Gripla - 01.01.2003, Page 80

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GRIPLA
athafnasaga hefnda og víga (1993, 21) [an action story of vengeance and
battles without a message], represents a concealed attack on the destructive
values of the heathen past which continued to inform the violence of the
Sturlung Age (and therefore must date from much later than the early 1200s).
He sees parody in the treatment of Þuríðr, who is referred to dismissively as
kerling, in contrast to Laxdœla saga's positive presentation of Þorgerðr. It is
indeed difficult to interpret as anything other than parody the burlesque sequel
to the whetting in Heiðarvíga saga (ch. 23), in which Þuríðr’s sons rid
themselves of their importunate relative by having her saddle-girth loosened
so that she tumbles into a brook. Bjami sees the purpose of the parody as
symbolic. In the words of Theodore M. Andersson, ‘condemnation is rein-
forced when ... Þuríðr is disgraced by her sons .... Her unregenerate spirit
literally takes a fall’. Andersson adds, ‘A minor problem in this interpretation
is that her dull-witted companion, who has no other part in the saga, suffers
the same fall’ (Andersson 1995, 451).
This is not the only loose end left by Bjami’s interpretation. It is true that
Þuríðr is discredited, not only by coming to grief in the stream, but by the
hysterical overtones of the whetting scene, where she strikes her son as close
to madness: ‘er á þessu mikit vanstilli, ok ertu nær óvitandi vits’ (277); and
‘gekk hon útan ok innar eptir gólfinu eiskrandi’ [there is great excess in this,
and you are almost out of your wits ... she went raging back and forth over
the floor]. But this is not to say that the ethic of revenge is discredited along
with her. Her hot-headed vengefulness is contrasted in the saga, not with any
such endorsement of peaceable values as Bjami implies, but with the more
controlled vengeful purpose of her son Barði. The expedition of vengeance
concludes a sequence in which Barði, under the direction of his foster-father
Þórarinn, steadfastly pursues the goal of redress for his brother’s death; a mat-
ter, first, of negotiating unsuccessfully for compensation, then of antagonizing
an opponent so as to give an excuse for more active vengeance, then of
manœuvring for support, all the time keeping these activities secret from the
targets of the attack. The saga offers, not a critique of the primitive values of
feud, but a carefully articulated illustration of the proverb ‘revenge is a dish
that should be eaten cold’.
In comparing the saga’s boorish treatment of Þuríðr with the respectful
stance adopted towards Þorgerðr in Laxdœla saga, it is necessary to bear the
wider literary context in mind. Throughout Laxdœla saga the actions and
consciousness of women are foregrounded to an unprecedented extent; the