Gripla - 01.01.1975, Side 167

Gripla - 01.01.1975, Side 167
PAGANISM AND LITERATURE 163 recorded elsewhere.4 I am simply pointing out that many of these fea- tures could be Christian as well, or could have been imported with Christianity. For instance, much has been written about the famous sólarsteinn which is mentioned several times (in Hrafns Saga Sveinbjarnarsonar, ch. 11, 19, íslendinga Saga, ch. 30, and even in Guðmundar Saga Arasonar by Arngrímr Brandsson, ch. 26.® As Th. Ramskou points out, it may have been a kind of leiðarsteinn used as a navigational aid, and accordingly a genuine Northern discovery. But scientific works such as those recorded in Rím I were not unknown to Iceland, and it is quite reasonable to think that the sólarsteinn goes back to Pliny the Elder or to Isidore of Sevilla. The latter, to be sure, was read by Icelanders in the XlIIth century. We can imagine, on the other hand, that the popular medicine, such as practised, for instance, by the famous lœknir Hrafn Svein- bjarnarson, could employ more or less magical methods. It is true that in this violent and quarrelsome Icelandic society wounds were often incurred, and we have many an example in the sagas of treatments and healings which, astonishing as they are for us, must have been effective. Of course, it is not necessary to invoke magic to provide a satisfying explanation of these results. Such realistic and matter of fact people as the Icelanders of the Sturlung Age may equally well have been reaping the benefits of their keen sense of observation and well known manual dexterity. What remains to be said is that the samtíðarsögur and particularly the jarteinabcekr of the biskupa sögur do not show traces of especially strange practices (See Hrafns Saga Sveinbjarnarsonar, ch. 4; Jóns Saga Helga I, ch. 44; Prestssaga Guð- mundar Góða, ch. 6; íslendinga Saga, ch. 81; Svínfellinga Saga, ch. 3; Þorgils Saga Skarða, ch. 7). We must therefore concentrate our attention on Hrafn’s doings. There is no sign of professional magic or occultism in his behaviour, and if there is an instance of a non-scien- tific approach, it consists (in ch. 5) in the reciiation of five Pater Nosters before beginning an operation. As for his science, several studies—and most recently Jónas Kristjánsson’s thesis Um Fóst- 4 Cf. chiefly N. Lid in Nordisk kultur XIX, 1935. 5 See for instance P. G. Foote: Icelandic ‘sólarsteinn’ and the Medieval Back- ground, in Arv 12, 1956.
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