Grettir at first cares little for this; but the last part of the curse comes on almost at once and makes him afraid to be alone after dark, while the second is not long delayed. On the eve of setting out once more for Norway, he quarrels with and slays a braggart named Thorbiorn; during the voyage itself he is the unintentional cause of a whole household of men being burnt to death; and lastly, by his own quarrelsome temper, and some "metaphysical aid," he misses the chance of clearing himself by "bearing iron" (ordeal) before King Olaf at Drontheim. Olaf, his own kinsman, tells him with all frankness that he, Grettir, is much too "unlucky" for himself to countenance; and that though he shall have no harm in Norway, he must pack to Iceland as soon as the sea is open. He accordingly stays during the winter, in a peace only broken by the slaying of another bersark bully, and partly passed with his brother Thorstein Dromond.
Meanwhile Asmund has died, his eldest son Atli has succeeded him, and has been waylaid by men suborned by Thorbiorn Oxmain, kinsman of the Thorbiorn whom Grettir slew before leaving Iceland the second time. Atli escapes and slays his foes. Then Thorbiorn Oxmain himself visits Biarg and slays the unarmed Atli, who is not avenged because it was Grettir's business to look after the matter when he came home. But Glam's curse so works that, though plaintiff in this case, he is outlawed in his absence for the burning of the house above referred to, in which he was quite guiltless; and when he lands in Iceland it is to find himself deprived of all legal rights, and in such case that no friend can harbour him except under penalty.
Grettir, as we might expect, is not much daunted by this complication of evils, but he lies hid for a time at his mother's house and elsewhere, not so much to escape his own dangers as to avenge Atli on Thorbiorn Oxmain at the right moment. At last he finds it; and Thorbiorn, as well as his sixteen-year-old son Arnor, who rather disloyally helps him, is slain by Grettir single-handed. His plight at first is not much worsened by this; for though the simple plan of setting off Thorbiorn against Atli is not adopted, Grettir's case is backed directly by his kinsmen and indirectly by the two craftiest men in Iceland, Snorri the Godi and Skapti the Lawman, and the latter points out that as Grettir had been outlawed before it was decreed that the onus of avenging Atli lay on him, a fatal flaw had been made in the latter proceeding, and no notice could be taken of the death of Thorbiorn at all, though his kin must pay for Atli. This fine would have been set off against Grettir's outlawry, and he would have become a freeman, had not Thorir of Garth, the father of the men he had accidentally killed in the burning house, refused; and so the well-meant efforts of Grettir's kin and friends fall through.
From this time till the end of his life he is a houseless outlaw, abiding in all the most remote parts of the island—"Grettir's lairs," as they are called, it would seem, to this day—sometimes countenanced for a short time by well-willing men of position, sometimes dwelling with supernatural creatures,—Hallmund, a kindly spirit or cave-dweller with a hospitable daughter, or the half-troll giant Thorir, a person of daughters likewise. But his case grows steadily worse. Partly owing to sheer ill-luck and Glam's curse, partly, as the saga-writer very candidly tells us, because he "was not an easy man to live withal," his tale of slayings and the feuds thereto appertaining grows steadily. For the most part he lives by simple cattle-lifting and the like, which naturally does not make him popular; twice other outlaws come to abide with him, and, after longer or shorter time, try for his richly priced head, and though they lose their own lives, naturally make him more and more desperate. Once he is beset by his enemy Thorir with eighty men; and only comes off through the backing of his ghostly friend Hallmund, who not long after meets his fate by no ignoble hand, and Grettir cannot avenge him. Again, Grettir is warmly welcomed by a widow, Steinvor of Sand-heaps, at whose dwelling, in the oddest way, he takes up the full Beowulf adventure and slays a troll-wife in a cave just as his forerunner slew Grendel's mother. But in the end the hue and cry is too strong, and by advice of friends he flies to the steep holm of Drangey in Holmfirth—a place where the top can only be won by ladders—with his younger brother Illugi and a single thrall or slave. Illugi is young, but true as steel: the slave is a fool, if not actually a traitor. After the bonders of Drangey have done what they could to rid themselves of this very damaging and redoubtable intruder, they give up their shares to a certain Thorbiorn Angle. Thorbiorn at first fares ill against Grettir, whose outlawry is on the point of coming to an end, as none might last longer than twenty years. With the help of a wound, witch-caused to Grettir, and the slave's treacherous laziness, Thorbiorn and his crew climb the ladders and beset the brethren—Grettir already half dead with his gangrened wound. The hero is slain with his own short-sword; the brave Illugi is overwhelmed with the shields of the eighteen assailants, and then slaughtered in cold blood. But Thorbiorn reaps little good, for his traffickings with witchcraft deprive him of his blood-money; the deaths of his men, of whom Illugi and Grettir had slain not a few, are set against Illugi's own; and Thorbiorn himself, after escaping to Micklegarth (Constantinople) and joining the Varangians, is slain by Thorstein Dromond, who has followed him thither and joined the same Guard on purpose, and who is made the hero of the appendix above spoken of.
Merits of it.
The defects of this are obvious, and may be probably enough accounted for in part by the supposition of the experts above referred to—that the saga as we have it is rather later than the other great sagas, and is a patchwork of divers hands. It may perhaps be added, as a more purely literary criticism, that no one of these hands can have been quite a master, or that his work, if it existed, must have been mutilated or disfigured by others. For the most is nowhere made, except in the Glam fight and the last scenes on Drangey, of the admirable situations provided by the story; and the presentation of Grettir as a man almost everywhere lacks the last touches, while the sagaman has simply thrown away the opportunities afforded him by the insinuated amourettes with Steinvor and the daughters of the friendly spirits, and has made a mere fabliau episode of another thing of the kind. Nevertheless the attractions of Grettla are unique as regards the mixture of the natural and supernatural; not inferior to any other as illustrating the quaintly blended life of Iceland; and of the highest kind as regards the conception of the hero—a not ungenerous Strength, guided by no intellectual greatness and by hardly any overmastering passion, marred by an unsocial and overbearing temper, and so hardly needing the ill luck, which yet gives poetical finish and dramatic force to the story, to cast itself utterly away. For in stories, as in other games, play without luck is fatiguing and jejune, luck without play childish. It is curious how touching is the figure of the ill-fated hero, not wholly amiable, yet over-matched by Fortune, wandering in waste places of a country the fairest spots of which are little better than a desert, forced by his terror of "Glam-sight" to harbour criminals far worse than himself, and well knowing that they seek his life, grudgingly and fearfully helped by his few friends, a public nuisance where he should have been a public champion, only befriended heartily by mysterious shadowy personages of whom little is positively told, and when, after twenty years of wild-beast life, his deliverance is at hand, perishing by a combination of foul play on the part of his foes and neglect on that of his slave. At least once, too, in that parting of Asdis with Grettir and Illugi, which ranks not far below the matchless epitaph of Sir Ector on Lancelot, there is not only suggestion, but expression of the highest quality:—
The parting of Asdis and her sons.
"'Ah! my sons twain, there ye depart from me, and one death ye shall have together, for no man may flee from that which is wrought for him. On no day now shall I see either of you once again. Let one fate, then, be over you both; for I know not what weal ye go to get for yourselves in Drangey, but there ye shall both lay your bones, and many shall grudge you that abiding-place. Keep ye heedfully from wiles, for marvellously have my dreams gone. Be well ware of sorcery; yet none the less shall ye be bitten with the edge of the sword, for nothing can cope with the cunning of eld.' And when she had thus spoken she wept right sore. Then said Grettir, 'Weep not, mother; for if we be set upon by weapons it shall be said of thee that thou hast had sons and not daughters.' And therewith they parted."
Great passages of the sagas.
These moments, whether of incident or expression, are indeed frequent enough in the sagas, though the main attraction may consist, as has been said, in the wild interest of the story and the vivid individuality of the characters. The slaying of Gunnar of Lithend in Njala, when his false wife refuses him a tress of hair to twist for his stringless bow, has rightly attracted the admiration of the best critics; as has the dauntless resignation of Njal himself and Bergthora, when both might have escaped their fiery fate. Of the touches of which the Egil's Saga is full, few are better perhaps than the picture in a dozen words of King Eric Blood-axe "sitting bolt upright and glaring" at the son of Skallagrim as he delivers the panegyric which is to save his life, and the composition of which had been so nearly baulked by the twittering of the witch-swallow under his eaves. The "long" kisses of Kormak and Steingerd, and the poet's unconscious translation of Æschylus[175] as he says, "Eager to find my lady, I have scoured the whole house with the glances of my eyes—in vain," dwell in the memory as softer touches. And for the sterner, nothing can beat the last fight of Olaf Trygveson, where with the crack of Einar Tamberskelvir's bow Norway breaks from Olaf's hands, and the king himself, the last man with Kolbiorn his marshal to fight on the deck of the Long Serpent, springs, gold-helmed, mail-coated, and scarlet-kirtled, into the waves, and sinks with shield held up edgeways[176] to weight him through the deep green water.