Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Qupperneq 52

Stari ek brag. Protest and Subordination
in Hallfreðar saga
MARIANNE KALINKE
Hallfreðr’s first and last poetic utterances fittingly bracket his biography, as it is
told in Óláfisaga Tryggvasonar en mestaHis first stanza expresses his belligerence
toward those who would attempt to control his life, while the last stanza lays that
same belligerence to rest as he recognizes the higher power governing his life.
Between the first and last stanzas, Hallfreðar saga tells the story of the poet’s
metanoia both in deed and in spirit. The young man whose fate in Iceland is
determined by others, and whom he threatens witli retaliation through poetry,
protests his impotence in Iceland by asserting himselfvis-á-vis King Óláfr, whose
respect and favor he gains in the process. Given the one power to which even the
king bows, namely the Christian God, Hallfreðr learns to submit to a will higher
than his own, but mediated through the person of the king. Hallfreðr’s proud
“stæri ek brag” (1:341,19), his first poetic utterance, is transmuted into a
submissive “valldi guþ” (2:313,14) on his deathbed. The story of Hallfreðr’s life
documents the stages of a conversion, a reorientation of his soul in both the secular
and spiritual realms. This conversion involves a gradual change of attitude toward
authority, specifically paternal authority.
Hallfreðar saga is one of four works — the others being Gunnlaugs saga
ormstungu, Kormáks saga, and Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa— in which the love-tri-
angle motif occurs. Scholars have even gone so far as to consider the poet’s lifelong
love for another man’s wife thecentral motif in the four skálda sagas.1 2 In each case
the protagonist is a poet who expresses his longing for or relationship to the wife
of another in both verse and deed. The conflict in each saga appears to be
generated by the love of two men for the same woman. In 1975 Paul Schach
rejected this traditional view in respect to Hallfreðar saga and suggested instead
that the work be interpreted as the drama of “the struggle between paganism . . .
and Christianity, embodied in the stern, dominating, inescapable figure of the
missionary king” Óláfr Tryggvason.3 Close scrutiny of one version of Hallfreðar
saga, as it is conceived by the compiler of Óláfi saga Tryggvasonar en mesta,
confirms that the love triad is to be rejected as the generating principle of plot.
The confrontation between paganism and Christianity, however, is not the heart
1 All references are to Óláf's saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, ed. Ólafiir Halldórsson, Editiones
Arnamagnæanæ, A, 1—2 (Kobenhavn: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1958; 1961).
2 See, for example, Bjarni Einarsson, To skjaldesagaer. En analyse af Kormáks saga og Hallfreðar
saga (Bergen-Oslo-Tromso: Universitetsforlaget, 1976), p. 34.
3 Paul Schach, “Antipagan Sentiment in the Sagas of Icelanders,” Gripla, 1 (1975), 130.