Gripla - 2020, Side 216

215
a woman (fold unnfúrs ‘land of the wave-fire (gold)’ and Eir aura ‘goddess
of the gold’). It would make perfect sense if the woman was Auðr, as the
saga author clearly understood it, which implies that st. 17, including the
kenning Egða andspillir, was first performed for Auðr as well.
With regard to the special kenning Egða andspillir as a við(r)kenning,
I find it quite implausible that someone could have fabricated this stanza
before the written saga came into being. Many scholars have attributed
spurious poetry in the sagas to the twelfth century, under the assumption
that there was a flowering of saga-like, “prosimetrical” oral tradition at
that time.52 There is, however, nothing in the Old Norse sources to sug-
gest such a development; instead, the actual comparable texts that we have
from the twelfth century are either lengthy skaldic poems in which the
whole narrative is contained within the poem without any accompanying
prose (e.g., Plácitusdrápa, Rekstefja), or rather rudimentary prose works
with little poetry or none at all (e.g., Íslendingabók, Ágrip). A supposed
prosimetrical “oral saga”, developed through the continuous production
of spurious skaldic stanzas, thus seems unlikely at this stage of Old Norse
literary development.53 Even if one were willing to accept the possibility
of such productions at a general level, it would be very difficult to argue in
favour of this in the particular case of Gísla saga st. 17: the stanza requires
a poet who knows Gísli’s story inside out and who is aware of the fact that
Ingjaldr in Hergilsey was of Agder descent – an “Egðr” – and who finds it
appropriate for Gísli to insert a hidden allusion to his friend in one of his
stanzas. I cannot think of any person being capable of this other than Gísli
himself, and for that reason I regard the stanza as authentic.
Another stanza about Ingjaldr
Relevant in this context is the fact that Ingjaldr is mentioned in yet another
stanza by Gísli, in st. 23 of the saga. That stanza is quoted when Gísli real-
52 See, e.g., Peter Foote, “An Essay on the Saga of Gisli and its Icelandic Background”,
the saga of Gisli, trans. George Johnston (London: University of Toronto Press, 1963),
93–134; Russell Poole, “Compositional Technique in some Verses from Gunnlaugs saga”,
journal of English and Germanic Philology 80 (1981): 469–85; idem, “The Origins of the
Máhlíðingavísur”, scandinavian studies 57 (1985): 244–85.
53 For a full rebuttal of this kind of reasoning, see Mikael Males, “1100-talets pseudonyma
skaldediktning: En kritisk granskning”, Maal og Minne 2017 (1): 1–24.
Gí SLI Sú RSSON AS E G ð A A n D s P I L L I R