Gripla - 20.12.2007, Page 55

ANTIQUARIANISM, POETRY, AND WORD-OF-MOUTH FAME
stretch of ice in order to kill an adversary, Þráinn Sigfússon, with one blow: a
display of virtuoso athleticism. Skarpheðinn’s comrade, Kári, immediately
assesses the deed with karlmannliga er at farit (233), ‘it was very heroic to do
that.’ Apparently, this speaker merely voices his knee-jerk response to the
events, and the result is a declaration of the obvious. It is not particularly re-
markable, original, thoughtful, witty, or well-phrased, especially when it is
compared to comments in similar situations. For instance, a comparable judge-
ment appears in the same saga when Kolskeggr assesses one of his brother
Gunnarr’s athletic feats as hart ríðr þú (138), ‘you ride fast,’ but this rather
unoriginal assessment occurs in the narrative for an obvious purpose. It recalls
a similar judgement by an adversary of Gunnarr’s, Skammkell (135), as
Gunnarr makes plain by noting the echo (138), while the inadvertent repeti-
tion of his enemy’s phrase reminds Gunnarr of an outstanding slight that can-
not be forgotten or ignored. And, significantly, any other spontaneous judge-
ments by individual characters of heroes or their acts that occur in Njáls saga
also have apparent thematic purposes. The assessments of lawyers during the
court-case against the burners of Njáll and his family intensify the see-saw
action of this section and thus help to build suspense (363-401). The fact that
enemies praise characters in the saga adds to the credibility of these assess-
ments and speaks to the objectivity and fair-mindedness of the speakers (335,
336, 396, 422, 435, 444). The only other spontaneous judgement that seems to
lack a thematic purpose in the saga is again an individual assessment of one of
Skarpheðinn’s deeds by Kári whose phrase again comes over as rather ordin-
ary (327).
Kári’s appreciation of Skarpheðinn’s great leap is so immediate and
unadorned that it sounds like a personal thrill of victory: a rendering not so
much of his own thoughts as those of his comrade. The appreciation then re-
presents a moment of direct empathy between these characters: one im-
mediately and apparently effortlessly places himself into the situation of the
other.14 In fact, the appreciation works well as an example of Emmanuel
Levinas’s idea that empathy involves an awareness that ‘The way in which the
other presents himself exceed[s] the idea of the other in me’(1969:50), an
observation that fits with heroic competition in general and Skarpheðinn’s
heroic attributes in particular. One of his major functions in the saga is to ex-
ceed others. In his case, the saga even associates his competitive abilities, such
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14 Empathy is ‘access to an exterior being,’ as Emmanuel Levinas calls it, that re-enacts a kind
of fundamental ‘moral consciousness’ (1990:293).