Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 266
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of all five of these actors appear in the Gautish story, where the slaying of
vilinn, the local name of the Baldrfigure, occurs at the hands of an actor
denominated jǫtunn, but the focus of the story is not on the slaying or on
revenge but on the compensation for vilinn, namely the engendering of a
brother, dedicated (as in Sonatorrek 17) to replace him and in Östergötland
named thor. the bereaved father, the odinfigure is not named directly
but called ‘the fanerespecting kinsman’ in the climactic line of the inscrip
tion, and his miraculous act of fathering the replacement brother happens
at the ripe age of ninety. Of the sacred rape of Rindr we learn only through
the phrase at kvanar husli ‘through the sacrifice of a woman’; but von
friesen tells us that a local place name Vrindarvé makes it probable that
Rindr was known in Östergötland under her West Nordic name.23
for a literary critic such a collection of narrative materials immediately
poses the question, why just these stories and why in just this collocation.
the numbering of minni’s in the heroic material shows that a selection was
made, and the lack of numbering in the myth section suggests a different
source. In any case, it is axiomatic that every inclusion implies exclusions,
selection. This question, the why of selection and arrangement, only
became available to scholars with Wessén’s 1958 break with the older, pre
dominantly functional readings; Wessén gave us a shapely literary collec
tion instead of fragmentary myths and incitements, but to my knowledge
Lönnroth in 1977 was the first to ask the literary why-question and has
been the most successful at answering it. Up to a point, I agree with him
that “All three legends ... were concerned with posterity ...” (Lönnroth 1977,
50). But my understanding of the contents of the sections, especially
Section 3, ended up being sufficiently different to elicit an alternative and
less ‘heroic’ variant analysis that emphasized the elementary facts of life
and death as understood through a myth shaped within the archaic family
– concerned, that is, with the wonder of genetic continuity after the death
of the beloved son. In the absence of any facts about vámóðr, I suggested
that eliade’s paradigm of homo religiosus, while it could teach nothing con
crete about vámóðr, could at least reveal a mentality in the perceived
homology between the real and mythical fathers and sons. The sparse
wording of Section 3 cannot offer insight into Varinn’s mind comparable
to that offered by Sonatorrek; still, we do have the expensive monument,
23 on Rindr, Harris 2006b, 83–84; von friesen 1920, 61.