Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1994, Qupperneq 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.