Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1975, Page 360
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The skeletal details of these three episodes are basically the same:
the hero is taken to the giant’s home following the abduction (of
the hero or his sister) by a winged monster; the hero sleeps with
the giantess and remains with her for a while; he then leaves to
resume his adventures. The incident in Q-Os most closely resembles
the one in Blv. Common to Q-Os and Elv to the exclusion of Vald
are the following items: after his abduction by a winged monster
the hero is taken to the giant’s home by the giant himself; children
result from the union of the giantess and the hero; the hero either
departs or is on the point of departing in the springtime. Many of
the minor details which occur in Blv are totally lacking in Q-Os,
however. One essential difference between the accounts in the two
sagas is the relationship of the hero to the giantess’s parents, which
is amicable in Q-Os while being antagonistic in Blv. Despite the
several discrepancies, I am favorably disposed to assume that the
incidents in both Blv and Vald were borrowed from the longer ver-
sion of Q-Os, and that the author of Blv embellished the story with
a number of details which better related to the rest of his work.
From the above discussion of the parallels to these three epi-
sodes in Blv, two conclusions can be drawn: (1) the author of Blv
was familiar with and made use of the abduction-by-dragon inci-
dent in Pidr and (2) he was familiar with the longer version of Q-Os
and used this saga’s finngalkn and, very probably, giantess epi-
sodes. The faet that he had two heroes to deal with, Etgarb and Åki,
whom he borrowed from Pidr, determined how he should use the
material derived from Pidr and Q-Os. To the older brother, Etgarb,
he attributed the dragon-slayer and marriage-to-the-widowed-
queen incidents of Pidr. (Bertelsen, Pidr, II, 359-368; and Mobius,
Blv, pp. 42-44.) To the younger brother, Åki, he assigned the ab-
duction-by-winged-monster (in its initial stages), love-of-a-giantess,
and finngålkn-sl&yev motifs of Q-Os. In combining the elements
from Pidr and Q-Os, he succeeded in integrating them skillfully into
the structure of Blv.
University of Massachusetts.