The Shadow Archive: Politics, Place, and Failure in the Postclassical Sagas

In 1262/1264, Iceland submitted to the Norwegian king, Hákon IV Hákonarson (1204-1263). From the late thirteenth century until the end of the Middle Ages, Iceland was subject to varying degrees of foreign control: as a dependency first of the Kingdom of Norway (c.1264-1380) and then of the Kalmar Union (c. 1380-1537). Despite nascent interest in late medieval Iceland, the Íslendingasögur thought to have been composed after the end of the commonwealth – the ‘postclassical sagas’ – remain understudied. Countering prevailing impressions of these sagas as ahistorical or apolitical, this thesis draws from postcolonial and queer theory to examine the postclassical sagas as a historical archive of later medieval mentalities. Engaging specifically with the work of Jack Halberstam, I argue these texts express a ‘politics of failure’, which undermines an emergent colonial relationship between Iceland and Norway through the strategic expression of negative affects in rewritings of the political past.

After an introduction that defines the postclassical sagas and the colonial situation of later medieval Iceland, my three thematic chapters reveal the ‘politics of failure’ sedimented within constructions of ‘home’, ‘abroad’, and ‘beyond’ in these texts. Chapter 1 examines the history of Iceland presented by the postclassical sagas, uncovering how an underlying pessimism about the future of Iceland as a dependency informs their narration of early medieval farmsteads. Chapter 2 charts journeys abroad, centring upon the influence of later medieval aspirations and anxieties on narrative trajectories that end in recognition and reward in the Norwegian court. Chapter 3 analyses Greenland and outlaw-inhabited islands as two sites of the ‘beyond’ in these sagas, arguing that these geographies permit the questioning of society as given and imagining of alternative relationalities and social orders. This thesis concludes that within these imagined places, ‘failure’ is a recurrent and historically-contingent form of political expression.