Gripla - 01.01.1998, Qupperneq 159

FOLKTALE AND PARABLE
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linked with Gautrekr’s, who as a boy disposed of his uncle’s prized ox by
killing it.6
Gautreks saga is particularly rich in its use of folktale motifs and indeed
whole tale-types. The story of Gautrekr begins with an analogue of AT 1544,
„The Man Who Got a Night’s Lodging", and continues with a series of motifs
illustrating the behavior of miserly fools. The story of Refr seems to be based
on Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka, which has been the subject of several folkloristic
studies and itself has multiple analogues in folktale (Ranisch 1900:lxi-ii). Yet
these folktale-aspects, which in themselves seem naive or unliterary, have
been adapted and modified to various degrees by the saga-author. John
Lindow (1978:173) notes (see also Harris 1979, Strömback 1968):
We must recall, however, that in no case does an Old Norse text
‘translate’ an intemational tale. Even in the case of clearest influence,
what the Norse text does is to rework the intemational material,
casting it in a Norse context according to the rules of Norse literature
and work it into some fuller text which makes complete sense in its
own terms.
What is unusual about Gautreks saga is not that it conforms to Lindow’s
generalization, but that the saga-author uses folktale structures and motifs as
a vehicle for a certain aspect of his theme, and abandons them when his
particular point is made.
The satiric aspect of Gautreks saga which Régis Boyer (1979) detects is in
fact limited to the first narrative strand, which opens with a parody of that
commonplace of romance, the hero finding adventure when he becomes lost
in the forest during a hunt. In this case, King Gauti loses not only his way, but
also his spear and all of his clothes except for his underwear.7 Eventually he
6 Neri turns his chair away from the sight of the missing shield on his wall, just as Skafnört-
ungr pulls his hood over his eyes to avoid watching Gauti eat his food. See Milroy (1966:214)
for an interpretation of Skafnörtungr’s action as originally to ward off the evil eye, a motif which
,Js found in a more or less clear form in Celtic stories of [this] type“.
7 See Milroy (1966:213-4) and the literature he cites for the age and extent in folklore and
medieval romance of this topos. If we attempt to take this episode seriously, we would read the
forest as the place outside civilization, opposed to the court, and possibly as the other-world or
psychic landscape of the hero. The loss of King Gauti’s clothes, weapon, horse, hawk, and
hounds — the identifying signs of his status — suggest that his identity is now lost or without
meaning, and that if he emerges from the forest, it will be as a new or rebom man, changed in
some way by his adventure. But such a reading is not validated, for Gauti emerges unchanged
and unchallenged, having encountered no monsters from his subconscious, but only a family of
foolish peasants.