Gripla - 20.12.2009, Síða 264

GRIPLA264
odin formed the model of paternal grief in real life, at least in circles of
Odin worshippers. Egill’s Odinic language, the ritual occasion of perform­
ance, and the situation of events – all suggest that Egill’s own grief was a
re­presentatio of the first death and first grief, that his poem and actions are
modeled on a paradigm of religious tradition wherein he cast himself as a
shadow of Odin and his lost sons as reflections of Baldr. This hypothesis
gets us close to a possible explanation of the persistence of the Baldr allu­
sions even into the court erfikvæði, though with changes of emphasis,
diminishment and eventual disappearance in the increasingly formal poetry
of the Christian courts. But how old and how widespread might these con­
nections between myth and elegy be?
Strange to say, there is a clear reflection of this web of connections in
the oe Beowulf, where, bafflingly, we find not only an echo of the proverb
egill quoted in st. 17 of Sonatorrek and find it in connection with a version
of the Baldr myth, but we find even the extra-poetic narrative pattern of
the bereaved father who takes to bed to die. After nearly thirty years of
writing about this suggestive nexus, I still cannot explain it simply and
without metaphor; but the analogues in Beowulf, which, after all, stem not
from English legend but from Gautish, southern Swedish sources, at least
support the idea that in pre­Christian Scandinavia, myth, and especially the
Baldr myth, was felt to be relevant to real-life grief and its expression in
poetry. I will not go into more detail on Beowulf in the present context, but
with all this in mind I would like to return to Rök and ask now about the
content and plan of the little anthology of stories varinn dedicated to
vámóðr.
Literary interpretation
there are of course many debatable spots in my interpretation of the Rök
text, but for the moment we are occupied here only with basic content.
Section One concerns Theoderic the Great, and its Question Two gives us
the teller’s basic slant on the Theoderic material. It is a form of wonder
perhaps specific to an oral culture: how can Theoderic have died nine gen­
erations ago but still be talked about. The Answer repeats the ‘then-and-
now’ opposition of Question 2, but the stanza, the only strict verse in the