Gripla - 2020, Blaðsíða 85

GRIPLA84
These seven final stanzas are connected to the battle of Stiklarstaðir.
As I have argued elsewhere, several texts suggest that sets of stanzas could
be transmitted orally with a minimal narrative frame, or even just set in a
scene.47 One example may suffice here. The poet Einarr Skúlason alludes
to the two first stanzas of the cluster of six stanzas found in the beginning
of the sixth chapter of Hallfreðar saga. In Øxarflokkr, Einarr Skúlason em-
ploys wordplay involving the meaning of the name of Freyja’s daughter,
Hnoss (treasure), thereby alluding to Hallfreðr’s ‘nú ák Sýrar mey dýra’
(now I own Sýr’s [Freyja’s] precious daughter [Hnoss > hnoss]).48 In Geisli,
Einarr quotes the line ‘Fyrr vas hitt es harra’ (it was in the past that […]
the lord’s/to the lord) by Hallfreðr, turning Hallfreðr’s mention of pagan
sacrifice into an image of the Passion. Einarr’s allusions suggest that the
stanzas constituted a well-known cluster in his day as well, connected to
Hallfreðr’s encounter with óláfr Tryggvason.
In the first of these six stanzas, Hallfreðr thanks the king for a gift,
whereas the remaining five are Hallfreðr’s so-called ‘conversion stanzas’,
where he reluctantly takes leave of the gods. The first stanza must thus
have belonged to a different original context of composition than the
other five, but it had apparently become part of the Hallfreðr-meets-óláfr
cluster by Einarr’s day. Einarr was probably born around 1090, and he is
mentioned as a priest in Morkinskinna and in a list of high-born priests in
the year 1143.49 This brings us to a point in time much earlier than that
of the saga authors. It would appear that the saga author has made few
adaptations of this cluster to the saga, since the six stanzas are connected
by minimal passages of prose, mostly consisting of the king saying that the
previous stanza was not good enough and that Hallfreðr has to compose
another. This is little more than a frame for the stanzas, and this is also
(2008), 135–55). Only one such suspension has, however, been found in a skaldic poem
(Mårtensson and Heimir Pálsson, 147–52).
47 Mikael Males, the Poetic Genesis of Old Icelandic Literature (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020),
80–85, 210–12, 259–62.
48 vatnsdœla saga, ed. by Einar ól. Sveinsson. íslenzk fornrit 8 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka
fornritafélag, 1939), 156.
49 Morkinskinna, ed. by Ármann Jakobsson and Þórður Ingi Guðjónsson, 2 vols. íslenzk forn-
rit, 23–24 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 2011), 2, 87, 124; Guðrún Nordal skaldic
versifying and social Discrimination in Medieval Iceland. The Dorothea Coke Memorial
Lecture in Northern Studies delivered at the University College London 15 March 2001
(London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2003), 4.