Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1994, Side 85

Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1994, Side 85
Skömm er óhófi ævi NARRATIVE SEGMENT (II. TRANSGRESSION) 83 PLOT (*Einarr searches for lost sheep/*Einarr spots sheep on the other side of *Freyá/*Einarr wades through *Freyá to rescue sheep) NARRATIVE SEGMENT: (III PUNISHMENT) I PLOT (*Einarr’s wet shoes betray him/*Einarr confesses his crime/Hrafnkell kills Einarr) Likewise, the outlawing and dispossession of Hrafnkell need not take its present saga form; it is only necessary that he be banished and humiliated. Even Hrafnkell’s revenge need not sacrifice Sámr’s brother. His son or another nephew would do just as well, provided he were a fitting object for the revenge, both in having sufficiently heroic stature and in provoking Hrafnkell’s attack. The twelve segments show that Hrafhkels saga actually contains material for two potentially different sagas. One narrates the rise and fa.ll of Hrafnkell, an unattractive bully, a rogue who suffers defeat, torture, and humiliation at the hands of tough-minded opponents, but who scrambles back to power and crushes his chief adversary. In this version Hrafnkell undergoes no radical change in character. He triumphs only because he is more cunning, more resourceful, and finally more unscrupulous and brutal than Sámr. In addition, his reclaiming of power is made possible primarily by Sámr’s generously/foolishly allowing him to live. True, he enjoys good fortune in exile and popularity among his new followers, but basically he acts out a charade while waiting to get even with Sámr; his conduct is, finally, outrageous. This reading of the saga assumes a bleak, even nihilistic, world in which power is the only tangible value. At least one reader so regards the saga (Bolton 1971), and those who find Hrafnkell unchanged throughout would seem obliged to arrive at a similar conclusion. I regard such a reading as deficient because it ignores much of the saga, namely those sections in which Hrafnkell’s appeal is undeniable, where he is forebearing, witty, appealing, likeable. That is, the saga of the unregenerate Hrafnkell can only be maintained if one either omits large sections of the saga or alters them in detail. In order to comprehend this point, we might imagine the existence of an earlier version we can call *Hrafhkels saga ójafhaðarmanns mikils,5 a lost saga that 5 I wish to make clear that I am not attempting to retrace the Entstebungsgeschichte of the saga in imitation of Heusler (1902) or Andersson (1980), but rather to isolate the two distinct strains in order to illustrate some points about the structure of the saga. The great Swiss scholar proposed a theory of composition for Völsunga saga, and Andersson undertook a reconstruction of the Brynhild story.
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Skáldskaparmál

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