Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1960, Blaðsíða 82

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referred to in Færøsk Anthologi, I, p. 410, but a clearer account is in
R. Rasmussen’s Sær er sidur å landi (Torshavn, 1940). Chr. Matras
has collected every possible piece of information about this Faroese
custom and written about it in an article, ‘Drunnur’, published in
Frodskaparrit, VI, 1957. At wedding-feasts the tail (together with
the lower vertebrae) of the animal which was killed for the feast—
an ox or a fat sheep—was decorated with silk ribbons and flowers
and passed about among the guests. Each one who took it had to
say a few words about it in rhyme. This portion of the animal is
called in Faroese drunnur, which no doubt is a loan-word from
Gaelic dronn, cf. The Illustrated Gaelic-English Dictionary, com-
piled by E. Dwelly, p. 363: ‘dronn, -uinn & -oinn, s.f. Rump, the
bard’s portion of the mutton ... At weddings, the man to whom
the dronn would come was obliged to make a verse, or an duhh
chapull would be on him.’
If our guess is correct that the Grettir of Grettisfærsla was the
penis of an animal, most probably a sheep, and that it was
passed aro und at a feast while the poem was sung (or recited),
then it seems most likely that this was done at the harvest. The
legendary Olafs saga helga mentions that it is common in Iceland
for workmen to claim ewes for slaughter in the autumn (Olafs saga
hins helga, Kristiania, 1922, p. 7 734; cf. also p. 824), and in Snorri’s
Olafs saga helga it is said to be the custom in Iceland that it is the
farmers’ duty in the autumn to give their men-servants a sheep for
slaughter. The sheep was killed when the haymaking was finished,
and this was thus a harvest feast, corresponding to the Michaelmas
feast common in Norway and other parts of Scandinavia (cf. Nils
Lid: Norske Slakteskikkar, pp. 13-16). It seems most probable that
Grettisfærsla was linked with some custom practised at this feast,
and one would thus expect the poem to contain some echo of an
old cult, no less than the verses which Vglsapdttr preserves.
It may be that this line of thought will lead us to a clearer ap-
preciation of those parts of Grettisfærsla where the context is doubt-
ful. In an Icelandic pdttur written about 1700, Inntak ur sogupætti
af Åsmundi flagdagæfu, there is a section which has been thought
to be largely a re-telling of Vglsapdttr. It tells of an ‘animal’ called
Volski, which was in reality the genital member of a horse. An old
couple had worshipped it and filled it with so much devilish power