Gripla - 01.01.2003, Page 80

Gripla - 01.01.2003, Page 80
78 GRIPLA athafnasaga hefnda og víga (1993, 21) [an action story of vengeance and battles without a message], represents a concealed attack on the destructive values of the heathen past which continued to inform the violence of the Sturlung Age (and therefore must date from much later than the early 1200s). He sees parody in the treatment of Þuríðr, who is referred to dismissively as kerling, in contrast to Laxdœla saga's positive presentation of Þorgerðr. It is indeed difficult to interpret as anything other than parody the burlesque sequel to the whetting in Heiðarvíga saga (ch. 23), in which Þuríðr’s sons rid themselves of their importunate relative by having her saddle-girth loosened so that she tumbles into a brook. Bjami sees the purpose of the parody as symbolic. In the words of Theodore M. Andersson, ‘condemnation is rein- forced when ... Þuríðr is disgraced by her sons .... Her unregenerate spirit literally takes a fall’. Andersson adds, ‘A minor problem in this interpretation is that her dull-witted companion, who has no other part in the saga, suffers the same fall’ (Andersson 1995, 451). This is not the only loose end left by Bjami’s interpretation. It is true that Þuríðr is discredited, not only by coming to grief in the stream, but by the hysterical overtones of the whetting scene, where she strikes her son as close to madness: ‘er á þessu mikit vanstilli, ok ertu nær óvitandi vits’ (277); and ‘gekk hon útan ok innar eptir gólfinu eiskrandi’ [there is great excess in this, and you are almost out of your wits ... she went raging back and forth over the floor]. But this is not to say that the ethic of revenge is discredited along with her. Her hot-headed vengefulness is contrasted in the saga, not with any such endorsement of peaceable values as Bjami implies, but with the more controlled vengeful purpose of her son Barði. The expedition of vengeance concludes a sequence in which Barði, under the direction of his foster-father Þórarinn, steadfastly pursues the goal of redress for his brother’s death; a mat- ter, first, of negotiating unsuccessfully for compensation, then of antagonizing an opponent so as to give an excuse for more active vengeance, then of manœuvring for support, all the time keeping these activities secret from the targets of the attack. The saga offers, not a critique of the primitive values of feud, but a carefully articulated illustration of the proverb ‘revenge is a dish that should be eaten cold’. In comparing the saga’s boorish treatment of Þuríðr with the respectful stance adopted towards Þorgerðr in Laxdœla saga, it is necessary to bear the wider literary context in mind. Throughout Laxdœla saga the actions and consciousness of women are foregrounded to an unprecedented extent; the
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