Gripla - 20.12.2006, Page 134

GRIPLA132
may also reflect an authorial claim to the control of Gísli’s poetry: the author
knows the sequence of verses and their narrative shape. Síðasta vísa Gísla is a
phrase with a cyclical quality, made up of three words which are phonetically
and grammatically tied together, each word is in the possession of the other,
an interconnectedness which reflects the positioning of Gísli’s poems as the
total possessions of Gísli. Gísli’s poetry performs a distinct part of the
meaning of saga as a whole; they are private statements of a world of thought
that we can tie to Gísli’s self-conception, but which also form part of the
character’s social world and part of that overall meaning developed and
controlled by the saga author. The saga is polyphonic, allowing changing
levels of control in the relationship between the author and his material. And
in respect of both authorial distance and the self-consciousness credited to
Gísli, we see the saga performing a secondary authorship, a character’s act of
representation that we could connect to our ideas about authorship in medieval
Iceland.
Gísli’s poems are situated separately and yet inside the world constructed
by the author in much the same way as Egill Skallagrímsson’s chamber is lo-
cated separately and within the totality of the farmstead at Borg, a secret, pri-
vate, and safe place in opposition to the exposed communal spaces of the
household. The situation this time is the loss of a family member, Egill’s son:
Mjƒk erum tregt
tungu at hrœra
eða loptvætt
ljóðpundara;
esa nú vænligt
of Viðurs þýfi
né hógdrœgt
ór hugar fylgsni. (Egils saga 1933:246)
Egill tók at hressask, svá sem fram leið at yrkja kvæðit, ok er lokit var
kvæðinu, þá fœrði hann þat Ásgerði ok Þorgerði ok hjónum sínum; reis
hann þá upp ór rekkju ok settisk í ƒndvegi; kvæði þetta kallaði hann
Sonatorrek. (Egils saga 1933:256-257)
[My mouth strains / To move the tongue, / To weigh and wing / The
choice word: / Not easy to breathe / Odin’s inspiration / In my heart’s
hinterland, / Little hope there. (Hermann Pálsson and P. Edwards 1976:
204)