Gripla - 20.12.2004, Side 119

Gripla - 20.12.2004, Side 119
THE PAST AS GUEST 117 identification of interpolations is a scholarly method for imposing discipline upon texts and manuscripts that appear to suffer from temporal disorder. An element that does not seem to fit in, one the content of which seems to be older or younger than the surrounding material, can be categorized as an interpolation, a visitor, as it were, from another text or another period. In the preparation of the scholarly editions so crucial to most scholar’s access to the textual matter of the past, many an interpolation has been removed from its supposedly ill-gotten seat of relative honor in the bosom of the main text and been shown to the outermost benches of the edition, in the afterword or the appendix. Such editorial practices have been part of the history of the nar- ratives under discussion here becoming difficult to find and, as a result, less frequently subject to scholarly inquiry. But having inquired into the metaphor of the past as guest for interpre- tation of those narratives, this essay returns to that matter here. This group of narratives concerns itself with the past in the present, a particularly urgent conceptual problem in the sagas of Óláfr in Flateyjarbók, where the past is ever irrupting and coming into dialogue, figuratively and pre-figuratively speaking, with the present. These works are a nexus of several typologies, both learned and popular. Óláfr Tryggvason is a forerunner of Óláfr helgi. Ól- áfr helgi as a saint is a type of Christ, and thus Óláfr Tryggvason as his fore- runner becomes a type of John the Baptist. The matter of whether the Saint King is in fact the reincarnation of his namesake the pagan Óláfr Geirsta›aálfr is also at issue, a telling example that not all relations between past and present are as spiritually benign as those just mentioned. The constellation of narratives in Flateyjarbók under discussion here is an attempt to grapple with the problematic relations that arise between past and present as a result of the typological thinking, broadly conceived, that attached to the Óláfs. The ramifications of this typological nexus and the mechanisms at work in it ex- tend beyond the metaphor of the past as guest, but the teasing out of a more representative sample is the subject of a larger project, of which this essay is a small part. This is the place to sum up, in closing, what the legal meanings and implications of gestr mean for an understanding of that dominant metaphor in these four texts. The legal associations of gestr are quite vexed. Nonetheless, we should not draw the simple conclusion that that the word and name is an ill-suited tool for thinking about the presence of the past. To be sure, figuring the past as a gestr is not a perfect solution the the conceptual problems inherent in thinking about
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