Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 161

PAGANISM AND LITERATURE 157
Óðinn which are not at all different from what we can leam in sha-
manistic texts.4 Let us, however, take a closer look at Prestssaga Guð-
mundar Góða, ch. 19: we read there that the priest Guðmundr Ara-
son has fallen asleep, from physical exhaustion, against a deacon who
is sitting next to him; after a while, the deacon does not feel the
weight of Guðmundr’s body at all. And at the same time, a man in a
distant region who has been long tormented by a flagð, having just
invoked Guðmundr, sees the saint appear in a blaze of light, and
sprinkle holy water on the flagð, which immediately disappears into
the ground, never to retum. This story may be relevant to the ham-
rammr complex and, as such, belongs, under Christian disguise, to
genuine Northern traditions which reflect shamanistic influences. But
rare is the mention of a hamrammr man travelling in human form—
they are usually supposed to take the shape of an animal—and, which
is far more interesting, a reader who was not aware of Northern
antiquities would doubtless take the whole story as a rather common-
place case of levitation, a property frequently attributed to Christian
saints in medieval hagiography.5 * *
Belief in the immortality of the soul, whatever its form, has given
birth in the North to another body of creeds which expresses itself in
the importance attached to the phenomenon of the landvættir: these
could be the souls of the dead which take refuge in places or things,
which ‘inhabit’ them, and thus protect their descendants.8 They want a
special cult and offerings, that is if we are to tmst many of the tales
from Landnámabók and Kristni Saga. There was here too a real diffi-
culty for the Church which, as a consequence, fought hard against
belief in the landvœttir, as we can see at the beginning of Úlfljótr’s
laws. Once more, we are obliged to state that there is, in the sam-
tíðarsögur, only one mention of landvœttir, and one additional refer-
ence in Geirmundar Þáttr Heljarskinns (the well-known story of the
rowan-trees at Skarð).
4 Ynglinga Saga, ch. VII (ÍF XXVI, pp. 18 ssqq).
5 See for instance O. Leroy: La lévitation, Paris, 1928.
8 See Jón Helgason: Islands Kirke fra dens Grundlœggelse til Reformationen,
K0benhavn, 1925, p. 18; K. B. Ólafsson: Landvættir og álfar, in Andvari, haust
1962, pp. 260-271.