Gripla - 20.12.2004, Page 95

THE PAST AS GUEST 93
to preserve intellectual goods closely associated with the prior age — for ex-
ample, narratives about heroes of the fornöld — in the later age. That danger
can only have added to the anxiety associated with disorder in general, what
Mary Douglas called matter out of place (Douglas 1966), or in this case, out
of time. Matter that was understood as not belonging to the time in which it is
was, in fact, apprehended, must have seemed disordered in exactly the
Douglassian sense and accordingly, anxiety-provoking.
Gestir play a role in the system of inheritance as recorded in texts like Gula-
flingslög and Grágás. Gestir are also a specific rank in the King’s hir›, one
whose duties are outlined in Hir›skrá and Konungs skuggsjá. Drawing evi-
dence from legal texts, in some cases Norwegian ones rather than Icelandic, is
of course somewhat dangerous praxis for generic as well as geographical
reasons. Gulafling in Norway is far from fiingeyrar in Iceland, and an even
greater gap, one might argue, lies between the genres of legal text like Gula-
flingslög and narrative that engages so intimately with the matter of forn-
aldarsaga as Nornagests fláttr and its kindred texts do (though they are not
fornaldarsögur themselves). Law would seem to be at one end of the scale of
historical reliability (or at least a kind of realism) and these eerie tales of
mysterious visitors to the King at the other. But my intent here is not to argue
for either the historicity of any of these episodes in Flateyjarbók or for the
legal validity of Gulaflingslög within the narrative world depicted within them.
Regardless of how fantastical we regard Nornagests fláttr and its allied tales or
believe their the consumers of Flateyjarbók to have regarded them, they reside
in the same discursive realm as Gulaflingslög and Hir›skrá in that they are
part of Old Norse letters. For this reason, I feel justified in turning to the legal
texts as to any other texts in the Old Norse world that might throw light on the
semantics of a specific word. The word gestr is played upon so centrally in
this constellation of narratives that it seems wise to seek broadly for the
possible associations of the word in any attempt at interpretation.
3. GESTIR: SOCIAL AND MYTHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND
3.1 Gestir and hospitality
Before getting to the legal sources, some social background should be sketched
in. There is a great deal to the word gestr and its associations on the level of
custom that would serve to create and maintain order and distinction in a