Gripla - 20.12.2004, Page 93

MERRILL KAPLAN
THE PAST AS GUEST
Mortal men, kings’s men, and four gestir in Flateyjarbók1
1. INTRODUCTION
FOUR narratives in Flateyjarbók depict the past as a guest of the Norwegian
king. The four share a few basic plot elements. A mysterious and aged stranger
comes to the court of the Norwegian king. The stranger tells stories about the
great pagan heroes and sovereigns. The king is always an Óláfr, either Óláfr
Tryggvason or Óláfr helgi, and he always listens with great interest. The
stranger is always a gestr in at least the two senses of being both a stranger
and a guest, and in three of the four he is even named Gestr. In some cases the
stranger is benign, but in others he turns out to be something quite malevolent.
In all cases, he is a representative of the fornöld and an irruption of the
heathen past into the Christian present. His presence creates a condition of
temporal disorder in which past and present exist simultaneously, heaped up
on top of each other in one time and place. My larger project is the examina-
tion of this group of narratives as attempts to grapple with the conceptual
problem presented by the presence of the past. The use of the word/name gestr
in these episodes is striking. The dominant metaphor in all of them is the past
as guest. Interpreting this material and how it takes on the inherently dis-
ordered situation of the presence of the past will depend on a solid under-
standing of the semantic and conceptual range of this lexical item. This essay
attempts to throw a bit of legal light on the semantic range of gestr by
investigating the part of that range that extends into law texts: gestir as par-
ticipants in the system of inheritance and gestir as members of the royal hir›.
1 Many of these ideas were presented first as part of a lecture series on law and saga under the
joint auspices of Málstofa Lagastofnunar and Mi›aldastofa Hugvísindastofnunar at the Uni-
versity of Iceland, March 14, 2003.