Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 167

PAGANISM AND LITERATURE
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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.