Gripla - 20.12.2007, Síða 18

GRIPLA
has been his helper, is pregnant by him. There follows a victorious duel with a
blámaðr of immense strength, and back in Iceland Búi repeats the victory over
twelve men. When he has been reconciled with his enemies he meets his fate
in the son he has had with Dofri’s daughter. Búi refuses to recognize the son,
who is only twelve years old, and demands that they wrestle. With the help of
his mother, who on this occasion is invisible, the son kills Búi and then leaves
Iceland again. Búi’s strength is great, but he is repeatedly saved from danger
by the protective magic of his fostermother and the help of his giantess lover,
and in the end his former lover interferes in his wrestling with their son and
causes his death. Thus the borders of the world of magic and giants are fre-
quently crossed in this saga, and the fate of the protagonist is decided by his
dealings with female supernatural beings, as is common in fairy tales.
Like the other late sagas Kjalnesinga saga has the surface characteristics of
an Íslendingasaga with tales about landnám and connection with known his-
torical figures such as Helgi bjóla son of Ketill Flatnose, and King Haraldr
Finehair; also, the fights between farmers on Kjalarnes are precisely located in
real landscape with known placenames. However, Búi is no usual saga hero.
He is fostered by a woman knowledgeable of magic who is somehow mys-
teriously connected with a mountain. Although not a Christian for good his-
torical reasons, Búi shows strong aversion to paganism in his youth and burns
a pagan temple, and in Norway he actually ‘goes into the mountains’, lives
there and begets a child. The duel between father and son is of course a well
known motif from heroic legend, and in the same way as Búi crosses borders,
the saga crosses or wipes out the borderline between heroic fornaldarsaga and
Íslendingasaga.
Þorskfirðinga saga or Gull-Þóris saga is incomplete because parts of it
have been erased from the only vellum manuscript (all the others are copies of
this ms. of a much later date). This saga is extremely rich in personal names –
some of them from Landnáma, some fictional – as well as placenames which
are interpreted as drawn from personal names. Thus the saga is given an his-
torical appearance, although several of the names arouse suspicion that the
saga is not to be taken seriously as history. The protagonist fights dragons in
his youth and thereby lays his hands on a gold-treasure which he guards
jealously. Back in Iceland he takes up farming and kills many people in the
conflicts he gets involved in. All his victories do little to strengthen his posi-
tion, however, but in his old age he disappears and is thought to have turned
into a dragon watching his gold in a waterfall named Gullfoss. An older
version of this saga that Sturla Þórðarson refers to in his Landnáma-version
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