Gripla - 20.12.2017, Page 103

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REBECCA MERKELBACH
“HE HaS LonG forfEItED
aLL KInSHIP tIES”
Monstrosity, Familial Disruption,
and the Cultural Relevance of the Outlaw Sagas
in an address to the Viking Society for Northern Research in 2015,
Andy Orchard argued that not only is there a significant clustering of story
elements – such as the connection of heroes and bears, their fights with
supernatural foes, or the decapitation of those enemies in or after death
– in Beowulf and much later in Grettis saga, but that these story elements
had become attached to outlaw narratives already at the time when tales
of Hereward the Wake were current in England shortly after the norman
invasion.1 While orchard presented compelling evidence for this argu-
ment, he – like many before him – did not address the question why these
stories are so pervasive, why they appear in both countries in various ex-
pressions and at various times; in short, why people were so interested in
stories about socially marginal heroes, lawbreakers, potentially dangerous
and disruptive outsiders. the aim of the present discussion is therefore to
approach this question from one possible direction by reading outlaws as
monstrous and situating them in their familial and cultural context. The
corpus of sagas under consideration here is limited to the main three out-
law sagas, Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, Gísla saga Súrssonar and Harðar saga
ok Hólmverja.2 Detailed discussions of Fóstbræðra saga and Kjalnesinga saga,
which arguably also partake in the tradition of stories about outlaw heroes,
1 this address has been published as andy orchard, “Hereward and Grettir: Brothers from
another Mother?” New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval
Scandinavia, ed. Jeffrey turco, Islandica 58 (Ithaca: university of Cornell Press, 2015),
7–59.
2 unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are taken from the Íslenzk fornrit editions of
Grettis saga (ed. Guðni Jónsson), Gísla saga (ed. Björn Þórólfsson), and Harðar saga (eds.
Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson). Quotations from Loth’s 1960 edition
of Gísla saga are indicated as such and appear in normalised spelling. all translations are my
own.
Gripla XXVIII (2017): 103–137