Gripla - 2020, Page 213

GRIPLA212
þat gerði Börkr inn digri af honum eyjarnar, en Ingjaldr fór í
Þorskafjarðardali ok bjó á Ingjaldsstöðum. Hans son var Þórarinn,
er átti Þorgerði, dóttur Glúms Geirasonar. Þeira son var Helgu-
Steinarr.45
The only major difference in the text of Sturlubók (see above, p. 209)
is the name of Ingjaldr’s farm in Þorskafjörður: in Þorskfirðinga saga it
is called Ingjaldsstaðir, but Hlíð in Sturlubók. Whereas Ingjaldsstaðir is
otherwise unknown, Hlíð is the name of a farm in Þorskafjörður to this
very day. Kålund thought Ingjaldsstaðir could be an invention of the saga
redactor because he did not know where in Þorskafjörður Ingjaldr actu-
ally lived or, less likely, that Hlíð may have been called Ingjaldsstaðir for a
time.46 Whether the redactor of the younger Þorskfirðinga saga copied this
part from Sturlubók or took it over from the older *Þorskfirðinga saga (as
Björn Magnússon ólsen believed), is irrelevant for our purposes. The
crucial fact is that Landnámabók and Þorskfirðinga saga bear witness to
a distinctive tradition about Ingjaldr in Hergilsey that is not represented
in Gísla saga. According to this tradition, Ingjaldr was forced to re-settle
in Þorskafjörður when his landlord, Bǫrkr, heard about his dealings with
Gísli, and in this tradition, Ingjaldr was a descendant of the settler Þrándr
mjóbeinn from Agder. This relationship may thus explain why Gísli, in
one of his stanzas composed during his outlawry, refers to himself as the
Egða andspillir ‘confidant of the people of Agder’.
It is evident from certain other differences between the two texts con-
cerning Gísli’s closest family that the author of Gísla saga did not make use
of Landnámabók as a source. In this case, there are also some discrepan-
cies between the different versions of Landnámabók. It is probably the
Hauksbók-version, which in addition to Sturlubók built on the older and
now lost Styrmisbók, that represents the oldest layer of this chapter.47 In
Hauksbók, we are told that Þorbjǫrn súrr had the children Gísli, Þorkell
and Þórdís, but no Ari is mentioned as in the saga. Further, it is said that
45 Harðar saga, ed. by Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, íslenzk fornrit XIII
(Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1991), 198.
46 P.E. Kristian Kålund, Bidrag til en historisk-topografisk Beskrivelse af Island, 2 vols (Kjøben-
havn: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1877–82), vol. 1, 519–20.
47 See Jón Jóhannesson, Gerðir Landnámabókar (Reykjavík: Félagsprentsmiðjan H.F. 1941),
105–06.