Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1977, Side 20
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more enigmatic than that, however. We can note that the lottery
is credited with only ad hoc significance, since the two men can
change places as they do: destiny has no hånd in this entirely hu- i
man business. Another small touch which complicates our sym-
pathies in a typically lifelike way is the faet, quietly notified by
the writer, that Bjarni’s foil is a young man. His desire for life is
the more natural, Bjarni’s duty towards him as his protegé the
more pressing. His conscience and self-control are understandably,
though not excusably, less developed - but being young, perhaps
there is also hope for him.
Bjarni does not think he should have reminded him of his pro-
mise and then gone to such insistent lengths to save his life. In
terms of drengskapr this attitude seems undeniably appropriate,
but would silence on the part of the young man not presuppose
that what was expected of him was a voluntary self-denial, a self-
sacrificing initiative, of a kind which even Bjarni himself was not
prepared to offer? In terms of rectitude the chief argument that
tells against the young man’s conduct must of course be that he
had forfeited his claim to performance of Bjarni’s promise by
consenting to the life-or-death outeome of the lottery - we assume
that this is what weighed with Bjarni, as it does with us. But
had he consented, or was he merely out-voted? And if he had
momentarily consented, could he fairly repent of it? The original
promise was proffered by Bjarni to him14. If there was a contractual
as well as a persuasive element in it, had he not played his part
simply by going to sea with Bjarni - and how was Bjarni to play
his part? Was the young man’s new implicit undertaking, made
now with death as the explicit factor, necessarily more binding
than Bjarni’s old explicit undertaking, made then with death as
the implicit factor? All such considerations add up to a nice point,
properly so for it is the fulerum on which the action of the episode
balances, and one to which I hope Ole Widding will charitably
extend his well-known interest in conscientia in its Norse forms.
14 The reference to the promise in 557, which leaves one to speculate on the
precise content, is mueh more to my taste (and just as well, because it is presumably
nearer the original) than the text in Hauksbok, which spells it out in brassy terms
- “at eitt skyldi ganga yfir okkr båda”.