The saint and the saga hero: hagiography and early Icelandic literature 9781843844815, 1843844818

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Cover image: King Óláfr Tryggvason and his dog Vígi, Árni Magnússon Institute, University of Iceland, GKS 1005 fol., fol. 5v. Photographer: Jóhanna Ólafsdóttir.

The relationship between that most popular of medieval genres, the saint's life, and the sagas of the Icelanders is investigated here. Although saga heroes are rarely saints themselves - indeed rather the reverse - they interact with saints in a variety of ways: as ancestors or friends of saints, as noble heathens or converts to Christianity, as innocent victims of violent death, or even as anti-saints, interrogating aspects of saintly ideology. Via detailed readings of a range of the sagas, this book explores how saints' lives contributed to the widening of medieval horizons, allowing the saga authors to develop multiple perspectives (moral, eschatological, psychological) on traditional feud narratives and family dramas. The saint's life introduced new ideals to the saga world, such as suffering, patience and feminine nurture, and provided, through dreams, visions and signs, ways of representing the interior life and of engaging with questions of merit and reward. In dialogue with the ideology of the saint, the saga hero develops into a complex and multi-faceted figure. Siân Grønlie is Associate Professor and Kate Elmore Fellow in English Language and Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford.

THE SAINT AND THE SAGA HERO

STUDIES IN OLD NORSE LITERATURE

THE SAINT AND THE SAGA HERO Hagiography and Early Icelandic Literature SIÂN E. GRØNLIE

SIÂN E. GRØNLIE

The Saint and the Saga Hero 9781843844815 V4.indd 1

15/09/2017 17:10

St Nicholas rescues some sailors from a storm at sea. Copenhagen, Arnamagnæan Collection, AM 921 IX 4to, 2r. Photograph: Suzanne Reitz. Used with permission of the Arnamagnæan Institute.

the saint and the saga hero

Studies in Old Norse Literature Print ISSN 2514-0701 Online ISSN 2514-071X Series Editors Professor Sif Rikhardsdottir Professor Carolyne Larrington Studies in Old Norse Literature aims to provide a forum for monographs and collections engaging with the literature produced in medieval Scandinavia, one of the largest surviving bodies of medieval European literature. The series investigates poetry and prose alongside translated, religious and learned material; although the primary focus is on Old Norse-Icelandic literature, studies which make comparison with other medieval literatures or which take a broadly interdisciplinary approach by addressing the historical and archaeological contexts of literary texts are also welcomed. It offers opportunities to publish a wide range of books, whether cutting-edge, theoretically informed writing, provocative revisionist approaches to established conceptualisations, or strong, traditional studies of previously neglected aspects of the field. The series will enable researchers to communicate their findings both beyond and within the academic community of medievalists, highlighting the growing interest in Old Norse-Icelandic literary culture. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors or to the publisher, at the addresses given below. Professor Sif Rikhardsdottir, Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Iceland, Aðalbygging v/Sæmundar­ götu, S-101 Reykja­vík, Iceland Professor Carolyne Larrington, Department of English Language and Literature, St John’s College, Oxford University, Oxford, OX1 3JP, UK Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK Previous volumes in the series: 1. Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts   Sif Rikhardsdottir

The Saint and the Saga Hero Hagiography and Early Icelandic Literature

Siân E. Grønlie

D. S. BREWER

© Siân E. Grønlie 2017 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Siân E. Grønlie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2017 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978 1 84384 481 5 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Word and Page, Chester, UK

contents Acknowledgements vii Preface ix 1. Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders

1

2. The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason

39

3. The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert

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4. The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint

111

5. The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint

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6. The Saint as Friend and Patron

209

7. Conclusion

257

Bibliography Index

265 297

acknowledgements There are many people I would like to thank for their help towards this book, but I can think of no-one who has inspired me more in my research and teaching than Heather O’Donoghue, whose classes on the sagas first captivated me as an undergraduate, and whose unstinting support over more recent years has sustained me through many difficult periods. I am deeply grateful to her. Other colleagues in Oxford and elsewhere have contributed much to my thinking – Matthew Townend, David Clark, Carl Phelpstead and Vahni Capildeo from the Old Norse reading group; Matthew Reynolds, Ann Pasternak Slater, Freya Johnston and Matthew Leigh, as well as Alison Finlay, Nick Jacobs, Carolyne Larrington, Lesley Abrams, Erin Goeres, Gareth Evans and Sara Baccianti. A paper given by Massimiliano Bampi at the Old Norse Research Seminar in Oxford introduced me to polysystem theory, and first suggested the relevance of this to my research. A chance meeting with Torfi Tulinius in the Turville-Petre Room cheered me as I worked through the final stages of my draft. The anonymous reviewer made many detailed and rigorous recommendations and helped me to avoid many errors – it goes without saying that any that remain are entirely my responsibility. Brian McMahon has been an invaluable research assistant. Many friends and colleagues have encouraged and sustained me with coffee, croissants, and conversation, especially Melanie Florence, Martin Henig, Noam Reisner, Rosie Dembski, Jo and Justin Hutchence, Peter Groves, Steve Eyre, Hermien van Zujlen, Elisabet Bratlie, Anne Marthe Nilsen Gibbons, George Westhaver, Evelyn and Leonard van Duijn and all five of the children – Elly, Jojanneke, Levi, Marjette and Femke. Thanks are due also to my family in Norway, England and the United States, especially to my parents and to my stepson Tom. My children – Sunniva, Benji and James – have never tired of hearing stories from the sagas, although admittedly they feel more lukewarm about medieval saints, especially when this involves visiting churches in the school holidays (‘We’ve come all this way to see a church?’). Their loving indulgence of me has been constant and means more to me than they can possibly know. And, finally, my heartfelt thanks and warmest love go to my husband Andrew, who has never wavered in his belief in me. Without him, I would not have written this book.

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preface Traditionally, the relationship between saints and sagas is formulated in terms of origins: in the words of Turville-Petre, the Icelanders would not have written sagas if they had not first been ‘trained in hagiographic narrative’.1 The translation of Latin saints’ lives predates the earliest sagas about Icelanders, so the saint’s life has been considered in some sense a starting point for the saga: Boyer, for example, speaks of the ‘emancipation’ of the saga; he describes sagas as saints’ lives without a saint in them.2 These views are, perhaps, not wholly surprising given the distinctiveness of the saga: here we have a genre uniquely Icelandic, in contrast to the international and ubiquitous saint. Yet the relationship between saints’ lives and sagas deserves attention beyond the ‘origins’ of Icelandic literature: the Icelanders translated, copied, composed and revised a range of hagiographic literature well up until, and in some cases past, the Reformation. Saints’ lives survive in more manuscripts than all the vernacular genres combined: they were of keen interest to the same audiences that appreciated the sagas of Icelanders. In this book, I argue that there is a creative interplay between saints’ lives and sagas throughout the saga-writing period, and that this had a significant impact on how saga narrative developed. I start from the premise that saints’ Lives are sophisticated literary texts, with much to offer the saga authors. They combine heroic narrative with a strong ideological challenge to secular heroism and material values. The world of the saint’s life is one in which the invisible and spiritual takes on material form: it seeks to transcend historical particularity and reaches towards the interrelatedness of all times and places. Saints offer a model of virtue in the daily struggle against sin and temptation, and throw into relief the eschatological trajectory of all human life. Most importantly, perhaps, the saints were not just literary characters to the medieval Icelanders, but a powerful and active presence in their lives. In this book, I wish to explore some of the ways in which sagas engage creatively with the lives of saints. I begin in Chapter 1 by surveying the wide 1

2

Gabriel Turville-Petre, Origins of Icelandic Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 142; discussed by Peter Foote, ‘Saints’ Lives and Sagas’, in Saints’ Lives and Sagas: A Symposium, ed. Hans Bekker-Nielsen and Birte Carlé (Odense: Odense University Press, 1994), pp. 73–88. Régis Boyer, ‘Vita–Historia–Saga’, Gripla 6 (1984), 113–27.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero variety and high quality of hagiographic writing in medieval Iceland, how quickly saints’ lives were appropriated as a vernacular genre, and their position at the centre of the literary polysystem. This placed them in a strong position to shape and ‘interfere’ with other genres, including the sagas of Icelanders. The interactive relationship between these two genres was not confined to the earliest period of saga-writing; it is just as prominent in some of the later sagas as in the earliest. In Chapter 2, I look at what was arguably the first native Icelandic saint’s life: Oddr Snorrason’s saga of Óláfr Tryggvason. Its interest lies specifically in its literary failure to mediate between Óláfr as hero and Óláfr as saint. Oddr’s struggle with the form of the saint’s life reveals his anxiety about the relationship between sanctity, power and violence: Óláfr is admired for the same heroic deeds by which he forfeits the perfection of the saint. The saga ends with a heroic last stand of epic proportions, but Óláfr is no martyr to his faith. The last we hear is (second-hand) of his repentance and conversion to the moral simplicity of the ascetic life. Oddr’s struggle with the saint’s life is taken further by later saga authors, who challenge both the centrality of the saint and the values of hagiographic literature. In Chapter 3, I investigate such oppositional attitudes in Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar and Hrafnkels saga, whose heroes distinguish themselves sharply from royal saints. Both sagas use aspects of the saint’s life – miracle stories, confrontation with secular authorities, destruction of temples, torture and martyrdom – only to undermine the values such stories encode. They present the reader with native and self-made heroes, whose power derives not from the practice of Christian virtue, but from the amoral mastery of their art. For Egill, the value of poetry is aesthetic, not moral; Hrafnkell learns to separate local politics from religion. In Chapters 4 and 5, I look at some of the ways in which sagas move into hagiographic territory, in their depictions of mission and conversion to Christianity, and in their representations of the inner life. In Vatnsdœla saga, Njáls saga and Eyrbyggja saga, the missions to Iceland offer new ways of thinking about death, judgement and the afterlife: human violence is relocated to and given new meaning within the framework of Christianity eschatology. The engagement with narratives of conversion allows the saga authors to address questions of merit and reward, crime and punishment, death and salvation – all matters of urgency for medieval Christians, but not the traditional stuff of saga narrative. In Gísla saga, Flóamanna saga and Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, the Icelandic and Greenlandic wilderness merge with the Christian desert and become a site of vision and encounter with the divine: the Christian concept of peregrinatio shapes Gísli’s lonely journey towards death, and Þorgils’s transformation into a figure of the suffering Christ. The increasing rapprochement with eremitic and visionary literature introduces new values to the saga world – weakness, suffering, femininity – and allows for a compelling critique of social norms. At the same time, the certainties of hagiography are carefully balanced against the greater ontological insecurity of the saga world.

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Preface In the sixth and final chapter, I return to issues of royal sanctity, this time with a focus on those sagas of Icelanders in which King Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr Haraldsson play a part. Here we see the saint (or would-be saint) intervening, more or less directly, in the lives of saga heroes, whether as political ally and patron, or moral advisor and judge. Working here across a range of sagas that use related motifs, I explore how these two kings take on specifically moral and intercessory roles, guiding the hero towards salvation (in Hallfreðar saga), warning against damnation (in Færeyinga saga and Laxdœla saga), mediating between the heroic past and the Christian present (in Fóstbrœðra saga), balancing the unruly and often unorthodox behaviour of the saga hero against his loyal devotion to saint and king. These provide a moral backdrop for the scene in Grettis saga where St Óláfr denies Grettir his one chance of redemption; following the botched ordeal, Grettir’s role as monster-slayer and defender of boundaries proves finally incompatible with the ideology of the saint. In these sagas, the ongoing dialogue with hagiography brings a richness and plurality of meaning, generated by the confluence of different literary worlds. This book contributes towards the growing interest in the sagas as prenovelistic discourse, in which multiple modalities co-exist. Sagas, however distinctive, were not produced in a literary vacuum from the rest of Christian Europe; their interplay with other genres, both in Latin and in the vernacular, is rich, varied and rewarding. Although saints are not the heroes of the sagas of Icelanders, the saint is a figure with whom the secular hero always had to contend, whether as a noble heathen or virtuous Christian, as an ancestor or friend, as the innocent victim of violent death or the perpetrator of serious crimes. This engagement with the saint’s life is not a weakness from which the sagas were gradually emancipated; it is a literary challenge taken on with courage and imagination. In dialogue with the ideological splendour of the saint, we see the saga hero develop into a richly complex and multifaceted figure. Siân Grønlie Feast day of St Walburga 25 February 2017

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In Memoriam

Sverre Grønlie 22 January 1973 – 16 May 2009 Sakna ek í sessi ok í sæingo míns málvinar Guðrúnarkvíða I

N 1 n Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders Introduction Today we may think of hagiography as a minor genre, too artificial and unrealistic to merit much serious attention. Medieval writers – it is important to understand – did not see things this way. Hagiography is not only the best represented of medieval genres in terms of manuscripts, but also has the longest continuous history: saints’ lives were composed, translated and copied from the second century up to and beyond the Reformation, and they spread from east to west and from the Mediterranean to the north, as new countries declared their arrival in the Christian world through the appropriation of the cult of saints. It was one of the few medieval genres that all classes of society were exposed to, from the lay person who might have heard them read out in church, to the clerical and the secular élite, who would have read them as part of their personal devotions, either in Latin or in the vernacular. Saints not only dominated the rhythm of the Christian year, through the liturgical cycle of saints’ days, but also permeated the medieval sense of place: their power was channelled through the materiality of their relics and expressed in their patronage of Church estates. While composing saints’ lives was primarily the preserve of clerics, the cult of saints both depended on and served the needs of lay people: the way in which Margaret, a virgin martyr, became known in the West as a patron of childbirth is a striking example of how the needs of ordinary women influenced clerical composition; her life continued to be copied long past the Reformation because women in labour depended on its help.1 Although saints themselves are typically of aristocratic lineage, miracle collections are one of the few places in medieval literature where the needs of ordinary people matter: single mothers, neglected children, the poor, the infirm. The importance of the cult of saints to medieval people (and to many Catholics today) cannot be emphasised enough. All this was as true for medieval Iceland as for anywhere else in Northern Europe: Árni 1

Margaret Cormack, ‘Holy Wells and National Identity in Iceland’, in Saints and their Cults in the Atlantic World, ed. Margaret Cormack (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), p. 236; Wendy R. Larson, ‘The Role of Patronage and Audience in the Cults of Sts Margaret and Marina of Antioch’, in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 23–35.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Þorláksson’s Christian law, loosely following the Apostles’ Creed, affirms that ‘Vér skulum trúa þat allt sem trúir õll kristilig þjóð ok heilagra manna samband ok heilug kirkja hefir samþykt’ (‘We are to believe everything that all Christian people believe, and the communion of saints and Holy Church has agreed on’).2 Hagiography was, perhaps, the major literary genre of the European Middle Ages, a ‘multilingual and multinational phenomenon’.3 In this chapter, I look at what characterises hagiography as a literary genre, and how heilagra manna sögur (‘the sagas of holy people’) developed in medieval Iceland, with a view to understanding their relationship to the vernacular genres and, in particular, to the sagas of Icelanders.

Hagiography and literary genre Hagiography has an unfair reputation for being monotonous; many have agreed with James Earl’s exasperated comment that ‘when you’ve read one saint’s life, you’ve read them all’.4 The use of the term hagiography (from the Greek hagios graphos) for a literary genre is in fact quite recent, dating from the mid-twentieth century; initially, it referred to any ‘holy writings’, including some scriptural books, and later it came to mean very specifically ‘the branch of study that has the saints and the worship of them for its object’, a definition still given in the New Catholic Encyclopedia.5 Yet, despite critical assumptions that saints’ lives are uniform (and, by implication, dull), the genre of hagiography is in fact extraordinarily wide-ranging. Salih describes it, paradoxically, as ‘both stereotyped and almost infinitely variable’: it is probably best understood not as a single genre, but as a multiplicity.6 Hagiography includes homilies, miracle collections, martyrologies, dialogues, inventions and translations (of relics). It applies not only to accounts of recognised saints, but also to writings about those acclaimed as saints but never canonised; this process did not come under the control of the papacy until the end of the twelfth century and, even then,

2

3 4 5

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Norges gamle love indtil 1387, ed. Rudolf Kaiser et al., 5 vols (Christiania: Gröndal, 1846–95), V (1890–5), 16. For the benefit of the reader, all quotations from unnormalised texts have been silently normalised to the c. 1200–50 standard. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Sarah Salih, ‘Saints, Cults and Lives in Late Medieval England’, in A Companion to Middle English Hagiography, ed. Sarah Salih (Cambridge: Brewer, 2006), p. 12. He is cited by Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, ‘“De historiis sanctorum”: A Generic Study of Hagiography’, Genre 13 (1980), 410. Guy Phillipart, ‘L’hagiographie comme littérature: concept récent et nouveaux programmes’, Revue des sciences humaines 251 (1998), 23; F. Halkin, ‘Hagiography’, in New Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Berard L. Marthaler et al., 2nd edition, 15 vols (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2003), VI, 613. Salih, ‘Saints, Cults and Lives’, p. 14; see also Ian Wood ‘The Use and Abuse of Latin Hagiography in the Early Medieval West’, in East and West: Modes of Communication, ed. Evangelos Chrysos and Ian Wood (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999), pp. 93 and 109.

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders could not always suppress local cults.7 Of the Icelandic saints, Þorlákr was not canonised until 1984, and Jón and Guðmundr have never received official recognition. As a Norwegian cleric complains in Lárentíus saga: ‘Undarligir menn eru þér Íslendingar, því at þér kallið þá marga heilaga menn sem hér hafa vaxit upp hjá yðr ok í õðrum lõndum vita menn engin skyn á’ (‘You Icelanders are remarkable, because you call many people saints who grew up with you here and about whom people know nothing in other countries’).8 In this sense, sainthood has its democratic side, as MacCulloch recently pointed out: ‘It’s the business of the Christian in the street to recognise sanctity where he or she stumbles across it’.9 Perhaps the most amusing example of the gap between local and official conceptions of sanctity is the case of the French greyhound Guinefort, who was murdered by his owner for a crime he did not commit. He was venerated as a saint from the thirteenth right up to the twentieth century, despite repeated attempts on the part of clerics to eradicate his cult.10 The first hagiographic writings were the canonical Acts of the Apostles, followed by the acts of the martyrs, extant in their earliest form as records of trials.11 With the exception of the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist and the apostles, the first saints were all martyrs, witnessing to Christ through their death. Their prototype was St Stephen in Acts, who established the imitation of Christ as the foremost hagiographic paradigm.12 The passions (Latin passiones) of these saints focus on the moment of death as the saint’s birth into eternal life (Latin dies natales): the martyrs defy not only death, but also decay and decomposition, as they triumph over these natural processes in a powerful assertion of bodily resurrection. Their lives are ‘dialectic and conflictual’, opposing Christianity to paganism, virtue to vice, heaven to hell.13 Perrot comments that ‘Le texte se tisse ainsi sur la trame d’un constant parallélisme entre les contraires, et d’un jeu de symmétries inverses’ (‘The text thus weaves the weft of a continual 7

8 9

10

11

12 13

André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 275; Margaret Cormack, ‘Saints’ Lives and Icelandic Literature in the 13th and 14th Centuries’, in Saints and Sagas: A Symposium, ed. Hans Bekker Nielsen and Birte Carlé (Odense: Odense University Press, 1994), pp. 27–8. Biskupa sögur, ed. Peter Foote et al., 3 vols, Íslenzk fornrit 15–17 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1998–2003), III (1998), p. 269. Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation by Robert Bartlett – review’, The Guardian (12 September 2013). Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century, trans. Martin Thorn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Richard A. Norris, ‘Apocryphal Writings and Acts of the Martyrs’, in The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature, ed. Frances Young, Lewis Ayres and Andrew Louth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 31–4. Acts 7: 54–60; cf. Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 115. Heffernan, Sacred Biography, p. 266.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero parallelism between contraries, a play of inverse symmetries’).14 Generically, they draw on biblical narrative and antique biography, especially encomium and panegyric.15 Some, like the apocryphal acts of the apostles, are also indebted to Greek romance. The Pseudo-Clementines, for example, have been described as the ‘first Christian novel’: they use known romance motifs such as narrow escapes, dangerous journeys, family dramas and final reunions.16 As the right conditions for martyrdom diminished, a new understanding of ‘white’ martyrdom developed: a life of self-denial and asceticism in the struggle against sin. The martyr gave way to the confessor, who imitates Christ in his way of life: the most influential life of a confessor was Athanasius’s Vita Antonii (dating from c. 360), known in Evagrius’s Latin translation, which famously precipitated the conversion of St Augustine.17 Another important milestone was Sulpicius Severus’s Vita Martini (dating from before 397) – the life of an ascetic, missionary and bishop, which established the model of the episcopal saint so important in the later Middle Ages.18 The vita of the confessor works with a ‘gradational’ rather than an ‘oppositional’ model, by which the saint rises to perfection by degrees.19 The lives of the desert fathers show a strong interest in the psychology of sin and temptation, associating demonic attack with internal impulses.20 They make use of images of interiority (secret journeys, symbolic death, ascent) and the action is set not in the public arena of the martyr, but in an inner, moralised landscape.21 The saint’s relationship to the natural world and other creatures becomes important in these lives: sanctity renews the Edenic relationship between humans and the environment in which they live.22 One thinks of the iconography of St Jerome removing a thorn from the lion’s paw, 14

Jean-Pierre Perrot, ‘Figures du temps et logiques de l’imaginaire en hagiographie médiévale’, Revue des sciences humaines 251 (1998), 64. 15 Heffernan, Sacred Biography, pp. 31–2. 16 Hippolyte Delehaye, Les passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1966), p. 317; Alison Goddard Elliott, Roads to Paradise: Reading the Lives of the Early Saints (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1987), pp. 46–7; Thomas D. Hill, ‘Imago Dei: Genre Symbolism, and Anglo-Saxon Hagiography’, in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 39. 17 Augustine, Confessions, ed. and trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), VIII.14–19, pp. 142–6; Averil Cameron, ‘On Defining the Holy Man’, in The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, ed. James Howard-Johnston and Paul Antony Hayward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 38. 18 Vauchez, Sainthood, pp. 285, 288. 19 Charles F. Altman, ‘Two Types of Opposition and the Structure of Latin Saints’ Lives’, Medievalia et Humanistica 6 (1975), 1–11. 20 David T. Bradford, ‘Brain and Psyche in Early Christian Ascetism’, Psychological Reports 109 (2011), 467. 21 Elliott, Roads to Paradise, pp. 42–3; Judith Adler, ‘Cultivating Wilderness’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006), 23. 22 Dominic Alexander, Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), p. 30.

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders or the delightful story about how two otters warmed St Cuthbert with their breath and dried him with their fur after he had stood praying in the sea.23 While the three main types of hagiographic writing – the acts of the apostles, the passions of the martyrs and the lives of the confessors – remained constant throughout the Middle Ages, conceptions of sanctity continued to change, leading to innovations in the genre.24 Gregory’s Dialogues (c. 600) was an important work in this regard: widely disseminated throughout Europe, it did much to popularise notions of sanctity, locating it in the ‘here and now’ rather than in the biblical past, immediately accessible and readily available for the edification of all Christians.25 It included the Life of St Benedict, abbot and confessor, founder of the Benedictine rule. The Acts of the Apostles found their continuation in the lives of missionary saints like Boniface, extending the reach of biblical narrative to the newly converted nations.26 In the eleventh century, the age of missions was succeeded by the age of Church reform, producing a new kind of martyr-bishop, who strongly championed the rights of the Church against the abuse of power by secular rulers.27 Thomas Becket is the foremost example of this kind of saint, and his cult was influential in Scandinavia, where it was propagated by Archbishop Eysteinn of Niðaróss on his return from exile in England.28 It may have been known even earlier in Iceland, since the priest Bergr Gunnsteinsson (died 1211) is believed to have translated Robert of Cricklade’s lost vita, partly incorporated into Thomas saga II.29 Most interesting, though, is the rise to sainthood of kings and dynastic leaders, whose possession of power and wealth contrasts sharply with the rejection of precisely these things by the early ascetics. Vauchez gives the name ‘hagiocracy’ to this correlation between sanctity, nobility and power: sainthood runs, he observes, in noble families.30 The cult of royal saints spread from Carolingia to Anglo-Saxon England, and from there to Scandinavia and Iceland: St Óláfr was almost as popular as 23

24 25

26

27

28

29 30

Two Lives of St Cuthbert, ed. Bertram Colgrove (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), pp. 188–91. On Jerome and the lion, see David Salter, Holy and Noble Beasts: Encounters with Animals in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001), pp. 11–24. André Vauchez, ‘The Saint’, in Medieval Callings, ed. Jacques Le Goff (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 328. James J. O’Donnell, ‘The Holiness of Gregory’, in Gregory the Great: A Symposium, ed. John C. Cavadini, Notre Dame Studies in Theology 2 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 69–71; Carole Ellen Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 67–8. Richard Price, ‘The Holy Man and Christianization from the Apocryphal Apostles to St Stephen of Perm’, in The Expansion of Orthodox Europe: Byzantium, the Balkans and Russia, ed. Jonathan Shepherd (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 503–4. Vauchez, Sainthood, pp. 294–5. Haki Antonsson, ‘Exile, Sanctity and Some Scandinavian Rulers of the Late Viking Age’, in Exile in the Middle Ages: Selected Proceedings from the International Medieval Congress, ed. Laura Napran and Elizabeth van Houts, International Medieval Research Series 13 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 103–5. Haki Antonsson, St Magnús of Orkney: A Scandinavian Martyr-Cult in Context, Northern World 29 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), p. 46. Vauchez, Sainthood, pp. 172–9.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero the Virgin Mary and St Peter. Folz describes the twelfth century as ‘le siècle des rois saints’ (‘the century of saintly kings’), noting that there were nine royal canonisations over this period, including Edward the Confessor.31 Royal cults were particularly strong in peripheral areas like Scandinavia and the East, which were less familiar with the traditional opposition between sanctity and rulership. The Old Icelandic Homily Book even includes konungar helgir (‘holy kings’) as a discrete category, placing them high up in the hierarchy of saints, after the apostles and before the martyrs.32 Indeed, both Cormack and Haki Antonsson observe that the main requirement for sainthood in the North was a violent death, even if it was in a political skirmish that had nothing to do with religion.33 Only towards the end of the Middle Ages is there a move away from episcopal and royal saints, as sanctity finds a new embodiment in mendicants like St Francis, who were converts and ‘self-made men’, and in visionaries like St Bridget of Sweden, who carved a niche for secular women.34 Ideas about sanctity continue to evolve today: John Paul II, now a saint himself, canonised more saints than any other pope so far (480 in total), including married couples and laypeople. Hagiography, then, constitues an unexpectedly wide-ranging and heterogeneous set of genres. At the same time, it presents a highly specialised and ideologically driven world-view, one that discourages challenge or critique. Sceptics tend to come to nasty ends, unless they turn from their unbelief: a rude Englishman who called St Þorlákr mõrbyskup (‘suet-bishop’) found himself transfixed where he stood, until he repented and confessed his fault.35 St Edmund of East Anglia is even sterner: when an important visitor to his tomb demands to see his uncorrupted body, he is immediately struck with madness and dies ‘a wretched death’.36 Hagiographers are self-conscious and articulate about the function of their writing: their stated purpose is to promote the cults of the saints through the liturgical cycle of the year and to publicise their intercessory powers.37 This is what distinguishes hagiography from history, 31 32

33

34

35 36 37

Robert Folz, Les saints rois du Moyen Âge en Occident: (VIe–XIIIe siècles) (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1984), p. 113. Homiliu-bók: Isländska Homilier efter en handskrift från tolfte århundradet, ed. Theodor Wisén (Lund: Gleerup, 1872), p. 159. On the importance of cults of royal saints to countries on the periphery of Europe, see Gabor Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 396–8. Haki Antonsson, ‘Saints and Relics in Early Christian Scandinavia’, Mediaeval Scandinavia 15 (2005), 54; Margaret Cormack, ‘Saints and Sinners: Reflections on Death in Some Icelandic Sagas’, Gripla 8 (1993), 198. On violent deaths, see also Vauchez, Sainthood, pp. 151–65, 413. Vauchez, Sainthood, pp. 187, 339, 369–85. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), pp. 227–8. Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. Walter Skeat, 2 vols. Early English Text Society os 76, 82, 94, 114 (London: Early English Text Society, 1881–1900), I (1881), 330–1. Heilagra manna søgur. Fortællinger og legender om hellige mænd og kvinder, ed. Carl R. Unger, 2 vols (Christiania: Bentzen, 1877), I, 15, 51, 321, 328, 421, 474, 642, 676; II, 156, 227, 245, 279.

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders with which it shares the moral aim of edification by example. In his Dialogues, Gregory explains how exemplary lives can be more effective than moral doctrine: ‘Eru þeir sumir, er betr styrkjask til ástar guðs af dœmum enn af kenningum’ (‘There are some who are better strengthened in the love of God by examples than by doctrines’).38 Likewise, the Prologue to the Vitae patrum describes how ‘Af sjálfri sõgunni skapaðisk eptirdœmi heilsunnar ok in skapligsta kenning mildinnar’ (‘The example of salvation has taken shape from history itself, as has the teaching most conducive to mercy’). The hagiographer is clear about his purpose in writing: ‘Nemandi þeira algert líf laðisk lesandi af tilsagningu lesningar til eptirlíkingar heilags verks’ (‘By learning of their perfect life, the reader will be inspired through the guidance of [his] reading to the imitation of holy works’).39 The two terms used here, eptirdœmi (‘example’) and eptirlíking (‘imitation’), crop up frequently in how hagiographers describe their work.40 Like the Scriptures themselves, hagiographic writings can be conceptualised as a skuggsjó (‘mirror’) in which one sees what one can or should be: in Þorláks saga B, the reader is reminded that ‘Þessa heilaga manns líf má kristnum manni vera svá sem hin skýrasta skuggsjó til eptirdœmis’ (‘The life of this holy man can be compared with the clearest mirror for the imitation of the Christian person’).41 Þorlákr himself provides the model for this readerly response: we are told that he often listened to ‘mõrgum fagrligum dœmisõgum, fróðligum ok fáheyrðum, frá helgum mõnnum’ (‘many beautiful exempla, full of wisdom and seldom heard, about holy people’).42 The consequence of this exemplarity is that the saint is presented not as an individual, with all the particularising detail we have come to expect from modern biography, but as a role-model and a powerful intercessor, whose simultaneous presence in heaven and on earth (through material relics) qualifies him or her as a mediator between God and ordinary sinners. The doctrine of the ‘communion of saints’ informs the literary personality of the saint, so that the acts and miracles of each individual are treated by hagiographers as interchangeable: what appears to be glaring plagiarism is in fact a deliberate ideological strategy.43 So, after hearing of Benedict’s miracles in the second book of Gregory’s Dialogues, Gregory’s interlocutor, Peter, is careful to draw attention to the biblical parallels: ‘Hann glíkðisk Moysi í því, er hann gat vatn ór steini, 38

39 40

41

42 43

Heilagra manna søgur, I, 180; See also Gregory I’s comments on historia (translated as saga) and exemplum (dœmisaga) in Leifar fornra kristinna frœða íslenzkra, ed. Þorvaldur Bjarnarson (Copenhagen: Hagerup, 1878), pp. 37 and 75. Heilagra manna søgur, II, 335, 340. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 518, 542; Postola sögur: Legendariske fortællinger om apostlernes liv deres kamp for kristendommens udbredelse samt deres martyrdød, ed. Carl R. Unger (Christiania: Bentzen, 1874), pp. 29, 485, 871. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 143. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 80, 185. Heffernan, Sacred Biography, pp. 130–42; Marianne Kalinke, The Book of Reykjarhólar: The Last of the Great Medieval Legendaries (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1996), pp. 125–6.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero en Eliseo í því, er járn renndi til eptis, en Petro postula í vatns yfirgõngu, en Elia í hlýðni hrafns, en David í því, er hann grét dauða óvinar síns, ok virðisk mér, sem hann væri fullr af anda allra þessa manna’ (‘He was likened to Moses in that he drew water from rock, and to Elijah in that the knife blade rejoined the handle, to the apostle Peter in walking on water, and to Elisha in the raven’s obedience, and to David in that he wept over the death of his enemy, and it seems to me as if he were filled with the spirit of all these people’). Gregory confirms that Benedict ‘hafði eins anda, þess er miskunnar fyllir hjõrtu allra sinna vina’ (‘had the spirit of the one who fills with mercy the hearts of all his friends’).44 Heffernan describes these intertextual references as ‘embedding’ and even speaks of the saints as having a ‘corporate’ or ‘collective’ personality: they must be read not as individuals, but as paradigms for the Christian community. The art of the hagiographer is to pare away historical specificity until the likenesses between all the saints become visible: it is with other saints, rather than with biological family, that the saint has his or her most important ties.45 While early saints like Martin or Margaret were allowed moments of weakness and doubt, these gave way, as the genre became established, to a paradigm of timeless and completed perfection. As Magennis has commented, hagiography is, paradoxically, a type of narrative that defies time and change.46 Saints’ lives are ‘symbolic’ or ‘emblematic’, transcending literal meaning, collapsing historical difference into the eternity of sacred time.47 In this sacramental world, the invisible takes on corporeity, so the saint’s virtus (both ‘virtue’ and ‘power’) takes on tangible expression in the incorruptibility of the flesh. The ideology of the saint’s life lends it a high degree of literary self-consciousness: hagiographers may draw freely on genres like epic and romance, but are careful to position themselves as superior. The earliest saints’ lives established themselves in an oppositional relationship to the epic, with which they share their public setting, their dramatic form, their hero’s invulnerability to pain and contempt of death. The heroic vocabulary of honour, courage and glory is appropriated to describe the saint’s triumph over death.48 This new Christian heroism claims to transcend and displace the secular variety: Sulpicius Severus, in his Preface to the Vita Martini, expresses hope that this work will ‘rouse the enthusiasm of its readers for the true wisdom, for heavenly military service Heilagra manna søgur, I, 208. Heffernan, Sacred Biography, pp. 20, 86–7, 115. 46 Hugh Magennis, ‘Conversion in Old English Saints’ Lives’, in Essays in Anglo-Saxon and Related Themes in Memory of Lynne Grundy, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet Nelson (London: King’s College London Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2000), pp. 287, 291; for examples of doubt or weakness in early saints, see Heilagra manna søgur, I, 478 (Margaret), 565 (Martin). 47 Heffernan, Sacred Biography, pp. 11, 94–7; Hill, ‘Imago Dei’, p. 48; Perrot, ‘Figures du temps’, p. 58; Vauchez, ‘The Saint’, p. 313. 48 Carole Ellen Straw, ‘“A Very Special Death”: Christian Martyrdom in its Classical Context’, in Sacrificing the Self: Perspectives on Martyrdom and Religion, ed. Margaret Cormack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 39–46; Altman, ‘Two Types of Opposition’, p. 3; Elliott, Roads to Paradise, pp. 22–32. 44

45

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders and for divine heroism’. He describes himself as pursuing not ‘empty renown from our fellow men, but an everlasting reward from God’.49 So, although the term ‘heroic virtue’ (borrowed by Aquinas from Aristotle) did not become an official criterion for sainthood until the late eighteenth century, saints are from the beginning understood as heroic.50 This is the case not just for the martyr, but also for the desert saint, who travels to the edges of the known world to overthrow devils and cleanse the land: Antony is physically battered by his demonic foes, but emerges as ‘ósigraðr guðs kappi’ (‘an undefeated champion of God’).51 In the lives of missionary saints, the mission field becomes the new battlefield, on which the saint fights with spiritual (and sometimes literal) weapons to extend the boundaries of Christendom. This close relationship between hagiography and epic is clearly seen in Old English poetry: works like Andreas and Guthlac make self-conscious use of secular epic and heroic biography to question what heroism might mean.52 Andreas, for example, opens with what Boenig describes (with some disapproval) as the ‘rattle of heroic language’.53 The apostles are ‘þeodnes þegnas’ (‘thanes of the Prince’), winning glory in battle (lines 9–11):54      þonne rond ond hand on herefelda helm ealgodon on meotodwange.      [whenever shield and hand on the battlefield defended helmets on the field of the Lord.]

In Iceland, Bishop Guðmundr Arason is the saintly figure who comes closest to this heroic model, wrestling trolls and defeating sea-serpents in true Beowulfian style. Ciklamini describes how one of his hagiographers, Abbot Arngrímr Brandsson, ‘coopt[s]’ aspects of epic and folktale to represent Guðmundr as a hero whose ‘spiritual strength encompasses physical strength as well’. She argues that his ‘succession to the traditional hero is, hence, one of superiority’.55 49 50 51

52

53 54

55

Early Christian Lives, ed. and trans. Carolinne White (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 135–6. K. V. Truhlar, ‘Virtue, Heroic’, in New Catholic Encyclopedia, XIV, 554–5. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 57. Anita R. Riedinger, ‘The Formulaic Relationship between Beowulf and Andreas’, in Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Period, ed. Helen Damico and John Leyerle (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), pp. 283–312; Alaric Hall, ‘Constructing AngloSaxon Sanctity: Tradition, Innovation and Saint Guthlac’, in Images of Sanctity: Essays in Honour of Gary Dickson, ed. Debra Hicks Strickland (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 207–35. Robert Boenig, Saint and Hero: Andreas and Medieval Doctrine (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1991), p. 65. Andreas and the Fates of the Apostles, ed. Kenneth Brooks (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 1. On the relationship between Andreas and Beowulf, see Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge: Brewer, 2003), pp. 163–6. Marlene Ciklamini, ‘Folklore and Hagiography in Arngrímr’s Guðmundar saga

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Perhaps the most significant difference between the saint and the epic hero is that the saint is never an autonomous figure, drawing strength from his or her self-assertion and the power of the human will. Rather, he or she acts in obedience to the will of God and as a channel of divine power.56 From a hagiographic point of view, this gives the saint an edge over the traditional hero, who is susceptible to the dangers of pride and overreaching, and who ultimately fails to realise the limits of his bodily strength. So hagiography does not so much share the heroic ideal as appropriate and reinterpret it, claiming not equivalence between saint and hero, but a redefinition of what true heroism means. While the saint’s life is, then, a type of heroic biography, it can be seen to resist many of the underlying assumptions of this form.

Translated and native hagiography As heroic biographies, the saints’ lives were of obvious interest to the saga authors; they were among the earliest extant prose works in Iceland and the only epic prose attested before the written sagas. The earliest reference to a saint’s life dates from c. 1130, when Ari Þorgilsson alludes to a ‘saga’ about St Edmund (probably in Latin); the very last legendary is dated to c. 1530 and consists of the low German translations in Reykjahólabók.57 The First Grammatical Treatise includes helgar þýðingar among the earliest written texts in Iceland, alongside laws (written down in 1117–18), genealogy, and Ari Þorgilsson’s Íslendingabók (c. 1130).58 The referent of þýðingar is somewhat uncertain in this context: its primary meaning is not ‘translations’ but ‘expositions’ or ‘interpretations’, probably referring to homilies and learned writings such as Physiologus and Elucidarius, all of which are preserved in manuscripts dating from the twelfth century.59 The early collections of homilies include a range of short hagiographic narratives: the Old Icelandic Homily Book, preserved in Stock. Perg. 4to nr 15 and dating from c. 1200, contains sermons on the Apostles, the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, St Michael, St Stephen and All Saints. The sermon on the apostles gives ‘þýðingu nafnanna’ (‘translations’ or ‘interpretations’ of their names) and insists on the importance of knowing their lives: ‘Kostgæfum vér at vita hvat

56 57

58 59

Arasonar’, in The Fantastic in Old Norse/Icelandic Literature. Sagas and the British Isles. Preprint Papers of the 13th International Saga Conference, ed. John McKinnell, David Ashurst and Donata Kick (Durham: The Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), p. 178. Straw, ‘A Very Special Death’, pp. 42–3. Íslendingabók, Landnámabók, ed. Jakob Benediktsson, Íslenzk fornrit 1 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1968), p. 4; Kalinke, The Book of Reykjahólar, p. 37; Jørgen H. Jørgensen, ‘Hagiography and the Icelandic Bishops’ Sagas’, Peritia 1 (1982), 4. First Grammatical Treatise: The Earliest Germanic Phonology, ed. and trans. Einar Haugen (London: Longman, 1972), pp. 12–13. Sverrir Tómasson, ‘The History of Old Nordic Manuscripts I: Old Icelandic’, in The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the North Germanic Languages, ed. Oskar Bandle, 2 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002–5), I (2002), 794.

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders postolar kenndu eða hvat þeir gerðu, því at jõfn heilsugata er í verkum þeira sem í kenningum þeira’ (‘Let us make an effort to find out what the apostles taught and what they did, because the way to salvation is [present] as much in their deeds as in their teachings’). They are both exemplars and intercessors, whose power is accessed through veneration: ‘Gõfgum vér guðs postola á jõrðu til þess at þeir sé árnendr várir á himni’ (‘Let us honour God’s apostles on earth in order that they may be our intercessors in heaven’).60 Likewise, the sermon on St Stephen educates the audience in how to respond to his life: ‘Sá er góðr er glíkisk Stephano í staðfesti góðra hluta; en sá er vándr er, finni hann dœmi leiðréttingar Páls’ (‘He is good who imitates Stephen in holding firm to good things, but let the one who is evil find an example in the conversion of Paul’).61 In the Old Norwegian Homily Book, preserved in AM 619 4to and dating from c. 1200–25, the sermon for All Saints describes the saints in hierarchical order, providing guidance on which virtue each one represents: the audience is encouraged to learn humility from the Virgin Mary, obedience from the angels, generosity from the apostles, patience from the martyrs, and chastity from the virgins. To remember and imitate the saints is to procure some guarantee of their support in the next life: that they will be ‘árnendr várir ok tœjendr á dómsdegi’ (‘our intercessors and helpers on the day of judgement’).62 By 1200, then, there was already a variety of hagiographic stories in the homilies, and an expectation that lay people will benefit from the lessons to be learned through the example of the saints. Outside the homilies, fragments of saints’ lives survive from the second half of the twelfth century: the earliest extant manuscripts are AM 655 4to IX, dating from c. 1150–1200, which contains fragments from a Norwegian translation of the lives of Matthew, Blasius and Plácidus (Eustace) and AM 655 4to III, dating from c. 1190–1210, which contains the end of the life of St Nicholas and some miracles. A manuscript from c. 1200–25, AM 677 4to, includes a translation of Gregory’s Dialogues, also extant in a twelfth-century Norwegian version, and other early fragments contain short passages to be read on the feast-days of Cuthbert and Benedict.63 The earliest extant Icelandic compilation is AM 645 4to, the first part of which dates to c. 1220. It contains the miracles of Þorlákr, followed by the lives of Clement, Peter, Jacob, Bartholomew, Matthew and Andrew. The second part, dating from c. 1225–50, includes a different version of the life of Andrew, the life of Paul, the Gospel of Nicodemus (Niðrstigningar saga) and the Life of Martin. Other saints whose lives were in circulation before 1250 include John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Erasmus, Silvester, Vincent and Basil, as well as some miracles of the Virgin Mary.64 Veneration of Mary Homiliu-bók, p. 19. Homiliu-bók, p. 178. 62 Gamal norsk Homiliebok, ed. Gustav Indrebø (Kristiania: Dybwad, 1931), pp. 145–7. 63 Kirsten Wolf, The Legends of the Saints in Old Norse-Icelandic Prose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 59–60; Sverrir Tómasson, ‘The History of Old Nordic Manuscripts I’, p. 786. 64 Jonas Wellendorf, ‘The Attraction of the Earliest Old Norse Vernacular Hagiography’, 60 61

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The Saint and the Saga Hero was particularly strong in the Northern Quarter, where the cathedral in Hólar was dedicated to her: Maríu saga was probably composed in c. 1215–37 by the priest Kyrgi-Bjõrn Hjaltason, although the earliest manuscript dates from the mid-fourteenth century.65 A number of later poems about Mary may be dependent on the saga; they include meditations on the sorrows of Mary, and a number of lively and unconventional miracles. In one, Mary saves the life of a cleric who drowns on his return from a visit to his mistress, snatching him from the clutches of demons because he died with the prayer Ave Maria on his lips.66 With the exception of Mary, these early saints are all male: Wellendorf notes the priority given to apostles, biblical characters and martyrs, although Martin and Benedict both exemplify the confessor saint. He suggests that the early translations show less interest in ‘blood and gore’ (the notorious torture scenes) than in ‘the public confrontation of the saint with those in power’, a theme that resonates with the encounters in the sagas between Icelanders and Norwegian kings.67 Indeed, the Old Norwegian Homily Book defines the martyrs as ‘þeir er fyrirlítu þessa heims líf ok boðorð heiðinna konunga’ (‘those who despised the life of this world and the commands of heathen kings’): for this homilist, the conflict between saint and ruler is part of what martyrdom means.68 There is also a strong attraction to Clement and Plácidus, whose lives Delehaye categorises as ‘passions romantiques’ (‘romance passiones’): these look unmistakably like sagas, with plots of multiple strands, involving noble heathens, journeys abroad, and family dramas.69 The popularity of Clement is not, perhaps, unexpected; he was patron of the first church to be built in Niðaróss.70 Plácidus is more intriguing, as there is no evidence of his cult in Iceland other than his mention in the liturgy.Yet his life is of keen literary interest: it is the subject of an impressive skaldic poem, surviving in a manuscript dating from c. 1200 (AM 673 b 4to), where it is found alongside Physiologus and some homiletic material, including the Old Norse ship allegory. It is the only twelfth-century poem in a near-contemporary manuscript and perhaps the first about a foreign saint. Louis-Jensen has shown that it is dependent on the prose life of Plácidus, and in Saints and their Lives on the Periphery: Veneration of Saints in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe (c. 1000–1200), ed. Haki Antonsson and Ildar H. Garipzanov (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), p. 246. 65 Wolf, Legends of the Saints, p. 231; Sverrir Tómasson, ‘Kristnar trúarbókmenntir’, in Íslensk bókmenntasaga, I, ed Guðrún Nordal, Sverrir Tómasson and Vésteinn Ólason (Reykjavík: Mál og Menning, 1992), p. 462. 66 Máríuvísur II, ed. Kari Ellen Gade, in Poetry on Christian Subjects, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross, Part 2: The Fourteenth Century, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 718–38. On poetry about Mary, see also Kellinde Wrightson, Fourteenth-Century Icelandic Verse on the Virgin Mary (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2001). 67 Wellendorf, ‘Old Norse Vernacular Hagiography’, p. 248. 68 Gamal norsk Homiliebok, p. 145. 69 Delehaye, Les passions des martyrs, pp. 238, 317. 70 Dietrich Hofmann, Die Legende von Sankt Clemens in den skandinavischen Ländern im Mittelalter, Beiträge zur Skandinavistik 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1997), pp. 277–82.

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders may have been written to accompany it and to provide a focus for meditation.71 Other early poetry about saints survives only in fragments, but there are enough of these to suggest that religious poetry flourished from the twelfth to the thirteenth century. A manuscript of Jóns saga postola from c. 1350–1400 preserves stanzas on St John the Evangelist by three twelfth-century poets: three by Nikulás Bergsson (died 1159/60), four by Gamli kanóki (mid to late twelfth century) and five by Kolbeinn Tumason (died 1208), who is also said to have composed a poem in praise of Mary, now lost. The manuscript belonged to Hof in Vatnsdalr and also contained an image of St John; it has been described as a medieval opus geminatum (‘twinned work’), in which prose and poetry complement one another.72 Other early hagiographic poetry has survived in grammatical treatises: two stanzas on Thomas Becket by Óláfr hvítaskáld Þórðarson (died 1259), nephew of Snorri Sturluson, and stanzas on Nicholas and Mary from the twelfth and thirteenth century.73 Later poetry on the saints, from the fourteenth and early fifteenth century, survives mainly in sixteenthcentury anthologies from the North: there are poems on St Peter, St Andrew and St Catherine of Alexandria, as well as catalogue poems on the apostles, other saints (including Knútr and Hallvarðr), and the virgin martyrs (including a stanza on Sunniva).74 The stanzas on St Peter, like those on St John the Evangelist, are appended to a manuscript of his saga (AM 621 4to, dating from c. 1450–1500); they are not organised chronologically, but foreground particular themes, one of which is Peter’s denial and tears of repentance, which heal and purify from sin.75 When hagiography first arrived in Iceland, it came as a foreign genre, but it was not long before the Icelanders began to compose their own vitae. Cormack describes Oddr Snorrason’s life of King Óláfr Tryggvason, dating from c. 1190, as ‘the first Icelandic attempt at original hagiography’.76 It was followed in c. 1200 by two hagiographic poems in skaldic metre: Hallar-Steinn’s Rekstefja and the anonymous Óláfs drápa Tryggvasonar.77 The earliest life of St Óláfr Haraldsson 71

72 73 74

75 76

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John Tucker, ‘St Eustace in Iceland: On the Origins, Structure and Possible Influence of the Plácítus saga’, in Les sagas de chevaliers (riddarasögur), ed. Régis Boyer (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1985), pp. 327–39; Plácidus saga, ed. John Tucker, Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, Series B, 31 (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1998), pp. xxxi, xcii, cii; Plácitusdrápa, ed. Jonna Louis-Jensen and Tarrin Wills, in Poetry on Christian Subjects, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross, Part I: The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 179–81. Poetry on Christian Subjects, 7.2, xlvi, xlix, 66–9, 70, 133–6, 223. Poetry on Christian Subjects, 7.2, xliii. Poetry on Christian Subjects, 7.2, xliv, 796–7 (Pétrsdrápa), 845 (Andréasdrápa), 852–3 (Allra postula minnisvísur), 872 (Heilagra manna drápa), 891 (Heilagra meyja drápa), 931–2 (Kátrínardrápa). Pétrsdrápa, ed. David McDougall, in Poetry on Christian Subjects, 7.2, xlvi, 796–7. Margaret Cormack, ‘Sagas of Saints’, in Old Icelandic Literature and Society, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross, Studies in Medieval Literature 42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 306. Hallar-Steinn, Rekstefja, ed. Rolf Stavnem, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1: From

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The Saint and the Saga Hero was probably composed around the same time or slightly later; some miracles survive in a fragmentary manuscript dating from the mid-thirteenth century (AM 325 IV α).78 St Óláfr’s life and miracles were also the subject of three much earlier religious poems: Sigvatr Þórðarson’s Erfidrápa and Þórarinn loftunga’s Glælognskviða, both composed shortly after Óláfr’s death in 1031, and Einarr Skúlason’s Geisli, which was composed for recitation in Niðaróss cathedral on Óláfr’s feast day, 29 July 1153.79 A few early narratives about saints are embedded in other works too: Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar incorporates a vernacular version of the legend of Sunniva, a virgin martyr, while Orkneyinga saga, usually dated to c. 1200, includes an account of the martyrdom of St Magnús of Orkney, which took place in 1117.80 These early hagiographic endeavours soon culminated in the life of the first Icelandic saint: Þorlákr Þórhallsson, bishop of Skálaholt, whose cult may have developed in response to the failure of Óláfr Tryggvason’s.81 His body was translated in 1198 and he was declared a saint in 1200; there is a fragment of a Latin vita from around the same time, and the first vernacular life was written before 1211; it survives in a fragment from the mid-thirteenth century (AM 383 4to I), as well as in two later versions.82 A second Icelander, Jón Õgmundarson, bishop of Hólar, was translated in 1199 and also declared a saint in 1200. A Latin life, based on Þorlákr’s, was composed by the monk Gunnlaugr Leifsson (died 1218), who also compiled some of Þorlákr’s miracles and revised Oddr’s life of Óláfr Tryggvason. It looks as if the impetus for both these cults came from the north of Iceland, where they were promoted by Bishop Guðmundr Arason

78 79

80

81 82

Mythical Times to c. 1035, ed. Diana Whaley, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 893–939; Óláfs drápa Tryggvasonar, ed. Kate Heslop, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, 1.2, 1031–60. Sverrir Tómasson, ‘Kristnar trúarbókmenntir’, pp. 451–3. Katrina Attwood, ‘Christian Poetry’, in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), pp. 47–52; Martin Chase, ‘Christian Poetry: West Norse’, in Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia (London and New York: Garland, 1993), ed. Phillip Pulsiano et al., pp. 74–5; Erin Goeres, The Poetics of Commemoration: Skaldic Verse and Social Memory, c. 890–1070 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 111–45. On Sunniva, see Thomas DuBois, ‘Sts Sunniva and Henrik’, in Sanctity in the North: Saints, Lives and Cults in Medieval Scandinavia, ed. Thomas DuBois, Toronto Old Norse-Icelandic Series 3 (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 66–84; on Magnús, see Maria-Claudia Tomany, ‘Sacred Non-Violence, Cowardice Profaned: St Magnus of Orkney in Nordic Hagiography and Historiography’, in the same volume, pp. 128–53 and Carl Phelpstead, Holy Vikings: Saints’ Lives in the Old Icelandic Kings’ Sagas, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 340 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007), pp. 85–91. Kirsten Wolf, ‘Pride and Politics in Late-Twelfth-Century Iceland’, in Sanctity in the North, ed. Thomas Dubois, p. 243. Wolf, ‘Pride and Politics’, p. 248; Sverrir Tómasson, ‘Kristnar trúarbókmenntir’, pp. 473–4; Ásdís Egilsdóttir, ‘The Beginnings of Local Hagiography in Iceland: The Lives of Bishops Thorlakr and Jon’, in The Making of Christian Myths in the Periphery of Latin Christendom (c. 1000–1300), ed. Lars Boje Mortenssen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), pp. 121–3, 125–8.

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders in cooperation with the Benedictine monks at the monastery of Þingeyrar.83 A more sober school of hagiographic writing developed in the south: Hungrvaka and Páls saga byskups date from the beginning of the thirteenth century, followed in the fourteenth century by Árna saga biskups and Lárentíus saga biskups. Ásdís Egilsdóttir makes a strong case for classing these as a branch of hagiography, although none of them are technically about saints.84 This flurry of hagiographic writing shows that, by the early thirteenth century, the Icelanders were familiar enough with the conventions of the genre to produce some exemplary saints’ lives of their own.85 Moreover, the speed with which we move from early experimentation in Latin to the writing of fully fledged vernacular sagas suggests a growing confidence with different kinds of hagiographic narrative. The rapid acceptance of saints’ lives as a vernacular literary genre is supported by the lack of distinction between translated and original texts: church inventories distinguish between books in Latin and books in the vernacular, but do not record whether these are translations.86 In manuscript collections, Norwegian and Icelandic saints often appear alongside their international cousins; the compilers clearly did not consider that translated and native saints’ lives constituted separate genres.87 The lives of Icelandic saints showcase many visions in which foreign saints play a part: Martin of Tours appears to Þorlákr in one vision, and works with him to help a poor single mother; while Blasius, a bishop in Armenia, appears to an Icelandic shepherd, who has called on him and Þorlákr to heal his sore throat.88 Conversely, the translated vitae include some miracles performed on behalf of Icelanders: an early-fifteenth-century manuscript of Cecilíu saga includes two miracles that took place at Húsafell in the west, perhaps in connection with Þorlákr’s decision in 1179 to prescribe observance of her feast-day by law.89 83

84

85

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87 88 89

Biskupa sögur, I (2003), cclxxxiii–ccxcii; Joanna A. Skórzewska, Constructing a Cult: The Life and Veneration of Guðmundr Arason (1161–1237) in the Icelandic Written Sources, Northern World 51 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), p. 210. Ásdís Egilsdóttir, ‘Heilagra manna sögur’, in Kristni á Íslandi II, ed. Hjalti Hugason, Sigurjón Einarsson and Gunnar F. Guðmundarson (Reykjavík: Alþingi, 2000), p. 38 and ‘Eru biskupasögur til?’, Skáldskaparmál 2 (1992), 207–20; despite the classification of bishops’ sagas under ‘secular saga-writing’ in his literary history, Sverrir Tómasson makes a similar point in ‘Veraldleg sagnaritun 1120–1400’, in Íslensk bókmenntasaga, I, p. 345. Jørgensen, ‘Hagiography’, p. 8; cf. Sverrir Tómasson, ‘Kristnar trúarbókmenntir’, p. 475; Ásdís Egilsdóttir, ‘Local Hagiography’, p. 130; Wolf, ‘Pride and Politics’, pp. 249–50. On bibical citation in Þorláks saga helga, see Pernille Hermann, ‘Saga Literature, Cultural Memory and Storage’, Scandinavian Studies 85 (2013), 337–40. Lars Lönnroth, European Sources of Icelandic Saga-Writing: An Essay Based on Previous Studies (Stockholm: Thule, 1965), pp. 6–7; reprinted in his The Academy of Odin: Selected Papers on Old Norse Literature (Copenhagen: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2011), pp. 13–23. Margaret Cormack, ‘Christian Biography’, in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk, p. 27. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 301, 329, II (2002), 79, 284–5. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 294–5; Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 74, 181, 241.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Cecilia’s patronage of the household at Húsafell is ascribed to the devotion of Guðrún Óspaksdóttir, granddaughter of Guðrún Ósvífsdóttir, the heroine of Laxdœla saga. We are told that she ‘hafði mikla virðing á Cecilíu ok lét heilagt dag hennar ok fastaði fyrir’ (‘had great esteem for Cecilia and observed her feast-day and fasted before it’).90 A visitor named Þorgils seeks healing there for an injured leg; he fasts before Cecilia’s feast-day and wakes up the next day healed. In a dramatic retrospective, he describes how he was seized by two demons, who pulled him from his bed by his hair and sore foot and proceeded to rip out his heart. Cecilia then appears, surrounded by light, and replaces his heart in his chest. She heals his leg and interprets the vision, admonishing him to live better from then on. A series of visions in Maríu saga are located at Kálfafell, Svínafell and Kirkjubœr in the south and east of Iceland: Mary appears once on her own and twice with Bishop Guðmundr Arason to help women with unwanted pregnancies. At Kálfafell, she also cooperates with St Nicholas and St Þorlákr, to whom the church there was dedicated.91 The same cooperation across national borders is found in Hemmings þáttr Ásláksson, a short story interpolated into Flateyjarbók: the hero is saved by a relic of St Stephen and a vision of St Óláfr, and a further miracle leads to the building of a church at Melstaðr where Stephen’s relic is safely housed.92 The Icelandic saints participate enthusiastically in the international arena of sanctity; they confirm their efficacy alongside their foreign counterparts. In Magnús saga lengri, the author singles them out as a sign of God’s grace to Iceland: ‘Vér erum eigi fjarlægir guðs miskunn, þó at vér sém fjarlægir õðrum þjóðum at heims vistum’ (‘We are not far from God’s mercy, even though we are far from other nations in the habitations of the world’).93 This lively participation in the communion of saints establishes Iceland, despite its peripheral location, as a new centre within the Christian world. It is not surprising, then, that so much early literary activity was hagiographic in nature, as Iceland marked its arrival in Christian Europe. The ‘Golden Age’ of Icelandic hagiography, however, falls in the late thirteenth to fourteenth century, a period characterised not only by new translations, but also by the creation of new works from pre-existing ones, with the compiler acting as translator and commentator in a self-consciously literary way.94 It is dominated 90

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92 93 94

Heilagra manna søgur, I, 295; Laxdœla saga, ed. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 5 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1934), p. 227; cf. Margaret Cormack, The Saints in Iceland: Their Veneration from the Conversion to 1400 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1994), pp. 21, 89. Maríu saga: Legender om Jomfru Maria og hendes jertegn efter gamle haandskrifter, ed. Carl R. Unger (Christiania: Brögger & Christie, 1871), pp. 154–7; cf. Cormack, Saints in Iceland, p. 137. Hemmings þáttr Áslákssonar, ed. Gillian Fellows Jensen, Editiones Arnamagnæanæ B, 3 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1962), pp. 23–8. Orkneyinga saga, ed. Finnbogi Guðmundsson, Íslenzk fornrit 34 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1965), p. 335. Simonetta Battista, ‘The Compilator and Contemporary Literary Culture in Old Norse Hagiography’, Viking and Medieval Studies 1 (2005), 11.

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders by the Northern Benedictine school of hagiography, associated with named writers at the monasteries of Þingeyrar and Mõðruvellir: Grímr Hólmsteinsson (died 1298), who wrote Jóns saga baptista; Bergr Sokkason (died 1370), author of Nikolaus saga, Michaels saga and Lárentíus saga; Arngrímr Brandsson, author of Thomas saga II and Guðmundar saga D; and Árni Lárentíusson, son of Bishop Lárentíus and author of Dunstanus saga.95 All these sagas are compiled from multiple sources: Bergr Sokkason’s Nikolás saga, for example, draws on Gregory’s Dialogues, Isidore of Seville and Augustine, as well as a Latin life of Nicholas. It was enormously influential; there are more records for this saga in church inventories than for any other saint’s life.96 The style of these sagas is very different from that of the early saints’ lives: it has been labeled ‘florid’ and is perhaps influenced by Franciscan and Dominican writing.97 It sets hagiography apart as a highly specialised aesthetic experience, which yields meaning only to those who can appreciate it. In his life of St Nicholas, Bergr Sokkason describes how ‘Heilagra manna líf er sem skuggsjó, í þeiri skuggsjó lítum vér fagra ásjánu lífs þeira ok vára atferð ólíka því, er saugaðir erum í margfõldum syndum’ (‘The life of saints is like a mirror; in that mirror we see the beautiful appearance of their life and the dissimilar behaviour of ourselves, who are enmired in manifold sins’).98 This emphasis on beauty is reflected in Helgastaðabók, the main manuscript in which this life surives: it is one of the most splendid to have been produced in Iceland, with three full-page illustrations and fifteen historiated initials. It belonged to the church at Helgastaðir, of which Nicholas was co-patron.99 Another impressive manuscript, from slightly earlier, is the Codex Scardensis: compiled c. 1360–75 in Helgafell for the chieftain and lawman Ormr Snorrason, it contains acts of the apostles in both simple and florid style. The largest vernacular legendary to be produced in Iceland was Stock. Perg. fol. nr 2, from c. 1425–45: it included classic saints like Martin and Nicholas, contemporary ones like Thomas Becket, Church Fathers (Augustine, Gregory), desert saints (Paul of Thebes, Mary of Egypt, Mary and Martha) and virgins (Catherine, Cecilia, Agnes).100 Sverrir Tómasson, ‘Trúarbókmenntir í lausu máli á síðmiðöld’, in Íslensk bókmenntasaga, II, ed. Sverrir Tómasson, Vésteinn Ólason and Torfi Tulinius (Reykjavík: Mál og Menning, 1993), pp. 249–54. 96 Cormack, Saints in Iceland, p. 137. 97 Ásdís Egilsdóttir, ‘Klaustrreglur og bókmenntir’, in Kristni á Íslandi, II, pp. 244–5; on ‘florid style’, see Hans Bekker-Nielsen, Thorkil Damsgaard Olsen and Ole Widding, Norrøn fortællekunst: Kapitler af den norsk-islandske middelalderlitteraturs historie (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1965) pp. 132–6. 98 Heilagra manna søgur, II, 158. 99 Helgastaðabók: Nikolás saga: Perg. 4to nr. 16, Konungsbókhlöðu í Stokkhólmi, ed. Stefán Karlsson, Sverrir Tómasson and Selma Jónsdóttir, Íslensk miðaldahandrit 2 (Reykjavík: S. Kristinsson, 1992), pp. 184, 189, 202–18. 100 Codex Scardensis, ed. Desmond Slay, Early Icelandic Manuscripts in Facsimile 2 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1960), pp. 9, 13; Lives of Saints: Perg. fol. nr. 2 in the Royal Library, Stockholm, ed. Peter Foote, Early Icelandic Manuscripts in Facsimile 4 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1962), pp. 18–28. 95

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The Saint and the Saga Hero These vast hagiographic manuscripts provide a literary context for the compilations of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar and Óláfs saga helga, which interpolate the lives of royal saints (or saints-to-be) with sagas and short stories about Icelanders. AM 61 fol., AM 53 fol. and AM 54 fol. all date from the late fourteenth century and, in Bergsbók, which is dated to the early fifteenth century, the compilation is attributed to Bergr Sokkason.101 Tómasskinna, dating from c. 1400, combines native and foreign lives: it places Arngrímr Brandsson’s life of Thomas Becket next to Snorri’s separate saga of St Óláfr, the most important of English archbishops alongside the best known Scandinavian king.102 It looks as if, by this stage, the generic boundaries between saints’ lives and kings’ sagas are no longer very clearly marked. Although the florid style sets the hagiography of this period apart, in other ways it is moving closer to secular literature: the lives of saints are expanded with chronological and genealogical details, narrowing the gap between sacred and secular biography.103 The rapprochement between saint’s life and secular biography reaches its peak in the sagas of Guðmundr Arason, but it can be seen as early as c. 1230 in Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar. Ásdís Egilsdóttir has argued that Hrafn may have been anticipated as a potential saint: he is presented as ‘pilgrim and martyr’ and, like Óláfr Tryggvason, lacks only posthumous miracles. His death scene certainly embeds echoes of the martyrdoms of Magnús of Orkney and Thomas Becket, whose shrine in Canterbury Hrafn had visited. Before he is struck down, he falls to his knees in prayer, and his blood transforms the place of death from rocky ground to a ‘grœnn võllr’ (‘green plain’), evoking the green fields of Paradise.104 A reference to the apostle Andrew is also embedded in this part of the saga: the evening before Hrafn is killed, he asks to hear a poem about Andrew’s martyrdom and, the same night, a priest dreams about ‘písl Andreas postula’ (‘the passion of the apostle Andrew’).105 Úlfar Bragason describes his saga as ‘blending’ or ‘intermingling’ saint’s life and secular saga in such a way as to foreground a ‘clear confrontation between value systems’. He argues that ‘Hrafn’s innocent death is a denial of the feud system’.106 Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar was an important source for the fourteenthcentury sagas about Guðmundr Arason, which were written to promote his sanctity, although it was never formally recognised. There are six versions of his life, four of which were written after the translation of his bones in 1315. 101 102 103 104

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Bergsbók: Perg. fol. nr. 1 in the Royal Library, Stockholm, ed. Gustaf Lindblad (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagge, 1963), pp. 12–13. Wolf, Legends of the Saints, p. 357. Sverrir Tómasson, ‘Kristnar trúarbókmenntir’, pp. 253–4; Cormack, ‘Saints’ Lives and Icelandic Literature’, pp. 30–2. Ásdís Egildóttir, ‘Pílagrímur og píslarvottur’, in Kristni á Íslandi, II, pp. 70–4; Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar, ed. Guðrún P. Helgadóttir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. lxi–lxxiv. Hrafns saga, pp. lxxx, 41; Orkneyinga saga, pp. 110–11, 321–2. Úlfar Bragason, ‘The Struture and Meaning of Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar’, Scandinavian Studies 60 (1988), 267–72.

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders The first, known as Prests saga, is part of the compilation in Sturlunga saga; the later sagas are a complex mixture of saint’s life and historical chronicle. Their sources include the Icelandic annals and Arons saga Hjõrleifssonar (c. 1340), which was probably also written in connection with the attempt to have Guðmundr canonised in 1330. The fourteenth-century lives of Guðmundr are very different from the classic vitae of Þorlákr and Jón. They are rich in genealogy and in skaldic verse, making them more like sagas of Icelanders: Skórzewska describes them as ‘a hagiography in accordance with the Icelandic saga tradition’.107 Although allusions to many earlier saints are embedded in his life, Guðmundr represents a new model of sanctity: he performs an unusual number of miracles while still alive, and makes controversial use of relics and holy water.108 Although Arngrímr Brandsson styles him as an Icelandic Thomas Becket, he has good relations with some secular leaders: Skórzewska has argued that his cult thrived precisely because it had support in influential circles.109 Three of his miracles are performed at Svínafell for the chieftain Sigurðr Ormsson, and his most stringent opponent, Kolbeinn Túmason, surrenders to him before death, asking for his prayers.110 His saintliness, moreover, is expressed in part through the nobility of his ancestry: his father Ari lays down his life to save a Norwegian jarl, while his uncle, the priest Ingimundr, dies in the Greenlandic wilderness, where his body is eventually found ‘whole and undecayed’ alongside a runic account of his last moments.111 Guðmundr’s hagiographers go to some pains here to validate Vauchez’s idea of ‘hagiocracy’ (p. 5). The hagiographic corpus surrounding Guðmundr also includes several long skaldic poems, three by Einarr Gilsson (including Selkolluvísur), two by Arngrímr Brandsson (a drápa and a kvæði), and a drápa and lausavísur (‘detached verses’) by Árni Jónsson, abbot of Munka-Þverá.112 With the lives of Guðmundr, then, we see how local hagiography changes and develops in response to audience expectation and the popularity of vernacular genres.

Sanctity outside the saint’s Life Most importantly, sanctity is not confined to potential or actual saints; it is seen all around in everyday life, as is suggested in Gregory’s Dialogues. Around the edges of official sainthood cluster all sorts of hagiographic cameos, especially 107

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110 111

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Skórzewska, Constructing a Cult, pp. 27–8; Cormack, ‘Sagas of Saints’, p. 309. Skórzewska, Constructing a Cult, pp. 29, 65, 96, 277; Cormack, ‘Holy Wells’, p. 231; Ásdís Egilsdóttir, ‘Áheit og helgir dómar’, in Kristni á Íslandi, II, p. 295. For allusions to other saints, see Biskupa sögur, ed. Jón Sigurðarson and Guðbrandur Vigfússon, 2 vols (Copenhagen: Hið íslenzka bókmenntafélag, 1858–78), I, 438, 465, 468, 469, 470, 473, 594, II, 11. Skórzewska, Constructing a Cult, pp. 150, 207; Biskupa sögur (1858–78), II, 109. Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 467–70, II, 70. Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 414, 435. Poetry on Christian Subjects, 7.2, xlii.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero of marginalised figures like women and children. Iceland produced no female saints, but Jóns saga helga contains a vita in miniature of the anchoress Hildr, who flees from her disapproving family to live an ascetic life in true desertsaint style.113 A book of Þorlákr’s miracles includes a vision experienced by an anchoress called Úlfrún, who is commended elsewhere for refusing to see her son: ‘Hon hélt svá ríkt einsetu sína, at hon vildi eigi, at sonr hennar kœmi til hennar, svá at hon sæi hann, þá er hann sótti hana heim’ (‘She kept her anchoritic vows so strictly, that she refused to see her son when he came to visit her’).114 In Guðmundar saga byskups, we are told that Guðmundr’s funeral oration for a third anchoress, Ketilbjõrg, was so impressive that those present ‘virðu [. . .] henni til heilagleiks’ (‘considered it [. . .] a token of her sanctity’).115 One thinks also of Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir in Grœnlendinga saga and Guðrún Ósvífsdóttir in Laxdœla saga, who both become anchoresses in their old age.116 Guðmundar saga byskups lends an aura of sanctity to the death of innocent children: a boy named Gestr, who dies tragically with many others in a heavy snowstorm, appears in a vision to one of the few survivors, revealing that he is now in heaven with his playmate Vermundr, whom he describes as Guðmundr’s aðaltúlkr (‘main intercessor’).117 It is easy to understand why the senseless death of two young boys might have been reconfigured as their accession to heavenly powers; in Vauchez’s words, ‘pity provokes piety’ and ‘victims become martyrs, hence saints’.118 These stories show the extent to which sanctity was recognised locally in Iceland, flourishing in and around ecclesiastical centres. Unofficial hagiographic cameos are found across other genres too, including royal biography and historical chronicle. Haki Antonsson writes about the presence of ‘oral hagiography’ in sagas about secular leaders, where hagiographic motifs cluster around death scenes in the absence of any official cult.119 In the contemporary sagas too, many death scenes are drawn along hagiographic lines. Sveinn Jónsson chants the Ave Maria while his hands and feet are chopped off; Ari Finsson is heard singing the Maríuvísur as he is killed; and Órækja Snorrason calls on Bishop Þorlákr and sings a prayer to Mary while he is being maimed.120 The power of the saint is acknowledged in a number of political confrontations: 113 114

115 116

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118

119

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Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 244–7, II (2002), 241–2. Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 478. Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 466. Grœnlendinga saga, in Eyrbyggja saga, Eiríks saga rauða, ed. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson and Matthías Þorðarson, Íslenzk fornrit 4 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1935), p. 269; Laxdœla saga, p. 228. Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 444–5; for túlkr, see Heilagra manna søgur, II, 309. Vauchez, Sainthood, p. 151. Haki Antonsson, ‘Insigne Crucis: A European Motif in a Nordic Setting’, in The North Sea World in the Middle Ages, ed. Thomas R. Liszka and Lorna E. M. Walker (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), p. 32; cf. Orkneyinga saga, p. 324; Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 3 vols, Íslenzk fornrit 26–8 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1941–51), III, 303, 345. Sturlunga saga, ed. Jón Jóhannesson, Magnús Finnbogason and Kristján Eldjárn, 2 vols (Reykjavík: Sturlunguútgáfan, 1946), I, 253, 395, II, 77.

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders in Þorgils saga ok Hafliða, Bishop Ketill of Hólar warns Hafliði not to break the peace on the feast-day of John the Baptist, lest he incur the saint’s rage.121 In Þorgils saga skarða, Óláfr hvítaskáld Þórðarson (probable author of a poem on Thomas Becket) threatens Hrafn Oddsson and Sturla Þórðarson with the power of St Nicholas: ‘Skal ek þess biðja almáttkan guð, ok inn helga Nicholaum biskup, er staðinn á, at hann hefni yðr sinna misgerða’ (‘I shall ask Almighty God, and the holy bishop Nicholas, who owns the estate, that he avenge on you the wrongs done to him’).122 Þorgils skarði decides not to graze his horses on his enemy’s home-field once he discovers that ‘Pétr postuli á tõðuna’ (‘the apostle Peter owns the field’).123 The most fully developed hagiographic cameo is Þorgils skarði’s death: like Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson, he asks to hear the life of Thomas Becket the night before he is killed. At the moment of martyrdom, he stops the reader to comment: ‘Þat myndi vera allfagr dauði’ (‘That would be a very beautiful death’). The next day, when he is killed, he receives an identical wound on the crown of his head. The abbot witnesses to the beauty (if not the integrity) of his dead body: ‘Hann kvaðst engis manns líkama hafa sét þekkiligra en Þorgils, þar sem sjá mátti fyrir sárum’ (‘He said that he had not seen a man’s corpse fairer than that of Þorgils, where it could be seen for the wounds’).124 Here too, one might speak of ‘oral hagiography’ centring upon violent death. It is difficult, though, to tell at what stage this embedding may have happened: is it the saga author or the historical persons who consciously arrange the moment of death to fit a recognisable hagiographic pattern? To return to MacCulloch’s words, sanctity is the ‘business’ of ‘the Christian on the street’: the saint is by no means confined to the saint’s life, and can pop up just about anywhere. There are examples across a range of genres of saints whose cults never took off. This seems to be the case for the hermit Ásólfr in Landnámabók, a Hiberno-Norse Christian who is persecuted by pagans because of his miraculous catches of fish. He appears after his death in a series of dreams to reveal the resting-place of his bones; and the wood for his church drifts along the fjord until it reaches the site of his cell. Sturlubók comments that ‘Er hann enn helgasti maðr kallaðr’ (‘He is called the holiest man’).125 It has also been suggested that there was a brief cult of Bishop Bjõrn Gilsson of Hólar, a descendant of Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir: in Eiríks saga rauða, a pagan prophetess has a vision in which Guðríðr is surrounded by radiant light, a sure sign that her progeny will include a saint.126 Both sagas about Greenland may have been 121

122 123 124

125

126

Sturlunga saga, I, 40. Sturlunga saga, II, 131. Sturlunga saga, I, 370; II, 171, 236. Sturlunga saga, II, 218–21. Landnámabók, in Íslendingabók, Landnámabók, pp. 61–5; Judith Jesch, ‘Early Christians in Icelandic History – A Case Study’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 31 (1987), 22–7; Cormack, The Saints in Iceland, p. 11; Margaret Clunies Ross, ‘“Saint” Ásólfr’, in Germanisches Altertum und christliches Mittelalter, ed. Bela Brogyanyi, Schriften zur Mediävistik 1 (Hamburg: Kovac, 2002), pp. 40–7. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 255; Eíriks saga rauða, in Eyrbyggja saga, Eíriks saga rauða, p. 208.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero written with the sanctity of Bjõrn in mind, with the aim of constructing a suitably illustrious lineage for a prospective saint.127 The Icelandic Annals include several other examples of nascent or unofficial cults: Archbishop Jón rauði under 1282; Abbot Bjarni Ingimundarson of Þingeyrar under 1299 (endorsed by Bishop Lárentíus); Abbot Guðmundr of Þingeyrar under 1399; and Þórðr Jónsson under 1385, 1389 and 1390.128 Þórðr is particularly interesting because he appears to have been a layperson. He not only has a translatio but also performs a posthumous miracle, in which he saves a local farmer’s life during a volcanic eruption: ‘Enn einn lifði í húsbrotunum ok hafði heitið á Þórð Jónsson’ (‘Only one survived the destruction of the house, and he had called on Þórðr Jónsson’).129 We have here the beginnings of a hagiographic narrative, although no-one saw fit to complete it. Finally, there are the semi-saintly missionaries of the Icelandic conversion narratives, who unanimously fell (and fall) short of official approval. Iceland is something of an anomaly in its paucity of conversion-age saints, perhaps as a result of the historical circumstances of the conversion and the role of royal power.130 Despite this, the accounts of Iceland’s conversion do display some hagiographic features. Kristni saga, probably written around the mid-thirteenth century, presents a number of would-be saints: the missionary bishop Friðrekr, described as sannheilagr (‘truly holy’); his companion Þorvaldr Koðránsson, who is reputedly heilagr (‘holy’) in the East; Stefnir Þorgilsson, killed by Sigvaldi jarl and perhaps named after the proto-martyr Stephen; Hjalti Skeggjason, who stands sponsor to his persecutor at baptism, providing an exemplum of Christian forgiveness. Even the uncompromisingly violent Þangbrandr performs a miracle using the sign of the cross.131 The conversion þættir in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta add a few more saintly characters to the mix: the hermit Máni inn kristni (‘the Christian’), who makes miraculous catches of fish during a famine; the little boy Ingimundr Hafrsson, who runs away from his family to be baptised; the noble heathen Arnórr kerlingarnef (‘old-woman’s-nose’), who provides for 127

128

129

130

131

Ólafur Halldórsson, ‘Lost Tales of Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir’, in Sagnaskemmtun: Studies in Honour of Hermann Pálsson, ed. Rudolf Simek, Jónas Kristjánsson and Hans Bekker-Nielsen (Vienna: Böhlau, 1986), p. 243; Teresa Paróli, ‘Bishops and Explorers: On the Structure of the Vinland Sagas’, in Sagnaþing helgað Jónasi Kristjánssyni sjötugum, ed. Gísli Sigurðsson, Guðrún Kvaran and Sigurgeir Steingrímsson (Reykjavík: Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag, 1994), pp. 648–9; Sverrir Tómasson, ‘Ferðir þessa heims og annars. Paradís – ódáins akur – Vínland í íslenskum ferðalýsingum miðalda’, Gripla 12 (2001), 35–8. Flateyjarbók: En samling af norske konge-sagaer, ed. Carl R. Unger and Guðbrandur Vígfússon, 3 vols, Norske historiske kildeskriftfonds skrifter 4 (Christiania: Malling, 1860–8) III, 572–4. Flateyjarbók, III, 572–4; Cormack, Saints in Iceland, pp. 11–12. Haki Antonsson, ‘The Early Cult of Saints in Scandinavia and the Conversion: A Comparative Perspective’, in Saints and their Lives on the Periphery: Veneration of Saints in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe (c. 1000–1200), ed. Haki Antonsson and Ildar H. Garipzanov (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 22–4. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 13, 25–6, 37–8.

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders the elderly during a famine.132 Like many of the sagas discussed above, these stories combine hagiographic and secular traditions: they feature sanctity and miracles, holy relics and consecrated water, allegory and moral exempla, but they also engage with genealogy, revenge killings and skaldic poetry, including some aesthetically impressive anti-Christian verses composed by pagan poets.133 The coming together of orally transmitted stories and hagiographic models in these texts has created unusually fascinating and complex conversion narratives. What this shows is that hagiography extends far beyond the early translations: rather than being foreign or ‘eccentric’, it was a mainstream literary activity, produced at centres across Iceland, including Þingeyrar, Mõðruvellir, Munka-Þverá and Helgafell.134 It thrived not only at the beginning of the sagawriting period, but up to and beyond the Reformation; indeed, in the later period, there was a close relationship between hagiography, secular history and romance. Although saints’ lives were required reading for monks and bishops, they were not an exclusively monastic pastime: they were composed, compiled and copied in monasteries, but could be commissioned and owned by local churches and lay people.135 This is supported by research into Icelandic scriptoria, which shows that the same scribes worked across a range of genres, no doubt for overlapping audiences. A striking example from the beginning of the period is the hand in Stock. Perg. 4to nr 18, one of the two main manuscripts of Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, which is also found in the earliest extant fragments of Egils saga (AM 162 A fol. δ) and Laxdœla saga (AM 162 E fol.) from c. 1300 or earlier.136 The hand of the chief scribe in Mõðruvallabók (AM 132 fol.), which contains eleven sagas of Icelanders, also occurs in a fragment of the Life of Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 81–5, 154, 156–8. Siân Grønlie, ‘The Missionary Saint and the Saga Hero: Viking Hagiography’, in The Introduction of Christianity into the Early Medieval Insular World, Converting the Isles I, ed. Roy Flechner and Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 19 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 457–82. 134 Sverrir Tómasson, ‘Kristnar trúarbókmenntir’, p. 425; on the eccentricity of the school of Þingeyrar, see Theodore Andersson, ‘Kings Sagas (Konungasögur)’, in Old NorseIcelandic Literature: A Critical Guide, ed. Carol J. Clover and John Lindow, Islandica 45 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 213 and Diana Whaley, ‘The Kings’ Sagas’, in Viking Revaluations, ed. Anthony Faulkes and Richard Perkins (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1993), pp. 50–1. 135 On the close relationship between lay and clerical culture, see further Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Society and Literature’, in The Manuscripts of Iceland, ed. Gísli Sigurðsson and Vésteinn Ólason (Reykjavík: Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland, 2004), p. 33; Lars Lönnroth, ‘Sponsors, Writers and Readers of Early Norse Literature’, in Social Approaches to Viking Studies, ed. Ross Samson (Glasgow: Cruithne, 1991), p. 9; reprinted in his The Academy of Odin, pp. 25–36; and, from the perspective of a historian, Gunnar Karlsson, Goðamenning: staða og áhrif goðorðsmanna í þjóðveldi Íslendinga (Reykjavík: Heimskringla, 2004), p. 485. 136 Óláfs saga Odds, ed. Ólafur Halldórsson, in Færeyinga saga, Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar eptir Odd munk Snorrason, ed. Ólafur Halldórsson, Íslenzk fornrit 25 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 2006), p. cxliv. 132 133

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The Saint and the Saga Hero St Nicholas, in manuscripts of Óláfs saga helga and Guðmundar saga prests, as well as in some Miracles of the Virgin, the Christian laws and Stjórn. He was at work in the mid-fourteenth century, perhaps in the scriptorium of Mõðruvellir in Eyjafjõrðr.137 Likewise, the hand in a fragment of Egils saga (AM 162 A β fol.) is also found in the Codex Wormianus, in manuscripts of Stjórn (AM 227 and 229 fol.) and Mikjáls saga (AM 657 a-b 4to), and in fragments of Maríu saga and Jóns saga baptista. It is probably that of a mid-fourteenthcentury scribe based at the monastery of Þingeyrar.138 Finally, the scribe who copied the first part of the sixteenth-century manuscript AM 152 fol., which contains Grettis saga Ásbjarnarsonar, seems to have been the brother of Bjõrn Þorleifsson, whose hand is found in fragments of religious works, and who was the scribe of Reykjahólabók.139 In these and other cases, the same scribes are copying a range of hagiographic and secular genres. It seems likely, then, that the same people who appreciated a good saint’s life also read and enjoyed the Icelandic sagas.

Saga genre and polysystem theory Hagiography, for all its range and variety, constitutes a fairly uncontentious set of genres: the term heilagra manna sõgur (‘sagas of holy people’) is well attested in Old Norse-Icelandic, as are terms for different kinds of hagiographic narrative: lífssaga (‘life-saga’, i.e. vita), píslarsaga (‘martyrdom-saga’, i.e. passio), jarteinir (‘miracles’).140 The same cannot be said about the vernacular genres of medieval Iceland: the sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur), the contemporary sagas (samtíðarsögur) and the mythic-heroic sagas (fornaldarsögur). Indeed, there is a general consensus on the difficulty of applying classical or prescriptive concepts of genre to medieval literature in the vernacular.141 For this reason, it is helpful to think more carefully about saga genre before theorising its relationship to the saint’s life. As is often pointed out, the modern categories used for vernacular sagas (sagas of Icelanders, contemporary sagas, mythic-heroic sagas) are based primarily on when and where the action takes place; they do not correspond to 137

Sverrir Tómasson, ‘Old Nordic Manuscripts I’, p. 798. Karl G. Johansson, Studier i Codex Wormianus: skrifttradition och avskriftverksamhet vid ett isländskt scriptorium under 1300-tallet, Nordistica Gothoburgensia 20 (Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet, 1997), p. 224. 139 Stefán Karlsson, ‘The Localisation and Dating of Medieval Icelandic Manuscripts’, Saga-Book 25 (1999), 142. 140 Gamal norsk Homiliebok, p. 133; Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 88; III (1998), 73; Heilagra manna søgur, I, 545; Postola sögur, pp. 336, 502, 507, 681, 709, 735, 851, 929. 141 Paul Strohm, ‘Middle English Narrative Genres’, Genre 13 (1980), 379–88; Paul Zumthor, Toward a Medieval Poetics, trans. Philip Bennett (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 118; Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature’, in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (London: Longman, 2000), p. 129; Alfred Hiatt, ‘Genre without System’, in Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 278–81. 138

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders any attested medieval terms, nor are they always identifiable by manuscript groupings. Nevertheless, there is a reluctance to abandon these terms entirely, especially in the absence of any alternatives. In a debate on genre in Scandinavian Studies 47 (1975), Lönnroth made the suggestion that sagas should be split into individual components, which could then be labelled with attested medieval terms (ættvísi, ævisõgur, jarteiknir), but this has not met with widespread agreement. Many scholars continue to feel intuitively that the old categories are right, even if the terminology used of them is anachronistic.142 One might argue, furthermore, that the absence of vernacular theory about genre does not constitute evidence that audiences were unaware of it: Butterfield points out, in her discussion of the Breton lay, that it is precisely when genre is taken for granted that it is not clearly articulated.143 Todorov’s work on speech genres shows that, just as context generates meaning for individual speech-acts, so genre should be thought of as a precondition for the interpretation of literary texts.144 Understanding cannot exist in a vacuum: every literary work relies on what Jauss calls a ‘horizon of expectations’ which directs and conditions audience response.145 Jauss’s definition of genres as ‘groups of historical families’ has proved useful in negotiating the sorts of difficulties presented by medieval genres like the sagas of Icelanders. Far from being static or prescriptive, the idea of a historical family allows for ‘literary evolution’: ‘the trying and testing of possibilities’ as genres become established and ‘the continual founding and altering of horizons’ as they develop into something new.146 Genre can thus be located at the interface between audience expectation and individual innovation: it is recognised as a dynamic force in literary creativity.147 Fowler, too, has emphasised the historical mutability and flexibility of genre: literary works can belong to more than one genre, switch genre half-way through, or allude to other genres by adopting aspects of their generic repertoire.148 It may therefore be better to think of medieval texts as participating in genres than as belonging to them, since every text inevitably changes the genre(s) in which it 142

143 144 145

146 147

148

See the debate between Joseph Harris, ‘Genre in the Saga Literature: A Squib’, Scandinavian Studies 47 (1975), 427–36, Lars Lönnroth, ‘The Concept of Genre in Saga Literature’, Scandinavian Studies 47 (1975), 419–26 and Theodore Andersson, ‘Splitting the Saga’, in Scandinavian Studies 47 (1975), 437–41; also Judy Quinn (ed.), ‘Interrogating Genre in the Fornaldarsögur. Round-Table Discussion’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 2 (2006), 275–96. Ardis Butterfield, ‘Medieval Genres and Modern Genre Theory’, Paragraph 13 (1990), 186. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Origins of Genres’, trans. Richard M. Berrong, in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (London: Longman, 2000), p. 163. Jauss, ‘Theory of Genres’, p. 131. Jauss, ‘Theory of Genres’, pp. 131–2, 140; Jury Tynyanov, ‘The Literary Fact’, in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (London: Longman, 2000), pp. 32, 34. Butterfield, ‘Medieval Genres’, p. 185. Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 37–40, 90–1.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero is situated.149 Fowler also suggests, following Wittgenstein, that genre might be thought of as a ‘family resemblance’ between texts, established by the historical tradition in which they stand.150 This approach allows both for the hybridity of individual works and for the element of overlap between different genres. As far as the sagas are concerned, there is a growing consensus that they are deeply hybrid, characterised by ‘multiple modalities’.151 Phelpstead has argued for the relevance of Bakhtin’s study of ‘pre-novelistic discourse’ to the kings’ sagas: these can be thought of as dialogic or polyphonic texts, allowing for multiple and sometimes clashing perspectives.152 Torfi Tulinius and Gísli Sigurðsson make the same point about the sagas of Icelanders: they argue that saga narrative shows a ‘premature development of novelistic discourse’; that it is a ‘forerunner to the European novel’.153 Recent work on ‘cultural memory’ in the sagas shares this new emphasis on intertextuality. Hermann argues that the sagas are not a ‘closed literary system’, but participate in a ‘network of vernacular and written texts’; all saga genres are characterised by ‘generic instability’, ‘heterogeneity’ and ‘plurality of discourses’.154 Since the written sagas presumably developed over time, rather than springing fully formed from the flux of oral tradition, it seems likely that the different genres or subgenres of saga emerged slowly, whether by gradual evolution or (better) in a dynamic process of innovation and displacement. In the case of the sagas of Icelanders, for example, it has been suggested that Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar marks the founding moment and that it was Laxdœla saga that came to define the ‘classical family saga’.155 Unfortunately, the uncertainty that surrounds dating Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, trans. Arital Ronell, Critical Enquiry 7 (1980), 65. 150 Fowler, Kinds of Literature, p. 41. 151 Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, ‘Generic Hybrids: Norwegian “Family” Sagas and Icelandic “Mythic-Heroic” Sagas’, Scandinavian Studies 66 (1993), 539–44; Margaret Clunies Ross, ‘The Intellectual Complexion of the Icelandic Middle Ages’, Scandinavian Studies 69 (1997), 449; Quinn (ed.), ‘Interrogating Genre’, p. 279; Jürg Glauser, ‘The Speaking Bodies of Saga Texts’, in Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World: Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross, ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop and Tarrin Wills (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), p. 16. 152 Phelpstead, Holy Vikings, pp. 65–72. 153 Torfi Tulinius, ‘The Matter of the North: Fiction and Uncertain Identities in ThirteenthCentury Iceland’, in Old Icelandic Literature and Society, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross, Studies in Medieval Literature 42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 261; Gísli Sigurðsson, ‘*The Immanent Saga of Guðmundr ríki’, trans. Nicholas Jones, in Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World, ed. Judy Quinn et al., p. 202. 154 Hermann, ‘Saga Literature’, pp. 335–7; Glauser, ‘Speaking Bodies’, p. 17. 155 Vésteinn Ólason, Dialogues with the Viking Age: Narration and Representation in the Sagas of the Icelanders, trans. Andrew Wawn (Reykjavík: Heimskingla, 1998), p. 219; Quinn (ed.), ‘Interrogating Genre’, p. 277; Theodore Andersson, The Growth of the Medieval Icelandic Sagas (1180–1280) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 207–9; Torfi Tulinius, ‘Writing Strategies: Romance and the Creation of a New Genre in Medieval Iceland’, in Textual Production and Status Contests in Rising and Unstable Societies, ed. Massimiliano Bampi and Marina Buzzoni (Venezia: Edizioni Ca’Foscari, 2013), p. 34.

149

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders (especially at the beginning of the period) makes this process difficult to chart. While most would consider the ‘post-classical’ saga, with its concentration of fantastic elements, fairly easy to identify, early experiments cannot always be distinguished from individual eccentricities or developmental dead-ends.156 The categorisation of saga genre, as mentioned above, is traditionally made on the basis of time and place: the sagas of Icelanders are set in Iceland in a period spanning settlement and conversion (the ‘saga age’, c. 870–1030); the contemporary sagas take place in Iceland in the twelfth and thirteenth century; and the mythic-heroic sagas happen in a largely imaginary landscape within the Viking world in an undefined and distant past.157 These differing configurations of time and space tie in neatly with Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope: the ‘intrinsic connectedness’ of time and space which he sees as essential to generic definition. In his long essay ‘Forms of the Novel and the Chronotope’, he describes this as a fusion by which time ‘thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible’ and space ‘becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history’.158 The sagas of Icelanders may have different forms (biographical, regional, agonistic, travel narratives), but their chronotope is remarkably consistent: they are set in a real geographical landscape ‘charged’ with meaning through the foundational moments of settlement and conversion.159 This meaningful intersection of time and space is what makes the sagas of Icelanders distinctive as a genre; its blending of oral storytelling and local history with imaginative remembering and literary form. Tulinius argues that the sagas of Icelanders take place in ‘a world of transition and in-between-ness’: they are poised on the threshold between pagan past and the Christian future, suspended in a state of ‘ontological uncertainty’.160 Hence the heroes of the saga are complex and composite figures, the products of historical fact and the literary imagination, living on the periphery of the Christian world. Indeed, Vésteinn Ólason describes the sagas as falling ‘between worlds’, engaged in a dialogue between ‘tradition’ and ‘literary culture’.161 His insistance on the coherence of the sagas of Icelanders as a single genre is supported by the fourteenth-century manuscript compilations Mõðruvallabók 156

157

158

159

160 161

Vésteinn Ólason, ‘The Icelandic Saga as a Kind of Literature with Special Reference to its Representation of Reality’, in Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World, ed. Judy Quinn et al., p. 38. Margaret Clunies Ross, Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse Myths in Medieval Northern Society, 2 vols, The Viking Collection, Studies in Northern Civilization 10 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1994–8), II, 50, 84–5. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84–5. Theodore Andersson, ‘From Tradition to Literature in the Sagas’, in Oral Art Forms and their Passage into Writing, ed. Else Mundal and Jonas Wellendorf (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008), p. 14; Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Íslendingasögur og þættir’, in Íslensk bókmenntasaga, II, pp. 46–7, 80. Tulinius, ‘The Matter of the North’, p. 253. Vésteinn Ólason, ‘The Icelandic Saga’, p. 46.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero (c. 1360–90) and Vatnshyrna (c. 1400), which suggest that there was an active process of canon formation in the second half of the fourteenth century.162 Interestingly, this takes place just as the traditional distinctions are starting to fade: the younger sagas of Icelanders merge increasingly with the mythic-heroic sagas, producing a fantastic world that resembles the ‘adventure chronotope’ of Greek romance.163 The first thing to note, then, is that the chronotope typical of the sagas of Icelanders could hardly be more different from that of the saint’s life. Historical time and place are blurred in hagiography: the chronotope that characterises the saint’s life is ‘vertical’ rather than ‘horizontal’, shaped by the eternity of sacred time, in which events from different historical eras simultaneously coexist.164 All places and all times are interlinked, just as all saints resemble each other; and even the presence of relics within the landscape (often associated with specific locations or territories) reconfigures each place as a tiny microcosm of heaven on earth. While the sagas are grounded in a historically specific moment, saints’ lives participate in the central events of salvation history and the cycle of liturgical time. While the sagas take place in a real landscape imbued with historical memory, saints’ lives unfold in a moral and abstract arena between the poles of heaven and hell. The particularising detail which is characteristic (and so admired) in the sagas is exactly what the hagiographer wishes to avoid: whereas the saga hero can be morally ambivalent, psychologically complex and realistically flawed, the saint maintains his or her dignity and poise as a paradigm of Christian ideology. While many sagas of Icelanders are structured around feuds and dramas of the human will, saints’ lives participate in the drama of salvation, figuring, in the saint’s triumph over death, the fulfilment of the divine will.165 The meaning of the sagas is open-ended and dialogical, an effect created by external focalisation and the lack of any explicit authorial judgement, while saints’ lives are exemplary and didactic, giving corporeal form to spiritual truths and closing down any alternative readings.166 The chronotopes of these two genres encode strikingly different views of the world: any switching, borrowing, or mixing between them is likely to lead to a confrontation between value systems. Jürg Glauser, ‘Sagas of the Icelanders (Íslendinga sögur) and þættir as the Literary Representation of a New Social Space’, in Old Icelandic Literature and Society, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross, Studies in Medieval Literature 42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 212. 163 Guðrún Nordal, ‘The Art of Poetry and the Sagas of Icelanders’, in Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World, ed. Judy Quinn et al., pp. 236–7. On the concept of adventure time, see Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 106; Carl Phelpstead ‘Adventure-Time in Yngvars saga víðförla’, in Fornaldarsagaerne: Myter og Virkelighet, ed. Agneta Ney, Ármann Jakobsson and Annette Lassen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009) pp. 331–46. 164 Bahktin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 158; Boyer, ‘Vita–Historia–Saga’, p. 119. 165 Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Family Sagas’, in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk, pp. 102–5; ‘The Icelandic Saga’, p. 44. 166 Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Family Sagas’, p. 108; ‘The Icelandic Saga’, pp. 34. 162

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders These differences, this aspect of confrontation, must be taken into account in assessing what sorts of interaction we find between sagas of Icelanders and saints’ lives. Up until now, this relationship has been framed largely in terms of origins, formation and evolution: the Icelanders start their literary career by translating lives of saints, and then move on to compose sagas of Icelanders, which (by unspoken assumption) are better and more interesting. The classic formulation is that of Gabriel Turville-Petre in his Origins of Icelandic Literature:167 [Saints’ lives] were the first written biographies which the Icelanders came to know. The Icelanders learned from them how biographies and wonder tales could be written in books. Thus they helped the Icelanders develop a literary style in their own language, and gave them the means to express their own thoughts through the medium of letters. In a word, the learned literature did not teach the Icelanders what to think or what to say, but it taught them how to say it.

A similar position is taken by Jónas Kristjánsson, who also builds his argument on the chronological priority of the saint’s life:168 The oldest sagas in West Norse are the saints’ lives translated from Latin and written in a style which was moulded both by the Latin of the originals and by spoken Norse. Later came the native sagas whose language and style developed under the formative influence of learned writing, in particular the saints’ lives.

In ‘Vita–Historia–Saga’, Boyer takes this one step further, proposing a linear development from saints’ lives and histories, to kings’ sagas and contemporary sagas, and finally to sagas of Icelanders. Sagas, he suggests, can be thought of as saints’ lives without saints in them, the successful end-point in a gradual process of ‘emancipation’ from hagiographic narrative.169 He adds that the Church not only taught the Icelanders how to say things, but also, in some cases, what to say. Phelpstead comes to a similar conclusion in his study of royal hagiography: ‘The learned literature helped to teach the Icelanders both how and what to think, as well as how to say it.’170 This position has been asserted most forcefully by Lönnroth, who in his Tesen om de två kulturerna argued against Einar Ólafur Sveinsson and Sigurður Nordal that the Icelandic literary system was not fundamentally different from the European one: sagas

Turville-Petre, Origins of Icelandic Literature, p. 142. Jónas Kristjánsson, ‘Learned Style or Saga Style’, in Speculum Norrœnum: Studies in Memory of Gabriel Turville-Petre, ed. Ursula Dronke et al. (Odense: Odense University Press, 1981), p. 291. 169 Boyer, ‘Vita–Historia–Saga’, pp. 116, 118, 126–7; and, for the concept of emancipation, ‘An Attempt to Define the Typology of Medieval Hagiography’, in Hagiography and Medieval Literature: A Symposium, ed. Hans Bekker-Nielsen et al. (Odense: Odense University Press, 1981), p. 36. 170 Phelpstead, Holy Vikings, p. 224. 167

168

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The Saint and the Saga Hero should be classed as ‘a branch of European literature’.171 In a more recent article, he relaxes this view somewhat: ‘Saga-writing as a whole was based on a close contact, perhaps sometimes a confrontation, but usually cooperation, between secular sponsors and clerical scribes, between native tradition and foreign learning.’172 Saga literature, he suggests, proceeds from two ‘overlapping and peacefully coexisting cultures’: one providing oral traditions, feud stories and skaldic poetry, and the other established literary genres such as the saint’s life. Other scholars have questioned this consensus on the priority of the saint’s life and its supposedly formative influence on the sagas. In ‘Saints’ Lives and Sagas’, Foote points out that the Icelanders ‘had their own resources’: they did not need saints’ lives to teach them either how to think or what to say.173 After investigating the influence of Clemens saga on narratives about Óláfr Tryggvason and Sigmundr Brestisson, he accepts Turville-Petre’s statement with qualification: hagiography ‘taught them something about how to say it – also about how not to say it’; native tradition is just as important.174 Sverrir Tómasson, meanwhile, turns the question of priority on its head, suggesting that Turville-Petre displays the attitude of a stórþjóðarmaður (‘member of a great nation’). He argues the opposite – that the success of translated hagiography was due to pre-existing native traditions: ‘Það var aðeins gerlegt af því að fyrir var í landinu blómleg, innlend frásagnarlist fiskimanna og bænda’ (‘It was only possible because there already existed in this land a flourishing, native narrative art belonging to fishermen and farmers’).175 Vésteinn Ólason also expresses some ambivalence about the formative influence of hagiography. While he acknowledges the occasional saintly character (like Hõskuldr Þráinsson), he insists that the value system of the sagas is first and foremost secular: ‘Það er samt undantekning að kristilegir fyrirburðir eða kristilegur hugsunarháttur hafi áhrif á hegðun manna á úrslitastund’ (‘It is nevertheless the exception for Christian symbols or a Christian attitude to have an influence on people’s conduct at the moment of death’).176 The resurgence of confidence in the orality of the sagas has moved us still further from any proposed starting-point in the saint’s life: Gísli Sigurðsson argues that the narrative technique of the sagas and the consistency of saga society can only be explained by their emergence from a ‘living oral tradition’.177 Andersson, in his recent work, proposes a double trajectory: the sagas develop from ‘a quasi-folkloristic gathering of traditions to an increasingly focused literary composition’ and from ‘a somewhat scattered biographical form’ (related to a ‘somewhat nebulous hagiographic model’) to

European Sources of Icelandic Saga-Writing, p. 3. Lönnroth, ‘Sponsors, Writers and Readers’, p. 10. Peter Foote, ‘Saints’ Lives and Sagas’, in Saints and Sagas: A Symposium, ed. Hans Bekker-Nielsen and Birte Carlé (Odense: Odense University Press, 1994), pp. 74–5. Foote, ‘Saints’ Lives and Sagas’, p. 86. Sverrir Tómasson, ‘Trúarbókmenntir í lausu máli á síðmiðöld’, p. 282. Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Íslendingasögur og þættir’, p. 76; ‘Family Sagas’, pp. 113–14. Gísli Sigurðarson, ‘*The Immanent Saga of Guðmundr ríki’, p. 203.

171 Lönnroth, 172 173 174

175 176 177

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders ‘an ever more dominant authorial point of view’.178 He suggests that not only story material but also ways of organising it were passed down in oral tradition, raising the possibility of full-length oral sagas.179 The model of a linear development from saint’s life to saga is clearly flawed, not least because hagiography flourished throughout the saga-writing period, gaining momentum during the fourteenth century, as it developed its own distinctive style. The different chronotopes of saints’ lives and sagas make it implausible that one evolved from the other, even if the first saints’ lives were translated before the first sagas were written down. However, it seems equally unlikely that the sagas are, as Andersson once put it, ‘inoculated’ against hagiographic influence, given that sagas and saints’ lives were copied by the same scribes and no doubt directed towards the same or overlapping audiences.180 As Simek has commented, ‘In saga writing, too, it is unlikely that the Icelandic literati who composed hagiography [. . .] would have handed over their quill to somebody else to compose an Eiríks saga rauða or Eyrbyggja saga’.181 Many sagas have been linked to monasteries where we know hagiography was produced: Fóstbrœðra saga, Vatnsdœla saga and Grettis saga to Þingeyrar, and Eyrbyggja saga and Laxdœla saga to Helgafell. Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga, as mentioned above, may have been written to support the incipient cult of Bishop Bjõrn Gilsson of Hólar. There is no clear demarcation, in any of these cases, between secular and clerical culture.182 We see just how complex the interaction can be from sagas like Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, which will be discussed in Chapter 2: Oddr first translated oral history and native traditions into a Latin vita, but then this Latin vita was translated back into Old Norse with additions from skaldic poetry and written histories. The result is not a straightforward progression from saint to hero, but a complex hybrid of heroic and hagiographic narrative. Similar movement back and forth across generic borders characterises the much later compilations of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar and Óláfs saga helga, to be discussed in Chapter 6. These contain, as their core, the lives of a saintly king and a royal saint, but they incorporate into these a range of sagas about Icelanders, with conflicting points of view. The tension this generates makes itself felt in the choices of successive compilers: abridged versions of the sagas of Icelanders are replaced over time with fuller texts, threatening the central position of the saintly kings. These multi-generic compilations challenge fixed generic boundaries and encourage ‘dialectical readings’.183 Finally, it should be noted that it is one of the younger sagas of The Growth of the Medieval Icelandic Sagas, pp. 2–3. Theodore Andersson, ‘The Long Prose Form in Medieval Iceland’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 101 (2002), 406–7. Andersson, ‘Kings’ Sagas’, p. 214. Rudolf Simek, ‘The Medieval Icelandic World View and the Theory of the two Cultures’, Gripla 20 (2009), 196. Gunnar Karlsson, Goðamenning, pp. 484–5; Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Society and Literature’, p. 33; ‘Íslendingasögur og þættir’, p. 50. Marianne Kalinke, ‘Textual Instability, Generic Hybridity, and the Development of

178 Andersson, 179

180 181

182 183

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Icelanders that resembles most closely the saint’s life: Perkins has commented that, if Flóamanna saga (c.1290–1330) were dated earlier, it would no doubt have been hailed as the ‘missing link’ between saint’s life and saga.184 As it is, the evidence suggests that the post-classical saga, with its affinity to romance, is moving closer to, not away from, hagiography. Sagas, then, did not evolve out of saints’ lives; the relationship between these two genres is more complex and dynamic. We must take into account, in the terms used by Lönnroth, ‘coexistence’, ‘cooperation’ and ‘confrontation’. Influence flows in both directions, and the charismatic personality of the saint extends far beyond the confines of the saint’s life. The strong emphasis, in Icelandic homilies, on the exemplary value of these texts means that sanctity was recognised in everyday life, not just in the highly literary world of the saint’s life. Some of the later saints’ lives, like those of Bishop Guðmundr, have adopted an interest in genealogy and poetry from the saga’s generic repertoire. At the same time, the different chronotopes of these two genres make ‘confrontation’ inevitable. A saint within a saga will challenge the values of that world, but the saga world will also change the saint. A better model for understanding the relationship between saint’s life and saga is polysystem theory, which has proved useful in understanding the influence of translated romance on the sagas. It has its origins in the work of Russian literary theorists, and was developed further by the Israeli scholar Itamar Even-Zohar: he defines a polysystem as ‘a multiple system, a system of various systems which intersect with each other and partly overlap, using concurrently different options, yet functioning as one structured whole’.185 This draws on the notion of ‘system’ as described by Tynjanov, who argued that genre is never static and can be defined only in evolution.186 The term ‘polysystem’ introduced by Even-Zohar insists on the ‘dynamic and heterogeneous’ nature of the literary system, and on the fact that more than one literary system may interact, especially in multilingual cultures.187 The polysystem is characterised by a ‘permanent struggle’ between different literary forms and by movement between centre and periphery; there is tension between ‘primary’ or innovative genres and ‘secondary’ or conservative ones. New genres arise on the periphery of the polysystem and work their way towards the centre, but once at the centre, they become increasingly conservative, until they too are supplanted by newer models. The social system provides the ‘particular conditions’ under which this need for innovation is felt.188 Literary evolution, then, arises out of struggle and competition between different genres. Polysystem theory has been

184

185 186 187

188

Some Fornaldarsögur’, in The Legendary Sagas: Origins and Development, ed. Annette Lassen, Agneta Ney and Ármann Jakobsson (Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2012), p. 202. Richard Perkins, personal communication. Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘Polysystem Theory’, Poetics Today 11 (1990), 11. Tynjanov, ‘The Literary Fact’, pp. 36–7. Even-Zohar, ‘Polysystem Theory’, p. 12. Even-Zohar, ‘Polysystem Theory’, pp. 21, 25.

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders much applied in translation studies, where it offers a way of understanding the relationship between peripheral literatures and culturally dominant centres. In such cases, ‘interference’ is the rule rather than the exception. When two literary systems come into contact, one will ‘interfere’ with the other, unless specific circumstances prevent this.189 Massimiliano Bampi has written extensively on the relevance of this theory to translated romance in medieval Scandinavia. Even-Zohar describes three situations in which translated genres can take a central position in the polysystem: when a literature is young and not yet established; when it is peripheral or weak, as is often the case for small nations; at moments of crisis, turning-point or literary vacuum, when ‘established models are no longer tenable’.190 Bampi describes the arrival of courtly ideology in Iceland as just such a turning-point in the literary system, a reaction to the recent loss of independence and the need to adapt to new cultural circumstances. Translated romance temporarily takes centre stage in the polysystem and exercises influence over other genres; this leads to increasing hybridisation, as the sagas of Icelanders adopt some of the generic repertoire of romance, favouring the ‘fantastic’ over the realistic.191 This is traditionally deplored, as by Ker, as a ‘decline’ in literary taste; Bampi, however, describes it as a ‘widening of narrative horizons’. An increasingly hybrid saga literature allows for the blending of tradition and innovation, clashing world views, and the introduction of new themes, motifs, and narrative patterns.192 The new, extended, generic repertoire meets the needs of a new social and political élite in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Iceland. Polysystem theory offers a new way of understanding the impact of saints’ lives on the Icelandic literary system. These demonstrably arrive when vernacular literature is ‘young and not yet established’; they carry all the prestige of a major European genre in contrast to the ‘peripheral’ position of the emergent saga. They correspond to a ‘literary vacuum’ created by the need for Christian teaching in the vernacular, as well as the local pressure for the Icelanders to establish their new Christian identity. These are precisely the circumstances in Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘Laws of Literary Interference’, Poetics Today 11 (1990), 60; José Lambert, ‘L’éternelle question des frontières: littératures nationales et systèmes littéraires’, in Functional Approaches to Culture and Translation: Selected Papers by José Lambert edited by Dirk Delabastita, Lieven D’Hulst and Reine Meylaerts (Amsterdam: Philadelphia J. Benjamin, 2006), p. 34. 190 Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem’, Poetics Today 11 (1990), 46–8. 191 Massimiliano Bampi, ‘Literary Actitivy and Power Struggle: Some Observations on the Medieval Icelandic Polysystem after the Sturlungaöld’, in Textual Production and Status Contests in Rising and Unstable Societies, ed. Massimiliano Bampi and Marina Buzzoni (Venezia: Edizioni Ca’Foscari, 2013), pp. 61–3. 192 Massimiliano Bampi, ‘The Development of the Fornaldarsögur as a Genre: A Polysystemic Approach’, in The Legendary Sagas, ed. Annette Lassen et al., p. 190. For the traditional negative view on the rise of romance in Iceland, see William Paton Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (London: MacMillan, 1922), pp. 275–9. 189

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The Saint and the Saga Hero which one would expect a translated genre to take centre stage in the polysystem. This centrality is supported both by the number of translations of saints’ lives, and by the speed with which vernacular hagiography develops. It is also supported by the blurred boundaries between translated and vernacular lives, another effect that occurs, as Even-Zohar notes, when translated genres are at the centre of the polysystem.193 The high status of saints’ lives, whether translated or vernacular in origin, is indicated by the large number of manuscripts produced: Stefán Karlsson notes that, between c. 1200 and 1550, ‘manuscripts of ecclesiastical stories are more numerous than those of the two best-known secular genres combined’.194 Of the 420 manuscripts containing sagas, 156 contain saints’ lives, as opposed to only 52 containing sagas of Icelanders. Manuscripts of saints’ lives are also more richly illustrated, an identifiable marker of high prestige; by contrast, among the sagas of Icelanders, only Njáls saga survives in an illuminated manuscript: Kálfalœkjarbók.195 This manuscript has three illuminated capitals, all of which have religious significance: the lion and the dragon, in the G of Gunnarr, is a conventional motif in church carvings, representing the victory of the resurrected Christ. The initial H, which opens the conversion narrative (chapter 100) depicts a rider and his horse – perhaps St Paul or the missionary Þangbrandr. Hamer has argued recently that the third initial N, in which a man slays a dragon, figures the Archangel Michael, drawing on the iconography of Sigurðr the dragon-slayer.196 What these illuminations seem to bring to the saga is an awareness of its hagiographic themes. Saints’ lives were at the centre of the polysystem from the earliest saga-writing up to the Reformation; under such circumstances, it would be astonishing if they had not ‘interfered’ with the development of the vernacular genres. Even-Zohar describes how the polysystem is characterised by ‘permanent struggle’ between periphery and centre. This can be seen in some authorial comments in the prologues to hagiographic texts. The earliest is the prologue to Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, where Oddr compares his vita favourably to other oral tales about the king: ‘Betra er slíkt með gamni at heyra en stjúpmœðra sõgur er hjarðarsveinar segja, er engi veit hvárt satt er’ (‘It is better to hear this with pleasure than stories of stepmothers that shepherds tell, in 193

Even-Zohar, ‘The Position of Translated Literature’, p. 50; Cormack, ‘Christian Biography’, p. 27. 194 Stefán Karlsson, ‘From the Margins of Medieval Europe: Icelandic Vernacular Scribal Culture’, in Frontiers in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the Third European Congress of Medieval Studies, ed. Outi Merisalo and Päivi Pahta (Louvain la Neuve: Fédération internationale des instituts d’études médiévales, 2006), pp. 488–9. 195 Soffiá Guðný Guðmundsdóttir and Laufey Guðnadóttir, ‘Book Production in the Middle Ages’, in The Manuscripts of Iceland, ed. Gísli Sigurðsson and Vésteinn Ólason (Reykjavík: Árni Magnússon Institute, 2004), p. 59. 196 Lars Lönnroth, ‘Structural Divisions in the Njála Manuscripts’, Arkiv för nordisk filologi 90 (1975), pp. 69–70; Andrew Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background. A Study of Narrative Method, Mediaevalia Groningana New Series 20, Germania Latina VIII (Leuven: Peeters, 2015), pp. 183–4, 251.

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders which nobody knows what’s true’).197 Spurkland suggests that stjúpmœðra sõgur (‘stories of stepmothers’) is a translation of aniles fabulas (‘old wives’ fables’) from 1 Timothy 4:7: it betrays a learned suspicion of orally transmitted stories that fall outside ecclesiastical control.198 The author of Hungrvaka, dating from c. 1200, contrasts his bœklingr (‘little book’) with less edifying and immoral forms of entertainment, although he does not specify what these are.199 In the prologue to Jóns saga baptista, a foundational text for the Northern Benedictine school of hagiography, Grímr Hólmsteinsson condemns those for whom ‘allt þykkir þat langt, er frá Krists kõppum er sagt, ok skemtask framarr med skrõksõgur’ (‘all that’s said about Christ’s champions seems boring, and would rather entertain themselves with fables’).200 Later in the saga, he reiterates this criticism in his comments on those who ‘gjarnari vilja heyra veraldligar víkinga sõgur enn ágæt verk valdra vígmanna ok kappa ins krossfesta Krists’ (‘would rather listen to secular stories about Vikings than the glorious deeds of the powerful warriors and champions of the crucified Christ’).201 It is noticeable that he appropriates the vocabulary of secular heroics here, even as he denies the value of these, defensively situating Christian heroes as superior to secular warriors or Vikings. Again, Bergr Sokkason, author of Lárentíus saga, weighs the benefits of his painstaking work of compilation against the moral dangers of listening to secular narratives: ‘Ok þó at þat verði nõkkut ónytsamligt starf saman at setja þvílíka hluti sem birtask ok auðsýnask má í þessu máli, er þó verra at heyra ok gaman henda at sõgum heiðinna manna’ (‘And although it may seem a somewhat thankless task to compile such things as may be revealed and displayed in this story, it’s still worse to listen to and take enjoyment in stories of heathen men’).202 On the other side of the fence, the prologue to Flóres saga konungs is disarmingly candid about hagiography’s lack of popular appeal: ‘Flestar sögur eru af nökkura efni. Sumar eru af guði ok hans helgum mönnum, ok má þar nema mikinn vísdóm. Eru þeir þó fleiri menn, er lítil skemmtun þykir af heilagra manna sögum’ (‘There are many sagas about various things: some are about God and his saints, and great wisdom may be learned there, but there are more people to whom there seems scant entertainment in stories about holy people’).203 These comments suggest that at least a handful of religious writers were anxious about their secular competitors, primarily perhaps the mythic-heroic sagas, which were the most recent innovation in the polysystem and the most likely referent of skrõksõgur (‘fables, fictitious stories’).204 They Óláfs saga Odds, p. 126. Terje Spurkland, ‘Lygisögur, skröksögur and stjúpmœðrasögur’, in The Legendary Sagas, ed. Annette Lassen et al., pp. 178–9. 199 Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 4. 200 Postola sögur, p. 849. 201 Postola sögur, p. 929. 202 Biskupa sögur III (1998), 216. 203 Flóres saga konungs ok sona hans, in Riddarasögur Norðurlanda, ed. Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 6 vols (Reykjavík: Íslendingasagnaútgáfan, 1941–51), vol. 5 (1951), p. 65. 204 Richard Perkins, ‘An Edition of Flóamanna saga with its Sources and Analogues’, 197

198

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The Saint and the Saga Hero worry, with some reason, that ‘holy people’ and the ‘champions’ of Christ might prove less entertaining than the ‘Vikings’ and ‘heathens’ that populate the mythic-heroic sagas and the sagas of Icelanders. The sagas of Icelanders may lack prologues and the explicit commentary of the saint’s life, but they too are active participants in this literary struggle and movement between the periphery and the centre of the polysystem. The advantage of polysystem theory for a study of this kind is that one no longer has to think of genre in terms of linear development, using either the metaphor of ‘emancipation’ or the more negative ‘decline and fall’. Instead, competition between genres is recognised as a creative and energising literary process: genres do not develop in isolation, but in dynamic interaction with each other. In the case of Iceland, polysystem theory also provides a way of thinking about how vernacular genres in a peripheral literature relate to one of the central genres of the European Middle Ages – in a context where, in the term used by Even-Zohar, one might expect significant ‘interference’. The friction created by this ‘interference’ takes many different forms, generating dialogue, challenge, experimentation, and subversion: a ‘widening of the narrative horizons’ that shape one’s experience of literary texts. The ‘novelistic’ richness of the sagas of Icelanders resides precisely in this active engagement with other genres; in this case, in the willingness to host one of the best-established and most popular genres of the medieval Christian world.

Conclusion The purpose of this book is not to reiterate nor to revisit arguments about the origins of the sagas of Icelanders, but rather to look at the ways in which sagas engaged creatively with saints’ lives over the medieval period: from Oddr’s experimentation with native hagiography to the large fourteenth-century compilations of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar and Óláfs saga helga, which juxtapose saint’s life and saga in such a way as to challenge the boundaries of both genres. Rather than two genres developing in isolation, or one genre developing out of the other, we find a shifting and dynamic balance of power between saint’s life and saga, which ranges from thoughtful adaptation to active struggle and competition, from ‘interference’ to interaction and interdependence. Unlike the kings’ sagas and contemporary sagas, the sagas of Icelanders do not have saints as heroes; they feature farmers, warrior-poets, priest-chieftains, and outlaws living in various parts of Iceland. Yet the protagonists of these sagas – who are often psychologically complex and sometimes anti-heroic – interact with saints in a variety of different ways. Some are the forerunners and ancestors of saints; some are the devout subjects of saintly kings; some might be considered the antithesis of a saint, while still others are endowed with hagiographic virtues or die a martyr’s death. Some sagas use narratives of conversion to reposition the saga hero as a noble heathen and proto-Christian, while others use the (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1972), pp. 385–6; Spurkland, ‘Lygisögur’, p. 182.

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Saints’ Lives and Sagas of Icelanders figure of the saint to mediate between the old-style hero and the new Christian world. Some adopt themes and motifs from hagiographic literature in order to take saga narrative in new directions: exploring the eschatological dimensions of the human dramas of the saga, moving inwards to probe the psychology of sin, layering the travel narratives of saga literature with the Christian allegory of redemption. The saga’s engagement with the saint’s life is thus far more interesting than the question of which came first: the heroes of the sagas are simultaneously opposed to and enriched by the ideological paradigm of the saint. In the next chapter, I look at the earliest stage of this symbiosis in the work of the Benedictine monk Oddr Snorrason, as he attempts to celebrate the Norwegian king, Óláfr Tryggvason, as both violent hero and missionary saint.

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N 2 n The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason Introduction Oddr Snorrason’s saga of the Norwegian king Óláfr Tryggvason has a strong claim to the status of the ‘first Icelandic saga’.1 Written in c. 1190 in Latin and translated into Old Icelandic shortly afterwards, it tells the story of Óláfr’s kingship and missions in Norway, ending with his disappearance at the battle of Svõlðr in the year 999/1000.2 As the first text with ‘full saga dimensions’, it draws on an eclectic mix of genres, which have been variously identified as saint’s life, secular biography, romance, heroic epic and folktale.3 Paradigms from the Bible and from popular saints’ lives jostle with traditional heroic tales of vengeance and sportsmanship, and clash with some sadistic scenes of trickery and torture. Óláfr’s birth and childhood, for example, are based on Christ’s Nativity and the Flight to Egypt; he is sold as a slave in Russia, where he rises quickly to pre-eminence, like Joseph; and he is transfigured like Christ and seen talking with angels.4 But he also avenges his foster-father at the age of nine, striking off the head of his killer in one blow; he is fond of women and has multiple marriages; and he makes a glorious last stand at the Battle of Svõlðr, surrounded by his loyal thanes. He finally disappears in a blinding flash of light and is rumoured to have become a monk in the East. The result is a composition that Andersson describes as ‘bipolar’ and Bagge characterises more politely as ‘fairly chaotic’: Oddr was a talented storyteller, but he struggled with the extended narrative form.5 Whether he actually intended to promote Theodore Andersson, ‘The First Icelandic King’s Saga: Oddr Snorrrason’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar or The Oldest Saga of Saint Olaf’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 103 (2004), 139–52; Haki Antonsson describes the monks at Þingeyrar as ‘the first generation of saga writers in Iceland’ in ‘Salvation and Early Saga Writing in Iceland: Aspects of the Work of the Þingeyrar Monks and their Associates’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 8 (2012), 77. 2 Theodore Andersson, The Partisan Muse in the Early Icelandic Sagas (1200–1250), Islandica 55 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), pp. 64–5. 3 Andersson, The Medieval Icelandic Saga, p. 25. 4 On the biblical models for Oddr’s saga, see Fagrskinna, ed. Gustav Indrebø (Oslo: Grøndahl, 1917), pp. 159–61 and Óláfs saga Odds, pp. lxxxi, lxxxv–lxxxvi. 5 Oddr Snorrason, The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason, trans. Theodore Andersson, Islandica 1

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Óláfr as a saint has been disputed, but either way, the saint’s life is the main literary model for his work. He depicts Óláfr as a great Christian missionary king: at the very least, his account can be described as ‘semi-hagiographic’.6 The most recent editor of his work, Ólafur Halldórsson, suggests that Oddr set out to make Óláfr a saint, but had to give up in the face of the oral stories in circulation; he could find no way to evade the ‘gruesome’ killings that dominate the second half of Óláfr’s life.7 Yet it is precisely Oddr’s difficulty and failures that are of interest in this chapter: his struggle to fit the material at his disposal into the conventional paradigms of the saint’s life has much to tell us about early medieval understandings of sanctity and its complex relationship to heroic narrative. The generic ‘chaos’ that this creates may be a literary flaw, but the fault lines are revealing: in this early experimentation, we see the first signs of creative interplay and tension between Latin saint’s life and vernacular saga. Oddr positions his life of Óláfr in relation to the saints’ lives at the centre of the literary polysystem: in doing so, he stakes a bold claim for the sanctity of his hero, given his highly unconventional credentials – a violent past, a mysterious death, and a lack of posthumous miracles.

The literary context Oddr Snorrason was a priest and monk at the Benedictine monastery of Þingeyrar in the north of Iceland in the second half of the twelfth century. We know little about his life other than that he came from a good family: his mother claimed descent from the sister of the saga hero Grettir Ásmundarson, and Oddr’s genealogy is given in both Landnámabók and Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar.8 The monastery of Þingeyrar was probably established in 1133, although there may have been a cell there from 1112. It was close to the episcopal see of Hólar and, by the end of the thirteenth century, it was a centre for translation and literary activity in the north of Iceland.9 52 (Ithaca and London: University of Cornell Press, 2003), p. 25; Sverre Bagge, ‘The Making of a Missionary King: the Medieval Accounts of Óláfr Tryggvason and the Conversion of Norway’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 105 (2006), 493. 6 In Formálar íslenskra sagnaritara á miðöldum. Rannsókn bókmenntahefðar, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, Rit 33 (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1988), pp. 265–79, Sverrir Tómasson argued that the prologue established Óláfr as a saint, and Jan de Vries even suggested that the saga was written to secure Óláfr’s canonisation in Rome (see Altnordische Literaturgeschichte, 2 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1941–2), II, 245). Later scholars have pointed out, however, that there is no sign of any cult of Óláfr in Iceland and that, without relics or any posthumous miracles, he was not a viable saint; see Julia Zernack, ‘Vorläufer und Vollender: Olaf Tryggvason und Olaf der Heilige im Geschichtsdenken des Oddr Snorrason Munkr’, Arkiv för nordisk filologi 113 (1998), 82; and Haki Antonsson, Magnús of Orkney, pp. 149–57. 7 Óláfs saga Odds, p. lxxxii. 8 Landnámabók, pp. 199, 211–12; Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, Bandamanna saga, Odds þáttr Ófeigssonar, ed. Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk fornrit 7 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1936), pp. 269–70. 9 On the establishment at Þingeyrar, see Orri Vésteinsson, The Christianisation of Iceland:

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason Oddr was contemporary with two other writers from Þingeyrar: Karl Jónsson, who was abbot in 1171–81 and again in 1188–1207 (he died in 1212/13), and Gunnlaugr Leifsson, who died in 1218/19 according to the Icelandic Annals. Karl had close links to the kings of Norway: he travelled to Niðaróss in 1185–8, where he began to write Sverris saga under the supervision of King Sverrir himself, and he probably wrote the rest of the saga after Sverrir’s death in 1202.10 Gunnlaugr was a prolific writer in Latin, but most of his work has been lost: he was closely involved with the canonisation of the first two native Icelandic saints, Þorlákr and Jón, in c. 1200, and he initially supported Guðmundr Arason as well.11 His written work seems to have included a collection of Þorlákr’s miracles, a vita of St Jón, a rhymed office (or possibly vita) of St Ambrose, and some stories about early Christianity in the North, perhaps including Þorvalds þáttr víðfõrla.12 Most intriguingly, Gunnlaugr made a revised version of Oddr’s life of Óláfr Tryggvason, which has survived only in fragments of a translation in manuscripts of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta.13 He had an interest in vernacular poetry and British kings: according to Hauksbók, he translated the prophecies of Merlin from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae into fornyrðislag verse.14 The rest of Geoffrey’s work (Breta sõgur), as well as Sallust and Lucan (Rómverja saga), may also have been translated at Þingeyrar before 1200.15 Other suggestions about what Gunnlaugr may have written are inevitably more speculative: he has been attributed with accounts of Bishop Poppo’s mission to Denmark, and Leifr Eiríksson’s mission to Greenland, and he perhaps had a hand in written stories about the hermit Ásólfr, who had an

10 11

12

13 14

15

Priests, Power and Social Change 1000–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 133–5. Sverris saga, ed. Þorleifur Hauksson, Íslenzk fornrit 30 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenska fornritafélag, 2007), pp. xxii–xxiv, lv–lxiv. Haki Antonsson, ‘Early Saga Writing’, p. 90. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), clxiii–clxiv, cclxxxiii–ccxcii, 72, 84, 151, 205, 218, 252, 289, II (2002), 243; see also Katrín Axelsdóttir, ‘Gunnlaugr Leifsson og Ambrósíus saga’, Skírnir 179 (2005), 337–49 and Gottskálk Jensson, ‘*Revelaciones Thorlaci Episcopi – enn eitt glatað latínurit eftir Gunnlaug Leifsson munk á Þingeyrum’, Gripla 23 (2012), 133–75. Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, ed. Ólafur Halldórsson, 3 vols, Editiones Arna­ magnæanæ, Series A, 1–3 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1958–2000), III, 57–8, 64–6. Hauksbók, ed. Eiríkur Jónsson and Finnur Jónsson (Copenhagen: Thiele, 1892–6). p. 271. Gunnlaugr’s translation of Merlínúspá is discussed by Simone Horst, ‘Die Merlínuspá – Gedicht von Gunnlaufr Leifsson?’, Skandinavistik 36 (2006), 22–31, Philip Lavender, ‘Merlin and the Võlva’, Viking and Medieval Scandiavia 2 (2006), 111–39; Stefanie Gropper, ‘Bretasögur and the Merlínússpá’, in The Arthur of the North: The Arthurian Legend in the Norse and Rus’ Realms, ed. Marianne Kalinke (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), pp. 48–60; Russell Poole, ‘The Sources of Merlínússpá: Gunnlaugr Leifsson’s Use of Texts Additional to the De gestis Britonum of Geoffrey of Monmouth’, in Eddic, Skaldic and Beyond: Poetic Variety in Medieval Iceland and Norway, ed. Martin Chase (Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 16–30. Gropper, ‘Bretasögur’, p. 48; Þorbjörg Helgadóttir, ‘On the Sources and Composition of Rómverja saga’, Saga-Book 24 (1994–7), 205–6.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero incipient cult in c. 1200 (p. 21).16 The monastery at Þingeyrar, then, stands at the very beginning of saga-writing in Iceland: it can be associated not only with the inception of the king’s saga (King Sverrir and King Óláfr Tryggvason), but also with the translation of historical texts, and the written lives of the first Icelandic saints. Oddr himself may have authored a second work, a Latin life of Yngvarr víðfõrli (‘far-traveller’), which was used as a basis for the surviving Yngvars saga víðfõrla.17 This tells the story of Yngvarr’s famed expedition to the East, where his son Sveinn converted the inhabitants to Christianity. The reference to Oddr is at the end:18 En þessa sögu höfum vér heyrt ok ritat eftir forsögn þeirar bækr, at Oddr munkr inn fróði hafði gera látit at forsögn fróðra manna, þeira er hann segir sjálfr í bréfi sínu, því at hann sendi Jóni Loftssyni ok Gizuri Hallsyni [. . .] Þessa sögu segist Oddr munkr heyrt hafa segja þann prest, er Ísleifr hét, ok annan Glúm Þorgeirsson, ok inn þriði hefir Þórir heitit. [We have heard and written down this story according to the account of that book which the monk Oddr the Wise had had made after the account of wise men, of whom he himself speaks in his letter, the one that he sent to Jón Loptsson and Gizurr Hallsson [. . .] The monk Oddr says that he heard the priest who was called Ísleifr tell this story, and another [called] Glúmr Þorgeirsson, and the third was called Þórir.]

Gizurr Hallsson is also mentioned as a recipient of Gunnlaugr’s saga of Óláfr Tryggvason, and Glúmr Þorgeirsson is perhaps to be identified with Glúmr Þorgilsson, who is cited as Gunnlaugr’s source elsewhere.19 Clearly this saga belongs to the same literary milieu as Oddr’s and Gunnlaugr’s work. Although we cannot be sure how close it is to Oddr’s Latin, it offers some significant parallels with the other writings from Þingeyrar. In particular, as Haki Antonsson has shown, it shares Oddr’s intense concern with lay sanctity and heroism: its overriding theme is ‘the search for salvation and the associated uncertainties this quest entails’.20 16

17

18 19 20

Peter Foote, ‘Notes on Some Linguistic Features in AM 291 4to (Jómsvíkinga saga)’, Íslenzk Tunga 1 (1959), 33; Ólafur Halldórsson, ‘The Conversion of Greenland in Written Sources’, in Proceedings of the Eighth Viking Congress, ed. Hans Bekker-Nielsen, Peter Foote and Olaf Olsen (Odense: Odense University Press, 1981), p. 207; Jesch, ‘Early Christians’, pp. 22–6. This was first argued by Dietrich Hofmann in two articles: ‘Die Yngvars saga viðförla und Oddr munkr inn fróði’, in Speculum Norrœnum, ed. Ursula Dronke et al., pp. 188–222, and ‘Die Vision des Oddr Snorrason’, in Festskrift til Ludvig Holm-Olsen: på hans 70-årsdag den 9. juni 1984, ed. Bjarne Fidjestøl (Øvre Ervik: Alvheim & Eide, 1984), pp. 142–51. Yngvars saga víðförla, in Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 3 vols (Reykjavík: Forni, 1943–4), III, 459. Óláfs saga Odds, p. 362; Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, III, 66; Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 72. Haki Antonsson, ‘Early Saga Writing’, p. 79.

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason It has been argued that the sagas written at Þingeyrar should be read in the light of contemporary Church politics, and especially the power struggle between secular and ecclesiastical authorities.21 This is most obvious in the case of Karl Jónsson, who wrote at the request of King Sverrir and presents him as a rex iustus on the model of David and Solomon.22 Oddr’s obvious interest in lay sanctity, and his portrait of Óláfr Tryggvason as a missionary king, has also been interpreted as an expression of support for Sverrir’s cause: Zernack argues that his saga constructs a spiritual lineage for royal power in its typological linking of Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr. Both Karl and Oddr use baptismal imagery to create bonds of spiritual kinship between kings: Sverrir has a dream in which he is invited to wash in the same water as St Óláfr, while Oddr describes how Óláfr Tryggvason ‘held’ St Óláfr in the baptismal font.23 However, as Haki Antonsson has pointed out, Oddr’s saga ends with Óláfr becoming a monk in the East: he rejects secular power, and turns to the religious life for salvation. Besides, Oddr’s view of Óláfr Tryggvason was clearly shared by some Norwegian ecclesiasts of that time: it is echoed in Theodoricus’s Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium, which is dedicated to Archbishop Eysteinn of Niðaróss.24 Gunnlaugr’s writings are even harder to synchronise with this supposed promotion of secular power. The stories with which his name is most persistently linked are not about laymen, but about bishops: he wrote at length about the lives of St Þorlákr, St Jón, and possibly St Ambrose, a particular favourite of reformers like Bishop Guðmundr Arason. Although Gunnlaugr is usually credited with the whole of Þorvalds þáttr víðfõrla, he is explicitly referenced only twice, once to authorise a miracle of Bishop Friðrekr and once in the story of the hermit Máni: the first of these scenes strongly endorses ecclesiastical authority and the second promotes withdrawal from the world.25 Þorvaldr himself, like Óláfr, ends his life in a monastery in the East and is buried by a church dedicated to John the Baptist, a strongly ascetic saint and a great opponent of secular power.26 Although we know that Gunnlaugr and the monks at Þingeyrar did fall out with Bishop Guðmundr at a later stage, there is little or no sign of this in what survives of Gunnlaugr’s work: all the evidence suggests that he was much more interested in the religious life than in the secular. 21 22

23 24

25

26

Lars Lönnroth, ‘Studier i Olaf Tryggvasons saga’, Samlaren 84 (1963), 88–94; Hofmann, ‘Die Vision des Oddr Snorrason’, pp. 144–51. Lars Lönnroth, ‘Sverrir’s Dreams’, in The Fantastic in Old Norse/Icelandic Literature, ed. John McKinnell et al., pp. 603–12, reprinted in his The Academy of Odin, pp. 163–78; Sverris saga, pp. lxiv–lxv. Zernack, ‘Vorläufer und Vollender’, pp. 89–92; For the images of baptism, see Óláfs saga Odds, p. 125 and Sverris saga, pp. 8–9. Haki Antonsson, ‘Early Saga Writing’, p. 104 and Magnús of Orkney, pp. 152–4. On Friðrekr’s miracles, see Siân Grønlie, ‘“Reading and Understanding”: The Miracles in Þorvalds þáttr ens víðfõrla’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 112 (2013), 475–94, especially 487–91. Máni is discussed in Jesch, ‘Early Christians’, pp. 23–4. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 37, 89, 100. Haki Antonsson, ‘Early Saga Writing’, p. 127.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero The changes Gunnlaugr made to Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar also show this trend. Judging by the few direct references to his name, Gunnlaugr’s most significant additions were to the end of the saga: he is cited in Flateyjarbók as a source for the later life of Óláfr Tryggvason’s bishop, Sigurðr, who moves on to evangelise in Sweden, and for the vision of Brestir, in which Óláfr appears on a ship with Bishop Sigurðr to receive the soul of Bishop Þorlákr Rúnólfsson.27 Again, his interest in bishops is evident, as is his interest in sanctity: it has been suggested that Þorlákr Rúnólfsson has here been confused with St Þorlákr Þorhallsson, and that Brestir’s vision therefore comes from Gunnlaugr’s collection of Þorlákr’s miracles, rather than from his life of Óláfr. Most importantly, Gunnlaugr is credited with significant information about Óláfr Tryggvason’s afterlife in the East: he may have composed the short story of Gautr, a Norwegian traveller to the Holy Land, who gives an eyewitness account of Óláfr’s life there as a monk. He certainly added material on King Edward the Confessor and Harold Godwineson: on Easter Day, Edward speaks with a saint’s authority about Óláfr’s death and salvation, while Harold is inspired by Óláfr’s example to enter the religious life after the battle of Hastings.28 We are even told that Óláfr Tryggvason compiled a saga about his escape from Svõlðr, and sent it to King Æthelred the Unready bound with six other heilagra manna sõgur (‘lives of holy people’); Edward the Confessor is said to read this book to his knights.29 This sure knowledge about Óláfr’s salvation contrasts sharply with how Oddr finishes his saga, for he registers some doubt about the circumstances of Óláfr’s death, as expressed in the poetry of Hallfreðr Óttarsson.30 Oddr’s desire to believe that Óláfr escaped is linked in one manuscript with his intense concern for Óláfr’s soul:31 ‘Trúi ek þessu’, segir Oddr munkr, ‘at Óláfr konungr hafi braut komizk, [ok] allir munu þeir trúa er mér eru líkir, þótt ek vita suma ifa þat, gamla menn [. . .] Ok þess vil ek biðja hvern sem einn er sõguna less’, segir Oddr munkr, ‘at þess biði at Óláfr konungr hafi himinríki með Guði ok eilífan fagnað fyrir sitt starf’. [‘I believe this’, says the monk Oddr, ‘that King Óláfr got away, [and] all those who are like me will believe [this], although I know that some old men doubt it [. . .] ‘And I wish to ask each and every one who reads the saga’, says the monk Oddr, ‘to pray that King Óláfr receive the kingdom of heaven with God and eternal joy in exchange for his hard work’.] Flateyjarbók, I, 514–17. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 359–62; Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, II, 340–7, 348–9. On the attribution of these chapters to Gunnlaugr, see Sveinbjörn Rafnsson, Sögugerð Landnámabókar: Um íslenska sagnaritun á 12. og 13. öld, Ritsafn sagnafræðistofnunar 35 (Reykjavík: Sagnfræðistofnun Háskóla Íslands, 2001), pp. 106–12. 29 Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, II, 320. 30 Erfidrápa Óláfs Tryggvasonar, ed. Kate Heslop, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, 1.1, 425–34. 31 Óláfs saga Odds, p. 358. 27

28

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason The obscurity surrounding Óláfr’s death jars painfully with the ontological certainties of hagiography. Haki Antonsson argues that Gunnlaugr rewrote the end of Oddr’s saga ‘to give greater clarity and a sense of closure’.32 In the process, he changed Óláfr from an exceptional hero into the conventional type of the penitent monk. These sagas are not obviously propaganda for secular power; but they do engage closely with the problem of lay salvation. Haki Antonsson has suggested that this was a pressing issue in twelfth-century Iceland, as the Church began to take on an independent identity and the lives of laymen and clerics became increasingly distinct.33 The sort of anxiety this generated can be perceived in a short anecdote appended to one manuscript of Oddr’s saga. This describes how Oddr wished to leave the monastery, but was prevented by a vision of Óláfr Tryggvason and Christ:34 Ok menn segja at fyrir hann hafi bori[t dýr]ligar sýnir. Ok hann sá Ólaf konung at sýn, at sõgn vitra manna, ok því framar, at menn segja at hann sæ[i Krist] sjálfan, þá er hann var í óynði ok vildi á braut ór munklífinu. Ok er hann kom í kirkjuna, sá hann [Krist] breiða frá sér hendrnar ok hneigja hõfuðit ok mælti áhyggjusamliga: ‘Hér máttu s[já hvat] ek hefi þolat fyrir yðrar sakar, ok muntu vilja bera freistni fyrir mínu nafni.’ [And it is said that [glorious] visions came to him. And he saw King Óláfr in a vision, according to the report of wise men, and furthermore, it is said that he saw [Christ] himself, when he was in a state of discontent, and wished to leave the monastic life. And when he came into the church, he saw [Christ] stretch out his arms and bow his head and [he] spoke gravely: ‘Here you can s[ee what] I have suffered for your sake, and you must be willing to endure temptation for my name.’]

Although the manuscript is damaged, these seem to be the words of Christ spoken from the cross; Harold Godwineson has a similar vision in the Vita Haraldi, where Christ also bows his head on the cross in answer to prayer.35 Exactly why Oddr was suffering óynði (‘discontent’) is not specified, but the mention of King Óláfr is intriguing; it suggests that Oddr’s unhappiness had something to do with his account of Óláfr’s life. At the end of his Life of St Martin, Sulpicius Severus also records his vision of the saint: he sees Martin holding up his written life and smiling his approval.36 If Oddr’s vision has a similar function, then it might express Christ’s approval of his saga. Haki Antons32

Haki Antonsson, ‘Early Saga Writing’, p. 95. Haki Antonsson, ‘Early Saga Writing’, p. 126. 34 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 358–9. 35 Three Lives of the Last Englishmen, trans. Michael Swanton, Garland library of medieval literature B. 10 (New York: Garland, 1984); p. 22. St Jón Õgmundarson has a similar vision in Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 233, which alerts him to the arrival of a hagiographic work (the Flagellatio crucis, found in Heilagra manna søgur, I, 308–11). 36 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 604, 639. 33

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The Saint and the Saga Hero son argues that Oddr is here ‘torn between the secular and the ecclesiastical worlds’.37 If so, this mirrors the tension between secular narrative and saint’s life that can also be perceived within his saga.

Manuscripts and sources Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar is usually dated to c. 1180–1200 and the suggestion that it was written closer to 1180 is attractive: it allows for the possibility that Karl Jónsson took it with him to Norway in 1185 to show to King Sverrir.38 A translation was made before c. 1220, when Snorri Sturluson used it as a source for his Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, and it survives in two main manuscripts (Stock. Perg. 4to nr 18 and AM 310 4to) and a fragment of a third (Uppsala De la Gardie 4–7), which was made in Norway.39 Of the two main redactions, AM 310 4to (A), which may have been made in Þingeyrar for export to Norway, has traditionally been considered closer to the original, but Óláfr Halldórsson has recently made a case for preferring Stock. Perg. 4to nr 18 (S), since the scribe of this manuscript copies the texts of other sagas with minimal changes.40 Both redactions, however, contain additions to the common exemplar. The end of the saga, which describes the battle of Svõlðr, was significantly amplified in the early stages of translation with skaldic verses from either Fagrskinna or (more likely) a common source. The A-text also uses material from Íslendingabók and Jómsvíkinga saga, and appends six stanzas from Hallfreðr’s Óláfsdrápa about Óláfr’s early raids.41 In the process of translation, Oddr’s Latin vita is moved closer to the vernacular saga, incorporating a number of skaldic verses by different poets that offered alternative perspectives on events. The exact sources Oddr used are hard to pin down, since few written works survive from before the end of the twelfth century. Some of his material was certainly oral and must have included skaldic poetry, although only one stanza in the translation can definitely be traced back to the Latin original, and it is just possible that Oddr composed this himself, although the same stanza is quoted in Kristni saga, where it is apparently authenticated by Ari Þorgilsson.42 A few 37

Haki Antonsson, ‘Early Saga Writing’, p. 128. The Partisan Muse, pp. 64–5. On the relationship between Oddr’s and Snorri’s sagas of Óláfr Tryggvason, see Óláfs saga Odds, pp. cxv–cxix; Theodore Andersson, ‘The Conversion of Norway according to Oddr Snorrason and Snorri Sturluson’, Medieval Scandinavia 10 (1977), 83–95. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. cxliv–cli, clii–clxx. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. cxix–cxliii, clxxvi–clxxxiii. Hallfreðr’s poety on Óláfr Tryggvason can be found in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, 1.1, 386–441. Óláfs saga Odds, p. 308; Biskupa sögur, I (2003), p. 38. For both sides of the argument, see Walter Baetke, ‘Die Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar des Oddr Snorrason und die Jómsvíkinga saga: zur Historiographie des nordischen Frühmittelalters’, in Formen mittelalterlicher Literatur: Siegfried Beyschlag zu seinem 65. Geburtstag von Kollegen, Freunden und Schülern, ed. Otmar Werner and Bernard Naumann, Güppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik 25 (Kümmerle: Göppingen, 1970), pp. 1–18; The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason, pp. 20–5. The stanza is edited separately in Old Norse and Latin in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas,

38 Andersson, 39

40 41

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason Norwegian names are cited as the informants for individual anecdotes, and it is likely that these were mediated through abbot Karl Jónsson, since they include King Sverrir himself.43 At the end of AM 310, 4to (A), a list of Icelandic informants is given:44 Þessa sõgu sagði mér Ásgrímr ábóti Vestliðason, Bjarni prestr Bergþórsson, Gellir Þorgilsson, Herdís Daðadóttir, Þorgerðr Þorsteinsdóttir, Inguðr Arnórsdóttir. Þessir menn kenndu mér svá sõgu Óláfs konungs Tryggvasonar sem nú er sõgð. Ek sýnda ok bókina Gizuri Hallssýni, ok rétta ek hana eptir hans ráði, ok hõfum vér því haldit síðan. [This saga was told to me by Abbot Ásgrímr Vestliðason, the priest Bjarni Bergþórsson, Gellir Þorgilsson, Herdís Daðadóttir, Þorgerðr Þorsteinsdóttir, Inguðr Arnórsdóttir. These people taught me the saga of King Óláfr Tryggvason as it is now told. I also showed the book to Gizurr Hallsson, and I corrected it according to his advice, and we have kept it since.]

It is not clear from the context whether these are Oddr’s or Gunnlaugr’s informants; the list comes immediately after the chapters on Edward and Harold, which are usually attributed to Gunnlaugr. Flateyjarbók, however, which includes the same list, specifies that these were the informants of both Oddr and Gunnlaugr, and since those people that can be identified with reasonable certainty appear to have been alive in the mid-twelfth century, there is no reason to doubt this information. The informants include a previous abbot of Þingeyrar (Ásgrímr Vestliðason), a nun at Hólar (Inguðr Arnórsdóttir), and Gellir Þorgilsson may be the grandson of Ari Þorgilsson.45 Gizurr Hallsson (died 1206), who lived at Haukadalr and Skálaholt, is a particularly interesting figure: he was the grandson of Teitr Ísleifsson, Ari’s main source for Íslendingabók, and he was deacon, chieftain, and then lawspeaker in 1181–1202.46 He was a well-travelled man and wrote a guide for pilgrims, Flos peregrinationis (sadly lost), and he is named as the main source of Hungrvaka. He was involved at some stage in a life of Edward the Confessor and perhaps also in the compilation of Veraldar saga; as noted above, he was a recipient and critic of Oddr’s Yngvars saga víðfõrla.47 His active engagement with Oddr’s and Gunnlaugr’s work shows that these were of interest not just to a small monastic or clerical audience of ‘brœðr enir

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1.1, 447–50 and 1.2, 891–2. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 261, 269–70, 342. Óláfs saga Odds, p. 362; Flateyjarbók, I, 517. Inguðr is mentioned in Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 219–20, 245, and it is possible that Herdís Daðadóttir was the sister of Inguðr’s mother, Guðrún Daðadóttir. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), xxi–xxii. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 3; Veraldar saga, ed. Jakob Benediktsson (Copenhagen: Lunos, 1944), pp. liii–lv, 72; Játvarðar saga, in Saga Játvarðar konúngs hins helga, ed. Carl C. Rafn and Jón Sigurðsson (Copenhagan: Qvist, 1852), pp. 5, 14–17. On Gizurr’s involvement with Edward the Confessor, see also Christine Fell, ‘The Icelandic Saga of Edward the Confessor: the Hagiographic Sources’, Anglo-Saxon England 1 (1972), 247–58.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero kristnu ok feðr’ (‘Christian brothers and fathers’), but also to the secular élite.48 Oddr also used written histories for the reign of Óláfr: he refers twice to Ari, quotes directly from the lost work of Ari’s older contemporary, the historian Sæmundr Sigfússon (1056–1133), and probably knew Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, which gives a memorable portrait of Óláfr as apostate.49 Oddr seems consciously to refute this in his account of Óláfr’s severe dealings with sorcerers and magicians. A number of Norwegian histories written towards the end of the twelfth century also include material on Óláfr Tryggvason, but the literary relationships are complex: the closest to Oddr is Theodoricus’s Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium, and it has been argued either that Oddr borrows from Theodoricus, or that Theodoricus borrows from Oddr, or (most likely) that they share a common source.50 The account of Óláfr’s marriage to Geira appears to be based on the Dido and Aeneas episode in the Aeneid; this is supported by evidence that Virgil was known at Þingeyrar and used by Gunnlaugr at around this time.51 Most obviously, Oddr draws freely on the Bible and on saints’ lives: he quotes directly from the Psalms, the Gospel of St John and 1 Peter, as well as basing his account of Óláfr’s childhood on biblical narratives: the Nativity, the Flight to Egypt, Joseph’s slavery in Egypt, and (later) the transfiguration of Christ.52 He was familiar with Gregory’s Dialogues, from which he borrows a number of incidents, and he also uses the lives of St Martin and of St Clement, which were among the earliest saints’ lives to be translated into Old Icelandic. St Martin had a strong cult in Iceland and relics in Skálaholt, while St Clement was venerated throughout the North: both were important missionary saints (p. 12). Many of the hagiographic motifs in Oddr’s saga are so conventional and widespread that it is difficult to specify exactly where they come from, but further parallels can be drawn with the lives of John the Baptist, St Andrew, St Eustace (or Plácidus) and St Nicholas.53 Oddr was widely read in Latin hagiography, and he found 48 49

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Óláfs saga Odds, p. 125. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 207, 208, 209, 232; Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, trans. Francis J. Tschan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), xl. (38), p. 82. Gudrun Lange, Die Anfänge der isländisch-norwegischen Geschichtsschreibung, Studia Islandica 47 (Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfa Menningarsjóðs, 1989), pp. 125–33; The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason, pp. 6–14; Óláfs saga Odds, pp. lxxxvi–cii. The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason, pp. 14–16; on the use of Virgil, see Hallvard Magerøy, ‘Vergil-påvirknad på norrøn litteratur’, Gripla 10 (1998), 77. Fagrskinna, pp. 159–61; Óláfs saga Odds, pp. lxxxi, lxxxv–lxxxvi. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. lxxxi–lxxxii, lxxxv–lxxxvi, xcv–xcvi. On John the Baptist, see further Zernack, ‘Vorläufer und Vollender’, pp. 78, 86–8; on Clement, see John Lindow, ‘Akkerisfrakki: Traditions concerning Óláfr Tryggvason and Hallfreðr Óttarsson vandræðaskáld and the Problem of Conversion’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106 (2007), 74–5; on Martin, see Lönnroth, ‘Olaf Tryggvasons saga’, pp. 69–72. On Gregory’s Dialogues, see Régis Boyer, ‘The Influence of Pope Gregory’s Dialogues on Old Icelandic Literature’, in Proceedings of the First International Saga Conference, University of Edinburgh, 1971, ed. Peter Foote, Hermann Pálsson and Desmond Slay (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1973), pp. 1–27;

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason here not only parallels, but also some problematic differences between Óláfr Tryggvason and these early ascetic saints. It is also likely that Oddr took inspiration from more recent saints’ lives, in particular legends about ‘holy’ kings like Charlemagne, Edward the Confessor and Harold Godwineson.54 The interest in royal sainthood reached its peak in Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and this must have influenced Oddr as he thought about Óláfr’s own problematic status as missionary king.55 Charlemagne was canonised in 1165, and there is good evidence that Oddr had access to material about him: there was an Icelandic translation of at least the first eighteen chapters of The Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle in circulation by c. 1200.56 This enormously popular work gave an entirely fictional account of Charlemagne’s ‘crusade’ against the infidels in Spain, and presented him as a new kind of knightly king and athleta patriae (‘athlete of the fatherland’).57 Lönnroth has argued that it provided Oddr with a model for how to combine the warrior and the missionary aspects of Óláfr’s character.58 The parallels between the two are certainly striking, if somewhat vague; the only undisputed loan is Oddr’s famous description of the procession of ships at Svõlðr, which is not from Pseudo-Turpin, but (directly or indirectly) from Notker’s Gesta Karoli Magni.59 Edward the Confessor, with his devotion to chastity and asceticism, is less useful a model for Óláfr, although Gunnlaugr exploits his saintly authority to give a verdict on Óláfr’s salvation. The Vita Haroldi, which dates from c. 1205–15, postdates Oddr’s Latin vita, but it seems likely that it did exert an influence on Gunnlaugr. It is primarily concerned with Harold’s life as a penitent after the Battle of Hastings, and it presents his entry into the religious life as a ‘conversion’: Harold chooses to reject the secular trappings of power and prestige and becomes instead a ‘warrior of Christ’. There is a close

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Kirsten Wolf, ‘Gregory’s Influence on Old Norse-Icelandic Religious Literature’, in Rome and the North: The Early Reception of Gregory the Great in Germanic Europe, ed. Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Kees Dekker and David F. Johnson (Paris: Peeters, 2001), pp. 255–74; Siân Grønlie, ‘Saint’s Life and Saga Narrative’, Saga-Book 36 (2012), 5–26. Lönnroth, ‘Olaf Tryggvasons saga’, pp. 72–88; ‘Charlemagne, Hrolf Kraki, Olaf Tryggvason: Parallels in the Heroic Tradition’, in Les relations littéraires francoscandinaves au Moyen Âge (Paris: Société d’Édition ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1975), pp. 29–52; ‘The Baptist and the Saint: Odd Snorrason’s View of the Two King Olavs’, in International Scandinavian and Medieval Studies in Memory of Gerd Wolfgang Weber, ed. Michael Dallapiazza et al. (Trieste: Parnaso, 2000), pp. 257–64. The importance of Anglo-Norman historians is emphasised by Shami Ghosh, Kings’ Sagas and Norwegian History: Problems and Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 113–46. See further Chapter 1 (pp. 5–6) and references there to Folz, Vauchez and Klaniczay. On Charlemagne in Iceland, see Peter Foote, The Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle in Iceland: A Contribution to the Study of the Karlamagnús saga (London: London Mediæval Studies, University College, 1959), pp. 48–51; Paul A. White, Non-native Sources for the Scandinavian Kings’ Sagas (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 67–71. Klaniczay, Holy Rulers, p. 398. Lönnroth, ‘The Baptist and the Saint’, p. 259. Lönnroth, ‘Olaf Tryggvasons saga’, p. 85; White, Non-native Sources, p. 70. Even this loan has been questioned (see The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason, p. 19).

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The Saint and the Saga Hero parallel to be found here with the depiction of Óláfr’s monastic afterlife in the East.60 Oddr’s main interest, however, is Óláfr’s heroism on the mission field, and it is on this that Oddr founds Óláfr’s claim to sanctity.

Apostle of the Northerners For Oddr, Óláfr Tryggvason was a founding figure for Christianity in the North: he describes him as ‘postoli Norðmanna’ (‘apostle of the Northerners’), and claims that he converted six countries to Christianity: Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Orkney, the Faeroes and Shetland.61 Óláfr, then, follows Patrick as ‘apostle’ of Ireland and Gregory as ‘apostle of England’, and Óláfr gives him a conversion experience like that of St Paul on the road to Damascus, the archetypal apostle to the heathen.62 This takes place in a dream while the young Óláfr is in Russia, and is framed by a vision of the beauty of heaven and the horrors of hell:63 Hann heyrði rõdd fagra mæla við sik: ‘Heyrðu, efni góðs manns, er aldregi blótaðir guðum ok óhreinum õndum, heldr svívirðir þú þau ok rækðir, ok því munu þín verk margfaldask mjõk ok til góðra hluta frævask. En þó skortir þik enn mikit at þú megir þessa staði byggva, er þú veizt eigi deili á skapara þínum ok hverr saðr Guð er.’ Ok er hann heyrði þetta, þá hræddisk hann við ok mælti: ‘Hverr ertu, Dróttinn, at ek trúa á þik?’ Rõddin mælti: ‘Far þú til Grikklands, ok mun þér þar kunnigt gert nafn Dróttins. Ok ef þú varðveitir hans boð muntu hafa eilíft líf, ok ef þú trúir sannliga munu margir eptir þér hverfa til réttrar trúar, því at Guð hefir þik til kosit at snúa honum til handa mõrgum þjóðum.’ [He heard a beautiful voice speak to him: ‘Listen, you who have the makings of a good man, who have never sacrificed to gods and unclean spirits, rather you have dishonoured and rejected them, and because of this your deeds will multiply greatly and bear fruit for good things. And yet you still fall very short of being able to inhabit these places, in that you know nothing about your Creator and who the true God is’. And when he heard this, he was frightened by it and said: ‘Who are you, Lord, that I may believe in you?’ The voice said: ‘Go to Greece, and the name of the Lord will be made known to you there. And if you keep his commands, you will have eternal life, and if you believe truly, many after you will turn to the true faith, because God has chosen you to turn to him many peoples.] Lives of the Last Great Englishmen, p. 16. On the possible influence of Harold’s life, see Marc Cohen, ‘From Throndheim to Waltham to Chester: Viking- and Post-Viking-Age Attitudes in the Survival Legends of Ólaf Tryggvason and Harold Godwinson’, in The Middle Ages in the North West, ed. Tom Scott and Pat Starkey (Oxford: Leopard’s Head Press, 1995), pp. 143–53; White, Non-native Sources, pp. 75–7; Ghosh, Kings’ Sagas, pp. 126–8. 61 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 358, 271. 62 For the conversion of Saul/Paul, see Acts 9: 5; Postola sögur, p. 216; Homiliu-bók, p. 178. 63 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 162–3. 60

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason The voice and Óláfr’s response (‘“Hverr ertu, Dróttinn?”’) closely echo the conversion of St Paul in Acts (‘“Quis es, Domine?”’), but the scene also recalls another well-known conversion experience: that of St Eustace or Plácidus, who is mentioned as a direct parallel to Óláfr in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta.64 Plácidus is a soldier and a noble heathen, and he is granted a vision of Christ because of his ‘good works’. Like Óláfr, he asks his interlocutor to reveal his identity ‘at ek trúa á þik’ (‘that I may believe in you’) and Christ tells him what to do next: ‘Ef þu trúir, þá far þú til borgarinnar ok tak skírn af byskupi kristinna manna’ (‘If you believe, then go to the town and receive baptism from the bishop of Christians’). Finally he urges Plácidus ‘at standask margar freistni, at þú takir kórónu ok dýrð sigrs’ (‘to endure many trials, that you may receive the crown and glory of victory’).65 There is a further parallel with the calling of Charlemagne in Karlamagnús saga, where St James appears to Charlemagne in a dream at night. Like Óláfr and St Paul, Charlemagne asks: ‘“Hver ertu, góði herra?”’ (‘“Who are you, good lord?”’) and the apostle describes how God has ‘skipað þig til þess að frjálsa eign mína undan heiðnum þjóðum, að þar fyrir takir þú bjarta kórónu eilífrar dýrðar’ (‘appointed you to free my estates from heathen peoples, that in exchange you may receive the bright crown of eternal glory’).66 The embedding of these allusions within Óláfr’s conversion – to a biblical apostle, a noble heathen and a great Christian emperor – creates a powerful sense not only of his divine calling, but also of the polarities between which he stands: the binary of salvation or damnation so clearly revealed in his vision of heaven and hell. On Óláfr’s response to this calling depends the salvation of many: Oddr invests his story with ‘cosmological drama’, locates it in eschatological time.67 Óláfr is also granted the full support of another missionary saint, Martin of Tours: Martin appears to Óláfr in a vision when he is first made king of Norway, and promises to speak with him and to strengthen his message. From that moment on, Oddr tells us, Óláfr’s preaching was so effective that ‘í hvers manns hjarta beit hans orð ok sú mildi er fylgði’ (‘his speech bit into the heart of every man, as did the grace that accompanied [it]’).68 Ólafur Halldórsson has likened this to the biblical account of how God strengthens the words of Moses: Óláfr is to lead his people, like Moses, over the Red Sea and into the Promised Land.69 Martin’s aid to Óláfr, his gift of eloquence, creates a link between them that lasts throughout Óláfr’s life.70 His missionary methods have 64

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Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, I, 158. Plácidus saga, pp. 11, 15, 25. Karlamagnús saga ok kappa hans, ed. Carl R. Unger (Christiania: Jensen, 1860), pp. 256–7. Bagge, ‘The Making of a Missionary King’, p. 506. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 212–14, 231. Óláfs saga Odds, p. lxxxii; on the importance of the Exodus for the monks of Þingeyrar, see Haki Antonsson, ‘Early Saga Writing’, pp. 82, 97, 112. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 560, 583. Clement is also noted for his eloquence: ‘Guþs mildi tœþi ávalt mǻlum páfans’ (‘God’s grace always assisted the Pope’s words’); see Clemens saga: The Life of St Clement of Rome, ed. Helen Carron, Viking Society for

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The Saint and the Saga Hero a precedent in Martin’s, which are characterised by the violent destruction of shrines and temples, sanctioned and upheld by divine power. On one occasion, for example, two angels dressed ‘svá sem riddarar vápnaðir ok skjáldaðir’ (‘like knights with weapons and shields’) protect him while he breaks down temples and idols in the presence of heathen worshippers.71 This resembles the scene where Óláfr destroys the temple of Freyr before Járn-Skeggi and his men, although Óláfr has human soldiers by his side. Angels appear to Martin throughout his life: he speaks with saints and angels whom no-one else can see, as if he himself already belongs in this invisible world. In one scene, as he celebrates mass, he is transfigured and ‘heavenly fire’ appears above his head, recalling the tongues of flame at Pentecost.72 Oddr borrows this cosmic cast of saints and angels when writing his saga: Óláfr’s bishop sees him speak with a ‘bjartan mann’ (‘a shining man’), and Guðbrandr describes him as ‘Guðs engill’ (‘God’s angel’), an expression used in the translated lives of John the Baptist and the apostle Andrew.73 It is the prominence of the devil, however, in Óláfr’s life that most obviously classifies it as hagiography. Martin, like other saints, is continually opposed by an envious devil, who appears to him in human form as well as in the shape of Roman gods. In the Norse translation, the gods that appear to him, Mercury and Jupiter, are translated as Óðinn and Þórr.74 Óláfr too encounters the devil as Óðinn and Þórr, as well as in other disguises. Oddr explains that ‘Ok nú er svá mikinn framgang hõfðu haft dýrðarverk Óláfs konungs, þá õfundaði þat óvinr alls mannkyns, er ávallt sitr um menn at gera þeim nõkkura meinsamliga hluti’ (‘And now that King Óláfr’s glorious deeds had had such great success, the enemy of all mankind was envious of it, who always lies in wait for people to do them various harmful things’).75 First the devil appears to Óláfr in the shape of an old man (identified in the S-text as Óðinn), who attempts to poison Óláfr and his men and distract them from the Christmas services; later, he appears at sea with Þórr’s red beard, and is identified as the devil.76 He also goes to work in less obvious forms, as in the life of St Martin and Gregory’s Dialogues: a number of Óláfr’s supposedly human opponents turn out to be devils in disguise. So, when Óláfr attempts to force Eyvindr kinnrifa (‘cheek-crevice’) to be baptised, Eyvindr reveals that he is not fully human:77

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Northern Research, Text Series XVII (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2005), pp. 46–7. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 560; cf. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 279–81. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 565, 569, 588, 593, 617, 621, 624–5. Óláfs saga Odds, p. 270; cf. Postola sögur, pp. 325, 847. The convert Faustinianus is also described as ‘sem engil Guþs’ (‘like an angel of God’) in Clemens saga, pp. 32–5. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 556, 563–4, 569. Óláfs saga Odds, p. 249. The devil’s envy is also noted in Heilagra manna søgur, I, 209, 229, 315, II, 30, 195. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 253, 288–90. Óláfs saga Odds, p. 257.

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason Faðir minn var ríkr ok móðir ok áttu mikit fé ok engan erfingja, ok þat hõrmuðu þau mjõk, ok keyptu síðan at fjõlkunngum mõnnum at móðir mín yrði kviðug, ok svá varð af þeira krapti. Ok varð ek af þeim samburð er raunar var kynngi ein. Ok nú er ek hefi eigi mannseðli með õllu, þá má ek eigi játa yðru boði. [My father and mother were rich and had a lot of money and no heir, and they grieved deeply over this, and later they paid sorcerers so that my mother would become pregnant, and so it came about through their power. And I was born of that union which in fact was sorcery alone. And now, since I do not have human nature in every respect, I am not able to respond favourably to your preaching.]

Óláfr Halldórsson suggests that this is a pagan version of the virgin birth, but it sounds more like the demonic incubus of medieval romance, which theologians in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries took seriously. The A-text adds in explanation that ‘jafnfullt er loptit af óhreinum õndum sem jõrðin’ (‘the air is as full of unclean spirits as the earth’), which echoes twelfth-century debate about where evil spirits lived: in the upper atmosphere, or closer to the ground.78 There is a similar explanation of Merlin’s origins in Breta sõgur, which was probably translated at Þingeyrar: ‘Þat finnask í bókum at þau eru dýr í lopti millim tungls ok jarðar (er) anda ok brigða mætti á sik mannslíkjum ok mætti bõrn geta’ (‘It is found in books that those creatures in the air between moon and earth are spirits and can take on human forms and can beget children’).79 This seems likely to be Oddr’s source. Eyvindr’s companion, Þórir, also turns out to be a demon: when Óláfr shoots him between the shoulders, a great hart leaps out of his body, and is hunted down and killed by Óláfr’s dog, Vígi. Interestingly, these are the only stories in his saga about which Oddr expresses some doubt: ‘En þótt slíkt sé sagt af tálum ok svikum óvinar ok blandat þessum hlutum við frásõgn Óláfs konungs, kunnum vér eigi at greina með skýru. En allir vitu hvé mõrg undr ok sjónhverfingar fjándinn hefir gert við sína menn, en trúum því af slíku sem oss sýnisk til þess fallit’ (‘And although such things are said about the tricks and deceits of the enemy and these things [are] mixed up with the account of King Óláfr, we do not know how to expound [them] with clarity. But everyone knows how many wonders and visual illusions the devil has performed with his people, and let us therefore believe of such things what seems to us Óláfs saga Odds, p. lxxxvi. For a discussion of medieval theology about incubi and their offspring, see Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 59–67. For twelfth-century discussions about where demons lived and what kind of bodies they had, see Jocelyn G. Price, ‘The Virgin and the Dragon: The Demonology of Seinte Margarete’, Leeds Studies in English 16 (1985), 340–1. Eyvindr’s resemblance to an incubus is discussed by Jacqueline Simpson, ‘Olaf Tryggvason versus the Powers of Darkness’, in The Witch Figure, ed. Venetia Newall (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 170, who refers to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account of Merlin’s diabolical origins in his Historia regum Britanniae (vi. 18–19). 79 Hauksbók, p. 271. 78

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The Saint and the Saga Hero fitting’).80 The A-text adds helpfully: ‘Þá dœmum vér þat eigi sannleik at svá hafi verit, heldr hyggjum vér at svá hafi sýnzk, því at fjándinn er fullr upp flærðar ok illsku’ (‘We do not consider it the truth that this happened, rather, we think that it seemed thus, because the devil is full of deceit and evil’). The issue here is not plausibility, so much as orthodoxy: since the devils that roam the earth have purely aerial bodies, the grossly corporeal nature of Eyvindr, who can die, and the hart, which seriously wounds Vígi, is theologically problematic. There were similar issues with the dragon that swallowed St Margaret, which some learned hagiographers omitted or dismissed as ‘fable’.81 Oddr’s approach to these stories is very much that of a hagiographic writer: he categorises them as dœmisõgur (‘exempla’) to be interpreted allegorically. Perhaps the most striking sign of Óláfr’s sanctity occurs towards the end of the saga, when Óláfr is transfigured in a hidden location after he has left his ship to pray. Oddr tells us that he leaves the ship alone at night, and walks ‘með þurrum fótum’ (‘with dry feet’) without leaving tracks, despite heavy dew on the ground.82 On one occasion, two men follow him, Guðbrandr ór Dõlum and Þorkell dyðrill, who later gave an account of what he saw to King Haraldr Sigurðarson (died 1066):83 Hann sá konung biðjask fyrir ok rétta hendr til himna, ok skein yfir hann ljós mikit, svá at eigi þóttisk hann mega í gøgn sjá, ok tvá menn sá hann hjá honum, skrýdda hvítum klæðum, ok lõgðu hendr yfir hõfuð konungi. Hann heyrði ok fagran sõng, ok sœtan ilm kenndi hann um tvær stundir nætr. [He saw the king pray and stretch his hands to the heavens, and a great light shone over him so that he thought that he could not see through it, and he saw two men beside him, clothed in white garments, and [they] laid hands on the king’s head. He also heard a beautiful song and smelt a sweet smell for two hours of the night.]

Although this recalls Martin’s transfiguration, it is even closer to the gospel accounts: like Christ, Óláfr makes his witnesses promise not to tell anyone what they have seen. As the transfiguration of Christ marks the transition to the passion narrative, so this scene is a prelude to Óláfr’s last great battle. It serves to tie together several important moments in Óláfr’s life. It recalls the ‘mikit ljós’ (‘great light’) seen by a pagan prophetess at his birth, the ‘bjartir menn’ (‘shining men’) and ‘sœtr ilmr’ (‘sweet smell’) in the vision he experiences at his conversion, the ‘morgunsól’ (‘morning sun’) that glances off the monks’ garments at his baptism in the Scilly Isles, and the ‘ljós mikit’ (‘great light’)

Óláfs saga Odds, p. 259. Price, ‘The Virgin and the Dragon’, pp. 339–40. 82 This echoes the description of Peter walking on water in Heilagra manna søgur, I, 200 (p. 206). 83 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 267–9; Postola sögur, p. 412; cf. Matthew 17: 1–13, Mark 9: 2–13, Luke 9: 28–36. 80 81

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason which will hide him at the battle of Svõlðr.84 At his baptism, the abbot predicts that he will become ‘lýsari margra anda’ (‘the illuminator of many souls’), a bringer of light to the darkness of the North.85 The recurrent imagery of light and sun around Óláfr strongly endorses him as a figure of Christ: his birth and baptism parallel those of the Saviour and represent the dawning of salvation for the inhabitants of the North. Again, Oddr handles this crucial miracle as a hagiographer would, authorising it through the testimony of a sannsõgull (‘reliable’) eyewitness. Óláfr’s imitation of Christ and the saints is a strong indicator of sanctity: new saints are recognised by re-enacting the deeds of established ones. Yet Oddr faced a serious problem in Óláfr’s lack of posthumous miracles – an essential criterion for a saint who was not a martyr. He felt this lack keenly, for he devotes his prologue to it, and returns to it in a later chapter. In the prologue, Oddr tries to solve this problem by using historical typology: he argues that Óláfr Tryggvason is fyrirrennari (‘precursor’) to Saint Óláfr Haraldsson, just as John the Baptist was to Christ. Óláfr’s lack of miracles, then, can be understood as an act of deference to his namesake, just as John the Baptist deferred to Christ. Oddr quotes John 3: 30 to sanction this view: ‘Þér hœfir at vaxa, en mér at þverra’ (‘It is fitting for you to increase, and for me to decrease’).86 Even so, Óláfr’s lack of miracles suggests a measure of inferiority, and Oddr struggles with this in his comparison of the two men:87 Õllum er þat kunnigt, at eptir lífit skein jartegnum enn helgi Óláfr konungr, en enn frægsti Óláfr konungr Tryggvason var mõnnum ekki kunnr í jartegnagerð eptir lífit. Þó trúum vér hann dýrligan mann ok ágætan ok Guðs vin. Þótti hann õllum ólíkr í atgervi meðan hann lifði, þótt eptir lífit væri þat eigi berat hverr kraptamaðr hann var, ok ekki skulum vér forvitnask Guðs leynda hluti. [It is known to everyone that the holy King Óláfr Tryggvason shone with miracles after death, while the most famous King Óláfr was not known to people for working miracles after death. Yet we believe him to be a glorious and excellent man and a friend of God. He seemed to everyone to be exceptional in accomplishments while he lived, even though after death it was not revealed what a man of power he was, and we should not pry into things concealed by God.]

Oddr makes a clear distinction here between the ‘holy’ Óláfr Haraldsson and the ‘most famous’ Óláfr Tryggvason: one officially ‘known’ to be a saint, the merit of the other forever ‘concealed’. The disparity between Óláfr’s excellence ‘while he lived’ and his obscurity ‘after death’ is evidently troubling for Oddr. In a later chapter, he comes back to these problems of knowledge and concealment Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 144, 162, 167, 345. The light that hides Óláfr at the Battle of Svõlðr is shared with St John the Evangelist; see Cormack, ‘Saints’ Lives’, pp. 39–40. 85 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 144–5, 167–8. 86 Óláfs saga Odds, p. 125 (in S only). 87 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 125–6. 84

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The Saint and the Saga Hero again: ‘Síðan er Óláfr konungr fell á Orminum langa vita menn ekki hans vistir, ok eigi er sýnt hans líf með berum táknum, en ifar engi hann af Guði sendan hingat í heim at boða helga trú ok at Guð gerði hann õllum ágætra í sínum siðum’ (‘Since King Óláfr fell on the Long Serpent, no-one knows his whereabouts, and his life has not been revealed with clear signs, but no-one doubts that he was sent into this world by God to preach the holy faith and that God made him more excellent than anyone else in his practices’).88 Perhaps Oddr is thinking here of Gregory the Great’s assurance that the absence of miracles does not mean that there are no saints, or his comparison between the apostles Peter and Paul, whose worth was equal, although their power to work miracles was not.89 Oddr’s emphasis on concealment closely echoes this section in the Norse translation of the Dialogues, where Peter twice describes the miracles of his obscure contemporaries as ‘leynd’ (‘concealed’), just as Oddr here defends ‘Guðs leynda hluti’ (‘things concealed by God’).90 Oddr exploits this loophole in Gregory to claim that Óláfr’s lack of miracles is overridden by the sheer exceptionality of his life: he repeatedly uses the adjective ágætr (‘excellent’) and praises Óláfr’s atgervi (‘accomplishments’) and afreksverk (‘great achievements’). As Sverrir Tómasson has shown, these terms refer to Óláfr’s missionary work: Oddr affirms strongly that Óláfr was sent by God ‘at boða helga trú’ (‘to preach the holy faith’).91 Oddr breaks with conventional measures of sainthood here by basing Óláfr’s claim to sanctity not on martyrdom or asceticism, nor even on the ideal exercise of royal power, but instead on heroic feats in the mission field. This was a new kind of saint in the twelfth century and it presented Oddr with some considerable challenges.92

Sanctity and violence Oddr’s aim was to depict Óláfr as a hero of the mission field, in armed combat with the forces of evil. This immediately raises the problem of sanctity and violence, which was a topical issue in the twelfth century. Early saints like Martin were typically pacifist and opposed to secular power: Martin famously declared that ‘Ek em Krists riddari, ok er mér eigi lofat at berjask’ (‘I am a soldier of Christ, and I am not permitted to fight’).93 In the eleventh and twelfth 88 89 90

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Óláfs saga Odds, p. 273. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 199–200. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 180, 199. Oddr’s discussion has also been compared with the preface to Jóns saga baptista, but this presents the opposite problem: it is John’s life that is ‘concealed’ to the hagiographer, not his miracles; see Sverrir Tómasson, Formálar, p. 276 and Postola sögur, p. 842. Sverrir Tómasson, Formálar, p. 265. Klaniczay (Holy Rulers, p. 134) notes that St Stephen of Hungary (died 1038) was the first ruler whose sanctity was based on his active missionary work; he too had the explicit support of St Martin. Haki Antonsson compares the two men in Magnus of Orkney, pp. 150, 155. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 555.

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason centuries, however, the ‘warrior’ saint became increasingly popular, making sanctity accessible to secular rulers and to lay people in accordance with the ideology of the Crusades.94 Forced conversion, although problematic for theologians, was celebrated in legends about Charlemagne: The Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle bypasses Martin’s paradox entirely when it describes Charlemagne’s army of proto-crusaders: ‘They were famous heroes and warriors, mighty in battle, illustrious in worldly honour, zealous soldiers of Christ.’95 In the Norse translation in Karlamagnús saga, the Saracens are routinely offered ‘tvo kosti’ (‘two choices’): ‘taka trú rétta ella þola skjótan dauða’ (‘to take the true faith or endure a quick death’).96 This is the same choice Óláfr offers to his pagan opponents: ‘taka trú, eða vera drepinn’ (‘to take the faith, or be killed’).97 Yet Oddr is very much aware of both models of sainthood. He includes in his life of Óláfr Tryggvason an account of St Sunniva, who rejects temporal power and puts out to sea without ‘herklæði né vápn’ (‘armour or weapons’). When a group of pagans set out to kill her and her followers ‘með miklu liði ok vel vápnaðir’ (‘with a large war-band and well armed’), God protects them from illegitimate attack by a fatal rock-fall.98 The contrast evoked by this embedded passio is an important one: it suggests that, despite the new possibilities for ‘holy’ warriors, the traditional model of the ascetic saint remained a challenge to the exercise of violence. Óláfr’s personal involvement in acts of violent retribution becomes an increasingly urgent problem as the saga goes on. The sort of difficulty Oddr faced can be seen in an early scene from the saga, part of the composite account of Óláfr’s conversion. Óláfr is raiding in Denmark after the death of his first wife, apparently with the aim of distracting himself from his grief. On their way back to their ships, he and his men are ambushed by a local makeshift army and find themselves cut off from the sea. Although not yet a Christian, Óláfr proposes that they construct a cross, and lie under it: ‘En óvinir þeira kómu með gný ok með kalli ok hugðusk þá mundu taka hõndum, er þeir sá litlu áðr; ok hljópu á þá ok tráðu undir fótum ok fundu eigi, ok skýldi þeim svá krossmark. Ok hurfu hermenn aptr með mikilli undran’ (‘And their enemies came with noise and shouting, intending to seize hold of the men whom they had just seen; and [they] stepped on them and trod [them] underfoot and did not find [them], and so the sign of the cross protected them.

Klaniczay writes about this transition in Holy Rulers, pp. 166–71, 396–8. Historia Karoli Magni et Rotholandi ou Chronique du Pseudo-Turpin, ed. Cyril MeredithJones (Paris: Droz, 1936), p. 127: ‘Isti præfati sunt viri famosi, heroes, bellatores, potentibus cosmi potentiores, fortioribus fortiores, Christi proceres’. For a history of forced conversion, see Lawrence Duggan, ‘“For force is not of God?” Compulsion and Conversion from Yahweh to Charlemagne’, in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 49–62. 96 Karlamagnús saga, pp. 259, 262. 97 Óláfs saga Odds, p. 236. 98 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 218–20. 94

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The Saint and the Saga Hero And the warriors turned back in great wonder’).99 The sign of the cross in this scene alludes to a number of well-known miracles: Constantine and King Oswald both win victories using the sign of the cross, and Constantine, like Óláfr, does so before his conversion.100 Both are praised alongside St Óláfr in the Old Icelandic Homily Book as ‘þeir er herjat gátu himinríki ok unnit af guðs miskunn bæði með líkamligum võpnum oc andligum’ (‘those who were able to harry the heavenly kingdom and conquer by God’s grace both with physical and spiritual weapons’).101 Other saints use the cross, as Óláfr does here, to avoid battle altogether. In Andreas saga, Andrew is also cut off from his ship and confronted by pagan soldiers: he makes the sign of the cross, and an angel appears and lifts the swords right out of their hands.102 In Martinus saga, Martin wins a victory without bloodshed when he declares his intention to go into battle armed only with the cross: his enemies rush to sue for peace before the fighting even starts.103 There is even a parallel for Óláfr’s apparent invisibility here: in Gregory’s Dialogues, a pagan army storms into a church to kill the monk Libertinus at prayer, but he is invisible to them and they tread on his body, as Óláfr’s enemies do here: ‘Þeir gengu á hann ok drápu fótum ok máttu eigi finna hann ne sjá hann’ (‘They walked on him, and stumbled over [him], and could neither find him nor see him’).104 This chapter comes immediately before Óláfr’s vision, and as Andersson has noted, it is ‘a sort of anticipatory revelation’: it shows that, although unbaptised, Óláfr is already sensitive to spiritual truths.105 Perhaps the whole scene could be read as a parable: when Óláfr urges his men to call on God ‘oss til hjálpar, at hann leysi oss’, he is praying for God not only ‘to help us and release us’, but also ‘to save us and redeem us’. Oddr does quite well in drawing spiritual nourishment from this tricky episode, but some contradictions still remain. Unlike Constantine and Oswald, Óláfr is neither establishing a Christian empire, nor defending his Christian homeland against heathens; unlike Andrew and Libertinus, he is not the unarmed victim of an unprovoked and unjustified assault; and, unlike Martin, he is most certainly not an advocate for non-violence. It is quite the contrary: he is the unprovoked aggressor, engaged in a Viking raid, while those who ambush him are locals justifiably defending their homes and goods. Oddr glosses over these major differences in context, and is silent on the subject of Óláfr’s aggressive violence. More problematic are Óláfr’s many encounters with sorcerers and idolaters, which give rise to a series of ‘inverse martyrdoms’ or ‘conversion atrocities’.106 One of Óláfr’s first acts as king is to round up all the sorcerers in Norway and invite them to a feast: once they are nicely drunk, he sets fire to the hall and Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 160–2. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 303. 101 Homiliu-bók, p. 159. 102 Postola sögur, p. 324. 103 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 555–6. 104 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 182. 105 Andersson, The Partisan Muse, pp. 54–5. 106 Andersson, ‘The First Icelandic Kings’ Saga’, p. 153 and The Partisan Muse, pp. 63–4. 99

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason burns them to death: ‘Þeir veinuðu mjõk ok létu ógurliga með gráti ok styn’ (‘They wailed loudly and gave terrible sobs and moans’). This is one of the earliest recorded events of Óláfr’s reign, for Oddr cites it directly from Sæmundr Sigfússon inn fróði (‘the wise’). He goes on to tell that one of these sorcerers, Eyvindr kelda (‘spring’ or ‘bog’), managed to escape through the flames; he launches a surprise attack on Óláfr while the king is praying in church. In the A-text, Oddr seizes the opportunity to moralise:107 En nú kom þat hér fram sem psálmaskáldit segir, at illska hans steig yfir hõfuð honum, ok í þeiri snõru sem sjálfr hann hafði egnt verðr hann ok sjálfr veiddr í. Ok nú ganga ∧þeir∨ af skipum sínum ok upp á eyna ok til þeirar kirkju er konungr ok byskup ok allt kristit fólk var þá at statt. Ok er Eyvindr sá heilaga kirkju, þá varð hann blindr ok allir hans menn. Gengu þeir þá aptr ok fram um eyna. [And now it happened here as the psalmist says, that his evil fell on his own head, and in the trap that he himself had baited he himself was caught. And now they leave their ships and [go] up onto the island and to the church in which the king and bishop and all the Christians were then standing. And when Eyvindr saw the holy church, then he and all his men went blind. They then went back and forth around the island.]

When Óláfr discovers them, he has them seized and taken to a skerry off the coast: according to the A-text, he has them killed there, but in the S-text (and in Snorri’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar), they are left to drown. The carefully chosen quotation from the Psalms justifies this violent outcome as self-evident: evil leads inexorably to its own destruction. Interestingly, exactly the same Psalm verse is quoted to justify a violent death in Aelred’s Life of King Edward, and this scene is not only present in Játvarðar saga, but linked with one of Oddr’s sources, Gizurr Hallsson.108 It tells how Edward has a vision at Pentecost, in which he sees the king of Denmark preparing to invade England. In his pride, he stumbles, falls into the water and drowns. According to Aelred, Edward comments that ‘he opened a trap for us and dug it deep, and in the trap he had made he himself fell’. The biblical quotation is not reproduced in the Norse translation, but Haki Antonsson has shown how this scene fits into a wider imagery of ‘watery graves’ in the work of Oddr and Gunnlaugr; it draws on Christian readings of Exodus as an allegory of redemption, in which the waters of the Red Sea save the redeemed but destroy sinners.109 The drowning of Eyvindr, then, can be read as a sign of his damnation, just as Óláfr’s earlier burning of the sorcerers creates an image Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 232–4, 252–3; Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, I, 312 (cf. Psalm 7: 15–16; 9: 15, 57: 6, 141: 10). 108 Aelred of Rievaulx, The Life of Saint Edward: king and confessor, trans. Jerome Bertram (Guildford: St Edwards, 1990), p. 38; Játvarðar saga, pp. 14–17. This scene is depicted on the screen of the Confessor chapel in Westminster Abbey. 109 Haki Antonsson, ‘Early Saga Writing’, pp. 83, 124–5. 107

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The Saint and the Saga Hero of the suffering in hell, which the unrepentant cannot escape. The crucial difference between these scenes is that, in the Life of St Edward, the royal saint has no personal hand in the drowning of the Danish king. The retribution is God’s, and Edward witnesses it with a smile, but he does not bring it about. There is a second parallel in Clemens saga, which was certainly among Oddr’s sources. Clement is preaching in church, when a heathen named Sisinnius tries to enter: he immediately goes blind, and wanders ‘í hring’ (‘in a circle’) with his men, just as Eyvindr wanders round the island.110 The phrasing is very close to the S-text of Oddr, which has ‘í hring ok kring’ (‘round and round’). Blindness in this case, however, is not about vengeance – nor even divine vengeance; it is part of a larger metaphorical structure. It can be understood as the blindness of unbelief, which is enlightened at the prayer of the saint: Sisinnius recovers his sight by stages as he is converted to the true faith. He eventually receives baptism, thanking God ‘es mik lét blindan verþa ok daufan firir ótrú mína til þess at ek mega nú siá it sanna ok heyra in réttu boþorþ’ (‘who made me become blind and deaf on account of my unbelief so that I can now see the truth and hear the right commandments’).111 In Oddr’s story, by contrast, it is not clear that baptism is on offer: although the S-text says that Óláfr preached the faith to Eyvindr’s men and they refused it, the A-text makes no reference to this. Even more disturbingly, for one familiar with Clemens saga, the drowning of Eyvindr in the S-text parallels the martyrdom of the saint: St Clement is taken out to sea by his enemies, tied to an anchor, and drowned.112 Despite the biblical sanction of the Psalmist, Óláfr looks more like a persecutor than like a saint. The increasing dislocation of Óláfr’s violence from his missionary work is explored further in a run of unpleasant scenes set apart towards the end of the saga. First, a heathen called Hróaldr, described as ‘auðigr ok heiðinn ok konungs óvinr’ (‘wealthy and heathen and the king’s enemy’), conjures up two waves to defend himself from attack, but Óláfr sails right through them and has him seized.113 This appears to duplicate an earlier scene also involving a man called Hróaldr, who also has power over the sea winds: Óláfr’s bishop overcomes this by sprinkling the sea with consecrated water.114 Each Hróaldr is an idolater who refuses to be baptised, and Óláfr has each one killed. After the death of the second Hróaldr, Oddr concludes that ‘Fór honum svá sem õllum õðrum, at fjándinn blekkir þá loks alla er honum trúa’ (‘It turned out for him as for all others, that the devil deceives in the end all those who believe in him’). The A-text adds, rather anxiously: ‘Týndi hann makliga lífi sínu’ (‘He deservedly lost his life’). The violence of these two scenes still just about belongs to the sphere of Christian mission, but the incident that follows does not. A Clemens saga, pp. 36–7. Clemens saga, pp. 42–3. I follow Carron’s parallel translation of the saga here. 112 Clemens saga, pp. 50–1. 113 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 281–2. 114 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 235–6. On the duplication here, see Andersson, Medieval Icelandic Saga, pp. 33–4. 110 111

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason nameless man, described as málsnjallr (‘eloquent’) opposes Óláfr’s preaching, so Óláfr has him seized and forces a small snake down his throat. This, Kaplan has suggested, is a parodic literalisation of the nickname ormstunga (‘snake’s tongue’), which alludes to poetic libel.115 The snake resists (in the A-text, the victim blows it away), so Óláfr ties it to ‘heitt járn’ (‘hot iron’). When it feels the heat, it plunges into the man’s stomach and emerges with his heart in its mouth. Oddr’s comment on this story is more guarded than previous ones: ‘Af þessu gerðisk hræzla manna mikil ok ógn við konunginn’ (‘At this, there was great fear among people and terror of the king’).116 The sequence ends with an Icelander, Sigurðr, who has killed one of Óláfr’s men: against the advice of his bishop, Óláfr has him bitten to death by dogs. His dog Vígi is reluctant to carry this out, and Óláfr has to egg him on. Oddr comments only that Óláfr’s bishop reproached him keenly, and that he had to perform ‘iðran bera fyrir Guði ok mõnnum’ (‘clear penance before God and people’).117 This sequence of chapters shifts quickly from the apparently justifiable killing of recalcitrant pagans to personal acts of revenge: it raises the question of where the line is to be drawn. The incident with the snake is particularly intriguing. The detail about the hot iron recalls a scene in Yngvars saga víðfõrla, in which Sveinn kills a dragon by shooting a burning arrow at it; the arrow passes through its mouth and penetrates to the heart.118 Haki Antonsson reads this as an allegory about the defeat of paganism, represented by the dragon, and perhaps Óláfr’s action should be understood in a similar way.119 This finds support in Kaplan’s compelling reading of the related story in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, where she suggests that it is a parodic inversion of the moment in Ragnarõk where the world serpent (now reduced to a tiny snake) swallows Þórr (now helpless rather than heroic).120 Pagan mythology is parodied and belittled in these violent and unrealistic scenes. At the same time, the humanity of Óláfr’s opponents creates some resistance to allegorical interpretation, and Óláfr problematically inverts the behaviour of his saintly role-models here. Saints usually drive out snakes and cure poisonous bites: in Martinus saga, Martin heals a boy who has been snake-bitten by drawing out the poison through his wound.121 While saints do inflict burning on evil spirits, they use ‘ardent’ prayer rather than literal heat: when Martin puts his finger into the mouth of a demon-possessed man, we are told that it burned him ‘sem hann tœki við heitu járni’ (‘as if he were touching hot iron’; italics mine).122 Unable to come out of the man’s mouth, the demon exits in his 115 116 117

118 119

120 121

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Merrill Kaplan, ‘Out-Thoring Thor in the Longest Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 107 (2008), 480. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 282–3. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 283–6. Yngvars saga víðförla, pp. 454–5. Haki Antonsson, ‘Early Saga Writing’, pp. 118–23. Kaplan, ‘Out-Thoring Thor’, p. 478. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 656. 572. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 561.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero excrement, just as in the A-text the snake passes through the man’s stomach and out again. The superficial similarity here masks an enormous moral gulf: the metaphorical ‘hot iron’ heals and purges, while Óláfr’s literal iron tortures and kills. By the time the snake emerges with the man’s heart in its fangs, we have left the saint’s life far behind. This detail belongs to the excesses of heroic legend: it recalls Sigurðr cutting out Fáfnir’s heart, or Hõgni’s brave heart on a plate, or Gunnarr dying in the snake pit, when a snake pierces his heart.123 These echoes of heroic legend continue into the following story: the Icelander Sigurðr holds off the dogs by fixing them with his ‘snõr augu’ (‘sharp eyes’), just as Gunnarr holds off the snakes with his harp.124 Óláfr’s conflicts take on the character of legendary heroics, as his violence becomes unrealistic and inhumane. It is often assumed that Oddr accepts such atrocities uncritically and, as we have seen, he sometimes expresses approval.125 His version of Christianity is militant and triumphalist: if paganism is strongly rooted and dangerous, a Christian king cannot afford to be weak. Oddr sees Óláfr’s opponents as inspired by the devil: even those who are actually human wield devilish powers and resemble pagan gods. The story of Eyvindr kelda, for example, is interwoven with Óðinn’s appearance, and his name links him with Eyvindr kinnrifa, offspring of a demonic incubus. Both men named Hróaldr are associated with Þórr by their power over the sea-winds; Snorri, in fact, rolls them together and names the composite character Rauðr (‘Red’), presumably in an allusion to Þórr’s red beard.126 The various tortures applied to these men are perhaps supposed to be read as allegories of damnation: Óláfr’s victims perish in flames, drown in the sea, and are eaten alive by snakes.127 By the end of the saga, however, when Sigurðr is bitten to death by Vígi, the animals themselves draw back from Óláfr’s commands and even Oddr cannot sustain his approval: this final revenge killing cannot be allegorised in terms of spiritual combat. At the battle of Svõlðr, Óláfr accepts that God’s favour has passed to Eiríkr jarl, and he later acknowledges that ‘Guð hefði eigi í alla staði hugnat hans ríki ok áburðr’ Völsunga saga, in The Saga of the Volsungs, ed. and trans. Ronald G. Finch (London: Nelson, 1955), pp. 33, 71. For the heart in iconography of Gunnarr, see Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, ‘Gunnarr and the Snake Pit in Medieval Art and Legend’, trans. Jeffrey Cosser, Speculum 87 (2012), 1028. 124 Óláfs saga Odds, p. 285; Völsunga saga, p. 71. On the significance of piercing eyes, see Riti Kroesen, ‘Hvessir augu sem hildingar: The Awe-Inspiring Eyes of the King’, Arkiv för nordisk filologi 100 (1985), 41–58. 125 Andersson comments that ‘it is difficult to imagine how Oddr Snorrason could have attributed such an unselfconscious sanguinary policy to Óláfr Tryggvason if he had been familiar with the salutary principle that “the best thing would be that God not have forced service”’ (The Partisan Muse, p. 63). 126 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, II, 324–7. On the relationship between Hróaldr, Rauðr and Þórr, see Richard Perkins, Thor the Wind-Raiser and the Eyrarland Image, Viking Society for Northern Research 15 (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2001), pp. 27–52, 159–64. 127 See Heilagra manna søgur, I, 251–2 (from Gregory’s Dialogues) for two visions of hell in which the dead are being devoured by dragons or snakes. 123

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason (‘God may not have liked all aspects of his power and show’).128 Oddr goes on to assert his own belief that Óláfr travelled to Greece, Jerusalem and Syria – ‘ok bœtt annmarka með iðran, er hann gerði á œskualdri’ (‘and atoned with penitence for the faults he committed in his youth’).129 The narrative dissolves into uncertainties based on second-hand information; Óláfr’s transformation into a desert saint takes place off stage in Oddr’s work. In the end, it seems, he could not fit Óláfr into any of the existing literary models for sainthood. Faced with the generic problem of a saint’s life without a saint in it, he can only end with the vain hope that Óláfr finally adopted the life of penitence universally recognised as fit for a saint.

Sanctity and heroism Ultimately, Oddr stalled in his literary endeavour to style Óláfr as a saint: Óláfr’s personal involvement in heroic acts of violence, while perhaps cause for admiration, excluded him from conventional models of sanctity. Instead of a hagiographic paradigm of completed perfection, Oddr ends up with a heroic paradigm of overreaching: Óláfr’s life has a clear rise and fall structure to it, as he himself recognises in his final battle. The scene in the A-text where Eiríkr jarl raises a cross in the prow of his ship recalls the earlier scene where Óláfr used the cross during a raid: Eiríkr has taken his place as divinely chosen successor to the kingdom.130 Yet, although the saga concludes with a penitential slant, this does not mean that Oddr condemns the heroic way of life; if anything, his expressed óynði (‘discontent’) suggests that he was disappointed by this outcome. Secular virtue may not guarantee salvation, but it still has value in the eyes of God, as Oddr argues in his prologue. Óláfr, without shrine or relics, may never have been a viable saint, but Oddr comes close to protesting that he still should be. This can be seen in a number of scenes where Oddr more successfully blends the saintly with the heroic. For Oddr, the physical strength that characterises Óláfr as hero can be understood allegorically as spiritual virtue, and a couple of stories in the middle of the saga lend themselves particularly well to this kind of reading. The first is the account of the Icelander Kjartan Óláfsson’s baptism during a visit to Norway in the autumn, which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6 (p. 230–1). In the A-text, we are told that Kjartan spots a good swimmer in the river, and wants to test himself against him. He jumps in and pulls him under the water twice. The third time, however, the unknown swimmer pulls Kjartan down: ‘Ok þykkir Kjartani þá mál upp, ok er þá engi kostr, ok kennir þá aflsmunar’ (‘And it then seems to Kjartan that his time’s up, and he has no chance, and [he] feels the difference in strength’).131 The swimmer then reveals that he is Óláfs saga Odds, p. 357. Óláfs saga Odds, p. 358. 130 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 336, 345. 131 Óláfs saga Odds, p. 241. 128 129

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The Saint and the Saga Hero King Óláfr and gives Kjartan his cloak as a gift. The S-text has a shorter version, with two dips in the water instead of three, but it preserves Kjartan’s crucial insight that ‘hann mundi skorta við þenna mann’ (‘he would fall short of this man’). Later, on Christmas Eve, Kjartan is asked what he thinks of King Óláfr. He replies: ‘Þat hygg ek at sá hafi betr er honum þjónar ok allra helzt þeim er hann boðar’ (‘I think that he who serves him does better, and [he does] best of all [who serves] the one he preaches’).132 The S-text interjects: ‘Ok hygg ek at allgóðir hlutir stýri honum’ (‘And I think that very good fortunes guide him’), which suggests a supernatural dimension to Óláfr’s strength. The day after Christmas, Kjartan is baptised together with all his men. Oddr puts Óláfr’s heroic abilities in swimming to good effect in this scene: his physical strength becomes a demonstration of the greater power of the Christian God, as Kjartan intuitively understands. Moreover, as Weber has shown, the swimming competition can be understood in figurative as well as in literal terms: the three dips in the water prefigure the threefold immersion in baptism, and the gift of the cloak represents the baptismal garments.133 The scene works in contrast to Eyvindr’s drowning and damnation: the waters of baptism are salvific and cleansing. Finally, the Christmas setting emphasised by Oddr recalls Óláfr’s own birth at Christmas; it consolidates the parallel between Óláfr and Christ. Figural readings are also evoked in a later scene, in which Óláfr saves the life of two of his retainers. When he hangs his shield on the top of a high mountain, two of them lay a bet as to which can retrieve it. Needless to say, they both get stuck, and hang there terrified until Óláfr rescues them. In the S-text, Oddr comments that Óláfr ‘hjálp þeim svá af dauðanum af sínum hvatleik ok atgervi’ (‘saved them thus from death by his bravery and accomplishments’). He then adds: ‘Ok alltorfengr mun slíkr maðr finnask í heiminum um alla atgervi’ (‘And such a man in all accomplishments will be very difficult to find in the world’).134 This story is immediately followed by the account of Óláfr’s transfiguration. Together, these two stories link Óláfr’s physical strength and his spiritual virtue: the mountain marks the height of his heroic stature, just as the transfiguration marks his spiritual ascent: Oddr tells us that the mountain ‘sýnisk mjõk yfir gnapa õðrum fjõllum’ (‘seemed to tower high over other mountains’), just as Óláfr ‘towers’ over other kings. It is surely relevant too that Christ is transfigured on a mountain, and that the shield often figures Christ’s passion in devotional writing, as well as being allegorical of faith.135 Óláfs saga Odds, p. 243. Gerd Wolfgang Weber, ‘Irreligiositöt und Heldenzeitalder’, in Speculum Norrœnum, ed. Ursula Dronke et al., pp. 502–3. See also the discussion in Lindow, ‘Akkerisfrakki’, pp. 64–80. 134 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 265–7. 135 Ephesians 6: 16. Ancrene Wisse: Parts six and seven, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1991), pp. 22–3; Ancrene Wisse, vol. 2, ed. Bella Millett, E. J. Dobson and Richard Dance, Early English Text Society os 326 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 263. Óláfr’s armour, sword and spear are interpreted allegorically in the chapters appended to the A-text, which are usually attributed 132 133

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason Physical and spiritual are close to indistinguishable in this scene. Óláfr saves his men from death through heroic ability, but he also redeems them from sin, establishing himself as their spiritual father, who carries them ‘undir hendi sér’ (‘under his arm’). The repetition of ‘atgervi’ (‘accomplishments’) recalls the comments Oddr makes in his Prologue, in which Óláfr’s extraordinary ‘atgervi’ (‘accomplishments’) are the basis of his claim to sanctity. Swimming and climbing are heroic feats in the saga, but they are more than this: they are signs of Óláfr’s spiritual preeminence and redemptive power. This melding of physical strength and spiritual power is particularly well illustrated by a short narrative set in Hálogaland (in the S-text) in the area of Naumudalr (in the A-text). This tells how two of Óláfr’s men overhear a conversation between three trolls, who discuss their failed attempts to destroy Óláfr. The first describes how he competed with King Óláfr and his men at wrestling, breaking the arm of one and the leg of another. When the king laid his hands on him, he was tormented by a burning sensation, and eventually escaped by sinking into the ground. The second troll tells how he took on the shape of a woman and offered King Óláfr a poisoned drink. Óláfr took the cup and battered him over the head; like the first, he sank into the earth. The third troll also tells how he took the shape of a woman and Óláfr tasked him with scratching his foot. When Óláfr fell asleep, he rose up to kill him, but Óláfr (in the A-text) or his bishop (in the S-text) hit him over the head with a book. When the retainers tell Óláfr what they have heard, he testifies to its truth, and warns them to avoid such danger in future. He and the bishop sprinkle the area with consecrated water and destroy ‘skrímslum õllum’ (‘all the monsters’).136 This entertaining little story effortlessly combines native traditions about wrestling trolls with hagiographic narratives about devils and their wiles. As often noted, it is probably based on an anecdote in Gregory’s Dialogues, in which a Jew overhears a group of devils in a pagan temple discussing their temptation of the saintly but vulnerable Bishop Andrew.137 At the height of this temptation, they induce him to give an overly friendly pat on the back to a nun staying in his palace. Both stories end with the transformation of the surrounding landscape: in the Dialogues, the temple is destroyed and a church is built in its place, while in Oddr’s version, the rocky wilderness is cleansed of its monstrous inhabitants. However, what is for Gregory a story about Andrew’s momentary weakness becomes in Oddr’s hands a sign of Óláfr’s superlative strength: whereas Andrew is saved from temptation only because the Jew tells him what he has overheard, Óláfr has already single-handedly dispatched all three of the trolls. Perhaps the one moment of danger is when he falls asleep to Gunnlaugr, when Bishop Sigurðr claims that they hang before the church doors in Jerusalem and Antioch; Óláfs saga Odds, p. 361; Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, III, 63. 136 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 290–4. This is discussed at more length in Grønlie, ‘Saint’s Life’, pp. 9–12. 137 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 222–4.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero with the obliging troll-wife by his side: in the A-text he is ready and waiting for her assault, but in the S-text he depends on the watchfulness of his bishop, who stays close to his side. The attack leaves him with a poisonous welt on his foot, a physical sign of a spiritual flaw, which heals only when the bishop cuts it out. In Gregory’s story, conversion and repentance are effected through divine grace: Andrew’s sexual weakness, once he has repented of it, becomes the channel through which the Jewish messenger is converted. In Oddr’s saga, by contrast, divine grace works through not weakness, but physical strength. Although two of the trolls take on female form, this is not, as for Gregory, a story about sin and temptation. The issue is not sex, but power, and it is not Óláfr’s prayers, but his hands that save. Immediately before this story, Oddr describes a sudden appearance from a red-bearded man, later identified by Óláfr as the devil. He hails Óláfr from a headland and is allowed on board the ship, where he regales the crew with stories about two giantesses that once inhabited the landscape. He then reveals his identity as Þórr by announcing that he dispatched them with his hammer; before anyone can react to this, he dives from the prow into the sea.138 Following this scene with Óláfr’s troll-bashing is significant, as Kaplan argues: it suggests that, in his defeat of the trolls, Óláfr is not just replacing, but bettering Þórr.139 Þórr, in fact, is here aligned with the trolls that were once his adversaries: when he dives into the sea, Óláfr comments that ‘skjótt sótti hann undan’ (‘he made his escape fast’), just as the trolls or devils dive suddenly down through the ground. These stories allow Oddr to show Óláfr at his most heroic and his most saintly, as he participates in the Christian conquest of the devil. Oddr’s desire to imbue heroic narrative with spiritual nourishment is also evident in his account of Óðinn’s appearance. Óðinn, like Þórr, is notable for his powers of story-telling: enraged by Óláfr’s mission, he turns up on Christmas Eve, and holds Óláfr captive with tales of ‘orrostum ok fornum atburðum’ (‘battles and ancient events’) in the A-text and ‘fornkonungum ok orrostum þeira’ (‘ancient kings and their battles’) in the S-text, a topic that obviously resembles Oddr’s own.140 Óláfr stays up late to listen, despite his bishop’s obvious unease, and when he wakes up in the morning, he finds that his guest has gone, leaving a choice cut of meat for his dinner. In the S-text, Óláfr throws some to a dog, who drops dead on the spot, and he orders the rest to be burned; in the A-text, he has it thrown into the sea, warning that ‘ef nõkkvorr maðr bergir því, þá mun hann skjótt deyja’ (‘if anyone tastes it, then he will die at once’). Óláfr then announces that the guest was Óðinn and spells out the moral of the story: ‘Fjándinn hefir brugðizk í líki Óðins ok vildi blekkja oss: fyrst at taka svefninn frá oss õndverða nótt, ok võku um tíðir, en síðan at fœra oss þetta djõfuliga eitr, at þat fengi oss bana hõrmuligan’ (‘The devil disguised himself in the shape of Óðinn and wished to deceive us: first by depriving us of sleep Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 288–90. Kaplan, ‘Out-Thoring Thor’, pp. 479–85. 140 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 249–54. 138 139

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason early in the night, and of vigilance during prayers, and then by giving us this devilish poison so that it would bring us a wretched death’). The A-text adds: ‘Ok hafði óvinr alls mannkyns svá fyrir búit tálsamligar snõrur vélarinnar, at fyrst fœri hann õndunum, en síðan líkõmunum’ (‘And the enemy of all mankind had prepared deceptive snares of cunning so that he might first destroy the soul, and then the body’). This story may be compared to one in Nikolaus saga, where the devil also reacts with fury to the success of Nicholas’s mission. Disguising himself as a woman, he visits some seafarers on their way to Myra, and gives them ‘eitrblandin smyrsl’ (‘poisoned ointment’) to take to Nicholas’s church. In the Norse translation, Nicholas identifies the visitor as ‘ódyggva Gefjon’ (‘wicked Gefjon’), and orders the ointment to be thrown into the sea: the waves burn at the spot where it sinks, just as the meat is burned in the A-text.141 Both stories share an emphasis on the devil’s vélar (‘tricks’), countered by the saint’s spiritual perception, but the devil’s excellence in story-telling is a detail of Oddr’s own. Óðinn’s tales are captivating to hear, but they are also a mortal danger: they endanger Óláfr spiritually by distracting him from prayer, and they take on material form in the slab of poisoned meat, which brings death to anyone who tastes it. As Rowe has argued in her discussion of the related story in Flateyjarbók, this literalises Augustine’s comment that even metaphorical references to pagan gods are ‘food fit for swine’.142 Oddr warns, through this exemplum, that curiosity about pagan kings and their battles is dangerous: far from an innocent pastime, it forms a real threat to one’s salvation. In a close parallel in Yngvars saga víðfõrla, curiosity about the pagan dragon Jacúlús is strongly condemned: Yngvarr tells his men not to forvitnast (‘enquire’) about the dragon, and those who fail to heed his warning drop dead.143 Here, appropriately enough, the story that endangers Óláfr is about a pagan king, whose bones turn out to be interred in a nearby mound. This king, we are told, worshipped a cow whose milk he drank, in a parody of how the primeval cow Auðhumla fed Ymir with streams of milk from its teats.144 Oddr’s life of Óláfr counters all such harmful stories about pagans, appropriating heroic narrative for firmly Christian ends. Óláfr Tryggvason not only displaces the pagan heroes of the past, but also claims to outdo them at their own game.

Óláfr Tryggvason in skaldic poetry Oddr self-consciously shapes the material at his disposition into a saint’s life, which he presents as a superior narrative form. He does so, with varying sucHeilagra manna søgur, II, 30. Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, The Development of Flateyjarbók: Iceland and the Norwegian Dynastic Crisis of 1389 (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2005), p. 200. 143 Yngvars saga víðförla, p. 442. 144 Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, ed. Anthony Faulkes (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1988), p. 11. 141

142

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The Saint and the Saga Hero cess, despite the lack of any evidence that would establish Óláfr as a saint. In the course of translation, however, skaldic stanzas were added that pull his work in rather a different direction. Most of these stanzas are about the battle of Svõlðr, described in a near-contemporary poem by Hallfreðr Óttarsson, as well as in the work of Halldórr ókristni (‘the unchristian’) and Skúli Þorsteinsson, the grandson of Egill Skalla-Grímsson, whose sympathies lay with Eiríkr jarl (see Chapter 3, p. 88).145 Six stanzas from Hallfreðr’s Erfidrápa (‘Memorial Lay’) are incorporated into the narrative, and six stanzas from his Óláfsdrápa, about the raids of Óláfr’s youth, are appended to the A-text in a continuous sequence.146 Stanzas from these poems are also found in Fagrskinna and Heimskringla, and manuscripts of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta preserve almost all of the Erfidrápa in a single sequence of stanzas.147 The stanzas from Hallfreðr’s Óláfsdrápa appended to the A-text form a curious conclusion to that version of the saga: they celebrate almost everything that Oddr found most difficult to fit into his portrait of the saintly missionary king. Hallfreðr portrays Óláfr only ‘fleetingly’ and very much as a ‘militant’ missionary: he is described as hõrgbrjótr (‘shrine-destroyer’) and végrimmr (‘fierce against heathen temples’) and his missionary work proceeds by a display of power rather than by preaching words of grace.148 In the tradition of the skaldic encomium for the warlord, he provides corpses as food for beasts of prey: Svá frák hitt, at hǻva hõrgbrjótr í stað mõrgum (opt kom hrafn at heipta) hlóð valkõstu (blóði). [Thus I have learned this, that the shrine-destroyer piled up high corpse-heaps in many a place; the raven often came to the blood of strife.]

He is even described in stanza 3 as feeding the corpses of the Saxons to ‘styggvan, ljótvaxinn hest Leiknar’ (‘the edgy, ugly-grown horse of Leikn ∧troll-woman∨’), and to ‘blõkku stóði kveldriðu’ (‘the black stud of the evening-rider ∧trollwoman∨’), both of which are traditional kennings for wolves. This indirect act of generosity towards troll-women (feeding their steeds) contrasts sharply with how trolls and troll-women are treated in Oddr’s life.149 The kenning lægir rógs rekka (‘subduer of the strife of men’) might seem to depict Óláfr Tryggvason as a just ruler, but its immediate context is to raiding with hõrð hræskóð (‘hard Halldórr ókristni’s verses are edited in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, 1.1, 469–85. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 320–2, 329–30, 339–40, 348–50. The stanzas from Óláfsdrápa are not printed in this edition, but they are in Saga Óláfs Tryggvasonar af Oddr Snorrason munk, ed. Finnur Jónsson (Copenhagen: Gad, 1932), pp. 247–56. 147 Óláfsdrápa, ed. Diana Whaley, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, 1.1, 387–91; Erfidrápa Óláfs Tryggvasonar, ed. Kate Heslop, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, 1.1, 401. 148 Óláfsdrápa, pp. 392–3. Translations of skaldic stanzas are taken from Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, whenever this is available. 149 Óláfsdrápa, pp. 394–5. 145 146

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason corpse-harmers’ [swords]), in this case among the Valkerar, probabably the people of the Walcheren in the Netherlands, but with a possible pun on val (‘slaughter, the slain’).150 Although these stanzas allude briefly to Óláfr’s missionary work, they cannot in any light be called hagiographic. Their inclusion in the A-text heightens the difficulty of combining ‘ógnblíðr greddir ulfar’ (‘the battle-glad feeder of wolves’) with the Christian saint.151 Likewise, the stanzas incorporated from Hallfreðr’s Erfidrápa accentuate the military heroism of Óláfr’s last stand. Oddr tells us that ‘þessi orrosta hefir frægst verit á Norðrlõndum’ (‘this battle was the most famous in northern lands’) and that ‘þvílíkr hõfðingi fell er þá var frægstr maðr á Norðrlõndum’ (‘such a chieftain fell who was then the most famous man in northern lands’).152 The repetition of frægstr (‘most famous’) echoes Hallfreðr’s word in the first stanza of his Erfidrápa:153 Nœfr vá einn við jõfra allvaldr tváa snjalla – frægrs til slíks at segja siðr – ok jarl inn þriðja. [The adept, mighty ruler fought alone against two bold princes and a jarl as the third; it is a famous custom to tell of such a thing.]

Hallfreðr reports that Óláfr spoke þróttarorð (‘forceful words’) to his men, urging them not to think of flótta (‘flight’). He praises the bravery of those men who ‘gerðut við vægjask’ (‘did not yield’), but leapt overboard to drown.154 Although the primary function of these stanzas is to corroborate the prose account and authenticate details of the battle through near-contemporary witnesses, it would be a mistake to dismiss them as purely corroborative or authenticating: as Stavnem has argued, Hallfreðr (and the other poets) are also alternative narrators, offering their own perspective on Óláfr’s last stand.155 By corroborating Óláfr’s heroism and pacing the battle finely, they tip the balance of the saga towards heroic epic: Óláfr’s violence is displayed at its most admirable in this single-handed battle against the odds. Particularly interesting are Hallfreðr’s musings on Óláfr’s apparent disappearance, which constitute near-contemporary evidence of the various rumours about his escape. Hallfreðr devotes five ‘intense’ stanzas to this issue, of which one helmingr (‘half-stanza’) and one stanza are quoted in both versions of Oddr’s saga:156 150 151

152 153 154

155 156

Óláfsdrápa, pp. 395–6. Óláfsdrápa, pp. 398–9. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 346–7. Erfidrápa, pp. 402–3; cf. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 320–1. Erfidrápa, pp. 405 (stanza 3), 415 (stanza 10); cf. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 332, 339–40. Rolf Stavnem, ‘Creating Tradition: The Use of Skaldic Verse in Old Norse Historiography’, in Eddic, Skaldic and Beyond, pp. 92–3. Erfidrápa, pp. 425–8; Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 348–9.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Veitkat ek hitt, hvárt Heita hungrdeyfi skalk leyfa dynsæðinga dauðan dýrbliks, eða þó kykvan. Sagðr vas mér, né meira muni maðr stríð of bíða, lýðum firrðr ok láði landvõrðr fyr sæ handan. Væri oss, þótt ærir elds þeim svikum belldi, heilalíkn, ef, hauka hǻklifs, jõfurr lifði. [I do not know whether I am to praise the hunger-soother of the gulls of the din of the gleam of the beast of Heiti ∧sea king∨[(lit. hunger-soother of the din-gulls of the beast-gleam of Heiti) ship > shield > battle > ravens/eagles > warrior] dead or, after all, alive. The land’s guardian [ruler = Óláfr] was said to me to be deprived of people and realm across the sea; a man will not suffer greater grief. It would be healing mercy for us if the lord lived, although envoys of the fire of the high cliff of hawks [arm > gold > generous man] committed that treachery.]

These stanzas are no doubt selected because they focus on Hallfreðr’s ignorance (‘Veitkat’ ‘I do not know’), thereby raising hope as to Óláfr’s survival; the translator misses, it seems, the grim irony of Óláfr as ‘hunger-soother’ in the first helmingr: has he fed the ravens with the corpses of others or in fact his own? The second stanza suggests that, while deprived of ‘people and realm’, Óláfr may not be deprived of life, even if the postponed ‘ef’ (‘if’) distances this hope. The unique compound ‘heilalíkn’, with its connotations of wholeness, healing and mercy, accords well with Oddr’s wider religious agenda: his desire for Óláfr’s salvation. Conversely, it is not surprising that the translator has omitted the remaining stanzas in which Hallfreðr prevaricates further, shifting from a rational judgement as to what is ‘sannfregit’ (‘truly heard’), ‘máli sõnnu’ (‘the true story’), to a dismissal of people’s ‘veifanarorð’ (‘wavering words’), before this wavering is reconfigured as an internal reality – a hoping for what cannot be – within the mind of the recently bereaved:157 Vættik virða dróttins; vils mest ok dul flestum. [I hope for the lord of men [ruler]; to most it is the greatest wilfulness and delusion.]

157

Erfidrápa, pp. 429, 432, 436.

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason It is not others who rumour Óláfr’s survival here, but Hallfreðr who vainly clings to a delusion recognised by others as false. As Heslop comments: ‘Hallfreðr seems to raise the possibility that Óláfr is alive only to reject it’.158 In the saga, his reflections have been trimmed to accord better with Oddr’s own beliefs. Hallfreðr’s concern for authenticity, for what has been ‘truly heard’, sets the tone for the following assertions in the prose: ‘Ef Guð lofar skal ek segja sem ek veit sannast’ (‘If God permits I shall tell what I know to be most truthful’), ‘þó ætla ek at vísu at þetta myni satt vera’ (‘yet I believe with certainty that this must be true’). We are a long way here from Hallfreðr’s ‘Veitkat’ (‘I do not know’) and the disclaimer ‘Sagðr vas mér’ (‘I was told’). The inclusion of Hallfreðr’s verses in the saga heightens some of its bipolarity, the tension between warrior and saint, fallen hero and penitent monk. There are, however, two hagiographic poems about Óláfr that are roughly contemporary with Oddr’s saga: Hallar-Steinn’s Rekstefja and the anonymous Óláfs drápa, both of which may date from c. 1200.159 A further anonymous poem copied into the bottom margin of AM 61 fol. (c. 1350–75), was probably composed by the Hand A scribe and so will not be discussed here.160 Hallar-Steinn may have come from Hõll in Þverárhlíð in western Iceland, and fragments of his poetry survive elsewhere.161 Twenty-eight stanzas of his drápa about Óláfr are incorporated into Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta alongside poetry by Hallfreðr and others; as Stavnem has shown, no distinction is drawn in this compilation between retrospective poems and those that are near-contemporary.162 Rekstefja is also preserved continuously in a sequence of long poems in Bergsbók alongside the anonymous Óláfs drápa Tryggvasonar (preserved only here), the anonymous Lilja and Einarr Skúlason’s Geisli. These poems are placed in between Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar and Óláfs saga helga, as companion pieces to the sagas.163 Stavnem suggests that Rekstefja was inspired by Geisli, with which it has clear affinities; he describes it as ‘a blend of saint’s vita and traditional encomium for a warlord’.164 Like Geisli, it follows the expected structure of a vita: life, death, miracles. This poem, and the anonymous Óláfs drápa that follows it in Bergsbók attempt a similar balancing act to Oddr. They bear witness to a wider interest in the complexities involved in celebrating Óláfr Tryggvason’s life. It is immediately obvious that Rekstefja and Óláfs drápa share a common core with Oddr’s saga. This consists of: Óláfr’s youth in Russia, his revenge for his father, his raids in the British Isles and rise to power in Norway, his conversion 158 159

160 161

162

163 164

Erfidrápa, p. 437; cf. also Goeres, Poetics of Commemoration, p. 80. Rekstefja, p. 894; Óláfs drápa Tryggvasonar, p. 1031. Poem about Óláfr Tryggvason, ed. Kate Heslop, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, 1.2, 1061–2. Rekstefja, p. 893. Rekstefja, p. 895; see also the discussion in Kate Heslop, ‘Assembling the Olaf-Archive? Verses in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta’, in The Fantastic in Old Norse/Icelandic Literature, ed. John McKinnell et al., pp. 381–9. Heslop, ‘Assembling the Olaf-archive?’, p. 388. Rekstefja, p. 894 and Stavnem, ‘Creating Tradition’, p. 98.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero of five countries, his final disappearance, and an expression of hope in his heavenly reward. Stavnem suggests that they are indebted to an early redaction of Oddr’s saga; and it is notable that they often agree independently with Oddr when they differ from one another.165 Rekstefja, for example, is closely related to Oddr in stanzas 25–31, which describe Óláfr’s athletic feats, his mountain rescue, and the events leading up to his transfiguration.166 Exactly the same events, also in tight sequence, are narrated in the S-text of Oddr chapters 41–2 (and in chapters 51–3 of the A-text).167 The references in this section to merki (‘sign’) and jartegn (‘miracle, proof’) closely echo Oddr’s use of tákn (‘sign’) and jartegn in his discussion of Óláfr’s sanctity.168 The anonymous Óláfs drápa, on the other hand, is closer to Oddr in its description of Óláfr’s missionary work. In stanza 13, for example, on the conversion of Iceland, Óláfs drápa describes (in the prose order) how Óláfr ‘lét góðar rœtr settar und ráð vǻru’ (‘let good roots be set under our condition’). This recalls how Oddr describes Óláfr in the Prologue to the A-text as ‘undirrót yðvarrar hjálpar ok skírnar’ (‘the origin/root of your salvation and baptism’).169 The poet calls Óláfr ‘góðum õr goðs’ (‘the good emissary of God’), just as Oddr claims that he is entrusted with ‘Guðs erendi’ (‘God’s message’).170 The poet describes Óláfr as ‘þarfastr hingat norðr’ (‘most needful here in the North’), in the same way that Oddr’s Óláfr is ‘postoli Norðmanna’ (‘apostle of the Northerners’), a helper or saviour ‘í Norðrálfu heimsins’ (‘in the northern part of the world’), who grants all ‘farsæliga hluti’ (‘useful things’).171 The emphasis in this poem on Óláfr’s utter hatred and systematic uprooting of heathenism neatly captures the tone of his encounters with heathens in the saga.172 It is probably best, then, to envisage both poets working in different ways from the same body of material as Oddr. If this is so, then it is ‘striking’, as Stavnem comments, that they pay so little attention to the matter of Óláfr’s disappearance at Svõlðr.173 There is no mention of a miraculous beam of light, no alleged escape, no hint of an afterlife in the East, despite the fact that Hallfreðr himself attests to rumours that Óláfr got away. Instead, both poets draw a firm line after Óláfr’s final appearance on the after-deck, claiming that they have no further information. In Rekstefja, the poet tells us simply:174 165

166 167

168 169 170 171

172 173 174

Stavnem, ‘Creating Tradition’, p. 98; cf. Margaret Clunies Ross, ‘Authentication of Poetic Memory in Old Norse Skaldic Verse’, in Minni and Muninn: Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture, ed. Pernille Hermann, Stephen Mitchell and Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), p. 70. The A-text numbers 5 countries, but lists 6 (Greenland is the addition); see Óláfs saga Odds, p. 271. Rekstefja, pp. 927–34. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 265–9. Rekstefja, pp. 930, 933; Óláfs saga Odds, p. 273. Óláfs drápa Tryggvasonar, pp. 1045–6; Óláfs saga Odds, p. 125. Óláfs drápa Tryggvasonar, pp. 1040–1; Óláfs saga Odds, p. 213. Óláfs drápa Tryggvasonar, p. 1046; Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 126, 145, 358. See, for example, stanzas 13–15 (pp. 1045–8). Stavnem, ‘Creating Tradition’, p. 95. Rekstefja, pp. 924–5.

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason Unnelds yppirunnum engi kann enn* lengi heg*ju hilmis seg*ja. [No-one can still for a long time tell the lifting trees of wave-fire [gold > men] about the condition of the ruler.]

He skips straight to ‘aðrar geysitíðar dáðir’ (‘other much-talked-about deeds’), neatly replacing the rumours about Óláfr’s death with information about his acts in life. The poet of Óláfs drápa leaves Óláfr fighting ‘as if he had three lives’, one for each of his enemies. He quotes Hallfreðr’s sannfregit (‘truly heard’), but only to negate it:175 Yggs þykkjumk ek ekki ógnblíðustum síðan hjaldrs frá horskum gildi hafa sannfregit annat. [I seem not to have truly heard anything since about the sage, most battledelighting dispenser of Yggr ∧=Óðinn∨ [battle > warrior]]

The poet then goes on to describe the aftermath of the battle, depicting, in a chilling series of stanzas, the bodies washing up on the shore:176 Skaut á grœnt með grjóti grár ægir ná sǻrum (lǻgu liðsmenn bjúgir) land (sem brúk of strandir). [The grey ocean cast a wounded corpse up with gravel on the green land; household troops lay twisted like heaps of seaweed across the beaches.]

Óláfr’s greatest moment of glory, as he stands unyielding in defeat, is followed by utter desolation, the bodies no longer upright, but ‘twisted’ and inert. The absence of a penitential afterlife gives a very different tone to these two poems. Óláfr’s military career and physical strength become the focus of his exceptionality. Indeed, the most noticeable aspect of these two poems is their lack of discomfort with Óláfr’s violent past: in this, they depart not only from Oddr, who allows Óláfr to express his contrition, but also from Geisli, where Einarr concedes that St Óláfr made atonement for the Viking raids of his youth.177 The lack of unease is particularly prominent in Rekstefja, where there is an easy continuity between the early Viking raids and the later Christian missions. The warrior Óláfs drápa Tryggvasonar, pp. 1051–2. Óláfs drápa Tryggvasonar, pp. 1053–4. 177 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 286, 358; Einarr Skúlason’s Geisli: A Critical Edition, ed. Martin Chase (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 63, 135. 175 176

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The Saint and the Saga Hero who causes aldrspelli (‘life-destruction’) to the English, who is varghollr (‘wolfgracious’), whose ‘ódeigr oddr beit feiga Skota’ (‘unblunt point bit the fated Scots’) is every bit the same man as the missionary who brings Christianity to the North by the sword:178 Þjóðlõnd þremja skyndir þrenn kristnaði ok tvenni; Ísland éla skyndir ítr lista vann kristnat gollmildir Grœnavaldi Gõndlar þeys ok Eyjar. [The hastener of swords [warrior] Christianised three and two countries. The gold-generous hastener of the storms of the thawing wind of Gõndul ∧valkyrie∨ [battle > arrows > warrior], splendid in accomplishments, made Iceland, Greenland and the Isles [Orkney] Christian.]

The success of the mission is the fruit of violence, evidence of ‘fremðarverka eggmóts’ (‘the remarkable achievements of the edge-meeting [battle]’). Even the valkyrie Gõndul sits comfortably in this narrative of forced conversion. We move from raids to Christian mission to the battle of Svõlðr, as Óláfr’s heroic violence reaches its highest point. There is no hint of treachery in this narrative, and certainly not of martyrdom; instead, the focus is heroic overreaching. Óláfr is described in stanza 14 as ‘móðþrútinn’ (‘courage-swollen’) and ‘gunnfíkinn’ (‘battle-eager’), daring to place himself at risk.179 Doomed men fall, ravens shriek, weapons sing, swords bite, spears fly, shields shatter: this is the stuff of legend, a last stand most fitting for this greatest of kings. As Stavnem comments, the poem ‘is deeply rooted in the traditional praise-poetry for warlords’; it veers away from hagiographic models of sainthood.180 Like Oddr, though, Hallar-Steinn chose to accommodate Óláfr’s heroic aggression within the overall hagiographic structure of a vita, and he therefore needed to tackle the expectation of posthumous miracles, which are amply present in Einarr Skúlason’s Geisli. He does this by separating out the semi-miraculous events of Óláfr’s life and placing them after the battle of Svõlðr. This is, in many ways, a stroke of genius, for it allows him to manage the anti-climax of Óláfr’s not-quite-death scene (a staple of the saint’s life) and to replace it with his transfiguration. Hallar-Steinn gives the events leading up to this an internal coherence: he singles them out as five ‘bjartar jartegnir allra dáða’ (‘bright proofs of all [his] deeds’), each one a ‘dáðstyrk merki dýrðar’ (‘deed-strong sign of glory’).181 The first four all have equivalents in Oddr: they include a couple of Óláfr’s sporting feats, his mountain rescue, and finally his ducking of Þorkell Rekstefja, pp. 908–10. Rekstefja, pp. 912–13. 180 Stavnem, ‘Creating Tradition’, p. 99. 181 Rekstefja, pp. 930, 933. 178 179

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason dyðrill as a light-hearted punishment for his curiosity (p. 54). These four deeds of physical strength become ‘signs’ of spiritual eminence when Óláfr miraculously restores Þorkell’s water-logged cloak (stanza 31):182 Goðvefr gerðisk jõfri grǻn ok skinn á hǻnum sjónfagr svipstund eina síðan jafn eða fríðri. [After that the beautiful precious cloth and the grey fur on it became for the ruler the same or even finer in a single moment.]

This miracle is not mentioned by Oddr, so perhaps it is Hallar-Steinn’s invention: it beautifully condenses the Christian significance of dipping in water (as for Kjartan Óláfsson, pp. 63–4) with the baptismal garments of the new man: the renewal and transformation of the old which is seen to be ‘fríðri’ (‘even finer’) than before. The scene that follows this is Óláfr’s transfiguration (stanza 32):183 Õrrjóðr allra dáða jartegnir vann bjartar – dvergregn dýrðar megnum dimmt – í sinn it fimta. Sigrgjarn sólu fegri sénn vas skrýddr með prýddum dõglingr dróttins englum dyggðar fúss í húsi. [The arrow-reddener [warrior=Óláfr] performed bright proofs of all [his] deeds for the fifth time; we [I] strengthen the dark dwarf rain [poetry] of glory. The victory-willing prince, eager for virtue, was seen arrayed more beautifully than the sun with the adorned angels of the Lord in a house.]

The adjectives ‘sjónfagr’ (‘beautiful’) and ‘fríðr’ (‘fine’) in stanza 31 combine with ‘bjartar’ (‘bright’) and ‘sólu fegri’ (‘more beautifully than the sun’) in stanza 32, so that even Hallar-Steinn’s poetry seems ‘dim’ and overclouded in comparison. The cloak Óláfr restored is transfigured into the shining garments he wears, just as Christ appears to St Martin wearing the same cloak that he shared with a beggar.184 The warrior once ‘eager for battle’ is now ‘dyggðar fúss’ (‘eager for virtue’), and the garments shining more brightly than the sun replace the ‘heavenly’ beam of light that Oddr describes at Óláfr’s disappearance.185 The mention of a house (which has no equivalent in either version of Oddr’s saga) brings the scene closer to the biblical transfiguration, where Peter clumsily offers

Rekstefja, pp. 932–3. Rekstefja, pp. 933–4. 184 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 555–6. 185 Óláfs saga Odds, p. 345. 182 183

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The Saint and the Saga Hero to construct three dwellings for Christ, Elijah and John the Baptist.186 It becomes a vision of the glorious afterlife that Óláfr will enjoy in heaven, where houses are allotted to individual saints.187 The positioning of the transfiguration at the end of the poem establishes it as a seal of divine approval, the final authentication of Óláfr’s secular heroics. This is confirmed, in stanza 33, when Christ invites Óláfr out of the world to receive his place with ‘gram ítrbóls sólar’ (‘the lord of the splendid abode of the sun’).188 These poets revel in the violence that causes Oddr so much grief as hagiographer, but they can do so only because they write in the tradition of the skaldic encomium, where the pursuit of power necessarily involves violence, whether for personal gain (as in Viking raids) or in the spread of the Christian faith. The disjunction between secular heroics and Christian exemplarity, if present in these poems, is crucially unacknowledged; there is a smooth transition from the warrior ‘eager for battle’ to the saint ‘eager for virtue’. Óláfr offers the perfect material for traditional skaldic praise-poetry, where large-scale violence and heroic last stands are the currency of fame; but Oddr faced the harder – if not impossible – task of making this fit into hagiographic prose. Despite the fact that Óláfr was, without cult or relics, always going to be a ‘failed’ saint, Oddr turns that failure into a work of literary complexity and perhaps even, in some ways, a success.

Conclusion Oddr was a pioneer in more ways than one: he was not only the first Icelander to write a full-length saga, but also the first to combine hagiography and heroic narrative in a creative, if sometimes dissonant, tension that we encounter again in later saga authors. Although Oddr could not, with the best will in the world, make Óláfr Tryggvason into a viable saint, he could and did present him as a great Christian hero, a man whose heroic violence on the mission field had exemplary value, even if it meant that he fell short of sainthood. His saga interacts not only with the Latin saints’ lives at the centre of the literary polysystem, but also with vernacular or popular tales. Oddr shapes Óláfr’s life according to hagiographic paradigms as far as he can, and acknowledges self-consciously when he cannot: most keenly felt is the need for a Christian death, for relics, and for some posthumous miracles. In the absence of these, Oddr extends the generic boundaries of the saint’s life through co-opting athletic skills and legendary exploits as ‘signs’ of spiritual power, even when these patently clash with monastic and penitential values. The addition of skaldic stanzas in later redactions accentuates this aspect of the saga, intensifying the ongoing dialogue as to what it is that constitutes a saint. Despite the lack of official recognition 186

Matthew 17: 1–8; Mark 9: 2–8; Luke 9: 28–36. On heavenly halls, see further Christian Carlsen, Visions of the Afterlife in Old Norse Literature (Oslo: Novus Forlag, 2015), pp. 209–17. 188 Rekstefja, pp. 935–6. 187

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The Failed Saint: Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfr Tryggvason for Óláfr, Oddr makes a strong case for his secular hero; the overall difficulty of blending saint’s life and saga is balanced by some conspicuous narrative successes. In consequence, we are left with a radically hybrid saga, in which secular heroics and penitential practices are awkwardly combined. Yet Oddr’s willingness to experiment with genre opened the way for later saga authors to do the same. Although few of the sagas discussed in this book come quite so close to being a saint’s life, they show the influence of Oddr’s thinking in a variety of ways: by making visible the ‘cosmological drama’ of salvation and damnation, by superimposing allegory onto heroic story, by reflecting on the ethics of violence and its place within the Christian world; or conversely by resisting Oddr’s correlation of kingship and sanctity, and his moralisation of heroic tales. In the next chapter, I look at two sagas that explicitly counter some of Oddr’s assertions, in particular his determination to bring together sanctity, Christian mission and royal power.

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N 3 n The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert Introduction Oddr Snorrason used the literary genre of the saint’s life to write about a legendary figure who was both royal and saintly, a Christian king and a missionary hero. Not all saga authors had – or perhaps wished for – such promising subjects. Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, written in c. 1220–30, is the biography not of a saint, nor even of a Christian, but of a self-confessedly pagan poet, and it is associated with a school of saga-writing that Andersson describes as political and rationalist rather than moral and hagiographic. It has close links to Heimskringla and Snorra Edda, and may even have been composed by Snorri Sturluson.1 Hrafnkels saga, written c. 1280–1300, can be grouped with a small number of sagas concerned with issues of governance; whether it is moral or political in nature has been hotly debated, but it too sports a hero who is neither Christian nor saintly, whatever the rights and wrongs of his final killing.2 1

2

For the date and authorship of Egils saga, see Jónas Kristjánsson, ‘Egilssaga og konungasögur’, in Sjötíu ritgerðir helgaðar Jakobi Benediktssyni, 20. júlí 1977, ed. Einar G. Pétursson and Jónas Kristjánsson, 2 vols. Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, Rit 12 (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi, 1977), II, 449–72; Melissa Berman, ‘Egils saga and Heimskringla’, Scandinavian Studies 54 (1982), 21–50; Margaret Cormack ‘Egils saga, Heimskringla and the Daughter of Eiríkr blóðøx’, Alvíssmál 10 (2001), 61–8; Torfi Tulinius, Skáldið í skriftinni: Snorri Sturluson and Egils saga (Reykjavík: Íslenska Bókmenntafélag, 2004), trans. Victoria Cribb, The Enigma of Egill: The Saga, the Viking Poet and Snorri Sturluson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); and the recent collection Egil, the Viking Poet: New Approaches to Egil’s Saga, ed. Laurence de Looze et al. (Toronto and London: Toronto University Press, 2015). For the different ‘schools’ of saga writing, see Theodore Andersson, ‘Snorri Sturluson and the Saga School at Munka-Þverá’, in Snorri Sturluson: Kolloquium anlässlich der 750. Wiederkehr seines Todestages, ed. Alois Wolf, Scripta Oralia 51 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1993), pp. 9–25. For the date of Hrafnkels saga, see Austfirðinga sõgur, ed. Jón Jóhannesson, Íslenzk fornrit 11 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1950), pp. lv–lvi. For moral readings of the saga, see Hermann Pálsson, Art and Ethics in Hrafnkels saga (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1971), Theodore Andersson, ‘Ethics and Politics in Hrafnkels saga’, Scandinavian Studies 60 (1988), 293–309; Fredrik Heinemann, ‘Skömm er óhófs ævi: Immoderation in Hrafnkels saga Freysgóða’, Skáldskaparmál 3 (1994), 79–107; also the earlier debate in Fredrik Heinemann, ‘Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða: The New Problem with the Old Man’ and ‘The Heart of Hrafnkatla Again’, Scandinavian Studies 47

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The Saint and the Saga Hero These sagas make use of hagiographic conventions in much more antithetical ways than Oddr, setting up their protagonists in contradistinction to the model of the saint. Egils saga, it can be argued, draws on the biographical pattern of the vita to explore a poetic personality that is temperamentally unstable and profoundly amoral: while Egill shares some of his linguistic powers with saints, he is portrayed as both an older and a more complex figure, whose ancestry is rooted in Scandinavian prehistory, and whose poetic gifts distance him from conventional morals. Hrafnkels saga has at its focal point a torture scene or passio followed by the destruction of a pagan temple, both scenes readily familiar from Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar and other conversion þættir (‘short stories’). It is striking, then, that Hrafnkell rejects pagan gods only to embrace godlessness, which is at best only half a conversion from a medieval point of view. In this chapter, I explore to what extent a peripheral genre such as the sagas of Icelanders may challenge the world-view of a central one – the saint’s life – resisting the kind of ‘interference’ one might expect to be the rule. These two highly literary sagas have not absorbed hagiographic conventions passively, but actively work with them: they promote their native saga heroes in conscious opposition to the Christian saint.

Poet and confessor The main character of Egils saga must be one of the least saintly characters in the sagas of Icelanders, described variously as moody, aggressive, violent, unstable, selfish and avaricious, but also as heroic, brave, deeply attached to his friends and occasionally even generous and altruistic.3 The saga, as is often noted, is

3

(1975), 448–52, 453–62 and Peter Hallberg, ‘Hrafnkell Freysgoði the “New Man” – A Phantom Problem’ and ‘Hunting for the Heart of Hrafnkels saga’, Scandinavian Studies 47 (1975), 442–7, 463–6. For socio-political readings of the saga, see Óskar Halldórsson, ‘The Origin and Theme of Hrafnkels saga’, in Sagas of the Icelanders: A Book of Essays, ed. John Tucker (London and New York: Garland, 1989), pp. 257–71; R. George Thomas, ‘Men and Society in Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða’, in Proceedings of the First International Saga Conference, ed. Peter Foote et al., pp. 411–34; Jan Geir Johansen, ‘The Hero of Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða’, Scandinavian Studies (1995), 265–86, Martin Arnold, The Post-Classical Icelandic Family Saga (Lewiston, NY: Lampeter Edwin Mellon Press, 2003), pp. 107–40; Thomas Bredsdorff, Chaos and Love: The Philosophy of the Icelandic Family Sagas, trans. John Tucker (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010), pp. 87–93. On Egill’s personality, see Kaaren Grimstad, ‘The Giant as Heroic Model’, Scandinavian Studies 48 (1976), 284–95; Margaret Clunies Ross, ‘The Art of Poetry and the Figure of the Poet’, Parergon 22 (1978), 3–12; Ursula Dronke, ‘The Poet’s Persona in the Skalds’ Sagas’, Parergon 22 (1978), 23–8, reprinted in Myth and Fiction in Early Norse Lands (Aldershot: Variorum, 1997), pagination in the reprint follows the original; Alison Finlay, ‘Pouring Óðinn’s mead: An Antiquarian Theme?’, in Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society. Proceedings of the 11th International Saga Conference 2–7 July 2000, University of Sydney, ed. Geraldine Barnes and Margaret Clunies Ross (Sydney: Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Sydney, 2000), pp. 85–99; William Sayers, ‘Poetry and Social Agency in Egils saga’, Scripta Islandica 46 (1995), 29–62.

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert generically mixed, with a close relationship to kings’ sagas, mythic-heroic sagas and perhaps even romances, as well as to the skáldasögur (‘sagas of poets’); it begins further back in time than any other saga of Icelanders, and an unusual amount of the action unfolds abroad, where Egill engages in various heroic and rather less than heroic adventures, in preference to participating in feud and litigation while at home in Iceland.4 The saga also serves as an anthology of the poetry that had presumably accumulated around Egill’s name, although the longer poems are not preserved in full in the oldest manuscripts and some of the lausavísur (‘separate verses’) may be conscious imitations.5 The saga, then, is generically hybrid, working with a range of sometimes clashing generic expectations: in contrast to the ‘collective’ or ‘corporate’ personality of the Christian saint, Egill is a complex and multi-faceted figure. Yet Egill’s obvious unsaintliness masks a number of significant parallels between the form of his saga and the biographical structure of the vita: Roughton has argued that Egill’s life may be modelled antithetically on that of the confessor saint, familiar to Icelanders from the native Þorláks saga byskups, as well as from the translated lives of Benedict and Martin.6 As Ásdís Egilsdóttir has shown, these lives can be divided into six parts, and all but one has a clear counterpart in Egils saga: birth, childhood and youth; travels abroad and return; daily habits and virtues; death and burial; translatio; miracles.7 In each part except the last, Egill acts in ways that both ‘match’ and are ‘diametrically opposite’ to those of the saint.8 For example, both St Þorlákr and Egill are exceptional in their childhood precocity, although this manifests itself in different ways: Þorlákr is described as ‘ólíkr flestum ungum mõnnum í sinni uppfœðingu, auðráðr ok auðveldr í õllu, hlýðinn ok hugþekkr hverjum manni, fálátr ok fályndr um allt’ (‘unlike most young people in his upbringing, easy-going and compliant in every respect, obedient and loved by everyone, reserved and steadfast in all things’). The three-year-old Egill, on the other hand, is ‘mikill ok sterkr svá sem 4

5

6

7 8

Margaret Clunies Ross, ‘The Skald Sagas as a Genre: Definitions and Typical Features’, in Skald Sagas: Text, Vocation and Desire in the Icelandic Sagas of Poets, ed. Russell Poole (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2001), pp. 25–49; Rowe, ‘Generic Hybrids’, pp. 539–54; Tulinius, ‘Writing Strategies’, pp. 33–40. On the relationship between poetry and prose in Egils saga, see especially Judy Quinn, ‘Ok er þetta upphaf’, Alvíssmál 7 (1997), 61–73 and Russell Poole, ‘“Non enim possum plorare nec lamenta fundere”: Sonatorrek in a Tenth-Century Context’, in Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature, ed. Jane M. Tolmie and M. Jane Toswell, Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe 16 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 175–99. On Egill’s authorship of the poetry in the saga, see Jónas Kristjánsson, ‘Kveðskapur Egils Skallagrímssonar’, Gripla 17 (2006), 7–35. Philip Roughton, ‘A Hagiographic Reading of Egils saga’, in Á austrvega. Saga and East Scandinavia. Preprint Papers of the 14th International Saga Conference, ed. Henrik Williams and Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist (Gävle: Gävle University Press, 2009), pp. 816–22. Ásdís Egilsdóttir, ‘Eru biskupasögur til?’, 207–20, and ‘Biskupa sögur ok helgar ævisögur’, in Biskupa sögur, I (2003), xviii–xxiii. Roughton, ‘A Hagiographic Reading’, p. 817.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero þeir sveinar aðrir er váru sex vetra eða sjau; hann var brátt málugr ok orðvíss; heldr var hann illr viðeignar er hann var í leikum með õðrum ungmennum’ (‘as big and strong as those other boys who were six or seven years old; he was soon talkative and articulate; he was rather difficult to manage when he was playing games with other children’).9 While Þorlákr is busy learning the Psalter by heart, Egill is composing his first poem in defiance of his father, and carrying out his first killing. While Þorlákr ‘þýddisk eigi leika né lausung’ (‘detached himself from games and foolishness’), Egill was ‘mjõk at leikum’ (‘often playing games’).10 While Þorlákr models the biblical injunctions to be ‘drykkjumaðr lítill’ (‘a light drinker’) and to ‘sigra reiðina með þolinmœði’ (‘conquer anger with patience’), Egill’s father sternly tells him that ‘þú þikir ekki góðr viðskiptis at þú sér ódrukkinn’ (‘You do not seem easy to manage even when you’re not drunk’).11 When travelling, Þorlákr shows no interest in ‘skart eða þessa heims skaut’ (‘finery or this world’s show’), but Egill flaunts his scarlet finery from abroad.12 The same contrast can be observed at the end of the saga: while Þorlákr prepares for death by giving away his belongings and lifting bans of excommunication, Egill buries his chests of treasure and kills two slaves. After death, one of Þorlákr’s most frequent miracles is to heal eye pain and give sight to the blind; he heals a baby whose eye has sprung out, and restores both sight and colour.13 Egill puts out one of his enemy’s eyes and ends his life blind in both.14 Egils saga contests and inverts many of the paradigmatic values of the saint’s life – or perhaps Þorláks saga opposes and resists the values of the Odinic hero. Either way, the life of Egill can be read as an imitatio dei (‘imitation of a god’), just as saints are eptirglíkjarar Krists (‘imitators of Christ’).15 As an ‘imitator’ of Óðinn, Egill acts out some of the central narratives of Norse mythology, including Óðinn’s theft of the poetic mead: the creation of poetry from spit and blood, the ransom paid by the dwarfs to the giant Suttungr, Óðinn’s seduction of Suttungr’s daughter Gunnlõð, and his vomiting up of the poetic mead.16 Kries and Krömmelbein suggest that the poem Hõfuðlausn ‘reenacts’ the ransom and theft motifs of this myth, reconfiguring Egill’s sea voyage to York as the journey of poetic composition.17 Likewise, Harris has described Egill’s poem Sonatorrek as his ‘internal imitatio dei’: he argues that Egill ‘assimilates himself as bereaved 9 10 11

12 13 14

15

16 17

Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 48–51; Egils saga, ed. Bjarni Einarsson (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2003), p. 43. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 49, 78; Egils saga, p. 54. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 66, 70; Egils saga, pp. 43, 53. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 53; Egils saga, pp. 125, 172. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 80–2, 88–92, 95, 99. Roughton, ‘A Hagiographical Reading’, p. 819; Egils saga, pp. 135, 179, 181. Roughton, ‘A Hagiographic Reading’, p. 819; Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 49. Snorri Sturluson, Edda. Skáldskaparmál 1: Introduction, Text and Notes, ed. Anthony Faulkes (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1998), pp. 3–4. Susanne Kries and Thomas Krömmelbein, ‘“From the Hull of Laughter”: Egill Skalla-Grímsson’s “Hõfuðlausn” and its Epodium in Context’, Scandinavian Studies 74 (2002), 125.

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert father to the divine pattern supplied by Odin’.18 Although these two long poems are not found in the earliest manuscripts of the saga, Egill’s appropriation of Odinic roles has flowed over into the prose, most obviously in the scenes with Bárðr and Ármóðr, where vomit, blood and poetry are intimately linked. After killing Bárðr, Egill leaves him lying in a pool of vomit and blood, and his verse commemorating this event plays on the transmutation of one liquid into another, just as spit and blood are transmuted into the mead of poetry. In the scene at Ármóðr’s house, his wife and daughter play an enabling role similar to that of Gunnlõð and, after vomiting down Ármóðr’s throat, Egill cuts off his beard and puts out one of his eyes, making him into a ‘parody’ of Óðinn.19 The verses that accompany this scene insist on the relationship between poetic output and vomit. Egill sees himself throughout the saga as upholding Odinic values, punishing those who breach the laws of hospitality and land-rights and those who incur the anger of the gods; he adopts Odinic styles of subterfuge and violence.20 Even in his old age and blindness, he adheres to the paradigm of Óðinn, and his daughter Þordís narrowly averts his plan to create havoc at the Alþing by ‘sowing’ silver among the attendees, as Hrólfr kraki sowed gold.21 The insistently Odinic character of so many of Egill’s escapades sets him in direct opposition to the Christian saint. In view of Egill’s Odinic role-models, it is perhaps surprising that the saga author also makes use of hagiographic motifs, suggesting some sort of parallel between Egill’s powers of poetic language and the Christian supernatural.22 More often than not, these embedded hagiographic allusions occur in contexts which are explicitly pagan, as in the scene with Bárðr mentioned above. Egill arrives at Bárðr’s farm during the sacrifice to the dísir (‘female spirits’), when King Eiríkr and Queen Gunnhildr are also feasting there. Bárðr houses him separately, but King Eiríkr generously invites Egill and his men to join them. Although Bárðr had previously served them buttermilk, he now plies them with strong alcohol, which Egill consumes on behalf of himself and his increasingly incapable companions. Gunnhildr and Bárðr conspire to murder Egill, and

Joseph Harris, ‘Myths to Live By in Sonatorrek’, in Laments for the Lost, p. 156. Haraldur Bessason, ‘Mythological Overlays’, in Sjötíu ritgerðir, I, 285; Carol J. Clover, ‘Skaldic Sensibility’, Arkiv för nordisk filologi 93 (1978), 68–75; Finlay, ‘Pouring Óðinn’s mead’, pp. 90–4; Laurence de Looze, ‘Poet, Poem and Poetic Process in Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar’, Arkiv för nordisk filologi 104 (1989), 134; Sayers, ‘Poetry and Social Agency’, pp. 36–7. 20 Grimstad, ‘The Giant as Heroic Model’, p. 287; Lois Bragg, Oedipus Borealis: The Aberrant Body in Old Icelandic Myth and Saga (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), p. 190; Roughton, ‘A Hagiographic Reading’, p. 819. 21 Haraldur Bessason, ‘Mythological Overlays’, p. 288; Finlay, ‘Pouring Óðinn´s mead’, p. 91; Harris, ‘Myths to Live By’, p. 156. 22 Clunies Ross, ‘The Art of Poetry’, p. 7 and ‘Skald Sagas as a Genre’, p. 46. For a full account of literary loans in Egils saga, see Bjarni Einarsson, Litterære forudsætninger for Egils saga, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi, Rit 8 (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1975).

18 19

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Bárðr prepares a cup of poisoned ale:23 Signdi Bárðr fullit, fekk síðan õlseljunni; fœrði hon Agli ok bað hann drekka. Egill brá þá knífi sínum ok stakk í lofa sér; hann tók við horninu ok reist á rúnar ok reið á blóðinu. Hann kvað: Rístum rún á horni, rjóðum spjõll í dreyra, þau vel ek orð til eyrna óðs dýrs viðar róta. Drekkum veig sem viljum vel glýjaðra þýja; vitum hvé oss of eiri õl þat er Bárðr of signdi. Hornit sprakk í sundr, en drykkrinn fór niðr í hálm. [Italics mine] [Bárðr made a sign over the cup, then gave it to the serving-woman; she brought it to Egill and asked him to drink. Egill then drew his knife and made a cut in his palm; he took the horn and carved runes on [it] and smeared [them] with blood. He spoke a verse: ‘Let us carve a rune on the horn, redden words in blood, I choose those words for the tree of the ear-roots of the wild animal [=drinking horn]. Let us drink as much as we wish from the cup of the merry servant-women; let us find out how the ale that Bárðr made a sign over agrees with us’. The horn sprang apart, and the drink spilled onto the hay.]

The scene ends with Egill killing Bárðr and escaping the pursuit of King Eiríkr. Despite the apparent incongruity of context, Boyer has noted that this scene recalls on a well-known episode from Book II of Gregory’s Dialogues, where some monks under Benedict’s authority serve him with poisoned wine:24 En er honum var sjá dauðadrykkr fœrðr í glerkeri, þá gørði hann þegar krossmark á mót, áðr honum væri glerkerit selld, sem hann var opt vanr. En þá sprakk í sundr glerkerit, svá sem hann lýsti steini á þat. Þá skilði guðs maðr, at þat ker hafði dauðadrykk, er eigi mátti standask lífsmark. [Italics mine] [And when that drink of death was brought to him in a glass cup, then he at once made the sign of the cross over [it], before the glass cup was given to him, as was often his habit. And then the glass cup sprang apart, as if he had struck it with a stone. Then God’s man perceived that the glass held a drink of death, which could not withstand the sign of life.] [Italics mine]

Unlike Egill, however, Benedict does not kill his would-be murderers: he reproaches them mildly before leaving the monastery to return to the solitary life. The ‘springing apart’ of the poisoned cup constitutes a close verbal parallel between the two scenes, but Egils saga has completely transformed the story as 23 24

Egils saga, p. 59. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 203; first noted by Boyer, ‘Gregory’s Dialogues’, p. 18.

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert told in Gregory’s Dialogues. The sign of the cross, so fundamental to Gregory’s allegory of how death is destroyed by life, is replaced by blood-stained runes and the oral recitation of poetry: it is a bold move on the part of the saga author to erase the salvific power of the cross and proclaim instead the life-giving power of the poetic text.25 Although death is in both cases defeated, the supernatural operates in different ways: whereas Benedict makes the sign of the cross out of pious habit, without even touching the cup, Egill acts quite deliberately in carving runes and smearing them with blood, arranging his words with care, as in his complex kenning for the drinking horn. The sign of the cross carries power in and of itself, without any privileged knowledge in the person who makes it, whereas the powers of poetic language are located within Egill’s body and require skilful appropriation. The only echo of the ‘sign’ of the cross in the saga is the observation that Bárðr ‘signdi’ (‘made a sign over’) the cup: the verb signa can mean ‘to mark with the sign of the cross, to bless’, or ‘to dedicate’ (to pagan gods). In one case, in Heimskringla, it can be translated ‘to make the sign of Þórr’s hammer’, but only so as to disguise the sign of the cross, which King Hákon the Good has made over his drink: Sigurðr jarl quickly reinterprets this as the sign of Þórr’s hammer, to avoid mutiny on the part of the heathens present.26 The sign of the hammer thus covers up the sign of the cross, just as the runes in the attempted poisoning of Egill replace the sign of the cross in the story about Benedict. Bárðr’s ineffectual ‘signing’ stands out in stark contrast to Egill’s masterful poetic work: unlike the symbol of the cross, the powers of language are not accessible to all, but are effective only for a small literary élite. Egill, then, commands a power both like and unlike that of the Christian saint: whereas Gregory’s story contrasts the ‘dauðadrykkr’ (‘drink of death’) served by the sinful monks with the ‘lífsmark’ (‘sign of life’) upon which the saint relies, Egils saga makes no such opposition. The saga does not oppose life and death, nor virtue and sin, but effective and ineffective instances of ‘signing’. Whereas Gregory distinguishes Benedict’s blameless conduct from the lazy and murderous monks, the morals of Egils saga are less clear-cut. Egill may characterise Bárðr in his verses as bragðvíss (‘cunning’) and kumlabrjótr (‘desecrator of heathen graves’), but the prose narrative describes him in more positive terms as ‘sýslumaðr mikill ok starfsmaðr góðr’ (‘a very diligent man and a good worker’).27 Despite his duplicitous behaviour towards Egill and his men, Bárðr is not an out-and-out villain, but is merely currying favour with those who are currently in power. Egill, on the other hand, has ulterior motives for wanting to stir up trouble: this scene unfolds at the same time as his brother Þórólfr’s marriage to Ásgerðr, which a suspicious illness on the part of Egill (love-sickness?) has prevented him from attending. The long-term consequence is Egill’s enforced departure from Norway and his brother Þórólfr’s death in 25

de Looze, ‘Poet, Poem and Poetic Process’, p. 130. Geir T. Zoëga, A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), p. 359; Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, I, 171. 27 Egils saga, pp. 57–8. 26

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The Saint and the Saga Hero England, which opens up the possibility for Egill to marry his brother’s wife.28 This ethical ambiguity is neatly summed up by Arinbjõrn’s father Þórir, who expresses it in terms of public opinion: ‘Man mál manna at Bárðr hafði verðleika til at hann væri drepinn. En þér Egli er of mjõk ættgengt at sjá lítt við því at þú fáir konungs reiði’ (‘It will be said by people that Bárðr deserved to be killed, but you, Egill, follow too closely in your family’s footsteps in caring little that you incur the king’s anger’).29 In his power with words, if not in his moral virtue, Egill resembles the saint, and nowhere more so than when he uses his poetic gifts to oppose royal tyranny and oppression. This is the context for the second borrowing from Gregory’s Dialogues, which is embedded in the head-ransoming episode, when Egill falls into the clutches of King Eiríkr after being shipwrecked off the coast of Northumbria. In the hope of gaining Egill a reprieve, his friend Arinbjõrn Þórisson persuades him to compose a praise poem for King Eiríkr overnight:30 Gekk hann upp í loptit til Egils ok spurði hvat þá liði um kvæðit. Egill segir at ekki var ort; ‘hefir hér setit svala ein við glugginn ok klakat í alla nótt, svá at ek hefi aldregi beðit ró fyrir’. Síðan gekk Arinbjõrn á brott ok út um dyrr þær er ganga mátti upp á húsit ok settisk við glugg þann á loptinu er fuglinn hafði áðr við setit; hann sá hvar hamhleypa nõkkur fór annan veg af húsinu. [He went up to Egill in the loft and asked how the poem was going. Egill says that it was not composed; ‘a swallow has been sitting by the window and chirping all night, so that I haven’t had any peace’. Then Arinbjõrn went away and out through the doors that led onto the roof of the house, and sat down by the loft window where the bird had perched; he saw where a certain shape-shifter left the house by another way.]

The implication is that the shape-shifter is Queen Gunnhildr, whose seiðr (‘magic’) has compelled Egill to return to Eiríkr’s court.31 This scene is modelled on one just before Benedict’s attempted murder, in which he is tempted by the devil:32 Á nõkkurum degi þá er Benedictus var einn saman, þá kom freistni at honum, því at nõkkurr svartr fugl lítill fló svá nær andliti hans, at hann mátti auðveldliga taka hendi, ef hann vildi. En hann gørði krossmark á mót ok flœði fuglinn. Þá varð guðs maðr fyr svá mikilli líkamsfreistni, at hann hafði aldregi slíka reynda, fyrir því at illgjarn andi leiddi fyrir hugskotsaugu honum nõkkura konu, þá er hann hafði fyrr séna. [One day, when Benedict was alone, then temptation came upon him, because a 28 29 30 31

32

On the complex relationship between Egill, his brother, and his brother’s wife, see Tulinius, Skáldið í skriftinni, pp. 55–75. Egils saga, p. 62. Egils saga, pp. 104–5. Egils saga, p. 101; noted by Boyer, ‘Gregory’s Dialogues’, p. 24. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 202.

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert certain small black bird flew so near his face that he could easily have touched [it], if he had wished. But he made the sign of the cross over [it], and the bird flew away. Then God’s man underwent a greater temptation of the flesh than he had ever experienced before, because an evil spirit led before his mind’s eye a certain women, whom he had previously seen.]

He escapes from sexual temptation only by throwing himself into a thorn bush, and this transformative experience marks the beginning of his ministry. In both cases, this scene is identified as a trial or temptation: Egill must freista (‘try’) to conceal his hatred of Eiríkr in a praise poem, while Benedict undergoes a freistni (‘trial, temptation’) greater than any before. There is, in both cases, a life at stake: Egill will lose his head if he cannot compose this poem, while Benedict risks the loss of his soul. Again, Egill’s gift of poetry is closely aligned with the cross in its power to save: Arinbjõrn relies on it to lend Egill hamingja and gæfa, both words which can carry Christian connotations of ‘grace’, as discussed in Chapter 4 (p. 130–1). Like a saint at prayer, Egill requires intense concentration to bring about his own small miracle of linguistic transformation, and he is disturbed in this work by a female shape-shifter, as Benedict is by the shape-shifting devil. Yet, while Gregory openly identifies his shape-shifter as an ‘illgjarn andi’ (‘an evil spirit’), Egils saga is more opaque: Gunnhildr is not named directly at this point, and only Arinbjõrn catches a glimpse of the hamhleypa (‘shape-shifter’). This uncertainty over the exact source of Egill’s disturbance is intensified by the greater realism of the scene: swallows do nest under the eaves of buildings and sing from the site of their nests. While Benedict wields the sign of the cross, Egill’s solution is more pragmatic: he needs the physical presence of his friend Arinbjõrn to keep the shape-shifter away. Egill uses poetry here as a defence against despotism, outwitting King Eiríkr and Queen Gunnhildr through the exercise of his poetic gifts.33 His relationship to royalty has a close parallel in the lives of ascetic saints like Benedict, who care just as little as Egill as to whether they incur the anger of kings. The encounters between kings and saints were a readily available literary model for ‘the antiroyal stance’ in Egils saga: early ascetic saints, unlike the later royal ones, deny and oppose the authority of secular rulers.34 A famous scene from the life of Benedict is the one in which he humbles Totila, king of the Goths, who tests his spirit of prophecy by dressing his servant Riggo as king. Benedict sees through the disguise at once, and reproaches Totila for his cruelty before telling him how long he has to live.35 This scene is borrowed in Snorri Sturluson’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar with King Óláfr in the role of Totila, although it is omitted from Oddr Snorrason’s, perhaps because it identifies Óláfr too uncomfortably with the tyrannical Goth.36 There is an inverse echo of it in Egill’s decision not 33

Poole, ‘Non enim possum plorare’, p. 199; Kries and Krömmelbein, ‘Hull of Laughter’, p. 125. 34 Clunies Ross, ‘The Skald Sagas as a Genre’, p. 37. 35 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 211–12. 36 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, I, 266–7. It is also found in Ágrip af Nóregskonungasögum.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero to disguise himself to fool King Eiríkr; in a breach of external focalisation, we are told that he knows he would be too easy to recognise. Egill and his family, moreover, are gifted with the same prescience as Benedict when it comes to predicting the fortunes of kings: Egill’s grandfather, Kveld-Úlfr, foresees the success of Haraldr hárfagri, and Egill admonishes King Hákon on his royal duty to uphold the law, and predicts his eventual death at the hands of Eiríkr’s sons.37 The Life of St Martin also features several such dramatic encounters between the saint and the secular authorities: one earl, Avicianus, is egged on by a black devil sitting on his shoulder, which Martin eventually overcomes through prayer.38 Egils saga strongly resists the model of royal sanctity that is so important to Oddr: in the head-ransoming episode, Egill is aligned with the early ascetic saints in opposition to royal power. It is no coincidence that, at the end of the saga, his grandson Skúli Þorsteinsson dies fighting against King Óláfr Tryggvason at the battle of Svõlðr (p. 68).39 The correlation of poetic power with hamingja and gæfa – with all their Christian resonance – is echoed in another scene in the saga, during Egill’s trip to Vermaland, when he stays overnight with a farmer named Þorfinnr. Egill notices that his host’s daughter is ill, and offers to look into the cause of this:40 Hann bað þá hefja hana ór rúminu ok leggja undir hana hrein klæði ok nú var svá gõrt. Síðan rannsakaði hann rúmit er hon hafði hvílt í ok þar fann hann tálkn ok váru þar á rúnar. Egill las þær ok síðan telgði hann af rúnarnar ok skóf þær í eld niðr; hann brenndi tálknit allt ok lét bera í vind klæði þau er hon hafði haft áðr. Þá kvað Egill: Skalat maðr rúnar rísta nema ráða vel kunni. Þat verðr mõrgum manni er um myrkvan staf villisk. Sá ek á telgðu tálkni tíu launstafi ristna. Þat hefir lauka lindi langs oftrega fengit. Egill reist rúnar ok lagði undir hœgindit í hvíluna þar er hon hvíldi. Henni þótti sem hon vaknaði ór svefni ok sagði at hon var þá heil, en þó var hon máttlítil.

37

38 39 40

A Twelfth-Century Synoptic History of the Kings of Norway, ed. Matthew J. Driscoll, Viking Society for Northern Research, Text Series 10 (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1995), pp. 28–31; Historia Norwegie, ed. Inger Ekrem and Lars Boje Mortensen, trans. Peter Fisher (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003), pp. 92–5; cf. also Óláfs saga hins helga, ed. Oscar Albert Johnsen, Det norske historiske kildeskriftfonds skrifter 47 (Oslo: Dybwad, 1922), pp. 18–19. Egils saga, pp. 3, 6–7, 24, 115–16, 154. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 570–1. Egils saga, p. 182. Egils saga, pp. 136–7, 142.

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert [He told them to lift her out of the bed and place clean sheets under her, and this was now done. Then he searched the bed where she had been lying, and there he found a whalebone, and there were runes on [it]. Egill read them and then he erased the runes and thrust them into the fire; he burned the whole whalebone and had the sheets she had used aired. Then Egill spoke a verse: ‘A man should not carve runes unless he has the skill to interpret [them]; it happens to many a man that [he] mistakes an obscure letter. I saw on the carved bone ten secret letters cut. It has caused long suffering to the tree of herbs [woman]’. Egill carved runes and placed [them] under the pillow in the bed where she was lying. It seemed to her as if she awoke from sleep and [she] said that she was then healed, but she was still very weak.]

Later, we are told that a local farmer’s son had carved the runes in an attempt to seduce her, but he had so little skill that he caused her harm instead. There can be little doubt that this story has been influenced by the biblical account of Christ’s healing of Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5: 35–43).41 The expression ‘sem hon vaknaði ór svefni’ (‘as if she awoke from sleep’) echoes Christ’s words in the Vulgate that ‘non est mortua sed dormit’ (‘she is not dead but sleeping’), and the power of the written word builds on the power of Christ’s spoken word in Mark, which is emphasised by the use of direct discourse in Aramaic (‘talitha cum’) alongside an explanation of what this means: ‘Quod est interpretatum puella tibi dico surgere’ (‘which is, being interpreted: Damsel (I say to thee) arise’).42 Egill’s linguistic ability is aligned with the Christian supernatural and with the spoken words of Christ. Similar miracles can be found in saints’ lives; the closest to Egils saga is probably Jerome’s Life of St Hilarion, where a young man buries ‘magic spells and strange figures’ under the threshold of a virgin’s house, causing her to go mad with desire; the word oftregi in Egill’s verse may also have sexual connotations, as the related word tregi is used in the runic curse in Skírnismál.43 Hilarion refuses, however, to credit these spells with any real power; he needs only to exorcise the demon that possesses her. In Martinus saga, it is explicitly the saint’s written word that saves: the daughter of a man called Arborius is healed when one of Martin’s letters (‘rit Martinus’) is placed on her breast: her fever immediately leaves her.44 Gregory’s Dialogues also emphasises the power of the saint’s written word: Gregory tells how one kraftauðigr bishop, Sabinus, prevented a river from flooding by throwing into it a written command (rit) to return to its course.45 Significantly, the word kraftauðigr can mean both ‘very powerful’ and ‘highly virtuous’.46 The saga See Bjarni Einarsson, Litterære forudsætninger, pp. 260–1; Finlay, ‘Pouring Óðinn´s Mead’, p. 94; Tulinius, Skáldið í skriftinni, p. 67. 42 Translations from the Vulgate come from the Douay-Rheims Bible, unless otherwise indicated. 43 Early Christian Lives, pp. 99–100; The Poetic Edda, ed. Ursula Dronke, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–2011), II, 138. 44 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 562. 45 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 225; Boyer, ‘Gregory’s Dialogues’, p. 17. 46 Zoëga, Concise Dictionary, p. 249; other instances of kraftauðigr are overwhelmingly 41

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The Saint and the Saga Hero author creates a parallel between Christian rit and Egill’s rúnar: these too are granted healing powers. Crucially, though, the linguistic efficacy of the saint has its source in the divine Word: the raising of Jairus’s daughter is an allegory of redemption, prefiguring Christ’s resurrection and his victory over death. By contrast, the story in Egils saga is neither Christian nor allegorical; it is a story about literary expertise. The first set of runes makes the girl ill not because they are pagan spells or amulets, as in the Life of St Hilarion, but because they are poorly executed: as Egill states in his verse, one should not carve runes ‘nema ráða vel kunni’ (‘unless one has the skill to interpret them’).47 This seems to be a proverbial statement, since it also occurs on a medieval rune stick found in Trondheim (A 142).48 Although the verb villask (‘to be mistaken, to go astray’) has overwhelmingly a religious sense in prose, it is used in a pointedly literary sense here. The runes carved by the farmer’s son make the girl ill because he is not skilled at what he is doing; Egill’s runes make her better because he is. While the power wielded by saints like Sabinus is inseparable from their virtue, Egill’s powers depend on mastery and knowledge of his craft. This can be used generously and even altruistically, as here, but it can also be used cruelly and egotistically: the healing of Þorfinnr’s daughter, where Egill apparently imitates Christ, comes directly after the blinding of Ármóðr, where he certainly imitates Óðinn. Good and evil are inseparable in Egill’s life as in his art: its purity is aesthetic, not moral. Perhaps the closest the saga comes to making a claim for poetry as redemptive is in the scene where Egill is persuaded to compose Sonatorrek, following the drowning of his favourite son, Bõðvarr. Egill’s grief at this event has a legendary overlay: he swells up so greatly that the seams of his clothes burst, just as Sigmundr swells up with grief at the death of Sinfjõtli.49 The work of poetic composition both saves Egill’s life and creates a poetic afterlife for his sons: it transmutes the sea that drowned Bõðvarr into the sea of poetry, enacting ‘salvation from defeat’.50 Torfi Tulinius has argued also that the poem links poetic composition with divine inspiration: Egill describes himself bearing ‘ór orðhofi / mærðar timbr /máli laufgat’ (‘from the temple of words / the timber of praise / leafed with speech’). This may be an allusion to the rod of Aaron in Numbers 17: 1–9, a sign of divine favour and a type of the Incarnation in biblical exegesis.51 The poem ends with Egill preparing for death ‘með góðan vilja’ (‘with

47

48

49

50 51

in a hagiographic context. See A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, s.v. ‘kraptauðigr’ for usage and ‘kraptr’ for the distinctions of meaning (accessed 30 August 2017, http:// onpweb.nfi.sc.ku.dk/wordlist_e_adv.html). de Looze, ‘Poet, Poem and Poetic Process’, p. 135. James Knirk, ‘Runes from Trondheim and a Stanza by Egill Skalla-Grímsson’, in Studien zum Altgermanischen. Festschrift für Henrich Beck, ed. Heiko Uecker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 441–20. Harris, ‘Myths to Live By’, p. 156. Haraldur Bessason, ‘Mythic Overlays’, p. 284; Clover, ‘Skaldic Sensibility’, p. 73; de Looze, ‘Poem, Poet and Poetic Process’, p. 137; Harris, ‘Myths to Live By’, p. 158. Torfi Tulinius, ‘The Self as Other: Iceland and Christian Europe in the Middle Ages’,

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert good will’), probably an echo of ‘bonae voluntatis’ (‘of good will’) in Luke 2: 14. While Tulinius argues that Egill comes across here as ‘a poet of pre-Christian times capable of expressing his inner life in terms close to Christianity’, Poole reads the poem differently: he argues that the poem ‘coopts Christian doctrine on preparation for death and the afterlife so as to reinscribe it oppositionally within an ancestral system of beliefs’.52 In other words, it resists the Christian significance of the language that it puts to use. This point might well be extended to the rest of the saga. It attributes redemptive powers to Egill, but not to make any claim to sanctity on his behalf. On the contrary, Egill ‘coopts’ the healing and life-giving powers of the saint in order to ‘reinscribe’ them within a different system of values, defying conventional morality in favour of intellectual and aesthetic craft.53 The saga has an ‘oppositional’ relationship to the saint’s life: it makes use of hagiographic models in such a way as to transform their meaning and to challenge their monopoly on redemptive language and saving power. As a pagan poet, then, Egill is a challenge to the Christian saint, with powers that are rooted in an older system of values. Whereas the saint can be seen as a relative newcomer to Scandinavia, Egill’s poetic gifts are inherited from a distant and partly non-human past, to which his size and distinctive physiognomy bear witness.54 Although Tulinius has suggested that Egils saga is a response to the growing popularity of romance in Norway and Iceland, it seems just as likely, given its date of composition, that it is a reaction to the widespread popularity of translated saints’ lives and the appearance of the first Icelandic saints, like Þorlákr, who embody the new Christian ethos.55 The saga sets out to defend and celebrate the native traditions to which Egill owes his art; more than that, it invests him with redeeming powers of his own. Egill’s turbulent and extreme personality is in every way opposed to that of the Christian saint, yet his words take effect in ways that only a saint can rival. What, then, of Egill’s attitude towards Christianity within the saga, which is fast encroaching on the Scandinavian world? Egill’s most obvious interaction with Christians comes during his time with King Aðalsteinn (Æthelstan), when we are told that he is prime-signed, a rite preliminary to baptism. Tulinius argues optimistically that this brings Egill ‘into the orbit of Christianity’ and Gripla 20 (2009), 211. Tulinius, ‘The Self as Other’, p. 212; Poole, ‘Non enim possum plorare’, pp. 194–8. 53 Sayers, ‘Poetry and Social Agency’, pp. 55–61. 54 Grimstad, ‘The Giant as Heroic Model’, pp. 284–95; Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, ‘Starkaðr, Loki and Egill Skallagrímsson’, trans. John Tucker, in Sagas of the Icelanders. A Book of Essays, ed. John Tucker (New York and London: Garland, 1989), pp. 146–59, reprinted in At fortælle historien. Telling History (Trieste: Parnaso, 2001), pp. 27–35; Joseph Harris, ‘Saga as Historical Novel’, in Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature: New Approaches to Textual Analysis and Literary Criticism, ed. John Lindow, Lars Lönnroth and Gerd Wolfgang Weber (Odense: Odense University Press, 1986), pp. 213–14; Rowe, ‘Generic Hybrids’, pp. 545–6. 55 Tulinius, ‘Writing Strategies’, pp. 33–40; see also Paul Schach, ‘Was Tristrams saga the Cultural Model for Egils saga?’, American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures 2 (1990), 67–86. 52

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The Saint and the Saga Hero ‘makes him eligible for salvation’.56 One manuscript of the saga does indeed portray Egill as a noble heathen, concluding that ‘Þikir eigi verit hafa meiri afreksmaðr í fornum sið, ótiginna manna, en Egill sonr Skalla-Gríms. Hann var primsigndr ok blótaði aldri goð’ (‘It is thought that there has been no more outstanding man in the old faith, among non-nobles, than Egill Skalla-Grímr’s son. He was prime-signed and never sacrificed to gods’).57 This makes him sound implausibly like Óláfr Tryggvason, who also performs afreksverk (‘outstanding deeds’) and who never sacrificed to gods (p. 56). Elsewhere, though, the saga is more cynical about Egill’s prime-signing, presenting it as a political manoeuvre: ‘Þeir menn er prímsignaðir váru hõfðu allt samneyti við kristna menn ok svá heiðna, en hõfðu þat at átrúnaði er þeim var skapfelldast’ (‘Those people who were prime-signed were free to have dealings with both Christians and heathens, but had as faith whatever suited them best’).58 Despite Egill’s warm relationship with King Aðalsteinn, he shows no sign of any preference for Christianity: he twice refuses the offer to settle at Aðalsteinn’s court, even though this is demonstrably in his best interests. If these offers imply coexistence with or even conversion to Christianity, Egill shows no interest at all. Not only does he lack the qualities of a noble heathen himself, but he also dislikes them in others. This is clear from his attitude to his surviving son: ‘Þorsteinn var vitr maðr ok kyrrlátr, hógværr, stilltr manna bezt. Egill unni honum lítit’ (‘Þorsteinn was a wise and peaceful man, mild-mannered, the most patient of men. Egill did not like him much’).59 Þorsteinn shares these Christian qualities with St Þorlákr, who is also described as stilltr (‘patient’). Despite this, he is presented as a lesser man than his father: we are told that he secretly borrowed Egill’s silk robes to wear at the Alþing, only to trail them in the dirt. Unimpressive though he may be, Þorsteinn represents the way of the future: he is baptised when Christianity comes to Iceland and buried at his church in Borg. Most telling is the translatio with which the saga ends, which was perhaps inspired by the translations of Þorlákr and Jón in 1198 and 1200.60 After Egill’s death, he is buried in a mound with his clothes and weapons, but when Christianity comes to Iceland, his niece Þórdís has him moved into the church at Hrísbrú, disrupting his comfortable pagan afterlife. When this church is taken down and the churchyard dug up, a man’s bones are found under the altar; they are larger than any other person’s and the skull is described as ‘allr báróttr útan svá sem hõrpuskel’ (‘all ridged on the outside like a scallop shell’). The saga author comments cautiously: ‘Þikjask menn þat vita af sõgn gamalla manna at mundi verit hafa bein Egils’ (‘People thought they knew from the report of elderly people that they must have been Egill’s bones’). To test its thickness, 56

Tulinius, ‘The Self as Other’, p. 212. Egils saga, p. 181 (W, similar in K); cf. Óláfs saga Odds, p. 126. 58 Egils saga, pp. 71–2. 59 Egils saga, p. 166. Compare Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 49. 60 Egils saga, pp. 181–2; Bjarni Einarsson, ‘Hörð Höfuðbein’, in Minjar ok menntir: Afmælisrit helgað Kristjáni Eldjárn, ed. Guðni Kolbeinsson (Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfa Menningarsjóðs, 1976), pp. 47–52.

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert the lawspeaker Skapti Þórarinsson strikes the skull with an axe: ‘En þar sem á kom hvítnaði fyrir, en ekki dalaði né sprakk’ (‘And it whitened where it struck, but did not dent or break’). Egill’s bones are then reinterred at Mosfell ‘í útanverðum kirkjugarði’ (‘on the outer edge of the churchyard’). Here the saga uses an absolute staple of the saint’s life – the translatio – to question whether Egill belongs in the Christian world: the indestructibility of his skull has been read as a ‘outrageous parody’ of the saint’s uncorrupted body.61 Despite Þórdís’s posthumous attempt to convert him, Egill does not belong under the altar, where relics of saints were often kept, and which is thus a place of sanctity. His bones are moved from the centre to the outer edge of the churchyard, where unbaptised babies were interred, reflecting his historical existence on the margins of the Christian world.62 Yet, despite the parodic implications, there is a sense in which Egill’s bones can be considered a genuine relic, embodying the greatness of the pre-Christian past. In particular, the focus on his skull is a reminder of the head-ransoming episode and the close identification of Egill’s head with his poetry: the image of the ‘scallop’ evokes the sea of poetry so familiar from Egill’s long poems, as well as recalling poignantly the sea shells Egill received as a child in payment for his first poem.63 The discovery of his shell-like skull under the church replays the washing up of Kveld-Úlfr’s body on the shores of Iceland, as if Egill too has been washed up unexpectedly on the shore of the Christian world. Perhaps it is significant that the scallop has long been a symbol of baptism and pilgrimage in Christian iconography: Egill has reached, after much journeying, his final destination, although his multiple burials make it difficult to say where this may be. The patterned ridges on his skull transform him into a sign in need of interpretation, a ‘text’ that re-emerges undamaged and still meaningful into the Christian world. They affirm that the power of poetry does after all outlast life, just as the saint’s powers reach beyond death. Egill may belong to a bygone era, but the art of verse he embodies lives on.

Pagan martyrdom Egils saga presents us with a vita of the pagan poet, from birth and to death and translatio. Hrafnkels saga, by contrast, is closer to an exemplum than a biography, focusing tightly on a short period of Hrafnkell’s life. It is the story of his fall and rise from adversity, reversing the rise and fall of a medieval tragedy of Fortune. The unusual economy and symmetry of the saga has led some scholars to the conclusion that it is a moral exemplum along biblical lines: the stories of Oedipus borealis, p. 191; de Looze, ‘Poet, Poem and Poetic Process’, p. 140; Roughton, ‘A Hagiographical Reading’, p. 820. 62 Tulinius, Skáldið í skriftinni, p. 83; cf. Grágás: Lagasafn íslenzka þjóðveldisins, ed. Gunnar Karlsson, Kristján Sveinsson, and Mörður Árnason (Reykjavík: Mál og Menning, 1992), pp. 4–5. 63 Sayers, ‘Poetry and Social Agency’, pp. 34–5; de Looze, ‘Poet, Poem and Poetic Process’, p. 140. 61 Bragg,

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Nebuchadnezzar and Job, for example, are made up of similarly symmetrical patterns.64 There is also, however, a native model in the story of Võlundr’s revenge in Võlundarkvíða: both Võlundr and Hrafnkell are hamstrung (although Hrafnkell appears to suffer no permanent effects from this), and both live on and wait to perfect their revenge.65 In the Eddic poem, moreover, Võlundr’s triumph over Níðuðr is carefully marked by structural repetition, just as Hrafnkell’s final offer to Sámr carefully repeats the same choice Sámr had offered him.66 Is this a ‘cautionary tale’ about pride and moderation, or is it a tactical story about the perfect revenge?67 This question has been a major issue in scholarship on Hrafnkels saga, with particular disagreement over whether the focus of the saga is moral or political: does Hrafnkell change and learn through adversity, using pain as a positive ethical resource, or does he callously adapt to the changing social climate with the same calculated self-interest shown throughout?68 The difficulty of agreeing on these point is itself significant: the saga does not offer glib answers to the sorts of questions it raises. The bipartite structure of the saga is important, however: Sverrir Tómasson suggests that it is based on medieval European works which fall into two halves – like a diptych – divided by the passion and resurrection.69 The centre of Hrafnkels saga, he argues, is the scene where Hrafnkell is tortured and chooses life, which shows ‘írónisk útfærsla á helgisagnaminni’ (‘an ironic implementation of hagiographic motifs’); an example is St Andrew, who is

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65 66 67 68

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On structure and symmetry, see Hermann Pálsson, Art and Ethics, pp. 23–32; Arnold, The Post-Classical Icelandic Family Saga, p. 107; Bjarne Fidjestøl, ‘Algirdas Julien Greimas and Hrafnkell Freysgoði’, in Selected Papers, ed. Odd Einar Haugen and Else Mundal, trans. Peter Foote (Odense: Odense University Press, 1997), pp. 162–5. On Nebuchadnezzar and Job, see Andersson, ‘Ethics and Politics’, pp. 296–301; Hermann Pálsson, ‘Átrúnaðr Hrafnkels Freysgoða’, Skírnir 140 (1968), 68–72; Bjarne Fidjestøl, ‘Hrafnkels saga etter 40 års granskning’, Maal og minne (1983), 16; Guðrún Nordal, ‘Trúskipti og písl í Hrafnkels sögu’, Gripla 9 (1995), 103. This is suggested by Larissa Tracy, Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity (Cambridge: Brewer, 2012), pp. 120–1. The Poetic Edda, II, 247, 251; Hrafnkels saga, in Austfirðinga sõgur, ed. Jón Jóhannesson, Íslenzk fornrit 11 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1950), pp. 121, 131. Jónas Kristjánsson, Icelandic Sagas and Manuscripts, trans. Alan Boucher (Reykjavík: Saga Publishing, 1970); p. 70; Johansen, ‘The Hero of Hrafnkels saga’, p. 275. On learning from pain and adversity, see particularly Hermann Pálsson, Art and Ethics, pp. 62–9; Davíð Erlingsson, ‘Etiken i Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða’, Scripta Islandica 21 (1970), 3–41; William Kratz, ‘Hrafnkels saga: Thirteenth-Century Fiction’, Scandinavian Studies 53 (1981), 420–46; Fidjestøl, ‘Hrafnkels saga’, p. 15; Bredsdorff, Chaos and Love, pp. 87–8; Johansen, ‘The Hero of Hrafnkels saga’, p. 283; Lars van Wezel, ‘On the Impossibility of Interpreting Hrafnkels saga’, in Germanic Texts and Latin Models: Medieval Reconstructions, ed. Karin Olsen, Antonina Harbus and Tette Hofstra (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), pp. 177–8. Sverrir Tómasson, ‘Skorið í fornsögu – þankar um byggingu Hrafnkels sögu’, in Sagnaþing helgað Jónasi Kristjánssyni sjötugum, ed. Gísli Sigurðsson, Guðrún Kvaran and Sigurgeir Steingrímsson (Reykjavík: Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag, 1994), II, 787–99.

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert bound by ropes like Hrafnkell, but who is described as ‘glaðr’ (‘glad’) to die.70 Guðrún Nordal also compares the torture of Hrafnkell to the passion of the saints; she suggests that Hrafnkell ‘fetar slóð píslarvottsins fyrir trúna á vin sinn Frey’ (‘treads the path of a martyr for his belief in his patron Freyr’). The saga can then be read as an allegory about the conversion of Iceland in the year 999/1000: it implies, through the character of Hrafnkell, that the Icelandic chieftains abandoned paganism without embracing Christian virtues.71 Thus the torture and humiliation of Hrafnkell fall at the very centre of the saga, where the conversion of Iceland rightly belongs (p. 120). At the same time, she recognises, the saga’s relationship to conventional narratives of conversion is unusual: no other saga hero shows quite the same intensity of personal devotion to a pagan god, and no other saga depicts a zealous heathen abandoning his religion without any explicit reference to Christian revelation or preaching.72 Moreover, Hrafnkell is converted from rather than to any religion: he starts the saga as a devout pagan and ends it as a convicted atheist, regaining his position of political leadership by dispatching Eyvindr in cold blood. Unlike Egill, he has no poetry to redeem him: he is, at best, a canny politician and, at worst, a ruthless killer. As Heinemann comments, ‘Hrafnkell’s conduct does not qualify him for sainthood’.73 The presence of hagiographic scenes at the very centre of the saga therefore deserves more attention. The most obvious of these ‘interferences’ from hagiography is the destruction of Hrafnkell’s temple, which is often criticised as an anachronism.74 It presumably takes place just after Hrafnkell leaves Aðalból and before Sámr moves in, although it is narrated out of chronological order at the end of Hrafnkell’s first year of exile.75 The sons of Þjóstarr first kill the horse Freyfaxi by pushing him off a cliff, in an apparent parody of pagan sacrifice. The most recent study of this scene by Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson concludes that ‘In their treatment of Freyfaxi, the Þjóstarsons act like Christians destroying sacred sites of old northern paganism’.76 Þorgeirr comments of Freyfaxi that ‘Mun þat nú makligt at sá taki við honum, er hann á’ (‘It is now fitting that he is received by the

Postola sögur, pp. 321, 340–1. Nordal, ‘Trúskipti og písl ’, pp. 97–114. 72 The closest parallel is in Friðþjófs saga ins frœkna, in Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, II, 249–70, where King Helgi takes personal offence at the accidental burning of the gods, but instead of abandoning his faith, he has Baldrshagi built again, while Friðþjófr maintains throughout the saga his indifference towards pagan gods. 73 Heinemann, ‘Skömm er óhófs ævi’, p. 103. 74 Eric V. Gorden, ‘On Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða’, Medium Ævum 8 (1939), 15–17; Sigurður Nordal, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, trans. R. George Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1958), pp. 25–6; Klaus von See, ‘Die Hrafnkels saga als Kunstdichtung’, Skandinavistik 9 (1979), 54. 75 Nordal, Hrafnkels saga, p. 36. 76 Aslak Liestøl, ‘Freyfaxi’, Maal og minne (1945), 59–66; Knut Liestøl, ‘Tradisjonen i Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða’, Arv 2 (1946), 94–110; Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson, ‘Freyfaxahamarr’, Skáldskaparmál 4 (1997), 238–53. 70 71

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The Saint and the Saga Hero one who owns him’).77 Although the owner is not specified, this must refer to either Freyr or the devil, and probably both. The brothers then go down to the temple, where Þorkell (in all but one manuscript) takes over the action; this is significant because he has spent time in Constantinople, one of the three great centres of the Christian world. We are told that ‘Þorkell vildi koma þar; lét hann fletta goðin õll. Eptir þat lætr hann leggja eld í goðahúsit ok brenna alt saman’ (‘Þorkell wished to go there. He had all the gods stripped. After that he set fire to the temple and burned it all down’).78 When Hrafnkell hears what has happened, he responds: ‘Ek hygg þat hégóma at trúa á goð’ (‘I think it folly to believe in gods’). The saga author adds: ‘Ok sagðisk hann þaðan af aldri skyldu á goð trúa, ok þat efndi hann síðan at hann blótaði aldri’ (‘And he said that from then on he would never believe in gods, and he brought it about afterwards that he never sacrificed again’). Superficially, this certainly looks like a biblical or hagiographic sequence: Hermann Pálsson observes that the destruction of temples and idols is such a commonplace in biblical literature that there is no need for a particular example.79 Such scenes occur frequently in the lives of saints and apostles, such as Martin and Peter, as in the lives of Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr Haraldsson. One thinks, for example, of Óláfr Tryggvason’s desecration of the temple at Mœrr or of Óláfr Haraldsson’s destruction of the idol of Þórr at Dalar, both carried out during Christian missions in an aggressive extension of royal power.80 Accounts of the conversion of Iceland also describe the destruction of temples: in Kristni saga, Stefnir Þorgilsson, angered by the lack of response to his preaching, is said to ‘meiða hof ok hõrga en brjóta skurðguð’ (‘damage temples and shrines and destroy idols’). In Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, his violence is magnified: ‘Þá reiddisk Stefnir ok tók at brjóta hof ok hõrga ok brenna skurðgoð með styrk sinna fõrunauta’ (‘Then Stefnir grew angry, and began to destroy temples and shrines and burn idols with the support of his companions’). Likewise, when Gizurr and Hjalti arrive at Hõrgaeyri off the south coast of Iceland just before the legal conversion, they too take to violence: ‘Þar váru áðr hof heiðingja ok blótskapr mikill. Brutu þeir þat allt niðr’ (‘Previously there had been temples of heathens and great sacrifice there. They broke it all down’).81 Although these scenes lack the sensationalism of the Norwegian examples, they do show how closely the destruction of temples is linked to Christian mission. Particularly interesting are two scenes from sagas of Óláfr Tryggvason, both found in the compilation Flateyjarbók. In the first, Óláfr speaks out against the worship of Freyr, which he opposes as ‘illr átrúnaðr’ (‘an evil belief’): he deliberately rides a horse ‘er þeir sõgðu at Freyr ætti’ (‘which they said that Hrafnkels saga, p. 123. Hrafnkels saga, p. 124. One manuscript (AM 551 C 4to) has Þorgeirr rather than Þorkell. 79 Hermann Pálsson, ‘Hrafnkels saga og Stjórn’, in Sjötíu ritgerðir, I, 337. 80 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 209, 560; Postola sögur, pp. 430, 750, 789; Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 263–4, 279–80; Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, I, 308, 317–18, II, 188–90. 81 Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 16, 30, 105, 162. 77

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert Freyr owned’), then enters the temple ok ‘hjó niðr goðin af stõllunum’ (‘cut down the gods from their pedestals’).82 He takes the idol of Freyr and drags it ostentatiously through the mud, before chopping it to pieces. The deliberate desecration of Freyr’s horse, followed by the humiliation of the gods, closely echoes the sequence of events in Hrafnkels saga. The second scene comes from a short story set in Iceland just before the conversion known as Þórhalls þáttr knapps. Þórhallr is a devout pagan who suffers from leprosy; a man appears to him in a dream and promises healing on condition that he destroy his temple: ‘En þá falsa guða er þér hafið tignat hér til skaltu aldri dýrka heðan af’ (‘And the false gods which you have honoured up until now you must never worship from now on’). When he awakes, he tells his workmen to ‘fara til skyndiliga ok brjóta ofan hofit’ (‘go quickly and break down the temple’); the gods take their leave, but not without a sacrifice: they kill his neighbour’s kapalhestr (‘old horse’) on their way.83 This all happens just before the legal conversion at the Alþing, and it closes with Þórhallr’s baptism, which cleanses him from leprosy as well as from sin. Like the saga, this tale combines the death of a horse and destruction of a temple: at the centre is Þórhallr’s rejection of the gods, which gives him a new lease of life. It is surely striking that the two closest analogues to Hrafnkels saga are explicitly hagiographic, drawing on idol parody and Christian symbolism. They suggest that the author of Hrafnkels saga is deliberately exploiting a hagiographic motif. This can be compared with how the desecration of temples is handled in other sagas of Icelanders. In Njáls saga, for example, the scoundrel Hrappr burns down a temple owned by Hákon jarl and Dala-Guðbrandr, which is dedicated to the goddess Þorgerðr Hõlgabrúðr (meaning ‘bride of Hõlgi’ or ‘of the rulers of Hálogaland’): ‘Hann sviptir faldinum hennar, en tekr af henni gullhringinn. Þá sér hann kerru Þórs ok tekr af honum annan hring. Hann tók inn þriðja af Irpu ok dró þau õll út ok tók af þeim allan búninginn; síðan lagði hann eld í goðahúsit ok brenndi upp’ (‘He removes her headdress, and takes from her the gold ring. Then he sees Þórr’s chariot and takes another ring from him. He took the third from Irpa and dragged them all outside and took off all their clothing; then he set fire to the temple and burned [it] up’).84 Like Þorkell, Hrappr is not identified as a Christian and has no obvious missionary agenda; on the contrary, he burns down the temple after seducing Guðbrandr’s daughter and killing one of his men. In Harðar saga, the pagan Grímkell burns down his temple when he discovers that the goddess Þorgerðr hõrgabrúðr is leaving; Flateyjarbók, I, 400–5. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 155–8. For the bipartite structure, see Siân Grønlie, ‘“No Longer Male or Female”: Redeeming Women in the Icelandic Conversion Narratives’, Medium Ævum 75 (2006), 297. 84 Njáls saga, in Brennu-Njáls saga, ed. Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 12 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1954), pp. 214–15. On Þorgerðr, see Nora K. Chadwick, ‘Þorgerðr Hõlgabrúðr and the Trollaþing’, in The Early Cultures of North-West Europe: H. M. Chadwick Memorial Studies, ed. Cyril Fox and Bruce Dickins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), pp. 397–417. 82

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The Saint and the Saga Hero he drops dead the very same evening.85 In Kjalnesinga saga, the Christian Búi Andríðason burns down his enemy Þorgrímr’s temple after locking the gods inside and killing Þorgrímr’s son at prayer. He is forced to leave Iceland to make amends, and Þorgrímr kills his father in revenge.86 Finally, in Fljótsdœla saga, Helgi and Grímr, sons of Droplaug, enter a temple belonging to the idolater Bersi; after several failed attempts to engage the gods in conversation, Helgi strips them of their clothes (‘flettir öll goð af klæðunum’) and throws them to the ground. The saga breaks off at this point, so we never find out what the consequences of this are, but it is clear from the end of Droplaugarsona saga that Grímr was at some stage converted to Christianity, and Helgi died one year into Þangbrandr’s mission.87 Although none of these instances occurs officially in the context of mission and conversion, there is nevertheless an overt engagement in every case with the moral significance of desecrating a temple. Búi has the most compelling credentials as a missionary: at the beginning of the saga, we are told that he ‘vildi aldri blóta’ (‘never wished to sacrifice’) and, at the end, that he was ‘skírðr maðr’ (‘a baptised man’). He is outlawed ‘um rangan átrúnað’ (‘for having the wrong faith’) and for failure to pay the temple dues; in this respect, he resembles Stefnir Þorgilsson and Hjalti Skeggjason, both of whom are also outlawed for blasphemy.88 In fact, Stefnir evangelises in exactly the same part of Iceland, Kjalarnes, so that Búi’s story replays his own, reconfiguring it as an earlier conflict between Celtic Christians and Norse pagans. Búi’s father, Andríðr, is an Irish Christian, and Búi is buried in the church built by the Irish settler Ørlygr. His burning of the temple can therefore be construed as a Christian act, although paradoxically he is required to atone for it in Norway.89 In Harðar saga, the departure of the gods is caused by their anticipation of the coming conversion, although this does not take place within the saga. Þorgerðr hõrgabrúðr says of Grímkell’s daughter Þorbjõrg that ‘Er yfir henni ljós svá mikit, at mik uggir, at þat skili með okkr’ (‘There is a light over her so strong that I am afraid that it will separate the two of us’).90 Moreover, Grímkell, although pagan, has insight into the malevolence of the pagan gods, and declares that he no longer wishes to hear their harmsõgur (‘tales of grief’ or perhaps ‘grief-causing tales’). Even in Njáls saga, where Hrappr is clearly a fraud, the author indulges in some gentle idol parody: when Guðbrandr sees the gods outside the temple, he wonders 85

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Harðar saga, Bárðar saga, Þorskfirðinga saga, Flóamanna saga, ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, Íslenzk fornrit 13 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1991), pp. 51–2. Kjalnesinga saga, ed. Jóhannes Halldórsson, Íslenzk fornrit 14 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1959), pp. 12–13. Fljótsdœla saga, in Austfirðinga sõgur, pp. 294–6; Droplaugarsona saga, in Austfirðinga sõgur, pp. 179–80. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 16–17: Stefnir is sóttr um kristni (‘prosecuted for being a Christian’). Kjalnesinga saga, pp. 9, 28, 43. On Ørlygr, see Landnámabók, pp. 54–5. Harðar saga, p. 52.

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert with naive credulity at the ‘mikill máttr’ (‘great power’) they have shown, ‘er þau hafa gingit sjálf út ór eldinum’ (‘in that they themselves walked out of the fire’). Hákon jarl has to spell out to him that ‘maðr mun brennt hafa hofit, en borit út goðin’ (‘a man must have burned the temple and carried out the gods’).91 The last great pagan jarl is forced to admit, on the basis of common sense, that his gods cannot have saved themselves. The absence of religious rhetoric or idol parody in Hrafnkels saga is particularly noticeable when it is compared with Fljótsdœla saga. This was probably written as a continuation of Hrafnkels saga, and Sverrir Tómasson suggests that the sagas reflect each other as two halves of a whole.92 Its temple scene, then, can be read as a reworking of the one in Hrafnkels saga, illustrating how it could have been used. The idolater Bersi is described in almost identical terms to Hrafnkell: we are told that he ‘elskaði mjök goðin’ (‘loved the gods very much’), was ‘blótmaðr mikill’ (‘a great sacrificer’) and ‘hafði mikinn átrúnað við goðin’ (‘had great faith in the gods’). Helgi, on the other hand, firmly opposes his devotion:93 Sé ek öngvan þann hlut í þínu fari [. . .] at þér verði jafnmikil heimska í sem þetta, er þú veitir svo mikinn átrúnað undærum þeim, er menn gjöra með höndum sér ok bæði eru blind ok dauf ok mállaus, ok þat skil ek, at þau megu hvórki gjöra sér gagn né öðrum [. . .] Verði mér aldri svo illt, at ek vænta mér góðs af þeim fjöndum, er öngu loða saman nema illu einu. [I see no other thing in your way of life [. . .] that makes you so foolish as this, that you place such great faith in these marvels, which men make with their own hands, and are blind and deaf and dumb, and I perceive that they can be of no benefit to themselves nor others [. . .] May I never come into such straits that I expect good from those fiends, who cleave to nothing but evil alone.]

Helgi’s attitude towards Bersi’s gods is tested when he and his brother Grímr stray across Bersi’s temple: he addresses the idols as ‘herjans synirnir’ (‘the sons of the devil’) and asks them to show him some hospitality. When they do not respond, he strips them and knocks them to the ground. Grímr condemns this as ‘illverk’ (‘an evil deed’), but Helgi thinks differently: he responds that ‘ek hafa aldri unnit betra verk enn þetta á minni ævi’ (‘I have never performed a better deed than this in my life’).94 The rhetoric of this scene is strongly hagiographic: the gods are both powerless man-made objects and at the same time agents of the devil, who bring harm to those who believe in them.95 Helgi may not be the most admirable of characters, but here he sounds like a missionary saint: his desecration of the temple is a proto-Christian act. In contrast, the sons of Þjóstarr declare no religious convictions and no-one approves their action. The saga author refuses to exploit the hagiographic potential of the scene: he Njáls saga, p. 215. Sverrir Tómasson, ‘Skorið í fornsögu’, pp. 787–99. 93 Fljótsdœla saga, p. 292. 94 Fljótsdœla saga, pp. 295–6. 95 Compare Heilagra manna søgur, I, 19, 293, 325, 372, 404, 476, II, 230, 254, 311. 91

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The Saint and the Saga Hero withholds approval of religiously sanctioned violence.96 The destruction of the temple in Hrafnkels saga fails to generate the expected moral meaning: it is not part of a Christian mission nor carried out by a missionary; it does not anticipate anyone’s conversion to Christianity; and it is not a vehicle for idol parody. The same might be said of the torture of Hrafnkell, which functions as an inverted passio in which Hrafnkell suffers (or has the chance to suffer) martyrdom for Freyr. The rarity of torture scenes in the sagas makes this one difficult to interpret, but some scholars consider the hanging to be Odinic: Hrafnkell is hanged from the washing pole like Óðinn from the world tree, and he undergoes a symbolic death and rebirth.97 This reading may be supported by the otherwise puzzling mention of his spear, a possible Odinic ‘signifier’ and the only object Hrafnkell is allowed to take with him from Aðalból.98 How this Odinic strain relates to his worship of Freyr is not clear, but Hrafnkell obtains no esoteric knowledge from his hanging. The rarity of torture in the sagas contrasts with its frequency in saints’ lives, where martyrs bear witness to Christ through their suffering and death, as described in Chapter 1 (p. 3). There are various analogues to Hrafnkell’s passio here: Andrew is bound on the cross by ropes, Juliana and Margaret are hanged by the hair, and Peter is famously crucified upside down.99 One might also point to the inverse martyrdoms discussed in Chapter 2 (pp. 58–61): in Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, Óláfr Tryggvason offers his pagan opponent Hróaldr ‘tvá kosti’ (‘two choices’): to save his life by abandoning his gods, or to die. Hróaldr does not have to think twice before he answers: ‘Þat hœfir mér, ok sœmiligra er mér þat at þola dauðann en láta þjónustu guða várra’ (‘It is befitting to me, and more honourable for me to suffer death than to abandon the service of our gods’).100 The contrast with Hrafnkell’s attitude is striking: he is also offered ‘tvá kosti’ (‘two choices’), but does not hesitate to opt for life: ‘Mõrgum mundi betr þykkja skjótr dauði en slíkar hrakningar, en mér mun fara sem mõrgum õðrum, at lífit mun ek kjósa, ef kostr er’ (‘To many a quick death would seem better than such insults, but it will be for me as for many others, that I will choose life, if it is offered’).101 Instead of dying for his religious beliefs, Hrafnkell is quick to reject this option, abandoning his god with the same decisiveness that characterises his later killing of Eyvindr. If his 96

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For some other responses to missionary violence, see Siân Grønlie, ‘Þáttr and Saga: The Long and the Short of Óláfr Tryggvason’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 9 (2013), 19–36. Dietrich Hofmann, ‘Hrafnkels saga und Hallfreds Traum’, Skandinavistik 6 (1976), 35; Lars van Wezel, ‘Mythic Elements in Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða: Prolonged Echoes and Mythological Overlays’, in Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society, pp. 547–8, 551–3. On other hangings in the sagas, see Kari Ellen Gade, ‘Hanging in Northern Law and Literature’, Maal og minne (1985), 159–83. Hrafnkels saga, p. 121. Postola sögur, pp. 109, 341; Heilagra manna søgur, I, 375, 476. Óláfs saga Odds, p. 236. Hrafnkels saga, p. 121.

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert religion will not serve him, Hrafnkell will not serve it; he does not invert, but subvert the Christian paradigm of the martyr. Hrafnkell does not exemplify Christian ideas about suffering and martyrdom in these scenes, and this is confirmed by the saga’s ironic echo of the biblical story of Job, the ultimate model of Christian patience in adversity. The Old Icelandic Homily Book describes how Job loses all his belongings and endures physical suffering: the devil asks God to give leave for him to ‘kenna kvala nõkkut ok sárleika á sínum líkama’ (‘feel something of torments and pains in his body’). This is echoed in Þorkell’s malicious comment to Hrafnkell, following his brutal torture: ‘Er vel nú, at þú kennir þess í dag á þér’ (‘It is now right, that you should feel this today in yourself’).102 As a result of Job’s patience, his losses are restored and his livestock increased ‘hálfu fleira en fyrr’ (‘by half as much again’). Likewise, after Hrafnkell’s fall, his livestock increases so greatly that ‘náliga væri tvau hõfuð á hverju kvikvindi’ (‘it was as if there were two heads on each animal’).103 Job holds steadfastly to his faith in God, but his wife, who is described as ‘heimsk kona’ (‘a foolish woman’), opposes this strongly: ‘Hvar eru góðgerningar þínir nú? Eigi nýtr þú þeira mjõk. Get ek at þat sé hégómi mikill er þar hefir á trúat’ (‘Where are your good deeds now? You don’t benefit much from them. I think that there’s great folly in what you’ve believed’). These are the words used by Hrafnkell when he abandon the gods: ‘Ek hygg þat hégóma at trúa á goð’ (‘I think it folly to believe in gods’). What Hrafnkell learns through his misfortune is the direct opposite to the biblical Job: he learns not to accept suffering with patience, but to abandon his worship of the gods responsible for his plight. What, then, of the supposed moral of the saga, as voiced by public opinion: ‘Á þetta lõgðu menn mikla umrœðu hversu hans ofsi hafði niðr fallit, ok minnisk nú margr á fornan orðskvið, at skõmm er óhófs ævi’ (‘There was much discussion about how his pride had fallen, and many now recall the old proverb, that short is the life of immoderation’)?104 As Andersson has pointed, this is the moral of many medieval exempla on the fall of powerful men.105 An example in Konungs skuggsjá is Haman from the book of Esther, who ‘týndi á einum dœgni õllum sínum ríkdómi fyrir sakar óhófs ok ofmetnaðar’ (‘lost in one day all his power on account of his immoderation and pride’). The author holds him up as an example for those with an inclination for honour and power: ‘Varask þú slíka atburð af þessum dœmum sem nú hefir þú heyrt’ (‘Beware of such an event by these exempla that you have now heard’).106 Both Þorkell and Þorgeirr are quick to frame Hrafnkell’s fall in these terms, and to express their sense that it is deserved. Þorgeirr comments with sanctimony on the reversal of Hrafnkell’s fortunes: ‘Svá er komit nú kosti yðrum, Hrafnkell, sem makligt er, ok mundi Homiliu-bók, p. 97; Hrafnkels saga, p. 120. Homiliu-bók, p. 98; Hrafnkels saga, p. 122. 104 Hrafnkels saga, p. 122. 105 Andersson, ‘Ethics and Politics’, pp. 296–301. 106 Konungs skuggsiá, ed. Ludvig Holm-Olsen, Gammelnorske tekster 1 (Oslo: Dybwad, 1945), p. 70; Esther 3–7. 102 103

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The Saint and the Saga Hero þér þykkja þetta ólíklegt, at þú mundir slíka skõmm fá af nõkkurum manni, sem nú er orðit’ (‘Your condition, Hrafnkell, has now turned out as is befitting, and it must have seemed unlikely to you, that you would ever be shamed in such a way by anyone, as has now come about’).107 Þorgeirr adopts the tone of the Christian moralist here: makligr (‘befitting, deserving’) is used by Oddr Snorrason to justify the killing of pagans and in Stjórn to approve the fall of evil kings.108 If Hrafnkell’s fall had been permanent, this might well have proved the final moral: indeed, one manuscript of the saga deliberately shortens Hrafnkell’s life so as to affirm that ‘the life of immoderation is short’: Hrafnkell ‘varð ekki gamall maðr’ (‘did not live to be an old man’).109 However, Hrafnkell’s speedy return to power and the ease of his eventual revenge throws this self-satisfying moral rhetoric into doubt.

Conversion to atheism Hrafnkels saga does not conform neatly to moral exemplarity, nor promote any positive moral change in its hero: the only way in which Hrafnkell indisputably changes in the course of the saga is in his rejection of gods. Hrafnkell’s zeal in matters of faith is strongly emphasised before his fall: the saga author insists that he ‘elskaði eigi annat goð meir en Freyr’ (‘loved no other god more than Freyr’) and that he had ‘mikla elsku’ (‘great love’) for Freyfaxi.110 The verb elska is rarely used for the worship of heathen gods, although it is commonly used of God and the saints, and Hrafnkell’s gift of a half-share in his horse to Freyr finds a parallel only in Þorláks saga, where an Icelandic farmer devotes half of his horse to the saint.111 Hrafnkell’s fervent devotion to Freyr is a far cry from the devotional ambivalence of Helgi the Lean or the shifting religious allegiances of Helgi’s descendant Víga-Glúmr. His first act upon assuming power is to build a temple to Freyr, where he holds sacrifices, and this strongly religious grounding of his leadership has consequences for the way in which he rules: we are told almost immediately that he was ‘ójafnaðarmaðr mikill’ (‘a man of great injustice’) and that the men of Jõkulsdalr ‘fekk af honum øngvan jafnað’ (‘got no justice from him’). Hrafnkell is an autocrat, wielding power by divine election, and this style of leadership is indeed associated with Freyr: as progenitor of the kings of Norway, he serves to legitimise royal ancestry, hereditary power and land-ownership.112 Moreover, the oath Hrafnkell swears to kill any man 107

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Hrafnkels saga, p. 120. Óláfs saga Odds, p. 282; Stjórn: Gammelnorsk bibelhistorie fra verdens skabelse til det babyloniske fangenskab, ed. Carl R. Unger (Christiania: Feilberg & Landmark, 1862), pp. 535, 587–8; see also Hermann Pálsson, ‘Hrafnkels saga ok Stjórn’, p. 337. Hrafnkels saga, ed. Jón Helgason (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1950), p. 40, note 5. Hrafnkels saga, p. 99. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 94, 124–5, 211. For elska, see Hermann Pálsson, ‘Hrafnkels saga ok Stjórn’, p. 336; and A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, s.v. ‘elska’, accessed 22 January 2017, http://onpweb.nfi.sc.ku.dk/wordlist_e_adv.html. Gro Steinsland, Det hellige bryllup og norrøn kongeideologi: en analyse av hierogami-myten

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert who rides Freyfaxi represents a religious and not a social obligation; in fact, it brings Hrafnkell into serious conflict with his social and legal responsibility as chieftain to act on behalf of his followers.113 Hrafnkell’s fulfilment of his vow goes against his own interests; it is motivated by religious zeal. In a noticeable breach of external focalisation, we are told that he kills Einarr ‘við þann átrúnað, at ekki verði at þeim mõnnum, er heitstrengingar fella á sik’ (‘in the belief that nothing would come of those men who brought on themselves the consequences of a vow’).114 He acts on principle, not according to reason, and personally regrets the killing that ensues. Hrafnkell’s rejection of gods has no connection to Christian mission or preaching; although it is sometimes called a conversion, in reality it goes only half way. As Fidjestøl has pointed out, Hrafnkell moves from ‘pagan’ to ‘not pagan’ or perhaps ‘not Christian’: he is converted not to Christianity but to atheism, and he rejects gods as a source of power.115 Although godless men crop up here and there in the sagas, Hrafnkell is the only one who is converted to godlessness: his atheism is not a precursor to Christian conversion but constitutes an end in itself.116 Nor does it have negative consequences for him: he is not killed by his slaves like Hjõrleifr in Landnámabók, nor ousted from his land like Víga-Glúmr in Víga-Glúms saga; instead, his circumstances start to improve.117 This may be because his rejection of religion is accompanied by changes to how he wields authority: even if, at the well-known textual crux, we read ‘var nú skipan á komin á land hans’ (‘there was a change to his estate’) instead of ‘var nú skipan á komin á lund hans’ (‘there was a change to his disposition’), we are still told that ‘maðrinn var miklu vinsælli en áðr’ (‘the man was much more popular than before’) and that ‘miklu var maðrinn nú vinsælli ok gæfari ok hœgri en fyrr at õllu’ (‘the man was much more popular and reasonable and amenable than before in every respect’).118 These social virtues contrast markedly with the initial description of Hrafnkell as ‘ójafnaðarmaðr’ (‘a man of injustice’), i Skírnismál, Ynglingatal, Háleygjatal og Hyndluljóð (Oslo: Solum, 1991), pp. 66–86; Haraldur Bessason, ‘Mythological Overlays’, pp. 278–81; Lars van Wezel, ‘Mythic Elements’, pp. 552–4 and ‘Mythology as a Mnemonic and Literary Device in Vatnsdœla saga’, in Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives: Origins, Changes and Interactions, ed. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert and Catharina Raudvere (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006), p. 291. On Hrafnkell’s autocratic style of leadership, see also Heather O’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 232–5, 239–40. 113 Arnold, The Post-Classical Icelandic Family Saga, p. 131. 114 Hrafnkels saga, p. 105; cf. O’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse, p. 234. 115 Fidjestøl, ‘Algirdas Julien Greimas’, pp. 162–5. 116 On godless and/or self-reliant men, see Landnámabók, pp. 48, 88–9; Egils saga, p. 93; Flateyjarbók, I, 382, 459–60; Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, I, 264, II, 252 and the discussion in Weber, ‘Irreligiosität und Heldenzeitalder’, in Speculum Norrœnum, ed. Ursula Dronke et al., pp. 474–505. 117 Landnámabók, pp. 142–3; Víga-Glúms saga, in Eyfirðinga sõgur, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson, Íslenzk fornrit 9 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1956), p. 89. 118 Hrafnkels saga, p. 125. Compare Heinemann, ‘Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða’, p. 449.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero and the saga author emphasises that he has grassroots support: ‘Vildi svá hverr sitja ok standa sem hann vildi’ (‘Everyone was eager to sit and stand just as he wished’). This contrasts with the earlier comment on his autocracy: Hrafnkell ‘vildi þó vera yfirmaðr þeira ok tók goðorð yfir þeim’ (Hrafnkell ‘insisted on being their leader and assumed authority over them’).119 Exactly the same idiom is used of Bishop Gizurr Ísleifsson in Hungrvaka, who is held up as a model of successful leadership.120 The change in Hrafnkell’s attitude can be clearly seen from a comparison between his first and last killing. He kills Einarr on a religious principle without support or even consultation with others, acting alone in reaction to Freyfaxi’s non-verbal complaint. He kills Eyvindr, in constrast, after he is egged on by a member of his household, and with the full support of the local community. His rejection of Freyr frees him from any moral imperative beyond his own self-interest: he no longer grounds his power in divine election or prerogative but in the calculated cultivation of good social relations.121 The saga, then, uses hagiography, conversion narrative and moral exemplum to reject the ideology on which these discourses are based: like Egils saga, it resists any correlation between religious and secular power, and challenges the view that political life should be ruled by moral paradigms. The saga author’s attitude towards religion is verging on the cynical: he distances himself from the religious extremism that leads to burning down temples, and refuses to let Hrafnkell die a martyr to his faith. Indeed, the one clear moral exemplum in the saga is Þorkell’s bizarre toe-pulling charade, which reads more like a literary joke than a valid religious allegory.122 Hrafnkell’s conversion may move him from ‘pagan’ to ‘not pagan’, but if anything, this leaves him even further from ‘Christian’ than before. Hrafnkels saga rejects roundly any religious grounding to political power, but it by no means rejects the idea of the supernatural. Both times that Hrafnkell rises to power are associated with mysterious events: the dream that leads his father Hallfreðr to a permanent place of settlement, and the extraordinary catches of fish that allow him to regain his position. In both cases, it has been argued, Freyr should be seen as the benefactor: he is the man who appears in the dream, and the ‘geit ok hafr’ (‘nanny goat and billy goat’) that die in the landslide, like Freyfaxi, should be understood as sacrifices to him. This Hrafnkels saga, pp. 124, 99. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 16. 121 Compare Óskar Halldórsson, ‘Origin and Theme’, pp. 268–70; Arnold, The PostClassical Icelandic Family Saga, p. 136; S. F. D. Hughes, review of Uppruni og þema Hrafnkels sögu, by Óskar Halldórsson, Scandinavian Studies 52 (1980), 306; O’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse, p. 240. 122 On this episode, see Whitney French Bolton, ‘The Heart of Hrafnkatla’, Scandinavian Studies 43 (1971), 335–52; Fredrik Heinemann, ‘The Heart of Hrafnkatla Again’, Scandinavian Studies 47 (1975), 453–6; and most recently William Ian Miller, ‘Feeling Another’s Pain: Sympathy and Psychology Saga Style’, European Review 22 (2014), 55–63. 119

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert interpretation is supported by the fact that some manuscripts of Landnámabók describe the animals as ‘gõltr ok griðungr’ (‘a boar and a bull’), animals that are sacred to Freyr.123 The same pattern of settlement is found in Vatnsdœla saga, where it is explicitly linked with the god Freyr: an amulet belonging to Ingimundr disappears in Norway and is discovered where Ingimundr is to settle in Iceland; Ingimundr’s pigs disappear over the winter and are found to have doubled in number; a boar called Beigaðr follows them around. The saga author uses exactly the same expression for the pigs that is used of Hrafnkell’s livestock: ‘Kvað svá rétt at mæla, at tvau hõfuð væri á hvívetna’ (‘He declared it right to say there were two heads on each one’).124 There are even two stories about missing sheep, and another horse called Freyfaxi: all of these elements seem to be part of a mythic pattern in which Freyr, as fertility god, legitimates land-ownership and hereditary power.125 It is puzzling, then, that Hrafnkels saga is so reticent about Freyr’s role in Hrafnkell’s settlement, when it is otherwise so explicit about Hrafnkell’s paganism: van Wezel notes that the pattern is not explicitly connected to Freyr in this saga and suggests that elements remain ‘undigested’, perhaps because they were not fully understood.126 The suppression of this pattern in Hrafnkels saga may well be deliberate, however, for Freyr in this saga is a malevolent agent.127 This is clear from the scene in which Einarr rides Freyfaxi, where there is a fine line between the realistic and the fantastic: thirty sheep go missing and then turn up in the first place Einarr had looked for them; all the mares run away when Einarr tries to ride them; Freyfaxi, in contrast, remains ‘svá kyrr sem hann væri grafinn niðr’ (‘as quiet as if he were dug down/rooted to the spot’).128 After Einarr has ridden him, Freyfaxi gallops straight down to tell Hrafnkell of his betrayal and returns to his stud upon Hrafnkell’s command. This sequence of events lies on the margins of credibility, with the implication that a supernatural agent 123

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125 126 127

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Georgia D. Kelchner, Dreams in Old Norse Tradition and their Affinities in Folklore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), p. 33; Marco Scovazzi, La Saga de Hrafnkell e il problema della saghe islandesi (Arona: Editrice Libraria Paideia, 1960), p. 11; Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, ‘Freyr in den Isländersagas’, in Germanische Religionsgeschichte. Quellen und Quellenprobleme, ed. Heinrich Beck et al. (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1992), pp. 720–35, reprinted in his At fortælle historien, pp. 179–91; Finn Hansen, ‘Hrafnkels saga: del og helhed’, Scripta Islandica 32 (1981), 23–9; Lars van Wezel, ‘Mythic Elements’, pp. 542–6; Nordal, ‘Trúskipti og písl’, p. 98. On the relationship of this dream to written and oral sources, see Hofmann, ‘Hrafnkels saga und Hallfreðs Traum’, pp. 19–36 and Óskar Halldórsson, ‘Origin and Theme’, pp. 260–4. Vatnsdœla saga, Hallfreðar saga, Kormáks saga, ed. by Einarr Ólafur Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 8 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1939), pp. 29–30, 35, 42–3; Hrafnkels saga, p. 122. Sørensen, ‘Freyr in den Isländersagas’, pp. 721–7; van Wezel, ‘Mythology’, p. 291. van Wezel, ‘Mythic Elements’, p. 549. Heinemann, ‘Skömm er óhófs ævi’ p. 90; William Sayers, ‘Ethics or Pragmatism; Fate or Chance; Heathen, Christian, or Godless World (Hrafnkels saga)’, Scandinavian Studies 79 (2007), 388, 402–3. Hrafnkels saga, p. 103.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero may be involved. Most interesting is the uncharacteristic use of the simile ‘sem hann væri grafinn niðr’ (‘as if he were dug down’), which suggests something unnatural and even sinister about Freyfaxi’s behaviour: the expression is most often used of corpses in the Christian laws.129 Exactly the same simile is used of a transfixation in Martinus saga, when the saint causes some hunting dogs to freeze ‘svá sem þeir væri grafnir niðr’ (‘as if they were dug down’); in another anecdote, Martin transfixes the horses of some merchants, rendering them ‘svá stirðir sem jarðfastir steinar’ (‘as rigid as earth-bound stones’) or ‘stirðir sem tré eða steinar’ (‘as rigid as trees or stones’).130 The phrasing here is comparable, but the motive for transfixation is reversed: Martin transfixes in order to restrain violence, while the transfixing of Freyfaxi is a catalyst for it. It is as if the horse’s behaviour lures Einarr into a trap, forcibly making him into a sacrifice to Freyr. This dark and malevolent power undermines Hrafnkell’s leadership and forces him to act against his own interests; Hrafnkell’s rejection of Freyr, conversely, suggests that success does not depend on gods, but on one’s relationship with the land and its people. Instead of associating Hallfreðr’s dream with Freyr, the saga author links it verbally with more beneficent powers: as Hermann Pálsson has shown, the closest parallels to the dream are in biblical and hagiographic narrative, where the same complex of warning, guidance and promise is to be found.131 One important parallel Hermann Pálsson notes is the dream of Gautr in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, where the man in the dream is later identified as Óláfr Tryggvason:132 Ok eina nótt dreymði hann, at maðr kom at honum ok mælti: ‘Þar liggr þú, Hallfreðr, ok heldr óvarliga. Fœr þú á brott bú þitt ok vestr yfir Lagarfljót. Þar er heill þín õll.’ (Hrafnkels saga) [And, one night, he dreamed that a man came to him and said: ‘There you lie, Hallfreðr, and somewhat unwarily. Move your household away and west over Lagarfljót. There is all your luck.’] En þegar hann var sofnaðr, bar fyrir hann at maðr kom at honum ok mælti til hans: ‘Þú sefir óvarliga’, segir hann. ‘Nú ef þú fýsist at flytjask yfir ána, þá rís upp skjótt ok munt þú finna skip lítit fljótanda við bakkann.’ (Gauts þáttr) [And, as soon as he was asleep, he had a vision that a man came to him and said to him: ‘You are sleeping unwarily’, he says. ‘Now, if you wish to cross the river, then get up quickly and you will find a little ship floating by the bank.’] Grágás, p. 7; A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, s.v. ‘grafa: grafa niðr’, accessed 24 January 2017, http://onpweb.nfi.sc.ku.dk/wordlist_e_adv.html. 130 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 566, 568, 591, 622. 131 Hermann Pálsson, ‘Hallfreðrs Traum in der Hrafnkels saga und seine literarischen Parallelen’, Skandinavistik 9 (1979), 57–61. 132 Hrafnkels saga, p. 97; Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, II, 341; cf. Flateyjarbók, I, 503. 129

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert In both cases, an unnamed man reproaches the dreamer for his unwariness (‘óvarliga’ ‘unwarily’), and commands him to cross a body of water (the Jordan, Lagarfljót). In Gauts þáttr, this crossing recalls the biblical crossing of the Red Sea and the River Jordan before settlement in the Promised Land. The parallel intimates that Hallfreðr’s settlement in Lagarfljót is preordained; indeed, it has replaced the guidance from pagan high-seat pillars that one finds in Landnámabók and other sagas.133 The same correlation between dreaming, supernatural guidance and heill is represented in many saints’ lives, where heill appears as an adjective meaning ‘whole, healed’, rather than as a noun meaning ‘luck, good fortune’. In Nikolaus saga, a poor man who is vanheill (‘crippled’) has a dream showing him where to seek healing: ‘Þenna mann dreymir eina nótt, at bjartr maðr stœði hjá honum svá segjandi: “Fyrir hví liggr þú hér ok sœkir eigi til Barim sem aðrir sjúkir menn?”’ (‘The man dreamed one night that a shining man stood beside him, saying this: “Why are you lying here instead of going to Bari like other sick people?”’).134 When he explains his disability, he is told that ‘Þú mátt senniliga fara, ef þú vilt’ (‘You are certainly able to go, if you wish’). Upon awakening, he discovers that he is ‘alheill’ (‘completely healed’), and the hagiographer affirms his belief that the man in the dream was St Nicholas. In Þórhalls þáttr knapps, an unnamed draummaðr (‘dream-man’) tells Þórhallr to follow him, promising that ‘þá muntu vera heill’ (‘then you will be healed’). The identity of this man is never revealed, but his appearance brings to mind St Michael.135 In a series of visions collected by Gunnlaugr Leifsson, St Þorlákr appears to an invalid called Valgerðr, asking ‘Því liggr þú ok sefr ok ferr eigi til messu’? (‘Why do you lie and sleep instead of going to mass?’). On another occasion, he appears to a crippled woman called Álfheiðr, declaring: ‘Hér liggr þú lúin ok lamin. Heyrð er bœn þín, ok bót muntu fá’ (‘Here you lie, tired and lame. Your prayer is heard and you will be cured’). She is later described as ‘alheill’ (‘completely healed’).136 The verbal correspondences (‘liggr þú’, ‘heill’) across these dreams are striking. The difference is that in the man in Hallfreðr’s dream is never identified: he is, perhaps, a mysterious emanation of the land itself.137 The same mystery lingers over the large catches of fish which work in favour of Hrafnkell’s restoration, alongside hard work and careful use of resources. The saga author tells us that Hrafnkell ‘hafði mikinn atdrátt af fiskinum’ (‘had great supplies of fish’); that ‘lagðisk veiðr mikil í Lagarfljót’ (‘there was a lot of fishing in Lagarfljót’) and that ‘þat helzk vel hvert sumar’ (‘this continued every summer’).138 This abundance of natural resources is sometimes attributed to Freyr

Landnamabók, pp. 42, 44, 124–5, 164; on settlement rituals, see Jonas Wellendorf, ‘The Interplay of Pagan and Christian Traditions in Icelandic Settlement Myths’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 109 (2010), 1–21. 134 Heilagra manna søgur, II, 152. 135 Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 154. On St Michael, see further Chapter 4 (pp. 137–9). 136 Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 244, 280. 137 O’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse, p. 231. 138 Hrafnkels saga, p. 122. 133

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The Saint and the Saga Hero and is connected elsewhere with Sámi sorcerers.139 Yet fishing is just as much the preserve of Christian saints, especially Celtic saints like Columba and Columban: by overturning scarcity, saints give a taste of the abundance of heaven and live in Edenic harmony with their natural environment.140 In the sagas, fishing miracles are often associated with Christian settlers and thus with the colonisation of the land: Landnámabók tells of an Irish Christian called Ásólfr, who makes miraculous catches of fish wherever he goes; in Þorvalds þáttr víðfõrla, there is a hermit called Máni, who catches enough fish to feed the hungry during a famine.141 St Þorlákr specialises in fishing miracles: he helps a poor and starving relative to net fifty fish on a cold winter’s day, and allows some other fishermen to catch two ‘holy fishes’.142 Even more impressively, Bishop Guðmundr blesses a couple of fishing stations during a famine: men catch first two fish, then forty-five, then five hundred. We are told that ‘Nú varð veiðr svá mikil um sumarit eftir, at varla kom nytjum á [. . .] ok skorti engan hlut til búsins, ok lengi síðan’ (‘Now the catch was so great the following summer that it was barely possible to use it [. . .] and the household lacked for nothing [then] and long afterwards’).143 Surprisingly enough, Hrafnkell turns out to have one thing in common with the saints: an easy harmony with the land and a natural mastery of its resources. Even after his rejection of Freyr, then, Hrafnkell is favoured by mysterious powers: although he rejects religion, the supernatural or numinous still has a part to play in the saga. As O’Donoghue has argued, it serves to mystify his power as chieftain, which depends neither on links with the fatherland, nor on the favour of the gods; with his rejection of Freyr, he rids of himself of his last ‘old custom’ and establishes himself as a ‘new’ or self-made man.144 Unlike the saint with his foreign origins and international reach, Hrafnkell is very much a homegrown hero: his most important relationship is not with kings or gods, but with the land itself.

Conclusion In these two works, we see the saga authors responding to the figure of the Christian saint, who is ubiquitous in medieval literature. Egill, it has been argued, can even be thought of as a kind of ‘anti-saint’, who challenges and subverts supposedly saintly norms. Although Egill’s poetic gifts are in some Ketils saga hœngs, in Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, I, 242–66. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 181, 572; Adomnan’s Life of Columba, ed. and trans. Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), II. 18–19, 20–2; Life of St Columban by the Monk Jonas, ed. and trans. Dana Carleton Munro (Felinfach: Llanerch, 1993), chapters 18–19, 60. On the significance of fishing miracles, see further Alexander, Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages, pp. 30–8, 48–9, 58. 141 Landnámabók, pp. 62–4; Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 84; see also Chapter 5 (pp. 189–90). 142 Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 130–1, 232, 293. 143 Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 593–4 with an embedded reference to a similar miracle in Martinus saga, cf. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 572. 144 O’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse, pp. 228, 232, 240. 139 140

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The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert sense parallel to the saint’s, they are based on a very different relationship to language. Whereas the saint’s power derives from his virtue, Egill’s does not; his practice of poetry can be spiritual and redemptive but is never moral or virtuous. The later Hrafnkels saga has at its centre a series of familiar hagiographic scenes: torture, the burning of a temple and Hrafnkell’s rejection of paganism. Yet the saga refuses to draw the expected religious meanings from these: it rejects the ideology that underlies them. Religion in this saga is portrayed as a destabilising force that upsets the political status quo; Hrafnkell does better godless, adhering to social instead of moral or religious constraints. Both sagas champion Icelandic heroes with a close relationship to the land and its prehistory, and show reservations about the kind of hagiography written by Oddr Snorrason: Egils saga subtly undermines Oddr’s alignment of royal power and sanctity, while Hrafnkels saga distances itself from the evangelistic fervour and ideology of martyrdom associated with the Norwegian missionary kings. We find here not straightforward ‘interference’ from hagiography, so much as ‘struggle’ and ‘contest’ over its central position in the literary polysystem. One question that needs to be addressed here is how far the use of hagiography by these saga authors was consciously oppositional and subversive. It seems entirely plausible that some hagiographic motifs may have floated freely, and perhaps even become part of oral story-telling, before the sagas were written down: the dramatic shattering of the cup in Egils saga, for example, or the fishing miracle in Hrafnkels saga. Certainly one might expect the Icelanders’ broad familiarity with hagiographic paradigms to have encouraged such ad hoc borrowing. At the same time, the highly literary and intertextual nature of Egils saga argues against this: its internal coherence, its generic hybridity, and the possible authorship of Snorri Sturluson, who arguably makes a similar case in his Edda for the intellectual value of traditional poetry and the cultural and mythological knowledge that underpins it.145 Likewise, the celebrated artistic economy of Hrafnkels saga counters the suggestion that the saga author borrowed from saints’ lives unknowingly; there is no reason to assume that he was any less aware of the hagiographic significance of desecrating a temple than of the generic implications of Eyvindr riding past Aðalból in coloured clothes.146 It is clear, moreover, that some later readers of these two sagas felt uncomfortable with their open challenge to the ideology of hagiography. One late manuscript, as we have seen, tries to depict Egill as a noble heathen after his death, while some paper copies of Hrafnkels saga omit the reference to his grave goods and to his Odinic spear. In the next chapter, I look more closely at this anxiety over the spiritual status of saga heroes: how do the sagas of Icelanders engage with Christian doctrine on death, judgement and the afterlife? See Kevin J. Wanner, Snorri Sturluson and the Edda: The Conversion of Cultural Capital in Medieval Scandinavia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), especially pp. 119–39. 146 The saga author’s use of type scenes is discussed in Fredrik Heinemann, ‘Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða and Type Scene Analysis’, Scandinavian Studies 74 (1974), 102–19. 145

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N 4 n The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint Introduction The sagas of Icelanders discussed in the last chapter take an oppositional attitude towards the saint and question the presuppositions of hagiography. Other sagas are more open to what hagiography has to offer: its contextualisation of human action within the cosmic drama of salvation, and its clear vision of moral and religious truths. One of the most obvious areas in which the sagas interact with hagiography is in narratives about the Christian missions to Iceland and the official conversion in 999/1000. The story of ‘how Christianity came to Iceland’ (as the opening of Kristni saga puts it) is inevitably also the story of how a local people come to enter the universal Church.1 By the end of the thirteenth century, the Icelanders were familiar with a wide range of missionary literature: the translated sagas of apostles and of classic missionary saints such as Martin; the lives of the Norwegian missionary kings, Óláfr Tryggvason and Óláfr Haraldsson; and the narratives about Iceland’s conversion to Christianity in Íslendingabók, Kristni saga and the kristniboðsþættir (‘conversion stories’) preserved in compilations of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta. Although, as discussed in Chapter 1, Iceland had no official conversion-age saints, these narratives about the missions to Iceland can be described as ‘semi-hagiographic’: they draw on both hagiographic conventions and local oral traditions of storytelling (p. 22–3). The first missionary to Iceland, the German bishop Friðrekr, is a saintly figure, who performs several miracles and lives an exemplary life: Kristni saga describes him as ‘sannheilagr’ (‘truly holy’) and Þorvalds þáttr víðfõrla tells us that he ended his life ‘með háleitum heilagleik’ (‘with sublime holiness’).2 The Icelandic missionary Þorvaldr and the German or Flemish cleric Þangbrandr are more ambiguous figures, who, like Óláfr Tryggvason, combine saintly fervour with heroic acts of violence – they preach and perform miracles, build churches and found monasteries, but they also engage in scurrilous poetic contests and carry out revenge killings: they are ideal material for a saga narrative.3 In this chapter, I look at how the missions to Iceland are presented within the sagas of Icelanders: what happens to these central 1

2 3

Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 3. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 13, 88. On Friðrekr’s miracles, see Grønlie, ‘Reading and Understanding’, pp. 475–94. Grønlie, ‘The Missionary Saint’, pp. 468–76.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero European narratives of mission and conversion when they are incorporated into a vernacular saga? In Vatnsdœla saga, the conversion takes place towards the end of the saga, as part of Friðrekr’s and Þorvaldr’s missionary activity in the north of Iceland. In Njáls saga and Eyrbyggja saga, the conversion falls near the centre of the saga, interrupting the sequence of feuds: this ‘interference’ provides an opportunity to pause and reflect on the widening horizons of the Christian world. In all three sagas, I argue, interaction with hagiography is used to open up new perspectives within the fictional world of the saga: the Christian missions bring new ways of thinking about death, judgement and salvation.

Conversion and literary genre In broaching the topic of mission and conversion, the sagas of Icelanders engage with some of the central texts of European literary culture. The conversion narrative, while not strictly a literary genre in its own right, is closely affiliated with some of the most important genres of Christian Europe: biblical, national and ecclesiastical history; royal biography and historical chronicle; the lives of saints and apostles; sermons and homilies; even (in the later Middle Ages) romance.4 Hagiography, then, is only one of many genres in which mission and conversion play a central part. In an interesting conference paper from 1985, Martínez Pizarro divided conversion narratives into four main categories: individual conversion, royal conversion, missionary conversion and forced conversion.5 This categorisation relies primarily on narrative perspective: while individual and royal conversion are narrated from the convert’s point of view, missionary and forced conversion are usually described from the perspective of the agent of conversion (whether missionary or king). In the first two cases, conversion is understood as an interior process, although one that may have theological and political implications. In the second two, conversion may be imposed ‘top-down’ through military conquest and the expansion of royal power.6 Although this chapter focuses on the presentation of missionary conversion in the sagas, Icelanders were familiar with all four types of conversion narrative. As an example of individual conversion, Pizarro cites the Confessions 4 5

6

On the wide ‘spectrum’ of conversion experiences in medieval literature, see James Muldoon, ‘Introduction’, in Varieties of Religious Conversion, pp. 1–4. Joaquín Martínez Pizarro, ‘Conversion Narratives: Form and Utility’, in The Sixth International Saga Conference 28.7–2.8.1985. Workshop Papers II (Copenhagen: Arnamagnæanske Institut, 1985), pp. 814–19. On the ‘top-down’ model of conversion in England and Scandinavia, see Birgit Sawyer, Peter Sawyer and Ian Wood, The Christianization of Scandinavia (Alingsås: Viktoria Bokförlag, 1987), p. 24; Carole M. Cusack, Conversion among the Germanic peoples (London: Cassell, 1998), pp. 18–20; Barbara Yorke, ‘The Reception of Christianity’, in St Augustine and the Conversion of England, ed. Richard Gameson (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), pp. 152–73; Nora Berend, Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’, c. 900–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 19.

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint of St Augustine, parts of which were transmitted in the fourteenth-century Augustinus saga, a translation of Vita Aurelii Augustini autore incerto, probably by Rúnólfr Sigmundarson (died 1307).7 Otherwise, spiritual autobiography is virtually absent in early medieval Europe. Royal conversion was better known; an example would be the conversion of King Edwin in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, where Bede works hard to fit the mismatching material into a recognisable paradigm of Christian conversion.8 This is comparable in some ways to what Oddr is doing with the various stories about Óláfr Tryggvason’s conversion (see Chapter 2, pp. 50–1). In both cases, these writers make it clear that conversion, while an inward change, has implications beyond the individual: Óláfr’s conversion is important not for him alone, but because he will bring salvation to the North. It has been argued that the account of Iceland’s conversion in Ari’s Íslendingabók also fits into this model: while not a king, Þorgeirr must make a decision, resting under his cloak, on behalf of all Icelanders.9 Most familiar in medieval Scandinavia, perhaps, were narratives of forced conversion, such as Charlemagne’s conquest of the Saxons and Valdimarr’s crusade against the Wends.10 As discussed in Chapter 1 (pp. 5–6), the rise of the cults of royal saints allowed for Christian kings to impose their religion through acts of violence. Missionary conversion can be illustrated by the Latin lives of Willibrord (who evangelised in Frisia and Denmark) and Anskar (in Denmark and Sweden); Anskar is the first missionary to be known, like Óláfr Tryggvason, as ‘apostle of the North’.11 Outside hagiography, one might look to Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, where not all of the missionaries to Scandinavia have particularly saintly characters; one reprobate bishop memorably bursts apart from overeating.12 This is the category to which the þættir (‘short Heilagra manna søgur, I, 122–52; Cormack, The Saints in Iceland, p. 82; Wolf, Legends of the Saints, pp. 41–3. 8 For the interpretation of this story, see Sharon Rowley, ‘Reassessing Exegetical Interpretations of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum’, Literature and Theology 17 (2003), 227–43 and ‘Bede in Later Anglo-Saxon England’, in The Cambridge Companion to Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 222–3. 9 Martínez Pizarro, ‘Conversion Narratives’, pp. 822–3; Gerd Wolfgang Weber, ‘Intelligere historiam: Typological Perspectives of Nordic Prehistory (in Snorri, Saxo, Widukind and others)’, in Tradition og historieskrivning, ed. Kirsten Hastrup and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen (Århus: Århus Universitetsforlag, 1989), p. 123. 10 Martínez Pizarro, ‘Conversion Narratives’, p. 819; Haki Antonsson, ‘Traditions of Conversion in Medieval Scandinavia: A Synthesis’, Saga-Book 34 (2010), 47–55, 67. 11 Anskar: The Apostle of the North, trans. Charles H. Robinson (London: The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1921), p. 127; Willibrord: Missionary in the Netherlands, 691–739, trans. Alexander Grieve (London: The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1923), pp. 104–10. 12 Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, IV.8, p. 192. On the influence of Adam of Bremen on history-writing in Scandinavia, see Peter Sawyer and Birgit Sawyer, ‘Adam and the Eve of Scandinavian History’, in The Perception of the Past in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Paul Magdalino (London: Hambledon, 1992), pp. 37–51. 7

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The Saint and the Saga Hero stories’) of Þorvaldr, Stefnir and Þangbrandr partly belong. Martínez Pizarro notes that relatively little attention is paid to the individual in narratives of missionary conversion; mass conversion is the norm, and one rarely if ever hears the voices of the converts themselves.13 It is at this point that the Icelandic þættir start to look different from their European counterparts: both local oral traditions and surviving skaldic stanzas (presumed to be authentic) provide insight into how Christianity may have been received. Þorvaldr complains in verse about the opposition to his preaching, and Þangbrandr’s pagan adversaries express in poetic form their resistance to the Christian faith.14 There is even a stanza celebrating the heroic killing of a pagan poet by Þangbrandr and his travelling companion Guðleifr Arason; it is attributed in one source to a certain Óðar keptr or Ljóðarkeptr, who composed at the court of King Knútr the Great.15 One can already see, in these Icelandic narratives of conversion, the tension between a peripheral culture and the dominant centre. They show not simply ‘interference’ from European hagiography, but a sense of their own distinctiveness in relation to that literature; they do not adopt unthinkingly the ideology of the saint’s life, but respond creatively to it. The heroic violence of the missionaries, and the greater sympathy for the (often quite reluctant) convert, are innovations on the part of the saga authors. Nevertheless, there are literary features that all conversion narratives share, indeed that all conversion narratives must share in order for conversion to be recognised as authentic. As Morrison has shown, the Latin term conversio is a metaphor taken from the manufacturing process in arts and crafts: it can refer to the transformation of raw material into a work of art, just as narratives of conversion transform ‘raw’ experience into text.16 As a consequence, he argues, all conversion narratives share a high level of artistry, even of conscious fictionality. Since an encounter with the divine – the ineffable, that which is beyond the constraints of language – lies at the heart of conversion, hiddenness is a prerequisite not only of the experience of conversion, but also of the retrospective narrative. As Bernard of Clairvaux comments in his sermon on 13

Martínez Pizarro, ‘Conversion Narratives’, pp. 816–18. On the silence of the converts, see also Nicholas J. Higham, The Convert Kings: Power and Religious Affiliation in Early Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 19. 14 Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 9–10, 12, 16, 20–2, 24, 26, 73–4, 79, 106–7, 108–10, 134–6, 138–9, 141; Njáls saga, pp. 260–7. On these verses, see Siân Grønlie, ‘Preaching, Insult and Wordplay in the Old Icelandic kristniboðsþættir’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 103 (2004), 458–74. 15 Landnámabok, pp. 348–9. 16 Karl F. Morrison, Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), pp. 5, 185 and Conversion and Text: The Cases of Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah and Constantine Tsatisos (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), p. vii; Peter G. Stromberg, ‘The Role of Language in Religious Conversion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, ed. Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 121; and Bruce Hindmarsh, ‘Religious Conversion as Narrative and Autobiography’, also in The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, pp. 345–9.

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint conversion, ‘Ita plane conuersio animarum opus diuine vocis est, non humane’ (‘So the conversion of souls is clearly the work of the divine voice, not of any human voice’).17 This hiddenness can be expressed through the blinding of Paul on the road to Damascus; Edwin sitting alone in silence as he ponders which religion to adopt; Augustine turning away from his friend Alippius so that his inner torment will not be seen; Þorgeirr lying silently under his cloak at the Alþing before he makes a final decision.18 The encounter with the divine is mediated through concealment and revelation, metaphor and poetic language. One of the primary metaphors used for conversion is enlightenment or illumination, whether of an individual or a people. In Augustinus saga, the moment of conversion comes as Augustine turns to the Bible and reads: ‘Flýðu þá þegar õll efanarmyrkr í brott af hans hjarta, en í staðinn kom óhryggðarljós postuligrar áminningar’ (‘All shadows of doubt then fled at once from his heart, and instead came the serene light of apostolic recollection’).19 The same metaphor is used repeatedly in the Old Icelandic Homily Book to describe the spread of the Christian faith. In a sermon on the apostles, the homilist describes how ‘Makliga kallask postular ljós, því at kenningar þeira lýstu of allan heim þá er áðr váru í villumyrkri’ (‘The apostles are fittingly called light, because their teachings illuminated throughout the whole world those who were previously in the darkness of error’).20 Likewise, in a sermon on Candlemas, he explains, in reference to the words of the Nunc Dimittis, that ‘Heiðnar þjóðir váru í hugarmyrkri, því at þeir sá eigi it sanna ljós þá er þeir kunnu eigi skapara sinn [. . .] En af því kallask Kristr heldr ljós heiðinna þjóða enn gyðinga, at heiðnar þjóðir lýstusk í hingatkvámu hans’ (‘Heathen peoples were in the darkness of the mind, because they did not see the true light, since they did not know their Creator [. . .] And that is why Christ is called the light of heathen peoples rather than Jews, because heathen peoples were illuminated in his advent’).21 The resurrection of Christ dispels ‘nátt myrk synda ok villu’ (‘the dark night of sins and error’) and turns it to ‘dagr bjartr trú réttrar oc miskunnar domini’ (‘the bright day of the true faith and the grace of the Lord’).22 Conversion is a turning from ignorance, error and sin to the light of apostolic truths. A slightly different model is suggested by metaphors of germination and fecundity, in which the words of God are sown within the darkness of the soul. This can be seen in the sermon for ember days, when the homilist explains:23

17 18 19

20 21

22 23

Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘On Conversion’, in Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works, trans. Gillian R. Evans (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), pp. 66–8. Siân Grønlie, ‘Conversion Narratives and Christian Identity’, forthcoming in Medium Ævum. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 133. Homiliu-bók, p. 16. Homiliu-bók, p. 83. Homiliu-bók, p. 71. Homiliu-bók, pp. 35–6.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Svá sem imbrudagar of vetr eru haldnir til þess at Guð fœri þela ór jõrðu, svá at sáð megi niðr komask, svá skulum vér nú halda þa ina sõmu imbrudaga til þess at Guð fœri ór brjósti váru grimmleiksfrost ok õfundarþela, svá at orðasáð hans megi koma í hjõrtu vár. Þá kømr orðasáð hans í hugskotsjõrð vára, er vér girnumsk at heyra kenningar, ok rekum frá oss illskukulða [. . .] Þá rœtisk orðasáð guðs er vér leggjum elsku á kenningar hans, ok sýnum svá sem upprennanda akr af guðs sáði, þat er vér sœkjum ofst til bœna ok til kenninga. [Just as the ember days in winter are observed in order that God may draw frost from the earth, so that seeds can go down into it, so should we now observe the same ember days so that God may draw from our breasts the frost of cruelty and frozen ground of envy, so that the seed of his words may enter our hearts. The seed of his words falls into the earth of our mind when we are eager to hear doctrines and drive from us the coldness of evil [. . .] The seed of God’s words takes root when we love his doctrines, and [we] resemble flourishing fields of God’s seed, when we turn as often as possible to prayers and doctrines.]

Conversion is understood here as an interior and seasonal, cyclical, process that takes place largely out of sight: the heart is a field that must be internally cultivated so that God’s words will take root and produce a visible harvest of good deeds. A hagiographer may make use of both these metaphors, as can be seen in Clemens saga, a saint’s life that is overtly novelistic (p. 4). When the apostle Peter arrives in Antioch, the people come to meet him barefoot and in hairshirts, because they have ‘horfit eftir’ (‘turned away to’) the error of Simon the magician. When they acknowledge Christ as Lord, ‘kom ljós mikit af himin ofan ifir allan lýþ, enda fingu þá þeir menn allir bót meinna sinna es siúkir hõfðu verit’ (‘a great light came down from heaven over all the people, and moreover all those people who had been sick received remedy for their afflictions’).24 Shortly afterwards, Clement’s father, Faustinianus, tells Peter that ‘Nú þykia mér guþs orþ þau er þú hefir sagt í brjóst mér vera búin til at gera at ser góþan ávõxt’ (‘Now it seems to me God’s words, which you have spoken [Petrs saga postola has ‘sáð’ ‘sown’] into my breast, are ready to produce a good harvest’).25 He is baptised, and Peter describes in his preaching, as an example for others, ‘hvé hann var snúinn frá heiþnum dómi af miskunn Guþs til algõrrar trú ok til dýrligs lífs’ (‘how he was converted from heathendom by the grace of God to perfect faith and an excellent life’). We have here a mass conversion that happens suddenly through divine intervention, and an individual conversion that is gradual and private. Both, which are equally valid, involve turning away from sin, error and heathenism, to faith, a virtuous life, and a ‘harvest’ of good works. This notion of turning is central to all understandings of conversion, as can be seen not only from the Hebrew and Greek terminology (such as metanoia), but 24

25

Clemens saga, pp. 32–3; the translation is also from Carron’s edition. Postola sögur, p. 67.

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint also from the Old Norse-Icelandic terms.26 Conversion is variously rendered as snúning (‘turning’), réttsnúning (‘turning to what is right’), and leiðrétting (‘righting one’s path’); verbs used include snúa (‘to turn’), snúask (‘to turn oneself’, ‘to be turned’), hverfa (‘to turn’), and venda (‘to turn’). We can see a variety of these expressions in the Old Icelandic sermon on the Heavenly City in Revelation 21:27 Gõngum vér inn í borgina guðs austan, þat er at vér snúimsk til góðra verka ok til guðs þegar á ungum aldri, en ef undan líðr æskutíð, þá gleymum vér eigi fulltíða aldri, ok hverfum frá syndum, svá at vér megim komask sunnan í borgina. En sá er gálauss var í æsku eða á fulltíða aldri, kosti hann þó at leiðréttask í elli sinni, at hann komisk vestrhlið borgarinnar. En sá er órœkinn var of alla tíð lífs síns allt til ellitíðar, þá skal hann enn eigi ørvilnask, því at hlið eru norðan á borginni þau er hann má finna ef hann snýsk til guðs af õllu hjarta á sjálfum ørvasa aldrinum (italics mine). [Let us enter God’s city from the east, which means that we turn ourselves to good works and to God while we are still young, but if the time of youth passes, then let us not forget the age of maturity, and let us turn from sins, so that we can get into the city from the south. And the one who was careless in youth and in the age of maturity, let him nevertheless strive to right his path in his old age, so that he can enter the city through the western gates. And the one who was negligent throughout his lifetime right up to old age must even then not despair, because there are gates to the north of the city which he may find if he turns himself to God with his whole heart in the very age of decrepitude.]

Again, one of the central paradigms is the life of St Paul, who was turned dramatically from persecutor to apostle: ‘Hann snørisk til guðs af bœn Stephans ok gørðisk postuli ok kennandi þjóða’ (‘He was turned to God by the prayer of Stephen and became an apostle and teacher of the nations’).28 The homilist encourages those who are evil to follow ‘dœmi leiðréttingar Páls’ (‘the example of Paul’s conversion’), using extensive parallelism and antithesis to illustrate his transformation: ‘Hann fell niðr illr ok reis upp góðr. Niðr fell hann grimmr ofstopamaðr, en hann reis upp ágætr kennandi [. . .] Þangat sem fyrir fór Stephanus grýttr af steinum Pauli, þangat kom eptir Paulus leiðréttr af bœnum Stephani’ (‘He fell down evil and rose up good. Down he fell a savage persecutor, but he rose up an excellent teacher [. . .] Wherever Stephen went before stoned by the stones of Paul, after him came Paul converted by the prayers of Stephen’).

Frederick J. Gaiser, ‘A Biblical Theology of Conversion’, in Handbook of Religious Conversion, ed. H. Newton Malony and Samuel Southard (Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press, 1992), pp. 93–5. The Hebrew root is šûb (‘to turn back, to return’); the Greek New Testament uses the terms epistrephō (‘to turn, turn around, turn back’), metamelomai (‘to change one’s mind, regret, repent’) and metanoeō (‘to change one’s mind, repent, be converted’). 27 Homiliu-bók, p. 19. 28 Homiliu-bók, p. 178. 26

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The Saint and the Saga Hero The chiastic syntax emphasises neatly Stephen’s agency in Paul’s conversion.29 It is worth noting that the verb snúa(sk) used repeatedly above can also mean ‘to translate’ (to ‘turn’ from one language to another), so that conversion and translation are closely related as creative and literary processes: conversion is the process by which one ‘translates’ the raw material of life into the literary paradigms of Christian conversion. Research in the social sciences into how converts tell their stories has emphasised that these are inseparable from the experience of conversion; telling one’s story is not secondary to conversion, but actually constitutes the way in which this takes place.30 One is converted by changing one’s ‘universe of discourse’: the way in which one relates to and interprets the world through language. Part of this change is ‘biographical reconstruction’: ‘re-membering’ one’s past in such a way as to align it with the central narratives of the group.31 Rambo suggests that a key moment is when converts perceive a point of contact (an ‘impression point’) between their own life stories and that of the group to which they adhere: conversion is about entering into a ‘new story’, appropriating this narrative as one’s own.32 This is a helpful way to think about how medieval Icelanders engage with stories about the conversion: how the past may be ‘re-membered’ through an ‘impression point’ between local traditions and the overarching story. This meeting (or ‘collision’ may be a better term) between old and new may be expressed in a convert’s reluctance or resistance; through a trial of strength in which the new faith triumphs over the old; through divine intervention and the Christian supernatural; or through a showdown between the living and the dead.33 Conversion is thus about reconstituting or translating the past into the ‘universal discourse’ of the Christian Church. In their approach to the past, then, all narratives of conversion must find 29

30 31

32

33

The source for this is a sermon of St Fulgentius (on the feast-day of St Stephen, 26 December), also used by Ælfric; see Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: Introduction, Commentary, Glossary, ed. Malcolm Godden, Early English Texts Society ss 18 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 25. Stromberg, ‘Role of Language’, pp. 122–4. The phrase ‘universe of discourse’ is borrowed from George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1934), p. 89; it is used by David A. Snow and Richard Machalek, ‘The Convert as Social Type’, in Sociological Theory, ed. Randall Collins (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1983), pp. 265–6 and ‘The Sociology of Conversion’, Annual Review of Sociology 10 (1984), 170–3; Clifford Staples and Armand L. Mauss, ‘Conversion or Commitment? A Reassessment of the Snow and Machalek Approach to the Study of Conversion’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 26 (1987), 133–47. Lewis Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 82–3, 118–21, 137–9; ‘The Psychology of Conversion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, p. 170. For a recent attempt to apply Rambo’s theories of conversion to Old Icelandic narratives, see Christopher Abram, ‘Modeling Religious Experience in Old Norse Conversion Narratives: The Case of Óláfr Tryggvason and Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld’, Speculum 90 (2015), 114–57. The term ‘collision’ was suggested to me by George Stroup, The Promise of Narrative Theology (London: SCM, 1984), p. 95.

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint a balance between continuity and change: the continuity that is essential to any notion of identity and the turning or transformation that is constitutive of Christian conversion. There are a number of ways in which this tension can be negotiated. One is to take a typological approach, whereby past event are reinterpreted and shaped into ‘types’ and ‘shadows’ of the Christian future. This grew out of the work of biblical exegesis, in which the Old Testament was read through the lens of the New, so that typological readings provided a model for how local histories could also be reshaped to point to the advent of Christ.34 For example, Bede fashions the Anglo-Saxons as the ‘new Israel’, crossing the sea to the Promised Land, where they have a missionary vocation to live out. He presents their conversion as a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies that Christianity would spread to islands at the end of the earth.35 A similar pattern has been perceived in Ari’s Íslendingabók, where the Northmen also arrive from across the sea. We are told that there were Irish Christians in Iceland before this, who left behind them staffs, bells and books: this foreshadows the advent of Christianity from Norway and figures Iceland as consecrated land.36 Likewise, in Landnámabók, there are echoes of the story of Noah’s ark in the failed settlement narrative of Flóki Vilgerðarson and his ravens.37 In Eyrbyggja saga, even pagan practices can prefigure the Christian future: the sacredness of Helgafell, later the site of an Augustinian monastery, forms a parallel with Mount Sinai in the Old Testament. Wanner suggests that one way to understand such parallels is ‘to conclude that they were meant to be read typologically’.38 Dreams and visions about the arrival of Christianity in 34

35

36

37

38

Weber, ‘Intelligere historiam’, pp. 97–101; see also his ‘Irreligiosität und Heldenzeitalder’, pp. 474–505 and ‘Siðaskipti. Das Religiongeschichtliche Modell Snorri Sturlusons in Edda und Heimskringla’, in Sagnaskemmtun, ed. Rudolf Simek et al., pp. 309–29. Bede’s rhetoric of ‘election’ is discussed by Patrick Wormald, ‘The Venerable Bede and the Church of the English, in The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism, ed. Geoffrey Rowell (Wantage: Ikon, 1992), pp. 207–28; Sarah Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series, VI (1996), 38–41; aspects of this are contested by George Molyneaux, ‘The Old English Bede: English Ideology or Christian Instruction?’, English Historical Review 124 (2009), 1289–323. See also Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘Islands and Idols at the Ends of the Earth: Exegesis and Conversion in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’, in Bede le Vénérable entre tradition et postérité, ed. Stéphane Lebecq, Michel Perinn and Olivier Szerwiniack (Villeneuve d’Ascq: CEGES, Université Charles-de-Gaulle, 2005), pp. 119–45. Margaret Clunies Ross, ‘Textual Territory: the Regional and Genealogical Dynamic of Medieval Icelandic Literary Production’, New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997), 21–2; John Lindow, ‘Íslendingabók and Myth’, Scandinavian Studies 69 (1997), 456; Pernille Hermann, ‘Íslendingabók and History’, in Reflections on Old Norse Myths, ed. Pernille Hermann, Jens Peter Schjødt and Rasmus Tranum Kristensen, Studies in Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 25–7. Landnámabók, pp. 36–9. Kevin J. Wanner, ‘Purity and Danger in Earliest Iceland: Excrement, Blood, Sacred Space and Society in Eyrbyggja saga’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 5 (2009), 240.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Iceland thus correspond to Old Testament prophecies about Christ: Þórhallr in Þiðranda þáttr ok Þórhalls and Gestr Oddleifsson in Laxdœla saga are both prophets along Old Testament lines.39 Some stories model the relationship between the Old and New Testament through the use of bipartite structures: McCreesh and Harris have both shown that many þættir and some sagas, including Njáls saga and Eyrbyggja saga, have the conversion as their structural turning-point.40 Rowe identifies the inclusion of bipartite þættir in Flateyjarbók as ‘a form of retrospective reading’.41 Typology provides a way of re-membering the past so as to integrate it into the model of Christian salvation history. Another learned possibility is to view the past through the lens of demonisation and/or euhemerisation – two approaches that are often combined, as in Ælfric’s De falsis diis, a translation of which can be found in Hauksbók.42 Here we are told that, after the fall of Babel, the devil deceives mankind into worshipping created things rather than the Creator: they ‘sá eigi skynsemðaraugum á várn dróttinn er þá skap’ (‘did not look with the eyes of reason on our Lord who created them’) and go on instead to sacrifice to ‘menn þá er ríkir ok ramir váru’ (‘men who were powerful and strong’), believing that they can accomplish as much dead as when they did when they were alive.43 This combination of false beliefs and demonic deception is pretty much standard in hagiography. In Clemens saga, for example, Clement reasons (like Ælfric) that the pagan gods are not only mortal, but also morally corrupt:44 Hann fœldi eigi siþ þeira, heldr sýndi hann þeim meþ mikilli skynsemi af þeira bókum sjálfra hversu illa ok flærþsamliga þeir Þórr eþa Óþinn eþa aþrir æsir vǻru getnir, ok hversu illa ok herfiliga þeir lifþu ok dó síþan vesalliga heþan ór heimi, ok má þá af því at õngum sannõndum goþ kalla. [He did not mock their faith, but rather demonstrated to them very rationally out of their own books how evilly and deceitfully Þórr and Óðinn and other gods had been begotten, and how wickedly and wretchedly they lived and Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 125; Laxdœla saga, p. 196. Bernadine McCreesh, ‘Structural Patterns in Eyrbyggja saga and Other Sagas of the Conversion’, Medieval Scandinavia 11 (1978–9), 271–80; Joseph Harris, ‘Saga as Historical Novel’, pp. 187–219. 41 Rowe, Development of Flateyjarbók, p. 58. 42 Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Edition, ed. John C. Pope, 2 vols, EETS, os 259, 260 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967–8), II, 667–724; Hauksbók, pp. 156–64. On this relationship see Arnold Taylor, ‘Hauksbók and Ælfric’s De Falsis Diis’, Leeds Studies in English 3 (1969), 101–9; David F. Johnson, ‘Euhemerisation versus Demonisation: The Pagan Gods and Ælfric’s De Falsis Diis’, in Pagans and Christians: The Interplay between Christian Latin and Traditional Germanic Cultures in Early Medieval Europe: Proceedings of the Second Germania Latina Conference held at the University of Groningen, May 1992, ed. Tette Hofstra, L. A. J .R. Houwen and Alisdair A. MacDonald (Groningen: Forsten, 1995), pp. 35–69; Magnús Fjalldal, Anglo-Saxon England in Icelandic Medieval Texts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 10–11. 43 Hauksbók, pp. 157–8. 44 Clemens saga, pp. 36–7 (using Carron’s translation). 39 40

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint then died miserably out of this world, and therefore they cannot be called gods on any truthful grounds.]

Sisinnius, however, expresses a different perspective, fresh from his recent conversion. The pagan gods are devils, which inhabit idols and deceive all those who fervently believe in them, drawing them to their own destruction:45 Ok es nú hreinsat hugskot mitt frá õllum sauri skurþgoþavillu, þvíat þat es diõfla leyni ok fylskni þeira skurþgoþ þau er vér trúþum miõk ok heimsliga á hingat til, ok gõfguþum af allri alúþ es verr var. En þau tæla alla þá menn es þeim trúa. [Now my mind is purged from all the filth of idolatry, because these are the hiding-places of devils and their secret dens: the idols which we hitherto believed in greatly and foolishly and worshipped with all earnestness, which was worse. But they entrap all people who believe in them.]

Conversion is not a fulfilment of the past, in this view, but liberation from the dangerous and destructive delusions propagated by the devil. Euhemerisation is arguably used in a ‘less polemic’, ‘fairly neutral’ way in Ari’s Íslendingabók, Snorri’s Ynglinga saga and the Prologue to Gylfaginning, where it is combined not with demonisation, but with the concept of natural religion.46 Faulkes argues that Snorri’s aim was to fit mythology into a framework of universal history, as ‘a groping towards truth by unenlightened heathens in a pre-Christian world’. Heathen religion is put forward in the Prologue as a ‘partial understanding of Christianity’, achieved as post-diluvian peoples exercise their God-given reason in the observation of the natural world. There is a firm theological tradition behind this, which goes back as far as the biblical book of Wisdom and is reiterated in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.47 However, it is also clear that deception is a major narrative strategy in Gylfaginning (‘the deluding of Gylfi’), and Abram has pointed out that in Skáldskaparmál the gods are said to ‘distort’ (falsa) historical accounts in order to euhemerise themselves.48 He suggests that Gylfi can be read as a sort of proto-missionary figure, drawing the pagans out through his questions in such a way to expose the error-riddled nature of their beliefs. Above all, conversion involves reorientation to a world newly situated within a grand eschatological scheme. In Bede’s account of the conversion of King Edwin, in his Historia ecclesiastica, the well-known figure of the sparrow Clemens saga, pp. 42–3 (using Carron’s translation). Anthony Faulkes, ‘Pagan Sympathy: Attitudes to Heathendom in the Prologue to Snorra Edda’, in Edda: A Collection of Essays, ed. Robert J. Glendinning and Haraldur Bessason (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1983), pp. 283–314; Wanner, Snorri Sturluson, pp. 154–8. 47 Wisdom 13: 5; Romans 1: 20. 48 Snorri Sturluson, Edda. Skáldskaparmál 1, p. 5; Christopher Abram, ‘Gylfaginning and Early Medieval Conversion Theory’, Saga-Book 33 (2009), 5–24. 45 46

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The Saint and the Saga Hero passing through a lighted hall affirms that what makes Christianity different is its provision of a master narrative for all human life: ‘So this life of man appears but for a moment; what follows or indeed what went before, we know not at all. If this new doctrine brings us more certain information, it seems right that we should accept it’.49 The later visions of Fursey and Dryhthelm, which circulated separately in Scandinavia and Iceland, confirm the importance of Christian doctrine on heaven and hell.50 Likewise, Alcuin’s suggested order of catechism, which draws on that of Augustine, gives teaching about the next life the foremost place: ‘First a man is to be instructed about the immortality of the soul, about the future life, and about the reward of good works and evil. Then that he will suffer eternal punishments with the devil for any sins and crimes and enjoy eternal glory with Christ for any good works or services.’51 Nedkvitne has argued that the medieval Church in Norway placed eternity and salvation top of its list of priorities.52 We see the importance of this teaching in the dialogue or catechism in Eiríks saga víðfõrla in Flateyjarbók. In response to Eiríkr’s many questions, the emperor of Constantinople instructs him that ‘Guð almáttigr gerði sér bjarta hõll; þá hõll kallaði hann himnaríki. Síðan gerði hann myrkvastofu; þat er þessi heimr, er vér byggjum. Í honum setti guð djúpa grõf; þat er helvíti. Í þeim stað er hvers kyns vesõld með eldi, ok þar kveljast andir ranglátra manna’ (‘God Almighty made himself a bright hall; that hall he called the kingdom of heaven. Then he made a dungeon; that is this world in which we live. In it, God set a deep pit; that is hell. In that place is every kind of misery with fire, and there the souls of wicked people are tormented’).53 Eiríkr asks further about hell, and is horrified to hear that all heathens will go there, exclaiming that ‘Aldri heyrða ek slíka hluti fyrr frá þeim sagða’ (‘I have never heard such things said about them before’). Óláfr Tryggvason reacts similarly when he sees his friends and relations in hell: ‘Honum fekksk svá mikils, þá er hann vaknaði, at hann flautr allr í tárum, ok hœgindin váru vát undir hõfði honum’ (‘It affected him so deeply, when he awoke, that he flowed with tears, and the pillow was wet beneath his head’).54 Famously, King Radbod stepped back from the baptismal font, once he realised that his ancestors were consigned

49 50

51

52 53 54

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 184–5 (using the parallel translation). Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, pp. 272–5, 488–99; Jonas Wellendorf, Kristelig visionslitteratur i norrøn tradition (Oslo: Novus Forlag, 2009), pp. 158–99; Carlsen, Visions of the Afterlife, pp. 28–30. Epistolae Merowingici et Karolini aevi, ed. Ernst Dümmler, vol. 4, Monumenta Germaniae historica (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895), Epistle 110, pp. 158–9. On Alcuin’s changes to Augustine’s catechism and, in particular, his placing of the ‘last things’ first, see Owen M. Phelan, ‘Catechising the Wild: The Continuity and Innovation of Missionary Catechisis under the Carolingians’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61 (2010), 455–74. Arnved Nedkvitne, Lay Belief in Old Norse Society 1000–1350 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculum Press, 2009), p. 310. Flateyjarbók, I, 30–1. Óláfs saga Odds, p. 164.

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint to hell.55 In such stories, one sees the cost of entering into the overarching Christian narrative of human life. In engaging with stories about mission and conversion, the sagas represent a peripheral literature responding creatively to the central narratives of Christen­dom. Although hagiography is far from the only genre in which mission and conversion are depicted, it is perhaps the closest to the saga in form and structure, and thus it has most to offer in terms of how to signify the abstract and eternal, how to set each individual instance of human life within the totalising perspective of salvation history. In this situation, one would expect as a rule what Even-Zohar calls ‘interference’: innovation in the saga genre as it interacts creatively with the missionary hagiography at the centre of the literary polysystem. In each of the sagas to be discussed here, the conversion to Christianity contributes significantly to the ‘widening of narrative horizons’.

From sun god to Christian God Vatnsdœla saga was probably written c. 1270–1300 in the north of Iceland, perhaps at the monastery of Þingeyrar, and it is preserved in copies of Vatnshyrna, a lost compilation of sagas of Icelanders with a focus on the ‘uncanny’ and the ‘extraordinary’.56 It is set in the years 870–980, coming to an end as the first recorded mission to Iceland begins: that of Bishop Friðrekr and Þorvaldr Koðránsson in the north. It tells the story of the leading family in Vatnsdalr, Ingimundr Þorsteinsson and his three sons, and chronicles their ongoing struggles against the anti-social individuals who threaten the new and vulnerable farming community in Iceland. Like many sagas, it begins with a Norwegian prologue that announces its main concerns: leadership, virtue and a cluster of concepts usually translated as ‘luck’ or ‘fate’ (hamingja, gæfa, gipta, forlõg, skõp). Ingimundr is led to Iceland by an amulet representing the god Freyr, following the prophecy of a Sámi sorceress, and Freyr presides over his settlement, which creates some suggestive parallels with Hrafnkels saga and other ‘sagas of Freyr’ (p. 105).57 This establishes Ingimundr as divinely favoured, and a favourite of the Norwegian kings; the saga is strongly royalist, and King Haraldr hárfagri approves Ingimundr’s departure. The saga ends with the conversion to Christianity of Ingimundr’s spiritual heir, Þorkell krafla, the foster child of his son Þórir. Such conversions at the eleventh hour are sometimes assumed to be conventional, even opportunist, updating an otherwise pagan narrative for the good of its Christian audience: one example of this might be the conversion of Vita Wulframni episcopi Senonici auctore Pseudo-Iona, ed. Wilhelm Levison, Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptorum rerum Merovingicarum 5 (Hanover: Hahn, 1910), p. 668. 56 Vatnsdœla saga, pp. xiii, li–lvi, and Andrew Wawn, ‘Vatnsdœla saga: Visions and Versions’, in Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World, ed. Judy Quinn et al., pp. 404–5. 57 Sørensen, ‘Freyr in den Isländersagas’, pp. 721–7; van Wezel, ‘Mythology as a Mnenomic and Literary Device’, pp. 289–92. 55

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Víga-Glúmr, who is something of a religious chameleon, and dies in baptismal garments in old age despite a lifetime’s devotion to Óðinn.58 In Vatnsdœla saga, however, the whole narrative tends towards Þorkell’s acceptance of Christianity: his conversion brings to fulfilment the long-standing monotheism of a leading family in Iceland, and affirms a typological relationship between good leadership and Christian virtue. The most explicitly hagiographic scene in the saga occurs immediately before Þorkell’s conversion: it is an account of how Bishop Friðrekr brings about the death of two berserkir who intrude on a feast at which Þorkell is present. The same story is told in Þorvalds þáttr víðfõrla, where it is explicitly attributed to Gunnlaugr Leifsson; if Vatnsdœla saga was indeed written at Þingeyrar, it is likely that the author drew directly on Gunnlaugr’s work.59 In Þorvalds þáttr, the two berserkir are guests at a wedding feast attended by both heathens and Christians; between them a small stream flows through the middle of the hall, perhaps representing the waters of baptism. The berserkir are active persecutors of Christians, determined ‘at eyða kristiligu siðlæti’ (‘to destroy Christian morals’). They challenge Bishop Friðrekr to compete with them ‘ef hann hefði þoran til eða nõkkut traust á guði sínum’ (‘if he had the courage to or any faith in his God’). Friðrekr has a fire built, which he consecrates with holy water: the berserkir stride into it, stumble over a log, and immediately burn to death. Friðrekr then makes the sign of the cross and enters the fire himself in full episcopal vestments. He passes through it unharmed, and we are told that ‘Eigi með nõkkuru móti sviðnuðu inar minnstu trefr á skrúða hans’ (‘Not the least fringe on his garment was in any way singed’). Many are converted by this miracle, and a witness is cited: we are told that Gunnlaugr heard it from ‘sannorðan mann’ (‘a reliable man’), Glúmr Þorgilsson, who heard it from Arnórr Arndísarson. The hagiographic qualities of this scene are transparent: it reads as a religious parable based on biblical and hagiographic motifs. At the centre is the trial of strength familiar from the Old Testament and many later lives of saints: Elijah on Mount Carmel in the first book of Kings, the three youths in the fiery furnace in Daniel, the miraculous immunity of saints and their relics to fire.60 Bede explains in his Vita S. Cuthberti how fire in this type of miracle can be interpreted in multiple ways, signifying how the saint has overcome the

Víga-Glúms saga, p. 51. Maarten Cornelius van den Toorn, Ethics and Moral in Icelandic Saga Literature (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1929), p. 128; Theodore Andersson, The Icelandic Family Saga: An Analytic Reading, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 28 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 28; Lars Lönnroth, ‘Rhetorical Persuasion in the Sagas’, Scandinavian Studies 42 (1970), p. 183; reprinted in his The Academy of Odin, pp. 77–109. 59 Vatnsdœla saga, pp. 124–6; Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 69–72. On the relationship between these accounts, see Siân Duke (Grønlie), ‘Kristni saga and its Sources: Some Revaluations’, Saga-Book 25 (1998–2001), 350–3, 364. 60 For examples and references, see Grønlie, ‘Reading and Understanding’, pp. 487–91.

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint flames of vice and will escape the fires of hell.61 In Þorvalds þáttr, the miracle also affirms the efficacy of ecclesiastical rite: the use of holy water, the sign of the cross, and episcopal vestments. It is immediately striking, then, that in Vatnsdœla saga these transparently hagiographical motifs have all disappeared; most noticeably, Bishop Friðrekr does not walk through any flames. The scene is now set at an autumn feast, where there is no stream running through the hall; and the berserkir, now regarded as a social nuisance by all, intrude on the feast from the outside. Þorkell asks Friðrekr to get rid of them, and he agrees to do so if the household will be baptised. Þorkell replies: ‘Allt er þá nær, ef þér sýnið mõnnum jarteinir’ (‘It will be all the easier, if you show people proofs’). Friðrekr then orders three fires to be made, all of which are consecrated, and the ablest men are equipped with large cudgels, since the berserkir are immune to iron. When the berserkir attempt to stride through the fire, they are badly burned and very frightened; they head for the benches, where the men on standby quickly beat them to death. There is nothing particularly supernatural about this outcome, so Þorkell’s request for jarteinir is not a request for ‘miracles’, despite the miraculous nature of the scene in Þorvalds þáttr víðfõrla. Rather, jarteinir should be understood in the sense of ‘proofs’ or ‘signs’: Þorkell demands evidence that this new faith can guarantee social harmony and stability. In the exchange that follows, a point of contact is established that resembles Rambo’s ‘impression point’: Þorkell kvazk eigi vilja aðra trú hafa – ‘en þeir Þorsteinn Ingimundarson hõfðu ok Þórir fóstri minn; þeir trúðu á þann, er sólina hefir skapat ok õllum hlutum ræðr’. Byskup svarar: ‘Þá sõmu trú boða ek með þeiri grein, at trúa á einn guð fõður, son ok helgan anda, ok láta skírask í vatni í hans nafni.’ [Þorkell said that he didn’t wish to have a different faith – ‘from Þorsteinn Ingimundarson and my foster father Þórir; they believed in the one who created the sun and rules all things’. The bishop answers: ‘I preach the same faith, with this difference: to believe in one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and to be baptised in water in his name.’]

Þorkell is uneasy about the prospect of baptism and decides to put it off ‘enn um sinn’ (‘for the moment’), although he expresses his conviction that the new faith is good and will succeed. His elderly father-in-law, Óláfr of Haukagil, is baptised and dies in white garments, and we are told that Þorkell was baptised later, when Christianity was made law. The chapter ends with a eulogy of his exemplary leadership and virtue: ‘Þorkell var mikill hõfðingi; hann lét kirkju gera á bœ sínum ok helt vel trú sína’ (‘Þorkell was a great chieftain; he had a church built on his farm and kept the faith well’). The removal of the miraculous from this scene shows that the saga author’s interests lie elsewhere: it is not the sanctity of Bishop Friðrekr that preoccupies him so much as issues of lay leadership and social cohesion. It is unlikely, in view 61

Two Lives of St Cuthbert, pp. 200–3.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero of the rest of the saga, that his omissions are due to disbelief; there are many other instances of the supernatural, including Sámi sorcery, magic storms and monstrous black cats. Rather, there is a shift of emphasis here from ecclesiastical rite to social utility: the berserkir are heathen and anti-Christian, but more importantly, they are disruptive and anti-social. They threaten the authority of the local leaders and endanger the welfare of the community. The saga author describes them as ‘óvinsælir’ (‘unpopular’) and ‘illmenni’ (‘trouble-makers’), echoing the characteristics of earlier villains such as Ljót, Hrolleifr and Þórólfr heljarskinn (‘the dark-skinned’).62 Indeed, the scene has been reshaped to fit a recurrent pattern in the saga, in which Ingimundr’s family works to rid the community of self-willed individuals who threaten the social good.63 Social cleansing can thus be read as a type of Christian exorcism: in this scene, the foreign bishop and the Icelandic chieftain work hand in hand. Þorkell asks Friðrekr for advice, and Friðrekr agrees to act ‘með yðrum atgang’ (‘with your help’): their mutual support is to the benefit of the social community. This successful cooperation continues after the conversion: Þorkell is both a great chieftain and a good Christian and church-builder. The saga has reshaped Gunnlaugr’s celebration of ecclesiastical power into a model of good leadership in the community. This shift in meaning entails a shift in perspective: the scene unfolds from the point of view not of the missionary bishop, but of the reluctant convert. Instead of separation and difference, it emphasises continuity and likeness: local traditions are brought into alignment with the beliefs of the universal Church. As Lönnroth has shown, Þorkell’s reference to ‘the God who created the sun’ draws on the concept of the noble heathen: it reflects the belief that heathens can, through observation of the natural world, reach a rational knowledge of God as Creator, although they lack the ‘irrational’ knowledge gained only through Christian revelation (the Trinity and the sacrament of baptism).64 Although it may seem that the saga parts company with the binaries of hagiography at this point, in fact it draws on two saints’ lives which were among the earliest to be translated: Plácidus saga and Clemens saga, both of which focus on family dramas and have markedly saga-like traits (p. 12). Plácidus, like Þorkell, is a noble heathen, whose good works, virtue and high social standing are rewarded with a vision of Christ. Christ appears to him from the cross ‘sólu bjartara’ (‘brighter than the sun’), declaring that ‘Ek em sá Jesus Kristr, er þu gõfgar óvitandi’ (‘I am that Jesus Christ, whom you worship unknowingly’) and ‘Eigi er rétt, at sá þjóni diõfli, er vinr minn gørisk í góðum verkum’ (‘It is not right that one who makes himself my friend through good works should serve the devil’).65 Important here is the idea that a heathen can worship Christ without realising it and the divine assurance that heathens will be rewarded for ‘good works’. Vatnsdœla saga, pp. 46, 51, 59–60, 83. Vatnsdœla saga, pp. 53–43, 79–80. 64 Lars Lönnroth, ‘The Noble Heathen: A Theme in the Sagas’, Scandinavian Studies 41 (1961), 1–29; reprinted in his The Academy of Odin, pp. 45–74. 65 Heilagra manna søgur, II, 193–4; Plácidus saga, pp. 8–15. 62 63

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint Clemens saga is even more closely related to Vatnsdœla saga: both tell the story of a noble family with monotheistic beliefs. Clement’s father, Faustinianus, is described as ‘algerr at sér ok allri veraldarspekð’ (‘fully endowed with all worldly wisdom’), and we are told that, though he sacrificed to pagan gods, he did not do so with his whole heart: ‘Hann trúþi raunar einn vera almáttkan Guð’ (‘He really believed in the existence of one almighty God’).66 This mixture of monotheism and reluctant heathenism recalls Ingimundr’s beliefs; in contrast to the zealous Hrafnkell, Ingimundr is far from overly eager to please the gods.67 Faustinianus’s wife, Matilda, is a devout pagan who worships the sun god, Apollo, and this can be understood to anticipate her later conversion to Christianity: Christ is closely associated with the sun in the Christian liturgy, and was sometimes painted as Apollo in the late Antique period. The son of Faustinianus and Matilda, Clement, warmly welcomes the first missionaries and upholds the new faith, although, as in the case of Þorkell, there is a considerable delay before he is baptised. We are told that ‘himinríkis sól’ (‘the sun of the kingdom of heaven’) shines brightly in his heart, recalling Christ the ‘sun of righteousness’ in the Christian liturgy.68 The typological link between Apollo and Christ may explain one apparent contradiction in Vatnsdœla saga: that Ingimundr is both a reluctant worshipper of Freyr and at the same time a true believer in the God who created the sun. As sun god, Freyr, like Apollo, can be read as a type of Christ, rather than as the malevolent agent at work in Hrafnkels saga.69 Most interesting is the account in Clemens saga of Faustinianus’s conversion at the hands of St Peter. Initially, he too is reluctant to accept the new faith: ‘Af því kalla ek yðr óvitra menn at mér virþisk svá sem ér kalliþ mann einn dauþan vera Guþ yþvarn ok trúiþ ér á hann sem á Guþ. En þat má hverr maþr skilia at einn es Guþ omnipotens ok óbrigþligr’ (‘I say you are not wise men because it seems to me as if you claim a dead man to be your God, and you believe in him as in God. But everyone must realise that there is one God, almighty and immutable’).70 Like Þorkell, he misguidedly rejects Christianity on the basis on his commitment to monotheism: he has a ‘rational’ knowledge of a single, omnipotent God, but lacks the revealed understanding of the divinity of Christ. St Peter responds, like Bishop Friðrekr, by pointing out the important likeness in what they believe: ‘Sá inn sami maþr es þu kallar dauþan, ok vér trúum á, es bæði maþr dauþligr ok Guþ lifandi omnipotens ok óbrigþligr’ (‘This same man whom you call dead, and we believe in, is both a mortal man and the living Clemens saga, pp. 2–3. van Wezel, ‘Mythology as a Mnemonic and Literary Device’, p. 291. 68 Clemens saga, pp. 4–5, 12–13, 18–19, 46–7; on Christ the ‘sun of righteousness’, see Malachi 4: 2; Homiliu-bók, pp. 37, 47; Elucidarius in Old Norse Translation, ed. Evelyn Sherabon Firchow and Kaaren Grimstad, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi, Rit 36 (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1989), p. 120 and Postola sögur, p. 466. 69 The argument that Freyr is a ‘prefiguration of the Christian God’ is made at greater length in Jürg Büschgens, ‘Vatnsdœla saga and Onomastics’, in Á austrvega, pp. 160–5. 70 Clemens saga, pp. 22–3. 66 67

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The Saint and the Saga Hero almighty and immutable God’). Both Peter and Friðrekr repeat the words of their converts back to them (‘I preach the same faith’; ‘This same man whom you call dead’): this is the ‘impression point’ that will allow their converts to reconfigure their beliefs so as to foreshadow Christian truths. Eventually, Faustinianus comes to believe in Peter’s teachings, but he delays baptism until he has gained a better knowledge of the Scriptures, just as Þorkell delays his baptism until Christianity is made law.71 For both Faustinianus and Þorkell, conversion fulfils a belief in God that they already hold. Belief in the ‘God who created the sun’ is found in a range of other sagas too, and as in the case of Plácidus and Clement, it is associated with noble birth. This is most obvious in Landnámabók, in the scene describing the death of the first lawspeaker, Þorkell máni (‘moon’): ‘Hann lét sik bera í sólargeisla í banasótt sinni ok fal sik á hendi þeim guði, er sólina hafði skapat; hafði hann ok lifat svá hreinliga sem þeir kristnir menn, er bezt eru siðaðir’ (‘He had himself carried into the sun’s ray during his last illness, and committed himself into the hands of the God who had created the sun; he had also lived as purely as those Christians who are most virtuous’).72 Þorkell’s son, Þorsteinn, is ‘allsherjargoði’ (‘the supreme priest’) when Christianity comes to Iceland. In Arnórs þáttr kerlingarnefs, set in the north of Iceland shortly after Bishop Friðrekr’s mission, the chieftain Arnórr gives a speech in support of the rights of the sick and elderly at times of famine:73 Nú ef sá er sannr Guð er sólina hefir skapat til þess at birta ok verma verõldina, ok ef honum líkar vel mildi ok réttlæti sem vér hõfum heyrt sagt, þá sýni hann oss miskunn sína, svá at vér megim prófa með sannendum at hann er skapari manna ok at hann megi stjórna ok stýra allri verõldu, ok þaðan af skulim vér á hann trúa ok engan guð dýrka útan hann einn, sannan ok sælan í sínu veldi. [Now if he is true God, who created the sun to brighten and warm the world, and if mercy and righteousness please him, as we have heard tell, then let him show us his mercy, so that we can prove in truth that he is the Creator of men and can rule and govern the whole world, and from then on we shall believe in him and worship no God except him alone, true and blessed in his power.]

This desire to ‘prófa með sannendum’ (‘prove in truth’) recalls Þorkell’s request for jarteinir (‘proofs’) from Friðrekr. Arnórr’s advice is taken and the famine promptly comes to an end; like Þorkell, he and his followers are baptised when Christianity is made law. This exemplum may be the source of a similar story in Reykdœla saga, where the chieftain Áskell, like Arnórr, speaks up for the rights of the very young and the very old: ‘Ráðligra var at gera skaparanum tígn í því at duga gõmlum mõnnum ok leggja þar fé til ok fœða upp bõrnin’ (‘It would be wiser to do the Creator honour by supporting elderly people and contributing Clemens saga, pp. 26–7, 32–5. Landnámabók, pp. 46–7. On Þorkell máni, see further Clunies Ross, ‘“Saint” Ásólfr’, pp. 36–7. 73 Biskupa sögur, I (2003), ccii; text I, 154. 71

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint money for this and bringing up the children’).74 Although no more is said about Áskell’s faith, he has foreknowledge of his death and refuses to be buried with grave goods, both of which characterise him as a proto-Christian.75 Two further converts start from a belief in ‘the God who created the sun’: Þorsteinn uxafótr (‘ox’s foot’) in Þorsteins þáttr uxafóts and Gestr Oddleifsson in Króka-Refs saga.76 In all these cases, belief in ‘the God who created the sun’ is associated with men of authority and power, and it creates a sense of spiritual continuity in leadership from pagan to Christian times. Monotheism is associated not only with specific beliefs but also with specific values: caring for the very young and the very old, providing for the vulnerable and those on the margins of society. These are acts of moral living, but in the saga they are also acts of good leadership. This combination of moral strength and effective leadership is particularly noticeable in the scene where Þorsteinn Ingimundarson decides to have Þorkell krafla (‘paw’) adopted. Þorkell is exposed as a baby (and ‘paws’ at his face with his hand) and Þorsteinn makes a vow to save him, if God will alleviate the berserkr fits suffered by his brother Þórir:77 Nú vil ek heita á þann, er sólina hefir skapat, því at ek trúi hann máttkastan, at sjá ótími hverfi af þér; vil ek þat gera í staðinn, fyrir hans sakar, at hjálpa við barninu ok fœða upp, til þess at sá, er skapat hefir manninn, mætti honum til sín snúa síðan, því at ek get honum þess auðit verða. [Now I wish to call on the one who created the sun, because I believe him most powerful, that these fits leave (‘turn from’) you; in return, for his sake, I will do this – help the child and bring it up, so he who created the person might afterwards turn him to himself, because I believe that this is destined for him.]

In this scene, Þorsteinn espouses Christian values unknowingly (‘óvitandi’) through his condemnation of child exposure, and he anticipates Þorkell’s coming conversion through the paired verbs hverfa af (‘turn from’) and snúa til (‘turn to’).78 His decision to save from exposure the baby who will become the first Christian in his family has symbolic significance. Þorkell resembles another baby who was saved from exposure: Moses, who led the Israelites out of Egypt, in that well-known Christian allegory of redemption. Yet Þorsteinn is not acting out of spiritual conviction alone: he also uses this opportunity to gain the goðorð (‘authority of chieftain’), which is held by Þórir, for his own 74

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Reykdœla saga, in Ljósvetninga saga með þáttum, Reykdœla saga ok Víga-Skúta, Hreiðarsþáttr, ed. Björn Sigfússon, Íslenzk fornrit 19 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1940), p. 170. Reykdœla saga, p. 198. Þorsteins þáttr uxafóts, in Harðar saga, pp. 363–4; Króka-Refs saga, in Kjalnesinga saga, p. 131. Vatnsdœla saga, pp. 97–8. On child exposure, see Íslendingabók, p. 17 and Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, in Borgfirðinga sõgur, ed. Sigurður Nordal and Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk fornrit 3 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1938), p. 56.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero sons, and it eventually passes from them to Þorkell krafla. As in Clemens saga, monotheism runs in leading families in Iceland, and good leadership involves even in pagan times the exercise of Christian virtue. Monotheism is associated in the saga with one other crucial but problematic Christian virtue: humility. This is explored in a couple of paired scenes, one centred on Þorsteinn Ingimundarson and the other on Þorkell krafla. Both are influenced by another conversion þáttr, Þiðranda þáttr ok Þórhalls, set just before Þangbrandr’s arrival in Iceland.79 Þiðrandi is the oldest son of Hallr of Síða, Þangbrandr’s first convert, and he is killed by the dísir in anticipation of his father’s coming conversion. The þáttr describes his humility and service to others at the feast held the night before his death: ‘Þiðrandi gekk um beina. Var hann í því sem õðru mjúkr ok lítillátr’ (‘Þiðrandi offered hospitality. In this, as other respects, he was meek and humble’).80 Þorsteinn and Þorkell are described in a very similar manner. At a wedding attended by Finnbogi, Bergr and Ingimundr’s sons, we are told that Þorsteinn ‘gekk mjõk at vinna mõnnum beinleika ok taka við klæðum manna, því at hann var hverjum manni lítillátari’ (‘assiduously offered people hospitality and took people’s clothes, because he was humbler than any other man’).81 At a later wedding held by Þorkell’s uncle, we are told that ‘Þorkell gekk mjõk um beina ok var lítillátr í sinni þjónustu’ (‘offered hospitality assiduously and was humble in his service’).82 Within the saga, however, this humility is misread as weakness, compromising the authority and leadership of Þorsteinn and Þorkell. Þorsteinn is knocked over and insulted by Bergr, while Þorkell is slandered as a swineherd and a slave’s son. Unlike Þiðrandi, they do not manage to turn the other cheek: the saga author shows himself acutely aware that the virtue of humility does not fare well in the saga world. Although Þorsteinn urges an arbitrated settlement, his brothers avenge his injury, while Þorkell strikes down the man who slandered him in one blow. We see here more of a ‘collision’ between Christian humility and the expectations generated by the saga genre. Stories of triumphant revenge may appear to challenge hagiographic values, but they do express confidence that evil will be punished, like Oddr’s biblically based conviction that the evildoer will ‘fall into the pit he himself has dug’ (p. 59). The family’s persistent success against those who unjustly oppose them is linked in the saga to the concept of ‘luck’; the sorceress Gróa laments before she dies that ‘Erfitt mun vera at standa í mót giptu Ingimundarsona’ (‘It will be difficult to stand against the luck of Ingimundr’s sons’).83 Whether ‘luck’ in the saga (and, indeed, more widely) is a pagan or Christian concept 79 On Þiðranda þáttr, see Biskupa sögur, I (2003), clxxxviii–cxcvii, 121–5; Dag Strömbäck,

80 81

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Tidrande och diserna: Ett filologisk-folkloristisk utkast (Lund: Blom, 1949); Merill Kaplan, ‘Prefiguration and the Writing of History in Þáttr Þiðranda ok Þórhalls’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 99 (2000), 379–94. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 123. Vatnsdœla saga, p. 86. Vatnsdœla saga, p. 117. Vatnsdœla saga, p. 96.

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint has been much discussed: in the settlement narrative, it certainly appears to be connected with Freyr, as his amulet directs Ingimundr to his future home and ensures the abundant fertility of the land.84 Some of the terms used for ‘luck’, such as hamingja and fylgja, have unmistakable pagan associations, and at one point the saga refers explicitly to ‘kona sú, er fylgt hafði þeim frændum’ (‘the woman, who had accompanied the family’), conceptualising their luck in terms of a female supernatural presence. On the other hand, this same woman protects Þorsteinn from death at the hands of the sorceress Gróa: she appears to him three times, warning him not to attend Gróa’s feast, and eventually afflicts him with eye pain, so that he is forced to stay at home. Her appearances save his life rather than heralding his death and, in this respect, her behaviour is more like a saint or guardian angel than a pagan fylgja; she recalls the hermit Ásólfr, who also appears in a dream three times, and threatens to put out the dreamer’s eyes if his command is not obeyed.85 In Þorláks saga helga, eye pain symbolises unconfessed sin, and it may function here as a moral judgment on Þorsteinn’s culpable (if temporary) attraction to a pagan sorceress.86 There is, in addition, a close connection between fylgjur and angels: in the earliest sermons, a guardian angel is said to fylgja (‘follow/accompany’) each person from birth.87 In Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, a pagan prophetess describes how Óláfr is accompanied with ‘með bjõrtum fylgjum ok hamingjum’ (‘with bright fylgjur and hamingjar’), and a Sámi later tells him that ‘Eigi fara litlar fylgjur fyrir þér’ (‘The fylgjur that go before you are not small’).88 The brightness of these supernatural beings suggests that they are angels, although the pagans who see them can only describe them in terms of beings they already know. In Njáls saga, Hallr of Síða describes St Michael as fylgjuengill (‘accompanying angel’, ‘guardian angel’), fusing the two concepts into one.89 It seems likely that the ‘luck’ of Vatnsdœla saga is also a composite notion. As an inheritable commodity or a supernatural woman, it has its origins in local beliefs, but its connection with the family’s monotheism and virtue draws it into the Christian sphere, where the terms gæfa and gipta more reliably carry 84

85 86 87

88 89

For discussions of ‘luck’ in the saga, see Lars Lönnroth, ‘Kroppen som själens spegel – ett motiv i den isländska sagorna’, Lychnos (1963–4), 24–31 and Peter Hallberg, ‘The concept of gipta-gæfa-hamingja in Old Norse literature’, in Proceedings of the First International Saga Conference, ed. Peter Foote et al., pp. 166–8; Hermann Pálsson, ‘Um gæfumenn ok ógæfu í íslenzkum fornsögum’, in Afmælisrit Björns Sigfússonar, ed. Björn Teitsson, Björn Þorsteinsson and Sverrir Tómasson (Reykjavík: Sögufélag, 1975), pp. 135–53; Rowe, ‘Generic Hybrids’, p. 547. Landnámabók, pp. 63, 65. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 94, 107–8, 208, 210. Leifar, pp. 166–7; Gamal norsk Homiliebok, p. 143. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 144, 188. Njáls saga, p. 257. On the fusion of pagan and Christian here, see Lars Lönnroth, Njáls saga: A Critical Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 133; Else Mundal, Fylgjemotivet i norrøn litteratur (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1974), pp. 125–8; Karen Bek-Pedersen, ‘St Michael and the Sons of Síðu-Hallur’, Gripla 23 (2012), 189; Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background, pp. 110–12.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero the meaning of divinely bestowed grace.90 It is significant that the scene which first establishes the family’s luck hinges precisely on an act of unmerited grace: the highwayman Jõkull’s lífgjõf (‘gift of life’) to Þorsteinn Ketilsson.91 In any case, luck in this saga has little to do with chance happenings: the narrative arc leads inexorably towards reward for virtue and punishment for vice. Wawn speaks of the saga author’s confidence that ‘nobility and goodness will always defeat malevolent forces in this world and the next’.92 It is above all this concern with the next world that shows the influence of hagiographic writing, since this is the narrative genre in which human affairs share a stage with the wider cosmic battle between good and evil. This moral and eschatological framework is seen most clearly in the extraordinary detail of the saga’s death scenes. The first is that of the highwayman Jõkull, son of Ingimundr jarl, who dies before he has the opportunity to repent. He tells his killer, Þorsteinn, that he was about to turn from his evil ways, and reflects ruefully on how ‘Ævin hefir ófõgr verit, enda er nú goldit at verðugu, ok ferr svá flestum ranglætismõnnum’ (‘My life has been ugly, and this is now repaid as is deserved, and so it turns out for most evildoers’).93 What happens to Jõkull after his death is not specified, but the prognosis does not look good; death without repentance leads to damnation, according to the teaching of the medieval Church. The same preoccupation with reward and punishment dominates Ingimundr’s dramatic death scene: he is murdered by the scoundrel Hrolleifr, described as a man who ‘launaði illu gott’ (‘rewarded good with evil’). Ingimundr not only hides his death from his sons for as long as possible, but also allows his killer to escape. His son, Þorsteinn, draws out the moral significance of this act of mercy: ‘Mikill manna munr er orðinn með þeim Hrolleifi, ok njóta mun faðir minn þess frá þeim, er sólina hefir skapt ok allan heiminn, hverr sem sá er. En þat má vita, at þat mun nõkkurr gõrt hafa’ (‘There is a great difference between him and Hrolleifr, and my father will surely profit by this from the one who created the sun and the whole world, whoever that is. But everyone knows that someone must have done so’).94 This is the first reference in the saga to the ‘God who created the sun’, and it is used to express hope (although not certainty) that Ingimundr’s goodness will be rewarded, that the final reckoning will distinguish between him and Hrolleifr. The saga author’s perspective here is not heroic, but moral and didactic: Þorsteinn does not consider his father’s reputation, but reflects instead on virtue, merit and reward. Hrolleifr, in contrast, is killed while actively engaged in pagan rites, and his mother Ljót dies ‘í móð sínum ok trolldómi’ (‘in her rage and sorcery’).95 Other evildoers meet with a range of nasty ends, and are given names that explicitly link them to Hel(l): 90 91

92 93 94

95

Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 4, 12 (gœzka) 40, 41 (gipta). Vatnsdœla saga, pp. 9–11. The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection, ed. Bernard Scudder, preface by Jane Smiley, introduction by Robert Kellogg (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 188. Vatnsdœla saga, p. 11. Vatnsdœla saga, p. 62. Vatnsdœla saga, pp. 68–70.

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint heljarmaðr (‘man from hell (Hel)’), mannfjándi (‘fiend of a man’), and manndjõfull (‘devil of a man’).96 In one particularly suggestive scene, the sorcerer Þórólfr sleggja (‘sledge-hammer’) sinks into the ground, taking a Norwegian with him: ‘Ok hljóp í fenit, ok sukku svá at hvárrgi kom upp’ (‘And he jumped into the marsh, and they sank down so that neither came up again’).97 Like the trolls who sink into the ground in Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, the villains of Vatnsdœla saga are not always fully distinguished from devils (p. 62). The sudden death that comes upon the evil contrasts with the foreknowledge of death on the part of the virtuous, although even the virtuous do not know where their final destination may be. While hell and damnation are realities to be feared, reward for pre-Christian virtue remains a distant hope. The Christian mission, then, comes at the end of the saga because it completes the dominant narrative pattern: that turning towards the good that characterises Ingimundr’s family line. A retrospective, typological, reading reveals that their pursuit of the social good is an expression of Christian virtue, and their luck an expression of divine grace; the hope of reward for good deeds becomes the promise of Christian salvation. This is neatly summed up in the saga’s final eulogy for Þorkell: ‘Hann þótti, sem var, inn mesti heraðshõfðingi ok mikill giptumaðr ok inn líkasti inum fyrrum Vatnsdœlum, svá sem Þorsteini ok Ingimundi, ok bar Þorkell þat fyrir, at hann var rétttrúaðr maðr ok elskaði guð ok bjósk mjõk kristiliga við dauða sínum’ (‘He was thought, as was the case, the greatest chieftain in the district, and a very lucky man, and the most like the previous people of Vatnsdalr, such as Þorsteinn and Ingimundr, and Þorkell had this advantage over them, that he was a right-believing man, and loved God and prepared in a very Christian way for his death’).98 As the first convert to Christianity, Þorkell fulfils the destiny of his family line. With his conversion, the saga moves from the ‘types’ and ‘shadows’ of his forbears to the certainty offered by baptism: with Christianity come clear knowledge of how to prepare for death, and assurance of a place in the next world. In its engagement with hagiography and with the conversion þættir, Vatnsdœla saga proves to be both selective and discerning. Shifting the emphasis away from trials of strength with their binary oppositions, it strives instead to create an ‘impression point’ between local beliefs in Vatnsdalr and the universal truths of Christianity, between the story of a local family and the story of salvation history. Identifying ‘luck’ with divine grace allows a retrospective reading of this family’s history, in which past events are imbued with a new concern for reward and punishment, and in which good leadership reaps an eternal reward as well as temporal success. By eliding the moral and the social good, the saga author brings the narrative trajectory to completion: Þorkell’s moment of conversion, as for Plácidus and Faustinianus, lies in his recognition of the God whom he has always served. Vatnsdœla saga, pp. 53, 56, 59, 60, 73–5. Vatnsdœla saga, p. 75; Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 292–3. 98 Vatnsdœla saga, p. 131. 96 97

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Mission and violence In Vatnsdœla saga, the Christian mission brings closure, a satisfying sense of an appropriate end. In Njáls saga, it has been argued, the missions disrupt the narrative and upset the moral equilibrium. Written c. 1275–85, Njáls saga is preserved in a large number of manuscripts, the oldest of which dates to c. 1300, shortly after its composition.99 The conversion comes near the centre, and with it the saga shifts markedly into a hagiographic mode, so much so that it is sometimes suggested that this part should be viewed as an independent episode or kristni þáttr (‘conversion narrative’), extraneous to the main body of the text.100 Yet manuscripts of the saga consistently signal its importance by the large initial at the opening of chapter 100; in Kálfalœkjarbók, this initial H is illuminated with the image of a horseman, perhaps the missionary Þangbrandr, the protagonist of this episode.101 The account of Þangbrandr’s mission is closely related to the conversion þættir in Kristni saga and Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, and covers the same events in much the same order: his conversion of Hallr of Síða, his confrontations with pagan poets and the sorcerer Galdra-Héðinn, his defeat of a berserkr at the house of Gestr Oddleifsson, and his enforced return to Norway.102 For the official conversion in 999/1000, the saga draws on Ari’s Íslendingabók with some additions from the Christian law in Grágás. These literary sources have been carefully adapted to suit their new context within the saga: Gizurr the White, Hjalti Skeggjason and Hallr of Síða all have important roles, and Njáll’s support of Christianity is emphasised. Like other noble heathens, he foresees the goodness of the new faith, declaring that ‘Svá lízk mér sem inn nýi átrúnaðr muni vera miklu betri, ok sá mun sæll, er þann fær heldr’ (‘It seems to me as if the new faith will be much better, and the one who prefers it will be happy’).103 His well-established prescience gives weight to this prediction. Njáll even reaches out to the as yet unknown God in prayer: we are told that ‘hann fór opt frá õðrum mõnnum ok þulði, einn saman’ (‘he often went away from other people and mumbled alone’). Hamer has suggested that the saga author echoes here the words of Psalm 1, in which sæll translates ‘beatus’ (‘happy, blessed’) and þylja translates ‘meditor’ (‘one who meditates’), describing the man who delights in the law.104 Still, these careful adaptations do not quite dispel the awkward placing of the saga’s conversion narrative: it falls between the killing of Hõskuldr Njálsson at the hands of Lýting and the killing of Hõskuldr Þráinsson by Njáll’s sons, thus Njáls saga, pp. lxxv–lxxxiv, cxlix–cl. The Icelandic Family Saga, p. 291. This view is discussed in Lönnroth, Njáls saga, pp. 216–42 and Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Um Njálu (Reykjavík: Bókadeild menningarsjóðs, 1933), pp. 44–9. 101 Lönnroth, ‘Structural Divisions’, pp. 69–70; cf. also Hamer’s suggestions in Njáls saga and its Christian Background, pp. 183–6. 102 Biskupa sögur, I (2003), ccxi. 103 Njáls saga, p. 255. 104 Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background p. 211.

99

100 Andersson,

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint interrupting the sequence of revenge killings that result from the feud between Njáll’s sons and Þráinn Sigfússon. As is often pointed out, this not only disrupts the course of events, but also creates a breach in the chronology of the saga: the historical establishment of the Fifth Court is displaced from 1005 to before the year 1000, and the lawspeaker switches temporarily from Skapti Þóroddsson to Þorgeirr Ljósvetningagoði and then back again.105 While this last point may be an oversight, the overall sense of rupture may well be deliberate: in contrast to Vatnsdœla saga, conversion in this saga heralds not continuity, but change. The prominent position of the kristni þáttr at the midpoint of the saga has sparked a number of bipartite critical readings, opposing the heroic code embodied by Gunnarr to the Christian self-sacrifice of Hõskuldr, setting feud and violence on the one hand against Christianity, law and peace on the other.106 The new Christian ethic of reconciliation is associated with Njáll, Hõskuldr, Hallr of Síða, and sometimes also with Flosi. Yet, as Cook has pointed out, the arrival of Christianity by no means brings feuding to a close.107 Hõskuldr’s sacrificial death does not arrest the feud in which Njáll’s sons are embroiled; instead, it proves a catalyst for the most violent atrocity in the saga: the burning of Njáll and his household in their home. Despite Hallr of Síða’s attempts to make peace, Njáll’s son-in-law Kári single-mindedly pursues vengeance for this burning; only when it is complete does he become reconciled with Flosi, thus bringing the saga to an end. Cook’s view is that, while Christianity has ‘no effect on the plot’, it provides ‘a wider setting for human activity’ and ‘a vision of a better world than one governed by the revenge ethic’.108 Some more recent readings have questioned even this. In dialogue with Lönnroth, Sävborg contends that the saga is not an allegory about how honour and revenge give way to Christian reconciliation and love; its characters and action are shaped not by clerical culture, but by the tradition within which the author works.109 Moreover, Tirosh proposes adding the suffix Víga (‘Killer’) to Njáll’s name: he describes him not as a Christian peace-maker, but as ‘an omnipotent and tyrannical father’, motivated by the fear of being usurped by his sons and manipulating events to bring about the ‘family’s demise’.110 105 106

107

108 109

110

Ian R. Maxwell, ‘Pattern in Njáls saga’, Saga-Book 15 (1957–61), 38: ‘The author deliberately juggled with history’. Richard F. Allen, Fire and Iron: Critical Approaches to Njáls saga (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1971), p. 90; Denton Fox, ‘Njáls saga and the Western Literary Tradition’, Comparative Literature 15 (1963), 289–310; Maxwell, ‘Pattern in Njáls saga’, pp. 17–47. Robert Cook, ‘The Effect of the Conversion in Njáls saga’, in The Audience of the Sagas, The Eight International Saga Conference. Preprints I (Göteborg: Gothenburg University, 1991), pp. 94–102. Cook, ‘The Effect of the Conversion’, p. 97. Daniel Sävborg, ‘Konsten att läsa sagor: Om tolkningen av trosskiftets betydelse i Njáls saga’, Gripla 22 (2011), 207; Lars Lönnroth, ‘Christianity, Revenge and Reconciliation’, in his The Academy of Odin, pp. 179–88 and ‘Att läsa Njáls saga – Svar til Daniel Sävborg’, Gripla 23 (2012), 367–74. Yoav Tirosh, ‘Víga-Njáll: A New Approach toward Njáls saga’, Scandinavian Studies 86 (2014), pp. 216, 224; cf. also Ursula Dronke, The Role of Sexual Themes in Njáls saga,

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The Saint and the Saga Hero It is clear from this that what the conversion changes in the saga is not how people act, but what their actions mean in a Christian world. In particular, the assumed opposition between violence and Christianity is difficult to maintain, and it is certainly not supported by the depiction of Þangbrandr’s notoriously violent mission. Instead of opposing Christianity to heroic violence, the conversion transposes violence to a new level, playing out the saga’s feuds on a cosmic stage between the poles of heaven and hell. As Allen has commented, ‘the boundaries of the saga are flung open to apocalyptic and demonic realms’.111 The saga does not offer a vision of a better human world, but it does offer glimpses of the world beyond this one, in salvific acts of self-sacrifice and in terrifying visions of hell. The saga’s engagement with mission and hagiography is not about peace-making and reconciliation in this life, but about judgement and damnation in the life to come. Þangbrandr would be an odd choice of missionary in a saga contrasting old-style heroic violence with Christian reconciliation: the decision to make him the central character of the kristni þáttr, rather than Gizurr the White or Hjalti Skeggjason, is surely a telling one. In the conversion þættir, Hjalti has a strong aura of Christian self-sacrifice about him: unjustly outlawed by the pagan priest Rúnólfr Úlfsson at the Alþing, he not only forgives the slave Rúnólfr sends to kill him, but also speaks up on behalf of Rúnólfr’s son Svertingr in Norway, and eventually stands sponsor to Rúnólfr at his baptism.112 In Kristni saga, we are told that a cross measuring Hjalti’s height was raised at the Alþing next to one marking the height of Óláfr Tryggvason; height here appears to indicate the spiritual ‘height’ of these two men and hence their authority before God.113 Although both Hjalti and Rúnólfr play a part elsewhere in Njáls saga, these particular stories are never alluded to; the only sign that Hjalti has any spiritual authority is when he is chosen to witness the appearance of Njáll’s and Bergþóra’s bodies after their deaths.114 He cuts, in fact, a heroic rather than a saintly figure in the saga. When he rides to the Alþing to join the other Christians, the saga author tells us that ‘Kvazk eigi vilja sýna þat heiðnum mõnnum, at hann hræddisk þá’ (‘He said that he did not wish to show the heathens that he was afraid of them’).115 After the burning of Njáll, Hjalti urges Kári to kill those responsible. Perhaps the saga author was unaware of Hjalti’s reputation in the conversion þættir for reconciling with his enemies, but this seems unlikely, given how closely his story is tied up with that of Þangbrandr. The saga author has not taken advantage of Hjalti’s potential saintliness; he chooses to focus on a far more ambivalent and complex character. Þangbrandr’s first convert in the saga is Hallr of Síða, and this is a key scene Dorothea Coke Memorial Lecture in Northern Studies (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1981), p. 14. 111 Allen, Fire and Iron, p. 117. 112 Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 26, 29, 142, 145, 172. 113 Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 32, 165. 114 Njáls saga, pp. 342–3. 115 Njáls saga, p. 270.

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint in all the accounts of his mission, where it is set at Michaelmas. In the conversion þættir, Þangbrandr preaches a long sermon on St Michael (for which Kristni saga provides a précis), in which he describes the orders of angels and the glory of heaven. Hallr responds with a spiritual insight into the ineffability of God:116 En er Þangbrandr hafði þessa hluti ok þessum líka talat með snjõllum framburði, þá mælti Hallr: ‘Þat sýnisk mér manninum ómáttuligt at skynja ok skilja hversu dýrðarfullr sá mun vera er slíkir ok svá ágætir englar þjóna’. Þangbrandr svarar: ‘Sannliga hefir heilagr andi blásit þessi skilning í brjóst þér, heiðnum manni.’ [When Þangbrandr had said these things and others like them with eloquent speech, then Hallr said: ‘It seems to me impossible for a person to perceive and discern how glorious must be the One whom such excellent angels serve.’ Þangbrandr answers: ‘Truly the Holy Spirit has inspired this understanding in your breast, a heathen man.’]

After witnessing the beauty of the liturgy and the healing of two old women through baptism, Hallr is eventually baptised on Easter Saturday. In Njáls saga, his baptism is brought forward to Michaelmas, and only St Michael is described: ‘“Hver rõk fylgja engli þeim?” segir Hallr. “Mõrg”, segir Þangbrandr; “hann skal meta allt þat, sem þú gerir, bæði gott ok illt, ok er svá miskunnsamr, at hann metr allt þat meira, sem vel er gõrt.” Hallr mælti: “Eiga vilda ek hann mér at vin.”‘ (‘“What powers accompany this angel?” says Hallr. “Many”, says Þangbrandr, “He shall weigh everything that you do, both good and evil, and is so merciful that he places more weight on that which is well done.” Hallr said: “I would like him as my friend.”‘).117 The emphasis has been shifted from God’s ineffable glory to St Michael’s role as psychopomp, his power to save souls at the moment of death. This was an important aspect of his cult in the West, as can be seen from church dedications, rune stones dating from the conversion period, and the Christian burial service, which calls on him as the soul’s defender and guide.118 The Old Norwegian Homily Book describes Michael as ‘hõfðingi Paradísar’ (‘chieftain of Paradise’) and explains that he has ‘veldi yfir allar andir réttlátra, at leiða þær í Paradísi frá kvõlum’ (‘power over all the spirits of the righteous, to lead them into Paradise from torments’).119 Likewise, the Old Icelandic Michaels saga emphasises Michael’s role as ‘valdsherra heilagrar Paradísi’ (‘mighty ruler of holy Paradise’), advising that ‘Allar réttlátar sálur skulu honum offrask i õðru lífi, at hann leiði þær ok laði til þess fagnaðar ok gleði’ (‘All righteous souls shall be offered to him in the next life, so that he may Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 130–1. Njáls saga, p. 257. 118 Bek-Pedersen, ‘St Michael’, pp. 177–8; Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background, p. 111; on runic inscriptions invoking Michael, see John McKinnell, Rudolf Simek, and Klaus Düwell, Runes, Magic and Religion: A Sourcebook, Studia Medievalia Septentrionalia 10 (Wien: Fassbaender, 2004), pp. 177–8. 119 Gamal norsk Homiliebok, p. 142; cf. Leifar, p. 166. 116 117

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The Saint and the Saga Hero lead and guide them to that joy and gladness’).120 The image of St Michael holding a pair of scales is a familiar one in Christian pictorial art: the carving of the Last Judgement from Hólar, dating from the time of Bishop Jón Õgmundarson (died 1121), probably depicted St Michael in this way. An eleventh-century verse by Arnórr jarlaskáld also alludes to this traditional representation, echoing Þangbrandr’s words to Hallr:121 Mikjáll vegr þat’s misgõrt þykkir mannvitsfróðr, ok allt et góða. [Michael, ripe with wisdom, weighs what seems wrongly done, and all the good.]

The emphasis on Michael as psychopomp therefore opens up a new eschatological perspective within the saga world: the conversion brings with it a greater awareness of the moral weight of human actions and the judgement that is to come. Hallr’s prominence in this early scene is sometimes connected to his role as peacemaker, both at the official conversion and at the battle of the Alþing, where he gives up compensation for his son Ljótr in the interests of reaching a peaceful settlement.122 Yet Michael is anything but a peacemaker, however ‘merciful’ he may be. In the Old Norwegian Homily Book, the homilist recommends him as a sure aid against one’s enemies, and prays that ‘hann árni oss sigrs af guði í gegn óvinum várum, ok stõðvi fjándr vára sýniliga ok ósýniliga’ (‘he grant us victory from God against our foes and rout our enemies visible and invisible’).123 Michael is an angelic warrior, leader of God’s armies and patron of the military orders. In Christian iconography he is often depicted as fully armed, his lance or sword raised against the devil, as on a wooden case from Vatnsfjörður church.124 In a vision in the fourteenth-century Nikolaus saga, he appears to St Nicholas in full battle array: ‘Honum birtisk svá sem gõfugr maðr sitjandi friðan hest, allr herklæddr svá sem dubbaðr riddari, hafandi blomberandligan sprota í hendi sér grafinn ok fagrt formeraðan med heilõgu krossmarki’ (‘It appeared to him as if a noble man were sitting on a beautiful horse, fully armed like a dubbed knight, having a blooming rod in his hand Heilagra manna søgur, I, 689. Diana Whaley, The Poetry of Arnórr jarlaskáld: An Edition and Study (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), p. 134; Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background, pp. 104–12. For the reconstruction of the carving from Hólar, see Þóra Kristjánsdóttir, ‘Icelandic Ecclesiatical Art in the Middle Ages’, in Church and Art: The Medieval Church in Norway and Iceland, ed. Lilja Árnadóttir and Ketil Kiran (Reykjavík: Oddi, 1997), pp. 58–60 and Hörður Ágústsson, Dómsdagur og helgir menn á Hólum (Reykjavík: Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag, 1989), p. 59. 122 Njáls saga, pp. 271, 411–12; Bek-Pedersen, ‘St Michael’ (pp. 186–93) discusses the significance of Michael to stories about Hallr’s sons, Þiðrandi and Ljót. 123 Gamal norsk Homiliebok, p. 142. 124 Þóra Kristjánsdóttir, ‘Icelandic Ecclesiastical Art’, pp. 57, 121 (catalogue); BekPedersen, ‘St Michael’, p. 178. 120 121

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint engraved and beautifully shaped with the holy sign of the cross’).125 Michael intervenes not only in spiritual, but also in earthly battles. Michaels saga tells of how the people of Sepontus were in need of defence from the still pagan Neapolitans; Michael appears to their bishop in a vision and promises to aid their cause. There is a vivid description of the slaughter at this battle, as the heathens are struck down and killed ‘sumir með eldi, sumir með járni’ (‘some with fire, some with iron’); this is exactly the phrase used by Flosi to justify the burning of Njáll.126 Michaels saga also contains a dramatic description of Michael’s defeat of the Anti-Christ, ‘leggjandi þann diõful digru spjóti svá mattugri hendi’ (‘piercing the devil with a huge spear and mighty hand’). It describes how ‘Í þessa minning sigrvegara Mikhaelis er hans líkneskja formeruð með spjótlagi í munn drekka, er liggr undir fótum hans’ (‘In memory of Michael the conqueror his image is shaped with spear-thrust in the mouth of a dragon, who lies under his feet’).127 This, according to Hamer, is the subject of the illuminated N in Kálfalœkjarbók, which shows a beardless man piercing a dragon with his sword; if so, it has been influenced by the iconography of Sigurðr Fáfnisbani (‘Fáfnir’s slayer’), a champion of heroic violence.128 The only other saga of Icelanders that mentions St Michael does so precisely in the context of armed conflict: unjustly fined for working over Michaelmas, Ljótr proposes an ordeal in which the Archangel will defend his cause: ‘Nú ef þér hefir gott til gengit og vili engillinn gefa þér sigr þá muntu þess at njóta. En ef þat var með fégirnd og ágang þá hafðu minna hlut og sjái hann mál okkart’ (‘Now if you meant well and the angel wishes to give you victory, then you will benefit from this. But if you acted with greed and aggression, then may you have the worse part, and may he watch over our cause’).129 In Christian art and literature, Michael is an agent of divine violence: he contextualises the human conflicts of the saga within a cosmic battle that will culminate in the violence of the Apocalypse. All in all, Michael does not sound as different from Þangbrandr as one might have expected: in the conversion þættir, Þangbrandr too is described as ‘lýðskaðr sem riddarar’ (‘mannered like knights’), and has a shield depicting Christ on the cross. The eschatological framework gives context and meaning to the violence of Þangbrandr’s conversion methods: perhaps he is not, as it is often assumed, such a poor representative of Christianity. Fox describes him scathingly as ‘merely a thug’, and his use of violence is problematised in the conversion þættir, where he is admired and at the same time condemned for his killings; a great success as a heroic warrior, but a failure as a missionary saint. In Njáls saga, however, his violence is not problematised so much Heilagra manna søgur, II, 89. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 693–7; Lönnroth associates this phrase (eldr ok járn) with the ‘clerical style’ in Njáls saga: A Critical Introduction, p. 115. 127 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 676, 689, 692, 711–12. 128 Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background, p. 251; Lönnroth, ‘Structural Divisions’, p. 70. 129 Valla-Ljóts saga, in Eyfirðinga sõgur, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson, Íslenzk fornrit 12 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzkra fornritafélag, 1956), p. 245. 125 126

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The Saint and the Saga Hero as heroicised: he kills his opponent Þorkell using a crucifix as a shield, and strikes the berserkr Ótryggr on the arm with a crucifix. It is difficult to tell how to read this: does the name Ótryggr (‘Faithless’) allegorise the berserkr, or does the crucifix literalise the metaphor of the cross as ‘sigr í orrustum’ (‘victory in battles’), like the cross painted on Þangbrandr’s shield?130 In other versions of the scene, Þangbrandr makes the sign of the cross over the berserkr’s sword; he does not actually wield it as a weapon. The saga author insists here on Þangbrandr’s violence rather than allegorising it away. There is a similar ambiguity about the first instance of the Christian supernatural in the saga: the dream of Kolskeggr, Gunnarr’s brother. Kolskeggr dreams that a ‘bright’ man appears to him and promises to find him a bride, and to make him ‘riddari minn’ (‘my knight’).131 As Einar Ólafur Sveinsson points out in his editorial note in Njáls saga, this is very like the dream in Þorláks saga helga, where Þorlákr is warned by God not to marry because ‘er þér õnnur brúðr miklu œðri huguð’ (‘a much nobler bride is intended for you’): this bride is a figure for the Church.132 In Njáls saga, the expression riddari minn recalls the Martinian paradox: ‘Ek em Krists riddari, ok er mér eigi lofat at berjask’ (‘I am Christ’s knight, and I am not allowed to fight’). However, in Kolskeggr’s case both marriage and warfare turn out to be understood in literal terms: he is baptised in Denmark, finds a wife in Miklagarðr (Constantinople), and becomes a warrior in the Varangian guard. The saga substantiates the metaphors of hagiography here; it does not shy away from the possibility of Christian violence. The saga author’s manipulation of hagiographic convention is particularly skillful in the scene set at Gestr Oddleifsson’s home. This presents a close parallel to the scene at the end of Vatnsdœla saga: like Friðrekr, Þangbrandr offers to dispose of a troublesome berserkr if Gestr and his household will be baptised. He builds three fires, the first consecrated by the heathens, and the second by him, while the third (as in a placebo-controlled trial) is left unconsecrated and, in the event, unused. When the berserkr arrives, he strides through the heathen’s fire unharmed, but comes to a halt before Þangbrandr’s fire, complaining that is ‘burning all over’:133 Hann høggr sverðinu upp á bekkinn, ok kom í þvertréit, er hann reiddi hátt. Þangbrandr laust með róðukrossi á hõndina, ok varð jartegn svá mikil, at sverðit fell ór hendi berserkinum. Þá leggr Þangbrandr sverði fyrir brjóst honum, en Guðleifr hjó á hõndina, svá at af tók.

130 Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background p. 241. For the cross as a sign of victory

and a shield, see Homiliu-bók, p. 39 and Líknarbraut, in Poetry on Christian Subjects, 7.1, 274–6. In the conversion þættir, Þangbrandr gives Óláfr a shield with the sign of the cross painted on it, which he was given as a gift by a bishop Hugbertus; see Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 14, 113–14. 131 Njáls saga, p. 197. 132 Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 54–5. 133 Njáls saga, pp. 267–8.

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint [He brandishes his sword at the bench, and it stuck in the roof beam as he raised it high. Þangbrandr hit him on the arm with a crucifix, and such a great miracle/sign took place that the sword fell out of the berserkr’s hand. Then Þangbrandr puts a sword through his chest, and Guðleifr hit his arm, so that he struck it off.]

Up to this point, the scene has unfolded very much like a stereotypical trial of strength: the fire consecrated by heathens does not harm the berserkr, but the fire consecrated by Þangbrandr causes him to burn him before he has even stepped in. The killing that follows, however, bends the hagiographic norm. It replays a well-worn miracle that works metonymically to establish the saint’s authority: an evildoer who raises his arm to strike a saint finds it frozen in mid-air. This happens to a Langobard soldier in Gregory’s Dialogues, to a heretic in Ambrosius saga, and to Þorsteinn Jónsson in Þorláks saga helga.134 In Martinus saga, it is combined with some comical blunders: when two evildoers try to strike Martin, one overbalances and falls over backwards, while the second drops his knife and loses it.135 In these saints’ lives, divine intervention not only protects the saint, but also prevents any killings from taking place. In Njáls saga, the opposite is the case. When the berserkr drops his sword, Þangbrandr and Guðleifr lay into him in a heroic double killing. As in Vatnsdœla saga, the ‘miraculous’ aspects of this scene are questionable: it is tempting to read the reference to jartegn (in the sense of ‘miracle’) as sarcastic, and the killing as yet another example of Þangbrandr’s lamentable failure to live up to the values of his faith. Yet the slapstick comedy of the scene, which is shared with Martinus saga, comes at the expense of the heathen berserkr, not the Christian missionary. Gestr and his household happily accept baptism as a result, and Gestr even speaks highly of Þangbrandr’s missionary efforts: ‘“Þú hefir þó mest at gõrt”, segir Gestr, “þó at õðrum verði auðit í lõg at leiða. En þat er sem mælt er, er eigi fellr tré við it fyrsta hõgg”’ (‘“You have contributed most”, says Gestr, “though it is destined for others to make it law. And it is as is said, that a tree does not fall at the first stroke”’).136 The choice of this particular proverb is interesting: it implies that violence is an inevitable part of mission, that heathenism must be forcibly ‘felled’ in order for conversion to take place. Perhaps it recalls the cutting-down of sacred trees by well-known missionaries like Martin and Boniface. Hamer suggests that it alludes to the biblical warning that every tree that does not produce fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire (Matthew 7: 18–19).137 This passage is found in an Icelandic translation of one of Gregory’s Homilies, where it is interpreted to mean that ‘hverr ranglátr maðr mun skjótt finna fyrirbúin loga’ (‘every evil man will soon find flames prepared [for him]’).138 This is also how it is understood Heilagra manna søgur, I, 33–4, 232; Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 176–7. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 560. 136 Njáls saga, pp. 268–9. 137 Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background, p. 144. 138 Hans Bekker-Nielsen, ‘Et overset brudstykke af en af Gregor den stores homilier’, 134

135

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The Saint and the Saga Hero in Flateyjarbók, where the same verses are quoted to justify the burning in of the pagan Sigurðr jarl: ‘Ill rót mundi illan ávõxt gefa [. . .] því at illt tré má eigi góðan ávõxt gefa, heldr skal þat vera upp hõggvit ok í eld kastat’ (‘A bad root would produce bad fruit [. . .] because a bad tree cannot produce good fruit, rather it must be cut up and thrown into the fire’).139 As in Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, the violent death of unbelievers is a figure for their burning in the fires of hell. Perhaps, then, the violence meted out by Þangbrandr in this world is a jartegn (‘sign’) of divine retribution in the next. If Þangbrandr’s killings are ‘signs’, they relate not to feud and social conflict, but to the cosmic struggle against the powers of evil. This is made visible in the cataclysm that occurs when Galdra-Héðinn tries to bring about Þangbrandr’s death: ‘Þá er Þangbrandr reið austan, þá brast í sundr jõrðin undir hesti hans, en hann hljóp af hestinum ok komsk upp á bakkann, en jõrðin svalg hestinn með õllum reiðingi, ok sá þeir hann aldri síðan’ (‘When Þangbrandr rode from the east, the earth burst open beneath his horse, but he jumped off the horse and managed to get up onto the bank, but the earth swallowed his horse with all its gear, and they never saw him again’).140 Although Sigurður Nordal has argued for the historical plausibility of this scene, the saga clearly establishes it as miraculous: Þangbrandr is riding from the Christian sanctuary at Kirkjubœr, while Galdra-Héðinn performs pagan sacrifices from the top of Arnarstakksheiðr.141 The dramatic description of the earth ‘bursting’ open and ‘swallowing’ the horse evokes medieval images of the mouth of hell: the landscape of Iceland is pagan and fraught with danger, opening suddenly to reveal the entrance to the abyss. Þangbrandr’s response to this narrow escape is every bit what one would expect in a saint’s life: ‘Þá lofaði Þangbrandr guð’ (‘Then Þangbrandr praised God’). The volcanic geography of this scene is not naturalistic, but symbolic: it situates Þangbrandr’s battle in a spiritual arena between the poles of heaven and hell. Divine power is very much on display in the chapter following the conversion of Iceland, in which the blind and illegitimate Ámundi miraculously regains his sight and takes revenge for his father’s death. Ámundi visits Lýtingr, his father’s killer, to demand compensation, but Lýtingr refuses, pointing out that he has already paid those who had a legal right to payout. Ámundi then appeals to God: ‘“Eigi skil ek”, segir Ámundi, “at þat muni rétt fyrir guði, svá nær hjarta sem þú hefir mér hõggvit; enda kann ek at segja þér, ef ek væra heileygr báðum augum, at hafa skylda ek annathvárt fyrir fõður minn fébœtr eða mannhefndir, enda skipti guð með okkr.”‘ (‘“I don’t believe”, says Ámundi, “that this can be right before God, when you have struck so close to my heart; and I can tell Opuscula 2, Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana 25 (1961), 41; cf. Heilagra manna søgur, II, 353. Flateyjarbók, I, 342. 140 Njáls saga, p. 259. 141 Sigurður Nordal, ‘Þangbrandur á Mýrdalssandi’, in Festskrift til Finnur Jónsson 29. maj 1928, ed. Johannes Brøndum-Nielsen et al. (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1928), pp. 113–20. 139

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint you that, if I were to have full sight in both eyes, I should get either financial compensation for my father or blood revenge; and may God judge between the two of us.”‘).142 When Ámundi reaches the door to Lýtingr’s booth, both his eyes are opened; he returns to Lýtingr and kills him with a single blow. As he departs, his eyes close at the spot where they were opened, and he remains blind for the rest of his life. Again, the saga is playful here with hagiographic conventions, since enlightenment or illumination, as discussed above (p. 115), is a classic metaphor for conversion. There are also some cases of temporary blindness, as in Andreas saga and Gregory’s Dialogues, which protect God’s servants from their aggressors.143 Earlier in Njáls saga, the magician Svanr darkens his opponents’ eyes using magic, and after three failed attempts, they have to abort their plan of attack. This is a neat inversion of the scene in Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, where the sign of the cross makes Óláfr and his men invisible to the farmers who have planned to ambush them (pp. 57–8).144 I have found no hagiographic parallel, however, for the temporary restoration of sight to the blind; here the saga author overturns generic expectations to give divine sanction to revenge. Hamer argues that the recurrence of Ámundi’s blindness condemns the taking of blood vengeance: it shows that he has failed to perceive the nature of Christian forgiveness, and plunges him into moral darkness again.145 Yet Ámundi correlates his moment of illumination with spiritual insight into God’s will: ‘Lofaðr sé guð, dróttinn minn! Sér nú, hvat hann vill’ (‘Praise be to the Lord my God! What he wishes can now be seen’). Since Njáll himself approves Ámundi’s killing, there is no good reason to take these words as ironic. This scene cannot be used to oppose Christianity to violence, and neither does it align Christianity with the law. We are specifically told that Ámundi has no legal right to compensation, but he does have a moral right in the eyes of God (‘fyrir guði’ ‘before God’), which God himself will intervene to uphold. Far from condemning human violence, the saga author extends it confidently into moral and eschatological realms. This new framework for human action is keenly felt when feuding resumes in the saga: as many have pointed out, the killing of Hõskuldr and the burning of Njáll are described in terms of sin, guilt and judgement.146 Mõrðr eggs on Njáll’s sons to kill their foster-brother, Hõskuldr, falsely persuading them that Hõskuldr is plotting their death in revenge for their killing of his father. The scene where they strike him down is set in early spring, as the sun rises in the east: Njáls saga, pp. 272–4. Genesis 19: 11; 2 Kings 6: 18; Postola sögur, p. 327; Heilagra manna søgur, I, 182. 144 Njáls saga, p. 38; Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 161–2. 145 Andrew Hamer, ‘“It seemed to me that the sweetest light of my eyes had been extinguished”’, in Introductory Essays on Egils saga and Njáls saga, ed. John Hines and Desmond Slay (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1992), pp. 93–101. 146 Maxwell, ‘Pattern in Njáls saga’, p. 44; Paul Schach, ‘Anti-Pagan Sentiment in the Sagas of Icelanders’, Gripla 1 (1975), 132; Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Njáls saga: A Literary Masterpiece, trans. Paul Schach (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), pp. 172–4. 142 143

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The Saint and the Saga Hero ‘Hann fór í klæði sín ok tók yfir sik skikkjuna Flosanaut; hann tók kornkippu ok sverð í aðra hõnd ok ferr til gerðis síns ok sár niðr korninu’ (‘He put on his clothes and threw on the cloak, Flosi’s gift; he took a corn basket and a sword in the other hand, and goes to his field and sows seed’).147 This recalls the sowing scene in the first part of the saga, when Gunnarr goes out to his field with cloak, corn basket, and axe, only to be run down by Otkell’s horse.148 Through their peaceful engagement in agricultural activity both men are portrayed as the innocent victims of violent crime. Gunnarr reacts angrily to the slight to his honour, and quickly retrieves his favoured weapon, carrying out the first in the series of killings that eventually leads to his death. Hõskuldr’s sword, in contrast, is never raised: it becomes a symbol of his choice of non-violence. In refusing to defend himself, he stays true to what he has previously said about Njáll’s sons: ‘Þá vil ek hálfu heldr þola dauða af þeim en ek gera þeim nõkkut mein’ (‘I would rather by half suffer death at their hands than do them any harm’).149 He falls to his knees and prays in the words of the proto-martyr Stephen, and in imitation of Christ: ‘Guð hjálpi mér, en fyrirgefi yðr’ (‘God save me, and forgive you’).150 His saintly pacifism both challenges the ethic of violence and, paradoxically, leads to violent retribution. Hõskuldr’s Christ-likeness resonates throughout the scene of his death: the rising of the sun and the sower with his seed-basket are images of Christ and of resurrection. The parable of the sower in Matthew 13: 36–43 describes the sower as Christ and the field as the world, and seed is used frequently in religious writings to signify God’s word: in Petrs saga postola, the first apostles are described as ‘gõfgir vinnumenn guðligrar sáðgørðar, kœnir at kasta korni Krists í ekru andanna’ (‘faithful labourers in the divine sowing, keen to plant the seed of Christ in the corn-field of the soul’).151 Later, the good seed of the parable is interpreted as the promise of eternal life: ‘Sáðkorn ins eilífa lífs falli í góða jõrð ok beri hundraðfaldan ávõxt’ (‘The seed-corn of eternal life falls on good earth and bears fruit a hundredfold’).152 Likewise, one of Gregory’s sermons for Easter relates the sowing of a seed to the resurrection of the body: ‘En hvat er undarlíkt þótt sá leiði til lífs ór moldu bein ok sinar ok hold ok hár er hvern dag endrnýjar ór litlu korni sáðs mikit tré ok aldin oc lauf’ (‘And why is it surprising if he who everyday recreates from a small seed a great tree with fruit and leaf, can raise to life from the earth bones and sinews and flesh and hair?’).153 In a famous passage from the Gospel of John, Christ’s death 147

148 149

150 151

152 153

Njáls saga, pp. 280–1. Njáls saga, p. 134. Njáls saga, p. 278. Luke 23: 34; Acts 7: 60; Homiliu-bók, p. 45; Gamal norsk Homiliebok, pp. 177–9. Postola sögur, p. 78. For Christ as sower, see also Líknarbraut stanza 5 (pp. 234–5) and 1 Corinthians 3: 7–9. Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background (pp. 205–6) notes the relevance of the iconography of the Second Typological Window in Canterbury Cathedral (dated to c. 1180), which depicts the Parable of the Sower. Postola sögur, p. 112. Leifar, p. 21 (from Gregory the Great).

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint is figured as a hveitikorn (‘grain of corn’) falling to the ground: in this scene, Hõskuldr sows the seeds of his blood, infusing it with the promise of renewal and resurrection.154 As Hamer has shown, sowing and reaping are recurrent images in the saga, tying in with the metaphors of germination and fecundity so widespread in the literature of conversion, where the cycle of the seasons is allegorised in terms of the human response to God’s words (p. 115–16).155 Of Hõskuldr’s killing, Flosi tells one of his supporters that ‘Er ok illu korni sáit orðit, enda mun illt af gróa’ (‘Evil seed has been sown, and evil will grow from it’). Likewise, Njáll comments on the lawsuit that ensues: ‘Af illum rótum hefir upp runnit’ (‘It has shot up from evil roots’).156 This brings us back to the ‘ill rót’ (‘bad tree’) that must be cut down and thown into the fire: each person will reap either the reward of eternal life or the punishment of eternal damnation. The sermon for the Ember days assures those who produce a harvest of ‘good works’ in this life that they will reap ‘eilífa dýrð’ (‘eternal glory’) in the next. Another sermon, on the parable of the wheat and the tares, describes the alternative scenario: ‘Í lófanum eru ok mjõk fá kornin þau er hirð eru ok í hlõður borin, hjá því sem sáða haugarnir eða agna, þeir er til enskis eru nýtir, nema kasta í eld oc láta brenna’ (‘On the threshing floor, the wheat that is gathered in and carried to the barns is very little, in comparison with the piles of wheat or chaff which are of no use, other than to throw into the fire and have burned’).157 In his Dialogues, Gregory quotes Christ’s words on this same parable: ‘Ek mun mæla við kornskurðarmenn, at þeir samni illum grõsum ok bindi saman í bundin ok kasti í eld’ (‘I will command the reapers, that they gather in weeds and bind them in bundles and throw them into the fire’). He explains that these reapers are angels, who ‘binda ill grõs í bundin, þá er þeir samtengja glíka glíkum í kvõlum’ (‘bind the weeds into bundles, when they join like with like in punishments’).158 The dark rider from the west who spreads fire with a burning brand resembles these avenging angels and, as Hamer has noted, a stack of weeds (‘arfasátr’) is used to ignite the fire at Njáll’s farm.159 In the light of the biblical parables, these are the ‘ill grõs’ (‘weeds’), bound together for burning. 154

155

156 157

158 159

Gamal norsk Homiliebok, p. 39 (John 12: 24). Cf. Tertullian’s statement that ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’, quoted in Frederick M. Biggs, ‘The Passion of Andreas: Andreas 1398–1491’, Studies in Philology 85 (1988), 422–4. Eugene Crook notes that this verse from John is also quoted in Gregory’s account of a martyrdom in book III of his Dialogues, but the passage is missing from the Norse translation; see Eugene Crook, ‘Gregory’s Dialogi and the Old Norse Sagas: Njal’s Saga’, in Rome and the North, p. 280. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 329. For the biblical parables of the sower, and of the wheat and the tares, see Matthew 13: 3–9, 18–30, Mark 4: 3–9, 14–20, 26–9, Luke 8: 5–8, 11–15; Leifar, p. 188; Gamal norsk Homiliebok, p. 69. Other relevant passages include Proverbs 11 and 22, Matthew 13: 37–8, 1 Corinthians 9: 10, Hosea 10: 12, Isaiah 55: 10. Njáls saga, pp. 288, 309. Homiliu-bók, pp. 35–7, 167. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 249, II, 88–9; Postola sögur, p. 886. Njáls saga, pp. 320–33; Revelation 19: 11–21.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero This recurrent imagery of the fires of hell underlies Njáll’s understanding of the burning. He soothes his frightened household with an impromptu homily: ‘Trúið þér ok því, at guð er miskunnsamr, ok mun hann oss eigi bæði láta brenna þessa heims ok annars’ (‘Trust also that God is merciful, and he will not let us burn in both this world and the next’).160 He follows here the advice of the Icelandic homilist, who reassures his congregation of God’s miskunn (‘mercy’) at times of need: ‘Nú megu því góðir menn allir vel af berask, þótt guð láti þá í nõkkurri freistni verða eða mannraun, at þeir skulu þat til hafa til syndalausnar ok verðleika við guð, at þeir þoli vel hreinsanareld þann er guð leggr á hendr þeim hér ok brennir af þeim syndasóttir’ (‘Now this is why all good men should endure patiently, if God allow them to come into some temptation or trial, because they shall have remission from sin and worthiness with God, in exchange for enduring patiently the cleansing fire which God lays on them and burns off them sin’s diseases’).161 The image of damnation is transformed into the means of atonement: suffered willingly, the flames signify ‘cleansing fire’ with which God heals from sin. This intense preoccupation with ‘signs’ of the next life is also apparent from the appearance of the dead, especially the bodies of Njáll and Skarp-Héðinn. Njáll and Bergþóra are found lying under an ox-hide with their foster-son Þórðr, and their bodies are perfectly preserved beneath it. Only one of Þórðr’s fingers has been burned where it sticks out from under the hide. The saga author comments that ‘Allir lofuðu guð fyrir þat ok þótti stór jartegn í vera’ (‘Everyone praised God for that and it was believed to be an important sign’).162 As Lönnroth has shown, Njáls saga borrows here from Plácidus saga, where Plácidus, together with his wife and sons, is burned to death in a brazen ox.163 When the bodies are removed, they are found untouched and ‘snjóvi hvítari’ (‘whiter than snow’): a sign that they have received ‘hlut þinna heilagra manna’ (‘the reward of your saints’).164 Njáll’s body, too, signifies his salvation, as Hjalti Skeggjason bears witness: ‘Njáls ásjána ok líkami sýnisk mér svá bjartr, at ek hefi engan dauðs manns líkama sét jafnbjartan’ (‘Njáll’s face and body seem to me so bright that I’ve never before seen a dead man’s body so bright’). The brightness of Njáll’s face is a metonym for sanctity: it is a trait shared by St Þorlákr and Bishop Guðmundr Arason, as well as by St Stephen, St Blasius and St Óláfr.165 Even the detail of the burned toe sticking out from the ox-hide can be read as a tiny hagiographic riddle: it recalls the thief whose stiffened toe sticks out from under St Jón’s cloak on the gallows, or the small girl Una Njáls saga, p. 329. Homiliu-bók, p. 96. 162 Njáls saga, pp. 342–3. 163 Lönnroth, Njáls saga, p. 122. 164 Heilagra manna søgur, II, 203; Plácidus saga, pp. 67–9. 165 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, III, 387; Heilagra manna søgur I, 270 and II, 293; Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 82, 189; Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 585. Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background (p. 245) argues that Njáll’s bright face derives from the beatitudes in Matthew 13: 24–30. 160 161

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint whose frozen foot protrudes from Bishop Guðmundr’s kirtle as they take shelter during a snow storm.166 The condition of Skarp-Héðinn’s body also serves as a sign, although its precise meaning is mysterious. The saga author tells us that ‘Hann hafði lagit hendr sínar í kross ok á ofan ina hœgri, en tvá díla fundu þeir á honum, annan meðal herðanna, en annan á brjóstinu, ok var hvárrtveggi brenndr í kross’ (‘He had laid his arms in a cross, the right over the left, and they found two marks on him, one between the shoulders and the other on his chest, and each was burned in the shape of the cross’). The bystanders assume that he has burned the marks on himself, but the possibility that they have appeared miraculously (as in some of the crusade narratives analysed by Haki Antonsson) is not out of the question, given Skarp-Héðinn’s immobility at the moment of death.167 Hamer argues further that the cross on Skarp-Héðinn’s shoulder aligns him with the penitent thief, who is sometimes identified as a fratricide.168 In Niðrstigningar saga, he is led into Paradise when he shows the sign of the cross between his shoulders, imprinted by Christ himself.169 Perhaps Skarp-Héðinn, like the penitent thief, has benefited from God’s mercy. The saga’s final foray into hagiographic territory is the battle of Clontarf in Ireland. Like the kristni þáttr, this draws on separate sources from the rest of the saga, including an early version of Orkneyinga saga, and possibly a lost saga about King Brian.170 The narrative is structured around the fates of two men, Óspakr and Bróðir, one a noble heathen and the other an apostate Christian, who sacrifices to pagan spirits. Óspakr joins the Christian King Brian and is baptised, while Bróðir fights against him to his own perdition. This is revealed in a dramatic series of signs or portents: blood rain, weapons that fight by themselves and ravens with iron beaks and claws. According to Óspakr, these birds signify demons: ‘Þar er hrafnar sóttu at yðr, þat eru óvinir þeir, er þér hafið trúat á ok yðr mun draga til helvítis kvala’ (‘When ravens attacked you, those are the enemies in whom you have trusted, and who will drag you into the torments of hell’).171 Here too, events on earth function as signs of the hereafter: they are markers of salvation or damnation. The battle of Clontarf is fought on Good Friday, and King Brian falls at the hands of Bróðir, refusing to take up arms. The name Bróðir (‘Brother’) evokes the earlier fratricide (Hõskuldr falling at the hands of Skarp-Héðinn) and there is also an echo of the martyrdom of St Óláfr, who like Brian, refuses to fight on Easter Day and throws down his sword at the moment of death to pray for his enemies.172 King Brian’s sanctity is clearly signalled at the moment of death: Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 444; Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 330; for these and other parallels, see Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background, p. 241. 167 Haki Antonsson, ‘Insigne Crucis’, pp. 15–32. 168 Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background, pp. 234–5. 169 Heilagra manna søgur, II, 8, 13–14. 170 Benjamin Hudson, ‘Brjáns saga’, Medium Ævum 71 (2002), 241–68. 171 Njáls saga, p. 447; for ravens as devils, see Postola sögur, pp. 750–1. 172 Óláfs saga hins helga, p. 85. On the parallels between Óláfr, Brian and Njáll, see 166

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The Saint and the Saga Hero when his head is cut off, his blood flows over and heals the severed hand of the boy standing next to him. When the body is eventually recovered, it has been rejoined to the head, as in the memorable case of St Edmund of East Anglia.173 There are multiple hagiographic allusions embedded here, firstly to the legend about the centurian Longinus, whose eyes were opened by the blood that flowed down his spear from the pierced side of Christ. Closer at hand, though, is the legend of Þórir hundr, St Óláfr’s enemy, whose wounded arm is healed when it comes into contact with Óláfr’s blood, and who is among the first to declare his sanctity.174 Such complex embedding of Christian miracles suggests a hagiographer at work. The same might be said about Bróðir’s gruesome death, which can also be read in terms of hagiographic conventions: he is tied to a tree, where his intestines are slowly unwound until he dies. Both Hill and Frankis have argued that this is a punishment reserved for apostates and heretics, and which recalls the deaths of Judas and Herod.175 The saga’s concerns are no longer heroic at this point: this is the violence of divine retribution. The cosmic significance of such violence is drawn out by the visions of damnation that accompany the course of the battle. The Icelander Hrafn the Red is chased out to a river, as he flees, where he has a vision of hell:176 Ok þóttisk þar sjá helvíti í niðri, ok þótti honum djõflar vilja draga sik til. Hann mælti þá: ‘Runnit hefir hundr þinn, Pétr postoli, tysvar til Róms ok mundi renna it þriðja sinn, ef þú leyfðir’. Þá létu djõflar hann lausan, ok komsk hann þá yfir ána. [And he thought he saw hell in the depths and, it seemed to him, devils wishing to drag him to [them]. He said: ‘Your hound, Peter the apostle, has run twice to Rome, and would run a third time, if you would allow it’. Then the devils let him go, and he managed to cross the river.]

At the same time, in Iceland, a priest has a similar experience: ‘At Þváttá sýndisk prestinum á föstudaginn langa sjávardjúp hjá altárinu, ok sá þar í ógnir margar’ (‘At Þváttá on Good Friday the priest was shown the deep of the sea by the altar,

173 174

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Lönnroth, Njáls saga, pp. 232–3; William Sayers, ‘Clontarf, and the Irish Destinies of Sigurðr Digri, Earl of Orkney, and Þorsteinn Síðu-Hallsson’, Scandinavian Studies 63 (1991), 171–3, 181. Njáls saga, p. 453; Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. Walter Skeat, 2 vols. Early English Text Society os 76, 82, 94, 114 (London: Early English Text Society, 1881–1900), II, 327–8. Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, III, 387. On Bróðir, see further John M. Hill, ‘The Evisceration of Bróðir in Njáls saga’, Traditio 37 (1981), 437–44 and John Frankis, ‘From Saint’s Life to Saga: The Fatal Walk of Alfred Ætheling, Saint Amphibalus and the Viking Bróðir’, Saga-Book 25 (1999), 121–37. A similar punishment is meted out to Ásbjõrn in Orms þáttr Stórólfssonar, in Harðar saga, p. 410. In Torture and Brutality, Tracy argues that this violence is pinned on the Irish as the ‘foreign other’ (p. 117), but this depends on the view that the Irish were ‘not perceived as Christian’ (p. 124), which is hardly true of Brian. Njáls saga, p. 452.

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint and [he] saw in it many terrible things’).177 This refers us back to the beginning of the conversion narrative and Þangbrandr’s first convert, Hallr of Síða. The word sjávardjúp (‘deep of the sea’) has very specific connotations: in the Old Icelandic Homily Book, the homilist describes how God led the Israelites out of Egypt, and drowned their enemies in sævardjúp (‘the deep of the sea’). He explains that we imitate this when we turn from our sins ‘svá at þeir søkkvi í helvítis djúp’ (‘so that they sink into the depths of hell’).178 At the site of Hallr’s baptism, the sacrament by which one is washed clear of sin (hence the name Þváttá: ‘washing-river’), we are reminded of the reality of damnation. There are two further parallels: in Agathu saga, the pagan persecutor Kvincianus is cast into ‘djúp árinnar’ (‘the deep of the river’), where men hear ‘djõfulliga blistran með ópi ok gný’ (‘devilish whistling with cries and uproar’). In Nikolaus saga, the young Nicholas has a vision of a stagnant pool of dark water standing next to a large and beautifully decorated altar. St Michael comes to interpret this for him: ‘Stõðuvatn fyrir útan portit svart ok illa daunat merkir stõðugan helvítis ófagnað fráskilan Guðs húsi’ (‘The dark and evil-smelling pool of still water outside the gate signifies the constant sorrow of hell, separated from God’s house’).179 Both visions recall Þangbrandr’s narrow escape from being swallowed up into the mouth of hell. Clontarf violently juxtaposes sanctity and redemption with sin and damnation; it is as if the events of Hõskuldr’s death are replayed in moral technicolour in a world of divine absolutes. The violence of this battle is no mere continuation of the saga’s heroics: it is a new vision of divine judgement and retribution. In Njáls saga, the Christian mission opens up new moral vistas: all human activity now unfolds between the moral poles of salvation and damnation, between the gates of heaven and hell. The saga makes use of hagiography to create an eschatological framework, to find ways of signifying a reality that is unseen, eternal, which lies beyond the usual scope of saga narrative. Christianity is not, as is sometimes argued, opposed to violence and feuding in the saga; but it does change the meaning of such things. Earthly events and human violence become ‘signs’ of salvation or damnation, as the saga author provides glimpses of the world beyond this one through the battles of Þangbrandr’s mission, through salvific acts of self-sacrifice, and through the terrifying visions of hell at the battle of Clontarf. This battle, fought on Good Friday, comes closest to re-enacting the cosmic battle between Christ and the devil, with its final triumph over death and sin. Significantly, though, the saga does not end here. Rather, it ends when the last burner left alive, Flosi, sets out to sea in a leaking ship, which he declares ‘œrit gott gõmlum ok feigum’ (‘good enough for old man close to death’). In this haunting evocation of peregrinatio, the saga leaves us with a final image of the inevitable uncertainty of one’s destination.

Njáls saga, p. 459. Homiliu-bók, p. 26; Stjórn, pp. 287–8, 437. 179 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 6, 12–13, II, 88–9. 177

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The realms of the dead In Njáls saga, the feuds and violence of the saga world take on new meanings in the context of Christian eschatology. In Eyrbyggja saga, too, the Christian missions bring with them new ideas about the afterlife and the plight of the dead. Tentatively dated to c. 1270, Eyrbyggja saga, like Vatnsdœla saga, was included in the Vatnshyrna compilation.180 Unlike the two sagas discussed so far, it deals rather concisely with the events of the Christian missions, in what McTurk notes is the one of the shortest chapters in the saga.181 We are told that Gizurr and Hjalti bring Christianity to Iceland, but that Snorri goði is most zealous in spreading it among the people from the western fjords.182 No other missionaries or accompanying priests are mentioned by name, so that the Icelandic chieftains play the key role in the conversion. Snorri goði and Víga-Stýrr build churches on their farms, and the pragmatics behind this are noted: ‘Þat var fyrirheit kennimanna, at maðr skyldi jafnmõrgum mõnnum eiga heimilt rúm í himnaríki, sem standa mætti í kirkju þeiri, er hann léti gera’ (‘It was the promise of clerics, that a man would have a right to space for as many people in the kingdom of heaven as could stand in the church he had built’).183 This asserts the continuity of socio-political power and charges the chieftains with responsibility for the salvation of their congregations. We are also told, however, that there are not enough priests to serve in these churches, which has consequences for the burial of the dead. This chapter is immediately followed by a generic shift into ‘the sphere of the marvellous and the uncanny’.184 The same summer that Christianity is made law, a ship arrives from Dublin, bringing the Hebridean Christian Þórgunna, who owns an expensive set of English sheets. Snorri’s sister, Þuríðr, is covetous of these and invites her to stay at Fróðá. During haymaking in the autumn, there is a sudden darkness at midday, followed by a shower of blood, which dries up quickly except on Þórgunna’s hay. Þórgunna takes to bed and dies, after warning Þuríðr’s husband, Þóroddr, to burn the bedclothes, but he is persuaded by Þuríðr to desist. As requested by Þórgunna, her body is transported to Skálaholt, where there are priests to sing the office of the dead; during the journey, Þórgunna gets up from her shroud stark-naked to serve her corpse-bearers food. Upon their return to Fróðá a ‘moon of fate’ (‘urðarmáni’) appears on the wall and circles the room in the opposite direction to the sun. The hauntings then begin: Þóroddr is drowned at sea with his crew, while other 180

181 182 183 184

Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Introduction’, in Gísli Sursson’s Saga and the Saga of the People of Eyri, trans. Martin S. Regal and Judy Quinn (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. viii, xli; the date is discussed at length in Eyrbyggja saga: The Vellum Tradition, ed. Forrest S. Scott, Series Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, A, 18 (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 2003), pp. 19–27. Rory McTurk, ‘Approaches to the Structure of Eyrbyggja saga’, in Sagnaskemmtun, ed. Rudolf Simek et al., p. 227. Eyrbyggja saga, p. 136; Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 36. Eyrbyggja saga, pp. xvi–xvii; Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Introduction’, p. xlii. Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Introduction’, p. xxiv.

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint people die of disease. On the day of Þóroddr’s drowning, a seal’s head comes up through the fireplace to stare fixedly at Þórgunna’s sheets. When the funeral feast is held, the drowned men turn up, cold and dripping wet, to sit round the fire in the living room. After the funeral, those who have died of disease turn up too, and the living are forced out. Meanwhile, the seal-headed creature (or perhaps another) is discovered in the storehouse, where it has been consuming the stores of dried fish. Þuríðr’s son, Kjartan, in consultation with Snorri goði, eventually brings the hauntings to an end. He burns the sheets and prosecutes the dead in a ‘duradómr’ (‘door-court’), while a priest holds services, hears confessions, and carries relics and holy water around the farm. Although this episode (known as the ‘Fróðárundr’, ‘the Fróðá marvels’) is structurally self-contained, it has some important links with the chapter on Iceland’s conversion. This chapter mentions that Þóroddr built a church on his farm at Fróðá, and this church plays a role in the hauntings that follow: we are told that Þórgunna goes there regularly to pray, and that the men who die of illness are buried there. There is, however, no priest to serve the church ‘því at þeir váru fáir á Íslandi í þann tíma’ (‘because they were few in Iceland at that time’). The marvels take place in the very first year of the conversion, at a time of transition from one system of beliefs to another. The saga author notes that, although the events take place over Advent, a time of fasting second only to Lent, this discipline is not yet observed: ‘Þó var þann tíma eigi fastat á Íslandi’ (‘Yet at that time no-one fasted in Iceland’). Despite the conversion, we are told, pagan beliefs linger on: ‘Þá var enn lítt af numin forneskjan, þó at menn væri skírðir ok kristnir at kalla’ (‘The old beliefs were still far from abolished then, although people were baptised and Christian by name’).185 There is a clear sense of ‘in-between-ness’ here, of what Tulinius calls ‘ontological uncertainty’ (p. 27). Indeed, the saga author exploits precisely this gap when Þórgunna foresees the significance of Skálaholt, which lies in the future for her, but in the past for the Christian audience, who knows that it became the site of Iceland’s first episcopal see.186 Although Böldl has suggested that the Christian aspects of this story are merely ‘akzidentiell’ (‘superficial’), the setting suggests otherwise: the marvels move beyond the domain of regional politics and power struggles to explore Christian conversion within the symbolic domain of belief and mentality.187 One line of approach is to interpret the marvels as a ‘cautionary tale’ in which Þuríðr, who is sometimes compared to the biblical Eve, is punished for her vanity: after the conversion, this is not just a social problem, but also

Eyrbyggja saga, pp. 147–8. Eyrbyggja saga, p. 141. 187 Klaus Böldl, Eigi einhamr: Beiträge zum Weltbild der Eyrbyggja und anderer Isländersagas, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde 48 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2005), p. 130; see also Knut Odner, ‘Þórgunna’s testament: a myth for moral contemplation and social apathy’, in From Sagas to Society: Comparative Approaches to Early Iceland, ed. Gísli Pálsson (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik Press, 1992), p. 133. 185 186

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The Saint and the Saga Hero a Christian sin.188 Vésteinn Ólason has suggested that one of the catalysts for the marvels may be Þuríðr’s extra-marital affair with Bjõrn Breiðvíkingakappi (‘champion of Breiðavík’), who is probably the father of Þuríðr’s son Kjartan: this affair is both a cause of social disorder within the community and against the new laws of the Church.189 It may be relevant in this respect that Þórgunna herself is elsewhere associated with illicit sexuality: in Eiríks saga rauða, she is involved in an extra-marital affair with Leifr Eiríksson, as a result of which she falls pregnant.190 The way in which Þórgunna’s situation mirrors Þuríðr’s is striking, and it may explain her keen interest in Kjartan, although it is also possible to read this as erotic, like the earlier rivalry between Geirríðr and Katla over the young Gunnlaugr Þorbjarnarson. Scott has even suggested that the shower of blood could be interpreted as menstrual, so that the marvels express a wider threat of female sexuality as socially disruptive.191 Yet to read the episode as divine punishment for Þuríðr’s loose morals seems reductive, especially since she is one of the few to survive the hauntings and her son, Kjartan, plays an important part in bringing them to an end. Arguably, this confirms his heroic stature and, by implication, Bjõrn’s paternity; this seems to complicate an explicit Christian moral on extra-marital liaisons. Clearly this is no straightforward ‘cautionary tale’; it may be more helpful to think of it as staging the radical upheaval of ideas about the dead that took place in the wake of Christian conversion. In doing so, it draws on a complex mix of popular ideas about the undead and learned (especially native) hagiography, in which ghost stories became increasingly popular from the twelfth century on.192 Although ghosts may seem out of place in a saint’s life, they played 188 189 190

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McCreesh, ‘Structural Patterns’, 274–5; Kjartan G. Óttósson, Fróðarundur í Eyrbyggju (Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfa Menningarsjóðs, 1983), pp. 55–6. Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Nokkrar athugasemdir um Eyrbyggja sögu’, Skírnir 145 (1971), 23–4; ‘Introduction’, pp. xxxvi–xxxviii. Hilda R. Ellis Davidson, ‘The Restless Dead: An Icelandic Ghost Story’, in The Folklore of Ghosts, ed. Hilda R. Ellis Davidson and William M. S. Russell (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991), p. 157. This parallel is also noted by Kirsi Kanerva, ‘The Role of the Dead in Medieval Iceland: A Case Study of Eyrbyggja saga’, Collegium Medievale 24 (2011), pp. 34–6. Forrest S. Scott, ‘The Woman who Knows: Female Characters of Eyrbyggja Saga’, in Cold Counsel: Women in Old Norse Literature and Mythology, ed. Sarah Anderson and Karen Swenson (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 235. On the ‘undead’, see Hilda R. Ellis Davidson, The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), pp. 87–95; Thomas DuBois, Nordic Religions in the Viking Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 77–8; Ármann Jakobsson, ‘Vampires and Watchmen: Categorizing the Mediaeval Icelandic Undead’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 101 (2011), 281–300. On ghost stories in medieval Christian writings, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Andrew Joynes, ‘Introduction’, in Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels and Prodigies, ed. Andrew Joynes (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), pp. 3–7; and John D. Martin, ‘Law and the (Un)dead: Medieval Models for Understanding the Hauntings in Eyrbyggja

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint an important part in the teaching of the medieval Church on death and the afterlife: the medieval ghost was as important a part of the ‘ordered spiritual world’ as saints, angels and demons.193 The Norse translation of Gregory’s Dialogues contains several ghost stories of this kind. In book II, Gregory tells us about two nuns whom St Benedict excommunicates; once dead and buried, their corpses get up and leave the church whenever mass is said. Likewise, the corpse of a boy who died without Benedict’s blessing is repeatedly thrown out of its grave; only when Benedict lifts his interdictions are the dead able to rest in peace.194 The laws of the Church apply as rigorously in the next life as in this one: as Bowyer comments, ghosts ‘are part of the world order and they obey the rules’.195 Many other stories are told in book IV of the Dialogues about the dangers of dying in mortal sin, although unfortunately this section is missing from the Norse translation. One dead sinner is seen in a vision bound and dragged from his grave by devils; the next day, his corpse is found lying outside the churchyard. Another sinner is heard crying ‘I burn, I burn’ from his grave and, when it is opened, only his clothes are found.196 Like the men and women who die of disease in Eyrbyggja saga, these dead are buried in the church, but their sin prevents them from resting quietly and the physical removal of their bodies signifies their damnation. Salvation and damnation are the central concerns of the ghost stories found in hagiography: they confirm the reality of the Christian afterlife, and set out the right relationship between the living and the dead. The same concerns can be seen in the ghost stories found in the native Icelandic saints’ lives, especially those from the northern diocese. Jóns saga helga has a two-part story about the anchoress Hildr which, like Eyrbyggja saga, combines the appearance of mysterious animals with the reanimation of the dead. In the first part, large mice or óvættir (‘evil spirits’) invade Hildr’s cell; like the ox-tailed creature in the storehouse, they manage to get in despite all practical measures taken against them.197 They are finally banished by an appearance from St Jón, who sprinkles Hildr’s cell with consecrated water. In the second part, an old woman called Guðrún is keeping watch over some corpses in the church at night, when one sits up and makes as if to grab her. Hildr watches through the window of her cell: ‘Henni sýndisk kirkjan õll full af draugum hræðiligum ok skuggum, ok sóttu allar þessar sjónhverfingar at Guðrúnu’ (‘It seemed to her that the whole church was full of terrifying ghosts and shadows, and all these visual illusions attacked Guðrún’).198 She tries to turn away, but, in a nightmarish paralysis,

193 194

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saga’, Saga-Book 29 (2004–5), 67–82. Richard A. Bowyer, ‘The Role of the Ghost Story in Mediaeval Christianity’, in The Folklore of Ghosts, pp. 177–92; Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, p. 171. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 171–2, 216. Bowyer, ‘The Role of the Ghost Story’, p. 190. Gregory the Great, Dialogues, IV. 53–4, ed. Odo John Zimmerman, Fathers of the Church 39 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1959), pp. 263–4. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 249–9. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 249–52.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero finds that she can neither move nor close her eyes. Fortunately, St Jón appears in full episcopal vestments with a bishop’s staff in his hand; upon his arrival, some of the evil ghosts sink through the floor and the others drift out ‘sem inn versti reykr’ (‘like the worst smoke’). These ghosts, unlike those in Eyrbyggja saga, are visual illusions, but they place the living at serious risk, and ecclesiastical ritual is necessary to banish them. The mice are explicitly interpreted as ‘fjándans freistni’ (‘the temptation of the devil’), a threat to Hildr’s soul, as well as to her physical well-being. The miracle section of Jóns saga contains another story that combines mysterious animals with the importance of saying prayers for the dead. It is set over Christmas and features a poor single mother, Þorfinna, who provides for her family by begging. On the sixth day of Christmas, Þorfinna loses her ability to speak and sits at home with ‘móðr mikill í hug hennar’ (‘great anger in her heart’). The weather is too bad to go out and she fears that she will not make it to the service for Epiphany.199 As she slumbers in her chair, weakness comes over her and she has a terrifying vision: ‘Þá þóttisk hon sjá þar í húsinu dýr nõkkut mikit, svart ok ógurligt. [. . .] Þat dregsk at henni’ (‘She thought that she saw there in the house quite a large animal, black and ugly. [. . .] It drew close to her’). She prays for help and, at the Virgin Mary’s intervention, the apparition sinks through the floor. St Martin then appears and makes the sign of the cross to prevent it from coming back. Finally, St Þorlákr makes an appearance to explain the meaning of these events: ‘Þú vanðisk lítt at syngja fyrir mat þinn ok minntisk eigi framliðinna manna sem þú skyldir, er eigi verða ófegnari bœnum en þú fœzla’ (‘You have not troubled to sing over your food and have not remembered the dead as you ought, who are no less eager for prayers than you for food’).200 There is a fascinating mix of psychology, morality and allegory here: the apparition can be read as a manifestation of Þorfinna’s carefully drawn mental state (her passionate anger), but is also explicitly connected to her imperfect observance of basic Christian rituals. Finally, Þorfinna’s situation can be read as an allegory for the desperate plight of the dead: her hunger becomes a figure for the ‘hunger’ of the dead for prayer, and her muteness for their complete dependence on the living to pray for them. One other story in Jóns saga helga is worth mentioning here, as it concerns the corpse of St Jón himself. The first time the corpse-bearers try to lift it for burial, they find it too heavy to move: ‘Líkit varð svá þungt at þeir máttu engan veg hrœra er til váru settir út at bera’ (‘The body became so heavy that those who were appointed to carry it out were not in any way able to move it’).201 They then realise that they have forgotten to put the episcopal ring on the saint’s finger; once they have done this, the same men are able to move the corpse without any trouble. As Foote comments in the footnote to his edition, it is quite common to have difficulties with moving the bodies of saints: the Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 300. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 301. 201 Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 241–2. 199

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint body of St Martin is also too heavy to move on the first attempt, because the wrong day has been chosen for his translation. The same is true of St Stephen and of St Óláfr.202 Since the saint’s body is a conduit of divine power, it cannot be moved without permission: inability to move it signals that the saint’s will has in some way been neglected or infringed. Most obviously parallel to Eyrbyggja saga is the story of Selkolla (‘Seal-head’) in sagas and poetry about Bishop Guðmundr Arason, a story which combines illicit sexuality with the imperfect observation of Christian rites.203 A couple is charged with carrying a baby to baptism; on the way, they put it to one side to enjoy some casual sex. When they return to the baby, they find that it is ‘blátt, dautt ok ferligt’ (‘black, dead and monstrous’) and they abandon it in horror.204 Soon afterwards, it reappears as a woman, sometimes with the head of a seal. It seduces the local farmer, Dálkr, and takes over his farm, so that people are afraid even to go across to the outhouses. Like the seal head in Eyrbyggja saga, Selkolla comes up and down through the ground, day or night, both inside and outside the house. This evil spreads through the district like a contagious disease. In Arngrímr Brandsson’s version of the saga, he describes how ‘Sumir lágu blindir, sumir beinbrotnir, aðrir með öllu dauðir, svá at öll sú heraðsbyggð var uppnæm til auðnar, áðr læknir kom’ (‘Some lay blind, some broken-boned, others stone-dead, so that the whole district was laid to waste, before the healer came’).205 When Guðmundr comes to stay on Dálkr’s farm, Selkolla appears as a serving woman, and makes to pull off his hose; like Óláfr Tryggvason (p. 65), Guðmundr strikes her on the head, forcing her to sink back through the ground. He then travels round the district, setting up crosses and sprinkling them with consecrated water. Selkolla makes a last attempt to come up by a stream, but is sent straight back down again. Her final appearance is on the seashore, when some men set out to sea with Guðmundr’s blessing; they are caught in a storm and close to drowning, when they notice a strange and unexplained object on board: a hrossknúta (‘horse’s joint’) or beinknúta (‘knuckle-bone’).206 They throw it overbroad and see Selkolla wading to land from the place where it fell. Whatever the origins of this story, its moral significance is clearly drawn out: Arngrímr states explicitly that Selkolla is an evil spirit who has taken possession of the body of an unbaptised child. She gains power through her sexuality, which spreads like a pestilence, and can only be overcome by the celibate bishop and saint. Her strong connection to water (the seal, the stream and the sea) suggests the unboundedness and disorder of sin; it stands in contrast to the cleansing waters of baptism to which the baby should have been carried, and Heilagra manna søgur, I, 606, II, 305; Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, III, 209. Selkolla is mentioned in Guðmundar saga byskups in Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 502, and her story is told in full in Biskupa sögur, I (1858–78), 604–8 and Saga Guðmundar Arasonar eptir Arngrím ábóta in Biskupa sögur (1858–78), II, 77–8, 80–2, where it is accompanied by Einarr Gilsson’s Selkolluvísur. 204 Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 605; II, 78. 205 Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 605–6, II, 78. 206 Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 608; II, 81–2. 202

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The Saint and the Saga Hero the consecrated water of which Bishop Guðmundr makes use. The hauntings, then, are a consequence of the failure to administer baptism and of sexuality that runs counter to the laws of the Church.207 The devastation caused by the hauntings becomes in Arngrímr’s redaction of the saga an allegory of sin and damnation: Selkolla spreads blindness, injury and death, and threatens death by drowning. Only Bishop Guðmundr, the ‘healer’, can bring salvation to the Icelanders: he reconsecrates the land with crosses and holy water, and guides the sailors safely through the storm to land. These ghost stories engage in lively and sometimes menacing ways with the right relationship between the living and the dead. The same anxieties are manifest in the Fróðá hauntings, perhaps most obviously in Þórgunna’s case, since her journey to Skálaholt resembles in some respects the translation of a saint. As in the stories about Martin and Jón, her posthumous action is a response to the infringement of her will: she redresses the lack of hospitality shown to her corpse-bearers, which threatens to slow their progress towards the church at Skálaholt. As Kanerva and Sayers have both pointed out, Þórgunna’s role here is that of ‘moral arbiter’.208 The emphasis on her complete nakedness, however, suggests that more may be at stake than just the negligence of her hosts on the journey. It contrasts tellingly with her previous love of fine clothes, a punishment that fits the sin. Schmitt notes that the spirits of the saved are always clothed, whereas souls in hell and purgatory are naked.209 It looks as if Þórgunna’s salvation may depend on a proper Christian burial. Þórgunna’s desire to be buried at Skálaholt can be compared with two other stories, which also draw on hagiographic models. In Laxdœla saga, Gestr Oddleifsson asks to be buried at Helgafell, anticipating its future importance as a Christian foundation, just as Þórgunna does in the case of Skálaholt. Although Breiðafjõrðr is frozen over and cannot initially be crossed, a strong gale clears the ice for just long enough for Gestr’s corpse to be transported over; this echoes a miracle in Þórláks saga helga in which St Þorlákr clears the ice from Hvítá just long enough for a ferry of almsfolk to get to Skálaholt.210 In Heiðarvíga saga, there is a colourful story about what happens when Víga-Stýrr’s body is transported to church: at the farm where his corpse-bearers stop for the night, he sits up and recites a verse, bringing madness and death to his host’s daughter, who ill-advisedly insisted upon seeing him. This looks like a parody of a common motif in hagiography, in which an unbeliever is punished for disbelieving in the incorruptibility of a saint.211 After a long delay caused by the extreme 207 208

209 210 211

Kanerva, ‘The Role of the Dead’, pp. 38–9; Ciklamini, ‘Folklore and Hagiography’, p. 174. Kanerva, ‘The Role of the Dead’, p. 40; William Sayers, ‘The Alien and Alienated as Unquiet Dead in the Sagas of Icelanders’, in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 248. Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, pp. 202–4. Laxdœla saga, pp. 196–7; Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 140. Heiðarvíga saga, in Borgfirðinga sõgur, pp. 233–4; compare the stories of unbelievers

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint heaviness of Víga-Stýrr’s body, he is eventually laid to rest in church. Both of these stories come from sagas that the author of Eyrbyggja saga may well have known: Þórgunna combines Gestr’s foresight and desire for salvation with the aura of menace that is emitted by the dead body of Víga-Stýrr.212 While Þórgunna’s successful burial at Skálaholt provides some indication that she is at rest, the same cannot be said of the dead at Fróðá. Although the men and women who die of disease are buried in the churchyard, there is no priest to give them a proper Christian burial, and they leave their graves much like the sinners thrown out in Gregory’s Dialogues. Similarly, the men that drown are denied a Christian burial, for their bodies are never found; instead, their ghosts come to the house, wet and cold, to garner what warmth they can from the fire. There is a parallel in Laxdœla saga, when Guðrún sees the drowned Þorkell and his men dripping wet outside the churchyard on Maundy Thursday: a terrifying image of exclusion from Christian salvation (p. 235).213 In folkloric terms, these dead are ‘placeless’ or ‘without status’: they have been denied the rites that would ensure them successful admission to the afterlife and are therefore caught in a permanent state of transition between this world and the next.214 As the dead in Eyrbyggja saga squabble between themselves and huddle round the fire, depriving the household members of warmth and food, the full horror of their plight is forced upon the attention of the living. At the heart of this episode, then, is the plight of those living (or dying) in the earliest years of Christianity, a plight also vividly evoked in Eiríks saga rauða, which contains perhaps the closest parallel to the mass hauntings in Eyrbyggja saga. Here too the hauntings take place in winter, shortly after the conversion, but they happen on a farm where there is no church, let alone a priest. Rather than assembling inside the hall, these dead block the doorway from the outside. Their leader carries a whip in his hand and closely resembles a devil.215 The moral of the story is delivered by the ghost of Þorsteinn Eiríksson, who like Þórgunna, is intensely concerned for his salvation: ‘Guð vill, at þessi stund sé mér gefin til leyfis ok umbótar míns ráðs’ (‘God wills that this time be granted to me as leave and for the amendment of my lot’).216 Guðríðr sees that he ‘felldi tár’ (‘dropped tears’), perhaps suggesting that he has returned in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, pp. 330–1; Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 227 (p. 6). Eyrbyggja saga, pp. xlvi–xlvii, 180. 213 Laxdœla saga, pp. 222–3. 214 Juha Pentikäinen, ‘The Dead without Status’, in Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies, ed. Reimund Kvideland, Henning K. Sehmsdorf and Elizabeth Simpson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 128–34; Terry Gunnell, ‘An Invasion of Foreign Bodies: Legends of Washed Up Corpses in Iceland’, in Eyðvinur: heiðursrit til Eyðun Andreassen, ed. Malan Marnersdóttir, Jens Cramer and Arnfinnur Johansen (Tórshav: Føroya fróðskaparfelag, 2005), pp. 70–9. 215 DuBois, Nordic Religions, p. 86; the man is Þorsteinn Eiríksson in Hauksbók and (more plausibly) the pagan overseer Garðarr in Skálholtsbók, AM 557 4to. 216 Eiríks saga rauða, p. 215. Contrast Grœnlendinga saga (pp. 259–60), where Þorsteinn returns from heaven to reassure Guðríðr that he has come til góðra hvíldarstaða (‘to good places of rest’). 212

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The Saint and the Saga Hero from Purgatory. He warns her that Christian practices are not being properly observed: ‘Er þat engi háttr, sem hér hefir verit á Grœnlandi, síðan kristni kom hér, at setja menn niðr í óvígða mold við litla yfirsõngva’ (‘It is no [good] custom, which has been practised here in Greenland, since Christianity came here, to bury people in unconsecrated earth with little ceremony’).217 At the end of this chapter, the pagan dead are cremated and the Christians taken to the nearest church. This easy distinction between pagan and Christian dead is notably absent in Eyrbyggja saga. The most mysterious aspect of the story in Eyrbyggja saga is the seal-headed creature, who materialises only partially and whose nature remains unexplained. Seals do figure occasionally in native hagiography, but as a source of food rather than as ghosts.218 The seal is sometimes interpreted as Þórgunna’s fylgja: Kanerva suggests that the parallel with Selkolla establishes a connection between seals and illicit sexuality, and there is indeed a connection between seals, selkies and Hebrideans.219 Alternatively, the seal can be read as a demonic apparition: it comes up through the fireplace, which Schmitt describes as the gateway to hell, and corresponds to the threatening animals in other saints’ lives.220 Since it attacks the stores of dried fish, it is perhaps conjured up by the Icelanders’ failure to fast over Advent, just as the apparition in Jóns saga helga is conjured up by Þorfinna’s failure to pray over her food. Glámr’s refusal to fast over Advent in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar also leads to his death at the hands of an unidentified demonic creature.221 The most interesting associations of the seal, however, come from folk tradition: Lúdvík Kristjánsson notes an Icelandic tradition that seals are the souls of Pharoah’s soldiers who died in the Red Sea.222 There are a number of variations on this theme around the North Sea area: seals are conceptualised as fallen angels who fell into the sea rather than on land, the souls of the lost awaiting judgement, suicides who drowned themselves in the sea, or the souls of those driven from the land because of their sin.223 This 217

218 219

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Eiríks saga rauða, p. 216. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 96, 118–19. Kanerva, ‘The Role of the Dead’, pp. 31, 38–9. For the view that the seal is Þórgunna’s fylgja, see Odner, ‘Þórgunna’s testament’, p. 138 and Böldl, Eigi einhamr, p. 129. For the connection between seals and Hebrideans, see Laxdœla saga, p. 41 and Sayers, ‘The Alien and the Alienated’, p. 246. Kjartan G. Ottósson, Fróðarundur, pp. 85–94; Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Introduction’, p. xxxvi. Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages (p. 181) comments that the fireplace ‘recalls the fire of the punishment after death’. In Guðmundar saga, the souls of the dead appear as dogs; see Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 444 (and compare the apparition of the devil as a dog in the next chapter, p. 446). Grettis saga, pp. 111–12; Kjartan Ottósson also notes the significance of the Christmas fast in Fróðarundur, p. 105. Quoted in Niels Einarsson, ‘Of Seals and Souls: Changes in the Position of Seals in the World View of Icelandic Small-Scale Fishermen’, Maritime Anthropological Studies (MAST) 3 (1990), 37. Mark Turner, ‘The Origins of Selkies’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (2004), 90–115; David Thomson, The People of the Sea (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996), p. 267; Ernest Marwick, The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland (London: Batsford, 1975), p. 113;

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint pervasive connection with drowning, sin and damnation works well in the context of Eyrbyggja saga: like the blood rain and the urðarmáni (‘moon of fate’) on the wall, the seal is a sign that demands the urgent attention of the living.224 The Fróðá marvels dramatise the most far-reaching change brought by the Christian missionaries: the change to beliefs about life after death. Whereas the pagan dead live on within the landscape of this world, the newly Christian dead can count on no such comfortable resting-place: when Þorsteinn þorskabítr (‘cod-biter’) drowns, he is seen entering the mountain on Helgafell and joining his ancestors on the seat of honour, but the dead from Fróðá bicker, wet and muddy, without social status, permanently stranded between worlds.225 They are no longer part of the old order, and yet they do not belong to the new; they are barred from the old pagan dwelling places, and yet are not permitted to rest quietly in the Christian churchyard. When they do finally leave the farmhouse, we are not told where they are going, only that they are reluctant to go: ‘Fannsk þat á hvers orðum, at nauðigr losnaði’ (‘It was apparent from the words of each one, that they departed against their will’). The final comment comes from Þóroddr, who, like the other ghosts, speaks partly in verse: ‘Fátt hygg ek hér friða, enda flýjum nú allir’ (‘I think there is little peace here, and let us all now flee’).226 The reluctance to leave and Þóroddr’s use of the verb flýja (‘to flee’) suggests a possible reclassification of the ghosts as evil spirits, but they do not sink through the floor, like the visual illusions in Jóns saga helga or Selkolla in the sagas of Guðmundr. At the end of the story, neither their ontological status nor their destination has been clarified; no final solution is offered to this problem. Most striking about this story, however, is how the presence of the ghosts is related to the lingering of pagan beliefs: the marvels are as much a psychological drama in the minds of the living as an eschatological drama about the plight of the dead. When the drowned men first arrive at Fróðá, the nominally Christian household assumes that they have been successfully admitted to the pagan afterlife: ‘Menn þõgnuðu vel Þóroddi, því at þetta þótti góðr fyrirburðr, því at þá hõfðu menn þat fyrir satt, at þá væri mõnnum vel fagnat at Ránar, ef sædauðir menn vitjuðu erfis síns’ (‘People greeted Þóroddr warmly, because this was thought a good omen, because people considered it true that, if drowned men came to their own funeral feast, they must have been warmly welcomed by Rán’).227 It is only when the ghosts outstay their welcome that it becomes evident this belief is false. Moreover, when the ghosts do finally leave, it is made clear that they stayed only for as long as the living allowed them: ‘Setit er nú, meðan sætt er’ (‘We sat as long as we were able to sit’), ‘Verit er nú, meðan

224 225 226 227

Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf (eds), Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1991), p. 528. For the blood-rain and the ‘moon of fate’, see Kjartan Ottósson, Fróðárundur, pp. 58–64, 73–7; Böldl, Eigi einhamr, pp. 127–8. Eyrbyggja saga, pp. 19, 148–9; McCreesh, ‘Structural Patterns’, pp. 273–4. Eyrbyggja saga, p. 152. Eyrbyggja saga, p. 148.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero vært er’ (‘We stayed for as long as we were able to stay’).228 The hauntings are enabled only by the continued pagan beliefs of the living: the ghosts are both real corporeal presences and, at the same time, a trick of the mind. In this reading, the Fróðá marvels stage a ‘collision’ between local beliefs and Christian teaching, the resistance to entering into a ‘new story’ that radically redraws the lines between the living and the dead. The ghosts embody this resistance, this refusal to leave, like Radbod stepping back from the font. At the same time, they have been enfolded within a greater story through their placement within the Christian year. Schmitt and others have noted that hauntings often take place over Christmas, at the boundary of the year, or at times like All Souls, when Christians remember the dead.229 Candlemas, when the Fróðá ghosts are banished, is the feast of the purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the presentation of Christ at the temple. It is known as the festival of lights, when candles were blessed and distributed to the congregation in memory of Simeon’s prophecy in the Nunc Dimittis (‘a light to lighten the Gentiles’). It was celebrated in the Middle Ages by a procession that went through the cemetery and up to the door of the church; in Scandinavia, it was a traditional day to bury the dead.230 In the Old Icelandic Homily Book, the sermon for Candlemas connects the entry into the temple with the Christian’s entry into eternal life: ‘Innganga Maríu í kirkju með fórnum merkir himinríkis inngõngu réttlátra manna með góðum verkum’ (‘Mary’s entry into the church with offerings signifies the entry of righteous people into the kingdom of heaven with good works’).231 It ends with a plea that we ‘lõðum hann með miskunnarverkum til musteris hjarta várs, ok tõkum við honum við hõndum réttrar trú, at hann leiði oss inn í musteri dýrðar sinnar’ (‘invite him with works of mercy into the temple of our hearts, and grasp hold of him with true faith, so that he may lead us into the temple of his glory’). Candlemas dramatises Christ’s entry into the human heart, and the Christian’s entry into heaven: the banishment of the ghosts from Fróðá becomes part of this same story, as the priest makes use of consecrated water and relics, and the sacraments of confession and the mass. The holy water and relics treat the ghosts as demonic apparitions that require exorcism; confession and mass treat them as sin and unbelief in the hearts and minds of the living. The liturgical setting infuses this drama of the living and the dead with the full symbolism of the story of Christian salvation: the light of Christ dispels the darkness of sin, death and damnation that hangs over the newly converted Icelanders. Eyrbyggja saga, p. 152. On liturgical time in ghost stories, see Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, pp. 172–6. On Christmas hauntings in folktales and sagas, see Terry Gunnell, ‘The Coming of the Christmas Visitors: Folk Legends Concerning the Attacks on Icelandic Farmhouses Made by Spirits at Christmas’, Northern Studies 38 (2004), 51–75. 230 M. F. Connell, ‘Candlemas’, in New Catholic Encyclopedia, III, 13–15; Hilding Johansson, ‘Maria’, in Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder fra vikingetid til reformationstid, vol. 11 (1966), 356; Homiliu-bók, pp. 82–6. 231 Homiliu-bók, pp. 82–3. 228 229

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The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint Yet the dead are not banished by Christian ritual and sacrament alone in this story, but also by the legal procedure of the door-court. The main role is played not by a priest, bishop or saint, but by Snorri goði and his nephew Kjartan. In this respect, the saga challenges the prevailing ghost stories found in the Icelandic saints’ lives. Both Tulinius and Kanerva have argued that Eyrbyggja saga has a ‘dialogic’ relationship to the story of Selkolla in sagas of Guðmundr: it takes issue with the view that only the representatives of the Church can exercise spiritual authority.232 While ghosts in hagiographic texts obey the laws of the Church, the ghosts in Eyrbyggja saga obey the laws of the land: they affirm the leading role of the Icelandic chieftain in spiritual and secular affairs.

Conclusion The ‘interference’ of hagiography is very visible in these three sagas, each of which engages with narratives about Christian mission in creative and distinctive ways. In Vatnsdœla saga, hagiographic narrative offers a way of creating continuity between the pagan past and the Christian present: the figure of the ‘noble heathen’ and the idea of the ‘good death’ become essential in establishing the political authority and Christian virtue of the leading family in Vatnsdalr. In Njáls saga, the extended narrative of Þangbrandr’s mission is used to signal the transition to a new moral and eschatological arena: the final conflicts are played out against the backdrop of heaven and hell, and human violence in this world becomes a terrifying image of divine retribution in the next. Finally, Eyrbyggja saga explores the cataclysmic upheaval that conversion to Christianity brings to beliefs about the dead and the afterlife; it enters directly into dialogue with some of the ghost stories that populate the native Icelandic saints’ lives. Although each saga focuses on a different aspect of mission and conversion, it is noticeable that they all share a central concern with salvation and damnation; they widen the scope of the ‘classical’ saga by integrating it into an eschatological framework, entering into the story of how human acts in this world will be rewarded or punished in the next. The focus, however, is less on the sanctity of missionary saints like Friðrekr than on the saintly character of noble heathens or new converts; this plays itself out most noticeably in the death scenes, where there are frequent allusions to recognised ‘signs’ of sanctity, if without a consensus of opinion as to how exactly these should be understood. This preoccupation with the eternal destination of saga characters is not something traditionally associated with saga narrative, but it tallies with the priorities of the medieval Church: according to Nedkvitne, ‘the central element of lay belief in Norse society consisted of doctrines about eternal life and salvation’.233 These three sagas engage with hagiographic and homiletic discourse in order to reflect on Torfi Tulinius, ‘Political Echoes: Reading Eyrbyggja saga in the Light of Contemporary Conflicts’, in Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World, ed. Judy Quinn et al., pp. 49–52; Kanerva, ‘The Role of the Dead’, pp. 38–9. 233 Nedkvitne, Lay Belief in Old Norse Society, p. 310. 232

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The Saint and the Saga Hero questions of merit and reward, crime and punishment, death and judgement; all matters of urgency for medieval Christians. In the next chapter, I look at how interaction with hagiography also paved the way for explorations of the interior life: sin, temptation and peregrinatio.

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N 5 n The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint Introduction The missionary saint is well represented in Icelandic literature, even if the saintliness of some of these figures proves to be somewhat questionable. Less well documented, perhaps, is the medieval interest in the desert saint, who also has a literary presence in the sagas. According to Íslendingabók and Landnámabók, Irish monks came to Iceland before the arrival of the Norsemen, seeking heremum in oceano (‘a desert in the ocean’): for them, Iceland was equivalent to the monastic desert in which the early Fathers of the Church chose to live out the biblical call to exile from one’s homeland for the love of God.1 Among the early settlers in Iceland, two are described as becoming einsetumenn (‘hermits’) in their old age: Jõrundr inn kristni (‘the Christian’) at Garðar and Ásólfr Konálsson at Hólmr. Like many Irish saints, Ásólfr provides for himself and his followers through miraculous catches of fish, and eventually settles in a kofi (‘hermit’s cell’), which later becomes the site of a church dedicated to Kolumkilla (‘Columba’). An understanding of Irish peregrinatio must lie behind this story, even if the writer is not entirely in sympathy with it.2 One of the earliest converts to Christianity, Máni inn kristni (‘the Christian’), also opts for the eremitic life: we are told that ‘hann hefir byggt svá sem einsetumaðr, því at svá sem hann var fjarlægr flestum mõnnum þann tíma í hugskotinu, svá vildi hann ok at líkamligri samvistu firrask alþýðu þys’ (‘he lived as a hermit, so that just as he was far from most people at that time in his mind, so also he desired to distance himself in physical interaction from the noise of the multitude’).3 The story of Máni is attributed to Gunnlaugr Leifsson from the monastery of Þingeyrar in the north of Iceland, and the eremitic life was well established in the northern diocese: sagas of Bishop Guðmundr mention two anchorites at Þingeyrar, Bjõrn and Úlfrún, and Jóns saga helga tells the story of the anchoress Hildr at Hólar. Like the desert saints, she steals away from her family ‘leyniliga’ (‘in secret’) and ‘leitar sér eyðistaðar’ (‘seeks a deserted place for herself’). She is eventually discovered in a landscape that strongly recalls that of the earliest ascetic saints: ‘Hon hafði þar þá gõrt sér eitt lítit skyggni af hellum, ok hafði 1

2 3

Islendingabók, p. 5; Landnámabók, pp. 31–2. Landnámabók, pp. 61–5; Clunies Ross, ‘“Saint” Ásólfr’, pp. 36, 38, 45–6. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 83–5.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero hon lesit sér mikil ber til fœzlu’ (‘She had made herself a little hiding place among the caves there, and gathered berries for her food’). She returns home and finally settles in a kofi (‘cell’) at the church at Hólar, opposite to which St Jón is later buried.4 This story, like those about Óláfr Tryggvason’s later life in Egypt and Syria (p. 63), shows both knowledge of and a keen interest in ascetic literature, which is also attested by later translations: the foundational narrative of Western asceticism, Antonius saga, was translated in the second half of the thirteenth century, alongside Jóns saga baptista, Vitae patrum, Páls saga eremita, Malcús saga and Maríu saga Egipzku. In this chapter, I look at how the lives of desert saints may have enriched the sagas of Icelanders through concepts of the wilderness: as a ‘setting for eschatological drama’, as a ‘site of contest with evil’ and finally as a ‘redemptive space’ for the cultivation of interiority.5 I explore this through three sagas of Icelanders which take place in the Icelandic or Greenlandic wilderness: Gísla saga Súrssonar (c. 1240–50), Flóamanna saga (c. 1290–1330) and Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss (c. 1350–80).6

Inner worlds Gísla saga Súrssonar is one of three sagas of Icelanders classified as ‘outlaw sagas’. It is extant in at least three distinct versions. Of these, the shorter version, found alongside other outlaw sagas in Eggertsbók (M), forms the basis of the standard edition, but the longer version (S) may well be more original and presents a subtly different picture of Gísli; both will be taken into account here.7 The saga tells the story of how Gísli is outlawed for the murder of his sister’s husband, an act undertaken in revenge for the murder of his wife’s brother: he is caught in a dense web of domestic and even, it has been suggested, incestuous relationships, very different from the hermit’s willed detachment from familial and worldly ties.8 Despite this, it is striking how many scholars 4

5 6

7

8

Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 244–7; Elliott, Roads to Paradise, pp. 91, 135. Adler, ‘Cultivating Wilderness’, pp. 11–26; Elliott, Roads to Paradise, pp. 42–3, 84. For the suggested dates of these sagas, see Gísla saga Súrssonar, in Vestfirðinga sõgur, ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson and Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk fornrit 6 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1943), p. xl; Flóamanna saga, in Harðar saga, p. clviii; and Bárðar saga, in the same volume, p. xcix. Emily Lethbridge, ‘Gísla saga Súrssonar: Textual Variation, Editorial Constructions and Critical Interpretations’, in Creating the Medieval Saga: Versions, Variability, and Editorial Interpretations of Old Norse Saga Literature, ed. Judy Quinn and Emily Lethbridge, The Viking Collection 18 (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2010), pp. 127–40; and ‘Dating the Sagas and Gísla saga Súrssonar’, in Dating the Sagas: Reviews and Revisions, ed. Else Mundal (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013), p. 105; Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Gísli Súrsson – A Flawless or Flawed Hero’, in Die Aktualität der Saga: Festschrift für Hans Schottmann, ed. Stig Toftgaard Andersen, Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde: Ergänzungsbände 21 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1999), p. 172; Tommy Danielsson, ‘On the Possibility of an Oral Background for Gísla saga Súrssonar’, in Oral Art Forms, pp. 29–31. Theodore Andersson, ‘Some Ambiguities in Gísla saga: A Balance Sheet’, Bibliography

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint have described Gísli using hagiographic terminology: Turville-Petre comments that he resembles in his suffering ‘a Christian martyr’ and Vésteinn Ólason speaks of his ‘persecution’ by Bõrkr.9 Gísli’s suffering, which is given unusual emphasis in the saga, has something in common with the ‘white martyrdom’ of the confessor, consisting in a protracted, life-long struggle against the powers of evil, rather than a glorious moment of heroic confrontation. Indeed, Gísli’s plight is in part attributed to a curse, which prevents him from receiving any support and, in the longer version of the saga, ró (‘peace’): Vésteinn comments that ‘it may well be that the Christian author has glimpsed the power of evil in what happens to Gísli Súrsson and his family, the power of Satan over the heathens’.10 This curse holds only on the mainland of Iceland, and it drives Gísli into what Barraclough has described as ‘marginal pockets beneath society and at its edges’: he hides out in deserted fjords, underground passages, cliffs and off-shore islands, inhabits liminal spaces along the tide-line and by rivers.11 Such cramped underground quarters project his outlawry symbolically as a kind of death: at one point, he even fakes his death by drowning, shedding his outer garments and overturning his boat by the shore. This sense of a living death is another link between Gísli and the desert saint, who is often figured, like St Antony, as inhabiting a tomb or undergoing a symbolic death: both are liminal figures, ‘in between’, ‘on the edge’, ‘underneath’, poised between life and death.12 Yet, despite all this solitary suffering, Gísli brings his life to a close in a grand heroic finale: he kills eight men in single-handed combat, before leaping from the cliff-top to his death. Gísli can be read as atgervimaðr ok fullhugi (‘a man of prowess and courage’), who repeatedly outwits his opponents before staging a great heroic death; but he is also a liminal figure who accepts suffering passively and is even commended for his patience: his brother admits that ‘ólíkr er Gísli õðrum mõnnum í þolinmœði’ (‘Gísli is unlike others in his long-suffering’), of Old Norse-Icelandic Studies (1968), 7–42; Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, ‘Murder in Marital Bed. An Attempt at Understanding a Crucial Scene in Gísla saga’, trans. Judith Jesch, in Structure and Meaning, pp. 235–63, reprinted in his At fortælle historien, pp. 37–58; Joseph Harris, ‘Obscure Styles (OE and ON) and the Enigmas of Gísla saga’, Mediaevalia 19 (1996 for 1993), pp. 75–90; Hermann Pálsson, ‘Death in Autumn: Tragic Elements in Early Icelandic Fiction’, Bibliography of Old Norse-Icelandic Studies (1973), 19. 9 Gabriel Turville-Petre, ‘Gísli Súrsson and his Poetry: Traditions and Influences’, Modern Language Review 39 (1944), p. 375; Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Gísli Súrsson’, p. 170. 10 Gísla saga Súrssonar, p. 56. The longer version (S) is printed in Tvær sögur af Gísla Súrssyni, ed. Sveinbjörn Egilsson (Copenhagen: Berling, 1849), p. 116; Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Gísli Súrsson’, p. 174. 11 Eleanor Barraclough, ‘Inside Outlawry in Grettis saga and Gísla saga’, Scandinavian Studies 82 (2010), 378. 12 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures 1966 (New York: de Gruyter, 1995), p. 94; Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 47; Elliott, Roads to Paradise, pp. 104, 173–80, 192–203; Christopher Holdsworth, ‘Hermits and the Power of the Frontier’, Reading Medieval Studies 16 (1990), 67–9.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero not a traditional quality for a saga hero.13 This side of Gísli is developed most fully in his dreams and poetry, which predates the written saga and may have been composed in the twelfth century.14 Just as Gísli moves beneath and around the social centre during his outlawry, so too the narrative begins to probe beneath outward appearances: it becomes less and less about what Gísli does, and more and more about what is happening inside him. As is often pointed out, Gísli’s main sequence of dreams begins only once he has exhausted all avenues of escape from his situation: utterly abandoned by his siblings (although not by his wife Auðr) and permanently denied a place in the social world, he turns inward and becomes increasingly absorbed in a world of dreams. His social isolation becomes, as for the desert saint, an occasion for the cultivation of ‘interior spaces’: just as the saint’s journey to the interior of the desert is an ‘image’ of interiority, so too Gísli’s occupation of subterranean hideouts signifies a move beneath the surface into himself.15 Within the saga genre, the appropriate medium for this interiority is not prose, but poetry: as O’Donoghue has argued, the saga author’s use of verse is ‘a literary device to make manifest Gísli’s inner life’; it gives us ‘direct access to his subjectivity’.16 Moreover, in order to give us this access, the saga author even ‘resists the constraints of externally focalized narrative’: although Auðr is usually present to provide Gísli with an audience for his dreams, Gísli on one occasion speaks a soliloquy, and his dream women take on ‘an independent status’, appearing as characters within the narrative.17 Whereas we have to await Auðr’s question to hear about Gísli’s dream women for the first time, later arrivals are announced by the saga author himself, as if they were external events: ‘Kemr nú jafnan at honum draumkonan sú in verri ok þó hin stundum in betri’ (‘Now the worse of his dream-women always comes to him and yet at other times the better one’).18 As Gísli’s life nears its end, his dreams start to control the rhythm of the narrative, recurring year after year as summer turns to autumn, until Gísli only has to close his eyes to enter into his dream world again. The saga becomes a compelling narrative of interior events, making it quite unique among the sagas of Icelanders. The traditional interpretation of Gísli’s dreams is that the two dream women represent Christianity and paganism, good and evil, the moral struggle within an Icelander living on the cusp of the conversion to Christianity. Turville-Petre states that ‘The dominant theme is the conflict between good and evil. Thus the good Gísla saga, pp. 52, 88; Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 96. Peter Foote, ‘An Essay on the Saga of Gísli and its Icelandic Background’, in The Saga of Gísli, trans. George Johnston (London: Dent, 1963), pp. 113–19; Turville-Petre, ‘Gísli Súrsson and his Poetry’, pp. 384–9; Danielsson, ‘On the Possibility of an Oral Background’, p. 40. 15 Adler, ‘Cultivating Wilderness’, p. 26; Elliot, Roads to Paradise, p. 91. 16 O’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse, pp. 139–40; Dronke, ‘The Poet’s Persona’, p. 25. 17 O’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse, p. 160–5; cf. also Hans Schottmann, ‘Gísli in der Acht’, Skandinavistik 5 (1975), 83. 18 Gísla saga, p. 94. 13 14

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint spirit represents Christian teaching, while the evil one, her hands besmirched with blood, symbolizes the old religion’.19 Gísli died in c. 977–9, around the time of the first recorded mission to Iceland, but we have previously been told that he ‘lét af blótum’ (‘abandoned pagan sacrifices’) during his travels in Denmark; according to the longer version, this was because he was prime-signed, a rite preliminary to baptism.20 Particular attention has been paid to the syncretic aspects of the dream women, who combine the pagan figures of dís and fylgja with Christian beliefs about guardian angels and psychopomps: Lönnroth describes them as ‘at once pagan Valkyries and Christian guardian angels, family fetches and sexual temptresses, symbols of both life and death’.21 In his view, the Christian elements of these dreams ‘cannot emanate from Gísli’, but must come from another world: their purpose is ‘to educate him’ and to frame his story ‘as part of a universal conflict between good and evil’.22 Likewise, Langeslag reads the dream women as working in unison to present ‘a dualistic afterlife strongly reminiscent of medieval Christian visionary literature’: he argues that ‘where the good dream woman encourages the poet in his bid for heaven, the evil dream woman appears as his tormentor in hell’.23 More recent readings, however, have tended to emphasise a psychological rather than a religious reading of the dreams. Crocker describes them as ‘a window into the tortured psyche of a man whose anxieties, fears and subconscious turmoil are largely due to the pressure-laden situation in which he finds himself’; Poilvez calls them ‘self-referential, dual and contradictory, eschatological; the inner voice of Gisli in crisis’.24 19

20 21

22 23 24

Turville-Petre, ‘Gísli Súrsson and his Poetry’, p. 387. Cf. also Foote, ‘An Essay’, p. 119; Lars Lönnroth, ‘Dreams in the Sagas’, Scandinavian Studies 74 (2002), 458–63, reprinted in his The Academy of Odin, pp. 129–38; Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Introduction’, p. xviii; M. A. Marion Poilvez, ‘Access to the Margins’, Brathair 12 (2012), 128. Gísla saga, p. 36; Tvær sögur af Gísla Súrsyni, p. 96. Lönnroth, ‘Dreams in the Sagas’, p. 461; see also Kelchner, Dreams in Old Norse Tradition, pp. 36–7; Foote, ‘An Essay on the Saga of Gisli’, pp. 119–23; Gabriel TurvillePetre, ‘Dream Symbols in Old Icelandic Literature’, in Festskrift Walter Bætke dargebracht zu seinem 80. Geburtstag am 28. März 1964, ed. Rolf Heller, Kurt Rudolf and Ernst Walter (Weimar: Böhlau, 1966), pp. 346–8. On the relationship between dísir, fylgjur and Christian saints and angels, see Frederic Amory, ‘Norse-Christian Syncretism and Interpretatio Christiana in Sólarljóð’, Gripla 7 (1990), 258; Peter Foote, ‘Observations on “Syncretism” in Early Icelandic Christianity’, in Aurvandilstá: Norse Studies, ed. Michael Barnes, Hans Bekker-Nielsen and Gerd Wolfgang Weber (Odense: Odense University Press, 1984), p. 86; Rudolf Simek, ‘Goddesses, Mothers, Dísir’, in Mythological Women: Studies in Memory of Lotte Motz, ed. Rudolf Simek and Wilhelm Heizmann (Wien: Fassbaender, 2002), p. 114. Lönnroth, ‘Dreams in the Sagas’, p. 462. Paul S. Langeslag, ‘The Dream Women of Gísla saga’, Scandinavian Studies 81 (2009), 47, 54. Christopher Crocker, ‘All I Do the Whole Night Through: On the Dreams of Gísli Súrsson’, Scandinavian Studies 24 (2012), 153–4; Poilvez, ‘Access to the Margins’, p. 129; cf. also Taylor Culbert, ‘The Construction of the Gísla saga’, Scandinavian Studies 31 (1959), 161.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero What is clear is that dreams function quite differently in Gísla saga from how they function elsewhere: even when they do anticipate future events, they are not primarily anticipatory. This is clear from the very first dream in the saga, in which Gísli has a premonition of Vésteinn’s death: unusually, we are not told about this dream until after the event, when Gísli reveals it in a private conversation with his brother. This is the first intimation that what Gísli thinks and feels may be different from what he says and does; despite his spoken acceptance that ‘fate will go as it must’, his desire to conceal his dream suggests some resistance.25 It tells us that there is more going on in Gísli than meets the eye, even at this early stage in the story. In his later dreams, both the duality of the two dream women and the way in which they contradict each other is highly unusual in saga literature: Manrique Antón points out that this represents ‘a breach of the unspoken role that predictions could not be annulled unless they contained an element that allowed this’.26 Yet the two dream women are consistently set against each other in the saga prose, from Gísli’s very first description of them: ‘Er õnnur vel við mik, en õnnur segir mér þat jafnan, er mér þykkir verr en áðr, ok spár mér illt eina’ (‘One is good to me, but the other always tells me things that seem worse than before, and predicts for me only bad things’).27 This opposition is voiced by the ‘worse’ dream woman herself, as Gísli’s dream winters draw to a close: ‘Nú skal ek því õllu bregða, er in betri draumkona mælti við þik, ok skal ek þess ráðandi, at þér skal þess ekki at gagni verða, er hon hefir mælt’ (‘Now I shall overturn everything the better dream woman told you, and I shall make sure that nothing she has said will be of benefit to you’).28 Instead of clarifying what will happen to Gísli, the dreams introduce confusion and uncertainty: they present two different outcomes for Gísli, perhaps even two different narratives of his life. One way of understanding this duality is through the ‘eschatological drama’ of eremitic literature, in which devils and angels compete for Christian souls: there are many examples of this in Antonius saga, as well as in the Vitae patrum and in Michaels saga. Antony describes to his followers in great detail how good and evil spirits produce different psychological effects on the individual: ‘Þá er várt hugskot birtisk ljósi heilagra engla, er þat eigi ókyrt eða stormsamt, heldr lint ok blítt; þá hitnar õndin af mikilli fýsi at eignask himneska fagnaði ok skjótliga með þeim Guðs englum at fara til himinríkis dýrðar’ (‘When our mind is brightened by the light of holy angels, it is not restless or stormy, but smooth and mild; then the soul is warmed by a great desire to possess heavenly joy and to enter quickly with the angels of God into the glory of the heavenly kingdom’). The presence of evil spirits, on the other hand, has quite the opposite Gísla saga, pp. 24, 34; Crocker, ‘Dreams of Gísli Súrsson’, pp. 147–8. Teodoro Manrique Antón, ‘“Vinr em ek vinar míns”: Guðrún Gjúkadóttir in Gísla saga and Íslendinga saga’, in The Fantastic in Old Norse/Icelandic Literature, ed. John McKinnell et al., p. 629; see also Poilvez, ‘Access to the Margins’, p. 128 and Crocker, ‘Dreams of Gísli Súrsson’, p. 158. 27 Gísla saga, p. 70. 28 Gísla saga, p. 102. 25 26

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint effect: they bring ‘þungi ok leiðendi af endrminning eiginligra synda, hræzlu dauðans [. . .] mœði kraptanna at fremja ok vel at lifa með miklum hjartans slæleik’ (‘heaviness and loathing at the memory of one’s own sins, fear of death [. . .] the exhaustion of one’s powers to do good and live well with great weariness of heart’).29 This is precisely the effect that the ‘worse’ dream woman has on Gísli, and it is noticeable how spiritual conflict is figured here not as external attack but as a battle within the heart and the mind. The same battle is dramatised in one of Antony’s later visions: he is lifted up by angels and carried towards heaven, but his way is blocked by devils, who exert themselves ‘upp at rifja allar syndir Antonii allt frá þeiri stundu, er hann var fæddr’ (‘to expound all of Antony’s sins from the very time he was born’). The angels challenge this, affirming that his sins ‘váru nú allar fyrirgefnar ok leystar fyrir guðliga góðgirnd’ (‘were all now forgiven and redeemed because of divine goodwill’). After they have won their case, the way to heaven is cleared and Antony finds himself not only physically, but also mentally, back where he started: ‘Sá hann ok fann sjálfan sik inn sama vera, sem hann var fyrri’ (‘He saw and found himself to be the same person that he had been before’).30 Spiritual battle here takes the form of a testing of one’s identity: it interrogates the relationship between who one is now and what one has done in the past. Poilvez’s assessment of Gísli’s dreams applies equally to Antony’s vision: both are ‘self-referential, dual and contradictory, eschatological’. The same focus on psychology and identity is found throughout the Vitae patrum, where it is frequently expressed through visions and otherworldly guides. A particularly important story is that of Isidore and Moses, which is also told in Bergr Sokkason’s later Michaels saga. Moses, an abbot and hermit in the Egyptian desert, is weighed down so sorely by demonic temptation that he dares not remain alone, and he flees to the cell of Isidore, also an abbot and hermit, for support:31 Því næst leiddi inn helgi Isidorus abóta Moysen með sér upp í it hæsta herbergi sitt, ok sagði til hans: ‘Líttu í vestrit ok sjásk um’. En er abóti Moyses lítaðisk um, sá hann fjándaflokk mikinn svá sem til bardaga búna með ákafligri fylkingu. Þá mælti inn helgi Isidorus: ‘Lít nú í austrit’. Ok er guðs maðr Moyses sá í austrit, gat hann at líta ótalligan fjõlda ítarligra engla sólu bjartari af dróttinligri dýrð. [Next, the holy Isidore led Abbot Moses with him up to the highest of his rooms, and said to him: ‘Look to the west and observe’. And when Abbot Moses looked around, he saw a great flock of devils armed as if for battle in a terrifying formation. Then the holy Isidore said: ‘Now look to the east’. And when God’s man Moses looked to the east, he could see a countless number of angels brighter than the sun, shining with noble glory.] Heilagra manna søgur, I, 74–5. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 95–6. 31 Heilagra manna søgur, II, 499. 29 30

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The Saint and the Saga Hero When this story is retold in Michaels saga, it is specified that they are in a lopthus (‘attic’) in which there are ‘gluggar á ofarliga bæði til austrættar ok norðrættar’ (‘windows above both to the east and north’); it is through these windows that Moses sees the battle which is taking place within himself. Moreover, the devils are not only armed, but also eager ‘allt at hrœra ok rifa ok særa, þat er fyrir varð’ (‘to stir up and tear and wound everything that came before them’), which reminds one of the terrible wounds inflicted by Gísli’s ‘worse’ dream-woman.32 Crocker’s description of Gísli’s dreams as a ‘window’ into the tortured psyche of a man’s deepest fear and anxieties would appear to apply equally to Isidore’s vision. That this story was well known in Old Norse is clear from Þiðranda þáttr ok Þórhalls, where the troops of devils and angels have been transformed into ‘bad’ and ‘good’ dísir or fylgjur, coming respectively from the north and the south (associated with Rome and therefore Christianity).33 This adaptation tones down the sense of inner experience, however: the arrival of the good dísir announces a historical change, the coming of Christianity to Iceland, albeit too late for the virtuous Þiðrandi. Another story, about the anchoress Úlfrún, shows a greater interest in the psychological pressures of solitude characteristic of the desert saints. Úlfrún is suffering from ‘meinsemi mikla ok matleysi ok hugarválað ok svefnleysi’ (‘great pain, lack of food, depression and insomnia’), and she calls on St Þórlákr for help.34 She dreams that she is in a room with many strangers, the last of whom approaches her bed. Þorlákr then appears and commands them all to leave. The last one, however, remains hidden in the room. Þorlákr seizes him and pulls him out by force, upon which Úlfrún awakens healed. This story functions as a miniature psychomachia, describing what is going on inside Úlfrún; the room is an internal space, and the sins that are causing her illness are personified as people. The hidden person, perhaps, represents a concealed sin which St Þorlákr must bring into the open. As Poilvez says of Gísli, this dream is ‘self-referential’; it projects into visionary experience what is happening inside. The dual and contradictory nature of Gísli’s dreams is common in visionary literature, where the moment of death becomes the occasion for a ‘symbolic duel between the soul’s good and evil impulses’ and for ‘an encounter with oneself’.35 There is a good example of this in book IV of Gregory’s Dialogues, in which a man named Stephen slips while crossing the dangerous bridge that connects this world to the next; his feet are pulled down by devils, while his head is held up by angels. Gregory interprets this, significantly, in terms of inner impulses: the ‘evil deeds of the flesh’ contend with the ‘noble work’

Heilagra manna søgur, I, 679–80. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 119–25. On Þiðrandi, see Chapter 4 (p. 130). 34 Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 241–2. 35 Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 27. 32 33

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint of almsgiving.36 This explanation is missing from the Norse translation of the Dialogues, as it falls between two surviving fragments, but there are many other such stories in the translation. The hermit Peter sees himself, on the point of death, being ‘leiddr at eldinum’ (‘led to the fire’), but at the last minute an angel prevents him from being pushed in, leaving him with the warning: ‘Hygg at vandliga, hversu þú skalt síðan lifa’ (‘Consider carefully, how you live from now on’).37 The dying monk Theodorus describes how he is torn between a terrifying dragon and the fervent prayers of his fellows: ‘Í dreka munni em ek, ok má hann eigi svelgja mik fyrir bœnum yðrum. Hõfuð mitt hefir hann i munni sér; gefi þér honum rúm, at hann geri þat skjótt, er ætlat er, ok kveli mik eigi þannig lengr’ (‘I am in the dragon’s mouth, and he cannot swallow me because of your prayers. He has my head in his mouth; give him space, so that he can do quickly that which is intended, and not torture me this way any longer’).38 Although things are looking bad for him, the monks refuse to stop praying, and he eventually makes enough of a recovery to reform. Zaleski argues that such scenes represent ‘partly an intrinsic process, the self-assessment of souls whom death or doomsday has unmasked’.39 The exit of the soul from the body is figured as a moment of profound ‘eschatological crisis’ in which one’s past deeds and contradictory ‘inner impulses’ are projected outward into visionary experience. Many stories of this kind involve an extended review of one’s life, in which angels and devils take turns to present their different narratives. There is a rather comical story about this in Michaels saga, in which a rich man, who has performed no good deeds, reaches the point of death. The obligatory devils appear and prepare to cart him off, having given him a full account of ‘alla þá illa hluti [. . .] er hann hafði guði í móti gõrt’ (‘all the evil things [. . .] which he had done against God’).40 It turns out, however, that once, in a moment of anger, he threw an old crust at a beggar; his guardian angel passes this off as almsgiving and thus tricks the devils into letting him go. There are some other stories like this in Maríu saga, including one about a monk who drowns unexpectedly on his way home from visiting his lover (p. 12). The next day, his body is dredged up, and he revives to tell his story:41 Þá kómu til illgjarnir andar grípandi mik sem sinn eiginligan mann, ok vildu þegar draga mik til helvítis kvala. Þar kómu ok til guðs englar, þeir sem í mót vildu standa þeira grimmleik ok frelsa mik af þeira valdi. Hér varð mikil þræta í milli þeira. Djõflarnir tõldu mikinn fjõlda minna synda mér til ásakanar ok fyrirdœmingar [. . .] Englarnir tõldu mín góð verk; váru þau fá ok nærr einskis verð hjá því, sem mínar syndar. Gregory the Great, Dialogues, IV. 37, p. 240. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 249–50. 38 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 251. 39 Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, p. 73. 40 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 681. 41 Maríu saga, pp. 845–88; cf. also 266–8 and 930–4. 36 37

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The Saint and the Saga Hero [Then evil spirits came to seize me as their own man, and wished to drag me straight to the torments of hell. God’s angels also came there, who wished to stand against their cruelty and free me from their power. A great debate now took place between them. The devils gave an account of the great number of my sins to accuse and condemn me [. . .] The angels gave an account of my good works; they were few and almost worthless in comparison with my sins.]

Luckily, Mary intervenes to save him because he died with her praise on his lips. Sometimes these opposing and contradictory narratives of the same life are even produced in written form: in Michaels saga, the devils turns up at the death of one rich man with ‘ina stœrstu bók’ (‘the largest book’) of his sins, while the angels can only produce ‘lítit bréf’ (‘a small letter’). This time, the devils prevail: ‘Þá hlupu djõflar á mik á tilvísan síns konungs með inum hvõssustum skálmum, ok tók annarr til at fótum, en annarr at hõfðum at særa ok saxa’ (‘Then the devils rushed on me at their king’s direction with the sharpest prongs, and one began to wound and cut at my feet and the other at my head’).42 This is not so different from Gísli’s own nightmarish visions of violent death and dismemberment. In the light of these stories, his visionary experience too might be interpreted as an encounter with himself and a retrospective process of self-assessment: it projects outwards into dream vision a struggle that is going on within. Gísli’s isolation and impending death give rise to a protracted near-death experience, which Zaleski describes as ‘a profound imaginative rehearsal for death’. Again, this echoes Crocker, who argues that Gísli’s dreams are ‘a sort of dress rehearsal’ in which he acts out his worst fears about what is to come.43 For Gísli, then, as for the desert saint and visionary, the wilderness is a site for ‘eschatological drama’, understood as an interior process of self-assessment that is projected outwards into his dreams. The two dream women, like the angels and devils of Christian visions, voice two different understandings of his life, two different versions of who he is in the light of his past deeds. The interiority of this process is increased in Gísla saga by the fact that the dream women speak not to one another, like most angels and devils, but exclusively to him and (contrary to how most scholars refer to them) they are never identified as morally ‘good’ or ‘evil’: both Gísli and the saga author refer to them instead as betri (‘better’) and verri (‘worse’) – a relative rather than an absolute designation, that defines them in relation to what Gísli wants to hear. The ‘better’ dream woman offers Gísli affirmation, acceptance, approval, a soft and comfortable bed in death and a rich reward in the next life. Her appearances, as Kanerva has shown, can be related to the scenes in which Gísli’s brother so painfully refuses him these same things. She reflects back Gísli’s own understanding of himself as the innocent victim of an aberration of justice, a ‘martyr’ to the ingratitude of the brother and sister for whom he has done so much.44 In Gísli’s first set Heilagra manna søgur, I, 684. Otherworld Journeys, p. 164; Crocker, ‘Dreams of Gísli Súrsson’, p. 154. 44 Gísla saga, pp. 62, 63, 74–5, 78; cf. Kirsti Kanerva, ‘Ógæfa as an Emotion in ThirteenthCentury Iceland’, Scandinavian Studies 84 (2012), 18–19; Crocker, ‘Dreams of Gísli 42

43 Zaleski,

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint of verses about her, he envisions a warm welcome from friends and family, a promise of ‘bjarg’ (‘provisions for outlawry’) and a future improvement in his circumstances: ‘Nú’s skammt til betra’ (‘Better things shortly await’).45 Although this is usually taken to refer to the next life, there is nothing to suggest that it does not refer to this one: in this hope, Gísli goes on twice more to ask his brother for help. The domestic setting of this first dream, as Dronke comments, reflects ‘his own preoccupations and homely longings’; the ‘better’ dream-women could even be understood as an idealised version of his loyal and supportive wife, Auðr.46 Rather than preaching a new faith to Gísli, the ‘better’ dream-woman reflects back the system of values by which he has lived, providing a retrospective vindication of his behaviour. Upon her first appearance, Gísli describes how ‘Hon réð mér þat, meðan ek lifða, at láta leiðask forna sið ok nema enga galdra né forneskju’ (‘She advised me, while I lived, to consider the old faith loathsome and learn neither spells nor ancient things’).47 In the longer version (S), in which she uses direct speech, she adds that he must ‘fyrirláta fornan sið ok öll blót önnur’ (‘You must abandon the old faith and all other sacrifices’). But this is old news: we have already been told that Gísli abandoned pagan sacrifices following his trip to Denmark. In a later strophe, Gísli quotes the ‘better’ dream woman’s warning not to kill fyrri (‘first’) or ótyrrinn (‘unprovoked’) and to extend charity to those who are in need:48 Baugskyndir, hjalp blindum, Baldr, hygg at því, skjaldar, illt kveða háð ok hõltum, handlausum tý, granda. [Ring-giver [man], help the blind. Attend to this, Baldr ∧god∨ of the shield [man], it is said that scorn is evil, and to harm the lame; aid the handless.]

This advice undoubtedly derives, as Paasche has shown, from I Ezra 4, but it does not at this stage make sense as a future course of action; rather, it shows how Gísli believes he has behaved and what he thinks he deserves.49 As he tells Þorkell, he could hardly have left Vésteinn unavenged: he sees himself as not the instigator, but the victim of others’ violence. Instead of counseling Christian pacifism, the ‘better’ dream-woman actually approves Gísli as warrior, or she does so at least in the versified report of her advice to him. He is described

45 46 47

48 49

Súrsson’, 160. Gísla saga, pp. 70–3. Dronke, ‘The Poet’s Persona’, p. 25; Lönnroth, ‘Dreams in the Sagas’, p. 459; also implied by Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Introduction’, p. xix. Gísla saga, p. 70; Tvær sögur, p. 126. Gísla saga, pp. 72–3. For the text and interpretation of these verses, I follow the Íslenzk fornrit edition, unless otherwise indicated. Fredrik Paasche, ‘Esras aabenbaring og Pseudo-Cyprianus i norrön litteratur’, in Festskrift til Finnur Jónsson, pp. 199–205.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero there by the kennings mildr malmrunnr (‘generous steel-tree’ [warrior]), valdr veðrs Skjõldunga (‘causer of the weather of the Scyldings’ [battle > warrior], and even ǻrr niðleiks ara steikar (‘messenger of play of the moon of eagle’s steak’ [corpse > sword > battle > warrior]), where the warrior is defined in relation to the human ‘steak’ he provides to birds of prey.50 Moreover, she vindicates his concern with honour and reputation, and, by implication, his killings in pursuit of this goal:51 Fátt kveða fleyja brautar fúrþverranda verra, randar logs ens reynda runnr, an illt at kunna. [Tree of the proven fire of the shield [sword > warrior], it is said that few things are worse for the diminisher of the flame of the path of ships [sea > gold > man], than to practise evil (=slander).]

This half-stanza identifies Gísli as generous (‘one who diminishes the flame of the path of the ships’, i.e. who gives away gold), and also as experienced in battle (‘the tree of the proven fire of the shield’, i.e. proven swordsman). It confirms that there are few things worse than to speak evil of others (‘at kunna illt’) or to be spoken ill of oneself. The dream-woman reflects back to Gísli his own hopes and expectations that he will be rewarded, but there is a tiny flicker of self-doubt: in the longer version (S), she adds that ‘vætti ek [. . .] ef þú ferr svá með, at þér dugi vel’ (‘I expect [. . .] if you behave in this way, that it will turn out well for you’).52 This is not to deny the biblical resonances of the ‘better’ dream-woman’s moral teaching, nor the relationship between her vision of the next life and the Christian heaven. Upon her second appearance, two years before Gísli’s death, she rides a grey horse and invites him to her home, promising that ‘Skaltu hingat fara, þá er þú andask [. . .] ok njóta hér fjár ok farsælu’ (‘You shall come here when you die [. . .] and enjoy here wealth and prosperity’).53 In Gísli’s verses, she promises to heal him fully (‘af heilu grœða’) and provide dýnur (‘pillows’), hvíla (‘a bed’), sæing blauta (‘a soft bed’); these terms are closely echoed in Christian poetry from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as in the visionary poem Sólarljóð.54 The ‘better’ dream-woman is described in a beautiful kenning that relates her to sea and sunlight (hneigi-Sól hornflœðar: the slanting sun of the horn’s ebb-tide), and therefore potentially to the Virgin Mary, stella

Gísla saga, pp. 71–2 (kennings in stanzas 17 and 18). Gísla saga, p. 72, where kunna illt is interpreted as fara með níð (‘to practise slander’). 52 Tvær sögur, p. 126. 53 Gísla saga, pp. 94–5. 54 Sólarljóð, ed. Carolyne Larrington and Peter Robinson, in Poetry on Christian Subjects, 7.1, p. 329, stanza 49 (sæng), p. 347, stanza 72 (hvílur); Harmsól, ed. Katrina Attwood, in Poetry on Christian Subjects, 7.1, p. 121, stanza 54 (græða andar sǻr). 50 51

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint maris, who always appears enveloped in light.55 Yet here too, there is a strong psychological element, for the ‘better’ dream-woman promises Gísli not the violent and solitary death he fears, but a gentle drifting into sleep:56 Hingat skalt, kvað hringa Hildr at óðar gildi, fleina þollr, með Fullu fallheyjaðar deyja; þá munt, Ullr, ok õllu, ísungs, féi þvísa, þat hagar okkr til auðar ormláðs, ok mér ráða. [Hither you, tree of shafts [warrior], shall die with Fulla ∧goddess∨ of the decider of death in battle [=Óðinn > valkyrie], said Hildr ∧Valkyrie∨ of the rings [woman] to the valuer of poetry [poet]. You will also, Ullr of the helmet [warrior], rule over all these riches and me; we two shall have a wealth of serpent-bed [gold].]

Although auðr (‘wealth’) can on occasion refer to spiritual riches, this is not the most natural understanding of the word, especially in conjunction with ‘ormláðs’ (‘bed of the serpent’); more likely, perhaps, it is a pun on the name of Gísli’s wife, Auðr, reinforcing her close connection with the ‘better’ dreamwoman and marital love.57 In this vision, we see Gísli struggling to maintain a sense of autonomy and agency in the face of impending death: he formulates it not as a necessity, but as an invitation and a reunion, a promise of the ‘rest’ denied to him in this life. The ‘worse’ dream-woman, on the other hand, presents Gísli with a very different version of his life – a version in which he is no martyr to be rewarded, but a criminal forced to relive his violent past. Instead of inviting Gísli back to her home, she forcibly invades his, appearing on the threshold of sleep drenched in blood:58 Kemr, þegars ek skal blunda, kona við mik til funda oss þvær unda flóði, õll í manna blóði.

Gísla saga, p. 95 (stanza 25); Maríu saga, pp. 334, 345, 536, 848, 1153; cf. also Anskar’s vision of the Virgin Mary in Anskar: The Apostle of the North, p. 29. 56 Gísla saga, p. 96. 57 Lönnroth, ‘Dreams in the Sagas’, 460. On Auðr’s connection to marital love, see Karin Olsen, ‘Women-kennings in the Gísla saga Súrssonar: A Study’, in Studies in English Language and Literature: ‘Doubt Wisely’, ed. Matthew J. Toswell and Elizabeth M. Tyler (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 269–70. 58 Gísla saga, p. 76. 55

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The Saint and the Saga Hero [The woman comes to meet me as soon as I fall asleep, covered in men’s blood, she washes us [me] in a flood of wounds [blood].]

The repetitive and obsessive focus on quantity of blood (unda flóð) in these scenes has few parallels in contemporary Christian visions of hell, and the imagery of cold and fire is entirely lacking: Gísli does not envisage punishment in the next life, but continually relives the horror of bloodshed, the bloodshed he has inflicted on others (manna blóð) and to be inflicted on him.59 These dreams give us access to a part of Gísli that otherwise remains hidden; they show, in Dronke’s words, ‘the conscience of a man who must do such things’.60 Gísli not only sees himself washed in the blood he has spilled, but, terrifyingly, becomes a spectator at his own death:61 Hugþak þvá mér Þrúði þremja hlunns ór brunni Óðins elda lauðri auðs mína skõr rauða. [I thought that Þrúðr ∧goddess∨ of wealth [woman] washed my hair red in the lather of Óðinn’s fire [sword > blood] from the well of the roller of blades [sword > wound].]

He is passive, helpless in hands which are not his own; the focus is not on his actions, but on his lack of agency, his inability to do anything but feel. He imagines blood pouring like water ‘ór brunni’ (‘from the well’) or rain ‘í benja éli’ (‘in the shower of wounds’); he is launched into a sea of blood by the kenning þremja hlunnr, where hlunnr is the roller used to launch or draw up a ship, and þremjar, an unspecified part of a sword, may be connected with þrõmr, meaning ‘coast’, ‘shore’, or a ship’s ‘edge’ or ‘rails’. The images of bloodstained hands and blood-drenched hair keep recurring, until dream and reality start to merge: Gísli describes the ‘worse’ dream-woman waking him ‘ór mínum draumi’ (‘out of his dream’), as if she is both within and without at the same time.62 These nightmares present Gísli not as a self-righteous man of action, but as a suffering individual in the grip of fear and self-doubt. A particular problem for those who wish to read the ‘worse’ dream-woman as a representative of paganism or as Gísli’s ‘tormentor in hell’ is the attribution to her of stanza 29, the most unambiguously Christian statement in the whole saga:63 59

60 61

62 63

Sólárljóð mentions ‘bloody hearts’ and ‘bloody runes’, likewise ‘faces [. . .] reddened in an ogress’s blood’ (pp. 337–9), but has no parallel to the sea of blood in which Gísli is washed. Dronke, ‘The Poet’s Persona’, p. 26. Gísla saga, p. 103. Gísla saga, p. 104. Gísla saga, p. 102. The meaning of góðmunr is disputed and the manuscript readings also differ. I adopt the interpretation in the Íslenzk fornit edition (‘great love’, ‘passionate love’), but for other possibilities, see Manrique Antón, ‘“Vinr em ek

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint Skuluða it, kvað skorða skapkers, saman verja, svá hefr ykkr til ekka eitr góðmunar leitat. Allvaldr hefir aldar erlendis þik sendan einn ór yðru ranni annan heim at kanna. [You two shall not live together, said the bearer of the drinking vessel [woman]; thus the poison of your great love has brought you to sorrow. The all-ruler of men [=God] has sent you away alone from your house to explore another world.]

On the assumption that allvaldr aldar (‘the all-ruler of men’) is a kenning for the Christian God, Langeslag and Olsen have both suggested that this verse should be reassigned to the ‘better’ dream-woman,64 but this cannot be the case, for it envisages death not as an invitation home and a reunion with loved ones (whether Auðr or the ‘better’ dream-woman), but as a lonely and frightening journey into the unknown (‘erlendis’: ‘abroad’, ‘in a foreign land’). In this respect, it makes more sense in the mouth of the ‘worse’ dream woman: it is not what Gísli wants to hear, but what he most fears. It presents his outlawry not as a travesty of justice that will soon be righted, but as an image of the human condition, a reminder that all life on earth is outlawry and exile from the homeland. His aloneness is not ‘a personal misfortune, but an existential fact’, as Magennis has said of the Old English poem The Seafarer.65 Death is figured as a dangerous journey upon which one can only embark alone, just as the poet envisages in Sólarljóð in his portrayal of sinners:66 Synðir því valda, at vér hyggvir förum ægisheimi ór. [Sins cause this, that sorrowful we journey out of the terrible world.]

vinar míns”’, pp. 629–30. Langeslag, ‘The Dream Women’, pp. 58–60; Olsen, ‘Women Kennings’, p. 278; cf. Foote, ‘An Essay’, p. 123. 65 Hugh Magennis, ‘The Solitary Journey: Aloneness and Community in The Seafarer’, in Text, Image, Interpretation: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and its Insular Context, ed. Alastair Minnis and Jane Roberts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), p. 309; for life on earth as útlegð (‘exile’), see Peter Hallberg, ‘Imagery in Religious Old Norse Prose Literature: An Outline’, Arkiv för nordisk filologi 102 (1987), 129; and for the patristic background, see Manuela Brito-Martins, ‘The Concept of Peregrinatio in Saint Augustine and its Influences’, in Exile in the Middle Ages: Selected Proceedings from the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 8–11 July 2002, ed. Laura Napran and Elizabeth van Houts, International Medieval Research 13 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 83–94. 66 Sólarljóð, p. 316 (stanza 30). 64

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Here in Gísla saga, more than anywhere else, we find the ascetic theme of desire and temptation: human passions are not redemptive, as the ‘better’ dream woman implies, but a poison (‘eitr góðmunar’) that spreads and leads only to sorrow and pain, like the ‘munaðar ríki’ (‘power of desire’) that brings many to grief in Sólarljóð.67 The ‘worse’ dream-woman, then, speaks here in a penitential and ascetic vein quite different from that of the ‘better’ one: Gísli’s acts of violence, she implies, are neither honour-driven nor meritorious, but the consequence of sinful passions for which he must atone. These two different versions of Gísli are particularly in evidence in the final sequence of verses in the saga, which follows on from the last appearance of the ‘worse’ dream-woman and leads into Gísli’s last stand. The first three verses in this sequence paint an image of his death as heroic and glorious, with Gísli, active to the last, performing at his best before an admiring female audience:68 Gætim vér, en væri, valtafn í mun hrafni, fríðr í fõgru blóði faðmr þínn roðinn mínu. [We [I] provided corpse-prey to the delight of the raven, and your beautiful embrace was reddened in my shining blood.]

Gísli is the active figure here, providing valtafn (‘corpse-prey’) for the hawk, and even his blood is described as fagr (‘fair, shining’), as it flows over Auðr: it is an image of aesthetic beauty, rather than of nightmarish horror. Gísli proclaims his heroism in the face of superior numbers and the excellence of his defence: Mǻttut skildi skaldi, skjõldr kom mér at haldi, gǻtum hug, við hneiti, hjõr gellanda bella. [[They] could not damage the poet’s shield (the shield came to my defence – I took courage – against the sword) with a shrieking sword.]

The elegant word-play on skáld (‘poet’) and skjõldr (‘shield’) bespeaks an exquisite control, and each killing redounds to Gísli’s glory (mannsbót, ‘that which increases a man’s honour’). The second set of verses, separated from the first three only by a brief statement of passing time, focuses in contrast on the horror of violent death, as blood flows like seawater (‘víðir’ ‘the wide sea’; ‘benvíðir’ ‘wound-sea’) down Gísli’s sides and over his shoulders. Now it is not he but his enemies who are described as feeders of the raven (‘valnœra’); as, in the most hellish image of the whole saga, Gísli imagines himself cut down, dismembered Sólarljóð, p. 303 (stanza 10); cf. p. 307 (stanza 18), p. 329 (stanza 48). On eitr (‘poison’), see Hallberg, ‘Imagery’, pp. 147–8. 68 Gísla saga, pp. 105–6. 67

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint and devoured:69 Hugðak hlífar flagða hristendr af mér kvista stór fingum ben, brynju báðar hendr með vendi. Enn fyr mækis munni minn hugðak, Syn tvinna, oss gein hjõrr of hjassa, hjalmstofn ofan klofna. [I thought that the shakers of troll-woman of the shield [axe > warriors] snapped off both my hands with the piercer of armour [sword] (we [I] got mortal wounds). Again, Syn ∧goddess∨ of the thread [woman], I thought that my helmet-stump [head] was split from above (the sword gaped over our [my] head) before the mouth of the sword.]

Like Egill in Sonatorrek or Guðrún in Hamðismál, Gísli uses the image of a tree from which the branches are snapped off (kvista ‘to cut, lop off branches’), his body a stump (stofn ‘stump of a cut tree’) from which the head is severed.70 But this is not, as for Egill and Guðrún, a family tree, in which branches represent offspring: it imagines the literal dismemberment of Gísli’s physical body. He is troubled not by the end of his family line, but by the existential fear of death itself, captured within the verse as a loss of the ability to act with his hands or think with his head – a ‘distillation of physical individual experience’.71 With the repetition of ‘hugðak’ (‘I thought’), the stanza insists on the workings of Gísli’s mind as he imaginatively experiences death. It is in depicting this individualistic fear, which we might think of as modern, that the saga comes closest to reproducing images of the Christian hell: the sword’s blade becomes a mouth that gapes (gína) over him to devour him in death, like the terrified Theodorus in Gregory’s Dialogues or the rich man in Michaels saga. Gísli’s lonely suffering in these verses reinforces the earlier description of death as a solitary journey, and they are connected with the verses about the ‘worse’ dream-woman through the repetition of ‘hugðak’.72 Yet there is a growing sense that Gísli has accepted his death and perhaps even embraces suffering. Between the horrific images of death and dismemberment, there are parenthetical statements of endurance and forbearing: Gísli states that he must ‘vinna vílsinn’ (‘endure a time of misery’) and proclaims that ‘bíðum brodda Gísla saga, pp. 107–8. Compare the poetic imagery of hell in Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar: kveljask andir í orms gini (‘spirits are tortured in the serpent’s mouth’, p. 30). In ‘Three Dream-Stanzas in Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar’, in Sagnaskemmtun, ed. Rudolf Simek et al., pp. 99–109, Foote argues that this poem was composed in a similar ‘mental climate’ to the poetry in Gísla saga. 70 Egils saga, pp. 146–54; Hamðismál, in The Poetic Edda, II, 161–2 (stanza 5). 71 Magennis, ‘The Solitary Journey’, p. 318; cf. O’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse, p. 177. 72 Cf. Langeslag, ‘Dream Women’, pp. 49–50. 69

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The Saint and the Saga Hero hríðar’ (‘we [I] await or suffer the storm of spear-points’). This is a very different attitude from the defiance of the preceding verses. As Gísli describes how his ‘lífs vánir’ (‘hopes of life’) fade, he comments that ‘líkn reynum svá’ (‘Such is the relief I experience’).73 Although this may be best read as an understatement, meaning that he experiences no relief or mercy at all, it seems significant that the word líkn has strong Christian associations: in Harmsól, God promises ‘sannri líkn ok syknu’ (‘true mercy and acquittal’) to the repentant sinner, where the legal term sykna can refer both to ‘declared innocence’ and to ‘freedom from guilt’.74 Gísli seems to reach here towards a new understanding of suffering as redemptive, a release from the burden of sin and guilt carried in this life. In his last dream stanza, he imagines a woman weeping over his dead body:75 Hugðak Sjõfn í svefni silfrbands of mér standa, Gerðr hafði sú gerðu, grátandi, brá váta, ok eld-Njõrun õldu allskyndila byndi, hvat hyggr mér, en mæra, mín sár, und því váru? [I thought, in [my] sleep that Sjõfn ∧goddess∨ of the silver headband [woman] (that Gerðr ∧giantess∨ of the girdle [woman] had wet brows) stood weeping over me, and that the excellent Njõrun ∧goddess∨ of the wave-fire (lit. the excellent fire-Njõrun of the wave) [gold > woman] quickly bound up my wounds. What [do you] think this signified for me?]

This weeping female figure is usually interpreted as Auðr, or perhaps the ‘better’ dream woman, who has promised to heal Gísli.76 But she also has something in common with the weeping women of religious poetry, like the Virgin Mary in Líknarbraut, who is described as weeping over the body of her son:77 Víst bar víf it hæsta vátar kiðr of gráti, sonr, þá es sárr af benjum siðnenninn dó hennar. [Certainly the highest woman bore cheeks wet from weeping when her virtuestriving son died, sore from his wounds.]

Gísla saga, p. 107. Harmsól, p. 77 (stanza 5). 75 Gísla saga, p. 109. 76 Olsen, ‘Women-kennings’, p. 282. 77 Líknarbraut, ed. George S. Tate, in Poetry on Christian Subjects, 7.1, p. 248 (stanza 18); cf. Turville-Petre’s footnote on the weeping Auðr in ‘Gísli Súrsson and his Poetry’, p. 388. 73 74

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint The tears are perhaps tears of penitence washing away the wounds of sin, as the virgin saints cleanse those who embrace suffering in Sólarljóð:78 Helgar meyjar höfðu hreinliga sál af synðum þvegit manna þeira, er á mörgum degi pína sjálfa sik. [Holy maidens had washed clean [lit. cleanly] of sins the souls of those men who on many a day mortify themselves.]

In Harmsól, both Peter and Mary Magdalen wash away their sin with tears, and the poet asks Christ to ‘grœða andar sár’ (‘heal the soul’s wounds’).79 Appropriately, before the conversion, Gísli does not understand what is beneath (‘und’) this dream, presenting it (as so much else in the saga) as an enigma, the significance of which must be uncovered by the reader. What happens to Gísli after death and does this weeping woman signify redemption? In contrast to most visionary literature, the saga gives no answers to such questions. But this final dream stanza raises the possibility that, for Gísli too, the wilderness may prove redemptive, a place of prophecy and encounter with the divine, as well as of suffering and death. Gísli’s last battle is carefully set on a cliff overlooking the sea, the coastal scenery signifying not only the end of the land, but also the end of Gísli’s time on earth, an eschatological boundary between the known and the unknown, human agency and that which lies beyond.80 As Gísli ascends the cliff and then leaps to his death, there is a sense not only of grand heroic finale, but also of abandon, of release, as he finally leaves behind the cramped inner spaces in which he has had to hide for so long. In the shorter text, we are told that he is buried ‘í grjótinu’ (‘in the gravel’), but the longer text replaces this with ‘í grœntóinni’, the space where the sea tides wash over the green turf.81 This ambiguous and liminal space, where land and water meet, seems an appropriate place to leave him: it is an unresolved space, a temporary space, a space that is open to ‘realms and agencies’ beyond the human. In the Norwegian laws of the Gulathing, it is the final resting place for those who cannot be buried in church, in the belief that all waters are blessed and will ease one’s entry into the next life.82 It is also Sólarljóð, p. 347 (stanza 73). Harmsól, pp. 117 (stanza 50), 119 (stanza 52), 121 (stanza 54). 80 On the significance of the coast for island communities, see Winfried Rudolf, ‘The Spiritual Islescape of the Anglo-Saxons’, in The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity and Culture, ed. Sebastian Sobecki (Cambridge: Brewer, 2011), p. 50; on seashore burials and tidal spaces, see Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550 (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 91 and Catherine A. M. Clarke, ‘Edges and Otherworlds: Imagining Tidal Spaces in Early Medieval Britain’, also in The Sea and Englishness, p. 85. 81 Gísla saga, p. 115; Tvær sögur, p. 158. 82 Stefán Karlsson, ‘Greftrun Auðar djúpúðga’, in Minjar ok menntir, pp. 481–8. 78 79

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The Saint and the Saga Hero where the early Christian settler Auðr chooses to be buried in Landnámabók, distancing herself from the still pagan landscape of the mainland; and it is where the outlaw Grettir is buried temporarily, before his body is moved to church.83 Gísli’s journey, too, is not yet over: it continues with Auðr, who with Vésteinn’s sister Gunnhildr, travels overseas to Denmark for baptism, and then departs on pilgrimage to Rome.84 Like Flosi in Njáls saga, they never return. Gísli’s vision of death as a solitary journey is finally resolved into the familiar symbolism of Christian pilgrimage; the eschatological crisis is at an end. Gísla saga is deeply indebted to eremitic and visionary literature for its sophisticated and densely psychological exploration of the depths of the human mind: the underground hiding places Gísli inhabits after his outlawry are also interior spaces created by his social isolation, as he wrestles through his dreams with complex and contradictory assessments of his life and with the difficulty of accepting his impending death. Although Gísli never explicitly criticises the society which has rejected him, the dream stanzas offer very different perspectives on bloodshed and violence from those of the social world of the saga; they give access to an unprecedented extent in saga literature to the secret and troubled contents of Gísli’s mind. Indeed, Gísli’s liminal existence on the periphery of saga society constitutes in and of itself a powerful critique of the prevailing ethos; as Turner has argued, the liminal state ‘can be seen as potentially a period of scrutinisation of the central values and axioms of the society in which it occurs’.85 Through its evocation of eremitic and penitential themes, the saga feels its way towards new ways of understanding isolation and suffering, but it does not, in the end, resolve the contradictions that the dream women represent. Their different readings of Gísli deliver no simple didactic message, but a challenge to the reader: ‘Hvat hyggr mér und því váru’? (‘What [do you] think this signified for me’?).

Trials and temptations Flóamanna saga, dating from c. 1290–1330, is extant in two versions, the longer (which was in the manuscript Vatnshyrna) and the shorter, which is the basis of the standard edition; in some manuscripts, it is named Sagan af Þorgils Örrabeinsfóstra, after its protagonist.86 It presents the reader with a very different kind of exile from the outlawry of Gísla saga: Þorgils is stranded in the Greenlandic wilderness when his ship is blown off course and wrecked on the way to the eastern settlement. He finds himself in a desert of snow and ice where survival itself is a struggle, and in this frozen wasteland he undergoes a series of trials and temptations in which he must hold firm to his Christian faith. As in the earlier Grœnlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða, Greenland here serves as a ‘backdrop Landnámabók, pp. 146–7. Gísla saga, p. 118. 85 Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 167; cf. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, p. 100. 86 Flóamanna saga, pp. cxxxiv–cxlii. 83 84

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint to stories of Christian fortitude’ and ‘the locus for the testing of Christian faith’, perhaps owing to the chronological convergence between the settlement of Greenland and Iceland’s conversion to Christianity.87 Flóamanna saga sets itself apart from these two earlier sagas, however, in its explicit loans from biblical as well as hagiographic narrative, most obviously Christ’s temptation in the wilderness as told in Matthew 4: 3–10. In its appropriation of biblical stories, the saga bears a close resemblance to Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, despite the century or so that separate them; Perkins has argued that it was intended to bridge the perceived ‘gulf’ between religious and secular literature in c. 1300.88 Particularly interesting is its relationship to vitae of St Þorlákr, since Þorlákr was a descendant of Þorgils, and the saga may well have been written in the vicinity of Eyrar, not far from the episcopal see at Skálaholt.89 The emphasis on patient endurance of suffering, which makes Þorgils unique among saga heroes, is a central virtue in lives of Þorlákr, as in the lives of other saints. For Þorgils, moreover, the wilderness is not just a place of ‘contest with evil’ and ‘eschatological drama’, but becomes a means of imitatio Christi (‘imitation of Christ’). This direct parallel between Þorgils and Christ pushes the saga narrative far beyond the boundaries of its genre. The saga’s unusual focus on the endurance of suffering is evident from the first description of Þorgils: we are told that he was ‘inn hraustasti i öllum mann­raunum, þegar honum dróst aldr’ (‘the bravest in all trials once he grew up’), and that he ‘stóðst vel margar mannraunir, er hann hlaut at bera’ (‘endured well many trials which it fell to him to bear’).90 These trials begin just before Þorgils’s journey to Greenland, following his conversion to Christianity. His change of faith earns him the enmity of Þórr, who appears to him in a series of threatening dreams, modelled perhaps on the serial dreams of Koðrán in Þorvalds þáttr víðfõrla or Sveinn in Sveins þáttr ok Finns.91 As in these conversion þættir, Þórr arrives to complain about Þorgils’s ingratitude towards him, and threatens to harm him and his livestock in revenge. After the death of two of his animals, Þorgils decides to spend the night in the cattle-shed and returns home the next morning ‘víða blár’ (‘bruised all over’). We are told that people believed that ‘þeir Þórr muni þá fundizt hafa’ (‘he and Þórr must have met then’) and, consequently, no more of his livestock die.92 The visible bruising 87

88 89

90 91

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Geraldine Barnes, Viking America: The First Millennium (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2001), pp. 3–4; Jonathan Grove, ‘The Place of Greenland in Medieval Icelandic Saga Narrative’, Journal of the North Atlantic 2 (2009), 38. Perkins, ‘An Edition’, p. 386. Richard Perkins, Flóamanna saga, Haukr Erlendsson and Gaulverjarbær, Studia Islandica 36 (Reykjavík: Bókmenntaútgáfa Menningarsjóðs, 1978), pp. 28–44. Flóamanna saga, pp. 251–2. Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 65–8; Flateyjarbók, I, 392. On Þorgils’s dreams, see Perkins, ‘An Edition’, pp. 293–4, and ‘The Dreams of Flóamanna saga’, Saga-Book 19 (1974–7), 197–208. On the dreams in Þorvalds þáttr, see Grønlie, ‘Reading and Understanding’, pp. 480–7. Flóamanna saga, pp. 274–5.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero may suggest that Þórr is visualised as a revenant, but the devil can also leave marks on his victims: in a night-time assault on St Antony, designed to dissuade him from venturing further into the desert, we are told that the devil broke down the doors to his tomb and ‘mœddi hann með mõrgum kvalum ok sárum’ (‘exhausted him with many torments and wounds’).93 It takes him three days to recover. Like Antony, Þorgils survives the devil’s initial onslaught, but wins only a temporary respite. This first scene sets up a power struggle between Þórr-as-devil and Þorgils, in which Þórr is determined to oppose Þorgils, and Þorgils to hold fast to God. The devil’s appearance as Þórr shows the influence of Martinus saga and Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, in both of which he engages in open warfare with Christians (p. 52).94 The scene that follows, moreover, is adapted directly from the Gospel of St Matthew. As Þorgils waits for a wind to take him to visit Eiríkr the Red in Greenland, Þórr appears in a dream as a red-bearded man, warning that his journey will be perilous unless he returns to the old faith. When Þorgils insists that God will guide him, Þórr transports him in a dream to a high place: ‘Síðan þótti honum Þórr leiða sik á hamra nökkura, þar sem sjóvarstraumr brast í björgum; – “í slíkum bylgjum skaltu vera ok aldri ór komast, útan þú hverfir til mín”. “Nei”, sagði Þorgils, “far á burt, inn leiði fjandi! Sá mun mér hjálpa, sem alla leysti með sínum dreyra.”‘ (‘Then it seemed to him that Þórr led him to some crags, where the sea current broke against the cliffs: “You shall stay in such waves and never escape, unless you turn to me”. “No”, said Þorgils, “depart from me, hateful devil! He will save me who redeemed everyone with his blood.”‘).95 This is unmistakably modelled on Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, and Þorgils’s words echo those of Christ as translated in Stjórn and elsewhere:96 Hann hóf hann upp á eitt it hæsta fjall ok sýndi honum õll veraldarinnar ríki ok alla þeira dýrð, ok sagði svá til hans: ‘Alla þessa hluti mun ek þér gefa, ef þú vegsamar mik svá at þú fallir fram fyrir mik’. Þar til svaraði svá Jesus: ‘Fyrir þann skyld far í brott andskoti, at svá er skrifat: Dróttin guð þinn skaltu dýrka ok honum einum muntu þjóna’. [He took him to the top of the highest mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and said this to him: ‘All these things I will give you if you honour me by bowing down before me’. To this Jesus answered thus: ‘For this reason, depart from me, devil, for it is written: You shall worship the Lord your God and you must serve him alone’.]

The biblical turn of phrase and the explicit reference to the blood of Christ are highly unusual in saga narrative: they create a typological link between the biblical wilderness of Judaea and the frozen seascape of the North. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 56. Perkins, ‘An Edition’, pp. 297–9. 95 Flóamanna saga, pp. 278–9. 96 Stjórn, p. 146; cf. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 76; Postola sögur, pp. 747, 760. 93 94

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, moreover, carries with it a range of traditional meanings; it is embedded within a complex and atemporal association of biblical and liturgical events. In Antonius saga, for example, it is retold as a moral exemplum on how Christians should deal with temptation, and Antony’s followers are advised to combat the devil by using the words of Christ: ‘Oss er ok leyfi af guði gefit í várum nauðsynjum þessi orð fram at flytja, því at fyrir þá sõk talaði hann slíka hluti, at með þessum hans orðum brytisk niðr vár freistni’ (‘We too are given leave by God to say these words in our times of need, for this is the reason that he said such things, that by these his words our temptation should be broken down’).97 Þorgils’s response, then, is the act of a model Christian and potential saint, who follows to the word the example set by Christ. In Stjórn, the focus is on a network of historical events, shaped into types and antitypes to illustrate the fulfilment of the Old Testament in the New. In a commentary drawing on Bede and Gregory, the compiler explains how these events are all linked by the number forty: ‘Á svá mõrgum dõgum héldusk undirdjúpsins võtn upp yfir jõrðina henni til hreinsanar í Nóa flóði, ok á svá mõrgum dõgum var Moyses í fjallinu þann tíma sem guð gaf honum sitt lõgmál [. . .] þat sama fólk á svá mõrgum árum fœddisk ok lifði við engla mjõl í eyðimõrkinni’ (‘For so many days the waters of the deep covered the earth so as to cleanse it in Noah’s flood, and for so many days Moses was on the mountain at the time when God gave him his law [. . .] that same people for so many years were fed and lived by the bread of angels in the wilderness’).98 The wilderness in which Christ is tempted is prefigured by the cleansing waters of Noah’s flood, the holy mountain where Moses encountered God and received the law, and the desert wilderness where the Israelites were fed with manna for forty years. In the Old Icelandic Homily Book, the homilist interprets all these historical events as allegories of salvation, illustrating how the Christian is led, through repentance and baptism, from the slavery of sin to the joys of heaven:99 Á endrhreinsaða jõrð stígum vér af õrk þeiri er guð stýrði í miklu hafi ok flóði, þá er líkamir várir ok andir hreinsask frá syndum í skírnarbrunni fyr almenniliga trú. Ór Egiptalands ánauð leysumk vér at søkkðum óvinum várum í it rauða haf, þá er vér ráðumk frá syndum í iðranartárum [. . .] en vér hjálpimk fyr iðran vára. Þá kómum vér til fyrirheitsjarðar af eyðimõrk eptir .xl. vetra, er vér erum leiddir frá syndum heims til paradísar fagnaða. [We set foot on newly cleansed earth from the ark that God steered through the great sea and flood, when our bodies and spirits are cleansed from sins in the well of baptism in accordance with the catholic faith. We redeem ourselves from the slavery of Egypt, our enemies having sunk into the Red Sea, when we turn from sins in tears of repentance [. . .] and we are saved because of Heilagra manna søgur, I, 75–6. Stjórn, p. 145. 99 Homiliu-bók, pp. 26–7. 97

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The Saint and the Saga Hero our repentance. We enter the promised land from the wilderness after forty years, when we are led from sins home to the joys of Paradise.]

All of these events are remembered in the liturgical observance of Lent, in which Christians are called to repentance and self-denial: ‘Nú þar sem hann fastaði .xl. daga fyrir sinn líkamsdauðann þurfandi fœðunnar næringar, var sem kallandi minnti oss á at vér bindimsk ok haldim oss frá þessa heims fýstum ok girndum’ (‘Now when he fasted for forty days on account of his mortal body’s need for the nourishment of food, it was as if by speaking [he] reminded us to bind and keep ourselves from the pleasures and desires of this world’).100 The wilderness is associated with baptismal waters and redemption, with penance and self-denial; it signifies not only purification from sin and the renunciation of worldly desires, but also the eucharistic mysteries of Easter, as the Israelites were sustained with manna from heaven.101 This train of associations suggests that Þorgils’s trials in Greenland are not a mere stroke of bad luck; rather, they signify the experience of all newly baptised Christians who renounce the temptations of the world. The potential significance of the wilderness is heightened by the northern seascape, which recalls the watery wilderness of Noah’s flood and the crossing of the Red Sea. Whereas the devil leads Christ to a high mountain, Þórr leads Þorgils to a cliff overlooking the sea: he begins his journey into the wilderness at the place where Gísli ended his. Perhaps this setting was suggested by Þórr’s function as wind god, and his role in the missionary Þangbrandr’s shipwreck, as celebrated by the poetess Steinunn, as well as his sensational appearance onboard Óláfr Tryggvason’s ship (p. 66). At the same time, it inevitably recalls the patristic allegory of the turbulent sea of life, through which the Christian must navigate safely towards heaven. There is a good example of this at the beginning of Gregory’s Dialogues: ‘Nú reiða mik stórar bylgjur mikils sjóvar ok margar hríðir á hugarskipi. En er ek minnumk ins fyrra lífs, þá er sem ek líta aptr til strandar þeirrar, er ek fyrirlét. Ok þá er mik reiða miklar bárur, þá má ek traut hõfn sjá, þá er ek hvarf frá’ (‘Now huge waves of the turbulent sea and many storms toss me in the ship of the mind. And when I remember my former life, it is as if I am looking back towards the shore which I left behind. And, when huge breakers toss me, then I can scarcely see the harbour that I set out from’).102 The sea here represents the dangers and distractions of the active Stjórn, p. 148 (here working from Bede). On biblical and patristic understandings of the desert, see Jean Leclercq, ‘Le désert’, in Chances de la spiritualité occidentale, Lumière de la foi 23 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1966), pp. 247–77; Bernard McGinn, ‘Ocean and Desert as Symbols of Mystical Absorption in the Christian Tradition’, Journal of Religion 74 (1994), 155–81. 102 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 179–80; cf. Hallberg, ‘Imagery’, pp. 132–6. On the significance of the sea to medieval Christians, see further Sebastian Sobecki, The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Brewer, 2008), pp. 36–41; Rudolf, ‘The Spiritual Islescape’, pp. 45–8; McGinn, ‘Ocean and Desert’, pp. 156–8; Peter and Ursula Dronke, Growth of Literature: The Sea and the God of the Sea, H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lectures 8 (Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, 1998) pp. 3–26; 100 101

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint life in contrast to the safe haven of the monastery, which Gregory as pope has left behind. Another example, explicitly applied to all Christians, is found in Maríu saga, when Mary miraculously raises a ship that has sunk to the bottom of the ocean: ‘Sú sama dróttning, sem þessa menn hjálpaði i sjóvardjúpi, dragi oss synduga af brõttum bylgjum veraldligs váða, hefjandi várt hugarskip af marabotnum lastanna, at vár augu sjái fagnaðarljós ok birti eilífra fagnaða’ (‘May the same queen, who saved these men in the deep of the sea, draw us sinners out of the steep waves of worldly peril, lifting the ship of our mind up from the seabed of sins, that our eyes may see the joyful light and the brightness of eternal joys’).103 The hagiographer is careful to explain the allegorical meaning here: the stormy waves represent the perils of life on earth, and the Christian soul is a ship in constant danger of sinking into the depths of hell – the same sjóvardjúp (‘deep of the sea’) in which the Egyptians are drowned, and which is seen by the altar at Þváttá in Njáls saga (p. 149). The ‘waves’ with which Þórr threatens Þorgils are both the rough waves of the northern sea and the ‘steep waves’ of sin and temptation. These deserts of sea and ice provide the setting for Þorgils’s trials and, ultimately, for his transformation into a figure of Christ. As soon as the shore is left behind, the wind drops and his ship drifts, until provisions begin to run out. Þórr twice appears to Þorgils to offer his help, but Þorgils doggedly refuses. After a long ordeal, his ship is wrecked on the western coast of Greenland. The crew is split into two: one group led by Þorgils and the other by Jósteinn and his wife Þorgerðr, who explicitly identifies herself as Þórr’s ‘friend’. While Þorgils’s men retire to bed early and observe the practices of their faith, Jósteinn’s men stay up and party rowdily all night.104 At Christmas, they hear a mysterious shouting in the north, and are struck down by pestilence: every last member of Jósteinn’s group dies, and they all walk again, directing their attacks against Þorgils. This episode is clearly indebted to the hauntings in Grœnlendinga saga, Eiríks saga rauða and Eyrbyggja saga, all of which the saga author may have known (p. 157–60). Here, though, the division of the crew into two groups directs attention away from the plight of the dead and towards the presence of moral allegory: sin leads to illness, contagion and death, while the strict observance of Christian practices keeps Þorgils and all his men safe. The episode recalls the moral division of the Israelites during the Exodus, when those who turn back to idolatry are killed.105 Jósteinn’s crew refuses to renounce ‘the pleasures and desires of the world’, and as a result dies far from the promised land. Food also functions allegorically in the saga, like the ‘bread from heaven’ that prefigures the eucharistic offering. Christ’s first temptation is to satisfy Danièle James-Raoul, ‘L’écriture de la tempête en mer dans la littérature de fiction, du pèlerinage et de voyage’, in Mondes marins du Moyen Âge, ed. Chantal ConnochieBourgne (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2006), pp. 221–3. 103 Maríu saga, p. 272. 104 Flóamanna saga, pp. 279–85. 105 Exodus 32: 25–35; Stjórn, pp. 312–13, 332–24.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero the needs of the flesh over those of the spirit – a struggle that is relived in the lives of many desert saints. Several food-related anecdotes in the saga insist on the willed self-privation of Þorgils and his men, reconfiguring their enforced endurance of hunger as the exercise of Christian virtue. For example, two weeks into the summer, Þorgils’s men find a bird’s egg and give it to Þorgils’s young son, Þorfinnr. He will eat only half, and when asked why, explains: ‘Því spari ek minn mat, at þér sparið yðvarn mat’ (‘I am sparing with my food, because you are sparing with your food’).106 Perkins has suggested that the timing of this incident places it on a minor rogation day, when only white food (including eggs) was allowed. If this is so, then the little boy’s fasting borders on the miraculous, and his precocity is comparable to that of the baby St Nicholas, who drank from his mother’s breast only once a day during fasts.107 Later, when they have reached the western settlement and a wetnurse is procured, the saintly toddler refuses milk before dark, just as St Antony ate only once a day after nightfall.108 In another scene, the men are so close to starvation that Þorgils decides to have Þorfinnr killed, so that he will not have to watch him die. Before he can do so, a mysterious shout alerts the men to a bear nearby, rather like God producing a ram in the story of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22). Þorgils kills it, but allows his men only one small piece each. When one of them comments on how he is matsparr (‘sparing with food’), Þorgils replies: ‘Þat hæfir, at svá sé’ (‘It is fitting that it should be so’).109 His frugality is expressed as the Christian virtue of forbearance, rather than a painful necessity for survival. The men’s greatest ordeal, though, is not hunger, but thirst; and this too is presented in terms of sin and temptation. Just moments before they find their way out of the wilderness and arrive at the eastern settlement, Þorgils and his crew are seized by sudden exhaustion and unbearable thirst: ‘Þeir gerðust þá mjök máttfarnir af þorsta, en var hvergi nær vatn’ (‘They became very weak because of thirst, but there was no water nearby’).110 In their desperation, the men suggest mixing seawater with urine, and ask Þorgils for leave to drink it. He takes the baling scoop with the mixture inside, and pronounces an ironic toast to Þórr: ‘“Þú, it argasta dýr, er ferð vára dvelr, skalt eigi því ráða, at ek né aðrir drekki sinn þarfagang.” Í því fló fugl, því líkastr sem álkuungi, burt frá skipinu ok skrækti við. Þorgils hellti síðan útbyrðis ór auskerinu’ (‘“You, most wretched of creatures, who is delaying our journey, shall not bring it about that either I or others drink their own urine.” At that moment, a bird, most like to a young auk, flew away from the ship and screeched. After that Þorgils poured the mixture out of the scoop overboard’). The spilt drink recalls the poisoned cup offered to St Benedict, and the black bird that heralded sexual temptation: Flóamanna saga, p. 291. Heilagra manna søgur, II, 21, 63–4; cf. Perkins, ‘An Edition’, p. 274. 108 Flóamanna saga, p. 302; Heilagra manna søgur, I, 53, 81, 83. 109 Flóamanna saga, p. 296; Richard Perkins, ‘Christian Elements in Flóamanna saga’, in The Sixth International Saga Conference 28.7–2.8.1985: Workshop Papers (Copenhagen: Arnamagnæanske Institut, 1985), p. 799. 110 Flóamanna saga, pp. 296–8. 106 107

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint the same two scenes from the Dialogues that were put to use in Egils saga SkallaGrímssonar (pp. 84–7).111 Their compression into a single scene here has the effect of transforming the cup of poison into the cup of sin. Thirst, though it may look like a basic human need, is in fact an occasion for temptation: the men’s recourse to seawater and urine is a failure of trust in God, who alone can satisfy thirst. There are similar moments of temptation in many lives of desert saints. In the Vitae patrum, a monk named Helenus is travelling through the desert, when he is tempted by the sight of the sweetest honey. Like Þorgils, he takes up the words of Christ to combat his desire: ‘Þú in blekkiliga lostagirnd, hverf braut frá mér, því at svá er ritat, gangið þér í andanum ok fylgið eigi holdsins girndum’ (‘You deceitful desire, turn away from me, because it is written, walk in the spirit and do not follow the desires of the flesh’).112 Once the devil has been defeated, God provides him with a pure spring of water and nourishing herbs. Likewise, in Antonius saga, Antony is travelling to a monastery nearby when he and his monks run short of water in the hottest part of the day. In response to his prayer, God causes a spring of water to flow from his tears to slake their thirst and alleviate their exhaustion: ‘Sløkkðisk þar þorsti þeira, er þyrstir váru, ok stýrkðusk þornaðir limir’ (‘The thirst of those who were thirsty was slaked there, and their worn limbs were strengthened’).113 Þorgils and his men also find fresh water as soon as the auk has flown away. This scene is not primarily about survival in extreme conditions; it is an allegory of sin and temptation. The wilderness, for Þorgils, is a site of temptation and self-privation, but it is also a place of encounter with the divine. When Þorgils and his men first arrive on the western coast, they support themselves by fishing, and the longer text describes how Þorgils always ends up with more fish than Jósteinn, even when Jósteinn insists that their takings be exchanged.114 As was explored in Chapter 3, miraculous catches of fish are associated with saints, especially Celtic ones, and the consistent difference in quantity between Þorgils’s catches and those of Jósteinn ensures that we understand this as a moral distinction, rather than a matter of chance. In his saintliness, Þorgils replenishes the wasteland and provides for himself and others, just like Ásólfr and Máni (p. 108). Þorgils’s remarkable catches of fish, moreover, recall an incident from his youth, in which he hooks a large halibut during a fishing trip on which nobody else makes a catch. As the wind picks up and a storm starts to brew, he rows confidently back to shore through rough seas. When, with some difficulty, he drags the fish home behind him, he finds a silver ring in the tracks on the ground.115 Perkins compares this heroic fishing feat to that of Hymir or the young Finnbogi, but there may also be a biblical source: in the Norse translation of Matthew 17: 27 in Petrs saga postola, Christ tells Peter to cast his net into the sea, where he will Heilagra manna søgur, I, 202–3; Perkins, ‘Christian Elements’, pp. 805–9. Stjórn, pp. 289–90, 295; Heilagra manna søgur, II, 427–9. 113 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 87–8. 114 Flóamanna saga, p. 283. 115 Flóamanna saga, p. 252. 111

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The Saint and the Saga Hero find a silver coin in the mouth of the first fish he catches.116 Importantly, Þorgils does not keep this silver for himself, but entrusts it to his foster-father. This miraculous catch aligns Þorgils directly with Christ and foreshadows what will later happen in the wilderness. The most strongly Christological moment lies at the heart of the chapters set in Greenland, in the horrific scene where Þorgils, at nón (the ‘ninth hour’), discovers his wife murdered in bed, their tiny son still suckling in her pooled blood. In a rare moment of emotion, the saga author tells us that ‘Þessa sýn hafði Þorgils svá sét, at honum þótti mestr harmr í vera’ (‘This sight seemed to Þorgils to be the most grievous he had ever seen’).117 What follows is unique in saga literature: Um nóttina vill Þorgils vaka yfir sveininum ok kvaðst eigi sjá, at hann mætti álengdar lifa, – ‘ok þykki mér mikit, ef ek má eigi honum hjálpa; skal þat nú fyrst taka til bragða at skera á geirvörtuna’, – ok svá var gert. Fór fyrst út blóð, síðan blanda, ok lét eigi fyrr en ór fór mjólk, ok þar fæddist sveinninn upp við þat. [That night Þorgils wishes to keep watch over the boy and said that he didn’t see how he could live much longer – ‘and it will cut me to the heart, if I cannot save him; now the first step to take is to cut my nipple’ – and this was done. First blood came out, then a mixed fluid, and [it] didn’t dry up until milk came out, and the boy was nourished with that.]

In the longer text, he puts burning embers beneath his feet to prevent himself from falling asleep. It may be, as Grove has suggested, that the saga author has some knowledge of extreme conditions and knows that male lactation can be the physiological consequence of long-term starvation and stress.118 It may be, also, that he knew of stories like the one Perkins translates from Markús Loptsson’s writings, in which a man stranded with a tiny baby, following a volcanic eruption, cuts off his nipples to let it suck his blood.119 In the saga, however, this is more than a survival technique. When Þorgils cuts his nipples, so that blood and milk flow from them, he becomes a figure for Christ as mother, who feeds the world with blood from the wound in his side, just as a mother breastfeeds her baby. This deeply affective imagery, associated with the Cistercians, was known in Iceland: we find it in Maríu saga, which includes St Bernard’s famous vision of feeding from the breast of the Virgin Mary, and in the description of the ‘pelican in the wilderness’ in Stjórn, a well-known bestiary item, as well as a patristic figure for Christ:120 116 117

118 119

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Perkins, ‘An Edition’, pp. 240–1; Postola sögur, p. 8; cf. also Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 232. Flóamanna saga, pp. 288–9. Grove, ‘The Place of Greenland’, pp. 36–7. Perkins, ‘An Edition’ pp. 320–4; see also ‘Christian Elements’, pp. 801–4. Maríu saga, pp. 195–6, 491; Stjórn, p. 78; cf. Leclercq, ‘Le désert’, p. 262 (on the pelican) and 271–2 (on the connection between the desert and the passion of Christ).

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint Sá fugl hefir þar ok jafnliga verit í eyðimõrkum nærri ánni Nilo, sem pellicanus heitir; af hverjum er þat segisk, at hann drepi sjálfr sína eiginliga unga; þrár hann síðan ok sýtir eptir þeim .iii. daga; eptir þat særir hann sjálfan sik ok dreifir þá með blóðinu, lifjandi þá sõmu sína unga með ádreifingu síns blóðs. [There is also a bird in the wilderness near the river Nile called a pelican, about which it is said that it kills its own young, then it repents and grieves for them for three days; after that it wounds itself and sprinkles them with the blood, giving life to the same young, its own, through the shedding of its blood.]

Even so, it is a profoundly daring scene in a saga, and there is little to compare with it in medieval hagiography, where milk flows from the wounds of male and female martyrs, but not from the breasts of men.121 The closest analogues are in Irish saints’ lives, where three men are said to lactate, one from his ear and two from their breasts. Bray describes the motif as a ‘powerful Eucharistic symbol’, like the manna that God rains down in the Exodus; in the face of hunger and need, it is a powerful affirmation of God’s abundant and faithful provision.122 It is also a moment of pure pathos. Þorgils is a father who cannot bear to stand by and watch his child die, who is willing to do anything to keep him alive. The wasteland has transformed him from a conventional saga hero into an affective image of the suffering Christ. The miracle of male lactation has interesting implications for gender in the saga, and particularly for its understanding of heroism. What is exemplary in a saint’s life is shameful in a heroic biography: we have here a genuine collision between the hagiographic and heroic worlds. The normative perspective reasserts itself when Þorgils leaves the wasteland and arrives in the eastern settlement, where he meets with a cooler than anticipated reception from his former friend, Eiríkr the Red. In a dangerous comparison between the two, one of Eiríkr’s men cuts to the chase: ‘Eiríkr er höfðingi mikill ok frægr, en Þorgils þessi hefir verit í vesöld ok ánauð ok óvíst er mér hvárt hann er heldr karlmaðr en kona’ (‘Eiríkr is a great and famous chieftain, but this Þorgils has suffered misery and need and it’s unclear to me whether he’s more of a man than a woman’).123 The insult, while conventional, is problematised by our knowledge that it is not merely symbolic: Þorgils has breastfed a child. The expected response is for Þorgils to prove his masculinity by taking revenge, so it is significant that, although his slave does kill the offender, Þorgils himself chooses to settle the matter peacefully. The whole brings to mind the incident in Þorvalds þáttr víðfõrla, when the missionary Friðrekr is accused of having given birth to nine children. While the alleged father, Þorvaldr, fulfils social Heilagra manna søgur, I, 264, 421. Dorothy Ann Bray, ‘Suckling at the Breast of Christ: a spiritual lesson in an Irish hagiographical motif’, Peritia 14 (2000), 282–93; and, further, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 132 and Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food for Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 270. 123 Flóamanna saga, p. 305. 121

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The Saint and the Saga Hero expectations by killing the perpetrators of this slander, Friðrekr embraces his motherhood: ‘Vel mætta ek bera bõrn þín ef þú ættir nõkkur’ (‘I might well have borne your children if you’d had any’).124 Þorgils, too, appears to feel little or no shame around his maternal instincts; when Þorfinnr later dies, he comments that he can ‘várkynna konunum þótt þær ynni brjóstbörnunum meira en öðrum mönnum’ (‘excuse women if they love the children they’ve breastfed more than anyone else’).125 Such a frank admission of womanly feelings is startling – like Gunnarr’s unanswered question in Njáls saga as to whether he is less of a man for being more reluctant to kill.126 The saga seems to redefine here what it might mean to be a man: to reconfigure feeding, loving, and suffering as praiseworthy male attributes. In the longer text, the breastfeeding scene is prefaced by the anxious but determined insistence that Þorgils ‘minntisk þá drengiliga á karlmennsku’ (‘manfully/bravely called to mind his masculinity/valour’).127 In the wasteland, masculinity and heroism do not consist in aggressive action but in patient forbearance and willing sacrifice. Even more than Gísli, Þorgils is a liminal figure: exiled in the wilderness and stripped of status and authority, he experiences the reversal of weakness and femininity.128 As for Gísli, from this liminal space, this desert of ice, comes a powerful critique of the masculine norms of saga society. The liminal is closely associated with the visionary and the prophetic, and this is true of Flóamanna saga as it is of Gísla saga. Shortly before Þorgils’s wife Þórey is murdered, she has a vision of heaven that could come straight out of Gregory’s Dialogues: ‘Hon kvaðst sjá fögr heröð ok menn bjarta, – “ok get ek at vér leysimst burt ór þessum vandræðum”’ (‘She said that she saw beautiful places and bright-shining people – “and I think that we will be released from these difficulties”’). Þorgils’s interpretation turns out to be closer to the truth: ‘Góðr er draumr þinn ok þá eigi ólíkastr at viti til annars heims ok munir þú eiga gott fyrir höndum ok munu helgir menn hjálpa þér fyrir hreint líf ok mannraunir’ (‘Your dream is good, and yet [it is] not least likely that [it] signifies the next world, and [you] will have good things ahead, and holy people will help you on account of your pure life and ordeals’).129 This near certainty of heaven (‘not least likely’) is unusual in saga literature, as is the promise that Þórey will be rewarded for her ‘ordeals’: it affirms the saga’s new ethics of suffering and purity, rather than masculinity and revenge. Later, Þorgils has his own series of dreams about his future in Iceland, perhaps modelled on

Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 12, 80, 96. Flóamanna saga, p. 312. 126 Njáls saga, p. 139. 127 Flóamanna saga, p. 288. 128 Turner, The Ritual Process, pp. 94, 168; Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 34–5. 129 Flóamanna saga, p. 286–7; cf. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 250; Maríu saga, pp. 536–7. On Þórey’s vision, see further Perkins, ‘Dreams’, 208–11. 124

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint the prophecies about Guðríðr and her descendants in Eiríks saga rauða.130 In one of these dreams, recorded only in the longer text, Þorgils dreams that he has five candles in his lap, like the seven fires in Gísli’s dream that represent his remaining years of life. The candle that is least burned is covered in fõlski (‘ash’), a colour that presumably signals the death of Þorgils’s youngest son, Þorfinnr, although this is not made explicit in the interpretation.131 The last of Þorgils’s dreams also relates to his offspring: ‘Ek sá á kné mínu ina hægra, þar váru vaxnir fimm hjálmlaukar saman, ok kvísluðust þar af margir laukar, ok ofarliga yfir hõfuð mér bar einn laukinn, en svá var hann fagr sem hann hefði gullslit’ (‘I saw on my right knee where five angelica plants had grown together, and many stalks branched off from there, and high over my head towered a single stalk, and it was beautiful as if it were the colour of gold’). Þorgils’s son, Þorleifr, can only guess that it signifies the excellence of one of his descendants, but this time, the saga author intervenes to confirm this: ‘Þat gekk eptir síðan, því at frá Þorgilsi er kominn Þorlákr byskup inn helgi’ (‘That later came to pass, because from Þorgils is descended Bishop Þorlákr the saint’). Þorgils’s suffering in the wilderness becomes a prologue to the biography of St Þorlákr, future bishop of Iceland’s first episcopal see and the first Icelandic saint. Þorgils’s relationship to St Þorlákr has no doubt shaped his presentation in the saga, which echoes, perhaps deliberately, some of the eremitic themes in Þorláks saga helga. Þorlákr is the most ascetic of the Icelandic saints, founder and abbot of the monastery at Þykkvabœr, and his life describes how he fulfilled the apostolic calling to hefna heimi (‘abandon the world’) and give up earthly possessions for the love of God.132 Both versions of his life (A and B) emphasise his forbearance of physical and mental suffering, but the later life (B) gives it particular prominence: ‘Hann hafði þegar mikla skapraun, bæði af viðrvist manna ok õðrum óhœgendum, þeim er hann átti um at vera, ok bar hann þolinmóðliga’ (‘His temper was at once sorely tried, both by men’s presence and other discomforts which he was troubled by, and he bore them patiently’).133 It describes him, like Þorgils, as enduring ‘þrautum ok meingørðir’ (‘hardships and offences’) and ‘mœðu ok meinsemðir’ (‘exhaustion and illnesses’), earning in this way his place among the saints who suffer persecution and martyrdom. Perhaps the focus on hardship and suffering in Flóamanna saga is designed as precursor to the ‘white’ martyrdom of Þorlákr. He is steadfast in self-privation, disapproves of frivolous games, and suffers thirst on his deathbed, transforming it into an imitatio Christi: ‘Ok veitti Guð honum þá dýrð at hann þyrsti við andlát sitt, sem sjálfan Guðs son ok skyldi hvárrgi stõðvask fyrr en í andligu lífi, því að Guðs vinir eru jafnan þyrstir til’ (‘God granted him the glory of thirsting at his death, like God’s own son, and neither should cease until [he entered] the Eiríks saga rauða, p. 208. Flóamanna saga, pp. 293–5. On this dream, see Perkins, ‘An Edition’, pp. 358–61 and ‘Dreams’, 222–32. 132 Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 57 (quoting Luke 14: 33). 133 Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 144, 155, 163, 168. 130 131

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The Saint and the Saga Hero spiritual life, which God’s friends thirst constantly for’).134 It is particularly intriguing that so many of Þorlákr’s miracles relate to fishing and the sea, given the importance of the seascape in Flóamanna saga: Þorlákr steers ships safely through storms, pulls a drowning man from the bottom of a flooding river, and provides a small and hungry relative with an abundant catch of fish.135 The hagiographer tells us that ‘náliga unni honum hugástum hvert barn er hjá honum var’ (‘nearly every child who was with him loved him with his whole heart’), and a significant number of his miracles are performed on behalf of children.136 The pathos of these stories, with their distraught parents and domestic accidents, comes closer to Þorgils’s own feelings for his youngest son Þorfinnr than anything else in saga literature.137 Indeed, one anecdote, about the healing of a baby born in extreme conditions during a journey across a frozen fjord, recalls closely the circumstances surrounding the birth of Þorfinnr.138 Þorgils can thus be read as fyrirrennari (‘forerunner’) to St Þorlákr, as John the Baptist is to Christ and as Óláfr Tryggvason is to St Óláfr (p. 55): a voice calling in the wilderness and preparing the way. In one important respect, however, Þorgils reveals himself not as a saint, but as an ordinary grieving father. We see this in the painful scene set off the coast of Iceland as they arrive home, when Þorfinnr dies in a tragic accident:139 Hann var þá tvau dægr í austri. Þá höfðu gengit átta áföll. Starkaðr bauð honum at fara frá austri. Þá kom áfall it níunda, ok var þat mest. Þat rak Þorgils af austrbitanum ok sló sveininn Þorfinn ór knjám honum ok utanborðs. Þá mælti Þorgils: ‘Sú bylgja gekk nú yfir at eigi þarf at ausa’. Báran kastaði inn aptr sveininum lifanda. Hann mælti þá: ‘Stórum stöplar nú yfir, faðir minn’. Þorgils mælti þá: ‘Ausi hverr sem má’. Þeir gerðu svá ok gátu upp ausit. Samdægris kom blóðspýja at sveininum ok andaðist hann. [He had been baling for twenty-four hours. Then eight waves had swept over. Starkaðr asked him to leave off baling. Then came the ninth wave, and it was the biggest. It swept Þorgils off the cross-beam by the baling seat and knocked the boy Þorfinnr off his lap and overboard. Then Þorgils said: ‘Such a wave swept over just now that there is no need to bale’. The breaker cast the boy back onto deck still alive. Then he said: ‘The sea surges over us now, my father’. Then Þorgils said: ‘Bale, everyone who can’. They did so and managed to bale out the water. On the same day, the boy spewed up blood and he died.] 134

135 136 137

138 139

Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 49, 69, 76, 78, 82. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 129–31, 201, 212, 214, 218–20, 223–4, 253, 276–9, 281. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 51. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 92–6, 108–9, 118, 201, 209, 216–20, 230, 242–3. On children in miracle stories about Þorlákr, see Diana Whaley ‘Miracles in the Sagas of Bishops: Icelandic Variations on a Common Theme’, Collegium Medievale 2 (1994), 175 and Joanna A. Skórzewska, ‘‘Sveinn einn fell í syruker’: Medieval Icelandic Children in Vernacular Miracle Stories’, in Northern World: Youth and Age in the Medieval North, ed. Shannon Lewis-Simpson (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 103–27. Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 95. Flóamanna saga, p. 311.

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint It is a masterfully drawn scene: the men are within sight of home, Þorgils is about to move from the baling seat, his despair turns to hope when the boy is, incredibly, swept back onto the boat alive, but this apparent miracle turns to tragedy again when he dies later the same day. Þorgils is so affected that he refuses to leave the body or to go ashore; for two days and nights, he neither eats nor sleeps. The loss of wife and then child establishes him, perhaps, as an Icelandic Job or Plácidus, both of whom lose wives and children, and yet stay true to their faith.140 But in this case, there is no happy reunion to come, as for Plácidus, nor any miraculous cure or resurrection, as for drowned children in the lives of saints like Þorlákr.141 On the contrary, the arbitrary nature of this death makes the scene uncomfortably true to life: the boy who survived his mother’s murder, starvation, and attack by a polar bear, dies by chance just two days from home. The nearest comparable scene is in Páls saga byskups: the drowning of Herdís, wife of Bishop Páll, as she is travelling home. While many are helped by miracles to arrive safely at Skálaholt, Herdís drowns arbitrarily in a squall. Like Þorgils, Páll does not eat or sleep until after the bodies have been buried. His biographer moralises about how God makes his disciples perfect through the willing embrace of ‘freistninni ok mannraunum’ (‘temptation and trials’); in this respect, Bishop Páll is modelled on his namesake, the apostle Paul, who also emphasises the value of freistni (‘temptation’), mannraun (‘trial’) and þraut (‘hardship’).142 In Flóamanna saga, no final moral is drawn, and one might be forgiven for thinking that Þorgils has suffered enough. Þorfinnr’s death acknowledges that real life is not like hagiography; not all tragedy can be reversed by a saint. With Þorgils’s return to Iceland, the saga returns to the norms of the genre, telling of his feud with Ásgrímr Elliða-Grímsson, his problematic relationship with his son-in-law, and the ups and downs of his marriage to a younger woman. There is little sign of the saintly Þorgils in all this, although he rarely persists in wrongful behaviour. One final episode, however, suggests the lasting change that Þorgils’s time in the wilderness has made. Þorgils is mocked and insulted by a passing Norwegian when he falls off his horse in cold weather. Although he is seventy, Þorgils challenges him to a duel and kills him on the spot, wielding the sword he won in Ireland in his youth. This is a feat of which many a saga hero would be proud, like Egill’s plot to wreak havoc at the Alþing, or Víga-Glúmr’s last failed attempt to dispatch his enemies; it is a glowing example of vigorous old age. Yet Þorgils condemns it himself as ‘it mesta glappaverk’ (‘the greatest mistake’), and promises to make amends, giving his sword to Helgi’s brothers.143 Perhaps this explains, as Perkins suggests, the disappearance of the sword from his family line, covering up the fictionality Heilagra manna søgur, II, 196–7. Heilagra manna søgur, II, 37–8; Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 108–9. 142 Biskupa sögur, II (2002), pp. 315–19; Homiliu-bók, p. 96. 143 Flóamanna saga, pp. 322–5; cf. Egils saga, pp. 180–1; Víga-Glúms saga, pp. 50–1; Perkins, ‘An Edition’, pp. 332–3. 140 141

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The Saint and the Saga Hero of the saga. Yet it also signals Þorgils’s abandonment of the last vestige of his youthful heroism, before his uneventful death and burial at his son-in-law’s farm. The saga mediates, in its final assessment, between Þorgils as hero and Þorgils as saint, Þorgils as powerful chieftain and Þorgils as suffering martyr. It is above all in this valuing of suffering and tragedy that the saga stretches and transforms its genre.

Colonising the wilderness Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, written in c. 1350–80, is extant in five medieval manuscripts and a large number of post-medieval paper copies, which are witness to its considerable popularity. Yet despite its inclusion in Vatnshyrna, a compilation of sagas about Icelanders, it belongs, as Ármann Jakobsson puts it, very much on the ‘periphery’ of the genre.144 Even more than Flóamanna saga, it confounds generic expectations, and has been variously described as a þjóðsagna sagn (‘collection of folktales’), a history, a tragedy, ‘serious fiction by a superstitious author or a generic farce by a sophisticated one’, a ‘hybrid’ of family and mythic-heroic saga, or (most recently) literary parody.145 Pulsiano describes it as landvætta saga, a saga of ‘nature spirits’, the non-human inhabitants of the Icelandic landscape, so it is hardly suprising that its relationship to hagiography is complex, since it is written from the perspective of the very beings that the missionaries to Iceland were determined to drive out. In Þiðranda þáttr ok Þórhalls, a prelude to Þangbrandr’s mission, the pagan prophet Þórhallr sees the hills opening and every creature, large and small, packing its bags and preparing to move on. The ‘advancing tide of Christianity’ means the disappearance or forceable displacement of the original inhabitants of the land.146 The second half of Bárðar saga, distinguished as Gests saga in some paper manuscripts, engages directly with this hagiographic narrative of colonisation and conquest, as it is told in sagas and þættir about the two Norwegian missionary kings. The final sequence of events is set in the wilderness of Greenland, which is, as in Flóamanna saga, a place of demonic temptation and the religious frontier of Christendom. This triumphant colonisation of the desert is problematised, however, by the first half of the saga, which opens onto a rich and variegated Bárðar saga, in Harðar saga, pp. lxix–lxxiv; Ármann Jakobsson, ‘History of the Trolls? Bárðar saga as an historical narrative’, Saga-Book 25 (1998–9), 53. 145 Ólafur Lárusson, Byggð og saga (Reykjavík: Ísafoldarprentsmiðja, 1944), p. 151; Paul Schach, ‘The Theme of the Reluctant Christian in the Icelandic Sagas’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 81 (1982), 202; Ármann Jakobsson, ‘History of the Trolls?’, pp. 53–60, 69; Rowe, ‘Generic Hybrids’, p. 542; Eleanor Barraclough, ‘Following the Trollish Baton Sinister: Ludic Design in Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss’, Viking and Medieval Studies 8 (2004), 17. 146 Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 125; Bárðar saga, ed. and trans. Jón Skaptason and Phillip Pulsiano, Garland Library of Medieval Literature Series A 8 (New York: Garland, 1984), p. xv; Ralph O’Connor (trans.), Icelandic Histories and Romances (Stroud: Tempus, 2002), p. 63. 144

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint supernatural landscape, inhabited by a variety of non-Christian beings, whose moral status cannot easily be determined.147 A major question, then, is how to understand the relationship between the saga’s two halves; the extent to which the saga author is in sympathy with the Christian conquest of the wilderness which is the inevitable endpoint of his narrative. The saga’s complex relationship to hagiography is clear from its main character, Bárðr, whom O’Connor describes as ‘a pagan equivalent of the Archangel Michael’.148 Of mixed ancestry, descended from risar (a type of giant), trolls and humans, Bárðr is a figure whose existence goes unacknowledged in hagiography, since he cannot be easily categorised as good or evil. Bárðr travels from Norway to Iceland alongside the first historical settlers to escape the tyranny of Haraldr hárfagri. The saga describes how, following the disappearance of his much-loved daughter Helga, he withdraws from human society and moves into Snæfellsnes, becoming a heitguð (‘god to whom one can make vows’) or bjargvættr (‘protective spirit’) for the humans who live nearby. At this point, the saga moves from a temporal ordering of events to a loose anecdotal structure that has been compared with medieval miracle collections.149 A few of the supernatural events in Bárðr’s life do indeed resemble Christian miracles. The first is the brief account of how Bárðr helps Einarr Sigmundarson, whose mother has been summonsed for witchcraft. Einarr pursues the prosecutor, Lón-Einarr, up to the cliffs Bárðr inhabits, where Bárðr has previously defeated an evil troll-woman. The saga author describes how ‘Þeir nafnar sóttust lengi. Þat segja menn, at Einarr Sigmundarson hafi kallat á Bárð til sigrs sér. Þá gekk í sundr bróklindi Lón-Einars, ok er hann tók þar til, hjó Einarr hann banahõgg’ (‘The namesakes fought for a long time. People say that Einarr Sigmundarson called on Bárðr for victory. Then Lón-Einarr’s belt snapped, and when he reached for it, Einarr struck him his deathblow’).150 This reads like the trials of strength found in so many conversion þættir about Óláfr Tryggvason, all of which feature a struggle which the protagonist wins only after he has called on either Óláfr or the God he preaches.151 The detail that Einarr called on Bárðr is missing from the saga author’s source (Sturla’s version of Landnámabók) and it looks as if it has been added precisely to turn a chance victory into a recognisable trial of strength.152 At the same time, the saga author does not confirm Bárðr’s supernatural intervention, formulating it merely as what ‘people say’. 147

148 149

150 151

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Ármann Jakobsson, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, in The Fantastic in Old Norse/ Icelandic Literature, ed. John McKinnell et al., pp. 54–8; O’Connor, Icelandic Histories, p. 67. Bárðar saga, pp. xcii–xciii; O’Connor, Icelandic Histories, p. 65. Ármann Jakobsson, ‘History of the Trolls’, p. 63; Barraclough, ‘Following the Trollish Baton Sinister’, p. 34. Bárðar saga, p. 121. Hallfreðar saga, in Vatnsdœla saga, p. 170; Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings, in Vestfirðinga sõgur, p. 326; Flateyjarbók, I, 259–60, 338, 381; cf. Joseph Gotzen, Über die Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss (Berlin: Druck von E. Ebering, 1903), p. 61. Landnámabók, p. 108.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero The anecdote that follows, in which Bárðr comes to the aid of the fisherman Ingjaldr, is even more like a conventional miracle story. Ingjaldr has run into trouble with a troll-woman called Hetta, and he finds himself stranded at a fishing station known as Grímsmið (‘Grímr’s fishing station’) as a storm blows up at sea:153 Litlu síðar dró upp flóka á Ennisfjalli, ok gekk skjótt yfir. Þar næst kom vindr ok fjúk með frosti. Þá sá Ingjald mann á bát, ok dró fiska handstinnan; hann var rauðskeggjaðr. Ingjaldr spurði hann at nafni; hann kveðst Grímr heita. Ingjaldr spurði, hvárt hann vildi ekki at landi halda. Grímr kveðst eigi búinn – ‘ok máttu bíða, þar til er ek hefi hlaðit bátinn’. [A little later, a cloud appeared above Ennisfjall, and drifted quickly over. Next there was wind and drifting snow with frost. Then Ingjaldr saw a man on the boat, and [he] pulled in fish strongly; he was red-bearded. Ingjaldr asked for his name and he said he was called Grímr. Ingjaldr asked whether he didn’t want to head for land. Grímr said he wasn’t ready – ‘and you can wait until I’ve loaded the boat’.]

As the weather deterioriates, Ingjaldr discovers that his fishing gear has disappeared and the oars are no longer serviceable. As freezing waves sweep over the boat and he feels his death approaching, he calls on Bárðr for help: Sá hann, hvar maðr reri einn á báti; hann var í grám kufli ok hafði svarðreip um sik. Ingjaldr þóttist þar kenna Bárð, vin sinn [. . .] Hvarf Grímr þá á bátinum, er Bárðr kom; þykkir mönnum sem þat muni Þórr verit hafa. Bárðr tók þá at róa allsterkliga ok allt þar til er hann dró undir land; flutti Bárðr Ingjald heim. [He saw where a man was rowing a boat alone; he wore a grey cloak and had a rope of walrus hide around him. Ingjaldr thought that he recognised there his friend Bárðr [. . .] Grímr disappeared from the boat, when Bárðr arrived; people think that it must have been Þórr. Bárðr then began to row very powerfully and all the way until he reached land; Bárðr took Ingjaldr home.]

This scene recalls several Christian miracle stories about Óláfr Tryggvason and St Þorlákr. As discussed in Chapter 2, Óláfr also encounters Þórr, whom he identifies as the devil, while sailing along the coast of Norway (p. 66). In a related story, found only in manuscripts of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, Óláfr glimpses a mysterious, tall and broad-shouldered man whose identity is not revealed, but who is capable of outrowing Óláfr’s men. Both stories support the possibility that Grímr may be identified as Þórr, with a mythological echo of his fishing competition with the Miðgarðsormr, where he also rows out dangerously far.154 Bárðr, on the other hand, acts like a Christian saint: in a miracle of St Þorlákr, set in Álptafjõrðr in the east, Þorlákr miraculously appears on a fishing boat off the coast of Iceland and steers it safely to shore with all 153 154

Bárðar saga, pp. 124–8. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 288–90; Flateyjarbók, I, 396–8.

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint its crew. In a similar miracle, set this time near Õlfúss in the south-east, he is seen by onlookers to sail an empty ship to land.155 Bárðr, then, carries out with competence the duties of the Christian saint: he rids the wasteland of trolls and pagan gods, and guides those at sea who call on him to harbour. Yet the flavour of international miracle here must be weighed against the specificity of the Icelandic landscape: both the place-names and the fragments of poetry attached to the story suggest that the saga author is drawing on local traditions. The vivid details of the changing weather and conditions at sea embed the story in a specifically Icelandic climate, and Bárðr himself has been described as ‘íslenzkur í húð og hár’ (‘Icelandic from head to toe’): he is less a saint than an emanation of ‘hit hrikalega, eyði- og einmanalega land utanvert jökulinn’ (‘the awe-inspiring, desolate and lonely land surrounding the glacier’).156 Likewise, the popular identification of Grímr with Þórr (and, by extension, the devil) is far from certain; it is not even clear whether Grímr is actively malevolent or merely indifferent towards a human who is trespassing on his fishing grounds. The landscape of the saga is not morally polarised, but decentralised: in it a variety of supernatural beings coexist and compete. It is not the Christian supernatural, but local knowledge and understanding that determines the lucky escapes of Einarr Sigmundarson and Ingjaldr: their connection to Bárðr is, above all, a connection to the environment in which they live. The second half of the saga turns to Bárðr’s son Gestr, who arrives at the Christian court of Óláfr Tryggvason in Norway, to become first the object and then the instrument of the spread of Christianity in the North. Given Gestr’s descent from giants, trolls and nature spirits, this is a paradoxical situation, as he is called upon to engineer the disappearance of his own family line in the wake of Christian conversion. The saga foregrounds here an anxiety which appears in the margins of many conversion narratives: what happens to those who cannot be part of the new Christian world? In Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, this is the situation of the anonymous Sámi sorcerer, who prophesies to Óláfr that he will convert Norway to Christianity, only to exclude himself from the change of faith: ‘Ok ef þér reynisk þetta með sannendum, er ek segi, þá skalt þú eigi bjóða mér annan sið en nú hefi ek ok eigi neyða mik til þess, því at ekki má ek snúask til annarra hluta eða annarrar natúru en nú ek em’ (‘And if you prove what I have said to be true, then you must not preach to me a faith other than the one I have now, nor force me into it, because I cannot be converted to anything or any nature other than what I am now’).157 In S, he says simply ‘Ekki má ek at õðru verða en nú em ek’ (‘I cannot become anything other than what I am now’). He can foresee and even approve the new Christian order, but cannot be part of it himself. It is hardly surprising that this theologically tricky moment is omitted in most redactions of Óláfs saga

Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 218–19, 281. Ólafur Lárusson, Byggð og Saga, p. 152. 157 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 187–9 (A). 155 156

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Tryggvasonar en mesta, although it has been reintroduced into Flateyjarbók.158 Other problematic non-humans are also censored, like Eyvindr kinnrifa, whom Óláfr tortures and kills because he refuses to be baptised (pp. 52–3). The different versions of Eyvindr’s story reflect significant anxiety about his ontological status. In the S-text of Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, Eyvindr is, like Gestr, of mixed ancestry: the offspring of a spirit and a human. He tells Óláfr that ‘Ok nú er ek hefi ekki mannseðli með õllu, þá má ek eigi játa yðru boði’ (‘And now, since I do not have human nature in every respect, I am not able to respond favourably to your preaching’). In the A-text, where he is instead a spirit masquerading as a human, he explains: ‘Fyrir því má ek eigi skírask at ek em eigi maðr’ (‘The reason why I cannot be baptised is that I am not human’).159 In Flateyjarbók, the story has changed again: we are told that Eyvindr was dedicated to Óðinn at birth and has chosen this for himself as an adult. He declares to Óláfr that ‘Nú em ek svá margfaldliga gefinn Óðni at ek má því með õngu móti brigða ok eigi vil ek’ (‘Now I am so manifoldly devoted to Óðinn that I can in no way change this, and I do not wish to’).160 His ambiguous status has been resolved into willed resistance to signal that he fully deserves his fate. In Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, there is little sympathy for such beings, but some of the conversion þættir take a different approach. In Þorsteins þáttr uxafóts in Flateyjarbók, the protagonist meets the non-human inhabitant of a mound, Brynjarr, who foretells a Christian future of which he can never be part: ‘Þú munt ok taka siðaskipti ok er sá siðr miklu betri, þeim sem hann mega hljóta, en hinum er erfiðra um, sem eigi eru til þess skapaðir ok slíkir eru sem ek, því at vit bræðr várum jarðbúar’ (‘You will also take the change of faith, and that faith is much better for those to whom it can be allotted, but it is more difficult for others, who are not made for it, and such [people] are like me, because my brother and I were earth-dwellers’).161 The closest he can come is to be baptised at one remove, through conferring his name on Þorsteinn’s son. His story is subordinate to that of the hero Þorsteinn, who is baptised and becomes Óláfr Tryggvason’s man, dying with him at Svõlðr on the Long Serpent. The innovation in Bárðar saga is to make such peripheral characters the focus of the saga narrative, to retell the coming of Christianity from the perspective of those who are driven out. This can be seen at the very beginning of the saga, when Bárðr dreams of a tree spreading out from the giant Dofri’s cave to cover the whole of Norway. There is a beautiful blossom on one branch: ‘Kvistr sá inn fagri mundi merkja þann konung, er út af þeim væri kominn, er þar yxi upp, ok mundi sá konungr boða annan sið en þá gengi; var Bárði draumr sá ekki mjõk skapfelldr’ (‘That beautiful branch would signify the king, who would be a descendant of the one who grew up there, and this king would preach a different faith from [the one] that was then current; that dream was not much Flateyjarbók, I, 231–2. Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 256–7. 160 Flateyjarbók, I, 385. 161 Flateyjarbók, I, 255; normalised text quoted here from Þorsteins þáttr uxafóts, p. 354. 158 159

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint to Bárðr’s liking’).162 The branches of this family tree call to mind Þorgils’s dream about St Þorlákr in Flóamanna saga, but its significance for the dreamer is precisely the opposite: for Þorgils, the dream promises a bright Christian future for his descendants, while for Bárðr it predicts only exclusion and darkness. In this new world of centralised power and Christian mission, the local and particular stand only to lose; the unstoppable spread of the overshadowing branches is not exhilarating, but claustrophobic. Likewise, when Gestr is first confronted with Óláfr’s offer of baptism, his response is unenthusiastic. Like Brynjarr, he recognises that ‘yðarr siðr muni betri vera’ (‘your faith will be better’), but he is aware of its consequences for him: ‘Alls ekki er mér um at láta þá trú, sem inir fyrri frændr mínir hafa haft. Er þat hugboð mitt, er ek læt þann sið, at ek muna ekki lengi lifa’ (‘I am not at all keen to abandon the faith which my ancestors have held. It is my intuition, if I abandon that faith, that I will not live long’).163 Óláfr’s reply, that ‘líf manna er í guðs valdi’ (‘human life is in God’s power’), is not encouraging given Gestr’s partly non-human descent. The saga author combines the type of the reluctant convert, loyal to his family and resistant to royal power, with something much more complex: in order to be baptised, Gestr must deny not only his ancestry, but his very nature and existence. In a saga which dramatises the conversion of Scandinavia from the point of view of its non-human inhabitants, the expected victory of Christianity tips into loss and defeat. Gestr’s name has a central part to play in the saga’s approach to the conversion narrative and the interrogation of its underlying assumptions. It links him with a number of stories about ‘guests’ of different kinds, which Rowe has classified as ‘pagan contact þættir’.164 In Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, an anonymous gestr (‘guest’) turns up at Óláfr Tryggvason’s camp and tries to trick him with stories of old and poisoned food. He is identified by Óláfr Tryggvason at the end of the story as the devil in the form of Óðinn (pp. 66–7).165 Then, in Flateyjarbók, a man with the proper name Gestr (‘Guest’) tries to lure St Óláfr into sin, by inviting him to reflect on fornkonungar (‘ancient kings’) and to express a desire to be like Óðinn. Here, too, he is identified as the devil in the shape of Óðinn and, true to his nature, sinks through the floor when St Óláfr reaches for his book of hours.166 The story closest to Bárðar saga is Norna-Gests þáttr, also in Flateyjarbók, where Gestr (‘Guest’) is no longer a pagan god or devil, but an itinerant traveller through the heroic past, who has lived for some three hundred years. After entertaining Óláfr Tryggvason and his court with snatches of heroic story and verse, he is finally baptised, dying in the white

Bárðar saga, p. 104. On dream visions of trees see Gabriel Turville-Petre, ‘Dreams in Icelandic Tradition’, Folklore 69 (1958), 93–111, reprinted in Nine Norse Studies (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1972), pp. 30–51. 163 Bárðar saga, p. 159. 164 Rowe, Development of Flateyjarbók, p. 60; cf. Harris, ‘Saga as Historical Novel’, p. 203. 165 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 248–54; also told in Flateyjarbók, I, 375–6. 166 Flateyjarbók, II, 134–5. 162

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The Saint and the Saga Hero clothes of a convert.167 He carries with him a lit candle which measures out his life, and can only be extinguished by Óláfr. As Kaplan has shown, the central metaphor in all these tales is ‘the past as guest’: the first two present the dangers of entertaining the past, both to the body and to the soul. In Norna-Gests þáttr, on the other hand, the framework of hospitality allows the past to be accommodated in the present: the Christian king is able to mediate (either appropriate or censor) the truths to be gained from pre-Christian myth and legend.168 The author of Bárðar saga clearly knew a version of this þáttr, from which he borrows several motifs (including the lit candle), but he makes his Gestr (‘Guest’) an embodiment specifically of Icelandic prehistory. The saga questions, through his name, whether the non-Christian past can still be entertained, and what the consequences of such hospitality might be. It is at this point that we return to the wilderness as a site of contest with evil, and a possible locus of redemption. Óláfr sends Gestr to uninhabited Helluland, past the Greenlandic óbyggð (‘wilderness’), to break into the grave mound of Raknarr and claim his treasure. Raknarr is an ancient king, who had himself buried alive with five hundred men and who, rather like the Green Knight in the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, makes an unexpected entrance at Óláfr’s court to issue a challenge to visit him at home.169 Breaking into a mound is a traditional way for a young hero to make a name for himself, and there are analogues in Harðar saga, in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar and in the reported text of Hrómundar saga Gripssonar.170 A number of saints also engage in mound-breaking, either exploiting or subverting the heroic overtones of what is very much a type scene. Both Antony and Guthlac launch their saintly careers by dwelling respectively in haugar (‘tombs’) or on a beorg (‘burial mound’), which they wrest from the control of their previous inhabitants.171 Guthlac inhabits a Roman chambered grave or a pre-historic mound on an island in the Fens; Raknarr’s burial mound is on a tidal island which a causeway joins to the mainland. Both are located in liminal spaces: near water, in borderlands, on the religious frontier between paganism and Christianity. The previous owners of Guthlac’s mound can be read not only as evil spirits, but also as the indigenous inhabitants of the land under threat from Flateyjarbók, I, 346–59. Merrill Kaplan, ‘The Past as Guest. Mortal Men, Kings’ Men and Four gestir in Flateyjarbók’, Gripla 15 (2004), 91–120; cf. Rowe, Development of Flateyjarbók, pp. 120–3. 169 Bárðar saga, pp. 160–1; Pulsiano, Bárðar saga, p. xxiv and Barraclough, ‘Following the Trollish Baton Sinister’, p. 27. 170 Harðar saga, pp. 39–44; Grettis saga, pp. 57–61; Hrómundar saga Gripssonar, in Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, II, 276–8; cf. Gotzen, Über die Bárðar saga, pp. 58–9. 171 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 56–8; Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 88–111; The Guthlac Poems of the Exeter Book, ed. Jane Roberts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 86–105. On the meaning of beorg, see Paul F. Reichardt, ‘Guthlac A and the Landscape of Spiritual Perfection’, Neophilologus 58 (1974), 331–8; Laurence K. Shook, ‘The Burial Mound in Guthlac A’, Modern Philology 58 (1960), 1–10; Karl P. Wentersdorf, ‘Guthlac A: The Battle for the Beorg’, Neophilologus 62 (1978), 135–42. 167

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint a new socio-political power (they speak Welsh).172 In the same way, Raknarr’s ancient power is threatened by the arrival of a new Christian king. These are as much ‘landscape narratives of conquest and possession’ as they are stories of individual conversion. They dramatise the territorial spread of Christianity, demonising those who stand in its way.173 In Bárðar saga, it is clear that Gestr has as much, if not more, in common with the supposedly demonic Raknarr than he does with the supposedly Christian Óláfr. At the beginning of the saga, Gestr’s grandfather, Dumbr, was ruling over Helluland, protecting people from ‘risum ok trollum ok óvættum’ (‘giants and trolls and evil spirits’), just as Raknarr is said in Halfdans saga Eysteinssonar to have rid the land of jötnar (‘giants’).174 Raknarr has killed his mother and father, but Gestr’s father, Bárðr, has previously killed his nephews and, at the end of the saga, will mutilate his son. Gestr does not really belong to the world of the missionary saint, but neither is he an evil spirit inhabiting a mound. The saga engages with a hagiographic narrative of conquest and conversion only to challenge the moral categorisations of hagiography. The journey through the wilderness, as in Flóamanna saga, is structured as a series of temptations, which Gestr and his companions must resist. Again, we find that the travelling party is morally divided: Gestr takes with him two sorcerers and a Christian priest, gifted by Óláfr Tryggvason, about whom he is less than enthusiastic. He also carries three other gifts from Óláfr: a sword, a cloth (perhaps an altar cloth) and a candle which lights itself in the dark. The devil’s first appearance is in the shape of Óðinn, described by O’Connor as a ‘cartoon character’, complete with one eye and a long, hooded cloak.175 He joins the party on their way north, as they sail across the Arctic Sea, preaches heathenism to them and suggests that they hold sacrifices. Eventually the priest, Jósteinn, loses his temper and strikes him over the head with a crucifix, whereupon he plunges overboard and disappears. Once in Greenland, the party glimpses two golden rods close to a kettle full of gold. Gestr sends the sorcerers up to get them, but as they reach out, the ground opens beneath them and swallows them up. Although the kettle is a folktale motif, the whole accords closely with how St Antony describes the devil’s tricks:176

Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, pp. 108–11. See Fabienne Michelet, Creation, Migration and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 164–97; Alfred K. Siewers, ‘Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation-Building’, Viator 34 (2003), 2, 8–28; Hall ‘Constructing Anglo-Saxon Sanctity’, pp. 213–23. 174 Bárðar saga, pp. 101–2; Halfdans saga Eysteinssonar, in Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, III, 316–18. On the difficulty of distinguishing between types of otherworldly being, see Ármann Jakobsson, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, pp. 54–5. 175 O’Connor, Icelandic histories, p. 71. 176 Stefán Einarsson, ‘Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss: Táknvísi og kristin áhrif’, Eimreiðin 72 (1966), 173; Heilagra manna søgur, I, 59, 78.

172

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Þat var enn þá er ek var staddr í eyðimõrk, setti hann optliga fram gull mér fyri augu svá sem sína gildru. Þetta gerði hann fyri þá sõk, at ek skylda í vefjask hans sviksamligu neti, ef ek vilda þat ágirnask með einni saman sýn; en ef ek vilda þat nálgask með átekning, hugði hann mér með bardaga áhlaup at veita. [It also happened, while I was in the wilderness, that he often set gold before my eyes as if [it were] his trap. He did it so that I would be snared in his deceitful web, if I were to desire it with even a single glance, but if I were to approach it so as to touch it, he intended to launch an attack on me by force.]

Every night, Gestr keeps watch over his men, and one night he is attacked by a raging bull – as Guthlac was before him.177 Despite his best efforts, he can do nothing until Jósteinn strikes it with his crucifix (following Guthlac, who ‘arms himself’ with the sign of the cross), at which it sinks through the ground at once. So far the priest has the advantage over Gestr, but the tables turn when they get to Helluland. Gestr and his men cross a lava field, wearing the iron shoes with which Óláfr has provided them, but Jósteinn, with no such shoes, ends up with bleeding feet, and Gestr has to carry him on his back.178 This may suggest that Gestr is softening towards the priest, but it also shows up the priest’s limitations as a missionary: while he is admirably equipped to deal with universal temptations, he will need some local knowledge if he is to tackle the specific challenges of the northern world. These demonic temptations reach their peak (as for Antony and Guthlac) in a fierce battle for possession of the mound. Jósteinn is subjected overnight to a whole series of visual illusions, with the aim of disarming his resistance:179 Ok er á leið at miðri nótt, sá hann, hvar Raknarr ríðr, ok var hann fagrbúinn; hann bað prest fara með sér ok kveðst góða skyldu hans ferð gera, – ‘ok er hér hringr, er ek vil gefa þér, ok men’. Öngu svarar prestr ok sat kyrr sem áðr. Mörg fádæmi sýndust honum, bæði tröll ok óvættir, fjándr ok fjölkynnigar þjóðir; sumir blíðkuðu hann, en sumir ógnuðu honum, svá at hann skyldi þá heldr en áðr í burt ganga. Þar þóttist hann sjá frændr sína ok vini, jafnvel Óláf konung með hirð sinni, ok bað hann með sér fara. Sá hann ok, at Gestr ok hans kompánar váru í búningi ok kölluðu, at Jósteinn prestr skyldi fylgja þeim ok flýta sér í burt. [And as midnight approached, he saw where Raknarr is riding, and he was beautifully arrayed; he asked the priest to come with him and said he would make good his journey – ‘and here is a ring I wish to give you, and a necklace’. The priest answers nothing and sat still as before. Many strange things appeared to him, both trolls and evil spirits, fiends and sorcerers; some were gentle with him, but some menaced him, to the effect that he would be obliged Felix’s Life of St Guthlac, pp. 114–15; cf. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 77. Shoes occur frequently in otherworld visions, often combined with landscapes of thorns or spikes that must be crossed; for a survey, see Carlsen, Visions of the Afterlife, pp. 147–62. 179 Bárðar saga, pp. 165–6. 177

178

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint to leave sooner rather than later. There he thought he saw his relatives and friends, as well as King Óláfr with his court, and [he] told him to come with him. He also saw that Gestr and his companions were preparing to leave and [they] called out that Jósteinn the priest should accompany them and hasten on his way.]

As in the lives of Antony and Guthlac, these temptations are intensely psychological: the devils take now one form, now another, promising good and threatening evil, offering friendship and prosperity or threatening with despair.180 In the Old English Guthlac A, one of the devil’s tricks is to remind Guthlac of his duty to his kinsmen (his ‘sybbe riht’), just as Jósteinn here sees his friends and relatives beckoning him to come home. As Antony instructs his followers, Jósteinn sits tight, relying on his crucifix and holy water to ward off the devils.181 In the light of day, the apparitions disappear, and Gestr can descend into the mound. At this point, the narrative comes close to allegory, recalling the events remembered in the Easter liturgy: the journey through the wilderness, the crossing of the Red Sea and the harrowing of hell. The candle given to Gestr by Óláfr Tryggvason lights itself as he enters the mound, and the light paralyses the mound’s inhabitants, just as light incapacitates the devils when Christ breaks into hell.182 Light, whether supernatural or real, is a generic tool for the mound-breaking enterprise, but candles also carry Christian symbolism, especially when gifted by a Christian king. It is a reminder of the candle given to the acolyte at baptism, which is lit from the Paschal candle representing Christ.183 Gestr is not yet baptised, and perhaps this explains why the candle goes out too soon, leaving him unprotected in the grip of evil. Raknarr, initially compliant, is fast to turn on him, and his five hundred dead companions leap to their feet. The saga then replays the trial of strength in the first half of the narrative, when Einarr Sigmundarson called upon Bárðr for victory:184 Kallaði Gestr þá á Bárð, feðr sinn, til fulltingis, ok litlu siðr kom hann, ok orkaði hann engu; færðu þeir inir dauðu hann í reikuð, svá at hann náði hvergi í nánd at koma. Þá hét Gestr á þann, er skapat hafði himin ok jörð, at taka við trú þeiri, er Óláfr konungr boðaði, er hann kæmist í burtu lífs ór hauginum. Fast herti Gestr þá á Óláf konung, ef hann mætti meira en sjálfum sér, þá skyldi hann duga honum.

180 181

182 183

184

Heilagra manna søgur, I, 86–7; Felix’s Life of St Guthlac, pp. 94–117; The Guthlac Poems of the Exeter Book, pp. 88–9. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 60. Bárðar saga, pp. 166–7; Heilagra manna søgur, II, 1–8. Harðar saga, p. 42; Flateyjarbók, I, 259. For the Christian symbolism of candles, see Homiliu-bók, p. 70; on Norna-Gests þáttr, see Joseph Harris and Thomas D. Hill, ‘Gestr’s “Prime Sign”: Source and Signification in Norna-Gests þáttr’, Arkiv för nordisk filologi 104 (1989), 119–21. Bárðar saga, p. 168.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero [Gestr then called on his father Bárðr for help, and a little later he came, and he could do nothing; the dead men jostled him, so that he was not able to get anywhere near. Then Gestr made a vow to the One who had created heaven and earth, to accept the faith that King Óláfr preached, if he got away alive out of the mound. Gestr then urged King Óláfr repeatedly, if he were more powerful than he [Gestr] himself, that he should then help him.]

Óláfr appears in the mound, like Christ, surrounded by light; Raknarr falls back, and the rest of the men sit down. Gestr then cuts off Raknarr’s head, before Jósteinn hauls him out of the mound. As they hasten to leave the island, the earth begins to shake, and the sea floods over the causeway: the landscape is no longer naturalistic, but allegorical, ‘realigning’, as Barraclough puts it, ‘with the new order’.185 Gestr sends his dog, Snati, to find a way through, but he drowns among the waves. Now it is not Gestr, for all his local knowledge, who must guide the men, but the skráfinni (‘scroll-monger’) Jósteinn, with his knowledge of the Scriptures: ‘Jósteinn prestr gekk þá fram fyrir þá ok hafði róðukross í hendi, en vatn í annarri ok stökkti því. Þá klufðist sjórinn, svá at þeir gengu þurrum fótum á land’ (‘Jósteinn the priest then went forward in front of them and had a crucifix in one hand, and water in the other and [he] sprinkled it. Then the sea was divided, so that they crossed with dry feet to land’).186 The detail of the ‘dry’ feet is a direct echo of the biblical Exodus: the flood, as in Genesis, cleanses and destroys, as Gestr and his companions pass through baptism to salvation, helped and guided by the Christian king and priest.187 We are told that Jósteinn ‘þóttisk hann ór heljum heimt hafa’ (‘thought he had retrieved him [Gestr] from hell’), a colloquialism which can here be taken at face value. Bárðr’s helplessness against the forces of evil contrasts with the power of Óláfr and his God, who alone can defeat the devil. The religious allegory is clear, but there is also a political allegory to be discerned: Bárðr is, after all, only a local deity from Snæfell, whose family has long ceased to hold sway in Helluland, and can hardly be expected to wield any influence so far from from his glacial home. Óláfr Tryggvason, on the other hand, represents the centralising and universalising power of the Church, claiming dominion not just over Norway but to the very furthest corners of the world. The saga appears here to endorse the Christian narrative of ‘conquest and possession’: the victory over Raknarr marks the elimination of political resistance, and justifies the displacement of local deities to make room for Christ and the saints. There is a final twist, however, on the night after Gestr’s baptism, when he dreams that his father Bárðr appears to reproach him: ‘“Illa hefir þú gert, er þú hefir látit trú þína, þá er langfeðgar þínir hafa haft, ok látit kúga þik til siðaskiptis sakir lítilmennsku, ok fyrir þat skaltu missa bæði augu þín.”‘ (‘“You did wrong when you abandoned your faith, which your ancestors have held, and let yourself be bullied into a change of faith through cowardice, and because 185

Barraclough, ‘Carrying the Trollish Baton Sinister’, p. 28. Bárðar saga, p. 169. 187 Homiliu-bók, pp. 26, 63; Stjórn, p. 286; cf. also the crossing of the Jordan, p. 608. 186

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The Outlaw, the Exile and the Desert Saint of that you shall lose both your eyes.”‘).188 When Gestr wakes up, both his eyes spring out, and he dies shortly afterwards, still wearing his baptismal garments. Although some have classified Gestr as a Christian martyr at this point, the symbolism is much more complex: a Christian convert should not be blinded after baptism, for baptism is always allegorised as illumination, a passage from darkness to light (p. 115).189 When, for example, a new convert is healed from blindness in Michaels saga, the hagiographer interprets for us: ‘Tekr konan ljós, en kastar myrkrum, undrandi sína nótt hafa brott flýit undan nýjum degi skýrrar sýnar’ (‘The woman receives light, and casts away darkness, marvelling that her night had fled away from the new day of clear-sighted vision’).190 Those who are blinded before they die should be those who deny God’s grace: Eyvindr kelda in Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar or Helgi in Helga þáttr Þórissonar, who is blinded by carnal desire despite a nominal attachment to Christianity. Otherwise, those who suffer from eye pain can always be helped by the saint, unless they are harbouring unconfessed sin.191 For a newly baptised convert to move from light to darkness, and life to death, is therefore the saga’s most shocking reversal of expectations. Bárðr, too, has not simply been reclassified as a devil: although he starts out sounding like Þórr in Flóamanna saga, with the characteristic whine of the self-pitying fiend, his words still have a ring of truth to them: Gestr has indeed denied his ancestry and his conversion could well be read as forced, if only by the weight of historical determinism. This final scene acknowledges that conversion is not always a move towards the light, that it involves significant loss as well as significant gain, sweeping away indigenous oral traditions that have no place within the world of scriptural history. Gestr can, paradoxically, help to spread the light of Christianity, but will himself end up in the darkness that lies beyond. And if Bárðr is, as Ólafur Lárusson has suggested, a figure for Iceland itself, then this finale has a political point to make as well: the saga resists the loss of native traditions and local identity in the face of Norwegian imperialism.

Conclusion The three sagas considered in this chapter inhabit the boundaries of the genre, even as they explore peripheral locations and characters: the outlaw in Iceland, the involuntary exile in Greenland, the non-human inhabitants of the Scandinavian past. The ‘interference’ of hagiography takes saga narrative in new directions: towards psychology and interiority in Gísla saga, towards religious allegory in Flóamanna saga, and even towards political allegory in Bárðar saga. It allows for new perspectives that critique or interrogate constituent aspects Bárðar saga, p. 170. Icelandic Histories, p. 71; Barraclough, ‘Following the Trollish Baton Sinister’, p. 39. 190 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 710. 191 Óláfs saga Odds, p. 253; Flateyjarbók, I, 361–2; Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 107–8. 188

189 O’Connor,

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The Saint and the Saga Hero of saga genre, such as heroic violence in Gísla saga or normative masculinity in Flóamanna saga, where the protagonists, like the desert saints, can be read as liminal figures who challenge the central values of ordered society. In Bárðar saga, the focus on the periphery, on characters who are neither entirely human nor exclusively otherworldly, throws an entirely new light on Christian narratives of colonisation and conquest, questioning the moral polarisation of hagiography. This is a case where the saga, as a peripheral genre, has a certain freedom to challenge some of the central narratives of Western Christendom. Gestr’s arrival at the court of Óláfr Tryggvason leads, in Stroup’s term, to a ‘collision’ between the local and the universal, the peripheral and the central; there is no easy resolution into Rambo’s ‘impression point’, as in some of the sagas discussed in Chapter 4 (p. 118). Instead, conversion is reconfigured in terms of blindness and loss, the flipside of the Christian symbolism of illumination. The wilderness in these three sagas is a place of temptation and renewal, of conversion and revelation, and it brings new values into the saga genre: penitential suffering, patient endurance, maternal love and grief. Yet the engagement with hagiography is far from straightforward, even in Flóamanna saga, where the hero comes closest to being like a saint. These sagas extend the boundaries of saga narrative, but like the sagas discussed in Chapter 4, they do not try to mimic the ontological certainties of hagiography. They still take place within ‘a world of transition and in-between-ness’, to repeat Tulinius’s words from Chapter 1 (p. 151). Alongside the visionary and allegorical, they find room for human predicaments, whether it is Gísli’s existential fear of death or Þorgils’s utter devastation at the death of his little boy. In Bárðar saga, moreover, there is considerable unease over the relationship between Christianity and political power: its connection with the aggressive foreign policy of the Norwegian kings. In the final chapter of this book, then, I turn back to the Norwegian missions orchestrated by Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr Haraldsson – a saintly king and a royal saint – with a focus on their royal and saintly interference in the spiritual lives of six saga heroes.

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N 6 n The Saint as Friend and Patron Introduction Christian missionaries and desert saints extend the generic range of the sagas of Icelanders, allowing them to embrace new values and produce different types of hero. In this final chapter, I wish to come full circle and return to royal saints in the sagas: King Óláfr Tryggvason, the would-be saint of Chapter 2, and King Óláfr Haraldsson, patron saint of Norway. The importance of these two kings is clear from the central position of their lives in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla as well as in the various separate sagas about them, including the large compilations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (p. 18). Their relationship to the Icelanders has a political edge: Óláfr Tryggvason was traditionally responsible for the conversion of some prominent Icelandic chieftains, and resistance to his policy of forced conversion provided a way of asserting Iceland’s autonomy vis à vis Norway.1 In the case of Flateyjarbók, Rowe has argued that the relationship between king and Icelander is viewed as one of ‘cultural paternity’: Norway is reasserted as the spiritual fatherland to promote the ‘benevolent coexistence of Olaf’s paternalism and the Icelanders’ self-will’.2 Either way, what is striking is how the figures of Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr come to mediate between saints’ lives and sagas of Icelanders: uniquely, they are able to cross between these two genres, and thus these two literary worlds.3 The ‘interference’ of the two Óláfrs in the lives of Icelanders is most obvious in the cases of Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld and Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld: Hallfreðr and Þormóðr were the court-poets, respectively, of Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr, and their poetry is quoted in the kings’ sagas in tribute to the lives and deaths of these two kings. The sagas of Hallfreðr and Þormóðr might thus be thought of as companion pieces to the lives of the kings they served, allowing a different narrative angle on the same body of events. This is no doubt why later compilers cut up Hallfreðar saga and Fóstbrœðra saga and inserted them in roughly chronological order into Snorri’s lives of Óláfr Tryggvason and St 1

Weber, ‘Irreligiositöt und Heldenzeitalder’, pp. 474–505; Schach, ‘The Reluctant Christian’, p. 186; Harris, ‘Saga as Historical Novel’, pp. 187–219. 2 Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, ‘Cultural Paternity in the Flateyjarbók Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar’, Alvíssmál 8 (1998), 3–28. 3 Phelpstead, Holy Vikings, pp. 59–61, 216–22.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Óláfr, creating a multi-generic approach to the problem of heroism and sanctity. Other saga heroes, together with excerpts from the works in which they figure, also make an appearance in these large compilations: Sigmundr Brestisson and Kjartan Óláfsson in redactions of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, and Þorkell Eyjólfsson and Bjõrn Hítdœlakappi in some manuscripts of Óláfs saga helga. The compiler of AM 61 fol. justifies these apparent digressions by using the metaphor of how ‘rennandi võtn fljóta af ýmissum uppsprettum ok koma õll í einn stað niðr’ (‘running waters flow from various tributary streams and all end up in one place’).4 One might argue, however, that fluidity of genre in these compilations works against rather than towards a single point of view. Although the saga heroes discussed in this chapter do not all participate in royal sanctity to the same extent as Hallfreðr and Þormóðr, their relationship with the king of Norway is an important measure against which they are assessed, much as Kjartan is said to fit into Óláfr Tryggvason’s clothes, and Sigmundr equals him in strength. Even from a distance, the two kings of Norway exercise varying degrees of influence over the Icelanders who have encountered them, dispensing advice, moral guidance and warning in dreams, and acting as agents of salvation through the gifts that they bestow. So, in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, the moment when St Óláfr chooses not to help Grettir gains its moral weight from our knowledge of all the cases where he has successfully intervened to counter the hero’s ill-luck. In this chapter, I look at how Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr ‘interfere’ in the lives of six saga heroes, mediating between different sets of values and providing a bridge between literary worlds.

Sigmundr Brestisson Færeyinga saga was probably written c. 1200–20, but it survives only in the fourteenth-century compilations of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar and Óláfs saga helga.5 It tells the story of the Faeroes’ conversion to Christianity, of the power struggle between its leading families, and of their eventual subordination to Norwegian power. The saga was probably connected from the outset with traditions about Óláfr Tryggvason, since the conversion of the Faeroes is attributed to him in the earliest literary sources.6 It survives in its fullest form in Flateyjarbók, where it is thought to have been copied from several sources, including an independent manuscript of the saga, a version of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta closely related to AM 62 fol., and Snorri Sturluson’s Óláfs saga helga (The ‘Separate Saga’ of St Óláfr).7 In Flateyjarbók, the part of the story that involves Óláfr Tryggvason is divided into three þættir, the first of which is placed immediately after Óláfr’s baptism in the Scilly Isles (chapters 94–115): it gives an account of 4

5 6 7

Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, II, 31. Færeyinga saga, p. lxii. Óláfs saga Odds, p. 271; Peter Foote, ‘On the Saga of the Faroe Islanders’, in Aurvandilstá, p. 172. Færeyinga saga, pp. vii, lviii–lxvii, lxxi–lxxvii.

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The Saint as Friend and Patron the childhood of the Faeroese chieftain Sigmundr, who escapes to Norway after the killing of his father and returns to the Faeroes as a young man to reclaim his paternal inheritance. The second þáttr comes after Óláfr Tryggvason sends Þangbrandr to convert Iceland (chapters 296–300). It tells how Óláfr converts Sigmundr to Christianity and sends him to convert the Faeroes. The third and final þáttr comes after Óláfr’s disappearance at Svõlðr and supposed entry into the monastic life (chapters 435–42); it gives an account of Sigmundr’s death.8 In the most recent edition of the saga, used in this chapter, the base text is Flateyjarbók, except for the chapters dealing with Sigmundr’s conversion and mission to the Faeroes (chapters 28–33), which are taken from AM 61 fol.9 Perhaps as a consequence of its piecemeal preservation, Færeyinga saga is difficult to classify: although it is traditionally labelled as a king’s saga, it has also been described as a ‘political saga’, a ‘colonial saga’ and as saga Götuskeggja. As a history of the leading family of the Faeroe Islands, it is in some ways closer to the sagas of Icelanders.10 Like the sagas of Icelanders, it is included in Flateyjarbók as the history of a political tributary to Norway, and the mission to the Faeroes immediately follows Óláfr’s mission to Iceland, inviting a comparison of methods and results. Although the saga appears to have originated in the missionary hagiography surrounding Óláfr Tryggvason, there is a general consensus that its main themes are political: the two main characters, Sigmundr Brestisson and Þrándr Þorbjarnarson, represent not just Christianity and paganism, but royal domination versus regional independence.11 Thus, while the Christian Sigmundr is more of a traditional hero, the pagan apostate Þrándr is far from unsympathetic. In a series of articles on the saga, Foote has argued persuasively that the narrative art of the author reveals him to have much in common with Þrándr: he is a ‘master of fraud’, a ‘comedian’ and a ‘political realist’ – hardly the virtues of a hagiographer.12 Yet the saga overlaps with hagiography at a few significant moments, most noticeably in the chapters that tell of Sigmundr’s first encounter with Óláfr Tryggvason and his subsequent conversion. As Harris has shown, we are encouraged to read Sigmundr here as a ‘secular type’ of Óláfr Tryggvason, just as Óláfr Tryggvason is a type of St Óláfr, and St Óláfr is a type of Christ.13 In a long speech, Óláfr Tryggvason describes to Sigmundr the trials the two men have experienced ‘í útlegð ok ánauð’ (‘in exile and hardship’): both lost their fathers in treacherous attacks, both were sold into slavery and driven from their óðalsjõrð (‘ancestral land’), both had to rely on the kindness of strangers. 8 9

10 11 12 13

Flateyjarbók, I, 122–50, 364–9, 549–7. Færeyinga saga, p. viii. Melissa Berman, ‘The Political Sagas’, Scandinavian Studies 57 (1985), 113; Rowe, ‘Generic Hybrids’, p. 544; Færeyinga saga, p. v. Berman, ‘The Political Sagas’, p. 124; Julia Bick, ‘Zwischen Heidentum und Christentum – Þrándr í Götu in der Færeyinga saga’, Skandinavistik 35 (2005), 16. Foote, ‘On the Saga of the Faroe Islanders’, pp. 177, 181; cf. also ‘Þrándr and the Apostles’ and ‘A Note on Þránd’s kredda’, also in Aurvandilstá, pp. 197, 207. Harris, ‘Saga as Historical Novel’, p. 206.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Both were finally able to make it home to regain their paternal inheritance: ‘Nú er svá komit um síðir at hvárrtveggi okkarr hefir õðlazk sína fõðurleifð ok fóstrland eptir langan missi sælu and sœmðar’ (‘Now it has come about at last that each of us two has regained his patrimony and native country after the longstanding loss of happiness and honour’).14 The whole is suffused with a religious register of exile (útlegð) and homecoming (fõðurleifð ok fóstrland): Óláfr reinterprets the adventures of Sigmundr’s youth as an allegory of spiritual exile from the heavenly homeland.15 His long ordeal ‘í ókunnu landi’ (‘in an unknown land’) becomes a metaphor for the experience of the Christian on earth, who yearns for entry ‘í hinni hæstu himinríkis dýrð’ (‘into the highest glory of the heavenly kingdom’). Óláfr promises him that his loss of worldly ‘sæla and sœmð’ (‘happiness and honour’) will be amply remedied by ‘þeiri sœmð ok sælu er almáttigr Guð faðir mun þér veita’ (‘the honour and happiness which Almighty God the Father will grant you’). He expresses his conviction that the past likeness between the two men anticipates their future likeness as Christian converts: Hinn háleiti himnakonungr, skapari allra hluta, muni þik leiða til kynningar síns háleita nafns ok heilagrar trúar af mínum fortõlum, ok gera þik mér samfélaga í réttum átrúnaði, svá sem jafnan í afli ok atgørvi ok õðrum sínum margfõldum miskunnargjõfum er hann hefir þér veitt sem mér lõngum tíma fyrr en ek hafða nõkkura vissu af hans dýrð. [The sublime King of the heavens, creator of all things, will guide you into the knowledge of his sublime name and holy faith through my persuasion, and make you my fellow companion in the true faith, as [my] equal in strength and accomplishments and in his other manifold gifts of grace which he gave you, like me, long before I had any knowledge of his glory.]

The physical accomplishments with which Sigmundr, like Óláfr, has been entrusted since childhood become signs and pledges of God’s prevenient grace. Óláfr concludes with the offer of his own friendship and esteem, and the promise of ‘co-ruling’ with God’s Son in heaven, fusing the religious and the political benefits of conversion to Christianity. Sigmundr is portrayed as a type of Óláfr, equal to him in strength and stature, but also as his political subject and spiritual ally: Óláfr hopes that, just as he has led Sigmundr to the true faith, Sigmundr will follow his ‘eptirdœmi ok áeggjan’ (‘example and urging’) by converting the Faeroe Islanders. Óláfr’s carefully crafted speech, most probably invented by the compiler of AM 61 fol., presents an Augustinian understanding of history: the events of Sigmundr’s life are teleologically ordered towards the end of Christian conversion.16 Sigmundr affirms this when he describes his moral status as a Færeyinga saga, pp. 69–70. Hallberg, ‘Imagery’, pp. 129–30. 16 Harris, ‘Saga as Historical Novel’, p. 207. 14

15

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The Saint as Friend and Patron noble heathen, one who, like Óláfr, has always acted on the intuition that the old faith ‘var øngu hæfr, þó at ek kynni engan betra’ (‘was of no use, though I knew of no better one’).17 Even at this early stage, though, there is a faint note of discord. Sigmundr reminds Óláfr of his previous service to the pagan Hákon jarl, of whom he refuses to speak ill: Ek var þjónostu bundinn Hákoni jarli; veitti hann mér gott yfirlæti, ok unða ek þá allvel mínu ráði, því at hann var hollr ok heilráðr, õrlyndr ok ástúðigr sínum vinum, þó at hann væri grimmr ok svikall óvinum sínum. [I was service-bound to Hákon jarl; he showed me high favour, and I was very well satisfied with my lot, for he was loyal and wise of counsel, generous and loving to his friends, though he was severe and treacherous to his enemies.]

In Flateyjarbók, Sigmundr’s praise directly contradicts the narratorial condemnation of Hákon jarl, where he is described as ‘undirhyggjufullr, ótrúr ok svikall bæði við vini ok óvini, inn rammasti guðníðingr ok blótmaðr’ (‘cunning, deceitful and treacherous both to friends and to enemies, the greatest apostate and idolater’).18 Sigmundr, in other words, remembers with affection the man who most opposed the advance of Christianity in the North. His conversion to Christianity has not annulled previous loyalties, even when these run counter to the dictates of his new faith. This dissonance sounds more loudly in a later chapter, in which Óláfr Tryggvason and Sigmundr are compared. Óláfr asks Sigmundr to compete with him at various physical feats, and the saga author describes them as near equals:19 Er þat sõgn manna at Sigmundr hafi næst gengit Óláfi konungi um margar íþróttir, þeira manna er þá váru í Nóregi, ok skorti hann þó alla hluti við konung, þá er þeir reyndu. [It was the common report that, in many accomplishments, Sigmundr came closest to King Óláfr of all the men who were then in Norway, and yet he fell short of the king in all things at which they competed.]

Sigmundr sounds like a pale imitation of Óláfr here, wanting only in comparison with the real thing. No more than two men sit between him and Óláfr at table: he has reached the height of royal favour. It is at this moment that Óláfr notices a gold ring on Sigmundr’s arm, a gift from Hákon jarl. Óláfr asks for the ring and offers to replace it with another, but Sigmundr refuses to cede it: ‘Góðr þótti mér þá nautinn er jarl var, ok vel gerði hann til mín marga hluti’ (‘The giver seemed good to me, where the jarl was concerned, and he treated me well in many respects’). His continuing regard for Hákon provokes Óláfr to anger, and he explains that he asked for the pagan ring only to protect the Færeyinga saga, p. 70; Óláfs saga Odds, p. 15 . Flateyjarbók, I, 239. 19 Færeyinga saga, pp. 75–6. 17

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The Saint and the Saga Hero wearer from harm: ‘Lát þér hann þykkja svá góðan sem þú vill, bæði hringinn ok þann er þér gaf; en giptufátt verðr þér nú, því at þessi hringr verðr þinn bani’ (‘Think it as good as you will, the ring or the one who gave it to you; but you will be short of luck from now on, for this ring will bring about your death’). This pronouncement hovers somewhere between cause and effect: it is not clear whether Óláfr is merely fortelling the consequences of Sigmundr’s affections or actively withdrawing his ‘luck’ from Sigmundr, as a saint might withdraw his blessing. Hermann Pálsson has argued that gipta and gæfa do have the sense of ‘blessing’ in lives of Óláfr Tryggvason and Óláfr Haraldsson: the king’s luck works in harmony with divine grace and can be bestowed upon his men.20 The loss of this luck will be catastrophic for Sigmundr, as the account of his death reveals. In AM 61 fol., the text of Færeyinga saga ends here, with a comment to the effect that Óláfr’s words proved true. In Flateyjarbók, however, a description of Sigmundr’s death is added just after Óláfr’s disappearance at Svõlðr. When his enemies ambush him on Skúfey, Sigmundr is trapped without his weapons; he and his brother Þórir jump off a cliff into the sea and try to swim to the shore of the nearest island. Sigmundr carries Þórir on his shoulders, but he eventually slips off and drowns. Sigmundr reaches shore alone as dawn is breaking and, too exhausted to walk, he collapses on a pile of seaweed. In this helpless state, he is found by some tenants of Þrándr, who murder him for the gold ring on his arm, ignoring Sigmundr’s plea that ‘þeir mundu hjálpa þá’ (‘they would then help [him]’). This pitiful death not only fulfills the pronouncement made by Óláfr Tryggvason, but also contrasts painfully with Óláfr’s last moments at Svõlðr: while Óláfr bravely fights to the last, before swimming under water to safety, Sigmundr is denied a heroic last stand and dies in ignominy on the shore. His body is unceremoniously hidden under some stones; it is some time before he is reburied in church. He pays a high price for losing the king’s favour and stubbornly adhering to pre-Christian loyalties. One way of reading this story, then, is as a cautionary tale about the danger of harbouring pagan sympathies. This is supported in Flateyjarbók by the paired scenes set at the temple of Þorgerðr Hõlgabrúðr, the tutelary spirit worshipped by Hákon jarl. In the first scene, Hákon urges Sigmundr to show devotion to Þorgerðr, and he agrees to visit her temple. The two men follow a cart lane into the forest and take a sidetrack to a clearing, where they find a finely decorated building. Hákon prostrates himself before Þorgerðr, in return for which he is allowed to take a gold ring from her arm; he persuades Sigmundr to accept it, promising that the ring will bring him heillir (‘luck’).21 This is the ring that Óláfr prophesies will bring about Sigmundr’s death. In the second scene, we are told of Óláfr Tryggvason’s visit to the same temple, accessed through the same clearing in the forest. Óláfr strips the gold and finery off the idol of Þorgerðr Hermann Pálsson, ‘Um gæfumenn ok ógæfu’, pp. 138–41; Lönnroth, Njáls saga, pp. 125–8; Rowe, ‘Cultural Paternity’, p. 14. 21 Færeyinga saga, p. 51. 20

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The Saint as Friend and Patron and has her tied to the back of his horse; he drags her through the dirt, breaks her to pieces and burns her to ashes. The compiler adds, as explanation for this extreme violence, that Óláfr did not wish any part of her to be preserved ‘til vándskapar eðr villuefnis’ (‘to the perdition and undoing’) of Christians.22 Sigmundr’s respect for Hákon jarl’s faith and refusal to speak ill of him contrast strongly here with Óláfr’s violent rejection of paganism and its characterisation as an insidious and corrupting power. The harsh treatment of Þorgerðr perhaps even anticipates what happens at Sigmundr’s death: he too is stripped of ‘klæðum ok gripum’ (‘clothes and valuables’) and dragged through the dirt to a makeshift grave.23 The ring given to him by Hákon does not bring the promised heillir (‘luck’), but instead renders him giptufátt (‘short of luck’). Even a second-hand attachment to paganism, a slight residual sympathy, is enough to bring him to a shameful end. Yet this is not the only way to understand Sigmundr’s death, and the saga as a whole resists this reading: it is as much Sigmundr’s idealism and generosity that lead to his death as any reprehensible association with paganism. Sigmundr’s tragic flaw is not an attachment to pagan gods so much as a traditional heroic reliance on his own strength; he tells Hákon that ‘ek trúi á mátt minn ok megin’ (‘I believe in my own might and main’), a formulation which, as Weber has shown, is anchored in a Christian retrospective reading of the pagan past, a valuing of all mental and physical strength as God-given.24 When, swimming for his life, Sigmundr chooses to take his brother Þórir on his back, we are reminded of how, as a young boy, he carried Þórir across the mountains to safety, despite Þórir’s pleas that he save himself.25 Both times, Sigmundr refuses, declaring that they will live or die together. The driving force in his life is not self-interest, but loyal devotion to those whom he loves. Likewise, his refusal on two occasions to take Þrándr’s life is explicitly counted among the causes of his death: Þórir warns him, when he lets Þrándr live for the first time, that it will bring about ‘þinn bani ok þinna vina’ (‘the death of you and of your friends’).26 Sigmundr behaves, at the end of his life, with the same moral integrity that he has always shown, but his ‘might and main’ fail him at the last. Despite all his efforts, Þórir drowns, and Þrándr takes callous advantage of his goodness, seeing in Sigmundr’s failure to kill him only a tactical advantage. Tragically, Sigmundr discovers the limits of his strength too late for Óláfr to intervene. More subversively, Sigmundr’s death might be read as a critique of the policy of forced conversion, the hallmark of Óláfr Tryggvason’s missions. The scenes that describe Sigmundr’s feud with Þrándr recall Óláfr’s many contests with sorcerers, centring on control over the wind and waves (p. 60). Sigmundr Flateyjarbók, I, 409. Færeyinga saga, p. 86. 24 Færeyinga saga, p. 50. On the origins of this collocation and its association with the noble heathen, see Weber, ‘Irreligiosität und Heldenzeitalter’, pp. 475–8. 25 Færeyinga saga, p. 22. 26 Færeyinga saga, p. 73. 22 23

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The Saint and the Saga Hero initially manages to outwit Þrándr, as Óláfr outwits his opponents, arriving unexpectedly on Þrándr’s island at a time when the currents are supposedly too strong to travel. Following Óláfr’s example, he gives Þrándr two choices: ‘at þú takir trú rétta ok látir skírask’ (‘that you take the right faith and are baptised’) or ‘at þú skalt vera drepinn þegar í stað’ (‘that you shall be killed here and now’).27 Þrándr initially resists this, but, unlike Óláfr, Sigmundr hesitates to kill him and eventually accepts a blatantly insincere profession of faith. When Sigmundr tries to take Þrándr back to Norway, it becomes clear that, out of the two, Þrándr now has the upper hand: he warns Sigmundr that they will not be able to set sail ‘svá at þeir flytti hann nauðgan með sér’ (‘so long as they take him with them by force’).28 The winds now respond as Þrándr directs, and Sigmundr has to leave him behind. Þrándr promptly abandons the Christian faith, but the memory of his forced conversion rankles: ‘Þú hefir mér margar skammir gert [. . . ] ok þá mesta er þú kúgaðir mik til siðaskiptis, er ek uni verst við allar stundir, er ek gekk undir þat’ (‘You have done many shameful things to me [. . .] but the worst [was] when you forced me into a change of faith, which, at all times, I like least, that I submitted to that’).29 A forced convert is not a lasting convert; such a policy risks social unrest. In the light of Óláfr’s own frequent contests with sorcerers, it is hard not to read into the struggle between Sigmundr and Þrándr an alternative (and arguably more realistic) view of just how such forced conversions might turn out. This would make the saga less of the hoped-for ‘tributary stream’ (p. 210) and more of a countercurrent, an exploration of alternative points of view. Perhaps the final word on this should be left to Þrándr, who is quite happy to concede that there is more than one way to view the world: ‘“Nú hefi ek mína kreddu, en þú þá er þú hefir numit, ok eru margar kreddur, ok er slíkt”, segir hann, “eigi á eina lund rétt.”‘ (‘“Now I have my creed, and you the one you have learned, and there are many creeds, and such things are”, he says, “not right in only one way.”‘).30 On a geographical and literary periphery, Þrándr does not need to be orthodox.

Hallfreðr Óttarsson Sigmundr’s life is marked irrevocably by Óláfr Tryggvason’s withdrawal of favour. In contrast, the story of Hallfreðr is one in which Óláfr sustains his favour throughout the poet’s tempestuous life, despite the fact that Hallfreðr also struggles with pagan loyalties, most obviously because of his poetic gifts. Like Sigmundr, Hallfreðr lives through the historical transition from the pagan Hákon jarl to the Christian Óláfr Tryggvason, and his ‘reluctant’ conversion is well known: it is documented in his saga in a series of verses which give the illusion of direct insight into the poet’s mind, in a similar way to Gísli’s dream Færeyinga saga, p. 73. Færeyinga saga, p. 74. 29 Færeyinga saga, p. 79. 30 Færeyinga saga, p. 116. 27

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The Saint as Friend and Patron verses.31 The authenticity of these ‘Conversion Verses’ is difficult to gauge: in a close study, Whaley describes them as, if fabricated, ‘a remarkably – implausibly? – good attempt to get inside the troubled head of a reluctant convert’, and if authentic, ‘a precious rarity’, giving ‘unparalleled access’ to the mindset of a ‘millennium man’.32 In recent readings of these verses, Poole and Goeres have tried to reconstruct their shape and meaning outside the prose context of the saga.33 In this chapter, however, they will be read as part of a narrative whole that charts Hallfreðr’s tortuous journey towards salvation. Unlike Færeyinga saga, Hallfreðar saga survives both as þættir in AM 61 fol. and related manuscripts, and as a freestanding saga in Mõðruvallabók. Bjarni Einarson has argued that these two versions of the saga have quite distinctive emphases: in AM 61 fol., Hallfreðr’s life is primarily a drama of conversion, while in Mõðruvallabók, it is above all a love story, typical of the skáldasögur (‘sagas of poets’) in the love triangle between Hallfreðr, Kolfinna and her husband Gríss.34 In addition, Kalinke has argued persuasively that the version of the saga in AM 61 fol. tells ‘the story of the poet’s constant struggle with paternal authority’: Hallfreðr rebels against his biological father Óttarr and his foster-father Óláfr of Haukagil, repeatedly puts his godfather Óláfr Tryggvason to the test, and submits only at the moment of death to the rule of his heavenly Father.35 The figure of Óláfr Tryggvason is central to this reading, from his initial acceptance of Hallfreðr as godson to his final posthumous intervention to ensure him a Christian burial on Iona.36 Even in Mõðruvallabók, however, Óláfr intervenes in the feud between Hallfreðr and Gríss over Kolfinna, and Gríss acknowledges that love for one’s lord comes before one’s love for a woman. Whether we are dealing with conversion story, love story or family drama, Óláfr emerges as the single most important influence in Hallfreðr’s life. 31 32

33

34

35 36

Cecil Wood, ‘The Reluctant Christian and the King of Norway’, Scandinavian Studies 31 (1959), 65–72; Schach, ‘The Reluctant Christian’, pp. 186–203. Diana Whaley, ‘The “Conversion Verses” in Hallfreðar saga: Authentic Voice of a Reluctant Christian?’, in Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross, The Viking Collection: Studies in Northern Civilization 14 (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2003), p. 254; cf. also Kari Ellen Gade, ‘The Dating and Attributions of Verses in the Skald Sagas’, in Skald Sagas: Text, Vocation and Desire in the Icelandic Sagas of Poets, ed. Russell Poole (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2001), pp. 50–74. Russell Poole, ‘The “Conversion Verses” of Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld’, Maal og minne (2002), 15–37; Erin Goeres, ‘The Many Conversions of Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 7 (2011), 45–62. Hallfreðar saga, ed. Bjarni Einarsson, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi, Rit 15 (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1977), pp. cxil–cxlii; Paul Schach, ‘Anti-Pagan Sentiment in the Sagas of Icelanders’, pp. 128–30. In this chapter, Bjarni Einarsson’s edition of the saga is used, and I quote from the text of AM 61 fol., unless otherwise stated. Marianna Kalinke, ‘Stæri ek brag: Protest and Subordination in Hallfreðar saga’, Skáldskaparmál 3 (1997), 50–68. Ármann Jakobsson, ‘Our Norwegian Friend: The Role of Kings in the Family Sagas’, Arkiv för nordisk filologi 117 (2002), 147–8.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero The role Óláfr will play in Hallfreðr’s life is anticipated in their very first encounter, which is set, significantly, at sea. Hallfreðr arrives off Agðanes to learn that Hákon jarl is dead and Óláfr Tryggvason is now in power. He and his men make vows to Freyr, Þórr and Óðinn, but fail to get an offshore breeze.37 They sail into the fjord and moor the ship outside the harbour, but a storm blows up in the night, and the anchor will not hold. As dawn breaks, a stranger on a nearby ship, described as ‘sá er stýrði’ (‘the one steering’) in AM 61 fol. and ‘sá er í stafninum sat’ (‘the one who sat in the stem’) in Mõðruvallabók, notices what danger they are in and offers his help: ‘Stormr er á en hér fyrir óhreint ok skerjótt ok skulum vér greiða ferð yðra’ (‘A storm is blowing, and it is dangerous around here, with many hidden skerries, and we shall make good your journey’).38 The phrasing here, as Lindow has shown, has moral overtones: the adjectives óhreinn (‘impure’) and skerjóttr (‘with hidden skerries’) occur overwhelmingly in homiletic prose and the expression greiða ferð is frequently used in prayers.39 The stranger is not identified, but he is wearing a green cloak and names himself Akkerisfrakki, which the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose translates as ‘one skilled in finding and retrieving the anchor’.40 Accordingly, when the anchor cord snaps, the stranger jumps overboard and retrieves it. He and Hallfreðr then exchange two helmingar (‘half-stanzas’) of a verse, Óláfr completing the half that Hallfreðr directs towards him. Hallfreðr and his crew reach the harbour in safety, where they learn that the stranger was King Óláfr Tryggvason. In his detailed discussion of this scene, Lindow notes its resemblance to the swimming contest between Kjartan and Óláfr in Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar. Hallfreðr is also present in this scene, although he refuses to compete with the king.41 In both cases, Óláfr is distinguished by feats of swimming and a fine cloak, and in both his identity is withheld until the end. Óláfr’s diving for the anchor thus replays the swimming contest with Kjartan, which serves to prefigure his immersion in the waters of baptism (p. 64). The waters of baptism also seem relevant to Hallfreðr’s first encounter with Óláfr: his perilous situation at sea recalls the patristic figure of the ship of the Church passing through the stormy seas of life towards the harbour of heaven. This figure is found in Christian skaldic poetry as well as in the ship allegory in the Physiologus manuscript, where the ship is interpreted first as the world, then as the mass, and the stem of the ship (where Óláfr is sitting in Mõðruvallabók) is allegorised as ‘skírn vára’ (‘our baptism’). The homilist warns that ‘Svá verðr ok ef vér missum ok 37 38 39 40 41

Richard Perkins, ‘The Gateway to Trondheim: Two Icelanders at Agdanes’, Saga-Book 25 (1998–9), 182–3. Hallfreðar saga, pp. 38–40. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 274, II, 235, 510, 523, 597; Maríu saga, pp. 94, 97, 951; Stjórn, pp. 138, 284. Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, s.v. “Akkerisfrakki”, accessed 3 February 2017, http:// onpweb.nfi.sc.ku.dk/wordlist_e_adv.html. Lindow, ‘Akkerisfrakki’, pp. 64–80; Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 240–2; Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 27–8; Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, I, 359.

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The Saint as Friend and Patron órœkjum guðs þjónostu ok tíða varðveizlu helgrar ok góðra verka, þá megum vér eigi koma til híminríkis. En ef skipit er vel skipat með õllum farbúnaði ok vel stýrt, þá kømr þat fagrliga til góðrar hafnar með guðs miskunn’ (‘So it will happen if we miss and neglect God’s service and the observation of canonical hours and good works, then we will not come to the kingdom of heaven. But if the ship is well equipped with all necessary provisions and skilfully steered, then it will come happily to good harbour by God’s mercy’).42 Lindow points out that the anchor is a particularly important symbol; one early Icelandic homily, quoting Hebrews 6: 19, speaks of the need to fasten ‘akkeri vánar yðvarrar á eilífri fóstrjõrðu’ (‘the anchor of your hope to the eternal homeland’).43 It is the symbol of St Clement, patron of the new church in Niðaróss, which Hallfreðr goes to visit on Christmas Eve.44 Lindow suggests that it evokes the virtue of clementia or clemency so important in Óláfr’s dealings with Hallfreðr. Even more striking are the hagiographical parallels to this scene, which closely resembles a miracle performed by St Nicholas. When some sailors are caught in a storm at sea, they call upon Nicholas for help. A stranger then appears on their ship and ‘bœtti skipreiða þeira ok reip, er slitnat hõfðu’ (‘mended their rigging and rope, which had snapped’).45 The sea grows calm and the stranger is able to guide them safely to shore. It is not until they meet Nicholas in his church in Myra that the sailors recognise the saint. Nicholas interprets the miracle for them: ‘Guð bjarg yðr fyrir trú yðra, skili þér ok þá, hversu mikit má fyrir guði hrein trúa, því at vér erum hvern dag barðir fyrir syndir várar, en ef vér snúumk til guðs af õllu hjarta, þá veitir hann oss miskunn sína ok leysir oss ór píslum’ (‘God saved you on account of your faith. Understand also, then, how much a pure faith can achieve before God, for every day we are buffeted on account of our sins, but if we turn ourselves to God with a whole heart, then he will show us his mercy and redeem us from torments’).46 The miracle is pictured in an English Psalter from c. 1250 (AM 921 IX 4to), which was in Iceland in the Middle Ages (see frontispiece). It is contained within an illuminated S, the first letter of Psalm 68 (‘Salvum me’). In Old Norse, this psalm opens with the words ‘Heyr þú dróttinn, vinn mik holpinn, því at võtn sóttu allt at lífi mínu; fastr em ek í djúpsins leiri, svá at eigi er við vært’ (‘Hear me, O Lord, come and save me, for the waters have pursued my very life; I am stuck fast in the mud of the deep, so that there is nowhere to rest’; verses 1–2).47 In other Psalters, like the Carrow Psalter from Norwich, also dating from c. 1240–50, 42

43 44

45

46 47

James W. Marchand, ‘The Ship Allegory in the “Ezzolied” and in Old Icelandic’, Neophilologus 60 (1976), 246; for an exhaustive study, see Hugo Rahner, Symbole der Kirche: Die Ekklesiologie der Väter (Salzburg: Müller, 1964), pp. 239–564. Lindow, ‘Akkerisfrakki’, p. 73; Leifar, p. 28. Clemens saga, pp. 50–3; Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, I, 370. Heilagra manna søgur, II, 24. Other versions of this same miracle can be found in Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 218–19, 281; Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 617–18; Ljósvetninga saga, p. 95. Heilagra manna søgur, II, 24–5. Heilagra manna søgur, II, 487.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero the same initial depicts Jonah and the Whale. It was understood to prophesy the passion of Christ, of which Jonah is a type, and it was the opening psalm of the first Nocturn on Maundy Thursday, at the start of the Easter tridium. In the bottom part of the initial, Nicholas appears to the sailors in their ship, wearing a red cloak and a blue-grey kirtle; in the top part, he sits in the stern of the ship, wearing a green cloak, with both hands on the rudder, steering it to shore, with the mast in the shape of the cross. The frame is green above and to the left, as are the fish and the sea. When discussing the significance of Óláfr’s green cloak, Lindow suggests that it may be an allusion to the season of Epiphany. Green is properly the colour of ordinary time within the Catholic Church, which begins with Epiphany. The connection seems particularly relevant in view of the recognition of Christ’s kingship at Epiphany, and its celebration of Christ’s mission to the Gentiles. The Old Norwegian Homily Book associates it with three events: the baptism of Christ in the Jordan, the marriage at Cana and the visitation of the Magi.48 Christ’s baptism in the Jordan was believed to sanctify all waters, so the green sea in the Psalter and Óláfr’s green cloak may be associated with the renewing waters of baptism. Green is also the colour of Paradise: in the lives of St Magnús of Orkney and of Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson, we are told that, at the spot where they were martyred, there flourishes ‘grœnleikr Paradísar’ (‘the greenness of Paradise’).49 Green, then, is associated with hope, renewal and recreation, as Óláfr guides Hallfreðr through baptism into the Church. Óláfr appears here as an agent of salvation, following in the footsteps of St Clement and St Nicholas. But the storms from which he saves Hallfreðr are not just the temptations of everyday life, but are very specifically poetic. In the Old Norse ship allegory, steering a ship is explicitly related to the tongue:50 Stýrit jarteinir tungu manns fyr því at stjórnin stýrir skipinu sem tunga manns stýrir õllum manninum til góðra hluta eða illra. En ef stýrimaðr stýrir illa skipini, þá [ferr] afleiðis skipit, ok fyrirfersk allt þat er á er skipinu. Svá fyrirferr ok sá maðr sér, er illa stýrir tungu sinni, ok verðr mõrgum þat at bana. En ef hann gætir vel tungu sinnar, þá stýrir hann sér til himinríkis. [The rudder signifies a person’s tongue, because the rudder steers the ship just as a person’s tongue steers the whole person to good things or to bad. And if the steersman steers the ship badly, the ship veers off course, and everything that is on the ship perishes. In the same way, the person who steers his tongue poorly will perish, and that will bring about the death of many. But if he guards his tongue well, then he will steer himself to the kingdom of heaven.]

This draws on James 3: 1–12, which is quoted at length in the Old Icelandic Homily

Gamal norsk Homiliebok, pp. 63–5. Orkneyinga saga, p. 119; Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 271; cf. Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar, p. 43. 50 Marchand, ‘Ship Allegory’, pp. 245–6. 48 49

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The Saint as Friend and Patron Book, but it works well also with the skaldic conceit of poetry as a ship.51 This is a widespread topos in classical poetry, although its source in Old Icelandic is likely to be native, a mythological allusion to the dwarfs ransomed from their skerry in return for the mead of poetry.52 We find a kenning of this type in one of Hallfreðr’s stanzas in Mõðruvallabók, where poetry is described as ‘flaustr burar Austra’ (‘the skiff of Austri’s son’, i.e. the ship of the dwarfs: poetry).53 As well as appearing in the long poems of Egill Skalla-Grímsson, the conceit is expertly developed in Einarr Helgason’s Vellekla, a poem composed for Hallfreðr’s former patron Hákon jarl: Einarr describes the waves of poetry booming in the hall and beating against ‘fles galdra’ (‘the skerry of incantations’, i.e. his teeth), as he bales out ‘hertýs vín-Gnóðar austr’ (the bilge-water of the Gnóð ∧ship∨ of the wine of the army-god = Óðinn > poem > vat > poem, i.e. the mead of poetry) before an audience of seasoned sailors.54 In a close echo of the homiletic imagery above, Snorri explains in Skáldskaparmál that ‘ef nýgõrvingar eru þá kalla menn munninn skip en varrarnar borðit, tunga rœðit eða stýrit’ (‘if allegory is being used, then people call the mouth a ship, and the lips the gunwhale, the tongue the oar or rudder’).55 Sayers has argued that this mythological complex is what lies behind the ‘maritime adventures’ of Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld (‘poet of Kolbrún’) in Greenland: it creates ‘a fundamental association’ between poetry and the sea ‘that could be hinted at or amplified at will by poets’.56 In Christian skaldic poetry, this complex is developed to include the conceit of the composition of poetry as a sea journey. In the opening invocation in Líknarbraut, the poet describes his tongue as ‘ár orða’ (‘an oar of words’) which impels poetry out of ‘munnshõfn’ (‘the harbour of the mouth’).57 In a later stanza, he conflates this with the figure of the cross as ship, based on learned exegesis of Noah’s ark:58 Skeið ert fróns ok fríðum farsæl konungs þrælum 51

52

53 54

55 56 57

58

Homiliu-bók, p. 210. William Sayers, ‘Skarfing the Yard with Words (Fóstbrœðra saga): Shipbuilding Imagery in Old Norse Poetics’, Scandinavian Studies 74 (2002), 5–10; on the myth of the mead of poetry, see the discussion in Roberta Frank, ‘Snorri and the Mead of Poetry’, in Speculum Norrœnum, ed. Ursula Dronke et al., pp. 166–7, and Daphne Loe Davidson, ‘Earl Hákon and his Poets’ (D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford, 1983), pp. 418–45. On this metaphor in classical literature, see Athanasios Kambylis, Die Dichterweihe und ihre Symbolik. Untersuchungen zu Hesiodos, Kallimachos, Properz und Ennius (Heidelberg: Winter, 1965), pp. 149–55; Godo Lieberg, ‘Seefahrt und Werk. Untersuchungen zu einer Metapher der Antiken besonders der lateinischen Literatur’, Giornale italiano di filologia 21 (1969), 209–40. Hallfreðar saga, p. 46 (following the prose order). Vellekla, ed. Edith Marold, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, 1.1, p. 285 (stanza 3) and p. 289 (stanza 5); Frank, ‘Snorri and the Mead of Poetry’, p. 158. Skáldskaparmál, p. 108; translated in Snorri Sturluson, Edda, p. 153. Sayers, ‘Skarfing the Yard’, pp. 4, 6. Líknarbraut, pp. 230–2 (stanza 2). Líknarbraut, pp. 264–6 (stanza 33).

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The Saint and the Saga Hero fljót ok farmi ítrum fóstrlands á vit strandar. Þú snýr bõls hjá bárum – boðar kasta þér lasta – lýðs und líknar auði lífs hafnar til stafni. [You are a voyage-prosperous, swift warship, bearing [lit. under] beloved servants of the king of earth [ruler = Christ] and a glorious cargo towards the shore of our native land. You turn your prow past the waves of evil to life’s haven bearing the wealth of grace for mankind; billows of vice toss you.]

The sea of poetry has become the sea of this world, in which the poet is buffeted by ‘waves of evil’ and ‘billows of vice’. As in the illuminated initial S, it is the cross as ship that bears Christ’s servants across the sea to ‘life’s haven’. The relevance of this rich complex of poetic imagery to Hallfreðr is readily apparent: he is described at the beginning of his saga as ‘níðskár’ (‘prone to slander’); a man whose tongue is more likely than not to steer him into moral danger. King Óláfr Tryggvason, on the other hand, is presented as one who can provide anchorage for the storm-tossed poet. Óláfr intervenes to save Hallfreðr at sea and stands sponsor to him to baptism. He also intervenes as moral censor once it becomes clear that Hallfreðr’s exercise of poetry may ‘collide’ with Christian ethics. The ‘interference’ of the saint can be taken literally at this point, as Óláfr pushes Hallfreðr towards a Christian understanding of his art. Soon after baptism, Hallfreðr composes a drápa about Óláfr, to which Óláfr at first refuses to listen. Hallfreðr resorts to threats: ‘Týna mun ek þá þeim frœðum er þú hefir látit kenna mér, ef þú vill eigi hlýða kvæðinu, því at ekki eru þau frœði skáldligri en kvæðit’ (‘I will then abandon the doctrines you have had me taught if you will not hear the poem, for those doctrines are not more poetic than the poem’).59 In AM 61 fol., this incident is what earns Hallfreðr the nickname of vandræðaskáld (‘troublesome poet’). The clash is dramatised further in the ‘Conversion Verses’, where Hallfreðr’s poetic stanzas are interlaced with Óláfr’s prose responses. While Hallfreðr lauds the aesthetics of pagan poetry, Óláfr dispenses moral judgement:60 Þetta er allilla kveðit ok er yfirbóta vert. [This is very badly recited and requires penance.] Helzti mikinn hug leggr þú á at lofa goðin, ok er þat illa virðanda fyrir þér. [You devote far too much thought to praising the gods, and it is a discredit to you.]

59 60

Hallfreðar saga, p. 44. Hallfreðar saga, pp. 46–50.

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The Saint as Friend and Patron Ekki bœtisk um ok er slíkt verra en eigi gert ok kveð þú nú vísu til yfirbóta. [There is no amendment, and such things are worse composed than not, and now recite another verse as penance.] Slíkt er betra en eigi kveðit ok yrk enn aðra vísu. [Such things are better recited than not, and compose one more verse.]

For Óláfr, the composition of poetry is a moral act which can be either sinful, requiring yfirbót (‘penance’), or salvific, making amends (bœta). In assessing whether Hallfreðr’s verses are verra en eigi gert (‘worse composed than not’) or betra en eigi kveðit (‘better recited than not’), he echoes the Icelandic homilist preaching on Psalm 141: ‘Lúk upp þú munn minn þá er betr gegnir at mæla en þegja, en þú byrg hann þá er betra er þagat en mælt’ (‘Open up my mouth when it is better to speak than to remain silent, and close it when it is better to have been silent than to have spoken’).61 Hallfreðr, however, still values aesthetics above doctrine, and he openly declares himself trauðr (‘reluctant’) and neyddr (‘forced’) to abandon Óðinn:62 Õll hefir ætt til hylli Óðins skipat ljóðum (algilda man’k) aldar (iðju várra niðja). [The whole race of men to win Óðinn’s grace has wrought poems (I recall the most excellent works of our forbears).]

The ‘algilda’ (‘most excellent’) in this verse stands in direct opposition to ‘allilla’ (‘very badly’) in the prose frame: the aesthetic excellence admired by Hallfreðr in pagan poetry is morally repugnant to Óláfr. Goeres has argued that the verses in themselves make no progress towards conversion, but simply take up different ‘rhetorical positions’; any sense of forward movement is artificially created by the prose frame.63 Yet the constant interruptions suggest not continuity, so much as movement back and forth between two fundamentally incompatible points of view. Leifar, pp. 163–4 (from AM 237a fol., dated to the second half of the 12th century), cf. Homiliu-bók, p. 101, Gamal norsk Homiliebok, p. 98. 62 Hallfreðar saga, p. 47. The Conversion Verses are quoted and translated here from the edition in Whaley, ‘Conversion Verses’, pp. 235–6. On the transition from pagan to Christian poetry, see see Diana C. Edwards (Whaley), ‘Christian and Pagan References in Eleventh-Century Norse Poetry: The Case of Arnórr Jarlaskáld’, Saga-Book 21 (1982–5), 34–7; Bjarne Fidjestøl, ‘Pagan Beliefs and Christian Impact: The Contribution of Scaldic Studies’, in Viking Revaluations, ed. Anthony Faulkes and Richard Perkins (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1992), pp. 101–20; Margaret Clunies Ross, A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics (Cambridge: Brewer, 2005), pp. 114–40. 63 Goeres, ‘The Many Conversions of Hallfreðr’, p. 49. 61

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Hallfreðr’s resistance to Óláfr’s moral interventions is taken further when Óláfr sends him to Þorleifr the Wise, who has refused to be converted to Christianity. Hallfreðr’s instructions are to kill or maim Þorleifr, and he is characteristically open about his reluctance: ‘Eigi sýnisk mér ferð þessi riflig’ (‘I don’t think this journey favourable’).64 He certainly appears as more Odinic than Christian: he disguises himself as an elderly beggar (stafkarl), turns his eyelids inside out, engages in a wisdom contest by a burial mound, and finally puts out just one of Þorleifr’s eyes. He fashions himself, rather too plausibly, as a man who has resisted Óláfr’s attempts to brjóta (literally ‘break’) him to Christianity, and when Þorleifr pleads for his second eye, he does not hesitate to brjóta (‘break’) Óláfr’s command.65 Whereas he refused to accept baptism from Óláfr without a cost (kauplaust), he readily agrees to give Þorleifr his eye for free (kauplaust). Hallfreðr may be working on Óláfr’s instructions here, but he still resembles Þorleifr much more closely than he does the Christian king.66 On his way back from this mission, Hallfreðr makes a detour to secure a second eye from his enemy, the Christian Kálfr, and he openly criticises Óláfr’s morals: ‘Góðr drengr er meiddr en vér látum mannskræfu þessa lifa’ (‘A good man is maimed, while we let this miserable coward live’).67 Óláfr orders Hallfreðr to go back and finish the job, but Hallfreðr refuses point-blank. Surprisingly, perhaps, this works out in his favour: later in the saga, Þorleifr saves his life from the Danish king Knútr, repaying him for the gift of his eye.68 Hallfreðr is rewarded, in a surprising turn of events, for breaking Óláfr’s command. His pagan sympathies, unlike those of Sigmundr, work for him in this case rather than against. Crucially, despite this troublingly Odinic performance, he does not forfeit Óláfr’s favour: even the pagan Þorleifr acknowledges that ‘konungs gæfan fylgir þér’ (‘the king’s luck goes with you’).69 This cycle of resistance and intervention is very much the pattern of the rest of the saga, a rolling repetition of the structure of alienation and return which Harris has identified in so many þættir.70 The circularity which Goeres discerns in the ‘Conversion Verses’ is actually a feature of the saga as a whole. This can be clearly seen in the episode about Hallfreðr’s journey to Sweden, an expedition undertaken expressly against Óláfr’s advice in order to further his poetic career. After Hallfreðr leaves Norway, he is first shipwrecked, then very nearly murdered by his travelling companion Õnundr and attacked by his corpse, then put into fetters and almost sacrificed to pagan gods. He ends up marrying a heathen woman to the neglect of his Christian faith. Once again, the narrative has allegorical overtones: Hallfreðr is warned that the way he has chosen is 64

65 66 67

68 69 70

Hallfreðar saga, p. 57. Hallfreðar saga, pp. 59, 61. Hallfreðar saga, pp. 42, 61. Hallfreðar saga, p. 62. Hallfreðar saga, pp. 105–6. Hallfreðar saga, p. 61. Joseph Harris, ‘Genre and Narrative Structure in Some Íslendinga þættir’, Scandinavian Studies 44 (1972), 1–27; cf. also Ármann Jakobsen, ‘Our Norwegian Friend’, p. 147.

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The Saint as Friend and Patron ‘ekki hreinn’ (‘impure’, ‘dangerous’), a spiritual sidetrack from the straight and narrow path. It is hardly surprising, given the religious imagery of sin, that he so often ends up in fetters.71 Yet what the saga emphasises throughout is Óláfr’s redemptive intervention. At his moment of greatest need, Hallfreðr calls on Óláfr’s God for help: ‘Dugi þú mér, Hvíta-Kristr [. . .] ef þú ert svá máttugr sem Óláfr konungr lánardróttinn minn segir’ (‘Help me now, White-Christ [. . .] if you are as powerful as King Óláfr, my liege lord, says’). In return, he is saved from death by ‘gipt Óláfs konungs er jafnan stóð yfir honum’ (‘King Óláfr’s luck, which always stood watch over him’).72 At the end of the episode, Óláfr appears to Hallfreðr in a dream and demands his return to Norway. He tells him to compose Uppreistardrápa in penance: ‘Ok bœtir svá sál þína en hefir eigi til ills eins íþrótt þá er guð hefir gefit þér’ (‘And in this way amend your soul, and do not use for ill alone the skill that God has given you’). This drápa is not included in the saga, and may in fact refer to a poem by Sighvatr Þórðarson; the term uppreist has been variously translated as ‘creation’ (Genesis is Uppreistarsaga), ‘reparation’ or ‘rebellion’.73 More relevant, though, is Óláfr’s insistence on poetry as a God-given gift that can and must be used for moral improvement. The verb bœta (‘to amend, atone for’) and til ills (‘for ill’) recall Óláfr’s quite contrary judgements on the ‘Conversion Verses’: ‘allilla’ (‘very ill’), ‘ekki bœtisk um’ (‘there is no amendment’). Óláfr guides Hallfreðr here towards a use of his poetic gifts that will save rather then endanger his soul. Most striking is the geographical reach of Óláfr’s ‘luck’: he appears to Hallfreðr in dreams in Sweden, Iceland and Denmark, both before and after his death. When Hallfreðr returns to Iceland after the death of his Swedish wife, his tongue soon leads him into danger again, and he engages in a characteristically Odinic combination of sex, poetry and violence: he sleeps with Kolfinna in her husband’s absence, and then goes on to compose a scurrilous sequence of verses about him that more than qualify as níð (‘slander’). This is probably why they are censored by the compiler of AM 61 fol., who comments that ‘eigi er þõrf á at rita’ (‘there is no need to record them’).74 They are included, however, in the redactions in Mõðruvallabók and Flateyjarbók, where they form a parodic counterpart to the ‘Conversion Verses’ – a parallel sequence of stanzas interleaved with disapproving comments, this time not from Óláfr, but from Kolfinna, who also judges that Hallfreðr ought to bœta yfir (‘make amends’).75 The incident escalates into a feud, in which two innocent men are killed, one of whom is Hallfreðr’s brother, Galti. Hallfreðr challenges Gríss to a duel, but the night before they are due to fight, Óláfr appears to Hallfreðr in a dream, Hallfreðar saga, pp. 34, 51, 74, 104; cf Homiliu-bók, p. 21. Hallfreðar saga, p. 70. 73 The Saga of Björn, Champion of the Men of Hitardale, trans. Alison Finlay (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik Press, 2000), p. xxix; Flateyjarbók, II, 394. On the meanings of uppreist, see Bjarni Einarsson, Skáldasögur: Um uppruna og eðli ástaskáldasagnanna fornu (Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfa menningarsjóðs, 1961), p. 207; Poole, ‘Conversion Verses’, pp. 18–19. 74 Hallfreðar saga, p. 86. 75 Hallfreðar saga, pp. 86–90. 71

72

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The Saint and the Saga Hero warning that Gríss has asked for God’s help and that Hallfreðr will not prevail against right. The next morning, Hallfreðr hears of Óláfr’s death and pulls out of the duel, heedless of any damage to his reputation. This conclusion to the love triangle is unparalleled in any other poet’s saga: Hallfreðr’s love for his lánardróttinn (‘liege lord’) takes decisive precedence over his love for Kolfinna.76 Óláfr’s death sets Hallfreðr adrift, both literally and figuratively. We are told that ‘Hvárki nam hann ynði á Íslandi né í Nóregi’ (‘He was happy nowhere, neither in Iceland nor in Norway’).77 It seems appropriate, then, that the final scene of the saga is also set at sea, as Hallfreðr, already unwell, is storm-tossed for the last time on his way home to Iceland. His verse returns to the nautical imagery of the opening scene off the Norwegian coast, in the voice of an exhausted sailor-poet:78 Hnauð við hjarta síðu hreggblásnum mér ási, mjõk hefir uðr at õðru aflat bǻru skafli, marr skotar mínum knerri, mjõk emk vátr, af nõkkvi, muna úrþvegin eira alda sínu skaldi. [The boom hammered me, storm-battered, on the side of my heart, the rolling sea raises one wave-crest after another, the sea rocks my ship (I am soaked) for a reason, the rain-soaked wave will not spare its poet.]

This is an internal, as well as an external predicament: it is not just the boom, but Hallfreðr’s heart that is ‘storm-battered’, as the sea turns against ‘its poet’. Foreseeing his death, Hallfreðr then speaks a verse about Kolfinna before the two main versions of the saga diverge. In Mõðruvallabók, this is the last verse Hallfreðr speaks, and it suggests that his thoughts are with the woman he loves, mingled with regret for the grief he has caused: ‘áðr var ek ungu fljóði at sútum’ (‘I caused grief to the young woman’).79 To this the saga adds a scene in which Hallfreðr sees an armoured woman striding towards him over the waves. Recognising her as his fylgjakona (‘fetch’, ‘guardian spirit’), he announces his separation from her: ‘Í sundr segi ek õllu við þik’ (‘I declare myself separated from you in every respect’). His son Hallfreðr takes her on instead, and the older Hallfreðr then dies. Mundal has suggested that this may represent Hallfreðr’s final rejection of paganism, and Harris conjectures further that the female figure may personify carnal love, so that the saga ends not Hallfreðar saga, pp. 100–1. Hallfreðar saga, p. 107. 78 Hallfreðar saga, p. 108. I have followed here the normalisation in the Íslenzk fornrit edition of Hallfreðar saga, p. 197, which is based on AM 61 fol. rather than Mõðruvallabók. 79 Hallfreðar saga, p. 109 (following the prose order). 76 77

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The Saint as Friend and Patron with unfulfilled longing, but with a rejection of illicit desire.80 Either way, it is puzzling that the fylgjukona is turned away by Hallfreðr senior only to be taken on by Hallfreðr junior, who is also a poet and also nicknamed vandræðaskáld (‘troublesome poet’), but who is entirely unknown outside this passage. At the decisive moment, it is almost as if Hallfreðr splits into two. Close to death, he can finally make a clean break, but only by rejecting his identity as a poet and continuity with his younger self. The compiler of AM 61 fol. omits this scene, perhaps out of discomfort over the continuing paganism embodied by the fylgjukona. Instead, it is replaced by a final verse that sounds out Christian eschatological themes:81 Ek mynda nú andask, ungr vask harðr í tungu senn, ef sǻlu minni, sorglaust, vissak borgit; veitk, at vætki of sýtik, valdi guð, hvar aldri, dauðr verðr hverr, nema hræðumk helvíti, skal slíta. [I would now die (young, I was harsh of tongue) free from sorrow, if I knew that my soul were saved. I know that I grieve for nothing (death comes to everyone) except that I fear hell. May God rule where life shall pass/end.]

This may, as Bjarni Einarsson has argued, have been composed by the compiler, but it is in dialogue, through verbal echo and polyptoton, with the preceding verse on Kolfinna, overwriting its nostalgia for human love with fear for one’s eternal destination. Hallfreðr’s regret for the sorrow caused to the young Kolfinna (‘ungum flóði’) is replaced by anxiety over the sins of his youth: ‘Ungr vask harðr í tungu’ (‘Young, I was harsh of tongue’). The same internal rhyme is used by the poet of Líknarbraut to express remorse for the verbal excesses of his youth:82 Ár því at ek má stórum ungr hógsettrar tungu frá afgerðum orða ofsjaldan vel halda. [For [being] young, I can all too seldom keep my oar of words [tongue] well from great offences of an easily employed tongue.]

Hallfreðar saga, p. 98; Mundal, Fylgjemotivet, pp. 118–19; Joseph Harris, ‘The Prosimetrum of Icelandic Saga and Some Relatives’, in Prosimetrum: Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse, ed. Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl (Cambridge: Brewer, 1997), p. 153. 81 Hallfreðar saga, p. 110, using the normalisation in the Íslenzk fornrit edition, p. 199. 82 Líknarbraut, pp. 230–2. 80

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Hallfreðr’s preoccupation with human sútir (‘griefs’) is rejected in favour of concern for his immortal soul: ‘Vætki of sýtik [. . .] nema hræðumk helvíti’ (‘I grieve for nothing [. . .] except that I fear hell’). His certainty of death and heroic equanimity in the face of it (‘death comes to everyone’) falters in the face of his ignorance as to whether he will be saved (‘I would now die [. . .] free from sorrow / if I knew that my soul were saved’). The verb slíta (‘end, ‘pass’, but also ‘to snap, break, tear’) which ends the verse evokes not only the severing of soul and body, but also the snapping of the anchor cord on Hallfreðr’s first journey across the sea. The apparent simplicity and directness of the stanza contrast sharply with the clever prevarications of the ‘Conversion Verses’: poetic ornament is laid aside as the poet confronts Judgement Day. Hallfreðr finds, in this last stanza, a poetic voice of which Óláfr would approve, devoted to neither pagan gods nor carnal desire, but to the cure of the soul. If Hallfreðr is coerced into this final conversion, he is coerced not by Óláfr Tryggvason but by his fear of Judgement Day. The king, however, has one last move to make, this time through the intermediary of his gifts. When Hallfreðr leaves Óláfr for the last time, Óláfr gives him three objects: a cloak, an arm-ring and a helmet. By luck rather than design, Hallfreðr has these with him when he dies, although he has tried to give the cloak to Kolfinna, and barely avoids paying the arm-ring in compensation to Gríss.83 These three gifts are placed in his coffin, and cast overboard with him. Hallfreðr’s body drifts to Iona, where it is found by servants of the abbot; they break into the coffin, steal the valuables, and sink his body in a marsh. This is beginning to look worryingly like Sigmundr’s fate, when Óláfr Tryggvason once again intervenes. He appears to the abbot in a dream, threatening retribution, and complaining that his servants ‘hafa brotit skip skálds míns’ (‘have broken my poet’s ship’).84 Hallfreðr’s body is dug up and reburied in the church, while Óláfr’s gifts are transformed into sacred objects: a chalice from the arm-ring, an altar cloth from the cloak, and a candlestick from the helmet. The description of Hallfreðr’s coffin as a ‘ship’ is a final reminder of the saga’s nautical allegory, as Óláfr steers his poet into the safe haven of the Holy Isle. For all Hallfreðr’s ambivalence and backsliding, Óláfr is the single most positive influence in his life; a model for how even the most recalcitrant of children can be redeemed given the right parental care.

Kjartan Óláfsson The stories of Hallfreðr and Kjartan are closely linked: they arrive in Norway at the same time, are converted by Óláfr within a day of each other, and both become honoured retainers of the king.85 In all versions of Óláfs saga TryggvHallfreðar saga, pp. 83, 93, 90, 102. Hallfreðar saga, pp. 110–11. For the hagiographic influences on this dream narrative, see Bjarni Einarsson, Skáldasögur, pp. 229–32. 85 Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 240–4; Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, I, 328–32; Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 27–9. 83 84

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The Saint as Friend and Patron asonar en mesta, their stories are interlaced: chapters on Hallfreðr follow chapters on Kjartan, and both men are present at crucial events, including the swimming competition and the service on Christmas Eve. In AM 61 fol., their stories are also intertwined with that of Sigmundr, so that the similiarities and differences in how these three men respond to Óláfr become a major point of interest.86 Sigmundr and Hallfreðr, as we have seen, resemble one another in their conflict of loyalties, although not in the final end to which this brings them: Sigmundr’s continuing attachment to the pagan jarl proves his downfall, while Hallfreðr is redeemed by the repeated interventions of Óláfr Tryggvason. Sigmundr and Kjartan are parallel in their exemplarity, each said to come second only to Óláfr: if Sigmundr matches Óláfr in most physical accomplishments, Kjartan is blessed with the same physique. He is, it is rumoured, the most impressive Icelander ever to visit Norway: ‘Var þat ok allra manna mál, at engi hefði slíkr maðr komit af Íslandi sem Kjartan’ (‘It was also the talk of all people, that no such man as Kjartan had ever come from Iceland’).87 Yet Kjartan’s exemplarity, like Sigmundr’s, is more complex than it at first appears, which leads to some significant deviations from Laxdœla saga in the corresponding Kjartans þáttr in AM 61 fol. and Flateyjarbók. Here we see the compiler struggling to channel Kjartan’s story into the appropriate ‘tributary’ stream, given that Óláfr appears to be ultimately powerless to avert Kjartan’s tragic fate. Like Sigmundr, Kjartan appears at first to have much in common with Óláfr: he is described in both saga and þáttr as handsome, strong, and superior to others in physical accomplishments. We are told that Óláfr esteems him above all others ‘fyrir sakar ættar sinnar ok atgørvi’ (‘on account of his family and accomplishments’), sanctioning his descent from an Irish king and his exceptional personal qualities.88 Like Óláfr, he has striking eyes, is a strong swimmer, and proves a charismatic leader: he takes the lead among all the Icelanders in Norway when he decides to be baptised. As befits such a hero, his wife Hrefna dies of grief after his untimely death, just as Óláfr’s wife Þyri lets herself die upon learning of Óláfr’s fate.89 In addition, Kjartan is said to possess some specifically hagiographic virtues: we are told that he is not only stronger than others, but also ‘lítillátari ok vinsæll, svá at hvert barn unni honum’ (‘more humble and popular, so that every child loved him’). This is an unusual quality in a saga hero, but it is shared by many saints, including Bishop Þorlákr and St Clement.90 His initial opposition to Christianity is figured as a Pauline drama of defiance: Óláfr comments optimistically that ‘kann ok vera, at þú haldir því betr trúna, sem þú mælir meir í móti henni en aðrir’ (‘it may also be that you will keep the faith

Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, I, 359–62, 370, 371–3, 387–8, II, 18–31. Laxdœla saga, pp. 123–5; cf. Færeyinga saga, pp. 29, 75–6. 88 Laxdœla saga, pp. 76–7, 123. 89 Laxdœla saga, p. 158; Óláfs saga Odds, pp. 354, 371. 90 Laxdœla saga, p. 77; Biskupa sögur, II (2002), 51; Clemens saga, pp. 46–7. 86 87

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The Saint and the Saga Hero better to the extent that you say more against it than others’).91 Upon Kjartan’s return to Iceland, this is manifestly the case: ‘Kjartan fastaði þurrt langafõstu ok gerði þat at engis manns dœmum hér á landi, því at þat er sõgn manna, at hann hafi fyrstr manna fastat þurrt hér innanlands. Svá þótti mõnnum þat undarligr hlutr, at Kjartan lifði svá lengi matlauss, at menn fóru langar leiðir at sjá hann’ (‘Kjartan fasted on dry food (i.e. fish and vegetables) during Lent, and did so without any precedent in this country, for it is said that he was the first person to fast on dry food in this land. It seemed to people such an amazing thing that Kjartan lived so long without meat, that people came a long way to see him’).92 With a touch of humour, perhaps, Kjartan turns standard Christian practice into a heroic feat. In his last fight against Bolli, Kjartan chooses to die rather than to kill his foster-brother: ‘Síðan kastaði Kjartan vápnum ok vildi þá eigi verja sik’ (‘Then Kjartan threw down his weapons and refused to defend himself’).93 This recalls St Óláfr’s martyrdom at the battle of Stiklastaðir: ‘Þá kastaði hann sverði sínu í brott’ (‘Then he threw his sword away’).94 Following the cycle of the Church calendar, Kjartan contrives to be baptised on the second day of Christmas, which is dedicated to the protomartyr Stephen, and to die on Easter Thursday, just in time to be buried at the newly consecrated church in Borg.95 At first glance, then, the saga presents us with a good Christian life followed by a martyr’s death: Hamer describes Kjartan as a ‘penitent and reconciled sinner’, and compares him with the Ethiopian convert in Acts, the Gospel pericope for the day of his death.96 Other aspects of Kjartan’s character, however, militate against reading his behaviour as exemplary, or his killing as a martyrdom. The psychology of Kjartan’s conversion is finely drawn, with his attitude towards Óláfr Tryggvason vacillating between resentment and grudging admiration.97 His inferiority to Óláfr in the swimming contest comes as an unexpected shock, which the saga author conveys by a rare insight into what he is thinking: ‘Þykkisk Kjartan nú eigi skilja, hversu sjá leikr mun fara, ok þykkisk Kjartan aldri komit hafa í jafnrakkan stað fyrr’ (‘Now Kjartan realises that he does not know how the contest will go, and Kjartan realises that he has never been in such a tight spot before’).98 He reacts sullenly to defeat, with self-deprecation and then feigned Laxdœla saga, p. 120; cf. Dronke, ‘The Poet’s Persona’, p. 26. Laxdœla saga, p. 138; cf. Patricia Conroy, and T. C. S. Langen, ‘Laxdœla saga: Theme and Structure’, Arkiv för nordisk filologi 103 (1988), p. 137 (‘a heroic stunt’). 93 Laxdœla saga, p. 154. 94 Óláfs saga hins helga, p. 85. 95 Laxdœla saga, pp. 122, 149, 158. 96 Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background, pp. 29, 45–7. 97 On the psychology of the saga, see James Drever ‘The Psychology of Laxdœla saga’, Saga-Book 12 (1937–45), 107–18; Ursula Dronke, ‘Narrative Insight in Laxdœla saga’, in J. R. R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam, ed. Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 120–37; Robert Cook, ‘Women and Men in Laxdœla saga’, Skáldskaparmál 2 (1992), 34–59; Schach, ‘The Reluctant Christian’, pp. 194–5. 98 Laxdœla saga, p. 117. 91

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The Saint as Friend and Patron indifference; we are told twice that he responds to Óláfr’s overtures ‘heldr seint’ (‘rather reluctantly’), and Óláfr describes him as behaving ‘allstórliga’ (‘arrogantly’). This judgement is borne out a few days later by Kjartan’s extravagant response to hearing Óláfr preach, when he proposes to Bolli that they ‘brenna konunginn inni’ (‘burn the king in his hall’):99 Engis manns nauðungarmaðr vil ek vera [. . .] meðan ek má upp standa ok vápnum valda; þykki mér þat ok lítilmannligt, at vera tekinn sem lamb ór stekk eða melrakki ór gildru; þykki mér hinn kostr miklu betri, ef maðr skal þó deyja, at vinna þat nõkkut áðr, er lengi sé uppi haft síðan. [I don’t want to be under compulsion from anyone [. . .] while I can still stand and wield weapons; it also seems cowardly to me to be taken like a lamb from a fold or a fox from a trap; the other option seems much better to me, if one has to die, to achieve something first that will be long remembered afterwards.]

Such heroic posturing is hardly compatible with the childlike humility Kjartan supposedly possesses: his refusal to be seized ‘sem lamb’ (‘like a lamb’) subtly ironises the ideal of Christian sacrifice. Even Óláfr enjoys a joke at his expense, when Kjartan magnanimously offers to tone down his worship of Þórr: ‘Þat sér á yfirbragði Kjartans, at hann þykkisk eiga meira traust undir afli sínu ok vápnum, heldr en þar sem er Þórr ok Óðinn’ (‘It is clear from Kjartan’s outer appearance that he thinks he has more faith in his strength and weapons than in Þórr and Óðinn’).100 This sophisticated use of the noble heathen motif has little to do with Kjartan’s theological status; rather, it reveals an important facet of his character: self-reliant, self-aggrandising, self-willed. When Kjartan does decide to be baptised, he presents it as entirely his own decision, engineering an encounter with Óláfr in which he can publicly request a large quantity of water: ‘Ok kvað þó mikils mundu við þurfa’ (‘And yet he said they would need a lot of it’).101 Whereas Hallfreðr insists on having Óláfr as his godfather, Kjartan goes out of his way to avoid any relationship that might imply his dependence: he refuses Óláfr’s proposal to act as his emissary in Iceland, and turns down marriage with the king’s sister Ingibjõrg, although it is clear that both she and Óláfr would have favoured this. As always, Kjartan gives no reason for his actions, but Ingibjõrg attributes it to his einræði (‘self-will’). This echoes Guðrún’s earlier complaint that that his journey to Norway was ‘skjótt ráðit’ (‘rashly decided’) and her condemnation of his bráðræði (‘impetuousness’).102 Kjartan’s refusal to depend upon King Óláfr is particularly clear from his treatment of Óláfr’s gift. We are told that, upon parting from Kjartan, Óláfr gives him a sword with protective qualities: ‘Láttu þér vápn þetta fylgjusamt vera, því at ek vænti þess, at þú verðir eigi vápnbitinn maðr, ef þú berr þetta Laxdœla saga, p. 119. Laxdœla saga, p. 121. 101 Laxdœla saga, p. 123. 102 Laxdœla saga, pp. 115, 124, 130–1. 99

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The Saint and the Saga Hero sverð’ (‘Make sure you carry this weapon with you, because I expect that you will never be weapon-bitten, if you carry this sword’).103 Like the gifts given to Hallfreðr, the sword embodies Óláfr’s protection and favour, but in the power struggle with Bolli that follows, it is stolen and sunk into a bog or fen. It is recovered without its sheath, but Kjartan no longer wants it; we are told that he ‘hafði jafnan minni mætur á sverðinu síðan en áðr’ (‘always valued the sword less from then on than he had before’).104 In his last fight, we are informed that he does not have it with him and, by implication, that the sword he is carrying is inferior: ‘Síðan brá Kjartan sverðinu – ok hafði eigi konungsnaut’ (‘Then Kjartan drew the sword – and did not have the king’s gift’).105 He pays a high price for his failure to value this sword as he should have, and for his determination to rely on his own strength rather than the king’s. This, perhaps, is what Óláfr foresees when he sends Kjartan off home: ‘Mikit er at Kjartani kveðit ok kyni hans, ok mun óhœgt vera atgørða við forlõgum þeira’ (‘Much is said about Kjartan and his kin, and it will be difficult to counter their fate’).106 Óláfr’s powerlessness to help Kjartan is the flipside of Kjartan’s determination not to need him; it contrasts sharply with his redemptive ‘interference’ in the lives of other Icelanders. Kjartan’s ambivalence as a character therefore creates problems for the compiler of AM 61 fol., wishing to recast his story as a ‘tributary’ to the saga of Óláfr Tryggvason. In order to do this, the compiler refashions the interaction between Kjartan and Óláfr into an exemplum about the relationship between Iceland and Norway, with Óláfr modelling the ideal Christian king, and Kjartan the proud-spirited but essentially loyal Icelandic subject. Kjartan’s resistance to conversion is played down upon his arrival in Norway, and he expresses his free admiration of Óláfr from the start. His proposal to burn the king in his hall is edited to lessen its extravagance, presented as a last resort rather than a heroic flourish:107 Ef konungr vill halda á trúboði þessu við oss sem við aðra menn þá sýnask mér ii kostir fyrir hõndum ok þó ójafnir: sá annarr at ganga glaðliga undir allan hans boðskap ok láta engra pyndinga við þurfa. Hinn er kostr annarr ef konungr er ráðinn í at veita oss afarkosti at brenna hann inni. [If the king insists on preaching the faith to us in the same way as to other people, then it seems to me that two choices are at hand – and yet [they are] unequal. One is to submit gladly to his whole proposal so that no force is required. The other option, if the king is determined to threaten us with hard terms, is to burn him in his hall.]

Laxdœla saga, p. 132. Laxdœla saga, pp. 140–2. 105 Laxdœla saga, pp. 152–3. 106 Laxdœla saga, p. 132. 107 Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, I, 363; Flateyjarbók, I, 312. 103 104

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The Saint as Friend and Patron This not only adds the real possibility of ‘glad’ acquiescence to Óláfr’s demands, but also posits a special relationship between ‘us’ (which Flateyjarbók clarifies to mean ‘Icelanders’) and the king of Norway. The compiler then invents a speech in which Kjartan retracts his words, characterising them as both a display of Icelandic defiance and the consequence of having had too much to drink:108 Nú er ek eigi svá heimskr maðr at ek kennumk eigi við at ek hefir talat illa. Hafa Íslendingar frændr várir verit lengi úvægnir bæði í orðum ok verkum. Þat er ok forn málsháttr með oss er oft reynisk at õl er annarr maðr [. . .] En siðuskipti várt félaga er á þann hátt, at vera má at mæli þat nõkkurir norrænir menn at oss Íslendingum kippi í kyn þó at vér gangim heldr fyrir blíðu en stríðu. [Now I am not so foolish that I cannot acknowledge that I have spoken wrongly. Our relatives in Iceland have long been unyielding both in words and deeds. It is also an old saying with us, which often proves true, that ale is another man [. . .] But the way to convert us fellows is in this manner: that it may be that some Norwegians will say that it runs in the family if we Icelanders yield to kindness rather than threats.]

Kjartan’s behaviour is presented as emblematic of the Icelandic people, while Óláfr’s forbearance is compared with Christ’s: he tells Kjartan that it costs him little to endure his threats ‘hjá því sem várr dróttinn Jesus Kristr konungr allra konunga þoldi saklauss af sínum úvinum’ (‘beside what our Lord Jesus Christ, King of all kings, suffered, while innocent, from his enemies’).109 Conversion to Christianity is aligned unproblematically with submission to the Norwegian king: Kjartan comes to believe ‘þá betr hafa er honum hlýðnask ok veita góðviljaða þjónostu’ (‘that they have the better part who obey him and do him willing service’). This is much more politically charged than the corresponding declaration of faith in Laxdœla saga: ‘Õll ætla ek oss þar við liggja vár málskipti, at vér trúim þann vera sannan guð, sem konungr býðr’ (‘I consider that all our affairs depend on our believing that it is the true God whom the king preaches’).110 Finally, the compiler replaces the baptismal scene in Laxdœla saga with the related scene in Heimskringla, where Kjartan agrees to baptism in exchange for Óláfr Tryggvason’s friendship.111 Kjartan becomes a loyal servant and a true ally of the Norwegian king; all proud self-will has disappeared. Even more radical changes are made to the account of Kjartan’s death, in which all wrong-doing on his part is omitted. The cause of conflict between Kjartan and Bolli is the theft of Óláfr’s sword and Ingibjõrg’s headdress, and there is no mention of how Kjartan humiliates Bolli’s household or sabotages his attempt to buy land.112 Kjartan’s final taunt to Bolli goes unmentioned, although Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, I, 366; Flateyjarbók, I, 313–14. Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, I, 365; Flateyjarbók, p. 313. 110 Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, I, 370; Laxdœla saga, p. 122; cf. Óláfs saga Odds, p. 243; Biskupa sögur, I (2003), 28. Flateyjarbók, I, 316. 111 Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, I, 371; Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, I, 330. 112 Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, II, 210–12; Laxdœla saga, pp. 144–5, 146–7. 108 109

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The Saint and the Saga Hero psychologically it is a significant moment: perhaps, as North has suggested, Kjartan still imagines that Bolli will intervene on his behalf, or perhaps he deliberately implicates Bolli in his death by making it impossible for him to stand by.113 The compiler’s interests here are quite different: he assigns blame for Kjartan’s death to the sons of Ósvífr (Guðrún’s brothers), previously responsible for outlawing the Christian missionary Stefnir Þorgilsson for blasphemy against the gods. Earlier in the compilation, Stefnir prophesies divine retribution for their actions: ‘Héðan munu eigi líða margir vetr, áðr yðr mun fyrir þessa sõk at hendi koma mikil úgipta ok hamingjuleysi’ (‘Not many winters will pass from now, before much ill luck and misfortune will befall you on account of this matter’).114 The compiler refers us back to this prophecy immediately after Kjartan’s death: ‘Kom þá fram þat er fyrirsagði Stefnir Þorgilsson, frændi þeira þá er þeir sektu hann á alþingi fyrir kristniboð sem fyrr er sagt’ (‘It then came about as Stefnir Þorgilsson, their kinsman, had predicted when they outlawed him at the Alþing for preaching Christianity, as was previously mentioned’). Thus, rather like Þiðrandi in Þiðranda þáttr ok Þórhalls, Kjartan becomes, in AM 61 fol., the innocent victim of historical forces; subject to an overarching pattern of prophecy and fulfilment that overrides any agency of his own.

Þorkell Eyjólfsson Kjartan’s story is incorporated into all versions of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, but only one manuscript of Óláfs saga helga excerpts the much darker encounter towards the end of Laxdœla saga between St Óláfr and Þorkell Eyjólfsson, Guðrún’s fourth husband.115 Þorkell, reputedly a great friend of St Óláfr, travels to Norway to obtain wood for a church, where Óláfr generously gives him the wood he needs together with an expensive cloak. One morning, Óláfr finds Þorkell on the roof of his new church, a precursor to the later cathedral dedicated to St Clement.116 He is measuring the beams to ensure that his church in Iceland will be no smaller than Óláfr’s in Niðaróss. Óláfr asks him politely to subtract two ells from the longest beam – ‘ok mun sú kirkja þó gõr mest á Íslandi’ (‘and that church will still be the biggest to be built in Iceland’). Þorkell refuses rudely, suggesting that Óláfr grudges him the wood. We are told that Óláfr replies ‘allstilliliga’ (‘very quietly’):117 Bæði er, Þorkell, at þú ert mikils verðr, enda gerisk þú nú allstórr, því at víst er þat ofsi einum bóndasyni, at keppask við oss; en eigi er þat satt, at ek Laxdœla saga, pp. 153–4; Richard North, Pagan Words and Christian Meanings, Costerus New Series 81 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), pp. 136–7: Cook, ‘Women and Men’, pp. 54–5; Carolyne Larrington, Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature (York: York Medieval Press, 2015), pp. 214–15. 114 Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, I, 311, II, 212. 115 Laxdœla saga, p. lxxviii. 116 Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background, pp. 36–8. 117 Laxdœla saga, pp. 216–17. 113

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The Saint as Friend and Patron fyrirmuna þér viðarins, ef þér verðr auðit at gera þar kirkju af, því at hon verðr eigi svá mikil, at þar muni of þitt allt inni liggja. En nær er þat mínu hugboði, at menn hafi litla nytsemð viðar þessa, ok far því firr, at þú gõrt neitt mannvirki ór viðinum. [It is both, Þorkell, that you are a man of worth, and that you’re getting much too arrogant, for it’s certainly pride in a farmer’s son to compete with us; and it’s not true that I begrudge you the wood, if it’s destined for you to build a church with it, for it certainly won’t be big enough to contain all your big-headedness. But I have a feeling that people will get little benefit from this wood, and it’s even less likely that you will make anything great out of the wood.]

Þorkell returns to Iceland, where he drowns on Maundy Thursday, whilst transporting the wood for the church to his farm. On the same day, Guðrún sees him standing outside the churchyard at Helgafell with his men, water dripping from their clothes. None of the bodies are recovered, and very little of the wood.118 Hamer has argued that this scene replays Kjartan’s encounter with Óláfr Tryggvason: Þorkell is warned not to keppask (‘compete’) with the king, while Kjartan taunts Bolli with ‘hvar kapp þitt er nú komit’ (‘where your competitive spirit has now got to’).119 He also notes the echo of ‘allstórr’ (‘arrogant’) and ‘allstórliga’ (‘arrogantly’) in the character assessments of the two Icelanders, and the importance of size in both stories: Kjartan is as big as Óláfr Tryggvason, while Þorkell wants to build a bigger church.120 The skilfully drawn miniature of Kjartan’s self-importance has developed into a devastating study of overweening pride. Indeed, in Guðrún’s dreams, Þorkell is represented by a helmet described as þungbærr (‘heavy to bear’), a word used in Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar of a king’s anger and in Hrafnkels saga of tyrannical and unjust rule.121 Þorkell raises himself to the heights of Óláfr’s church in Niðaróss only to sink to the bottom of Breiðafjõrðr. He last appears outside the churchyard at Helgafell, excluded from consecrated ground. The liturgy of Maundy Thursday frames his drowning within the opening plea of Psalm 68, the same psalm illustrated in the Psalter with a miraculous rescue at sea (p. 219). Þorkell, however, sinks down into the watery abyss with no hope of redemptive intervention. Þorkell’s death is a terrifying one for a medieval Christian, the consequence not only of provoking the anger of a saint, but, at a more profound level, of selfdelusion, blindness to one’s own spiritual state. It is foreshadowed in Guðrún’s dreams, when she pictures Þorkell as a helmet that ‘steypðisk’ (‘hurled itself’) into the fjord, the verb suggesting agency, not accident: pride coming before a fall.122 Þorkell, too, has a dream just before his journey to Norway in which he Laxdœla saga, pp. 222–3. Laxdœla saga, pp. 117, 217. 120 Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background, p. 33. 121 Egils saga, p. 62; Hrafnkels saga, p. 22; cf. also Saga Óláfs hins helga, p. 108; Stjórn, p. 65. 122 Laxdœla saga, p. 89; the verb steypa is often connected with ofsi, as in the expression in Laxdœla saga, p. 220 (steypa svá ofsi þínum ok ójafnaði ‘to bring down your pride and injustice’). 118 119

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The Saint and the Saga Hero sees his beard stretching across Breiðafjõrðr, but in spite of Guðrún’s warning, he takes this to signify the spread of his power.123 When warned, on the day of his death, that it is not safe to travel, he insists on the right to do as he wills.124 His delusions of power come to a sudden end when he is overpowered by the wind and waves. Guðrún, in contrast, understands the nature of his death as a warning: she turns to religion, learns the Psalter by heart, and sheds tears of repentance in church. Her blindness in old age recalls a later verse in Psalm 68: ‘I have laboured with crying; my jaws are become hoarse: my eyes have failed, whilst I hope in my God’ (Psalm 68: 3).125 The redemptive quality of her tears is indicated by a dream granted to her granddaughter Herdís, in which a finely dressed woman appears. She complains that Guðrún’s tears are burning her, as prayers and consecrated water burn evil spirits elsewhere. When the church floorboards are taken up, a collection of ugly bones is found and removed from under the altar.126 Dronke suggests that Guðrún here repents of her past and is cleansed by her penitential tears. However she may have lived, she ends her life within the ‘ship’ of the Church, while Þorkell drowns in stormy seas.127 Neither Óláfr Tryggvason nor St Óláfr Haraldsson intervene decisively in the lives of Kjartan and Þorkell. Rather, they offer a moral commentary as to why, despite all their promise and capability, their lives end in the way they do. Óláfr Tryggvason’s desire to avert Kjartan’s fate fails when Kjartan neglects to carry his sword. St Óláfr’s friendship with Þorkell cannot save him from the consequences of his pride. The geographical distance between Norway and Iceland becomes a moral distance the saint cannot bridge – hence the difficulty of fitting these stories into the later compilations about the two kings. In Laxdœla saga, the story of conversion is intertwined with a psychological study of selfreliance, self-will and self-delusion. The two kings are moral arbiters in this, but not, finally, salvific agents.

Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld St Óláfr exercises far greater influence in Fóstbrœðra saga (‘The saga of the Sworn Brothers’), which survives in two versions of an independent saga (in Mõðruvallabók and Hauksbók) and as þættir in Óláfs saga helga in Flateyjarbók.128 The date of the saga is a matter on which there is no consensus: some scholars would place it at an early stage of saga-writing (c. 1200–10), while others, like Jónas Kristjánsson, have dated it closer to c. 1300.129 The explicit authorial 123 124

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Laxdœla saga, p. 215. Laxdœla saga, pp. 221–2. Laxdœla saga, pp. 228–9. Laxdœla saga, pp. 223–4. Dronke, ‘Narrative Insight’, p. 137; Grønlie, ‘Redeeming Women’, pp. 308–10; Hamer, Njáls saga and its Christian Background, p. 52. Flateyjarbók, II, 91–108, 148–68, 199–226, 339–43, 358–66. Sigurður Nordal, ‘Sagalitteraturen’, in Litteraturhistorie B: Norge og Island, ed.

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The Saint as Friend and Patron commentary and rhetorical ornamentation in the saga make it unusual, even unparalleled, among the sagas of Icelanders; but it is not clear whether this is to be understood as early experimentation (a divergence from what came to be the norm) or whether it is a later development under the influence of court style and romance.130 There is also widespread disagreement over whether the additional scenes found in Flateyjarbók are interpolations or original to the saga; most concern Þorgeirr, but there are also some subtle changes to the account of Þormóðr’s last stand.131 What can, perhaps, be agreed on is the saga’s longstanding relationship with hagiography: as court poet to St Óláfr, Þormóðr’s life and death always belonged to a larger hagiographic canvas. In Flateyjarbók, both saint and hero might be said to step across generic boundaries, as St Óláfr intervenes in Þormóðr’s feuds and killings, and Þormóðr participates in the passion of the saint. This unexpected relationship between saga and passio provides the stimulus for an explicitly moralising voice: we hear, especially in Flateyjarbók, a hagiographer at work, evaluating the ethics of heroic life.132 At first glance, neither of the sworn brothers looks like a suitable friend for a saint. Þorgeirr is arguably more of a serial killer than a traditional hero: his exploits are marked by their amorality, the lack of any distinction between ‘actions right and actions wrong’.133 This is especially the case in Flateyjarbók, which includes two scenes without parallel elsewhere, one in which Þorgeirr kills a man because he did not hear him calling, and another in which he cuts off the head of a shepherd because ‘hann stóð svá vel til hõggsins’ (‘he stood so ready for the blow’) – his neck just happened to be invitingly extended.134 There is little or no moral rationale for most of Þorgeirr’s actions, and Flateyjarbók in particular shows considerable interest in his pathological lack of fear: it includes a scene where Þorgeirr refuses to shout for help, even though he is hanging off a cliff by a handful of angelica.135 Kjartan’s self-sufficiency looks

130

131

132

133 134

135

Sigurður Nordal, Nordisk Kultur VIII B (Copenhagen: Schulz, 1953), p. 239; Jónas Kristjánsson, Um Fóstbrœðrasögu (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1972), pp. 311–26; Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, ‘Modernitet og traditionalisme. Et bidrag til islændingesagaernes litteraturshistorie med en diskussion af Fóstbrœðra sagas alder’, in Die Aktualität der Saga, pp. 159–62, reprinted in At fortælle historien, pp. 263–75. Klaus von See, ‘Die Überlieferung der Fóstbrœðra saga’, Skandinavistik 6 (1976), 1–18; reprinted in Edda, Saga, Skaldendichtung: Aufsätze zur skandinavischen Literatur des Mittelalters (Heidelberg: Winter, 1981), pp. 443–60; Sørensen, ‘Modernitet og traditionalisme’, pp. 159–60. Jónas Kristjánsson, Um Fóstbrœðra sögu, pp. 82–6; Jakob Benediktsson, ‘Some Episodes in the Flateyjarbók text of Fóstbrœðrasaga’, in Sagnaskemmtun, ed. Rudolf Simek et al., pp. 153–8. Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, ‘On Humour, Heroes, Morality and Anatomy in Fóstbrœðra saga’, trans. Peter Foote, in Twenty-Eight Papers Presented to Hans BekkerNielsen on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday (Odense: Odense University Press, 1993), pp. 395–418, reprinted in At fortælle historien, pp. 207–20. Sørensen, ‘On Humour’, pp. 406–7; Andersson, The Partisan Muse, p. 176. Fóstbrœðra saga, pp. 151, 156–7. Fóstbrœðra saga, p. 189.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero trivial in comparison; there are no internal constraints on Þorgeirr’s behaviour, not even the instinct to live. Þormóðr too is far from an exemplary Christian; although permanently maimed after a botched seduction, he still manages to kill fourteen people during his life, most of them in revenge for Þorgeirr’s death. He continues to kill right up to the moment of his death, slicing off the buttocks of a man who ill-advisedly questions the courage of Óláfr’s warriors.136 The sworn brothers, then, do not resemble St Óláfr, nor do they sport any hagiographic virtues of their own. Yet Þorgeirr’s fearlessness and courage are described as gifts from ‘inn hæsti hõfuðsmiðr’ (‘the supreme craftsman’), Godgiven qualities that he is responsible for using in accordance with God’s will:137 Ok af því at allir góðir hlutir eru af guði gõrvir, þá er øruggleikr af guði gõrr ok gefinn í brjóst hvõtum drengjum, ok þar með sjálfræði at hafa til þess, er þeir vilja, góðs eða ills, því at Kristr hefir kristna menn sonu sína gõrt, en eigi þræla, en þat mun hann hverjum gjalda, sem til vinnr. [And just as all good things are made by God, so courage is made by God and placed in the breasts of bold men, and with it free will to make their own choices, for good or ill, because Christ has made Christians his sons, and not slaves, and he will repay each person according to his deeds.]

This sets out the action of the saga as a drama of ‘free will’. As Christian heroes, Þorgeirr and Þormóðr can choose how to use their gifts: for evil in self-assertion and gratuitous violence, or for good in the service of God.138 Their relationship with Óláfr is therefore morally decisive, for as both king and saint, his favour is considered synonymous with God’s: ‘Váru þeir allir mest virðir af guði, er konungi líkaði bezt við’ (‘All those were most honoured by God who pleased the king most’).139 Óláfr offers the sworn brothers the chance to channel their heroic violence into the service of a Christian saint. His mediatory role is clearly articulated in Flateyjarbók, where the first extract from the saga is prefaced with these remarks:140 Má af slíku merkja gœzku ok giptu Óláfs konungs, at hann veitti þat athald svá miklum óeirðarmõnnum sem þeir váru fóstbrœðr, at þeir elskuðu konunginn yfir alla menn fram. Urðu þeim ok síðan sín verk õll at frægð ok frama, þau sem þeir unnu í heiðr við konunginn. [In this the grace and good luck of King Óláfr can be perceived: that he was able to restrain such very unruly men as the sworn brothers were, so that they loved the king above all other men. And from then on all the deeds they performed in honour of the king contributed to their glory and fame.]

Fóstbrœðra saga, p. 273. Fóstbrœðra saga, p. 133. 138 Sørensen, ‘On Humour’, pp. 407–10. 139 Fóstbrœðra saga, p. 121. 140 Flateyjarbók, II, 91. 136 137

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The Saint as Friend and Patron This passage celebrates Óláfr as mediator between the ‘old-fashioned’ selfassertion of the heroic world and the ‘modern’ world of Christian forbearance.141 He is able not only to regulate the brothers’ violence, but even turn it to their own good. In this respect, Þorgeirr and Þormóðr form a moral diptych: while Þormóðr refuses to be parted from St Óláfr, Þorgeirr leaves his service to return to Iceland, where he is treacherously killed. On their first encounter, Óláfr describes Þorgeirr as ‘eigi í õllu gæfumaðr’ (‘not a lucky man in every respect’), and he repeats this when Þorgeirr announces his intention to leave: ‘Þú myndir eigi vera gæfumaðr í õllum hlutum’ (‘You won’t be a lucky man in all respects’).142 His luck depends upon him remaining with St Óláfr in Norway and using his strength to extend the king’s power.143 Instead, he dies in Iceland, betrayed by his enemies, admittedly after a quite splendid display of heroics. In an allusion to Psalm 90, the saga author comments that ‘Var honum sjálfum hugr sinn bæði fyrir skjõld ok brynju’ (‘His courage served him both as shield and armour’).144 This is simultaneously admiring and damning: Þorgeirr’s reliance on his courage for a shield clashes with the Psalmist’s reliance on God’s truth (‘his truth shall compass thee with a shield’, v. 4). Even after Þorgeirr’s head has been severed, it terrifies his enemies: ‘Þeim sýndisk þá hõfuðit ógurligt, augun opin ok muðrinn, en úti tungan’ (‘The head looked terrible to them, the eyes and mouth open, and the tongue out’). This is one of the rare moments where Hauksbók expands rather than abridges the text of the saga, adding the detail that ‘augun hrœrðusk ok um snerusk, tungan var úti ok blaðraði’ (‘the eyes moved and looked around, the tongue hung out and blathered’).145 Once outside Óláfr’s service, Þorgeirr’s strength can no longer turn to his good or to the good of others. Even in the afterlife, like the unburied corpse of Víga-Stýrr (p. 156), he continues to spread violence and fear. Perhaps there is even a parody of the life-giving relics of the saint. Particularly interesting is a short anecdote about what happens on Easter Thursday (the same day as Kjartan’s killing), some time after Þorgeirr’s death. His ghost is seen in the company of his dead companions: ‘Váru allir alblóðgir ok gengu inn eptir vellinum ok ór garðinum, ok er þeir kóma at á þeiri, er fellr fyrir innan bœinn, þá hurfu þeir’ (‘They were all bloody and walked across the field and past the fence, and when they came to the river that flows in front of the farm, they disappeared’).146 Shortly afterwards, two sworn brothers (who had previously fallen out) kill each other on exactly this spot. The incident seems to be adapted from a similar one in Víga-Glúms saga, and the killings of Hõskuldr and Kjartan are also fratricides of this kind (pp. 143, 233).147 In 141

142 143 144

145 146 147

Sørensen, ‘Modernitet og traditionalisme’, pp. 158–9. Fóstbrœðra saga, pp. 159, 194. Fóstbrœðra saga, p. 185, 193. Fóstbrœðra saga, pp. 206–8. Fóstbrœðra saga, p. 212. Fóstbrœðra saga, pp. 217–18. Víga-Glúms saga, pp. 40–1, 66–8, 78; Njáls saga, pp. 280–1.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero Fóstbrœðra saga, however, it recalls most obviously the relationship between Þorgeirr and Þormóðr, which Þormóðr breaks off early in the saga precisely because he fears that it will lead to violent death.148 The chance death of these other sworn brothers, for which the catalyst is Þorgeirr’s continuing malevolence, shows where unbridled violence will lead, how it will turn destructively against itself when unrestrained by the Christian king. Instead, the socially disruptive rivalry and competition between Þorgeirr and Þormóðr is redirected positively into Þormóðr’s relationship with St Óláfr. In this sense, the saint provides a new, acceptable, and socially beneficial context for passionate devotion between men. Þorgeirr forfeits the divine favour Óláfr proffers, but Þormóðr, in an episode found only in Flateyjarbók, contrives to bring about a change in his luck. He first encounters Óláfr after killing one of his men: he leaps onto Óláfr’s ship and has himself captured, declaring that he would care nothing for life ‘ef ek kœmumk á vald konungsins’ (‘if I could get into the custody of the king’).149 Óláfr judges him ‘meiri gæfumaðr’ (‘a man of greater luck’) than Þorgeirr, but still considers him ‘lagðr til óhappanna’ (‘destined for misfortunes’).150 He grants him his freedom, but Þormóðr insists on being accepted into the king’s service: ‘Nú ger þú annathvárt, tak við mér eða lát mik drepa ella’ (‘Now do one of these two: take me on or have me killed’).151 Just before his death, he reflects on this decisive moment and, with the benefit of hindsight, affirms his utter dependence on the saint: ‘Ek hefi rannsakat ráð mitt, ok sýnisk mér svá, at síðan ek var sjau vetrum ellri, hafi sá einn hlutr verit mér til hjálpar framleiðis, er ek hefi fylgt þer’ (‘I have examined my lot, and it seems to me that, since I was seven years old, the one thing that has always helped me is that I have followed you’).152 Like Hallfreðr with Óláfr Tryggvason, Þormóðr understands intuitively that he must depend on St Óláfr for help. Although he lacks Þorgeirr’s fearlessness and apparent invulnerability, this makes him nevertheless the luckier man. By the end of their first encounter, St Óláfr has revised his initial judgement: ‘Eigi ætla ek, at þú verðir til lykða ógæfumaðr’ (‘I don’t think that you will be an unlucky man in the end’).153 Þormóðr’s first act in Óláfr’s service is to travel to Greenland to avenge Þorgeirr’s death, an expedition on which he departs with Óláfr’s blessing. He survives it only because of Óláfr’s frequent interference, and in this respect his story closely resembles Hallfreðr’s. Like Hallfreðr, he calls on Óláfr when his own strength runs out: ‘Rennir þá hugnum þangat, er var Óláfr konungr, ok vætti hans hamingju, at honum myndi duga’ (‘Then he turns his mind to where King Óláfr was and set his hope on his luck, that it would help him’).154 His faith in Óláfr saves him again and again, from drowning and from ambush. Brothers and Sisters, pp. 212–14. Þáttr Þormóðar, in Vestfirðinga sõgur, p. 285. Þáttr Þormóðar, p. 286. Þáttr Þormóðar, p. 287. Fóstbrœðra saga, p. 265–6. Þáttr Þormóðar, p. 288. Fóstbrœðra saga, p. 240.

148 Larrington, 149

150 151

152 153 154

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The Saint as Friend and Patron After one of his killings, he escapes by swimming out to an island and hiding under a clump of seaweed, like Sigmundr in Færeyinga saga. His pursuers reach the island and shout for him, but he finds (conveniently) that he is unable to answer: ‘Honum þótti sem tekit væri fyrir munn honum’ (‘He felt as if his mouth were held shut’).155 In contrast to Sigmundr, he escapes without even losing face, saving his life and his honour. He swims to a skerry close to the shore, but is too exhausted to reach land. In a dream, Óláfr appears to a local farmer named Grímr, acquaints him with Þormóðr’s whereabouts, and commands him to see to his well-being: ‘Ek em Óláfr konungr Haraldsson, ok er þat ørendi mitt hingat, at ek vil, at þú farir eptir Þormóði, hirðmanni mínum ok skáldi, ok veitir honum bjõrg’ (‘I am King Óláfr Haraldsson, and my errand here is that I want you to find Þormóðr, my courtier and poet, and make provision for him’).156 The saint not only condones Þormóðr’s revenge, but even aids him in its execution. Óláfr here exercises his saintly powers, but he also coopts more ambiguous forces, turning them to Þormóðr’s benefit. Þormóðr travels to Greenland in the company of a poet who calls himself Gestr, an alias sometimes used by Óðinn and associated with the pagan past (pp. 201–3).157 In Grímr’s dream, Óláfr identifies this poet as the Icelander Helgu-Steinarr and tells Grímr that he will rescue Þormóðr from the skerry and accompany him back to Norway. The pagan god of poetry disguised as Gestr thus becomes the instrument of the Christian saint. Another surprising ally for a Christian saint is a sorceress called Gríma, who hides Þormóðr from his enemies’ pursuit by placing him on a chair carved with Þórr’s image; this renders him invisible to them. In a learned exchange with the sorceress Þórdís, who is leading Þormóðr’s enemies, Gríma defends herself from charges of paganism: ‘Nú kømr mér þá heldr í hug, er ek sé líkneski Þórs af tré gõrt, þat er ek má brjóta ok brenna, þegar ek vil, hversu miklu sá er meiri, er skapat hefir himin ok jõrð ok alla hluti sýniliga ok ósýniliga ok õllum hlutum gefr líf ok engi maðr má yfir stíga’ (‘Now what comes to mind rather when I see the wooden image of Þórr, which I can break and burn whenever I want, is how much greater is the one who created heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible, and gives life to all things and whom no person can overcome’).158 This employs the discourse of hagiography, but in order to deceive: the mention of the ‘visible’ and the ‘invisible’, recalling the Nicene Creed, is particularly ironic, given that it is precisely Þormóðr’s invisibility that is at stake. Gríma goes on to imply that it is Þórdís herself who stands in need of the Christian God’s care: ‘En þér er nauðsyn, þat er heilõg gæzla er svá yfir þér, at fjándinn á ekki þik svá heimila til illra hluta sem þú vildir gõrt hafa’ (‘But it is needful for you that holy guard is kept over you, so that the devil does not have you at his disposal to do all the evil that you might have Fóstbrœðra saga, pp. 254–5. Fóstbrœðra saga, p. 255. 157 Sayers, ‘Skarfing the Yard’, pp. 2–4. 158 Fóstbrœðra saga, p. 247. On Gríma, see further Grønlie, ‘Redeeming Women’, p. 304. 155 156

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The Saint and the Saga Hero wished’). This may sound subversive in the mouth of a sorceress, but it is also plainly true: Þormóðr is protected by St Óláfr’s ‘heilõg gæzla’ (‘holy guard’), while those that oppose him serve the devil’s cause. The image on the chair may represent Þórr, but it is used here for a Christian end; however pagan she may appear, Gríma serves God in serving St Óláfr’s court poet. In this distant and peripheral region, St Óláfr mediates successfully between the pagan and the Christian world: he not only tolerates moral ambiguity, but even channels pagan magic towards the Christian cause. At the end of the saga, Óláfr appears not only as a mediator, but also as intercessor, one of the defining roles of a saint.159 In Mõðruvallabók, Þormóðr asks Óláfr to promise him ‘at vit munim til einnar gistingar báðir’ (‘that we two will both go to the same lodgings’). Óláfr’s reply is inspired by Christ’s words to the penitent thief, though perhaps with a greater measure of self-doubt: ‘Eigi veit ek, hvárt mín ráð megu um þat til leiðar koma, en ef ek má nõkkuru um ráða, þá muntu þangat fara í kveld, sem ek fer’ (‘I don’t know whether my counsels can bring that about, but if I do have any say in the matter, then you will go tonight where I go’).160 Óláfr sounds uncertain here about the extent of his powers, but in Flateyjarbók he is more troubled about the moral issues raised by Þormóðr’s killings: ‘Eigi veit ek, hvárt vit erum jafnbúnir til einnar gistingar [. . .] en þó mun ek því heita þér, at þú komir til nõkkurrar hvíldar eptir sjaund þína, ok munt þú eigi mega minna við koma en dœgr komi fyrir hvern mann, er þú hefir vegit’ (‘I don’t know whether we two are equally fit for the same lodgings [. . .] but I will promise you this, that you will find some rest seven days after your death, and you won’t get away with less than one half day for each man you have killed’).161 Legally, the seventh day was when one’s inheritance was divided and one’s creditors paid off; biblically, the number seven symbolises completion and perfection, as when the Old Icelandic Homily Book comments that all feast-days signify ‘himneska hvíld’ (‘heavenly rest’), but the Lord’s day most of all.162 The legal and biblical are combined here through the metaphor of sin as a debt that must be paid before eternal rest is enjoyed; this concern with purgatory and the particular judgement (‘iudicium particulare’) is a common homiletic theme.163 In the Old Icelandic Homily Book, the audience is warned to be ‘við búinn’ (‘prepared’) for judgement, and is informed that each person not destined for hell will suffer ‘hreinsanareld nõkkura stund ok þá meinlæti er af honum brenni inar smæri syndir, þær er hann hefir óbœtar áðr hann andisk’ (‘purgatory and chastisement for a time, which will burn away the venial sins that he has not atoned for before he died’). Yet, despite fighting beside Óláfr without shield or armour, Þormóðr survives the battle in which Óláfr dies. In Flateyjarbók, he worries that martyrdom has been denied to him Jónas Kristjánsson, Um Fóstbrœðra sögu, p. 319. Fóstbrœðra saga, p. 263. 161 Fóstbrœðra saga, p. 265. Cf. Óláfs saga hins helga, p. 80. 162 Homiliu-bok, pp. 27–8. 163 Homiliu-bók, pp. 155–6. 159 160

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The Saint as Friend and Patron because of his spiritual condition: ‘Þóttisk vita at hann myndi eigi verðr vera fyrir illra gørða sinna sakar at falla með konung’ (‘He realised that he must have been unworthy to fall with the king because of his evil deeds’). He prays to St Óláfr to fulfil his promise ‘at þú myndir mik eigi fyrir róða láta, ef þín ráð mætti standa’ (‘that you won’t throw me to the winds, if your counsels are permitted to stand’).164 As he prays, he receives a mortal wound from an arrow, in a final echo of Psalm 90 (v. 5). This protracted death scene has a dual function: it both ensures Þormóðr’s salvation through Óláfr’s intercession and endorses Óláfr’s sanctity through his answer to Þormóðr’s prayer. In the end, Þormóðr is saved neither by his own virtue, nor even by penitence and amendment of life, but by passionate unswerving devotion to a saint.

Bjõrn Hítdœlakappi Óláfr’s sanctity is at the centre of Fóstbrœðra saga, mediating between the pagan and the Christian worlds. It plays a much smaller, but still significant role in the life of another Icelandic poet: Bjõrn Hítdœlakappi (‘champion of Hítardalr’), whose saga probably dates to c. 1215–20.165 As is the case with the sworn brothers, a section of Bjõrn’s life also overlaps with royal hagiography: the opening (chapters 1–5) is known only from Óláfs saga helga in Bœjarbók, where it is introduced as an account of those Icelanders ‘sem uppi váru um daga Óláfs konungs Haraldssonar ok hans urðu heimuligir vinir’ (‘who lived in the days of King Óláfr Haraldsson and became his intimate friends’).166 The list includes Þorkell Eyjólfsson from Laxdœla saga, and Þórðr Kolbeinsson and Bjõrn Hítdœlakappi, whose rivalry lies at the heart of Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa. The extract ends with Bjõrn’s departure from St Óláfr’s court, and it includes a story about how St Óláfr gave Bjõrn his garter, which was later found undecayed in his grave. A slightly expanded version of this miracle can also be found in Óláfs saga helga in AM 61 fol. and in Tómasskinna, although it is omitted in Flateyjarbók.167 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, none of these manuscripts has much to say about the later dealings between Bjõrn and Þórðr with their virulent exchanges of poetic invective: Bœjarbók ends by referring the reader to the saga to find out ‘hversu karlmannliga Bjõrn fór, en Þórðr vesalmannliga’ (‘how vigorously Bjõrn behaved, but Þórðr miserably’).168 This smoothes over, rather unfairly, the moral complexities involved; Finlay is closer to the mark when she describes Bjõrn’s devotion to St Óláfr as ‘somewhat antagonistic’ to the ‘racy details of the feud’ and ‘only explicable in terms of the saga’s relationship to 164 165 166 167

168

Fóstbrœðra saga, p. 268. The same expression is used of Christ in Harmsól, pp. 120–1 (stanza 53). The Saga of Björn, pp. xlvii–lii. Bjarnar saga, p. 111; The Saga of Björn, p. lxvii. Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa, ed. Richard Constant Boer (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1893), p. 82; The Saga of Björn, p. xxi, 85. Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa, ed. Boer, p. 25.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero hagiography’.169 Generic overlap here creates complexity of character: Bjõrn is simultaneously a pious hero to be admired, and enmeshed in adultery, insult and violence. As for Þormóðr, there can be no question of moral perfection: what makes the difference is personal devotion to a saint. Unlike his rival Þórðr, Bjõrn not only recognises Óláfr’s sanctity intuitively, but also allows it to influence him; it restrains him, if not from verbal abuse, at least from unnecessary violence. Even before he has met Óláfr, Bjõrn spares Þórðr’s life on behalf of the king, telling Þórðr that ‘Met ek hann svá mikils ósénan, at fyrir þat drep ek þik eigi, er þú vart gestr hans’ (‘I value him so much unseen, that I will not kill you, just because you were his guest’).170 He repeats this to Óláfr when he finally meets him in person: ‘Ek virða þik svá mikils ósénan, at fyrir því drap ek Þórð eigi ok alla skipshõfn hans, at hann hafði yðvarr vetrgestr verit’ (‘I honoured you so highly unseen, that I did not kill Þórðr or any of his crew because he was your guest over the winter’).171 The repetition of ‘ósénan’ may echo Christ’s blessing in the Gospel of St John on those ‘er trúðu ok sá eigi’ (‘who believed and did not see’).172 Bjõrn’s relationship to Óláfr is that of sinner to saint, and his fear of incurring Óláfr’s anger contrasts with Þorkell Eyjólfsson’s dangerous nonchalance. Bjõrn willingly accepts Óláfr as mediator in his dispute with Þórðr, and keeps to the settlement until he is provoked; he even gives up Viking raids at the king’s request.173 St Óláfr, in return, gives his seal of approval to Bjõrn, declaring him ‘meiri vinr minn’ (‘all the more my friend’).174 Bjõrn leaves Norway only when Óláfr tells him to and takes the king’s friendship with him: Óláfr judges him at their parting to be ‘vaskan mann ok góðan dreng’ (‘a brave man and a good fellow’).175 Even after the feud with Þórðr has been reignited, allusions to Bjõrn’s piety continue: he builds a church dedicated to St Thomas the Apostle, and is said to have composed a drápa about the saint. Like Hallfreðr’s Uppreistardrápa, the poem itself is lost, but Finlay thinks it possible that it did once exist, since this is attested by Rúnólfr Dálksson, who was perhaps a twelfth-century cleric.176 Bjõrn’s piety is also expressed in a stanza in anticipation of his death, in which he sees a helmeted woman calling him home. Like Gísli’s ‘better’ dream woman, she is described in what appears to be a blend of pagan and Christian poetic diction: ‘hjalmfaldin Ilmr orma armleggjar’ (‘the helmeted Ilmr ∧goddess∨ of the serpents of the arm > arm-rings > woman, i.e. valkyrie) of ‘hilmir dagleygjar’ (‘lord of day-fire’), which may be a kenning for the Christian God.177 Bjõrn does not, like St Óláfr, throw down his weapons before death, but he does fall 169 170 171

172 173 174

175 176 177

The Saga of Björn, p. xxix–xxxi. Óláfs saga hins helga, pp. 89–90. Bjarnar saga, p. 130. Bjarnar saga, p. 132. John 20: 29; Leifar, p. 19 (from Gregory the Great). Bjarnar saga, pp. 130–3. Bjarnar saga, p. 133. Bjarnar saga, p. 134. Bjarnar saga, p. 163; The Saga of Björn, pp. xxxi–xxxii. Bjarnar saga, pp. 196–7; The Saga of Björn, p. 73 (note 182).

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The Saint as Friend and Patron to his knees in a tiny gesture towards Christian martyrdom.178 He is buried in his church in Vellir. He is not, like Þormóðr, inseparable from St Óláfr, but the king’s friendship and approval form a continuous thread through his life. This friendship takes material form in St Óláfr’s garter, which creates a point of physical contact between poet and saint, allowing Bjõrn a vicarious share in Óláfr’s future sanctity.179 We are told that one day, after a communal bath (an echo of the swimming contest, perhaps), Bjõrn accidentally puts on Óláfr’s garter instead of his own and Óláfr graciously allows him to keep it. Bjõrn treasures this gift: we are told that he ‘hafði ávallt þessa reim um fót sinn, á meðan hann lifði, ok með henni var hann niðr grafinn’ (‘always wore this garter on his leg, for as long as he lived, and he was buried with it’).180 When his bones are dug up, it is found undecayed, although everything else has rotted away. The saga author tells us, moreover, that this object can still be seen: ‘Er þat nú messufatalindi í Gõrðum á Akranesi’ (‘It is now the cincture of a set of mass vestments at Garðar in Akranes’). In the expanded version of this miracle in AM 61 fol. and Tómasskinna, the compiler adds: ‘Nú sýndisk í þessum atburð mikill heilagleikr Óláfs konungs, at sá einn hlutr var úfúinn í jõrðu á beinum Bjarnar, er helgask hafði af líkama Óláfs konungs’ (‘Now the great holiness of King Óláfr was revealed in this event, since only that object which had been sanctified by the body of King Óláfr was undecayed in the earth on Bjõrn’s bones’).181 The garter reveals the sanctity of Óláfr, not Bjõrn, but even proximity to such a relic can be salvific when it is a conscious choice. Bjõrn’s care in keeping the garter with him contrasts with Kjartan’s neglect of Óláfr Tryggvason’s sword: it is an acknowledgement of dependence on the king. The saga keeps coming back to this: before Bjõrn’s last battle, it specifies that he had wound ‘silkiræmu um fót sér, þeiri er hann hafði skipt um við inn helga Óláf konung’ (‘the silk garter around his leg, the one he had exchanged with the holy King Óláfr’).182 We are reminded of it again when Bjõrn is buried: He ‘var niðr lagðr með klæðum ok ræmunni, sem fyrr var sagt’ (‘was laid down with his clothes and the garter, as was previously said’).183 The repetition signals the importance of the garter for Bjõrn’s afterlife, associating him with the life-giving powers of the Christian saint and the incorruptibility of Christian resurrection. As a cincture, the garter takes on further significance, symbolising the Christian virtues of bindandi (‘abstinence’) and varúð (‘spiritual watchfulness’) – virtues that hardly characterise Bjõrn’s recorded life, but with which he is invested posthumously through Óláfr.184 It is surely not a coincidence that the garter

178 179

180 181

182 183 184

Bjarnar saga, p. 202. The Saga of Björn, p. xxx. Bjarnar saga, p. 134. Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa, ed. Boer, p. 82. Bjarnar saga, p. 199. Bjarnar saga, p. 207. Messuskýringar: Liturgisk symbolik frå den norsk-islandske kyrkja i millomalderen, ed. Oluf Kolsrud (Oslo: Dybwad, 1952), p. 40.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero ends up at Garðar in Akranes, the home of an early Christian settler.185 These hagiographic elements have little impact on the main action of the saga, but they become a defining aspect of Bjõrn’s character. However scurrilous some of the details of his poetry and life, St Óláfr’s garter invests him with an aura of sanctity.

Grettir Ásmundarson In the sagas discussed so far, Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláf act as judges, mediators and agents of salvation. They are morally central to Hallfreðar saga and Fóstbrœðra saga, intervening respectively in the lives of Hallfreðr and Þormóðr, who in turn bear witness to their saintly powers; but even when they appear in more minor roles, their favour can influence a saga hero’s ‘luck’. This set of expectations is behind St Óláfr’s guest appearance in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar: Grettir travels to Norway, first to offer his services to the saint, then to appeal for absolution for the burning of Þórir Skeggjason’s sons. Given the late date of the saga (c. 1310–20), it is likely that the author was familiar with the saga of the sworn brothers, and he entwines Grettir’s story in various ways with theirs.186 So, in a scene found in both Fóstbrœðra saga and Grettis saga, the lawspeaker Skapti asks Þorgils Arason (with whom they are all staying) about the temperament of the three men. He replies: ‘“Er þat þó ólíkt, því at Þormóðr er maðr guðhræddr ok trúmaðr mikill, en Grettir er svá myrkfælinn, at hann þorir hvergi at fara, þegar at myrkva tekr [. . .] En Þorgeir, frænda minn, hygg ek eigi hræðask kunna.”‘ (‘“It differs in that Þormóðr is a man who fears God, and a very religious man, but Grettir is so scared of the dark that he doesn’t dare to go anywhere when it begins to get dark [. . .] But I don’t think that my kinsman Þorgeirr is able to feel fear.”‘).187 The sworn brothers also have a small part in two other episodes in Grettis saga, in one of which they engage – unsuccessfully – in a power struggle with Grettir.188 Grettir is aligned with Þormóðr in his vulnerability; and yet the outcome is manifestly different, for Þormóðr’s fear of God is what saves him, while Grettir’s fear of the dark becomes a life-threatening disability that eventually leads to his death. The contrast between Þormóðr’s redemption and Grettir’s failure to find absolution poses difficult questions about merit and reward. Óláfr appears at a key moment in the saga, shortly after Grettir has been cursed by the revenant Glámr and before his full outlawry from Iceland. It is a decisive moment in Grettir’s life, the only moment, perhaps, when Glámr’s curse might conceivably be reversed. Óláfr has more to offer Grettir than a fair legal trial: he can give him, as he does Þormóðr, a new salvific purpose for his heroic strength. His refusal to do so represents a judgement not just on Grettir as an individual, but on the kind of heroism he represents. Landnámabók, pp. 61–2. On the late date of the saga, see Grettis saga, pp. lxviii–lxx. 187 Grettis saga, p. 163. Fóstbrœðra saga, p. 191 (only in Flateyjarbók). 188 Grettis saga, pp. 88–94, 159–62. 185 186

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The Saint as Friend and Patron Grettir’s encounter with St Óláfr, then is a deliberate entry into literary dialogue with the saint’s life. This is in line with the saga’s ‘post-classical eclecticism’ and its high level of literary self-consciousness.189 As de Looze has shown, the saga contains numerous allusions to ‘a cycle of written text’, including (just from among the sagas discussed in this book) Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, Vatnsdœla saga, Fóstbrœðra saga and Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa.190 As poet, Grettir is the last branch of a ‘fraternal genealogy of poets’ which gives way in the epilogue to the new and luckier romance hero, his half-brother Þorsteinn drómundr (‘galleon’), ‘hero and poet of love’.191 As hero and monster-slayer, he can be compared with his luckier maternal ancestors, Ingimundr and his descendants in Vatnsdœla saga: both Grettis saga and Vatnsdœla saga were probably written in or around the monastery of Þingeyrar, perhaps at around the same time.192 Grettir, like Ingimundr and his sons, is engaged in landhreinsun (‘land-cleansing’), and has a claim to be precursor to the saint; he is, in fact, fourth cousin to St Óláfr, a family tie he tries his best to exploit.193 Like the saint, Grettir has been described a ‘boundary crosser’ and a ‘mediator between two worlds’.194 He acts in defence of the Christian community, although he himself is paradoxically excluded from it. When he carries the widow and her daughter at Sandhaugar across the flooded river to church, he re-enacts a miracle from Óláfs saga helga in which St Óláfr ferries pilgrims to church.195 The saga looks backwards to heroic epic and forwards to continental romance, but it also looks sideways to hagiography, for Grettir’s role of defender against the forces of evil will be appropriated by the Christian saint. Grettir’s eagerness to meet St Óláfr is emphasised soon after his encounter with Glámr and is introduced as an opportunity for him to reassert his heroic standing and find a purposeful outlet for his strength. The saga author tells us that ‘Váru margir merkiligir hlutir sagðir frá Óláfi konungi ok þat með, at hann tók þá menn alla bezt, sem váru atgørvismenn um nõkkuru hluti, ok gerði sér þá handgengna’ (‘Many remarkable things were said about King Óláfr, including the fact that he received with most honour those men who were physically accomplished in some way, and then made [them] his retainers’).196 Grettir, we are told, hopes that Óláfr will convert his heroic potential into social standing: ‘Vænti hann sér sœmðar sem aðrir af konunginum’ (‘He expected to receive the Skaldic Verse, pp. 182–3. Laurence de Looze, ‘The Outlaw Poet, the Poetic Outlaw: Self-Consciousness in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar’, Arkiv för nordisk filologi 106 (1991), 88–9. de Looze, ‘The Outlaw Poet’, pp. 89, 102. Richard Harris, ‘The Proverbs of Vatnsdœla saga and the Sword of Jökull’, in The Hero Recovered: Essays on Medieval Heroism in Honour of George Clark, ed. Robin Waugh and James Meldon (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2010), 150–70. Grettis saga, pp. 3, 134. Kirsten Hastrup, ‘Tracing Tradition’, in Structure and Meaning, pp. 284, 290; cf. Bredesdorff, Chaos and Love, p. 99. Grettis saga, p. 211; Óláfs saga hins helga, pp. 708–9. Grettis saga, pp. 124–5.

189 O’Donoghue, 190 191

192

193 194

195 196

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The Saint and the Saga Hero same honours as others from the king’). This is his chance to win the approval and acceptance that he has failed to find in Iceland, a failure that Glámr appears to have rendered permanent. Glámr has declared that all Grettir’s deeds will turn ‘til ógæfu ok hamingjuleysis’ (‘to misfortune and lucklessness’),197 but Óláfr is able to improve one’s gæfa (‘luck’), as is clear from Þormóðr’s life. Indeed, Óláfr’s power to lift curses and relieve phobias is the subject of an anecdote found in Óláfs saga helga and Flateyjarbók. After the Danish retainer Sigurðr Ákason is cursed by a flagð (‘troll-woman’), he becomes unable to stand the sight of blood. Forced to leave the court of King Knútr in disgrace, he finds his way to St Óláfr instead. On Easter Day, Óláfr commands Sigurðr to watch as he takes a knife and carves a cross on his palm: ‘Hann gerir svá ok fær nú sét blóðit svá at honum bregðr ekki við ok aldri síðan varð honum at þessu mein’ (‘He does so and now manages to look at the blood without being affected, and it never caused him distress again’).198 As a result, he is able to resume his killing career and regain his status as ‘inn vaskazti maðr’ (‘the most valiant man’). This happy ending is precisely what Grettir desires for himself: to be released from his curse and taken into the power and protection of a Christian king. Who better to relieve him of his crippling fear of the dark than the saint celebrated in Einarr Skúlason’s Geisli as a ‘beam of light’ from the Sun of Mercy?199 Grettir’s desire to place his accomplishments at St Óláfr’s service is laudable, but it turns against him before they meet, as Glámr’s curse starts to take effect. Grettir is travelling with a group of merchants and, when they are caught in a snowstorm and too damp to make a fire, they beg him to swim to other side of the fjord, where they can see fire in the distance. They appeal manipulatively to his reputation: ‘Þú ert nú mestr atgørvismaðr af íslenzkum mõnnum kallaðr’ (‘You are said by Icelanders to be the most accomplished of men’).200 This is the opportunity for which Grettir has been waiting: to display the atgørvi (‘accomplishments’) that he knows St Óláfr to value most. Initially, he seems to have succeeded in this: when he returns with the fire, the merchants praise his frœknleikr (‘valour’) and ‘kváðu engan hans jafningja mundu vera’ (‘said that none could be his equal’).201 The next day, they discover that Grettir’s theft of fire on the other side of the fjord has burned the lodging and all its occupants to the ground – and even worse, the victims turn out to be the sons of the merchant Þórir Skeggjason, a close friend of St Óláfr and Bishop Sigurðr. Overnight, Grettir’s mythic-heroic fire-fetching exploit is reclassified as a crime: ‘it mesta illvirki’ (‘the worst of evil deeds’). The merchants spread the news of this terrible burning, and it reaches the ears of St Óláfr before Grettir gets there himself. When he finally manages to gain a hearing, it is not as an expectant Grettis saga, p. 121. Óláfs saga hins helga, p. 52; Flateyjarbók, II, 140. 199 Einarr Skúlason’s Geisli (2005), pp. 51 (stanza 1), 124 (commentary); Einarr Skúlason, Geisli, ed. Martin Chase, in Poetry on Christian Subjects, 7.1, p. 7 (stanza 1). 200 Grettis saga, p. 129. 201 Grettis saga, p. 131. 197

198

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The Saint as Friend and Patron hero to be welcomed, but as an unwitting criminal who desperately needs exoneration. This Óláfr allows him in the form of an ordeal, in preparation for which Grettir fasts dutifully. The ordeal, however, never takes place, for when Grettir enters the church, he is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a small boy. The boy is described as ‘heldr svipligr’ (‘rather unpleasant-looking’) – the same expression used of the evil spirit that appears to Herdís in Laxdœla saga – and he immediately starts to insult Grettir and question his right to be there, accusing him of being ‘ódáðamaðrinn, er sannreyndr er at illvirkjum ok hefir brennt inni saklausa menn’ (‘the criminal, who is proven in evil deeds and has burned to death innocent men’).202 We are told that Grettir ‘varð skapfátt mjõk við þetta’ (‘lost his temper violently at this’); unable to restrain himself from striking the boy, he knocks him unconscious on the spot. Some say that Grettir must have killed the boy, but the saga author notes another possibility: ‘Engi þóttisk vita, hvaðan sjá piltr kom, eða hvat af honum varð, en þat ætla menn helzt, at þat hafi verit óhreinn andi, sendr til óheilla Gretti’ (‘Nobody seemed to know where the boy came from, or what became of him, but the most widely held opinion is that it must have been an unclean spirit, sent to Grettir’s misfortune’). The ordeal is called off, and Óláfr pronounces Grettir ‘mikill ógæfumaðr’ (‘a very unlucky man’), commenting that ‘Mun eigi hœgt at gera við ógæfa þinni’ (‘It will be difficult to counter your lucklessness’).203 This is what Óláfr Tryggvason says about Kjartan and his kin: ‘Mun óhœgt vera atgørða við forlõgum þeira’ (‘It will be difficult to counter their fate’). Grettir begs Óláfr to reconsider, pleading both their kinship and his abilities as warrior. Óláfr only repeats his initial judgement: ‘Miklu ertu meiri ógæfumaðr en þú megir fyrir þat með oss vera’ (‘You are far too unlucky a man to be able to remain with us’). No other Icelander, not even Þorgeirr, is rejected in such an uncompromising way. Grettir eventually returns to Iceland and is outlawed the next summer for the burning of Þórir Skeggjason’s sons. The allusion to an ‘unclean spirit’, sent to tempt Grettir, draws the saga into the sphere of moral allegory. Evil spirits often appear in saints’ lives in the form of small boys: in Gregory’s Dialogues, Benedict sees ‘svartr sveinn’ (‘a black boy’) tugging at a monk’s robes while he is at prayer and, in the Vitae patrum, the devil appears to a hermit ‘svá sem í ásjónu eins ungs sveins af verõldinni’ (‘in the shape of a young boy of secular life’).204 The boy that provokes Grettir, then, could be understood as an evil spirit: Cook argues that this external assault places Grettir in a good light as the victim of malevolent forces.205 The boy thus forms a counterpart to the character of Glámr, whose ontological status is similarly unclear: he too is called an ‘unclean spirit’ and mysteriously disappears when a priest joins the search, problematising his Grettis saga, p. 133; Laxdœla saga, p. 223. Grettis saga, p. 134. 204 Heilagra manna søgur, I, 162, II, 626. 205 Robert Cook, ‘The Reader in Grettis saga’, Saga-Book 21 (1982–5), 151. 202 203

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The Saint and the Saga Hero otherwise corporeal existence.206 In the lives of saints, however, the distinction between external and internal impulses is not so clearly drawn. In the above scene from Gregory’s Dialogues, Benedict holds the monk responsible for the boy’s behaviour: he strikes the monk, not the boy, with a stick. Likewise, in the lives of the desert fathers, evil spirits are identified with thoughts and can embody specific sins: an ugly ‘black boy’ that disrupts St Antony is revealed to be the spirit of fornication, while a small Ethiopian that sits on Apollonius’s shoulder identifies himself as the ‘devil of pride’.207 The childlike form of these sins carries a spiritual meaning: it signals the youth or weakness of the sin, which must be rejected before it grows too strong; as in the Augustinian reading of Psalm 136, which advocates smashing ‘the little ones’ (‘evil desires newly come to birth’) against the rock (‘the rock is Christ’) before they mature into and are reinforced by bad habits.208 From a hagiographic perspective, there is no contradiction in reading an evil spirit both as an external source of evil and as an internal flaw. It is to Grettir’s flaws of character that Óláfr attributes the failure of the ordeal: ‘Fyrir sakar þess, at nú óneyttisk skírslan fyrir sakar þolleysis þíns, þá muntu þessu máli eigi framar fá af þér hrundit en svá, sem nú er orðit, ok hlýtr jafnan illt af athugaleysinu’ (‘Because the ordeal is now annulled because of your impatience, you will not be able to clear yourself from this matter any further than you’ve already done, and such carelessness always turns out badly’).209 It is not the boy’s accusations, but Grettir’s angry and impulsive reaction that sabotages his chance of redemption. The youth of the boy does not signify the weakness of evil here, but perhaps it suggests a weakness within Grettir, a childlike vulnerability. It takes us back to Grettir’s childhood, when he sabotaged all his father’s attempts to set him to productive work. If Glámr represents, as Tulinius has argued, a ‘negative version’ of paternal authority, threatening to curb Grettir’s strength and arrest his development, then the disruptive little boy signifies Grettir’s resulting immaturity, his ‘besetting dependence’ on others.210 The events of the ordeal express complex and contradictory aspects of Grettir’s character: on the one hand, his desire to be approved and accepted, on the other hand the way his own childish and unmastered impulses continually work against any positive outcome.

Grettis saga, pp. 112, 122. Early Christian Lives, pp. 12–13 (this section of the Life of St Antony is missing from the Norse translation); Heilagra manna søgur, II, 385. 208 Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms. 121–150, ed. Boniface Ramsey, trans. Maria Boulding, The Works of Saint Augustine III/20 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2010), pp. 239–40. 209 Grettis saga, p. 134. Cf. Robert James Glendinning, ‘Luck and the Problem of Justice in Grettis saga’, in Germanisches Altertum, p. 105. 210 Torfi Tulinius, ‘Revenants in Medieval Icelandic Literature’, Caietele Echinox 21 (2011), 71; Russell Poole, ‘Myth, Psychology and Society in Grettis saga’, Alvíssmál 11 (2004), 5, 9–10, 14. 206 207

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The Saint as Friend and Patron The accusations made by the boy are also significant: he denies Grettir’s right to a place in Christian society, ranking him not only among ‘illvirkjar ok ránsmenn ok þjóðar’ (‘evildoers and robbers and thieves’), but also among monsters. He calls Grettir margýgjusonr (‘the son of a mermaid’), an otherwise unrecorded insult. It perhaps relates to the story in Óláfs saga helga about how St Óláfr kills a mermaid, which is illustrated in Flateyjarbók.211 The boy declares Grettir’s guilt in advance of the ordeal that is to decide it, placing him not only among criminals, but more specifically among those creatures from whom St Óláfr is to cleanse the land. The harshness of this judgment contrasts with Óláfr’s more measured view, repeated after the ordeal: ‘Líkara væri, at þú hefðir eigi viljandi mennina inni brennt’ (‘It is more likely that you did not intentionally burn these men to death’).212 The boy’s accusations may express communal opinion, or they may represent Grettir’s own internal sense of guilt, his fear that the evil he unintentionally caused is in fact an expression of his true nature. The moral philosopher Gabriele Taylor describes how, in extreme cases of guilt, such as murder, some experience a split personality, with the result that the doer of the terrible deed is seen as alien to the self.213 This may explain what Grettir seeks from St Óláfr: confirmation from this figure of moral authority that what he has done is not an expression of who he is. Hence his slight uncertainty when Óláfr asks him whether he is Grettir the Strong: ‘Kallaðr hefi ek svá verit, ok em ek af því hér kominn, at ek vænta af yðr nõkkurrar linunar um þat illmæli, er mér hefir kennt verit, en ek þykkjumk þessa eigi valdr’ (‘I’ve been called such, and I’ve come here because I hope to get from you some mitigation of the slanderous things that have been ascribed to me, but I don’t think that I’m the cause of them’).214 He wishes to see the burning as alien to himself, something for which he is not responsible; but his hesitation in identifying himself as Grettir the Strong suggests that he is no longer so sure of who he is. The boy declares the opposite: what Grettir has done does express who he is and therefore cannot be atoned for – a reaction described by Taylor as a ‘secondary deviance’ to guilt.215 Rather than making amends, Grettir must spend the rest of his life becoming what his unwitting act proclaims: a thief, an evildoer, a monster, an outcast from Christian society. The possibility that the boy expresses in some way Grettir’s own sense of guilt is strengthened by Kanerva’s research into ógæfa, a word that appears repeatedly in Óláfr’s pronouncements on Grettir. Kanerva argues that ógæfa, like guilt, can be identified as an ‘emotion of self-assessment’ caused by a failure to observe communally recognised obligations; it arises, like guilt, when one’s actions are

Grettis saga, p. 133; Óláfs saga hins helga, pp. 15–16; Flateyjarbók, II, 25–6. The image of the mermaid is on fol. 79r. 212 Grettis saga, pp. 132, 134. 213 Gabriele Taylor, Pride, Shame and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 90, 95. 214 Grettis saga, p. 132. 215 Taylor, Pride, Shame and Guilt, pp. 90–3. 211

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The Saint and the Saga Hero no longer perceived to be in line with one’s personality.216 In the case of Gísli, the ‘duplicity’ of guilt is expressed through the different assessments of his dream women, as he vacillates between self-justification and self-abhorrence, with no way of determining which view is correct. Grettir, however, has access to a moral authority who can absolve him, and only his failure to submit to the ordeal prevents him from resolving his guilt. By taking matters into his own hands, he loses his chance to turn his guilt into what it could be: an ‘emotion of salvation’ leading to repentance. It becomes, instead, ‘merely destructive’, a ‘burden’ for which there is no relief.217 Hamer has shown that the ordeal is linked with the circumstances of Grettir’s death through a series of verbal repetitions.218 When the log cursed by the sorceress Þuríðr washes up on Drangey, Grettir perceives at once that, like the boy, it is sent ‘okkr til óheilla’ (‘to the misfortune of us two’). Despite this, he fails to restrain himself: when the log washes up a third time, we are told that he loses his temper (‘varð skapfátt við’) and fails to recognise it.219 In fury, he strikes at it with an axe, which glances off and bites into his leg. The wound goes septic, so that Grettir ‘mátti hvergi kyrr þola, ok eigi kom honum svefn á auga’ (‘couldn’t bear it at all quietly, and sleep didn’t come to his eyes’).220 As in the ordeal, the attack comes from within and without: although the sorceress Þuríðr has used magic to curse the log, Grettir makes himself vulnerable to it through his lack of self-control. When Þuríðr declares him ‘heillum horfinn, allri gipt ok gæfu ok allri võrn ok vizku’ (‘deprived of wholeness, all good fortune and luck, and all protection and wisdom’), she does little more than describe the spiritual condition in which he has long been living.221 The log is described as a rót (‘tree’, ‘root’), a word that often carries figurative and moral meanings, as in the parable of the ‘ill rót’ (‘bad tree’) in Matthew 7: 18, or in John the Baptist’s warning of judgement in Luke 3: 9: ‘Nú þegar er øx reidd at rótum trés’ (‘Now the axe is laid to the roots of the tree’).222 Gregory’s sermon on this passage explains that the tree represents ‘all mankind’ and the axe ‘our Lord’, consisting of a handle (his humanity) and iron (his divinity) – ‘en hann høggr með guðdómi’ (‘and he strikes with his divinity’). It is worth noting that the words tré, rót, øx, hõggva and járn in the passage from Gregory are all repeated in this part of the saga, which suggests that there may be some direct influence.223 If this is the case, then Grettir’s wound can be read as the divine 216

Kanerva, ‘Ógæfa as an Emotion’, pp. 8–13; cf. also Hermann Pálsson, ‘Um gæfumenn ok ógæfu’, pp. 148–9. 217 Taylor, Pride, Shame and Guilt, pp. 92, 101. 218 Andrew Hamer, ‘Grettis saga and the iudicium dei’, in Northern Voices: Essays on Old Germanic and Related Topics, ed. Kees Dekker, Alasdair MacDonald and Hermann Niebaum (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), pp. 19–22. 219 Grettis saga, pp. 250–1. 220 Grettis saga, p. 252. 221 Grettis saga, p. 247. 222 Bekker-Nielsen, ‘Et overset brudstykke’, p. 41–2. 223 Bekker-Nielsen, ‘Et overset brudstykke’, p. 40; Grettis saga, pp. 250–1, 262–3.

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The Saint as Friend and Patron judgement subsequent to his ordeal; he strikes at the ‘root’ of his problems only to find that it lies within himself. In his infected wound – self-inflicted, incapacitating and sleep-depriving – we see the consequences of his own selfdestructive actions, leaving him unable to defend himself. Grettir’s vulnerability on Drangey may be contrasted with Þormóðr’s relative resilience in Fóstbrœðra saga, as he escapes from island to skerry, wounded and exhausted, but secure in the power and protection of St Óláfr. This contrast is particularly evident in the role played by the two sorceresses: whereas Þuríðr’s sorcery is actively harmful, Gríma’s is coopted to serve the interests of the saint. The effectiveness of Þuríðr’s sorcery is not only a measure of Þorbjõrn Õngull’s spiritual corruption, but also of Grettir’s vulnerability and weakness. Without St Óláfr’s protection, he cannot defend himself from evil; even his opponent’s nickname, õngull (‘hook’), expresses the extent to which he is ensnared.224 The festering wound on his leg contrasts with the garter so carefully wound around Bjõrn’s which, although it does not save his life, grants him a small share in Óláfr’s sanctity. Grettir has no chance, following his rejection by Óláfr, of overcoming the evil that besets him, whether from outside or from within. The way in which the log keeps washing up with the tide, no matter how often it is cast away, is a powerful metaphor for the resurgence of guilt that has been suppressed rather than resolved. Óláfr’s refusal to extend his protection to Grettir hangs heavily over the outlaw’s end. The saga’s engagement with the hagiographic traditions surrounding St Óláfr is densely psychological in nature; it becomes a way of exploring issues of guilt and redemption as an aspect of Grettir’s character. A more conventional nod to hagiography is found in the epilogue to the saga, which contains a corresponding ordeal, this time successfully completed, in which Spes and Þorsteinn clear themselves from the adultery of which they are in fact guilty.225 After a long and happy marriage, Spes turns to religion to seek absolution from sin: ‘Nú veit ek, at þessa okkra skuld megu hvárki leysa okkrir frændr né fémunir, útan vit sjálf gjõldum skyld fyrir. Nú vil ek breyta ráðahag okkrum ok fara ór landi ok á páfagarð, því at ek trúi, at svá má mitt mál leysask’ (‘Now I know that this debt we two owe can’t be redeemed by our kinsmen nor by gifts of money, unless we two ourselves pay what is due. Now I wish to make a change to our life together, and go abroad and to the papal palace, because I believe that in this way my case can be resolved’).226 They confess, undergo penance, and receive as expected ‘lausn allra sinna mála’ (‘absolution from all their affairs’). Finally, they enter separate monastic cells to prepare for their passage to eternal life. Spes and Þorsteinn resolve their guilt as model Christians, for whom it is a skuld Barlaams ok Josaphats saga, ed. Magnus Rindal, Norrøne tekster 4 (Oslo: Norsk historisk kjeldeskrift institutt, 1981), p. 114. 225 Paul Schach, ‘Some Observations on the Influence of Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar’, in Old Norse Literature and Mythology: A Symposium, ed. Edgar C. Polomé (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), p. 117; Glendinning, ‘Luck and the Problem of Justice’, p. 108. 226 Grettis saga, pp. 286–7. 224

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The Saint and the Saga Hero (‘debt’) needing to be repaid, and they do so through pilgrimage and penance in accordance with the laws of the Church. Unlike Grettir, they successfully convert their guilt into an ‘emotion of salvation’, and their choice of solitude contrasts painfully with his enforced and miserable isolation on Drangey at the end. In consequence, they are pronounced ‘inir mestu gæfumenn’ (‘the luckiest of people’), a judgement with which few would disagree. How the ordeal performed by Spes and Þorsteinn reflects on Grettir’s botched ordeal is difficult to say, unjust to the extreme as it appears; for he is not cleared despite his innocence, and they are cleared despite their guilt. Does the saga reach here towards an overall balance between luck and lucklessness, in which the couple’s luck somehow makes up for Grettir’s lack of it? Or does it fall back, as Glendinning has suggested, on hagiographic commonplace because it has no final answer to the questions it has raised?227 These moral issues linger, but the literary world hastens on: Þorsteinn is the hero of the future, and Grettir belongs in the past. His brand of heroism, based on physical strength and impulsive violence, is waning in the light of a Christian future in which the saint will take on the forces of evil and successfully defeat them through virtue. If Grettis saga was written at Þingeyrar, where so much hagiography was produced, then the saga author knew all too well that the power to defeat trolls and revenants – Grettir’s greatest asset –no longer belonged to the old-style hero, but to bishops and royal saints; whether Bishop Guðmundr Arason, or King Óláfr Tryggvason, or St Óláfr himself.228 Whereas the sons of Ingimundr, Grettir’s luckier kinsmen, come to prefigure the saint in their exemplarity, Grettir himself represents something far more complex, a heroism based not on perfection, but on compulsion and vulnerability – which cannot, finally, be redeemed.

Conclusion The sagas discussed in this chapter overlap with hagiography to varying degrees, from the sustained engagement that characterises Hallfreðar saga and Fóstbrœðra saga, to the minor motif of the garter-as-relic in Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa, to the self-consciously literary dialogue with the saint’s life in the moral psychology of Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar. Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr appear in a range of clearly defined roles, from proselytising hero to salvific agent, from moral authority to mediator between worlds. The king’s favour or lack of it plays a decisive role, redeeming Hallfreðr and Þormóðr, condemning Sigmundr and Þorkell Eyjólfsson, and glorifying Bjõrn Hítdœlakappi. The concept of gæfa recurs repeatedly as an attribute of these two kings which they can extend to their followers, corresponding to the charisma or patronage of a saint. It 227

Hastrup, ‘Tracing Tradition’, p. 288; Glendinning, ‘Luck and the Problem of Justice’, p. 111. 228 Grettis saga, p. 289; Óláfs saga Odds, p. 294; Ólafs saga hins helga, p. 69; Biskupa sögur (1858–78), I, 109, 130, 598.

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The Saint as Friend and Patron is embodied in their gifts – cloak, ring, helmet, sword, garter – which make a difference to those who handle them with devotion (or even, in Hallfreðr’s case, without). We find in these sagas many literal examples of ‘interference’ from hagiography, as Óláfr Tryggvason breathes down Hallfreðr’s neck as he composes poetry, and St Óláfr orchestrates Þormóðr’s rescue in Greenland. Yet, though there are currents of resistance, they are given less prominence than one might expect, given the Icelandic freeholder’s stereotypical attitude of defiance towards Norwegian kings. In Laxdœla saga, Kjartan’s interaction with Óláfr Tryggvason reveals his self-reliance to be a serious flaw; St Óláfr’s exchanges with Þorkell Eyjólfsson and Grettir Ásmundarson explore the moral psychology of sin and guilt. Perhaps Sigmundr and Hallfreðr come closest to traditional ideas of insubordination, with their open refusal to obey the king’s every command and their explicit critique of forced conversion. At the same time, Óláfr Tryggvason offers Hallfreðr a father upon whom he can depend, and St Óláfr keeps his promise of salvation to Þormóðr, despite his moral scruples over the poet’s killings. Indeed, these two kings offer a model of ideal relationships between men that contrasts sharply with the paternal neglect, sexual jealousy and fraternal rivalry explored in so many of the sagas. More striking, perhaps, given their reputation for missionary violence, is the way in which the two Óláfrs make space for moral ambiguity, mediating between pagan aesthetics and moral didaticism, sanctioning a place for heroic violence, and even magic, in the new Christian world. In the large hagiographic compilations about Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr, the figure of the king can cross between saint’s life and saga of Icelanders, allowing the action to be viewed in multiple ways. In Færeyinga saga, Sigmundr’s death can be read as a stern condemnation of residual pagan sympathies or a sympathetic depiction of the fate of the ideal hero in a politically ruthless and amoral world. Kjartan can be read as secretive, stubborn and proud to the end, or a loyal servant of the Norwegian king, helplessly caught up in the pre-ordained drama of salvation history. Hallfreðr dies either regretting his love for Kolfinna, or looking with some trepidation to the life of the world to come. While the compiler of AM 61 fol. is keen to establish these sagas as ‘tributaries’, flowing in the same direction, the result may be better described as a ‘confluence’, a meeting-place or mingling of traditions and genres in which each preserves something of its distinctiveness. These multi-generic compilations affirm that the sagas of Icelanders should not be read in isolation; rather, they are active participants in a vibrant web of literary relations.

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N 7 n Conclusion What I have argued, in this book, is that one cannot approach the sagas of Icelanders in a literary vacuum: it is right neither to view them in isolation from European genres, nor to think of them as borrowing passively or unconsciously from better-established literary traditions. Metaphors based on the linear development of genre (whether in terms of ‘emancipation’ or ‘decline’) fail to capture the lively friction between genres that is such an energising force in literary creativity and innovation: the sagas of Icelanders developed as they did not because they were isolated from European literature, but through active engagement and dialogue with other – more mainstream – literary genres.1 Once we move away from the idea that the saint’s life was merely a starting point for the saga, we can appreciate more fully exactly what the relationship between these two genres entailed. So the differences between saga and saint’s life have been an important focus of this study: it is precisely because the chronotopes of these genres – the spatiotemporal configurations within them – are so different that their interrelationship is so interesting.2 The sagas of Icelanders rarely intrude on the territory of the saint’s life because the saga hero is considered to be a saint. It is more often the other way round: engagement with the saint’s life becomes a way of defining what the saga hero is not. Either way, interaction with the saint’s life should be recognised as a self-conscious literary act: the saga can only define its own horizons in interaction with other types of narrative prose. Polysystem theory, developed by Even-Zohar, is particularly helpful for an understanding of the interaction between genres, and has already been usefully applied to the relationship between saga and romance.3 It posits a hierarchy of genres, and potentially multiple literary systems in multilingual areas, which evolve as a result of constant movement between centre and periphery, as innovative genres arise on the margins and work their way towards the centre. This theory, I have argued, applies well to the literary situation in Iceland 1 2

3

For theories of ‘emancipation’ and ‘decline’, see Boyer, ‘Medieval hagiography’, p. 36; Ker, Epic and Romance, p. 50. For the chronotope, see Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 84–5. Even-Zohar, ‘Polysystem Theory’, pp. 9–25; Bampi, ‘Literary Activity and Power Struggle’, pp. 59–70 and ‘The Development of the Fornaldarsögur as a Genre’, pp. 185–96.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero where major genres like the saint’s life are far better represented in quantity of manuscripts than vernacular genres that are unique to Iceland. As the saga develops, then, one would expect ‘struggle’ and ‘competition’ with the genres at the centre; and this is precisely what one finds.4 This ‘struggle’ and ‘competition’ can be seen in sagas like Egils saga SkallaGrímssonar, which is probably one of the earliest Icelandic sagas and was perhaps authored by Snorri Sturluson. It borrows freely from the generic repertoire of the saint’s life despite the quite unsaintly and at times Odinic behaviour of its protagonist: it appropriates aspects of the saint’s life in order to critique the saint’s monopoly on language and saving power. Egill comes to represent a whole literary culture, and the poetry and prose that are bound up with it; his skull is washed up like a shell, out of place, on the shore of the Christian world. His reburial on the outer boundary of the churchyard may represent Iceland’s place on the periphery of Christian Europe: it is an expression of cultural marginality or liminality that could apply to Old Norse-Icelandic literature as a whole. The saga challenges the centrality of hagiography as a literary genre through asserting the value of traditional culture; the saint is a relative newcomer compared to Egill, whose ancestry embeds him in the ancient Scandinavian world. In the same way, sagas like Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða and Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss are engaged in a struggle against cultural imperialism; they resist the correlation of sanctity and power found in royal hagiography, and stand in stark opposition to narratives of Christian conquest and territorial expansion. Hrafnkell is a homegrown hero with no claim to noble ancestry in Norway, whose leadership grows out of a relationship with the land and its nature. Bárðr is identified with the Icelandic landscape; he represents a whole way of life threatened with extinction by the arrival of Christianity from Norway, as local beliefs and stories give way to the universalising agenda of the saint. The spread of Christianity is viewed in this saga from a radically different perspective, so that what emerges is a sense of the cultural loss masked by the triumphalism of the medieval Church. The continual tension between central and peripheral genres results, according to Bampi, in the blending of traditional and innovative material, in increasing hybridisation, and in the extension of generic repertoires.5 Again, this can be seen from the beginning of the saga-writing period, as Oddr Snorrason attempts in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar to blend saint’s life with heroic epic, reshaping the Christian saint in the image of the traditional hero. His failure to do this convincingly results in an interesting literary experiment; the saga becomes a way of challenging orthodox forms of sanctity, affirming the value of local and unconventional understandings of the saint. This is, if anything, intensified by the later addition of skaldic poetry to Oddr’s work, which pulls the saga away from the Latinate tradition towards saga and elegy. Indeed, Óláfr sits much more comfortably in the skaldic eulogy for a warlord than he does in the prose 4

5

Even-Zohar, ‘Polysystem Theory’, p. 14. Bampi, ‘Literary Activity and Power Struggle’, pp. 62–7.

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Conclusion of the saint’s life, where his violent spreading of the Christian faith collides with the ideals of the ascetic saint. A similar process can be observed in the sagas of Bishop Guðmundr Arason, although these lie beyond the scope of this book: such ‘not quite saints’ lives’ open up new possibilities for literary innovation precisely because of their marginal status.6 From towards the end of the sagawriting period, we find another generic hybrid in Flóamanna saga: Þorgils is not a conventional saga hero, but neither is he a conventional saint. His experiences in the wilderness remake him in the image of the suffering Christ, a prototype of his descendant St Þorlákr; he brings new values into the saga world based on feminine nurture, the endurance of suffering, and the imitation of Christ. Yet in early life, he makes a name for himself by raiding and robbing grave mounds; back in Iceland, he reverts quickly, if not without pangs of regret, into self-assertive acts of violence. This saga author has given serious thought to what the saintly inversion of values might look like within the saga world; his bleeding, suffering, self-reproaching hero subverts conventional stereotypes of aggressive masculinity to present a culturally compelling Icelandic image of sanctity – although one still located elsewhere. In Njáls saga, too, we see this tension between conservatism and innovation, expressed through the transposition of cosmic violence and Christian eschatology onto the feuds and conflicts of the saga world. Local events are subjected to a radically different system of signification: the frequent references to jartegnir (‘proofs’, ‘miracles’, ‘signs’) indicate a profound change not to what happens (feud versus arbitration) but to what it might mean (temporal versus eternal). The surface narrative becomes a way of signifying that which lies beyond it; the events of the saga unfold not just in real space and time, but in an abstract arena extending between the poles of heaven and hell. The real Icelandic landscape with its volcanic cavities and concealed pitfalls opens unpredictably to reveal the hell-mouth beneath; the murder of Hõskuldr is revealed as martyrdom through embedded allusions to Abel, Stephen and Christ. The parable of the Sower, which Hõskuldr acts out, is part of a seaching investigation of human actions and their consequences, one that transports the saga from local conflict at the Alþing to the apocalyptic Battle of Clontarf in Ireland. In his Dialogues, which the saga author knew, Gregory the Great warns his readers that ‘clear signs’ of the next world will intensify as this one nears its end.7 So, in this final battle, the invisible is made visible, the intangible tangible, just as hagiographic narrative aims to do: the beasts of battle become demons that drag the souls of the damned down into hell; Brian’s blood, like Christ’s, heals wounds. The extended generic repertoire – the superimposition of the ‘vertical’ chronotope 6

7

This concept is gratefully adapted from Ármann Jakobsson’s description of ‘not quite kings’ sagas’ in his ‘Royal Biography’, in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk, p. 391. Heilagra manna søgur, I, 253; Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, Njáls saga, pp. 14–15, 205–6; Boyer, ‘Gregory’s Dialogues’, p. 19; Dag Strömbäck, The Conversion of Iceland: A Survey, trans. Peter Foote (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1997), pp. 94–9; Crook, ‘Gregory’s Dialogi and the Old Norse Sagas’, pp. 275–85.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero of the saint’s life – creates an entirely different level of meaning in the saga;8 heroic violence in this world takes on new dimensions as a sign of judgement in the next. We see also in Njáls saga a new interest in moral psychology, a turning inwards of the saga genre to explore the interior life. The metaphors of germination and fecundity that run through this saga foreground the moral life of the individual: the seeds planted in the field of the human heart grow either into virtue or into sin. The effects of sin and guilt are made visible in the character of Skarp-Héðinn, whose grin singles him out like the mark of Cain – the first fratricide – and for whom the crosses burned on his dead body signify an act of expiation, linking him with the penitent thief.9 Other sagas share this interest in moral psychology and interiority, drawing on visionary literature and the lives of desert saints: for outlaws like Gísli and Þorgils, the Icelandic and Greenlandic wildernesses are a means of exploring the self in isolation from society. The desert fathers were the great experts when it came to the psychology of guilt, sin and temptation; they had established ways of representing internal struggle through dreams and visions, demonic attacks and angelic visitations. The saga authors drew on these in imagining the interior lives of saga heroes: the unexpressed guilt of Gísli over the murder of his sister’s husband or the psychological impact on Grettir of his unintentional burning of Þórir’s sons. The two dream women in Gísla saga represent in some sense Gísli’s own ambivalence towards his actions, viewed as exemplary adherence to heroic values or as horrific and unnecessary crimes. Their contradictory visions of the afterlife move slowly towards a Christian understanding of penitential suffering and redemption; they open up Gísli’s spiritual life to an unprecedented degree. Likewise, the mysterious boy who interrupts and sabotages Grettir’s ordeal can be read as an embodiment of the internal flaw, the compulsive lack of self-control, that will not allow Grettir’s heroism to be redeemed, even by a saint; his inability to resolve his guilt, his festering self-inflicted wound, can be contrasted with the successful resolution achieved by Spes and Þorsteinn, who end their lives with a pilgrimage to Rome and, fully absolved, settle each into their own monastic cell. In Fóstbrœðra saga, another compulsive killer, Þormóðr, finds absolution through his personal loyalty to St Óláfr: he is able to rely on the saint’s intercession, although he must still make some atonement for sin. This interest in the moral life of the saga hero marks a new stage in saga narrative, building on the interest in complex character that is so important a part of saga art.10 The saint’s life undoubtedly extends the generic repertoire of the sagas of Icelanders, but the sagas of Icelanders also distance themselves firmly from the saint’s ontological certainties. The saga world, as Tulinius has argued, is characterised by ‘transition’ and ‘in-between-ness’, and the sagas encourage The Dialogic Imagination, p. 158. Njáls saga and its Christian Background, p. 228. 10 Andersson, Growth of the Medieval Icelandic Sagas, pp. 206–6. 8 Bakhtin, 9 Hamer,

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Conclusion multiple perspectives on one and the same event.11 While the saint’s life condemns cynicism and doubt, the saga author is free to give expression to both, much as the dream women in Gísla saga articulate two contradictory versions of Gísli’s life. The author of Flóamanna saga uses the narrative convention of the mannjafnaðr (‘comparison of men’) to suggest different readings of the saintly character of Þorgils – either a great hero and leader or a passive and effeminate wretch.12 The supernatural is handled with caution in both Njáls saga and Grettis saga: we are informed as to public opinion (Skarp-Héðinn may have been burned the two crosses on himself; the boy who insulted Grettir may have been an unclean spirit), but it is neither confirmed nor denied. Properly attested Christian miracles are few and far between; there seems to be a shared understanding that this is not how the saga world works. These individual instances serve as a microcosm of how whole sagas may be read in multiple ways: how the self-willed and secretive Kjartan of Laxdœla saga can become the model Icelandic subject in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta; or how Flateyjarbók sharpens through additional scenes the moral distance between the violence of the sworn brothers and the sanctity of the king they serve. The ‘confluence’ of sagas in the large compilations about Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr creates a rich plurality of meaning, as we are invited to view the missions of these two kings – and the saga heroes who encounter them – through a variety of different lenses. In this respect, one might argue, sagas are more to modern taste than the saint’s life: they adopt precisely the cautious attitude towards the truth with which we are in sympathy. The ‘ontological uncertainty’ of the saga world is felt keenly in its death scenes, although there are signs of sanctity surrounding Njáll’s radiant body and in Þórey’s vision of heaven. Vatnsdœla saga, more than any other saga, gives a vibrant and positive depiction of pre-Christian virtue and the ‘good death’; but even here Þorsteinn can only hope that his father Ingimundr will receive what he deserves. The sea voyage becomes a central image in saga literature for the uncertainty of one’s final destination: at the end of Njáls saga, Flosi sets out to sea in a leaking boat, and Hallfreðr’s coffin is described as a ‘ship’ that drifts to the Holy Isle. His final verse at sea hauntingly evokes the anxiety of the average Christian in the face of death: the inevitable uncertainty and fear as to where one’s life will pass. The coastal scenery of Iceland provides an eschatological stage for Gísli’s last stand and Þorgils’s temptation by Þórr, as Gísli faces his last moments on earth, and Þorgils sets out as a new Christian convert on the dangerous seas of this world. Sigmundr, Gísli and Grettir are all given makeshift burials on the seashore – a temporary space that expresses a strong sense of liminality, of not quite belonging anywhere. Perhaps there is a 11

12

Tulinius, ‘The Matter of the North’, p. 253. On the mannjafnaðr, see Carol J. Clover, ‘The Germanic Context of the Unferð Episode’, Speculum 55 (1980), 444–68, and Karen Swenson, Performing Definitions: Two Genres of Insult in Old Norse Literature (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1991), pp. 44–53 (especially p. 47).

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The Saint and the Saga Hero memory here of the first peregrini who made their way out to Iceland, carrying Christianity to this island at the edge of the known world; like the Christian settler Auðr, who asks to be buried in the space below the mark of the high tide. Iceland itself is caught up in and becomes part of the Christian concept of peregrinatio: an expression of one’s alienation from God, one’s longing for a heavenly home. The complex relationship of the sagas to Christian allegory is also evident in the symbolism of drowning, which biblical and hagiographic literature correlates closely with damnation. This lies behind the punitive drowning of Eyvindr kelda in Oddr Snorrason’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar and colours the end of Laxdœla saga, when Þorkell Eyjólfsson drowns on Maundy Thursday after daring to measure himself against a saint. Sigmundr just makes it to shore only to be murdered on a clump of seaweed, a death linked to his sympathy for the pagan Hákon jarl; in contrast, Þormóðr is rescued by St Óláfr from a bed of seaweed off the coast of Greenland, when he is too exhausted to swim to land. The rescue at sea is a staple of the saint’s life, expressive of the saint’s redemptive power, and it resonates through Hallfreðar saga, where Óláfr Tryggvason saves Hallfreðr and his men by diving for the anchor cord of their ship. Likewise, in Bárðar saga, Óláfr’s priest Jósteinn parts the flooding waters of a tidal island, allowing Gestr and his companions to cross safely to the mainland, like the Israelites across the Red Sea. In these cases, allegory lies just below the surface, but in other sagas the fate of those who die at sea is less certain, becomes a focus of anxiety. The drowned dead in Eyrbyggja saga belong to a time of cultural and religious transition: although newly baptised Christians, they turn up to feast in the hall of the living, like the pagan dead in their mounds. Once ousted from this temporary waiting room, there is silence as to where they have passed. One of the costs of ‘entering into’ the Christian story of death and judgement is this abandonment of those who die outside the aegis of the Church.13 Perhaps the most affecting story is the death at sea of Þorgils’s small son in Flóamanna saga: saved, as if by a miracle, when he is washed overboard by the wind and waves, he later spits up blood and dies in his father’s arms, less than a day before they reach land. Þorgils reacts to this not as an exemplary saint, but as any human, grieving father, who cannot bear to let go of the body of his little boy, and neither eats nor drinks for days. The absence of redemptive meaning in this scene is painful: saints’ lives are full of optimistic stories about young children saved from death (including drowning) in the nick of time through the generous intervention of a saint. The saga acknowledges here that not all experiences in life can be framed in hagiographic terms. Above all, the relationship between saga and saint’s life is that of a peripheral to a central genre, the relationship of local and traditional forms of storytelling to the dominant centre, out of which the ideology of the saint’s life proceeds. This sense of writing from the edge, from an island, from ‘out’ rather than from ‘in’, is pervasive in the sagas and it is what gives them their extraordinary 13

Rambo, ‘The Psychology of Conversion’, p. 170.

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Conclusion power. The periphery is a place of liminality, of transition and inversion, of not quite belonging, but it is also, as Turner has shown, a place of power: a place from which a compelling critique can emerge of the values of the cultural centre.14 It is a place from which dissenting voices can be heard, like those of Egill, Hrafnkell, and Bárðr. This can be seen in how the sagas relate to some of the central symbols of Christianity. An organic representation of salvation history is the tree of Jesse; familiar from stained glass windows from the twelfth century on, this portrays the lineage of Christ and the flowering of Aaron’s rod, allegorised as the Virgin Birth; an image used subversively in Egill’s Sonatorrek, as he relocates salvation in the poetic word.15 This image appears in dreams in Eiríks saga rauða and Flóamanna saga, where it signifies the lineage of a bishop and a saint; the shining branches and Icelandic angelika with their golden blossom affirm Iceland’s participation in the universal Church and the communion of saints, the importance of each part within the whole. In Harðar saga, however, this universality is questioned, as Signý dreams of not one tree, but two: the tree that foreshadows Hõrðr’s birth has deep roots, but few leaves; while the tree that foreshadows Þorbjõrg’s is covered in blossom. Hõrðr will have no part in the Christian future; will instead be forcibly cut down. In Njáls saga, Gestr Oddleifsson compares the Christian missions to the felling of a tree. Similarly, in Bárðar saga, Bárðr dreams of a tree that grows out of Dofri’s cave in Norway with a golden branch and a bright blossom, representing (‘so people say’) St Óláfr, the saint as the image of Christ. Yet the rapidity of its growth, up to the ceiling and out of the cave, covering the whole of Norway, is strangely menacing. We experience here the rapid spread of Christianity in the North from the outside rather than from within – as we do also in the skaldic stanzas by pagan poets embedded in þættir and sagas about the first Christian missionaries to Iceland. The voice given in the sagas to those excluded from, and even hostile to, the encroachment of Christianity on their world gives us a unique perspective on the conversion of the North. There is a similar complexity in how the sagas handle metaphors of sight and blindness, which are part of the central Christian symbolism of conversion as illumination, a movement from knowledge to ignorance, from darkness to light. The sagas make frequent use of this symbolism, but not always in a conventional way. In Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, the hardened pagan Eyvindr kelda is blinded as he glimpses the church in which Óláfr Tryggvason is praying; this expresses – as one might expect – his blindness to the truth and protects the Christian king from harm. In Njáls saga, on the other hand, the blind Ámundi is temporarily and miraculously granted his sight so that he can take revenge on his father’s killer; whether this endorses or condemns revenge killings is 14 Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 167; Holdsworth, ‘Hermits and the Power of the Frontier’, 15

p. 69. Emile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Dora Nussey (New York: Harper, 1958), pp. 165–8; Poole, ‘Non enim possum plorare’, pp. 193–4.

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The Saint and the Saga Hero more difficult to ascertain. In Hallfreðar saga, Óláfr Tryggvason sends Hallfreðr to blind the pagan chieftain Þorleifr the Wise, who has refused to be converted to Christianity; but in a stubborn rejection of this correlation of paganism with blindness, Hallfreðr puts out just one of his eyes; he takes the second from his Christian enemy Kálfr, who has – one guesses not entirely without cause – accused him of pagan superstitions. For this he is rewarded towards the end of the saga, when Þorleifr intercedes with Eiríkr jarl to save his life: Hallfreðr makes the right decision, the outcome suggests, in choosing to disobey the Christian king. Perhaps the most daring inversion of this central Christian symbol is in Bárðar saga, when Bárðr appears to Gestr after his conversion and puts out both of his eyes. Blindness here signifies not ignorance of Christian truths, but the loss of one’s identity and past. Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar and Bárðar saga form a diptych in this respect: both depict the territorial expansion of Christianity, but the first is from the perspective of the evangelising king, while the second is from the less orthodox position of the nature spirits that are driven out. This literary dialogue allows the historical fact of conversion to be viewed from either side; it creates a space for the expression of cultural anxiety, for loss as well as gain. Even-Zohar commented that one must expect ‘interference’ in the relationship between central and peripheral literatures, and I have used this term in the course of my analysis to describe how saints and sagas interact.16 Yet, although it has proved a useful analytical tool, I wonder whether ‘interference’ is quite the right word, implying as it does unwanted meddling, obstruction, opposition on the part of the saint. There are, of course, examples of unwanted (or at least unsolicited) meddling in the sagas – Óláfr Tryggvason’s censure of Hallfreðr’s poetry, for example – but it might be better to think of the relationship between saga and saint’s life in terms of dialogue, interdependence, active and willing engagement on the part of the sagas with one of the central narrative genres of the Christian Middle Ages. The ‘struggle’ between saga and saint’s life is not unconscious or unwanted, producing anachronisms of content or eccentricities of style that ‘interfere’ with the verisimilitude of the saga world and the much-admired objectivity of saga style. Rather, it is an essential aspect of the intertextuality or ‘multiple modalities’ of the saga; the way in which it not only critiques other genres, but actually absorbs them into itself, creating a plurality of meaning within the saga genre, as observed in other types of pre-novelistic discourse.17 Above all, the saga develops and defines itself as a genre through its difference from the saint’s life; it becomes self-reflexive through the process of relating to this major literary rival. Precisely because the sagas of Icelanders are in some sense peripheral, they are able to engage both compellingly and critically with some of the central narratives of medieval Christianity.

16

Even-Zohar, ‘Polysystem Theory’, p. 25; ‘Laws of Literary Interference’, pp. 53–72. The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 10–11, 48–51; Clunies Ross, ‘The Intellectual Complexion of the Icelandic Middle Ages’, pp. 449–51.

17 Bakhtin,

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295

Index Aaron, rod of 90, 263 Acts of the Apostles 3, 5, 51, 230 Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum 48, 113 Advent 151, 158 Ælfric 118 n. 29, 120, 148 n. 173, 157 n. 211 Aelred, Life of King Edward 59 Æthelred the Unready 44 Agathu saga 149 Alcuin 122 allegory 23, 37, 54, 61–4, 77, 85, 90, 95, 104, 135, 140, 145, 154, 156, 189, 207–8, 212, 249 drowning 59–60, 235, 262 Exodus 51 n. 69, 59, 106–7, 129, 158, 185–7, 191, 205–7 sea of life 186–7, 221–2, 261–2 ship of the Church 12, 218–21, 228, 236 see also typology Ambrose, St 41, 43, 141 Ámundi Hõskuldsson, see under Njáls saga Andreas 9 Andrew, St 11, 13, 18, 48, 52, 94–5, 100 Andreas saga 58, 143 see also Andreas Antonius saga 164, 168, 185, 189 see also St Antony Antony, St 9, 165, 169, 184, 188, 202–5, 250 angels 11, 39, 52, 131, 137, 145, 153, 158, 167–72 Ari Þorgilsson 10, 46–8 Íslendingabók 111, 113, 119, 121, 129 n. 78, 134, 163

Anskar, St 113, 175 n. 55 Arngrímr Brandsson 9–10, 17–19, 155–6 see also Guðmundr Arason Arnórr jarlaskáld 138 Arnórs þáttr kerlingarnef 22–3, 128–9 Arons saga Hjõrleifssonar 19 Árna saga byskups 15 Árni Jónsson 19 Árni Lárentíusson 17 Áskell Eyvindarson 128–9 Ásólfr Konálsson 21, 41, 108, 131, 163, 189 Auðr Vésteinsdóttir 166, 173, 175, 177–8, 180, 182 Auðr the Deep-Minded 183, 262 Augustine of Hippo 4, 17, 67, 112–13, 115, 122, 250 Bakhtin, Mikhail 26–8 see also chronotope, genre Bartholomew, St 11 Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss 164, 207–8, 258, 262–4 Bárðr’s miracles 196–9 Bárðr’s dream 200–1, 263 Gestr’s conversion 199–202, 206–7 Greenlandic wilderness 202–6 Basil, St 11 Bede 113, 119, 121–2. 124–5, 185–6 Benedict, St 5, 7–8, 11–12, 81, 84–8, 153, 188–9, 249–50 see also Gregory’s Dialogues Bergr Gunnsteinsson 5 Bergr Sokkason 17–18, 35, 169 Bergsbók 18, 71 Bernard of Clairvaux 114–15, 190

297

The Saint and the Saga Hero Bersi Õzurarson 98–9 Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa see Bjõrn Hítdœlakappi Bjarni Ingimundarson, Abbot of Þingeyrar 22 Bjõrn Gilsson, Bishop of Hólar 21–2, 31 Bjõrn Hítdœlakappi 210, 243–6, 253–4 Blasius, St 11, 15, 146 Bolli Þorleiksson 230–5 Boniface 5, 141 Breta sõgur 41, 53 Brennu-Njáls saga, see Njáls saga Brian Boru, King 147–8, 259 Bridget of Sweden, St 6 Brynjarr 200–1 Búi Andriðason 98 Bœjarbók 243 Candlemas 115, 160 Catherine of Alexandria, St 13, 17 Cecilia, St 15–17 Charlemagne 49, 51, 57, 113 Christ 35–6, 45, 49, 51, 55–7, 100, 115–16, 120, 122, 126–7, 145, 147, 181, 222, 225, 238, 250 baptism 220 harrowing of Hell 205–6 healing of Jairus’s daughter 88–90 Nativity and Flight to Egypt 39, 48, 64 passion 144–5, 148–9, 190–1, 220, 233, 242–4, 259 resurrection 34, 90, 94, 115–16, 144–5 temptation 183–6, 189 transfiguration 39, 54–5, 64, 75–6 see also Aaron, Candlemas, Christmas, cross, saints, typology, visions Christmas 52, 64, 66, 154, 160, 187, 219, 229–30 chronotope 27–8, 31–2, 257, 259–60 Church 29, 111, 118, 126, 132, 140, 161, 206, 220, 262–3 burial in church 92–3, 157–60, 181–2, 214, 228, 230, 258 church building 12, 16, 21, 65, 98, 125–6, 150–1, 234–5, 244–5

church dedications 1, 12, 16–17, 43, 137, 163, 219 church doctrine 2, 91, 109, 122, 126, 132, 152–3, 156, 161, 206, 222–3, 254 church reform 5, 43–6, 156 see also allegory, conversion, missions Clement, St 4, 11–12, 48, 219–20, 229, 234 Clemens saga 30, 60, 116, 120–1, 126–8, 130 see also St Clement Clontarf, see under Njáls saga Codex Scardensis 17 Codex Wormianus 24 Columba, St 108, 163 Columban, St 108 Constantinople 96, 122, 140 conversion 49, 58, 66, 92, 127–8, 130, 161, 166, 181, 199, 203, 262–4 Faeroes 209–12 Greenland 41, 50, 72, 74, 158 Iceland 22–3, 27, 36–7, 71–2, 95–8, 111–13, 120, 183 Scandinavia 50, 74, 201, 263 forced 57–8, 74, 113, 141, 209, 215–16, 255 metaphors of 114–17, 145, 207–8, 263–4 narratives of 111–14, 118–23, 203 see also Augustine, Eyrbyggja saga, Hallfreðar saga, Hrafnkels saga, Laxdœla saga, missions, Njáls saga, Óláfr Haraldsson, Óláfr Tryggva­ son, St Paul, Vatnsdœla saga ‘Conversion Verses’, see under Hallfreðr Óttarsson conversion þættir  22–3, 80, 111, 113–14, 120, 133–4, 136–7, 139–40, 183, 196–7, 199–200, 263 see also Arnórs þáttr kerlingarnefs, Kristni saga, Þiðranda þáttr ok Þórhalls, Þórhalls þáttr knapps, Þorvalds þáttr víðfõrla cross 45, 63, 100, 126, 136, 138–40, 147, 154, 220–2 miracles involving 57–8, 84–5, 87, 124–5, 140, 143, 204, 248 Crusades 49, 57, 113, 147 Cuthbert, St 5, 11, 124–5

298

Index Dala-Guðbrandr 52, 54, 97–8 De falsis diis, see Ælfric Denmark 41, 57, 59, 113, 140, 167, 173, 182, 225 desert 164–6, 169, 172, 182–92, 196–7, 202–6, 259–60 Desert Fathers 4, 17, 63, 163, 172, 208–9, 250, 260 see also Antony, desert, Vitae patrum Devil/devils 9, 52–3, 60–2, 88, 99, 101, 120–2, 126, 133, 138–9, 147–9, 157–8, 206–7, 241–2 as pagan gods 52, 62, 66–7, 96, 184–6, 198–9, 201, 203 debates with angels 168–72 shape-shifting 53–4, 65–6. 86–7, 133, 153–4, 204–5, 249–50 see also Christ, ghost stories, Óláfr Tryggvason, St Michael, visions Dialogues, see Gregory’s Dialogues dreams, see visions ‘Dream Women’, see under Gísli Súrsson Droplaugarsona saga 98 Dunstanus saga 17 Easter 44, 137, 144, 147, 186, 205, 220, 230, 239, 248 Edmund, St 6, 10, 148 Edward the Confessor 6, 44, 47, 49, 59–60 Egill Skalla-Grímsson 68, 80–93, 95, 108–9, 179, 195, 221, 258, 263 kills Bárðr 83–5 maims Ármóðr 83, 90 heals Þorfinnr’s daughter 88–90 burial 92–3 Odinic attributes 82–3 Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar 23–4. 26, 79, 93, 104, 109, 189, 235, 247, 270 see also Egill Skalla-Grímsson Einarr Þorbjarnarson 103–6 Einarr Gilsson 19, 155 n. 203 Einarr Helgason, Vellekla 221 Einarr Sigmundarson 197, 199, 205 Einarr Skúlason, Geisli 14, 71, 73–4, 248 Eiríkr blóðøx, King 83–4, 86–8 Eiríkr jarl 62–3, 68, 264

Eiríkr the Red 184, 191 Eiríks saga rauða 21, 31, 152, 157–8, 182–3, 187, 193, 263 See also Eiríkr the Red, Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir Eiríks saga víðfõrla 122 Elijah 8, 76, 124 ember days 115–16, 145 Epiphany 154, 220 Erasmus, St 11 Erfidrápa, see Hallfreðr Óttarsson Esther 101 Eustace, see Plácidus Even-Zohar, Itamar 32–4, 36, 123, 257 Eyrbyggja saga 43, 112, 119–20, 187, 262 conversion of Iceland 150–1 Fróðáundr 162–73 see also ghost stories Eysteinn, Archbishop of Níðaróss 5, 43 Eyvindr kelda 59–60, 62, 64, 207, 262–3 Eyvindr kinnrifa 52–4, 62, 200 Eyvindr Bjarnason 95, 100, 104, 109 exempla 7, 22–3, 54, 67, 93, 101–2, 104, 128, 185, 232 Exodus, see under allegory Faeroes 50, 210–11 See also conversion, Færeyinga saga, Sigmundr Brestisson Faustinianus 52 n. 73, 116, 127–8, 133 Finnbogi Ásbjarnarson 130, 189 Flateyjarbók 16, 44, 47, 67, 96–7, 120, 122, 142, 200–2, 209, 225, 229, 233, 248, 251 version of Fóstbrœðra saga 236–8, 240–3, 246, 261 version of Færeyinga saga 210–11, 213–15 Fljótsdœla saga 98–9 Flóamanna saga 32, 164, 182–96, 201, 203, 207–8, 259, 261–3 see also Þorgils Örrabeinsfóstri Flóki Vilgerðarson 119 Flóres saga konungs 35 Flos peregrinationis 47 Flosi Kárason 135, 139, 144–5, 149, 182, 261 Francis, St 6

299

The Saint and the Saga Hero Freyfaxi 95, 102–6 Freyr 52, 95–7, 100, 102, 104–6, 108, 123, 127, 131, 218 Friðrekr, Bishop 22, 43, 111–12, 123–8, 140, 161, 191–2 Fróðáundr, see Eyrbyggja saga Fóstbrœðra saga 31, 209, 236–43, 246–7, 253–4, 260 see also Þorgeirr Hávarsson, Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld Færeyinga saga 210–17, 241, 255 See also Sigmundr Brestisson, Þrándr Þorbjarnarson Galdra-Héðinn 134, 142 Gamli kanóki 13 see also Harmsól Gautr 44, 106–7 Gefjon 67 Geisli, see Einarr Skúlason Gellir Þorgilsson 47 genre 23–8, 32–4, 39, 77, 79–80, 112, 210, 255, 257–8, 262–4 see also Bakhtin, chronotope, conversion, saints’ lives, sagas of Icelanders, polysystem theory Geoffrey of Monmouth 41, 53 n. 78 Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, see Adam of Bremen Gesta Karoli Magni, see Notker Gestr Bárðarson 199–208, 262, 264 Gestr Oddleifsson 120, 129, 134, 140–1, 156–7, 263 Gestr, alias of Helgu-Steinarr 241 ghost stories 152–61, 184, 224, 235, 239–40, 246, 254 Gísla saga Súrssonar 164–5, 182, 192, 207–8 see also Gísli Súrsson Gísli Súrsson 164–6, 178–82, 186, 192–3, 208, 216–17 ‘Dream Women’ 166–78, 180, 244, 252, 260–1 Gizurr Hallsson 42, 47, 59 Gizurr Ísleifsson 96 Gizurr the White 96, 134, 150 Glámr 158, 246–50 Glúmr Þorgeirsson/Þorgilsson  42 Good Friday 147–9

Gospel of Nicodemus, see Niðrstig­ ningar saga Greenland 19, 21–2, 41, 72, 74, 158, 164, 182–96, 202–7, 221, 240–2, 255, 260, 262 see also conversion, desert, Eiríks saga rauða, Flóamanna saga, Fóstbrœðra saga, Grœnlendinga saga Gregory the Great 50, 144, 185, 244 n. 172, 252 Gregory’s Dialogues 5, 7, 11, 17, 19, 48, 52, 56, 62 n. 127, 141, 143, 145, 153, 157, 186, 192, 259 Bishop Andrew 65–6 Libertinus 58 Peter 171 Sabinus 89 Stephen 170–1 Theodorus 171, 179 see also Benedict, Gregory the Great Grettir Ásmundarson 40, 182, 240, 246–55, 260–1 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar 24, 31, 40, 158, 202, 210 See also Grettir Ásmundarson Gríma, sorceress  241–2, 253 Grímkell Bjarnarson 97–8 Grímr, alias of Þórr 198–9 Grímr Hólmsteinsson 17, 35 Gríss Sæmingsson 217, 225–6, 228 Gróa, sorceress 130–1 Grœnlendinga saga 20, 31, 157 n. 16, 182, 187 Guinefort 3 Guðbrandr, see Dala-Guðbrandr Guðleifr Arason 114, 140–1 Guðmundr Arason 3, 9, 14–16, 20, 41, 43, 108, 146–7, 254 sagas of 18–19, 24, 32, 155–6, 158 n. 220, 159, 161, 163, 259 see also Arngrímr Brandsson, Selkolla Guðmundr, Abbot of Þingeyrar 22 Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir 20–2, 157–8, 193 Guðrún at Hólar 153–4 Guðrún Óspaksdóttr 16 Guðrún Ósvífsdóttir 16, 20, 157, 231, 234–6 Guthlac 9, 202–5

300

Index Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi 34, 135, 140, 144, 192 Gunnhildr, Queen 83, 86–7 Gunnlaugr Leifsson 14, 41–5, 47–9, 59, 65 n. 135, 107, 124, 126, 163 Gylfaginning, see Snorri Sturluson hagiography, see saints’ lives Hákon the Good 85, 88 Hákon Sigurðarson jarl 97, 99, 213–6, 218, 221, 262 Hallar-Steinn, Rekstefja 13, 71–5 Hallfreðar saga 209–10, 217, 246, 254, 262, 264 see also Hallfreðr Óttarsson Hallfreðr Óttarsson vandræðaskáld 44, 209–10, 216–17, 229, 231–2, 240, 244, 246, 254–5, 264 Óláfsdrápa 46, 68–9, 71 Erfidrápa 68–73 ‘Conversion Verses’ 216, 222–3, 225 rescue at sea 218–22, 264 travel to Sweden 224–5 affair with Kolfinna 217, 225–7 death and burial 217, 226–8, 261 Hallr of Síða 130–1, 134–8, 149 Hallvarðr, St 13 Hamðismál 179 Harmsól 174 n. 54, 180–1, 243 n. 164 Haraldr hárfagri 88, 123, 197 Harðar saga 97–8, 202, 263 Harold Godwineson 44–5, 47, 49–50 Hauksbók 41, 120–1, 157 n. 215, 236, 239 Heiðarvíga saga 156–7 Heimskringla, see Snorri Sturluson Helgafell 17, 23, 31, 119, 156, 159, 235 Helgastaðabók 17 Herdís Bolladóttir 236, 249 Helluland 202–4, 206 Hildr, anchoress 20, 153–4, 163–4 Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium, see Theodoricus Historia regum Britanniae, see Geoffrey of Monmouth Hjalti Skeggjason 22, 96, 98, 134, 136, 146, 150 Hólar 12, 14, 21, 31, 40, 47, 138, 163–4 Hrafn the Red 148

Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson 18, 21, 220 Hrafnkell Freysgoði 93–4, 99, 106–8, 258, 263 destruction of temple 80, 96–100 rejection of gods 80, 95–6, 100–1, 103–4, 108–9 relationship to Freyr 95, 102–6, 127 torture 80, 94–5, 100–1, 109 Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða 79–80, 93–5, 97, 99, 101–2, 109, 123, 127, 235, 238 see also Hrafnkell Freysgoði Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar 18, 179 n. 69, 220 see also Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson Hrappr Õrgumleiðason 97–8 Hrolleifr Arnaldsson 126, 132 Hróaldr, two sorcerers 60, 62, 100 Hungrvaka 15, 35, 47, 104 Hõskuldr Þráinsson 30, 134–5, 143–5, 147, 149, 239, 259 Iceland 1–2, 5, 9, 12, 16, 27, 36, 45, 48, 71, 93, 119, 123–4, 130, 151, 190, 192, 198, 207, 219, 246 landscape 107–8, 119, 142, 148, 163, 165, 194, 198–9, 207, 261–2 literary activity 10, 13, 16–17, 20, 22–3, 33, 36, 40–2, 91, 257–8 settlement 105, 123, 163, 197 relationship to Norway 209–10, 231–6 travel to and from 41, 46, 98, 194–5, 225–6, 229–30, 235, 239, 246, 248–9, 259 see also under conversion, saints, saints’ lives, sagas of Icelanders Ingibjõrg Tryggvadóttir 231, 233 Ingimundr prestr 19 Ingimundr Þorsteinsson 105, 123, 126–7, 130–3, 247, 254, 261 Ingjaldr at Hváll 198–9 Iona 228, 261 Isidore and Moses 169–70 Íslendingabók, see under Ari Þorgilsson Jacob, St 11 Jerome, St 4–5, 89 Jesse, tree of 263 Job 94, 101, 195

301

The Saint and the Saga Hero John the Baptist 3, 10, 11, 21, 43, 48, 52, 55, 76, 194, 252 Jóns saga baptista 17, 24, 35, 56 n. 90, 164 see also John the Baptist John the Evangelist 11, 13, 55 n. 84 Joseph 39, 48 Jómsvíkinga saga 46 Jón Õgmundarson, St 3, 14, 41, 43, 45 n. 35, 92, 138, 146, 153–4, 156, 164 Jóns saga helga 19, 20, 153–4, 158–9, 163 See also Jón Õgmundarson Jósteinn, priest 203–6, 262 Juliana, St 100 Jõrundr inn kristni 163 Karl Jónsson, Abbot of Þingeyrar 41, 43, 46–7 Karlamagnús saga 51, 57 Kálfalœkjarbók 34, 134, 139 Kári Sõlmundarson 135–6 Ketilbjõrg, anchoress 20 Ketill, Bishop of Hólar 21 kings’ sagas, see under sagas Kirkjubœr 16, 142 Kjalnesinga saga 98 Kjartan Óláfsson 63–4, 75, 210, 218, 228–37, 239, 245, 249, 255, 261 Kjartan at Fróðá 151–2, 161 Knútr, St 13 Knútr the Great 114, 224, 248 Kolskeggr Hámundarson 140 Konungs skuggsjá 101 Kolbeinn Túmason 13, 19 Kolumkille, see Columba Kristni saga 22, 46, 96, 111, 134, 136–7 kristniboðsþættir, see conversion þættir Króka-Refs saga 129 Kveld-Úlfr Bjálfason 88, 93 Kyrgi-Bjõrn Hjaltason, see Maríu saga Landnámabók 21, 40, 103, 105, 108, 119, 128, 182, 197 Lárentíus saga 3, 15, 17, 35 Laxdœla saga 16, 20, 23, 26, 31, 120, 156–7, 229–36, 243, 249, 255, 261–2 see also Guðrún Ósvífsdóttir, Kjartan Óláfsson, Þorkell Eyjólfsson Leifr Eiríksson 41, 152 Lent 151, 186, 230

Lilja 71 Líknarbraut 140, n. 30, 144 n. 151, 180, 221, 227 Ljóðarkeptr 114 Ljót, sorceress 126, 132 Ljótr, see Valla-Ljótr Longinus 148 Lucan 41 Magnús of Orkney, St 14, 18, 220 Magnús saga lengri 16 Máni inn kristni 22, 43, 108, 163, 189 Margaret, St 1, 8, 54, 100 Maríu saga 12, 16, 24, 171, 187, 190 Maríu saga Egipzku 17, 164 Martin, St 8, 11–12, 15, 17, 48, 51–2, 54, 56–8, 61, 75, 81, 96, 111, 140, 154–6 Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini 4, 45–6 Martinus saga 58, 61–2, 88–9, 106, 141, 184 Mary, Virgin 3, 6, 10–13, 16, 20, 24, 154, 172, 174–5, 180, 187, 190 see also Candlemas, Maríu saga Matthew, St 11 Maundy Thursday 157, 220, 235, 262 Merlin 41, 53 Michael, St 10, 34, 107, 131, 137–9, 149 Michaelmas 137, 139 Michaels saga 17, 24 168–72, 179, 197, 207 see also Michael Miklagarðr, see Constantinople miracles 1–2, 7, 15–16, 24, 58, 81, 88–90, 141, 148, 191, 195, 197–8, 219, 259, 261 in conversion þættir 23, 43, 111, 124–5, 141 fishing 21–2, 104, 107–8, 163, 189–90, 194 posthumous 18, 22, 40, 55–6, 71–2, 74–6 see also Virgin Mary, St Óláfr, saints, saints’ lives, visions, St Þorlákr missions 41, 50, 56, 60, 73–4, 76–7, 100, 103, 109, 201, 220, 261, 263 to Iceland 72, 98, 111–12, 123, 133–4, 141, 149–50, 161, 167, 211 to Norway 40, 66, 68–9, 96, 208, 215

302

Index see also conversion, Friðrekr, Óláfr Haraldsson, Óláfr Tryggvason, saints, Stefnir Þorgilsson, Þangbrandr, Þorvaldr Koðránsson Moses 8, 51, 129, 185 Munka-Þverá 19, 23 Mõðruvallabók 23, 27, 217–18, 221, 225–6, 236, 242 Mõðruvellir 17, 23, 24 Nicholas, St 11, 13, 16–17, 21, 23, 48, 67, 107, 138, 149, 188, 219–20 Niðaróss 5, 12, 14, 41, 43, 219, 234–5 Nikulás Bergsson 13 Nikolaus saga 67, 107, 138, 149 see also Bergr Sokkason, St Nicholas Niðrstigninga saga 11, 147 Njáll Þorgeirsson 134–6, 139, 143–6, 147 n. 172, 261 Njáls saga 34, 97–9, 112, 120, 131, 134 Ámundi’s revenge 142–3 Clontarf 147–9, 259 Hõskuldr’s martyrdom 143–5 kristni þáttr 134–42 see also Njáll Þorgeirsson Noah 119, 185–6, 221 noble heathen 12, 22, 36, 51, 92, 109, 126–31, 134, 147, 161, 212–3, 321 see also Clemens saga, Vatnsdœla saga Norna-Gests þáttr 201–2 Norway 39, 46, 91,98, 102, 105, 122, 134, 136, 197–200, 206, 211, 228–36, 258, 263 see also under conversion, Iceland, missions, Óláfr Haraldsson, Óláfr Tryggvason Notker, Gesta Karoli Magni 49 Nunc Dimittis 115, 160 Oddr Snorrason 31, 34, 37, 39–77, 79–80, 88, 102, 109, 113, 130, 133, 142–3, 183–4, 218, 259 life 40–1, 45–6 work  42–5, 47–50 see also Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggva­ sonar, Yngvars saga víðfõrla, Þingeyrar Oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar 39–77, 87, 100, 131, 133, 142–3, 183,

199–201, 207, 218, 262–4 date, manuscript, sources 23, 39–40, 46–50 as vita 13–14, 31, 34–6, 39–40, 50–67, 76–7, 79–80, 258–9 Óðar keptr, see Ljóðarkeptr Óðinn 52, 62, 66–7, 82–3, 90, 100, 120, 124, 200–1, 203, 218, 223, 231, 241 see also Devil/devils Óláfr of Haukagil 125 Óláfr Haraldsson, St 5, 13, 16, 96, 111, 146–8, 155, 194, 201, 209–11, 230, 255, 263 miracles 14, 243, 245–6, 247 and Bjõrn Hítdœlakappi 243–6 and Grettir Ásmundarson 246–55 and Þorkell Eyjólfsson 234–6 and Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld 236–43, 260, 262 see also under Óláfr Tryggvason Óláfr Tryggvason 14, 18, 37, 39–77, 88, 96–7, 106, 111, 122, 131, 136, 197, 209–10, 254–5, 263 afterlife 44–6, 69–73, 164 atrocities 56–63, 100, 200, 207, 262 conversion 50–1, 54, 57–8 encounters with devils 52–4, 65–7, 155, 184, 186, 198–201 heroic feats 63–6, 69, 74, 76–7, 92 and Gestr Bárðarson 202–8 and Hallfreðr Óttarsson 216–29, 240, 246, 262, 264 and Kjartan Óláfsson 228–33, 235–6, 245, 249 and Sigmundr Brestisson 30, 110–16, 228–9 and St Óláfr 43, 55–6, 194, 211 skaldic poetry about 67–76, 258 transfiguration 54–5, 75–6 Óláfr Þórðarson hvítaskáld 13, 21 Óláfsdrápa, see under Hallfreðr Óttarsson Óláfs drápa Tryggvasonar 13, 71–2 Óláfs saga helga 18, 24, 31, 36, 71, 210, 234, 236, 243, 247–8, 251 Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta 22–3, 18, 31, 34, 36, 41, 51, 61, 68, 71, 96, 106, 111, 134, 198–200, 210, 228–9, 234, 261

303

The Saint and the Saga Hero Old Icelandic Homily Book 6, 10–11, 58, 101, 115, 149, 160, 185–6, 220–1, 242 Old Norwegian Homily Book 11–12, 137–8, 220 Orkneyinga saga 14, 147 see also Magnús of Orkney Órækja Snorrason 20 Oswald, St 58 Ótryggr 140 Parable of the Sower 144–5, 259 Páls saga byskups 15, 195 Paul, St 11, 34, 50–1, 56, 115, 117–18, 195, 229 Pentecost 52, 59 peregrinatio 149, 162–3, 177, 262 Peter, St 6, 7–8, 11, 13, 21, 56, 75, 96, 100, 116, 127–8, 148, 181, 189–90 Physiologus 10, 12, 218 Plácidus 11–13, 48, 51, 126, 128, 133, 146, 195 polysystem theory 32–6, 40, 76, 109, 123, 257–8 prime-signing 91–2, 167 Psalms 48, 59–60, 134, 219–20, 223, 235–6, 239, 243, 250 Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle 49, 57 Radbod 122, 160 Raknarr 202–6 Rekstefja, see Hallar-Steinn relics, see under saints Reykdœla saga 128–9 Reykjahólabók 10, 24 Romance 4, 8, 23, 32–3, 39, 53, 81, 91, 112, 237, 247, 257 Rome 148, 170, 260 Rúnólfr Úlfsson 136 Russia 39, 50, 71 sagas 24–5, 27, 30, 33, 123, 130, 168, 182, 190, 192, 208 contemporary 20–1, 24, 27, 29, 36 kings’ 18, 26, 29, 36, 42, 81, 209, 211 mythic-heroic 24, 27–8, 35–6, 81, 196 of Icelanders 2, 19, 24–37, 81, 97, 109, 111–12, 164, 166, 209, 211, 237, 255, 257–64

saints 1–2, 5–6, 80, 85–6, 89–91, 96, 146, 185, 191, 196, 202, 229 ascetic 4–5, 20, 43, 49, 56–7, 87–8, 163–4, 178, 188, 193, 259 communion of 2, 7, 16, 231, 263 confessor 4–6, 12, 81–2, 165 environment 4–5, 108, 189 imitatio Christi 3–4, 55, 82, 144, 183, 187, 190–1, 259, 263 intercession 6–7, 11, 242–3, 260 lay sanctity 42–5, 57, 63 martyrs 3–5, 9, 11–12, 18, 20, 36, 95, 100–1, 104, 109, 144–5, 165, 172, 191, 193, 196, 207, 230, 242, 245, 259 missionary 4–5, 9, 22, 37, 48–9, 51, 56, 68, 79, 99, 111, 113, 139, 163, 203 relics 1–2, 7, 16, 19, 23, 28, 40 n. 6, 48, 63, 76, 93, 124, 151, 160, 239, 245–6 royal 5–6, 49–50, 79, 113, 208–9, 236, 238, 266 virgin 1, 11, 13, 14, 17, 181 warrior 8–10, 37, 49, 56–7, 71, 73–4, 76, 82, 90, 100, 140 unofficial sanctity 19–23 see also Desert Fathers, Gregory’s Dialogues, Vitae patrum saints’ lives 1–2, 6–7, 24, 39–40, 46, 109, 112, 114, 124, 143, 247 passio 3–5, 12, 24, 57, 80, 95, 100, 237 translatio 22, 81, 92–3, 154–6 vita 4–5, 13, 19, 24, 71, 74, 80–1, 93 translated 10–12, 15–16, 29–31, 34, 48, 52, 81, 91, 111, 126, 164 vernacular 12–19, 54, 153–6, 161, 195 and heroic epic 8–10, 39, 63, 68–76, 247, 258 and sagas 28–37, 76–7, 111, 191, 238–9, 249–50, 244, 257–62, 264 see also Christ, miracles, saints, visions Sallust 41 Scilly Isles 54, 210 Selkolla 19, 155–6, 158–9, 161 Selkolluvísur, see Selkolla Sigmundr Brestisson 30, 210–16, 224, 228–9, 241, 254–5, 261–2 see also Færeyinga saga

304

Index Signý Valbrandsdóttir 263 Sigurðr jarl  85, 142 Sigurðr Ákason 248 Sigurðr Fáfnisbani 34, 62, 139 Sigurðr, Bishop 44, 65 n. 135 Sigvaldi jarl 22 Sigvatr Þórðarson 14, 225 Silvester, St 11 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 202 Skapti Þórarinsson 93 Skapti Þóroddsson 135, 246 Skarp-Héðinn 146–7, 260–1 Skálaholt 14, 47–8, 150–1, 156–7, 183, 195 Skúli Þorsteinsson 68, 88 Snorri Sturluson 13, 79, 109, 121, 209–10, 211, 221, 258 Óláfs saga helga 18, 210 Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar 46, 59, 62, 87 Snorri goði 150–1, 161 Sonatorrek, see under Egill Skalla-Grímsson Sólarljóð 174, 176 n. 59, 177–8, 181 Spes 253–4, 260 Stefnir Þorgilsson 22, 96, 98, 114, 234 Stephen, St 3, 10–11, 16, 22, 117–18, 144, 146, 155, 230, 259 Stjórn 24, 102, 184–6, 190–1 Sturlubók 21, 197 Sulpicius Severus, see under St Martin Sunniva, St 13–14, 57 Sveinn Yngvarsson 42, 61 Sveins þáttr ok Finns 183 Sverrir, King 41–3, 46–7 Svertingr Rúnólfsson 136 Svõlðr 39, 44, 46, 49, 55, 62, 68, 72, 74, 88, 200, 211, 214 Syria 63, 164 Sæmundr Sigfússon 48, 59 Teitr Ísleifsson 47 Theodoricus, Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium 43, 48 Thomas saga, see Thomas Becket Thomas Becket 5, 13, 17–19, 21 Tómasskinna 18, 243, 245 trial of strength 118, 124, 133, 141, 197, 205 typology  55, 90, 119–20, 124, 127, 133,

184–5, 211–12, 220, 259 see also allegory Úlfrún, anchoress 20, 163, 170 Valla-Ljótr Ljótólfsson 139 Vatnsdœla saga 31, 105, 112, 123–33, 140–1, 161, 247, 261 see also Friðrekr, Ingimundr Þorsteins­son, Þorkell krafla Vatnshyrna 28, 123, 150, 182, 196 Veraldar saga 47 Víga-Glúmr Eyjólfsson 102–3, 124, 195 Víga-Stýrr 150, 156–7, 239 Vígi 53–4, 61–2 Virgil 48 Vincent, St 11 visions 43–5, 59, 97, 106–7, 126, 131, 138–40, 183, 190, 206–7, 210, 225, 228 eschatological  50–1, 54, 62 n. 127, 122, 136, 148–9, 153, 166–82, 192–3, 244, 252, 260–1 prophetic 18, 21, 119–20, 140, 200–1, 235–6, 263 saints 15–16, 20, 107, 241, 51, 138–9, 154, 241 Vita Haraldi, see Harold Godwineson Vitae patrum 7, 164, 168–9, 189, 249 Võlundarkvíða 94 Willibrord 113 Yngvars saga víðfõrla 42, 47, 61, 67 Þangbrandr 22, 34, 98, 111, 114, 130, 134–42, 149, 161, 186, 196, 211 Þiðranda þáttr ok Þórhalls 120, 130, 170, 196, 234 Þingeyrar 15, 17, 22–4, 31, 39 n. 1, 40–3, 46–8, 51 n. 69, 53, 123–4, 163, 247, 254 Þórarinn loftunga 14 Þorbjõrg Grímkelsdóttir 98, 263 Þórdís Einarsdóttir 241 Þórdís Þórólfsdóttir 83, 92–3 Þórðr Jónsson 22 Þórðr Kolbeinsson 243–4 Þórey Þorvarðsdóttir 192, 261

305

The Saint and the Saga Hero Þorfinna, single mother 154, 158 Þorfinnr Þorgilsson 188, 192–5 Þorgerðr Hõlgabrúðr/hõrgabrúðr 97–8, 214–15 Þorgeirr Hávarsson 237–40, 246, 249 Þorgeirr Ljósvetningagoði 113, 115, 135 Þorgeirr Þjóstarsson 95–6, 101–2 Þorgils saga ok Hafliða 21 Þorgils saga skarða 21 Þorgils Örrabeinsfóstri 182–96, 201, 208, 259–62 Þórgunna 150–2, 156–8 Þórhalls þáttr knapps 97, 107 Þórir hundr 148 Þórir Ingimundarson 123, 125, 129 Þórir Skeggjason 246, 248–9, 260 Þorkell dyðrill 54, 74–5 Þorkell krafla 123–30, 133 Þorkell máni 128 Þorkell Eyjólfsson 157, 210, 234–6, 243–4, 254–5, 262 Þorkell Þjóstarsson 96–7, 101, 104 Þorlákr Rúnólfsson, Bishop 44 Þorlákr Þorhallsson, St 3, 7, 19, 43, 81–2, 91–2, 140, 146, 183, 193–5, 259, 201, 229, 259

Miracles 6, 11, 14–16, 20, 41, 44, 82, 107–8, 154, 156, 170, 194, 198–9 see also Egill Skalla-Grímsson, Þorgils Õrrabeinsfóstri Þorláks saga helga  7, 15 n. 85, 81–2, 102, 131, 140–1, 156, 193 see also Þorlákr Þorhallsson Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld 209–10, 221, 236–46, 248, 253–5, 260, 262 Þorleifr the Wise 224, 264 Þórr 52, 61–2, 66, 85, 96–7, 120, 183–8, 198–9, 207, 218, 231, 241–2, 261 see also Devil/devils Þorsteinn drómundr 247, 253–4, 260 Þorsteinn Egilsson 92 Þorsteinn Eiríksson 157–8 Þorsteinn Ingimundarson 125, 128–33, 261 Þorsteins þáttr uxafóts 129, 200 Þorvaldr Koðránsson 22, 112, 114, 123 see also Þorvalds þáttr víðfõrla Þorvalds þáttr víðfõrla 41, 43, 108, 111, 124–5, 183, 191–2 Þrándr Þorbjarnarson 211, 214–6 Þuríðr Barkardóttir 150–2 Þuríðr, sorceress 252–3

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Cover image: King Óláfr Tryggvason and his dog Vígi, Árni Magnússon Institute, University of Iceland, GKS 1005 fol., fol. 5v. Photographer: Jóhanna Ólafsdóttir.

The relationship between that most popular of medieval genres, the saint's life, and the sagas of the Icelanders is investigated here. Although saga heroes are rarely saints themselves - indeed rather the reverse - they interact with saints in a variety of ways: as ancestors or friends of saints, as noble heathens or converts to Christianity, as innocent victims of violent death, or even as anti-saints, interrogating aspects of saintly ideology. Via detailed readings of a range of the sagas, this book explores how saints' lives contributed to the widening of medieval horizons, allowing the saga authors to develop multiple perspectives (moral, eschatological, psychological) on traditional feud narratives and family dramas. The saint's life introduced new ideals to the saga world, such as suffering, patience and feminine nurture, and provided, through dreams, visions and signs, ways of representing the interior life and of engaging with questions of merit and reward. In dialogue with the ideology of the saint, the saga hero develops into a complex and multi-faceted figure. Siân Grønlie is Associate Professor and Kate Elmore Fellow in English Language and Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford.

THE SAINT AND THE SAGA HERO

STUDIES IN OLD NORSE LITERATURE

THE SAINT AND THE SAGA HERO Hagiography and Early Icelandic Literature SIÂN E. GRØNLIE

SIÂN E. GRØNLIE

The Saint and the Saga Hero 9781843844815 V4.indd 1

15/09/2017 17:10