Gripla - 2020, Qupperneq 207

GRIPLA206
ing to the Icelandic annals, his family came to Iceland in 952, at a time
when Gísli must have been nearly twenty years old.21 He would accord-
ingly most likely have been identified as ‘a Norwegian’, if indeed such
a term would have made any sense in the mid-tenth century (in Iceland
he would more likely have been an austmaðr ‘easterner’). It is, however,
problematic to take a kenning that literally means ‘confidant of the Egðir’
as a term for ‘Norwegian’. If one accepts that Egðir here are pars pro toto
for ‘Norwegians’, a ‘confidant of the Egðir’, that is ‘of the Norwegians’,
would rather be someone like a Swede or an Icelander; possibly it could
also be a kenning for a Norwegian king (see below). If one instead takes
the term Egðir more literally, then a ‘confidant of the Egðir’ would probably
be a man from another part of Norway, presumably from a district close to
Agder, for instance Rogaland. We know, however, that Gísli Súrsson came
from Nordmøre, which is far from Agder, and one gets the impression that
something else is at the bottom of the expression Egða andspillir.
Both Sveinbjörn Egilsson and Finnur Jónsson most likely based their
interpretation of the kenning Egða andspillir as ‘Norwegian’ on a well-
known kenning type in which a Norwegian king is referred to in peri-
phrases such as Dœla dróttinn, Hǫrða fylkir or sygna ræsir.22 But these are
obvious cases of pars pro toto, in so far as the king is dróttinn, fylkir, ræsir
etc. over the inhabitants of a certain part of Norway as well as the country
as a whole. Moreover, the base-word of such constructions is always a
poetic synonym (heiti) for ‘king’ or ‘ruler’, as in the examples above. The
only exceptions to this are some rare examples of vinr ‘friend’: Magnús
góði is called Hǫrða vinr ‘friend of the Hǫrðar’ in Arnórr jarlaskáld’s
Magnúsdrápa (ca. 1047), st. 1,23 as is óláfr Tryggvason in a half-stanza at-
tributed to Hallar-Steinn (twelfth c.) that seems to be modeled on a stanza
by Arnórr.24 In addition, Haraldr Sigurðarson is called gjafvinr sygna ‘gift-
friend of the Sygnir’ in the drápa Arnórr composed about him (ca. 1066),
21 Cf. Vestfirðinga sǫgur, ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson and Guðni Jónsson, xlii. As the íF editors
note, it is highly unusual for the arrival of a settler to be precisely dated like this in the
annals, and the explanation they give is that Ari fróði Þorgilsson (1067–1148) might have
recorded the year in his writings.
22 For more examples, see Rudolf Meissner, Die Kenningar der skalden. Ein Beitrag zur skal-
dischen Poetik (Bonn og Leipzig: Kurt Schroeder, 1921), 353–58.
23 skP II, 207.
24 skP I, 939–40.