Gripla - 01.01.1990, Page 262

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GRIPLA
counsel of the seer to his son toward the end of section one, in stanza
25, in which the dreamer is advised to pray to those maidens - the dísir
- who have the ear of God, as in the kenning below, ‘dísir . . . / drótt-
ins mála . . .’ (= dróttins máladísir):
Dísir bið þú þér
dróttins mála
vera hollar í hugum;
viku eptir
mun þér vilja þíns
allt at óskum gá.
The ‘dísir of God’s converse’ have been elevated in this stanza from
their pagan status of guardian spirits to the Christian ranks of ‘holy
maidens’ - the ‘helgar meyjar’ in stanza 73 - who cleanse the souls of
those saved from sin, and can intercede for sinners with God, as it says
in the Stockholm Homily Book (p. 43); in the heavenly hierarchy of
the Church they would be ranged with the saints of the New Cov-
enant, a little lower than the angels, under the supreme authority of
the intercessor, Mary.28 The Church officially accords the saints and
the angels invocation, if not worship.29 Norse paganism on the other
hand sacrificed to the dísir during the nocturnal dísablót, these spirits
unlike the vaguer fylgjur having enjoyed a definite cult in Iceland and
Norway.30 Peter Foote has conceded that the fylgjur could be assimi-
lated ‘positively’ to the guardian angels in Icelandic Christianity,31 and
we may therefore regard the assimilation of the dísir to the Christian
sanctae virgines in stanzas 25 and 73 of Sólarljóð as an equally good in-
stance of syncretism, which upgraded the tutelary deities of an estab-
lished Norse cult.
Back to the solar imagery of the poem, one may wonder before the
suggestive figure of the sun-stag and its two mysterious (human?) lead-
ers, which greet the dead seer on the threshold of hell (st. 55), wheth-
er this creature too were not a truly syncretic reminiscence of Christ as
28 Falk, Sljð. I, p. 15. On the pagan dísir, see Gabriel Turville-Petre’s chapter,
‘Guardian Spirits,’ in Myth and Religion in the North, New York, etc. 1964, pp. 221-28.
29 Falk, loc. cit.
30 Turville-Petre, op. cit., pp. 224-25.
31 ‘Observations’, op. cit., p. 86.