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have been received by tradition in the context of a narrative paradigm – a
‘myth’, if you like – in which a father suffers such grief for his early-dead
son that he wishes to die – until recalled to life, poetry, and/or revenge by
a relative. the story’s turn from death to life is in some cases attributed to
salutary effects of poetry itself.19 the full form of this narrative pattern as
we find it in Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings, as well as twice in Egils saga, specifies
that the old man takes to his bed to die. It would be hard to imagine this story
outside the family, yet even the much cooler court poems harbor some
expressions of emotion: Sigvatr exclaims Ólmr erumk harmr ‘violent is my
grief’ in his Ólafsdrápa, precisely in the tradition of egill’s interjection
helnauð es þat after the burial of his brother.20 Meanwhile, some myth-
based terminal motifs – desolation of the land; no better will be born; and
this latter often linked to a separate apocalyptic motif – are scattered
through much of the larger corpus of erfikvæði.
A related red thread of this kind is a pattern of allusions to Baldr and to
Ragnarök. It was Magnus Olsen who first traced the Baldr thread through
eyvindr’s Hákonarmál of c. 961, and, somewhat less certainly, in Sigvatr’s
Ólafsdrápa of about 1040 (olsen 1924; 1929). I continued that exercise
with the anonymous Eiríksmál of c. 954 and the Ólafserfidrápa of Hallfreðr
vandræðaskald, 1001 (Harris 1999). If these results hold, we can say that
allusions to Baldr and Ragnarök constitute a basso continuo through the
whole extant series of royal funeral poems from late pagan into early
Christian times. But are these merely superficial allusive imitations, or
were they signs of something deeper, something constitutive of the genre
in early times? Sonatorrek, generically related but private rather than royal
in setting, might tip the balance in answer to that question.
I have argued that the Baldr myth, odinic language, and the Ragnarök
theme run through much of Sonatorrek as a submerged but easily reachable
metaphor. I attempted to explain egill’s use of the myth in terms of the
relationship of archaic religious man to the divine pattern, a relationship
made famous in the writings of Mircea Eliade and now almost synony­
mous with his name (Harris 1999). Applied to our materials, the Eliade
hypothesis might run thus: since in the mythology the death of Baldr was
the archetypal death and the archetypal sacrifice, the pattern set there by
19 Discussed mainly in Harris 1994b.
20 References in Harris 2006b.
PHILoLoGy, eLeGy, AnD CuLtuRAL CHAnGe