Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1960, Page 83

75
that it walked about with them like a man and could do any kind
of work they needed; it also made various journeys (Islenzk rit
sidari dida, VI, p. 101; for this pdttur, cf. ib., pp. clvi-clxi, and
Knut Liestøl’s Norslce trollvisor, Kristiania, 1915, pp. 15-59). The
detail of Volski’s doing all kinds of work and making journeys is
comparable to the section of Grettisfærsla where the kinds of work
which Grettir can do are listed (52v, 11. 3-13; cf. especially 1. 4:
‘vera i hlaupi’). The crudest section of Grettisfærsla (52v, 11. 14-26)
can be seen as parallel to the lines in Vglsapattr:
t>ér er ambått
jsessi Vol si
allodaufligr
innan læra.
The indecent poems which according to Adam of Bremen were
sung at the sacrifices at Uppsala, were they something like this ?
The explanation of the section on 53 recto, lines 2-8, where there
are numerous parallels with Ljuflingsmal, is to be sought I think
in the story which is linked with that poem. It may be that this
story, like other Icelandic popular tales which tell of a woman’s
having a child with a huldumadur, is based on some old recollection
from worship of the Vanir. The same is probably true of the passage
in the pdttr of Qgmundr dyttr and Gunnarr helmingr where we read
that ‘a woman, young and beautiful, was procured to serve Freyr,’
and that the Swedes thought that he would need to have marital
relations with her. The popular traditions which I consider the most
important in this connection are Kotludraumur, where a woman is
said to have a child by a huldumadur ‘on an island’ (i holma einum);
Snjaslcvædi, where the connection is obscure and the story mixed
with other elements; and the tale of Finna forvitra, where a man is
said to have had a child with his sister on an island. One can go on
to imagine that the motif of a woman’s having a child with a
huldumadur derives from a myth about the child of the god of
fertility, and that in Grettisfærsla and Ljuflingsmal are preserved
relics of a ceremony which consisted in sending to sleep some
being thought of as the personification of this child. In this connec-
tion we may cite two stories of mythical origin about sleeping