Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1977, Page 15
13
selves to God, and then the skipherra draws off with his boatload.
The ship sinks, the souls of the drowned are seen flying to heaven
in the shape of beautiful doves, and the bishop who had wept for
their destruction now weeps more bitterly because he had not
shared their death and salvation. The chap who feil into the sea
comes safe to land under the protection of St Mary* 5.
In the Bjarni-story the shipmen begrudgingly accept the faet
that the ship’s boat will only take some of them and belatedly
agree to Bjarni’s proposal that the selection must depend on a
lottery and not on mannvirding. Dr Bjarni sees this proposal as a
firm expression of belief in people’s “equal rights to survive”. He
observes that mannvirding would not be mentioned if it did not
ordinarily count for something in the community, so the exemp-
lum amounts to a protest against inereasing disregard for equality
in Icelandic society in the late thirteenth century. And the “idea
of equality among free men” is so clearly expressed here because
of “the provocative effeet” of the Bishop-story, which in contrast
offers an “extreme example of inequality”. The writer of the story
of Bjarni Grimolfsson takes the Bishop-story as his model but
inverts its lesson to give “the finest example of self-sacrificing
drengskapr in the whole of saga literature”.
In reconsidering this episode I do not mean to counter Bjarni’s
view but merely hope to deepen the focus a little, first by recal-
ling two brief classical discussions of the “right to survive” di-
lemma - also conducted in terms of shipwreck - and then by rais-
ing the problem of obligation, which is a further feature of the
Bjarni-story. These few notes are concerned with ethical implica-
tions rat her than with literary influences.
The first passage is in Cicero’s De officiis, written in 44 B.C.,
where in Book III he makes rapid reference to some cases of con-
science put by the Stoic, Hekaton of Rhodes, a pupil of Panaetius,
Cicero’s chief source for the earlier books. Among them we find
these (III 89-90) :6
6 I am not as confident as Bjarni Einarsson is that this man “er villdi fara i
baatinn” was not one of those selected for rescue.
6 H. A. Holden, M. Tvlli Ciceronis De officiis Xibri tres (1899), p. 127.