Gripla - 2022, Blaðsíða 81

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and the second person pronoun þér, and makes a coarse application of the
kenning principle in that the blood-and-suet sausages are likened to snakes
in a kettle, now raised to the level of the snakes into whose pits Germanic
heroes were thrown. The sausage in the spherical cauldron is thus also a
miniaturization of Jǫrmungandr, the Miðgarðsormr or World Serpent at
the bottom of the sea, who holds the cosmos together. He takes Þórr’s bait
of an ox head on a line but his correct management is otherwise required in
order to preclude cosmic chaos. How do you compare with Þórr, Kormákr?
All this in a brief question that demands a public answer. Narfi’s tone is that
of Loki in Lokasenna, his critical catalogue of divine misbehavior. And the
cookhouse is essentially an arena for transformation, Loki’s forte. Although
Narfi employs only rudimentary poetic devices – alliteration and internal
rhyme – through chiasmus and assonance he neatly encompasses most of
Kormákr’s name within the two elements of his culinary compound (ketils
ormar). Kormákr is then caught in the carnal, mythologically fraught image
like the suet mixture in its intestinal casing (see below for another equation
of a personal name with a menial object for purposes of disparagement).
Thus, on the homological principle and with its intricate cross references,
in Narfi’s mouth even a kitchen kettle can supply inspiration comparable
to that of the cauldron of poetry.23 We should not forget the larger context
of the cookhouse: heat, smoke, water vapor, the seething kettle, inherently
slippery sausages, a scene reminiscent of cosmogonic myth: death, dismem-
berment, and reconstitution on the one hand, and the fastidious aspiring
lover, decked out in his custom finery on the other.
Narfi’s question also seems a mischievous and insinuating parody
of the collaborative preparation of food as sacrifices to the gods. The
Gotlanders’ term for such co-religionists was suþnautr (putative Icelandic
*soðnautr) ‘boiling-mate’. Kormákr’s impatience with shared religious or
magical activity is well illustrated in the remainder of the saga.
23 Cf. the vat of beer when Egill Skallagrímsson is poorly received by the king’s reeve Bárðr;
Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, ed. by Sigurður Nordal (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag,
1933), ch. 44, 108–11. On liquids as the medium for the transferal of knowledge and
art, see Judy Quinn, “Liquid Knowledge: Traditional Conceptualization of Learning in
Eddic Poetry,” in Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations and Their
Implications, ed. by Slavica Ranković, Leidulf Melve, and Else Mundal (Turnhout: Brepols,
2010), 89–100, and Stefka G. Eriksen, “‘Liquid Knowledge’ in Old Norse Literature and
Culture,” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 49 (2018): 169–97.
RINGING CHANGES