Gripla - 20.12.2008, Blaðsíða 105

103HEARING VOICES
poem ended the third time, everything disappeared from them deeper into
the cave’ (ÍF 13, 450; Complete Sagas of Icelanders, II, 447).
Disacousmatisation thus does not take place in the prose, where the
impersonal leið frá þeim is as circumspect as Bárðar saga’s passive construc-
tions. But the first of the repeated final lines in the poem contains the name
Hallmundr (Hallmundr í gný fjalla, ‘Hallmundr in the din of the moun-
tains’), and it seems reasonable to identify this being with the first-person
speaker in the rest of the poem, a bjargálfr ‘rock-elf’ (st. 11) who einn á ...
hús í hrauni ‘has a house alone in the lavafield’ (st. 12). Furthermore, the
parallel between the flames and terrifying noises described at length in the
first half of the poem (which probably represents a volcanic eruption, see
Guðmundur Finnbogason 1935; ÍF 13, cciii-ccxii) and the glowing eyes and
fearsome voice of its speaker also suggests the same body is the origin of
both, and that his performance is a multimedia re-enactment of the erup-
tion. Within the poem, Hallmundr’s step makes the rocks resound (gnýr,
þás gengr enn hári / gramr um bratta hamra, ‘it roars when the hoary prince
goes round the steep crags’, st. 1), and in the frame narrative, his dreadful
voice terrifies his hearers, not least thanks to the repeated last line.
Stefán Einarsson observed that þessi ógnum þrungna endurtekning (‘this
terror-steeped repetition’) is common in medieval and post-medieval
dream- and ghost-verses (1951, 114), and wondered why the poem in
Bergbúa þáttr exhibits this feature, as it belongs to neither of these genres.
He suggested it may be because of the occult learning in the poem – its
second half describes Þórr’s battles with giants – or because the speaker
is himself a half-giant (blendingur). But it seems more reasonable to see in
repeated last lines one of a number of strategies to foreground the aural,
than to insist as Stefán did that final-line repetition is a special case, with
its ultimate origins in (Finnish) seiðr. Other sound effects such as repeti-
tion of every second line or rhymed couplet patterns (as in the examples
from Bárðar saga above), or iðurmælt-like effects (for example the dream-
verse Gunnlaugr addresses to Illugi in Gunnlaugs saga ch. 13) are also
characteristic of dream-, ghost- and prophetic verses; final-line repetition
is perhaps just better-known because the instances of it have been indexed
several times,13 whereas no comprehensive survey of dream and prophetic
verses exists. The examples of final-line repetition are also strikingly vari-
13 See the studies referenced in note 4.