Gripla - 2022, Blaðsíða 72

GRIPLA70
These several topics and motifs will recur in elaborated form and inter-
relation in the course of the saga, interconnected by the polysemantic
term mál, variously ‘speech, poetry; measure, measurement; case, matter,
affair’, after the younger Kormákr has entered the narrative spotlight. The
introduction of the saga’s principal is here deferred in order to examine the
opening episodes of the saga.
The Icelanders of the sagas are depicted as believing in a personal desti-
ny.3 The focus in this belief was on terminal states: death in combat or an
uneventful old age, although the decisive etiological moment was imagined
as in the Norns’ determination of an individual fate at birth. The ways and
sequences of events in which such destinies are realized are often effected
through a double or enhanced causality, human and supernatural. Ultimate
fate is generally beyond human scrutiny, although certain wise folk have
intimations of an unseemly or untimely end. On a level more perceptible
to human understanding, magic or sorcery may be put to work. Lastly, the
more apparent reasons for certain turns of event are generally to be traced
to the personalities of the principals and to their interaction.
Ǫgmundr Kormáksson, from the Vík region of Norway, goes raid-
ing in the British Isles as soon as mature, and his reputation comes to the
attention of Ásmundr, a notorious Viking. In a development more sug-
gestive of romance than saga, the men establish contact and agree to meet
in a Viking approximation of pitched battle. Yet when this takes place,
Ásmundr does not engage his full force and, after four days of conflict, is
routed with great losses. Ǫgmundr returns home with fame and fortune.
His father states that no more prestige is to be gained through warfare
(“Kormákr kvað Ǫgmund eigi mundu meira frama fá í hernaði”).4 This
is an indirect appeal for moderation on the part of the elder Kormákr.
Hóf ‘moderation’ represented a masculine ideal in pagan Iceland – think
of Gunnarr Hámundarson of Brennu-Njáls saga – but is only a shadow
motif in Kormáks saga (see below).5 Kormákr also judges it opportune
3 See, most recently, Neil Price, “The Home of Their Shapes,” in his Children of Ash and Elm:
A History of the Vikings (New York: Basic Books, 2020), 31–63.
4 Kormáks saga, ch. 1, 204.
5 Brennu-Njáls saga, ed. by Einar Ól. Sveinsson (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1944),
ch. 19, 52–53. Hóf displays an interesting semantic development. The term is traced to
Proto-Indo-European *kap- ‘to grasp’, via a sense of ‘fit amount under the circumstances’;
cf. Gothic gahōbains ‘abstinence’, Old English behōfian ‘to require’, Old High German