Gripla - 20.12.2017, Page 116

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them. Grettir goes around stealing or sitting on people’s property for a
large part of his life, which on one occasion, in the Westfjords, brings
him close to death and at another time, on Drangey, provides the reason
for Þorbjǫrn ǫngull to kill him. from these episodes, a pattern emerges.
Grettir takes from people what he wants, and through this, he becomes
monstrous in his own right: when he lurks next to the Kjǫlr road, he
develops a similarity to Glámr whose hauntings prevent the farmers of
Vatnsdalr from pursuing their every-day business, and his stealing of sheep
especially on Drangey is as severe a threat to economic prosperity in the
area as Þórólfr bægifótr’s killing of animals. as Janice Hawes notes, “[t]his
parallel to the non-human world emphasizes the danger that Grettir now
poses to his society. Sheep-stealing may seem to be a trivial act for such a
strong man, but it can threaten the livelihood of a farm-based society like
medieval Iceland.”60 It is also at these times that the monstrous epithets
like vágestr or dólgr mentioned above are used by the affected farmers to
refer to Grettir. this shows that, because of the disruptive impact he has
on the local community, he becomes monstrous in their eyes, turning
into “a danger to the human society” of Iceland.61 Similarly, Hörðr and
his Hólmverjar [people of Hólmr/island-dwellers] (first mentioned in ch.
24) are eventually killed by the landsmenn [land-people/dwellers] (first
mentioned in ch. 28) because of their stealing and raiding of farms in the
Hvalfjǫrðr area. Here, an opposition is set up between those living on the
island, the Hólmverjar, and those living on land, consistently referred to as
landsmenn, a clear attempt at ‘othering’ the disruptive island-dwellers that
is comparable to the people of Skagafjǫrðr describing Grettir as a vargr.
The Hólmverjar thus become a threat that must be removed for society to
return to stability. the greatest weakness of the group of island-dwelling
criminals lies in their numbers: too many outlaws and troublemakers have
assembled on Geirshólmr. Effectively, Hörðr turns into a “Krebsgeschwür
der Gesellschaft, das beseitigt werden muss” [a tumor of society that has
to be removed];62 and their presence destabilises the area to such an extent
60 Janice Hawes, “the Monstrosity of Heroism: Grettir Ásmundarson as an outsider,”
Scandinavian Studies 80 (2008): 31.
61 Ibid., 21.
62 Hans Schottmann, “Die Harðar saga Grímkelssonar,” Studien zur Isländersaga: Festschrift fur
Rolf Heller, eds. Heinrich Beck and Else Ebel, Ergänzungsbände zum rGa 24 (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 2000), 231.