Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1992, Page 225

223
“Fjplkimnigri kono scallatu ífaðmi sofa”
episode in the life of St. Knút in Knýtlinga saga. A beautiful woman (the
wife of a priest at that) catches the king’s eye and he orders that she be
brought to his bed that evening. When the servants have left the room, it is
the woman who gives the future saint a lecture on proper Christian
behavior: “As you are so fairly reforming the ways of other people in this
country, it behooves you to have the best morals, because you are the
foremost person in the country.” (“svá vel ok fagrliga sem þér siðið aðra
menn í þessu landi, þá samir yðr þó at hafa fegrsta siðu, því at þér eruð fyrir
pllum mpnnum hér í landi.”)8 My translation does not do justice to the
parallel between the verb “siða,” which was also used in the sense of
“convert to Christianity,” and the noun “siðr,” meaning both “religion” and
“moral custom or conduct,” and commonly used to contrast the heathen and
Christian faiths in the collocutions “heiðinn siðr” and “kristinn siðr.” The
implication is clearly that the new faith entails a new moral code.
The lives of the native Icelandic saints contain no episodes in which the
saints themselves are tempted. When St. Þorlákr withdraws at the last
minute from the match being arranged for him, he is rejecting not so much
the joys of the marriage bed as a solid financial arrangement. St. Jón of Hólar
had been married twice, and the fact did not prevent him from becoming a
saint.
It is quite possible that the ideal of clerical celibacy was considered
completely unrealistic by the Icelanders; a sign of sanctity, although not a
prerequisite for it.9 In the twelfth century, the Icelandic church seems to have
8 Danakonunga SQgur, ed. Bjarni Guðnason, íslenzk fornrit XXXV, p. 149.
9 It is striking that none of candidates for sanctity in the late twelfth and early
thirteenth century had known offspring. Both Þorlákr and Guðmundr the Good
appear to have been celibate, and neither Jón Ogmundarson nor Björn Gilsson,
whose bones were elevated as potential relics at the same time as Jón’s, had children.
It is worth noting the way the author of Jóns saga carefully qualifies his statement,
noting that in spite of having had two wives, Jón “had no children that survived
childhood, or about whom we have heard, with either of them.” (“við hvárigri átti
hann börn, þau er or barnæsku hafi komizt, eða vér hafim sögur frá heyrðar.” BS I p.
157) It is only the younger version of the saga which goes so far as to state that “many
people think that he did not pollute himself bodily with either one” (“átti við
hvorigri börn, né nokkurri konu annari, svá at vér hafim sögur frá heyrt, ok er þat
margra manna ætlan, at hann hafi með hvorigri líkamliga flekkazt.” (BS I p. 230)
While it is tempting to argue that Jón’s marriages may be responsible for the fact that
he never attained the popularity of Þorlákr or Guðmundr, this can probably be
accounted for simply by the fact that his sainthood was announced too soon after
Þorlákr’s, and that Jón himself had been dead too long to appeal to the populace as a
whole.
Even monasteries and convents seem to have been filled primarily with widows or
chieftains retiring to do penance for their sins; the genealogies in the B text of
Fagrskinna (a Norwegian ms. from the middle of the thirteenth century) consider it
noteworthy that a woman became a virgin nun (“meynunna”, Ágrip af
Nóregskonunga sQgum. Fagrskinna - Nóregs konunga tal, ed. Bjarni Einarsson,
íslenzk fornrit XXIX, Reykjavík, 1985, p. 370.)