Gripla - 20.12.2004, Page 115

THE PAST AS GUEST 113
highest honor and joy given to him by God along with all those who
were of like mind in violence against the Creator. And thus, as he was
before more beautiful and handsome than all angels in the highest
virtue, so he because ever after uglier and more hideous than all devils
in the deepest hell, so full of wickedness and jealousy with his devils
and his messengers that he tried most of all things to destroy every
good plan and often pours out the poison of his trickery for mankind
with various appearance or seeming, because if he ever sees the flock
of people in his service decrease but the sheep of the divine herd
increase due to the speeches and fair exhortations of the messengers of
Jesus Christ, then he seeks by all means to entrap with some trickery
those by whose hand he thinks he has suffered shame or harm of and
intends thereafter to lead into the darkness of unreckonable error those
same persons whom he thought to have lost and lost before, as may be
seen in what follows.
I wonder if it would impose too much on the text here to see a troublesome
divine hir› member in some little way parallel to those troublesome gestir of
the laws. It’s admittedly difficult to imagine the half-pay húskarlar as those set
highest in the King’s honor, and their liminal position in the hir› and cavalier
carrying out of their duties are hardly comparable to the revolt in Heaven.
However, the favored angel who falls so far does so because he crosses the
crucial line between high-set servant and enemy of the sovereign, and that is
the line the gestir seem to be flirting with in Hir›ská 44. It is after all explicitly
God’s least-well behaved hir›ma›r who visits the King here, and he does so
under the name Gestr.
The primary associations with the word as it attaches to the embodiment
of the past at Ögvaldsnes are considerably more negative than in Nornagests
fláttr. The dulnefni plays a significant role, the strangeness and unknown
quality of the stranger is stressed, and even some of the hospitality-related as-
pects of gestr are problematic. Gesterf› does not apply, and the oblique con-
nection to the hir›, if we may read so far here, would only increase the sense
of anxiety and spiritual danger attaching to this episode.
5.3 Ó›inn kom til Óláfs
Here the visitor calls himself Gestr (nefndisk Gestr), and this also is a dul-
nefni, as this is Ó›inn again, or rather, an unclean spirit that has taken his