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group”.81 the saga also reflects this narrow focus in the “confined land-
scape of narrow fjords and valleys; a potentially claustrophobic world that
magnifies the strengths and weaknesses of the bonds that unite society.”82
In addition to this, it internalises its protagonist’s association with the
para normal by letting the monster fights other outlaws engage in take place
inside Gísli’s mind. While Gísli does not actively fight with the dream
women, through his dreams and the women that appear in them, Gísli’s in-
ner struggles are made manifest to the audience, providing an insight into
the outlaw’s psyche, and allowing a glimpse of a “verfolgten, verlassenen
und gequälten Menschen” [a hunted, abandoned and tormented human
being].83 Like Grettir, Gísli suffers from a fear of the dark because of his
internal struggles, haunted as Grettir is by what he has seen and done.
Generally, Gísli is more difficult to categorise than either Grettir or
Hörðr, both of whom are more unambiguously monstrous in their actions
against society. Gísli’s ambiguity is most pronounced in his adoption of
different disguises that confuse his pursuers,84 and it could be argued that
Gísli constructs himself as someone whose humanity is uncertain.85 Thus,
Gísli, more than the other outlaws, seems to be suspended in an uncertain
ontological state that problematises our conceptions of the boundaries be-
tween human and monster. He shifts not only in his shapes and disguises,
into the landscape and out of it, but his character is also highly variable
across the tradition associated with him. He can never be fully grasped,
always elusive, always escaping. It is this “propensity to shift”86 that under-
lines Gísli’s familial disruptiveness and gives him monstrous potential in
the end. However, since his impact is confined to his family, he cannot ul-
timately be argued to be similarly socially monstrous as Grettir and Hörðr,
and this needs to be borne in mind.
Nevertheless, it has emerged that one can in fact read the three major
81 Heather o’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative (oxford: oxford
University Press, 2005), 142.
82 Barraclough, “Inside outlawry,” 379.
83 Hans Schottmann, “Gísli in der acht,” Skandinavistik, 5 (1975): 94.
84 Which, as McLennan suggests, is a transgressive trait; “Monstrosity,” 123.
85 Vésteinn Ólason, “Introduction,” Gisli Sursson’s Saga and The Saga of the People of Eyri,
transl. Martin S. regal and Judy Quinn (London: Penguin, 2003), xx, therefore considers
Gísli a trickster figure.
86 Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 5.
“HE HaS LonG forfEItED aLL KInSHIP tIES”