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subtext of Kormákr’s retort then goes beyond Narfi’s offensive allusion:
“To the son of Ǫgmundr, the Suet­lander seems good and fucked” (with
some latitude tallowed with góðr). Kormákr has then taken Narfi’s offen-
sive question (how he might find the sausages) and transformed it into a
completed act of male rape or worse, if consensual. The cauldron of poetry
is double-bottomed and the trick is turned back on the trickster.
This reading is admittedly tendentious, less in terms of the Old Norse
poetry of personal insult than in its lexical allusions and substitutions.
But without such a reading and its double entendre, Kormákr’s retort is un-
memorable, almost a turning away from the contest, and this in the pres-
ence of Steingerðr. At a minimum, it is an understated warning to Narfi
that Kormákr is capable of a more forceful reply, in a variety of genres,
including the scurrilous (see further below on his threats in this regard).
Later in the day of the above incident, Kormákr encounters Narfi at the
farmstead and, having reflected that he didn’t want Narfi running his af-
fairs (in a prose statement), he gives the servant a blow to the head with
the poll or butt of his axe and improvises stanzas that are insulting without
being scurrilous. Class distinctions are still operative, but the dimension
of human sexuality is not alluded to. It must be admitted that this suggests
that Kormákr, as conceived by the author of the prose narrative, judged
his reply to Narfi inadequate to the circumstances, which would undercut
the speculative reading proposed above. But the incident may also seem an
afterthought. It could also be put down to the occasional inconsistences in
the information content in the saga between verse and prose.25
Hvat skaltu, orfa Áli,
ófróðr of mat ræða?
Þér vas kerski þeirar
þǫrf eng við mik, Narfi.26
25 On the long-recognized but difficult problems of the prosimetrum, see most recently
Heather O’Donoghue, The Genesis of a Saga Narrative: Verse and Prose in Kormáks saga
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). We do well to bear in mind features of Kormáks
saga that may owe their presence to a recognition of the skalds’ sagas as a sub-genre with
its own conventions, e.g., the love triangle; see the essays in Russell Poole (ed.), Skaldsagas:
Text, Vocation, and Desire in the Icelandic Sagas of Poets (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000).
26 Kormáks saga, ch. 4, 216–17, st. 13.
RINGING CHANGES