Gripla - 01.01.1990, Page 322

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GRIPLA
concerns the clothing of the assassin, the other the relative positions of
sleeping-hall and byre in the farms Sæból and Eiðar; and further, the
purpose of tying together the cows’ tails in the byre in each context.
Björn K. Þórólfsson says that on both these points the account of
Droplaugarsona saga is consistent, while that of Gísla saga is inconsist-
ent and redundant.43 This is true enough, yet these two points do not
seem to me as weighty or decisive as Björn and Jón think. What mat-
ters most, it seems to me, is that these scholars have not made a de-
tailed comparison in those sections that are after all most important in
each separate account; namely, the description of the killing. I will
now take these sections, referring to the passages I have already quot-
ed.
The account of Gísla saga has one feature over and above that of
Droplaugarsona saga, when it tells of the talk and mutual relations of
Þorgrím and Þórdís in bed. ‘Do you want me to turn towards you?’
says Þorgrím when he wakes for the first time. The sense of this ques-
tion is clear, for it means straightforwardly ‘Do you want me to have
intercourse with you?’ When again a few lines further on it is said that
Þorgrím ‘thought that it was Þórdís waking him, and he then turned
towards her’, the meaning is equally clear. Þorgrím turns to his wife to
have intercourse with her, and at the same instant he is stabbed to
death.
This feature has no parallel in other sagas, and therefore it seems
natural to suppose that here we have the residue of a tradition about
the slaying of Þorgrím. The next task is to consider whether this epi-
sode could have had any particular significance at any time in the peri-
od when the tradition would have arisen, roughly speaking between
the years 960 and 1240.
In terms of Christian thought, there is no particular significance in a
man being killed in the circumstances described, except in so far as the
tragedy is made unusually gruesome. It becomes a totally different
matter if this account is set in the conceptual and theological context
of the tenth century.
In fertility cults, ritual worship or celebration culminates with the
king/high priest or the god of sacrifice copulating with the appropriate
43 ÍF VI, pp. xix-xx and works there cited.