Gripla - 20.12.2004, Qupperneq 108

GRIPLA106
court. Konungs skuggsjá 27 explains that they are handgengnir menn but not
bor›fastir. This has implications for the operation of hospitality:
... ok eigi skulu fleir í flví húsi yfir bor› stíga9 til matar e›a drykkjar er
konungr sitr e›a hir› nema um jól ok páskir, flá skulu fleir eta ok
drekka í konungs höll me› hir› hans en eigi fless á millum (KS:41).
... and they shall not partake of food or drink at table in the same
building where the King sits or his hir› but for during Christmas and
Easter, then they shall eat and drink in the King’s hall with his hir›, but
not between.
These guests of the King are only welcome as guests, as visitors partaking of
food and hospitality, twice a year. Royal lack of confidence in these men as
participants in the contract of hospitality is institutionalized as part of their
official job description as set out in Konungs skuggsjá. If the konungs gestir
and their role are part of the broader field of associations consumers of Flat-
eyjarbók had with the word gestr, then imagining the past as a gestr in the
present is much more problematic than it has seemed thus far.
The trouble with the past in the present, as mentioned at the very begin-
ning of this essay, is temporal disorder, the conceptual threat of matter out of
place. Many of the implications of the term gestr work to domesticate the
matter of the past portrayed as guest by making it part of systems of social and
narrative order. The trouble presented by the konungs gestir in this context is
twofold. First, they are meant to distinguish between friends and enemies
within the kingdom, between people in the right place and those in the wrong
place, and then, in strikingly Douglassian terms, to cleanse the realm by doing
away with the matter out of place. Yet, Hir›skrá 44 suggests that they were
not exemplary in the first part of this work of imposing order. Second, they
seem often to be out of place themselves, welcome neither by the King nor
abroad in the land, and marginal among the húskarlar under the best of
circumstances. Under less exemplary conditions, for instance, if they failed to
9 I take stíga yfir bor› to mean much the same thing as setjast yfir bor›, which Fritzner glosses
as to set oneself at table, much as sitja yfir bor› is to sit at table. Fritzner himself lists stíga
yfir bor› in this context with several other phrases (stíga fram yfir bor›i›, hlaupa yfir bor›i›)
drawn from contexts in which the actor is more clearly vaulting the table or crossing before
the high table to address the King (Fritzner III 1896:169–70). I see no easy way of reading
this phrase that way, however.