Gripla - 20.12.2004, Page 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