Gripla - 01.01.2003, Side 52

50
GRIPLA
Upp SQgðo ÍQg ... hlífa — gnóg til gumna feigðar — gálkn ‘Destroyers
of defences declared their laws — sufficient for the death of men’.
(Hallfreðr Óttarsson).6
... ginðo Þriðja hauðrsáþjóðirþunn gálkn járnmunnum ‘there gaped
the fine-edged destroyers of the shield — Óðinn’s earth — with iron
mouths at the hosts of men’. (Halldórr ókristni).7 8
... váro reynd í rQndom randgálkn ‘destroyers of shields were well-
tried against shields’. (dream-verse, Gunnlaugs saga)?
Hallfreðr is composing an elegy for his king and friend, Óláfr Tryggvason,
in which the hostile gálkn have the voice of fate and its judgements. Halldórr,
composing a flokkr in honour of the — still living — Jarl Eiríkr, Óláfr’s
enemy, deliberately echoes some of Hallfreðr’s phrases, but makes his gálkn
physically solid with razor-jaws of iron — clearly, not just spirits — and uses
a kenning for ‘shield’ that has no associations of defence. In the dream-verse
in Gunnlaugs saga there are no unearthly overtones, only the weary word-play
of the dead man’s ghost. The idiom has worn out.
Hallfreðr’s father, Óttarr, was bom in Hálogaland, a close neighbour of
the Lapps, and perhaps a descendant of the family of Ohthere, the explorer,
who told the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred (c. 896) of his visits to the homes of
Lappish hunters and fishermen on White Sea coasts, where he listened to their
stories9. A hundred years later, Hallfreðr Óttarsson, in his Oláfsdrapa, uses for
the first recorded time, the word gálkn, which, two hundred years later, reap-
pears as a specifically Lappish phenomenon, in the composite finngálkn.
The finngálkn is an imagined monster: it comes from the adventurous
entertainment world of the finnfQr, the caravans of traders and tourists who for
centuries had sought out the Lapps for the fame of their shamanism, as well as
their furs.10 Thefinngálkn is, it would seem, a garbled version of the ancient
6 Óláfsdrápa, c. 1001, v. 8, Skjaldedigtning B I 152.
7 Eiríksflokkr, c. 1003, v. 7, Skjaldedigtning B I 194; cf. ÍF XXVI 367 note.
8 Skjaldedigtning B I 398; ÍF III 104; c. 1270-80.
9 See A. S. C. Ross, The Terftnnas and Beormas ofOhthere, reprinted, with an Additiona! Note
by the author, and an Afterword by Michael Chesnutt. Viking Society for Northem Research,
University College London. 1981.
10 For references see Vigfússon s.v. Finnar; Fritzner s.v. finnafé, -vara, ftnnferö, -fgr, -lcaup,
-skref. On the deep influence of Lappish shamanism on the Norse imagination see the recent