The Role Of Sexual Themes In Njál’s Saga

THE ROLE OF SEXUAL THEMES IN NJÁLS SAGA By URSULA DRONKE VIGFUSSON READER IN ANCIENT ICELANDIC LITERATURE AND ANTIQUITIES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD The Dorothea Coke Memorial Lecture in Northern Studies delivered at University College London 2.7 M ay 1980 P U B L IS H E D F O R T H E C O L L E G E B Y T H E V IK IN G S O C IE T Y F O R N O R T H E R N R E S E A R C H LO N D O N ® U N IV E R S IT Y C O L L E G E L O N D O N 1 9 8 1 P R IN T E D B Y C L A R K C O N S T A B L E L T D E D IN B U R G H TH E R O L E OF SEX UA L TH EM ES IN N J Á L S S A G A F or th e c r it ic , NJÁLS SAGA seem s as s l ip p e r y as an eel the size o f Miðgarðsormr. Its skin glistens w ith a myriad themes, all familiar, yet all precisely different from any seen elsewhere. This alternation o f familiarity and surprise gives a remarkable illusion o f reality. Perhaps for that reason the saga has often been read as if it contained insights into the lifestories o f real people, whose characters may be probed and analysed and domestic circumstances debated as if these were matters o f historical truth. But only an imagined Miðgarðsormr can encircle the earth, and it is only a human fantasy—though fed indeed by natural images—which has been able to impose the horizon o f Njáls Saga upon us. This creative fantasy the author o f Njáls Saga has himself placed under the governance o f certain rhetorical rules, techniques already polished by traditional narrative practice and clearly visible from without. For example, when Skarpheðinn Njálsson, skimming over the ice as swift as a bird, brings down his axe through the head o f Þráinn, the back teeth from the jaws spill out on to the ice. W hen Skarpheðinn himself is trapped in the burning house at Bergþórshváll, Þráinn’s nephew, Gunnarr Lambason, leaps up onto the wall and calls out ‘Are you crying now—hvártgrætr þú nú, Skarpheðinn? ‘N o,’ he answers, ‘though it’s true my eyes are smarting. But you seem to be laughing— hvárt er svdV ‘Sud er vist—yes,’ says Gunnarr, ‘and I have not laughed till now since you killed Þráinn.’ ‘Then here is the memento from that,’ says Skarpheðinn, and he took from his purse the jaw -tooth he had hacked from Þráinn and flung it at Gunnarr’s eye, so that the eye lay out over the cheek. W hen Gunnarr Lambason is in exile for the burning he is invited to tell the tale o f it before the King o f Dublin and the Earls o f Orkney and the Hebrides. The King asks how Skarpheðinn bore the burning. ‘W ell at first, but by the end he was weeping— lauk svd at hann grit.’ And Gunnarr told a biased tale, lying about the event time and time again—16frá víða. Outside, Skarpheðinn’s brother3 T H E R O L E OF S E X U A L T H E M E S in-law, Kári, is listening. He springs into the hall with drawn sword and strikes Gunnarr’s neck with such force that the head bounds up onto the table before the King and the Earls. In this way, by links o f parallel and echo—the severed heads, the jaw tooth, the jibe o f womanish weeping—each incident is made to live on rhetorically in the next as it would live on in fact in the memory o f any man who might have experienced them.1 A contrasting device o f suppression o f information is also used by the author o f Njáls Saga to achieve the continuity he wants for his narrative. For example, the saga draws to a close with a marriage uniting a man and a woman from the two feuding families. This event is very plainly stated: Flosi then married Kári to Hildigunnr, his brother’s daughter, whom Höskuldr Hvitanessgoði had been married to. W e are not here reminded that Kári was one o f those who sta