, as foul weather makes them lose their way. Darkness falls and they find the entrance to a cave, previously unknown to them, where they can shelter. Þórðr marks a cross on the rockface at the entrance and the two men step inside, albeit staying close to the entrance and not daring to venture further in. During the night, they become aware of a being of some kind inhabiting the depths of the cave. We should keep in mind that it was rare for large mammals to be found in medieval Iceland, so, from the perspective of social realism, this is unlikely to be a bear or suchlike.¹⁰ The first sign of this creature is the noise of its moving around, but this is followed by the sight of two eyes “er þeim þótti því líkast sem væri tungl tvau full eðr törgur stórar” (which seemed to them like two full moons or large shields; 1991, 442).¹¹ Next, the two men hear a loud voice reciting a poem of twelve stanzas that tells of the cataclysmic traversal of a giant through the Icelandic wilderness. Many scribes and scholars have, on the basis of the mention of a Hallmundr in the first stanza, assumed this to be the speaker. Thus, the presumably older embedded poem is commonly called Hallmundarkviða (The Poem of Hallmundr). Fear of the risks outside in the dark prevents Þórðr and his manservant from fleeing the horror that lies deeper within. Petrified, they hear this same poem recited at three points throughout the night, but eventually the dawn comes and they make their escape. Their journey to the church is resumed but they have missed the festivities. On the return journey they pass by the spot where they believe the cave to be, but it is gone.

This short and straightforward, yet eerie, tale may seem to have little to do with chronodisplacement, consisting, instead, of humans encountering a supernatural being in Iceland’s wilderness. Trolls and bogeymen are frequent inhabitants of caves in many traditions. Ármann Jakobsson has written about this particular moment, observing that “[c]aves are also traditional settings for liminal encounters in medieval Iceland” (2017, 40). Bergbúa þáttr is, however, one of several tales in which a representative of Iceland’s Christian Middle Ages comes into contact with a supernatural being associated with its pre-Christian period. Consequently, Ármann Jakobsson has also noted the temporal frame of this work and that “paranormal activity tends to be closely identified with the pagan past in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century historiography of Iceland” (2017, 39). From his perspective, this is not just an encounter between the human and the non-human but between the pre-conversion past and the Christian present. This cross-temporal reading is strengthened by the cave-dweller’s poetic comment that, besides the various wonders listed, there will come to be known “á Snjógrundu undr, þats æ mun standa, annat” (another wonder in Iceland, which will last for all time; 1991, 445).¹² This passage has been read as a reference to the coming of Christianity.¹³ Since the visitors to the cave already inhabit a Christian Iceland, the cave-dweller’s use of the future tense implies that this mysterious figure inhabits a bygone temporal moment. In this light, when the cave-dweller instructs Þórðr and his companion to memorize his poem, Hallmundarkviða, we recognize this gesture as a message to the future. The poem becomes a relic embedded in the newer prose frame of Bergbúa þáttr, a relation which shows an isomorphism within the diegetic case of the cave-dweller’s ancient utterance being learnt and repeated in the voice of its future audience, Þórðr.

What, however, is the content of the message? On the most basic level it is a statement of presence: “I am here; the past is here; the pagan bedrock upon which Icelandic society was formed is still here.” But the contents of the poem also describe the rocky tumult resulting from the giant’s progression through the Icelandic landscape and, in doing so, gives a sense of temporal incommensurability. The very first lines make it clear that the giant is connected to geological processes: “Hrynr af heiða fenri; / hǫll taka bjǫrg at falla; / fátt mun at fornu setri / fríðs aldjǫtuns hríðar” (Crashing is caused by the wolf of the heaths [i.e. giant], precarious rocks begin to fall, few can pass freely in the ancient abode of the winds of the aged giant [i.e in the mountains]; 1991, 443). The craggy surface of Iceland appears as a turbulent and dynamic landscape, constantly changing as supernatural inhabitants trundle about. One interpretation of the poem views it as an extended description of a single volcanic event and associated phenomena.¹⁴ But one might also wonder whether the hectic rocks alluded to in the poem are rather an image of eon-long geological change (including various volcanic phenomena) as seen from the sped-up perspective of a rock-giant. The first verse establishes the great age of the “aldjǫtun” (“aged giant”) and the rock itself (the “fornu setri” or “ancient abode”). Perhaps the glowing eyes from within the cave experience time in synchronicity with the rocky landscape, more in tune with a deep time awareness. The mention of the giant’s stone boat, a seeming oxymoron, in the ninth verse of the poem also encourages the reader to identify with a very different frame of reference.¹⁵ After all, it is only on geological timescales that solid rocks shift and flow like a ship on the sea. Thus, the poem — stubbornly entoned three times by the cave-dweller — could be an attempt to impart this perspective to the unwitting human observers. If this is a message from the past to the future, perhaps the kernel is that the future listener should question their own narrow-minded temporal complacency. The sudden sealing and disappearance of the cave at the end of the prose tale seem to confirm this picture, showing how the elasticity of rock in the giant’s past (as presented in the poem) has the potential to intrude upon the Christian present.

While the cave in Bergbúa þáttr is one of several natural points of connection in medieval Icelandic literature to the past, gravemounds can in many ways be seen as the quintessential time-capsules within the Icelandic corpus. They are, in contrast to caves, manmade features of the landscape that create an artificial underland within which a different temporality applies. As Chadwick Allen explains, with regard to indigenous earthworks in what is today the southeastern United States, “in their role as structures for making connections across worlds and generations, mounds operate similarly to a computer interface in the sense that they enable communication between disparate structures” (2022, 322), an observation which seems equally relevant to the literary mounds from medieval Iceland wherein deceased individuals live on, down in the dark, instead of decomposing and blinking out of existence.

Many sagas include scenes in which heroes descend into gravemounds and encounter representatives of the pagan past, usually in an antagonistic situation, often returning with a prize in the form of a weapon. In Hrómundar saga Greipssonar, for example, the hero, Hrómundr, having sailed south to France, breaks into the gravemound of a viking named Þráinn.¹⁶ Þráinn should be dead, but, when the roof of the mound is breached, he is found sitting on a chair, blue and swollen.¹⁷ It is hard to know how long he has been there, but he claims to have lived for a long time in his mound. He also recalls his early life, which includes a string of duels, one of them with a king named Semingr. This may be the same Sæmingr mentioned as a son of Odin by Snorri Sturluson (1988, 6) in the prologue to his thirteenth-century Edda, the implication being that Þráinn was alive and kicking at the beginnings of Scandinavian prehistory. Hrómundr defeats, decapitates, and cremates Þráinn, emerging with loot, among which is the sword Mistelteinn (or Mistletoe, an allusion to a staple of Nordic mythology, namely the plant used through Loki’s machinations to kill the god Balder and set off a chain of events leading to Ragnarök, the fall of the gods). If the sword is an object out of time, a message of sorts, Þráinn also provides Hrómundr with another, more literal message before dying: it is not good to trust too much in fancy treasures. Þráinn’s words prove true — an accurate prophecy out of the past — as the sword Mistilteinn, subsequently, does not always serve Hrómundr well, slipping from his grasp in a battle upon a frozen lake and disappearing through a crack into the depths. The sword, said by one of his opponents to be too heavy for Hrómundr to handle, is loaded with the excess materiality of the past that prevents its being successfully wielded for long.

Yet another saga shows not just the point of discovery of burial goods but also the moment at which those goods are deposited in order that they may later be discovered. In showing both the initiation and the culmination of the communicative act that utilizes a gravemound as its medium, this saga lays out the grammar of such potentially deep time messages. The text in question is Göngu-Hrólfs saga (The Saga of Hrólfr the Walker), a legendary saga which was probably composed in the early-fourteenth century but remained extremely popular for many centuries thereafter.¹⁸ At the start of the saga, Hreggviðr, King of Garðaríki (i.e. approx. Russia), and his daughter Ingigerðr are introduced. Almost immediately, Hreggviðr’s kingdom is attacked and he dies in battle against the invaders, led by the evil raider Eiríkr. Once the dust has settled on the battlefield, Eiríkr visits Ingigerðr, who is distraught at her father’s defeat and death. Eiríkr, apparently charmed by the grieving princess, promises to grant her any wish and hopes to marry her. She seizes upon the opportunity and demands that a mound be built for her father and that:

haugrinn skal standa lángt burt í eyðimörk; bera skal gull ok góða gripi í hauginn hjá honum; hann skal vera í öllum sínum herklæðum, ok girðr sverði sínu. (1830, 246)

the mound shall stand far out in uninhabited tracts. Gold and treasures shall be placed in the mound alongside him. He will wear all his armour and his sword will be strapped to his side.

The princess also requests that she be given a moratorium of three years before being obliged to marry Eiríkr. Once per year she will be permitted to select a champion who will engage in a contest with Eiríkr’s own champion, and if Ingigerðr’s champion should be victorious, Eiríkr and all his men must abandon their claim to Garðaríki. Despite being on the losing side, Ingigerðr has made the most of Eiríkr’s tactical error and provided herself with a potential get-out clause.

Eiríkr, on the other hand, is rather dismayed at Ingigerðr’s demands, but he cannot renege on his promise. Yet Grímr Ægir, an evil sorcerer and Eiríkr’s right-hand man, has a plan to mitigate the damage. He proposes to cast a spell such that only the person wearing Hreggviðr’s armor shall be able to defeat Eiríkr’s champion. Since the armor will be securely ensconced within the mound, Grímr’s plan is quite simply that whatever goes in the ground shall never come out, but his plan also makes retrieval of the buried goods extremely desirable. Eiríkr accepts Grímr’s plan and puts it into effect, but Ingigerðr is the last person to exit the mound, secretly leaving two sets of armor with her dead father. Forever planning ahead, she has provided for the eventuality that someone will retrieve the armor only to be forced to hand it over to Eiríkr or Grímr. With two identical sets, the ersatz one can be relinquished while Ingigerðr’s enemies remain none the wiser.

After this sequence, the hero of the saga, Göngu-Hrólfr is introduced. He has many adventures, but, much later in the saga, he ends up in Russia on a quest to locate the mound. He braves many perils but eventually arrives there to find Hreggviðr waiting, as if on the doorstep of a house, to explain the whole situation to him (1830, 280). In addition, Hreggviðr gives Hrólfr both sets of armor: the true one, which he must use to defeat Eiríkr’s champion, and the identical, but magically-useless, one that Hrólfr must hand over to Eiríkr. Hrólfr follows the instructions and everything goes to plan. He eventually defeats the champion and escapes with Ingigerðr (only much later in the saga does Hrólfr return to Russia with an army and decisively put an end to Eiríkr and Grímr Ægir).

The gravemound in this episode is clearly not used for communication between far-distant generations: Ingigerðr is a young woman, seen as a potential match when the mound is made, and she remains so when Hrólfr retrieves the armor. The saga is vague about how much time passes in the interim, but it seems unlikely to be more than ten years. This is not a deep time message and the gravemound is not a time capsule used for sending objects that might speak to the distant future. But the process at work here functions over the few or several years between the mound’s building and its “plundering,” and this process could be imagined to work over longer timescales. Thus, it is the chronodisplacing mechanism itself, rather than its actual application, which is most interesting. And the process is quite simple: place an object in a gravemound and, in the future, someone will be able to retrieve it (perhaps at the very moment when they need it). This process is straightforward but not without complications, as it may be hard to distinguish an authentic message from the past (genuine armor) from an ersatz one (fake armor).

All three examples presented in this section show communication with the future from the subterranean past, each hinting at different considerations associated with such messages. The cave-dweller in Bergbúa þáttr’s view of geotectonic change could be read as presenting a temporal perspective that differs from that of the Christian men who enter the cave (and perhaps from that of the original audience of the tale, who might be expected to identify with the Christian characters’ subject-position). As such the tale acknowledges that there is no absolute temporality, an implication which can well be extracted from time-travel tales in general. When speaking to the future, it seems, one might need to contend with the fact that those in the future do not abide by the same temporal relations or share the same grasp of temporality.

On the other hand, both Þráinn in Hrómundar saga Greipssonar and Hreggviðr in Göngu-Hrólfs saga are not shown as experiencing time in a qualitatively different way from those who visit them in the mounds. These scenes, however, express anxiety about the objects and messages conveyed through time and the potential incommensurability of chronodisplaced, material-discursive phenomena. Þráinn’s sword invokes ideas of cursed grave goods,¹⁹ but instead of seeing this as merely connected to vengeful spirits or the undead, one might focus on a more practical aspect, such as that of altered material conditions over time. It is a commonplace of much medieval and early modern thought that ancient peoples were physically larger than people of later times: Þráinn’s sword, thus, ends up as a tool that cannot adequately serve its future owner. Likewise, the two sets of armor that come out of Hreggviðr’s grave suggest a duality in material-discursive messages from the past: some may be effective and others ineffective, but how can one be sure which is which when outwardly they are identical? The next section builds upon these examples by presenting further voices from the past which, while non-subterranean, evoke similar unease with regard to the messages they communicate.

Long-Lived Wanderers as Conduits to the Past

In Göngu-Hrólfs saga, Hreggviðr ends up being just as much part of the message as the goods within the gravemound. Several other such figures who convey messages beyond what is presented as a normal human lifespan exist within the corpus of medieval Icelandic literature. In some cases, they transmit information across the generational divide not because they communicate from beyond (or within) the grave but rather because they speak towards the end of their supernaturally-extended lives.²⁰

One example of such a figure is Starkaðr, a famed anti-hero from Old Norse Legend (who also appears in the Latin Gesta Danorum [c. 1200] by the Dane Saxo Grammaticus). Starkaðr is a principal character in a redaction of the thirteenth-century Gautreks saga (The Saga of Gautrek), in which he serves the pagan king Víkarr in pre-Christian Scandinavia. During his time as Víkarr’s retainer, Starkaðr is woken one night by his enigmatic foster-father and led out into the woods. It turns out that his foster-father is actually a disguised Odin, who then takes a seat amongst a panel of twelve deities determining fates. Thor bears a grudge against Starkaðr’s family and, therefore, predicts only bad things, the first of which is that Starkaðr will have no offspring or descendants. Odin responds: “Þat skapa ek honum, at hann skal lifa mannsaldra þrjá” (I ordain that he shall live three normal human lifetimes; 1830, 32). Odin and Thor continue to argue. Odin asserts that Starkaðr shall be a great poet but, in a counter-move, Thor declares that he shall not be able to remember any of his compositions. One can imagine how Starkaðr’s poems could have been seen as relics conveying information about an ancient pagan past (like the cave-dweller’s poem) because Starkaðr’s extended life allowed him to live on while subsequent generations were born. Thor’s curse hints at the fragility of such memory, however, and Gautreks saga performs its own amnesia, forgetting about Starkaðr and turning its focus elsewhere. The reader can only guess how his long life played out.²¹

For human lives perceived as existing in time,²² a life lived is a form of time travel. The individual is present in their past, their future, and everything in between. A long-lived individual is not qualitatively but, rather, quantitatively different, spread over a greater extension of time. Despite the existence of many different temporal orientations, most people’s embeddedness in time is so self-evident that it may seem counter-intuitive to equate that perspective with the kind of rupture to which discussion of time travel typically alludes. Literary descriptions of long-lived individuals can, however, use selective focus to emphasize the disjointedness between a character’s past and future in such a way that an aura of time travel, or chronodisplacement, is effected. Such is the case, for example, in the short narrative known as Norna-Gests þáttr (The Tale of Norna-Gestr), probably composed in the twelfth century but embedded in the Longer Ólafs saga Tryggvasonar hin mesta (compiled c. 1300). The tale takes place when King Ólafr Tryggvason (r. 995–9) is in Trondheim and a man named Gestr (literally, “guest” or “visitor”) arrives to ask for lodging. The king obliges but Ólafr does not speak with the visitor on the first night because he must hurry to evensong, his zeal affirming the Christian context of the narrative.²³

Gestr is a mystery. Later in the text, when he shows a wondrous golden ring to the court, the king asks him to explain how he came by it. Gestr recounts how he was with Sigurðr the Dragon-Slayer, a hero from the legendary past. He tells of their many adventures, including how Sigurðr gave him the ring when it fell from the harness of his horse. Gestr, further, recounts his time with the legendary sons of Ragnar loðbrók. These stories make it clear that Gestr is centuries old, and, eventually, he explains how his long life came to be. Three wandering prophetesses came to his parents’ house when he was born and made predictions for his life. The youngest of these women felt sidelined by the others and, in a fit of rage, declared that the child would only live as long as it took a specific candle to burn. The candle in question was immediately extinguished and its careful preservation meant that instead of being doomed to a short life, Gestr was granted one of marvelous duration. The story ends when Gestr agrees to be baptized, leaving behind his pagan past. He then lights the stub of the candle, letting it burn down such that he dies.

This tale creates a sense of rupture by contrasting the Christian court of Ólafr Tryggvason with the long-distant pagan past evoked in Gestr’s stories, in which Odin still walks the earth. There is a significant lacuna between these two temporal locations, such that it seems as if Gestr has gone directly from the one to the other while skipping the intervening centuries. Christianity had clearly been making inroads at the time of the narrative frame, but instead of Gestr being part of this burgeoning Christian world, he seems, instead, temporally displaced, his long-overdue baptism only coming right at the end of the story. The king perceives Gestr’s disjointed temporality: “eigi fær ek skilit til fulls um aldr þinn” (I can’t completely get my head around your age; 1829, 332). It seems that not just the surprising sum of years provokes confusion (Gestr finally clarifies the sum as three hundred), but also the lack of a smooth transition over that period. Additionally, his body fails to act as a somatic signifier of the passage of time: he is said to be “nokkut hníginn á efra aldr” (somewhat getting on in years; 1829, 314), perhaps a typical Old Norse use of litotes but ambiguous nevertheless.²⁴ Gestr, too, seems aware of the incongruity: he is reluctant to tell his story since “mun flestum þikkja ótrúligt” (most people will find it hard to believe; 1829, 320). As is the case for many a time-traveler in modern sci-fi novels and films, incredulity is the response Gestr expects. Consequently, in order to corroborate his story, Gestr is ready with a number of physical relics from the days of yore. First, he reveals the ring, but he also shows a lock of hair from the tail of Sigurðr’s horse, a pair of iron shoes worn down in the soles from a military expedition to Rome, and, finally, the stub of the candle itself, its absent wax acting as an inverse measuring rod of a life lived. These objects are chronodisplaced relics suddenly introduced into an unsuspecting present. Some of them — the shoes and the candle — also bear the awe-inspiring marks of the passage of time in their very materiality. Stories and utterances from the past are here accompanied by material objects, which age in a more tangible way but which may lead, nevertheless, to speculation as to how discursive phenomena also reveal their temporality.

Yet another example of a long-lived individual is Örvar-Oddr (Arrow-Oddr), the hero of an eponymous saga (Örvar-Odds saga, thirteenth-century). Oddr grows up at a farm named Berurjóðr on the coast of Norway. One day, a wandering prophetess arrives to tell people’s fortunes. She spots Oddr trying to avoid attention and, despite his opposition, proceeds to ordain his future. She claims to him, “þú skalt lifa ccc vetra ok fara land af landi … en aldri ferr þú svá víða, þá skaltu hér deyja á Berurjóðri” (you shall live three hundred years and travel from land to land … but never travel so far that that you will not die here at Berurjóðr; 1888, 14). She goes on to point out one of the horses on the farm, Faxi, who will be linked to Oddr’s demise.

The wandering woman who makes this prediction does not seem to possess power to extend Oddr’s lifetime; rather, she can merely see a long life is on the cards for him. No explanation is given for why this is the case within the narrative, but, from an authorial perspective, the reason is quite clear: Oddr’s extended life allows the authors and subsequent redactors and scribes to add an endless series of adventures, dispersed in time and place, to the life-story of a single character. It should then come as no surprise that Örvar-Odds saga is one of the longest narratives within its subgenre of legendary sagas (alongside its generic colleague, the previously-discussed Göngu-Hrólfs saga). At the very end of the saga, however, as predicted, Oddr returns to Berurjóðr in Norway, drawn by some irresistible desire. Faxi, the fateful horse, was killed by Oddr immediately after the prophesy was made and buried under large rocks and piles of sand, but the passage of time has laid bare what once was consigned to the underland:

Var þar nú hvervetna jǫrð blásin, er þá var vel blómgað … þá mælti Oddr: “þat ætla ek, at liðin sé ván, at spá sú muni fram koma, er vǫlvan arma spáði fyrir lǫngu, – en hvat liggr þarna, er þat … eigi hrosshaus?” “Já,” segja þeir, “ok er ákafliga fornligr ok mikill ok grár allr utan.” (1888, 192–94)

There was now earth which had been eroded by the wind everywhere, where at one time there had been abundant vegetation … Oddr said: “I guess that it is too late now for the prophecy which that wretched sibyl ordained for me so long ago to come true. But what’s that there?” said Oddr, “what’s lying there, isn’t it a horse’s skull?” “Yes,” they say, “and thoroughly ancient and bleached.”

Oddr steps forth and pokes the skull, startling a snake, which crawls out and bites him on the leg. The poison from the bite begins to take effect almost immediately, and Oddr sits down to compose a poem about his life while he awaits his imminent death. In this scene, we see the confirmation of the prophecy and, perhaps, an affirmation of a fatalistic worldview.

Taking the temporal aspects of this tableaux into account, however, the scene is jarring in that it pulls the reader out of the seemingly eternal present of Oddr’s string of escapades, what Bakhtin might have identified as the chronotope of adventure-time.²⁵ Throughout the saga, no mention is made of Oddr growing old, and there is little focus on the passing of time. But the laconic description of the eroded earth and the bleached horse skull, a sign that time and the elements have worn away the earth that once laid so heavily upon Faxi’s remains, forces a sudden awareness of disjuncture. A significant amount of time must have passed for these changes to have occurred: as Reinhard Hennig has pointed out, “erosion in the saga clearly fulfills the narrative function of making imaginable the immensely long time that has passed between Oddr’s youth and death” (2019, 333).²⁶ One recognizes that Oddr is thoroughly ancient and severed irreparably from the world in which he grew up. In this context, his placid resignation and the recitation of his life in poetic form seems to show an awareness of this. Visible signs of material degradation act as a reminder to Oddr of his origins in the past and as a spur to the production of his memorial utterance, transmitting that past to future audiences. Once again, as with Bergbúa þáttr and Hallmundarkviða, there is an isomorphism between the subject matter and the literary genetics of the prosimetrum frame: the poem itself is probably older than the prose saga and is, thus, an embedded relic (Leslie-Jacobsen 2019). This moment when the distant past comes into contact with the far future invokes literary creation, a sign that the author recognized the conceptual links between the two.

The Seven Sleepers in Iceland

Richard Cole comments that “[t]he landscapes of the north are haunted by several wanderers whose existence is marked by a supernatural longevity” (2015, 214). Several of these have been discussed in the previous section, but Cole also points out that “[t]his surplus of timeless flâneurs makes it hard to follow the northbound footprints of medieval Europe’s best-known pedestrian” (2015, 214), the Wandering Jew. Nevertheless, he suggests that “there do seem to be a few moments in Old Norse literature where Cartaphilus [i.e. the Wandering Jew] is anonymously merging with indigenous wanderer traditions” (2015, 219). Separating out local Icelandic traditions from those inspired by classical or continental works is a hazardous job and, moreover, unnecessary if one wishes to understand the conceptual universe available to medieval Icelanders. For those who could read, or who were read to, literature with local origins would have stimulated reflection just as much as literature of more exotic provenance. In identifying the traces of time travel in medieval Iceland, then, we would be remiss not to take into account another story with foreign roots, namely the Icelandic Tale of the Seven Sleepers or, as it is known in its earlier Latin forms, Septem dormientes. This work, which blends the idea of chronodisplaced humans and a subterranean capsule environment, has its origins far back in the fifth century, but it likely arrived to Iceland, along with other Christian literature, in the period after the conversion (c. AD 1000) and must have been translated, subsequently, into Old Norse. The tale was incredibly popular and widespread in medieval Europe, the most well-known version of which is the Latin text contained in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea.

In medieval Iceland, one of the earliest witnesses of the Seven Sleepers is a fragmentary version (lacking the ending) in a thirteenth-century manuscript. A full-length version also appears in the early-sixteenth century collection of saints lives known as Reykjahólabók.²⁷ Thus, we know that this story could have been familiar to Icelanders throughout the entirety of their literate Middle Ages.²⁸

The narrative’s action takes place in the past, when Decius was emperor and persecuted Christians (around AD 250). He comes to Ephesus and tortures and kills many Christians, so seven young men decide to leave the city and hide out in a cave in the mountains. When Decius finds out about them, he sends two men to seal up the cave. While these men obey the emperor’s orders, they also leave a chest with information about what has happened. The seven young men, however, have not noticed: they are asleep and God has decided to watch over them and extend their slumber in answer to their prayers. Three-hundred and seventy-two years pass and we find the Christian emperor Theodosius struggling with a heresy that denies the resurrection of the flesh. God chooses this moment to wake his sleeping beauties, who are none the wiser that any time has passed. After a local man, inspired by a dream of divine origin, unseals the cave, the seven (still) young men awake and send one of their number, Malcus, into Ephesus to buy food. In the city, Malcus is shocked to see crosses over the gates and to hear everyone speaking in respectable Christian terms. He confirms that he is actually in Ephesus, and he resumes his initial purpose to buy bread for his companions. When the coins he tries to use, imprinted with Decius’ head, arouse surprise and suspicion, he is taken before the judge and bishop of the town to explain where he got the money. He has no answer other than that he received the coins from his father and friends, but nobody knows any of the names mentioned. Eventually, he learns that Decius died long ago and he begins to realize what has happened. He invites the judge and bishop to accompany him to the cave, where they find the chest with its explanation of how these men were sealed up there during Decius’ persecutions. This evidence confirms Malcus’ story and, additionally, explains the locals’ confusion. The emperor Theodosius is invited, finally, to witness this miracle and the young men explain to him that they are proof from God of the resurrection of the flesh. With their story told, they lay down to sleep one final time and, having served their purpose, go to join God in heaven.

This story is a textbook case of premodern chronodisplacement with a deep-time perspective in which the sealed cave acts as a time capsule. Not only are the sleepers chronodisplaced, but so too are the material objects that serve as independent witnesses to their miracle. Both the coins and the chest, the latter containing the message inscribed upon a lead tablet, reveal a concern for independent confirmation of the primary message, namely the sleepers themselves. The emphasis on textual proof and written records is reaffirmed when local officials ask Malcus where he got the silver coins from. He gives the name of his father, to which the town judge replies that “þꜳ menn hefvr þv nv vp thalet hier fyrer oss. at eingen madr er so gamall at þa mvne. vtan at eins j vore kronika þar finn eg sodan manna nofn” (those men, whom you have just now named for us: nobody is so old that he remembers them, but only in our chronicle can I find men bearing such names; 1969, 207). Both the coins and the mention of the father are initially seen as proof that Malcus lies, but this same evidence subsequently confirms his story. The lead tablet seems to be an isolated example of a written text transported to the future for the eyes of generations to come, something which surely could have appealed to a medieval Icelandic writer.

While Bergbúa þáttr might be seen to reveal an interest in an alternative pagan temporality, this story is firmly ensconced within a discourse of Christian time that sees God himself as representative of the deep time perspective. Medieval Christian thought was preoccupied with the relationship between secular time and sacred time, and, as Carolyn Dinshaw has explained with regard to one of the most influential accounts of time during the period, “for Augustine, time is a good, because created by God, but is also associated with life on earth, which is ultimately an exile from the timeless divine realm, eternity” (2012, 13).²⁹ When the sleepers awake, the narratorial voice reminds the reader of the prophet David’s words to the effect that “Þvsvnnd ꜳr fyrer þinv avglitte drotten. er ecki leingr en fra þeim deigi sem j gær var” (one thousand years before your countenance, Lord, is not longer than from yesterday to today; 1969, 202).³⁰ The three-hundred and seventy-two-year-long sleep is here merely a taster of a much broader deep time reckoning, marvelous in itself but figuratively revealing yet greater extents. Moreover, the sleepers’ only function is their symbolic role of alluding to the resurrection of the flesh at the Judgement. One might think that God put them to sleep during the persecutions in order that they might awake later and live out their lives in peace well into old age. But as soon as the sleepers are witnessed by the people and the emperor, they lay down once more and die. R. M. Liuzza points out with regard to the Old English version of the Seven Sleepers tale that “it is sometimes said that among the many things people in the early Middle Ages lacked was a sense of historical anachronism or historical development,” but that, in the absence of attention to historical detail, there is an emphasis on the “affective quality of temporal dislocation” (2016, 67, 69). One might also see the short lives of the sleepers following their reawakening as a sign that chronodisplacement is not considered a viable option in the long run: one should stick to one’s own time.

In the earliest Icelandic manuscript fragment of this tale, the thirteenth-century AM 623 4to, there is a curious scribal flourish which suggests a personal attempt to communicate the past into its future. The silver coins that Malcus uses to buy bread play a pivotal role in the story, acting as clear chronodisplaced markers and as signs that something is not as it should be. In the fragment, at a pivotal moment, the scribe chose to replace the word “fé,” the medieval Icelandic word for money, with the F-rune, ᚠ. Thus, the phrase “sa er fornt fe hafþi meþ ser” (“the man who had ancient money with him,” 1877, 240; emphasis added) becomes “sa er fornt ᚠ hafþi meþ ser.” In this way, the scribe’s own practice mirrors the action within the text: at a point where a material object from the past intrudes into a future, the scribe inserts a linguistic symbol from the runic futhark (the F-rune, ᚠ) into a text written in the Roman alphabet, a corresponding orthographic irruption of a perceived past into a future. Here, the scribe’s adoption of a similar chronodisplacement chimes with Dinshaw’s claim that “exposure to, or contact with, such [heterogeneous] temporalities can expand our own temporal repertoires” (2012, 6).

The Tale of the Seven Sleepers continued to be popular in Iceland well after the medieval period. At least sixteen handwritten copies of the story appear in manuscripts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a poetic retelling was produced in 1765 and disseminated in multiple witnesses. One of the latest manuscripts to contain the story is kept at the National Library of Iceland. Dated between 1899 and 1903, this text was written in the decade following the publication of H. G. Wells’ Time Machine, which launched the modern time travel story.

Conclusion: Every Past is a Former Future

Most modern time travel literature falls within the genre of science fiction. The texts discussed here are superficially far from science fiction, unsurprisingly since, as R. M. Liuzza has pointed out, “there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as medieval science fiction, because in the Middle Ages there is neither science nor fiction in anything like the modern sense of these words” (2016, 61).³¹ The generic association of time travel with science fiction is so ingrained that the non-identification of medieval texts with the sci-fi genre might automatically inhibit modern readers from seeing the premodern examples I have presented as narratives concerned with time travel. I have, nevertheless, shown that there is ample evidence these texts do involve one temporal location intruding upon — or communicating with — another temporal location, that is, these narratives demonstrate time travel of a kind or, as I have called it, chronodisplacement. These texts often present chronodisplacement through moments when the narrative past connects to the narrative present. From the perspective of the inhabitants of that narrative past, however, they are communicating with the future. On the other hand, readers or audiences of these texts, both those from medieval Iceland and those alive today, witness communication between representatives of a far distant past with representatives of a less distant past. This is the case since the narrative-present of many Old Norse texts lies already in the past in relation to the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries when they were written down and first circulated.

The examples examined in this essay frequently involve subterranean time capsules, be they caves or gravemounds. In such spaces the intrusion from the past usually occurs in the form of a subject from that past: a being, human or otherwise. These subjects, then, speak to their future. Objects such as swords speak, figuratively rather than literally, across time. I, further, highlighted the figure of the long-lived individual, a recurrent feature of Old Norse literature whose long life is itself a form of time travel, an interpretation strengthened by the ability of narrative to make use of ellipsis.³² In stories such as the Seven Sleepers, the far past rubs shoulders with the distant future as chronological time within the story passes rapidly from one stanza or paragraph to the next. The contemptuous reign of the pagan Decius is juxtaposed with the Christian era of Theodosius in the space of a few lines. The example of the Seven Sleepers combines the time capsule and the long-lived individual and shows that continental material also contributed to medieval and early modern Icelandic understanding of such themes.

If time travel is present, and readers can understand it, at least from some perspectives, as affording examples of communication with the future, then what can this tell us about medieval Icelanders’ own understanding of their relationships with future subjects and audiences? Any answer must admit that literary representation of communication with the future does not tell us transparently what the authors believed: textual and generic rules may have limited what it was possible to say. Nevertheless, it seems noteworthy that there are no representations of characters within these texts travelling into a future, like Wells’ protagonist, beyond the point at which they were written: time travel and communication with the future is always safely encapsulated within the past from the perspective of authors and readers. This might seem to encourage us to affirm that medieval Icelanders were, for the most part, uninterested in the future, being, instead, obsessively fixated upon their own past. While they were passionately involved with the past,³³ this does not rule out an interest in the relative dynamics of past, present, and future: as Eric Weiskott has stated, with regard to Reinhart Koselleck’s research, “[e]very present is a former future” (2021, 175). By showing chronodisplacement to a relative future within the frame of the past, medieval Icelanders would seem to have taken this one step further: every past is also a former future (for those who came from even further back).

This may have something to do with how Icelanders conceived of their own future. In a recent monograph on concepts of time in an Old Norse context, Kristýna Králová talks of a dichotomy between domestic and foreign time reckoning. According to the former, “[t]he future was perceived as predestined; it lied [sic] in fact in the distant present” (2020, 278–9). But “[t]his concept of the future undergoes a fundamental change under the influence of Christianity” (2020, 279), with people seeing the future as a place where one could change one’s destiny. Králová may not have exhausted the ways in which medieval Icelanders thought about the future: the final lines of Egill Skallagrímsson’s Arinbjarnarkviða — “long may my words live” — seem to represent hope and, thus, future uncertainty in the voice of a pagan poet.³⁴ But perhaps a general rigidity in the conception of what was to come made certain authors prefer to explore the dynamics of speaking to the future in the more familiar literary chronotope of the legendary or historical past. One was free, then, to consider the relative implications without needing to wrestle with predictions.

Another curiosity about these textual representations is the materiality and mediality of the messages to the future. Prose texts often include poetic irruptions: Hallmundarkviða, Hreggviðr’s verses and Örvar-Oddr’s death-song. Since saga texts often seem to have taken preexisting poetic texts and used them in the construction of the prose, these are literally intrusions from the past. In other cases, oral stories are recounted within a written form (Norna-Gestr’s tales in the written saga): runic letters embedded in the roman alphabet and inscribed metal coins and tablets described on the parchment leaf (or, for modern readers, the printed page). All of this seems to suggest that medieval Icelandic authors were aware that communication across time meant accepting the changing materiality of support upon which one’s message would be inscribed, as well as the changing media used for conveying those messages. Such authors may have wondered in what ways their own sagas would have been transmogrified such that they could be consumed by future audiences. They may also have had an inkling that temporal perspectives could vary over time, and that communicating through writing and story was one way to foster more heterogeneous temporal experiences.

In the introduction to this article, a subsidiary aim was stated, namely of considering whether deep time considerations arose in Old Norse representations of chronodisplacement. While critics such as Gould (1987, 1–2) have argued that awareness of deep time is a product of the temporal revolution of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, whereby the age of the world came to be reckoned in millions of years, the status of such awareness before that paradigm shift is uncertain. One might argue that deep time simply did not exist for the inhabitants of the medieval world, but Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has rejected such “sharp historical ruptures” (2015, 79), insisting that medieval people too were capable of recognizing dizzying expanses of time. If this is true, the images which invoked their temporal vertigo may look quite different to those that provoke the same response in contemporary audiences. In a world where immediate perception may have been more restricted, perhaps what was considered to greatly exceed immediate perception would also appear more restricted (from certain modern perspectives) but could nevertheless function as deep time. As we have already seen, Králová described the future for medieval Icelanders under the influence of domestic time perception as a “distant present” (2020, 279). As that distant present evaporated under the pressure of foreign models, new vistas may have appeared which caused temporal unease.

This brings us back to Bergbúa þáttur and Hallmundarkviða. While several of the examples looked at above involve stone, rocks or the underland, few present us with characters in such a state of discomfort as this prosimetric text. On the surface, the discomfort may be attributed to the Christian characters of the prose text being confronted with the monstrous pagan voice and imagery of the poetry. But following Cohen’s line of thinking, that engaging with stone can reveal “a deep past intimate to thinking the future’s advent” (2015, 24), we may also see how “convey[ing] within its materiality the thickness of time, stone triggers the vertigo of inhuman scale” (2015, 23–4). Iceland’s rocky and tumultuous landscape may have been particularly effective in stimulating such awareness.

In Underland, MacFarlane argues that “a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance, and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come” (2019, 15). The medieval Icelandic texts analyzed here do not talk of time intervals of millions of years, so it seems reasonable to see the contemporary deep time awareness referred to by MacFarlane as quantitatively more pronounced, if not affectively more profound.³⁵ But there is a qualitative isomorphism here, for surely the texts considered trace similar webs of gift, inheritance and legacy beyond the strictures of an easily-conceived everyday temporality. Medieval Icelandic literature speaks often of legal and quasi-genealogical inheritance, but beyond these frequently-occurring frames, gifts and inheritance from ancient cairns or supernatural beings pose greater problems and provoke mental gymnastics. Authors used them to work through ideas of talking to the future, and, if deep time ultimately refers to scales that “exceed immediate perception,” then it is not a stretch to read some of these texts as grappling with deep time issues. And if this is the case, then it may not be too far-fetched to imagine that certain Icelandic writers of the medieval period also considered how their own texts would be read in the future, perhaps even the distant future, if sealed in a casket and hidden in a cave, somewhere …

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This work was supported by Vetenskapsrådet.

Notes on contributors

Philip Lavender

Philip Lavender received his PhD in Nordic Philology from the University of Copenhagen and is a researcher and docent at the University of Gothenburg. His research focuses on medieval and early modern Icelandic literature, taking in themes such as forgery and temporality. He is the author of Long Lives of Short Sagas: The Irrepressibility of Narrative and the Case of Illuga saga Gríðarfóstra (2020) and co-editor of Faking It!: The Performance of Forgery in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture.

Notes

^1. “Literature,” “author,” and “reader” are debated terms and to engage with the debates here would go beyond the scope of this article. I will note, however, that one key argument concerns the relevance and scope of the concept of author in medieval contexts. I use these terms in a general sense, whereby “author” and “reader” could be replaced with less common yet broader terms such as “communicator” and “communicatee.”

^2. It is not uncommon for readers, however, to frame reading — specifically of texts with “period” settings — as a way of travelling back into the past.

^3. There are, it must be conceded, famous statements concerning authors’ desires to leave a literary legacy for (future) posterity. Even these, however, can be seen in some ways as rhetorical ploys aimed at present audiences.

^4. See, however, Felski (2011).

^5. In what follows, I will mostly talk in terms of the relation between “pasts” and “futures.” From the perspective of the past, the dynamic is actually between the present and the future. From the perspective of the future, it is actually between the present and the past. In order not to favor either perspective (by instantiating it as the “present” vision), “past” and “future” are the chosen terms of the discussion.

^6. To my knowledge, “chronodisplacement,” based on Greek “Χρόνος” (time), has not been used previously in critical-theoretical discourse, although “chrono-displacement” is the condition which affects Henry, the protagonist of Audrey Niffenegger’s popular novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. I often prefer “chronodisplacement” to its near synonym “time travel” because, although they both partake of the spatialization of time, “chronodisplacement” seems to me less loaded with pre-expectations regarding the nature of the travel or displacement and thus helps one maintain an open mind to potential examples.

^7. On the Icelandic population, see Tomasson (1977).

^8. Note that straightforward descriptions of volcanic activity are surprisingly rare in medieval Icelandic literature. See Falk (2007). Compare Falk’s analysis, however, with that of Mathias Nordvig, who explains, “[i]t is a prevalent myth in scholarship on medieval Icelandic literature that volcanoes are not discussed. This is because there are few direct and coherent descriptions that are intelligible to contemporary readers” (2021, 33).

^9. There are accounts of a small number of Irish hermits having arrived in Iceland prior to AD 870, hence my use of “for the most part.”

^10. Polar bears did occasionally reach Iceland on drift ice but were not native. The only native land mammal permanently residing in Iceland in the Middle Ages was the arctic fox.

^11. Translations are my own unless otherwise stated. The shields should be imagined as round shields or targets.

^12. This reference appears in the fifth verse. Tarrin Wills’ edition of Hallmundarkviða for the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages collected edition (Bergbúa þáttr 2022), which he kindly shared with me prior to publication, has also been of help in my reading of the poem.

^13. See, for example, Tarrin Wills’ comments on this interpretation (Bergbúa þáttr 2022, 32, 43) and his summary of previous scholarship (33–4).

^14. This is how Mathias Nordvig (2021, 47–51), for example, has read it.

^15. Nordvig speculates that a boat might be conceptually connected with speed and, thus, “fast-moving objects” such as “ejecta and lava” (2021, 48). There is, however, no explicit reference to speed in connection with the boat, which is described as “styrkvan” (“strong” or “sturdy” as Nordvig translated it).

^16. Our earliest manuscript witness of the saga is from the seventeenth century, but an older poetic version has been dated to the fourteenth century and a separate saga mentions a wedding feast in 1117, at which Hrómundr’s tale was supposedly told as entertainment (Kapitan 2018, 2–5). The relevant scene from the saga can be found in Rafn’s edition (1829, 368–71).

^17. Another example of this is Bölverkr in Andra saga jarls (The Saga of Earl Andri) of whom Margaret Schlauch wrote that he “has had himself placed in his burial mound alive; but that had been many years before, and in the natural course of things he has probably died long before his tomb is opened … but he is as active as ever” (1934, 142).

^18. “Saga” is the term used for most prose narratives produced in medieval Iceland. These prose narratives are subdivided on the basis of style or content into groups or genres such as “sagas of Icelanders” (Íslendingasögur), “chivalric sagas” (riddarasögur), “kings’ sagas” (konungasögur), “bishops’ sagas” (biskupasögur), “legendary sagas” (fornaldarsögur), etc. The legendary sagas normally discuss events that are supposed to have taken place predominantly in the Nordic countries prior to the settlement of Iceland in the late-ninth century.

^19. See also chapter 5 of Chadwick Allen’s Earthworks Rising (2022), in which both colonial tropes about “disturbed Indian cemetery” (288) and indigenous accounts of mounds used as containment devices for dangerous spirits are discussed.

^20. A number of examples are discussed in Schlauch (1931, 970–7).

^21. Other works produced in Iceland fill out Starkaðr’s biography. See Bampi (2018).

^22. Note, however, Karen Barad’s critique of this container model, which she points out “pervades much of Western epistemology” (2007, 223). They would rather see human lives as entangled with space and time in processes of becoming or spacetimemattering.

^23. We are told that these events take place in the third year of Ólafr’s reign (1829, 315), thus c. 998.

^24. This could, however, be interpreted as litotes.

^25. Bakhtin (1981), especially section I, “The Greek Romance.” See also Phelpstead (2009) on adventure-time in an Old Norse context.

^26. Hennig also points out that this scene is one of the only detailed descriptions of soil erosion in medieval Icelandic literature, which may be surprising considering that anthropogenic soil erosion seems to have been a significant problem in medieval Iceland.

^27. Björn Þórleifsson (d. between 1548 and 1554) commissioned the collection, which seems for the most part to be based on Low German sources. See Kalinke (1996, 6).

^28. Very few manuscripts exist from the twelfth century, thus, the thirteenth century marks the onset of a flourishing written culture. 1550, the date of the Reformation in Iceland, is also normally taken as the end point of the Icelandic Middle Ages.

^29. For a general introduction to the medieval Christian experience of time, see chapter 6 of Le Goff (1992), in particular pages 169–94.

^30. The biblical reference is to Psalms 90:4.

^31. Note that the debate over medieval science is ongoing: for a concise summary see Falk (2021, 7–9).

^32. On ellipsis see Genette (1980, 106–9).

^33. Torfi Tulinius, for example, says that “the literary record shows a real fascination among thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelanders for the period in which the country was settled and later converted to Christianity” (2020, 159).

^34. On Arinbjarnarkviða, Carolyne Larrington has stated that “we may … assume that the historical Egill Skalla-Grímsson … is the author” (1992, 49), which would mean that it was composed in the tenth century.

^35. It is worth noting that the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, which contains entries up to the year 1550, does not contain the words “milljón” (million in Modern Icelandic) or “milljarður” (billion).