Gripla - 2019, Síða 91
91
Old Icelandic saga material, it will be possible to view with greater clarity
the distortionary effects of using the term “giant” in scholarship on and
translations of Old Norse-Icelandic texts.
Ármann Jakobsson’s claim that that the saga “giants” are “deformed
and ugly” will be considered first. This characterisation certainly applies
to many jötnar in the sagas. As suggested above, the primary function
of jötnar in the mythological narratives of the Codex Regius poems and
Snorra Edda was as the wise and ancient opponents of the Æsir, and this is
reflected by their physical appearance in this context: they are, as Clunies
Ross suggests, “frequently characterised as old, as befits their role as the
original inhabitants of the mythic world,” are only occasionally enormous,
and only rarely horrific.38 This important mythological function is lost
in the sagas where, as demonic vestiges of the pre-Christian religion of
Scandinavia, jötnar are recast as agents of terror and fear.39 Accordingly,
their physical monstrosity is emphasised over their wisdom, and jötnar
with horrific appearances abound in the sagas. The bodily mutations of
these jötnar can be extreme. The younger Starkaðr of Gautreks saga, for
instance, complains in a verse that men mock him for the fact that he once
possessed eight arms. He continues:
Hlæja rekkar, er mik sjá,
ljótan skolt, langa trjónu,
hangar tjálgur, hár úlfgrátt,
hrjúfan háls, húð jótraða.
[Men who see me laugh at [my] ugly snout, long muzzle, dangling
branches, wolf-grey hair, scabby neck, scarred skin.]40
References to such physical imperfections are not uncommon in the cor-
pus of fornaldarsögur: the jötnar of Hálfdanar saga Brönufóstra possess
two or three heads each; Selr of Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar has a tusked
38 Prolonged Echoes, 67.
39 On this, see Schulz, Riesen, 139–55.
40 Víkarsbálkr, ed. and trans. by Margaret Clunies Ross, in Poetry from the Fornaldarsögur,
Part I, ed. by Margaret Clunies Ross, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 286. The translation offered here has been influenced by that
of Clunies Ross.
A PROBLEM OF GIANT PROPORTIONS