Gripla - 01.01.1984, Side 250

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GRIPLA
and are nobler by romance standards. For example, Hildigeir displays
no desire for revenge for his father’s death. When the meeting with Hálf-
dán occurs, he is as reluctant as in Saxo to fight Hálfdán because he is
aware that they are brothers, but otherwise the meeting is conducted in
rather different terms. Hálfdán actually requests that the increasing
number of champions are sent against him, while in Saxo he merely
accepts this when it occurs. He then fights and defeats Hildigeir, and
when his dying brother tells him of their relationship, he asks him to
slay him too. Hildigeir instead sends a message by Hálfdán to their
mother, asking her to take no revenge, and declares that he believe his
death to have been brought about by some enchantment. No sense of
real tragedy similar to that found in Saxo has been retained.
The story ends in Saxo with the death of Hildigeir, but the author of
the saga added a string of new events, connected to the previous ad-
ventures by the theme of enchantment. When Hálfdán returns to his
mother she tells him that all the slayings that have occurred are the
result of álög or enchantment put on her by a suitor whom she had
rejected. At her instigation Hálfdán seeks aut and slays this character,
then collects his relatives’ inheritance, marries a lady he meets in the
course of this adventure, settles down and names a son after Hildigeir.
Through his use of a variation of the popular álög theme, and through
his insertions of additional adventures in the saga, the author has di-
verged quite considerably from his source. A reason for his free adapta-
tion of Saxo’s story may be that other forms of the tale were almost
certainly unknown in Iceland at the time. The medieval saga Ásmundar
saga kappabana, which also contains the tale of the fight between the
two brothers is only known from two manuscripts, which had both left
Iceland by this time. The saga was printed in Sweden in 1722 and at
least one copy of this printed version reached Iceland in the nineteenth
century,9 but it is likely that it was known to only a very few people
before it was printed in Carl Christian Rafn’s edition of the Fornaldar
sögur Norðrlanda in 1829-30.
The author of Starkaðar saga was in a quite different position. This
hero was well-known in Iceland through the medieval accounts of his
deeds, in particular in Gautreks saga and Heimskringla. The author was
9 Saugu Asmundar er kalladur er Kappabani, ed. Johannes F. Peringskiöld,
Stockholm, 1722. It was copied by Gísli Konráðsson in about 1820 (Lbs. 1341 4to).