Gripla - 20.12.2007, Síða 64

GRIPLA62
named Gestr who is a kind of ghost of paganism and a personification of old
stories: he converts to Christianity and dies, and thus deliberately lets the
written tradition overtake him, in a kind of validation of the Christian belief
system. He sacrifices himself like Christ or a saint to the new traditions.
Though in the other tale the old god of fame flees, and thus seems to retain
some of his power, in this version a kind of exorcism of fame takes place.
Gestr brings the past into the present and renounces it.26 Hallfreðar saga also
provides evidence that there were ‘spiritually positive’ as well as ‘negative as-
pects of the heathen age’ (Rowe 2004:461): Hallfreðr’s conversion to Chris-
tianity is more of an ongoing, competitive dialogue with Óláfr Tryggvason
than a one-time event, and the fame of both men plays a strong part in their
dealings.27
The spiritual conflicts that occur in Hallfreðar saga and the þættir help to
articulate the new Christian order that attacks the saga ideal of communication
during the conversion age: God, by being immortal (an attribute he enacts
through the resurrection) produces deeds that nobody can top; heavenly im-
mortality supplants immortality through fame; texts can replace memories,
disrupt chronologies, and displace oral histories at any moment; ultimately, all
signs are subsumed into Christ, who is the Word. During the clash of literary
and oral traditions, then, oral people could interpret the logocentricism of the
scriptural sign as a destroyer of the elasticity of the oral tradition, which can
produce earlier and earlier, and therefore potentially greater and greater heroes,
26 See Flateyjarbók I:384, 398; Schlauch 1931:971. Several critics argue that ‘the pagan world
is presented as deserving of Christian regard’ in this tale (Rowe 2004:470; Harris and Hill
1089:103-122).
27 For instance, Hallfreðr praises himself for securing the famous king as his godfather. At one
point, the skald even directly connects his Christian beliefs with a praise-poem that he has
prepared in Óláfr’s honour. Hallfreðr says that he will lose his Christian instruction if Óláfr
does not hear this work, and claims that what he has learned about Christianity is ekki skáld-
ligri, 36 ‘not more poetic’ than his praise-poem, which the king then agrees to hear (155).
Later, Óláfr voices approval of Hallfreðr’s stanzas that speak of Christ’s dominance and
labels the ones that betray nostalgia for the old gods with terms such as allill vísa, ‘terrible
verse’ (157, 158). But the reader cannot help but notice that these judgements are parallel to
the pronouncement that the king made earlier about Hallfreðr’s praise-poem: gott, ‘good’
(155), so that Óláfr’s religion and spiritual influence seem to be wrapped up in his reputation.
One might note that even the stanzas that depict Christ positively present Him as in conflict
with the old gods (Hallfreðar saga:158-159; Poole 2002) and that direct evaluations of
skaldic verse such as the ones that the king conveys are rare in the sagas. For instance, almost
all of the superbly composed stanzas by Egill in Egils saga pass by entirely without
comment.