Gripla - 20.12.2014, Blaðsíða 101

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sorted challenges to prove their mettle and bridal-quests, interspersed with
feasting – are upper-class, but the realities of life in a subarctic climate de-
mand that those who wish to emulate these characters adjust their expecta-
tions: by grettir’s time, a life of raiding and fighting is not a viable option.
As Russell Poole has noted, Grettis saga’s presentation of Grettir’s laziness
alternating with impressive feats, his stealing, and his harrassment of farm-
ers, suggest some ambivalence about the role of upper-class men and their
lack of participation in the everyday drudgery of Icelandic agrarian life.48
on this score, grettir stands in opposition to his father Ásmundr and his
brother Atli, who, like Þórðar saga hreðu’s protagonist, make themselves
useful members of the community. Þórðr, a late settler in Iceland (like
Grettir’s ancestors), is an ‘umsyslu maðr micill ok hinn mesti þiod smidr’
[an industrious man and master craftsman] whose carpentry skills are in
strong demand; thus there are positive, aspirational images of upper-class
men to be found here.49
reading the eleven sagas of AM 152 fol. in close succession has the ef-
fect that the sagas’ common features – plot elements and motifs, recurrent
characterisations, themes and values – rise past their external features and
to the surface. these are explored, first, through images of brothers and
their opponents, and, second, encounters between human and monstrous
characters. the analysis presented in the following is by no means exhaus-
tive, and indeed, the sagas – individual works that they are – can never be
made entirely to overlap ideologically and ethically, or to cohere with each
other in every respect; there will always be inherent contradictions in the
type of analysis presented here. However, by teasing out these common
themes, and reading them against the manuscript’s historical context, I
aim to show that there are likely impulses behind the selection of these
particular sagas which shed some light on the identity and ideology of its
possible patron and his community.
48 Poole, ‘Myth, Psychology,’ 11–12; see also Carolyne Larrington, ‘Awkward Adolescents:
Male Maturation in norse Literature,’ in Youth and Age in the Medieval North, ed. shannon
Lewis-Simpson, the northern World (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 154.
49 f. 89v; Þórðar saga hreðu, 172. According to the saga, Þórðr builds a ferry in Miðfjörðr and
several living quarters, and since he ‘vard skiott audigr madr af smijdum sijnum’ [soon
became a rich man from his carpentry], he seems to have worked as a carpenter; f. 97v,
Þórðar saga hreðu, 222.
IDEoLogY AnD IDEntItY In LAtE MEDIEVAL WESt ICELAnD