Gripla - 01.01.1998, Page 160

158
GRIPLA
makes his way to the house of a family of foolish pagan peasants, and the
subsequent events form an inversion of „The Man Who Got a Night’s Lod-
ging“. Aame and Thompson (1961) say:
The rascal feigns deafness and eats the best food. He accepts hos-
pitality before it is offered. He takes the host’s horse out of the stable
and puts his own in. He is to pay for his lodging with a goatskin; he
takes one of the host’s own goats. At table they put poor food before
him but he continues to get the best. At night he manages to sleep with
the wife or daughter. When the woman puts out food for her husband
in the night he gets it himself. He makes the women believe that the
man knows all about them, and they confess their misdeeds. The host
becomes angry and is going to kill the rascal’s horse; he kills his own
instead.
The inversion is an ethical one that leaves the structure of the tale intact. In
contrast to the folktale’s rascally, selfserving hero and the more or less honest
host whom he shamelessly takes advantage of, King Gauti is „vitr maðr ok
vel stilltr, mildr ok máldjarfr“8 (Gautreks saga:l), while the host is the
miserly peasant Skafnörtungr. Gauti does accept hospitality before it is
offered, helps himself to food unasked, and sleeps with his host’s daughter,
but he does nothing to trick or threaten him. Instead it is the peasant’s own
cowardly, stingy nature that creates the havoc surrounding Gauti’s visit. The
saga-author has added the reek of folk humor to the story in order to
emphasize the destructiveness of the lack of charity, as in the episode of the
foolish servant who kills the dog for „betraying" the location of the house to
a stranger (Gautreks saga:3), and Skafnörtungr’s response to Gauti’s reason-
able request for a pair of shoes: he pulls out the laces before he gives the
shoes to the king. The saga-author draws the moral of this incident in a verse
which Gauti utters (Gautreks saga:6):
Skúa tvá,
er mér Skafnörtungr gaf,
þvengjum er hann þá nam;
ills manns
kveð ek aldri verða
grandalausar gjafir.9
8 „A wise man and good-tempered, generous and free-spoken“.
9 „Two shoes Skinflint gave me, which he deprived of laces; I say there will never be guiie-
less gifts from an evil man.“