ABSTRACT
This chapter scrutinises the emotional affect surrounding the transmission history of Sturlunga saga—from its medieval Icelandic compilations to its modern reception. As it is shown, medieval authors and their audiences perceived history not as an abstraction of facts but as emotional affect, which was held in considerable import for their narratives. Furthermore, the influence of mystical theology and apophasis upon medieval poetics of the supernatural is also shown as it pertains to the terse and reticent Icelandic saga prose, whose tone is cloaked in intentional and understated ambiguity. Examining how the impact of historical events on human experience was articulated in early medieval intellectual discourses provides a solid vantage point for assessing Sturlunga saga’s own narration of the same. Crucially, these observations allow the present study to shed a critical spotlight on the agency and role of the historian—medieval as well as modern—and scrutinise how historiography itself is an ongoing phenomenological entanglement between the narrator and the narrated, the researcher and the researched, the past and the present.
