Women of the Twilight: The Narrative Spaces of Women in the Icelandic Rural Community of the Past

Abstract

The article deals with some of the spatial features of women’s storytelling traditions in rural Iceland in the late nineteenth century and early 1900s. The study is based on audiotaped sources collected by folklore collector Hallfreður Örn Eiríksson in the 1960s and 1970s from informants born in rural Iceland in the later part of the nineteenth century. The main focus of the article is on 200 women that figure in these sources and their legend repertoires, although a small sample group of 25 men and their repertoires will also be examined to allow comparison. The article discusses what these sources tell us about women’s mobility and the social spaces they inhabited in the past. It goes on to consider the performance space of the Icelandic turf farm in which women’s storytelling took place from the perspective of gender. After noting how the men and women in the sources incorporated different kinds of spaces into their legends, it takes a closer look at how the spatial components of legends told by the women reflect their living spaces, experiences, and spheres of activity. The article underlines that while women in the Icelandic rural community were largely confined to the domestic space of the farm (something reflected in the legends they told), they were neither socially isolated nor immobile. They also evidently played an important part in oral storytelling in their communities, often acting as the dominant storytellers in the performance space of the old turf farm.