Gripla - 01.01.1990, Side 323

OLD NORSE RELIGION IN THE SAGAS OF ICELANDERS
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consort.44 In this way he brings the rite to an end; and we may think
that Þorgrím, the 25-year old priest of Frey, was playing this role when
he is made to say to his wife Þórdís: ‘Do you want me to turn towards
you?’ And so, when soon after he turns to his wife to have intercourse
with her, and is stabbed to death in the act, it is not simply a matter of
a man being killed in his bed at night; it is rather that the presiding
priest is killed while completing the ritual. By tenth-century standards,
the death of Þorgrím would have been not simply murder by night, but
also sacrilege of the gravest kind.
Frey was god of fertility and fruitfulness in general, of the fertility of
men and beasts in particular. The poem Skírnismál depicts his impa-
tient longing for his own marriage; Adam of Bremen says that the idol
of Frey in the temple at Uppsala was carved with a gigantic priapus;
and an image found in Sweden which is generally thought to represent
Frey has the same distinctive feature.45 Considering all this, I regard it
as no accident that a text which records the killing of Þorgrím takes
especial trouble to demonstrate that at the point of death Þorgrím was
exactly like Frey.
Þorgrím was killed about forty years before the Conversion. Thus
there was plenty of opportunity for a tradition of the slaying to be fully
formulated and established while Norse religion was still dominant in
the country. At that time, all the circumstances would be seen from
the standpoint of Norse belief; cause and effect would be interpreted
in accordance with current concepts. It seems to me that these con-
cepts and this interpretation can still be read between the lines of
Gísla saga, once it is carefully examined. As far as transmission of the
episode goes, we can call to mind that Snorri goði was present in bed
with his parents, as yet unborn. Snorri became father of Þuríð, the
wise, well-informed and reliable woman who supplied material to Ari
fróði. So in this case there were unusually fair prospects that a tradi-
44 Rosalie David, ‘Egypt’, Mythology, ed. by Richard Cavendish, London 1980, p.
102; Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, London 1983, pp. 331-366 and
references.
45 Sœmundar-Edda (1926), p. 83-4, 92-3; Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis
Ecclesiœ Pontificum, ed. B. Schmeidler (1917), 257; E.O.G. Turville-Petre, Myth and
Religion of the North (London 1964), p. 248 n. 51.