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some frequency: how to respond to criticism, mockery, or abuse by a social
inferior, when anything more than words in response would be an abuse
of status-derived power and thus in the nature of a minor injustice. The
well-known whetting scenes illustrate that the “heroic” male often has lit-
tle choice but to act on the directives of his critic, e.g., Hrafnkell Freysgoði
after the washer-woman’s comments on his laxity in seeking vengeance.20
We may imagine Narfi lifting a length of sausage on a wooden stirrer for
their assessment and recall the measuring rod of an earlier chapter. Yet
here quality not quantity is to be tried. Narfi is also taking the measure
of his man by inviting his evaluation of the products of the non-male
environment, products with which he should have little expertise. In a
homological reading, the stirring rod has the latent potency of a níðstǫng
or pole of defamation, on which a slaughtered (or sacrificed) horse’s head
might be mounted.21 The meat sausage thus brandished might be open to
interpretation as a phallic symbol, albeit a limp one. At most, Kormákr has
entered a scene productive of impressions of gender ambiguity and is being
called on it: his interest in food preparation and possibly in a symbol of
male genitalia is questioned, prompted by his having already taken several
steps away from mainstream manliness by coming into the cookhouse to
seek out female company.
Homological thinking was integral to the Norse worldview and was
applied over great differences of scale.22 Narfi mocks Kormákr through
the appropriation of poetic technique. His kenning is a debasement of
poetic lexis and register, since ormr is otherwise frequent in the sense of
serpent or dragon in kennings for gold. Narfi employs apostrophe, cre-
ates a subjective environment through the use of the verb þykkja ‘to seem’
20 Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, in Austfirðinga sǫgur, ed. by Jón Jóhannesson (Reykjavík: Hið
íslenzka fornritafélag, 1950), ch. 8, 126–27.
21 On níð and related, see the fundamental studies of Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, The
Unmanly Man: Concepts of Sexual Defamation in Early Northern Society (Odense: Odense
University Press, 1983), and Folke Ström, “Níð, Ergi and Old Norse Moral Attitudes,” The
Dorothea Coke Memorial Lecture in Northern Studies delivered at University College
London, 10 May 1973 (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1973).
A classic realization is found in Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappi, in Borgfirðinga sǫgur, ed.
by Sigurður Nordal and Guðni Jónsson (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1938). In
homological terms both the assumed stirring rod and lot-measuring rod have their ana-
logues in Yggdrasill, the cosmic ash tree, yet in a significantly different register.
22 Sayers, “Njáll’s Beard, Hallgerðr’s Hair, and Gunnarr’s Hay: Homological Patterning in
Njáls saga,” TijdSchrift voor Skandinavistiek 15 (1994): 5–31.