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the past in the present. The word is too broad in its semantic range for that,
and it brings with it additional threats of disorder and disruption at the same
time that it provides some order and conceptual comfort. To have dealings
with the past in the form of a gestr is to invite trouble to your door, and indeed
some of the pleasing outcome we find in Tóka fláttr hinges on the narrative
having freed itself from this complicated and complicating word entirely. But
in these specific narratives the usefulness of gestr as a lexical, conceptual tool
for thinking about the past rests on a higher plane. The resolution in Tóka fláttr
is dependent on the tension the word gestr helps create in the previous epi-
sodes. The constellation of narratives as a whole is a greater narrative engine
that takes the reader or auditor through several possible ways of thinking
about the stuff of the past, serving up much of that very stuff along the way
and then providing a happy ending. Though that ending involves getting rid of
the word gestr, it has been the ambiguity and difficulty of that word that has
provided the combustible fuel for that engine all along.
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