Gripla - 20.12.2008, Page 112

GRIPLA110
bull and named Glæsir, is as gentle as a lamb but jafnan, er hann beljaði, lét
hann stórum afskræmiliga; en er kerling heyrði hann, brá henni jafnan mjǫk við,
‘whenever he bellowed, it sounded really hideous, and every time the old
woman heard it, she became very distressed’.
The third and final time we hear from Glæsir, hann gall ákafliga hátt,
at svá gǫrla heyrði inn í húsin, sem hjá væri, ‘he roared very loudly, so that he
was heard as clearly inside the house as if he were inside’; we note that
Glæsir’s voice is consistently heard from outside, in accordance with the
familiar acousmatic schema. The old lady recites two verses (Skj AI, 425;
BI, 394). In the first she describes Glæsir’s voice as violently and physi-
cally forceful, beating upon the bodies of its hearers: Haus knýr hjarðar vísi
… blóðvita rǫddu, ‘the prince of the herd [BULL] bangs on the skull with a
blood-knowing voice’.20 She alone is able to interpret Glæsir’s wordless
speech, which she mediates for her audience: sá kennir þér sinna / svarðristit
ben jarðar, ‘he [Glæsir] teaches you [Þóroddr] to find the swardless wound
of earth [GRAVE]’, or more directly, fé fjǫtrar / fjǫr þitt, ‘the animal fetters
your life’. But despite her ability to interpret Glæsir’s bellowing, her own
voice, in contrast to his, lacks force: Opt es auðar þopta / œr, es tungu hrœrir
… es ér látið, ‘Often the prop of riches [WOMAN, i.e. the foster-mother] is
mad when she moves her tongue, so you people say’.21 The old woman’s
voice can be ignored and – what will come as no surprise to the seasoned
saga-reader – it is. Þóroddr insists on keeping Glæsir, and the following
summer, to the accompaniment of beljan ‘bellowing’ and skræk mikinn
‘great shrieks’, the bull gores him to death and disappears into the sea.
The emphasis in both verse and prose on Glæsir’s vocal violence is
striking and at first glance surprising. Bellowing, no matter how hideously,
is not the worst thing a bull can do. But the stress on vocalisation expands
on the idea, introduced by the ingestion of Þórólfr’s ashes, that Glæsir is an
animal/human hybrid: the voice the foster-mother hears is Þórólfr’s, com-
ing up from Glæsir’s entrails. As Glæsir is partly human, he is endowed
with vox, rather than merely sonus, but only the second-sighted foster-
mother can hear and mediate it, while all the others hear is animal noises,
20 AM 448 has raddar gen. in place of rǫddu dat. The reading of AM 448 provides the aðal-
hending missing from the line in the vellum mss but is syntactically and semantically dif-
ficult.
21 Látið is the reading of the vellum mss; AM 448 4to has litit (i.e. litið), which seems to mean
something similar (‘as you see it’).