Gripla - 20.12.2004, Qupperneq 113

THE PAST AS GUEST 111
the hospitality contract is problematic, as though he is involved in the ex-
change of food, it is he, the guest, who provides it to his host, and it is poi-
soned food at that. Accordingly, the emphasis falls on his defectiveness as a
participant in hospitality.
The sense of gestr as a stranger is clear when the King asks the cooks if
they had seen anyone unfamiliar (ma›r ... sá er fleir bæri eigi kennsl á), and in-
deed they had seen an aged fellow whom they had not recognized (ma›r
aldra›r sá er vér kenndum eigi) (Flb. I:376). When the King puts questions to
him, gestrinn fekk ór öllu leyst — the guest or stranger answered all of them
well, and this is the common noun with definite article, and it is spelled out.
But sometimes the name appears. When he begins his narration, the text reads
G(estr) sag›i, which looks like a name, and when he comes to sit at the King’s
footboard and is called gestr hinn gamli (G híN gamli) which also looks like a
personal name with a nickname. The section heading reads Frá vi›tali kon-
ungs ok gests, which is ambiguous.
The instability here might simply be scribal carelessness, but it also seems
to be peculiar to the Flateyjarbók version of the text. The text as it stands in
AM 62 fol uses the common noun throughout (Ólafur Halldórsson 1961: 86–
87; Ólafur Halldórsson 1993:38rb). It may be coincidence, or the version in
Flateyjarbók may be influenced by Nornagests fláttr, which ended only a couple
of leaves previously, with its extended play on the name and the several senses
of the word. But considered or unconsidered, the variation in the rendering of
the word/name gestr here, together with the stranger’s very Odinic appearance
— aged, well-spoken (or›spakr), one-eyed and weak-sighted, and wearing a
low hat — makes for uncertainty about the figure’s true identity, and that
uncertainty makes for narrative tension.
The mysterious stranger turns out to be Ó›inn, who in turn is really Satan,
óvin alls mannkyns sjálfr fjándinn, and thus here the name Gestr is the
dulnefni. The fact that the Devil in disguise would be afoot in this episode has
in fact already been given away in the section immediately prior, on which
more below, but that explanatory prose does not mention Ó›inn. Thus the
revelation of identity at the end of the episode is not completely empty. It is
rather the fulfillment of exactly the suspicions likely to have been aroused by
the word or name gestr. The stranger is revealed to be Ó›inn, and the tale is
revealed to be the sort of tale in which a mysterious figure turns out after the
fact to have been Ó›inn. This narrative possibility is one for which we had
been primed already in Nornagests fláttr, both by the play on gestr at the outset