The Story of Grettir the Strong

by Unknown

The poem seems to be a death-song over the cave-kin of the country by the new change of thought brought in by Christianity.

P. 189. 'Grettir lay out that summer on Madderdale-heath, and in sundry places, and at whiles he was at Reek-heath.' A corroboration of the saga has been clearly set forth by the discovery of a Grettir's-lair, in Axefirth-peak, in 1862. True the saga passes over Grettir's doings on these vast eastern wildernesses, but tradition has preserved the name[275] for the place, and it shows by its construction and position that it must have been constructed by one skilled in choosing a good fighting stand, and a good and wide view at the same time. An Icelandic farmer has thus given an accurate and reliable description of Grettir's lair:

'In the summer of 1850, when I came north to Axefirth, I heard talk of a Grettir's lair upon Axefirth-peak.... Many who had seen it made a slight matter of it, which brought me to think it must have few peculiarities of antiquarian interest to show. But on the 7th of September, this summer (1862), I went with the rape-ruler Arni Jónsson of Wood-stead to inspect the lair. Walking up to it from the level ground below took us three minutes. The lair stands in the lower part of a slip of stones beneath some sheer rocks between a sandstone rock, called the carline, and the stone slip from the peak. It is built up of stones, straight as a line, and runs, 4-3/4 ells in length, 10 inches broad, and is, within walls, 7/8 of an ell deep. The half of it is deftly covered in with flat stones, the longest of which are 2 ells 9 inches long, and about half an ell in thickness, and a little more in breadth. Small thin fragments of stone are wedged in between these where their junctures do not close tight, and so firmly are they fixed, that without instruments they may not be removed. One stone in the south wall is so large that we deemed it fully the task of from four to six men to move it when loose. The north side wall is beginning to give way, where the room is covered in. On the outside it is overgrown with black scurf and grey moss. The head end we deemed was the one which is turned to the rock and is not covered in, and evidently has been open from the beginning. Here the floor is overgrown with moss, grass, thyme, ferns, crow-foot, and lady's-mantle. In all likelihood the inmate has closed that part of the room in with hides, when needful. On sitting up, all who went to and fro on the road below, must have been within view; not only those who came from the north of Foxplain (Melrakkaslètta) and Nupa-sveit, but also far toward the north he had a view even unto the open sea, nay, even unto Budluga-haven. Looking southwards, he must have seen all who came up from the outer firth; for from the lair there is a clear view even unto Burn-river, past which the high-road goes. A popular tradition says, too, that all who must needs pass this way, when Grettir was in the Peak, had taken at last to going over the top of the Peak, where there was no road, but the sheep-wilds of the Axefirthers. The lair-bider, even if he was set on by an overwhelming force, was not easily won, and least of all a man of such prowess as Grettir, except by shot; for he might at a moment's notice take his stand in the rock above his head,[276] the where one side only gives the chance of an onset, and where there is an ample supply of loose stones, large and small, on the Peak side of the rock to defend oneself; on three sides sheer rocks hem in the position, and those overhead are many times the height of a man's.'

P. 208. Knave-game. Perhaps the truer rendering would have been 'nut-game,' if indeed 'hnet tafl' here stands not for 'hnef-tafl,' as we at first supposed. It is undoubtedly true that among the early games of Iceland the 'hettafl,' 'hnottafl,' was a distinct kind of game, as was also the 'hneftafl,' 'hnefatafl,' knave-game. If we follow the text as it stands, the game that Thorbiorn played is supposed to have borne some resemblance to what is now called in Iceland 'refskák,' fox-play, anglice 'fox and geese,' the aim of which is, by twelve pieces, called lambs, to bring the fox into such a position as to leave him no place to move, whichso way he turns.

P. 240. Pied-belly we call the Ram, although the saga seems to mean that he was called Autumn-belly, which is a name of little, if of any, sense at all. We suppose that haus-mögóttr, p. 169, and haust-magi, p. 184, is one and the same thing, the t having spuriously crept into the text from a scribe's inadvertence.

P. 243 (cpr. 207, 225, 272). 'In such wise Grettir lost his life, &c.' The hardest thing to account for, or to bring to an intelligible issue in Grettir's saga, is the incongruity between the statements as to his age at his death and the number of years of his outlawry, as compared with the truthful account of the events told in the saga itself. From the time when Grettir slew his first man, all the events of the saga may be traced clearly year for year up to his death, and their truthfulness is borne out whensoever they chance to run parallel to events mentioned in other trustworthy sagas, and they fall in with the right time nearly without an exception. But the statement on the page referred to above, that he was fourteen years old when he slew Skeggi, that he was twenty when he dealt with Glam; twenty-five when he fell into outlawry, and forty-four when he was slain, is utterly confuted by the chronology of the saga itself.

These numbers given above are obviously made to fall in with the story in page 225 about the talk of the time of his outlawry at the Thing. The question is stated to have been this: whether he had been a fraction of the twentieth year an outlaw, his friends hoping that in such case a part might count pro toto. But the truth of the matter was that he had neither been an outlaw for a fraction of the twentieth year, nor even for anything like nineteen years. He was outlawed at the Thing held in 1016, his year of outlawry dated from Thing to Thing; this talk befell in 1031, consequently he had been full fifteen years[277] and no fraction of a year in outlawry. The story, therefore, of the twenty years, or nineteen years and a fraction, of outlawry falls utterly to the ground when brought to the test of the actual facts as recorded in the saga.

But, despite of this, it is not to be supposed that this episode at the Thing in 1031 is brought in at random and without any cause. There are two obvious reasons for assigning twenty years to the length of Grettir's outlawry, and for bringing into the tale a discussion on that subject just where it is done. The one we may call the reason of traditional belief, the other the reason of dramatic effect. Grettir was indisputably for all reasons the greatest of Icelandic outlaws, and the fond imagination of his biographers at all times urged them to give the longest endurance to the time of his outlawry above all outlaws, without inquiring closely as to whether it agreed with the saga itself or not. The other, or the dramatic motive, lies in bringing in the discussion on this long outlawry just at this particular Thing of 1031; for it was obviously the teller's object to suggest to the reader the hope of the great outlaw's legal restoration to the cherished society of man just before the falling of the crushing blow, in order to give an enhanced tragic interest to his end, and he undoubtedly succeeds in doing this. To these reasons, besides others less obvious, we imagine this main inconsistency in Grettir's saga is to be ascribed.

Nevertheless, it is worth observing that blunders of scribes may have in a measure been at work here. If we are not mistaken most of the existing MSS. of our saga state that when he fell (p. 243) 'he was one winter short of—var hánum vetri fátt á'—whatever number of years they give as his age. And we venture the suggestion that originally the passage ran thus: var hánum vetri fátt á hálf iv{tugum},[^[21]] i.e., he lacked one winter of thirty-five years, when he was slain. If a subsequent scribe committed the easy blunder of dropping I before V, the reading of our original (Edition, 53) would be the natural result, and an offspring of that same blunder would also as easily be the other reading, common to one class of the Grettir MSS.: var hánum vetri fátt í v{tugum} or í hinum v. tug, by dropping the syllable 'hálf.'

If the whole passage on page 243, beginning with the words quoted in [278] the commencement of this note, be not indeed a later interpolation, we believe that all that follows the words, 'till the time when he dealt with Glam, the Thrall,' must, indeed, be taken as an interpolation of later commentators.