Gripla - 20.12.2008, Blaðsíða 97

95HEARING VOICES
Out he rowed alone in his boat,
skin-cloaked Ingjaldr,
eighteen hooks he lost,
skin-cloaked Ingjaldr,
and a forty-yard line,
skin-cloaked Ingjaldr,
may he never return again,
skin-cloaked Ingjaldr.
People were startled by that, but it was held to be true that Hetta
the troll-woman must have said these words, believing, just as she
hoped, that Ingjaldr ought never to return, exactly as she had
planned it. (Complete Sagas of Icelanders II, 247, slightly modified)
The source of this second verse is mysterious, not only due to the elision
of the agent brought about by the passive constructions (komit var ... kveðit
þetta), but also because the group of people sitting inside the farm house
hear the verse come from outside and cannot see its speaker. The disem-
bodied speaker at first has only sonic characteristics; that is, all we know
about them is that they speak með dimmri raust. And the verse this voice
speaks achieves its effect less by what it means than by how it sounds, via
the musical repetition of the line Ingjaldr í skinnfeldi, a repetition appar-
ently unique in the Old Norse verse corpus (Ólafur Lárusson 1944, 162).
Sound-patterning over and above dróttkvætt norms is a typical feature
of prophetic and magical verse in the sagas. Common forms of this include
repetition of the final line of the stanza4 or unusual rhyme-patterns, such
as the feminine end-rhyming couplets of Hetta’s first stanza. Given the
nature of our sources, it is impossible to know whether magical verses in
4 Examples include the troll-wife’s verses in Hemings þáttr (Skj AI, 430), Gunnarr’s verse
from the haugr in Njals saga ch. 78 (Skj AI, 604) and the vision-verse in ch. 125 of the same
saga (Skj AI, 431), the dream verses in Draumr Þórsteins Siðu-Hallssonar (Skj AII, 214), a
number of verses in manuscripts of the Sturlunga compilation, especially grouped around
the battle of Örlygsstaðir (Skj AII, 145–6), and Sneglu-Halli’s dream verse (Skj AI, 389).
This last is a typical instance of Sneglu-Halla þáttr’s parodic way with convention, especially
conventions of poetic performance: Halli performs a fake dream verse, complete with repe-
tition of the final line blakir mér þari of hnakka ‘kelp is flapping around my neck’, to frighten
other travellers off a ship he wishes to get a passage on (ÍF 9, 292). For further instances of
final-line repetition see the lists in Faulkes (1991, 52), Skj (BII, 609), and Möbius (1879–81,
II, 129).