Gripla - 20.12.2017, Síða 107

107
between the living and thus all that human society stands for effectively
comes to an end. this “economic dimension of revenant activity” high-
lights the way Glámr interacts with society,19 and society responds to this
interaction with fear and flight: the saga here says that Urðu menn ákaflega
hræddir; stukku þá margir menn í brott [people became very afraid; many ran
away].20 this again underlines both the social and economic implications
of Glámr’s hauntings: if everyone runs away, farming becomes impossible.
another feature of this interaction, and one that emphasises that degree
of interaction is just as important as manner, is Glámr’s curse, and the
fact that what enables him to utter it in the first place is his greater ófag-
naðarkraptr [evil force].21 It is the fact that he talks to his opponent that
shows that Glámr is one of the most active revenants, and this is one of the
reasons why his monstrosity has such an immense influence on Grettir.
What these features highlight is that the concept of monstrosity in the
Íslendingasögur is a social one. rather than the purely physical aspect of
revenancy, it is the social dimensions of their activity that make revenants
monstrous: the fact that they disrupt social interaction between the living,
that they turn them mad and kill them, that they force them to abandon
farms. this social threat has to be opposed by society’s “Mobilisierung
ihrer ordnungsstiftenden bzw. –bewahrenden Energien” [mobilisation of
those energies that stabilise and preserve societal order].22 This idea, that in
the vernacular literatures of north-Western Europe monstrosity is a social
concept, is not a new one: Jennifer neville argued for a similar approach
in her article on monsters and criminals in Old English literature,23 and it
is her argument that provides a way of transferring observations from the
more monstrous undead to the more human outlaws.
the central point of neville’s argument is her statement that “merely
being Homo sapiens does not grant human status in old English texts: hu-
19 Sayers, “the alien and alienated as unquiet Dead,” 249.
20 Grettis saga, 113.
21 Ibid., 121.
22 Klaus Böldl, Eigi einhamr: Beiträge zum Weltbild der Eyrbyggja und anderer Isländersagas
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 132.
23 Jennifer neville, “Monsters and Criminals: Defining Humanity in old English Poetry,”
Monsters and the Monstrous in Medieval Northwest Europe, eds. K. E. Olsen and L. A. J. R.
Houwen (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 103–22.
“HE HaS LonG forfEItED aLL KInSHIP tIES”