Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Qupperneq 143

Riti Kroesen
141
his half-brother to be his substitute. After his refusal there is no other choice left:
for the king but to die himself, that is: the king is asked to die a sacrificial death
after his having killed a monster, an embodiment of chaos, something which a
king, as maintainer of the order of the gods, is obliged to do. Héðinn, his
substitute, must then become a king himself and marry the bride.
3. Helgi Haddingjaskati. At the end of the second Lay of Helgi Hundingsbani the
following statement is made:
Helgi ok Sigrún er kallat at væri endrborin. Hét hann þá Helgi Haddingjaskaði (better
var. Haddingjaskati), en hon Kára, Hálfdanar dóttir, svá sem kveðit er í Károlióðum,
ok var hon valkyria.
From this it follows that there must have been yet another Helgi, who also had
his valkyrie. People must also have felt that there was a strong link between the
different Helgis: Helgi Hundingsbani was named after Helgi Hjörvarðsson and
Helgi Haddingjaskati was said to be a reincarnation of Helgi Hundingsbani.48
Unfortunately the Lay of Kára, which must have contained the third Helgi’s story
has not been handed down.
Still some traces of it can be found in a much younger set of Icelandic rímur,
the Gríplur. This poem is thought to be a free adaptation of a lost Fornaldarsaga,
which must have turned Helgi’s story into a parody. Here Helgi is a villain, which
can never have been the case in the original tale. Afterwards a still younger
Fornaldarsaga, the Hrómundar saga Gripssonar, was made out of the rímurF
The hero of the rímur and the saga is Hrómundr Gripsson, at one time a rather
popular hero in Iceland.50 He fought against Helgi, whose surname here refers to
the fact that he is in the service of two brothers called the Haldingjar (!). Óðinn
is present in the story too, if only in the shape of the evil counsellor Blindr, and
what he says and does is a parody of what in heroic stories usually is quite a serious
matter. Kára or (var.) Lára protects her lover Helgi by soaring above him on the
battlefield disguised as a swan (!). She has the same claim of being a valkyrie as
the ladies of the Helgi stories, but she is called a witch here, a suspicious being.
Then something lugubrious and at the same time comical happens: he inadver-
tently slashes off her leg with his sword, and she falls down dead. This is the
turning-point of Helgi’s luck, and soon afterwards he, too, is dead. All in all, we
can be fairly sure that this story is a parody of an original story about a hero and
a valkyrie.
There is another woman in the story: Svanhvít the sister of the Danish king
48 Höfler (1952 a).
49 Rímasafn fslands (1905), I Bind, pp. 351—408, Hrómundar saga Gripssonar, FAN IV, pp.
405-22. For the problems connected with the reconstruction see LeRoy Anderson (1911 and
1912) and Browne (1948).
50 A saga about him was part of the entertainment at a wedding party in the Sturlunga saga.
Sturlunga saga I (1954), p. 28.