Gripla - 20.12.2004, Side 103

THE PAST AS GUEST 101
through which heritable goods might flow, but only in one direction. In
Nornagests fláttr, those heritable goods are transparently symbolic of the same
heroic past as is contained in his narratives, where their passage from guest to
host is smoothed by the social framing devices discussed earlier. Gesterf›
rhymes well with these other strategies for thinking about the past in the
present.
Gesterf› would apply obviously only to mortal guests and, as argued thus
far, to tangible goods. Tóki, like Nornagestr, is mortal, but he carries no com-
parable material treasures. He does carry intangibles like those Nornagestr
bears, that is, narrative and frœ›i. I would suggest here that the notion of gest-
erf› might have applied to the narrative situation in which Tóki finds himself,
not at all as a law, but in a broader conceptual way influencing how the
audience of Tóka fláttr understood the text. That is, familiarity with a law or
custom like gesterf› may have predisposed this audience to expect that should
a guest die, the goods he carried with him would pass to his host—including
intangible goods. Several things point to inheritance having been a natural
way for medieval Icelanders to conceive of the continuity and passage of such
intangibles as knowledge and narratives. We need not even reach for anach-
ronistic ideas of ‘cultural heritage.’ Plenty of intangibles are heritable in saga,
among them hamingja and gæfa as well as skill at poetry or at matters spiritual
(Clunies Ross 1998:93–6). Even God’s mercy is referred to as eilíf erf›
(eternal inheritance) elsewhere in Flateyjarbók, in fiáttr fii›randa ok fiórhalls,
(Flb. I:421; ÍF XV:cxc). In a society so concerned with genealogy and its
expression in literature (Clunies Ross 1998:95), it makes sense that inheri-
tance would be a useful way of thinking about the persistence of narrative
goods and frœ›i through time.
If we are willing to permit the extension of metaphorical gesterf› to the
intangibles of frœ›i, then both Nornagestr and Tóki as mortal guests become
one-way channels for the movement of narrative goods not just as performers
but as participants in the system of inheritance. Along with the social em-
bedding discussed above, these implications of and associations with the term
gestr make for excellent tools for thinking about the past in the present, once
the past has been conceived of as a gestr.