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perspective of Sneglu-Halla þáttr in the saga of King Haraldr harðráði.28
His queen, Þóra, thinks it scandalous that the king should allow himself to
be talked to by his poet Sneglu-Halli in an indirect but insulting way that
suggests that the king has willingly or unwillingly participated in same-sex
acts. Haraldr states that he alone will determine what is permissible: “vil
ek eigi snúa orðum Halla til ins verra, þeim er tvíræði eru”(rather liter-
ally: I don’t wish to turn to the worse words from Halli that are tvíræði).29
Tvíræði, literally ‘bi-vocalism’, an utterance in “double-speak,” has often
been rendered “ambiguous.”30 Yet we may prefer a literary use of the term
“bivalent,” it being not so much a question of obscurity as of the need to
recognize two disparate valences, one of which is unacceptable in public
or in the presence of one’s betters. Haraldr charges Halli to compose
something bivalent (“mæla nǫkkur tvíræðiorð”) about the queen. Modern
interpretations have Halli stating that Þóra is the most suitable sexual
partner for the king but accompanying this with explicit detail on the act
of penetration that enrages the queen, who calls the stanza slanderous and
also calls for the poet’s head. But for Halli to have met Haraldr’s criteria
for tvíræði, an innocuous reading must also be available. The vocabulary
employed here allows the interpretation “to peel back all the leather from
Haraldr’s forehead to the nape of his neck (beam).” The queen is being
identified by Halli as the person most fitted for the intimate act of re-
moving the leather cap or liner worn by Haraldr under his metal helmet.
28 See the fuller discussion in Sayers, “Command Performance: Coercion, Wit, and Censure
in Sneglu-Halla þáttr,” Mediaevistik 34 (2021): 25–48, and a related episode in the life
of King Haraldr of Norway in Sayers, “The Gift of a Sail in a Tale about King Haraldr
harðráði Sigurðarson: Textile and Text,” Maal og minne 113.2 (2021): 197–216. Other
recent studies of the þáttr include Jeffrey Turco, “Loki, Sneglu-Halla þáttr, and the Case
for a Skaldic Prosaics,” New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval
Scandinavia, ed. by Jeffrey Turco (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 185–241;
Christopher Abram, “Trolling in Old Norse: Ambiguity and Excitement in Sneglu-Halla
þáttr,” in Words that Tear the Flesh: Essays on Sarcasm in Medieval and Early Modern
Literature and Cultures, ed. by Alan Baragona and Elizabeth A. Rambo (Berlin and Boston:
de Gruyter, 2018), 41–62; “Sneglu-Halli, Lausavísur,” ed. by Kari Ellen Gade, Poetry from
the Kings’ Sagas from c. 1035 to c. 1300, 2 vols., ed. by Diana Whaley Skaldic Poetry of the
Scandinavian Middle Ages 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009) 1:325–26.
29 Sneglu-Halla þáttr, in Eyfirðinga sǫgur, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka
fornritafélag, 1956), 263–95, ch. 10, at 294.
30 The Tale of Sarcastic Halli, trans. by George Clark, in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, ed.
by Viðar Hreinsson, 5 vols. (Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríksson Publishing, 1997) 1:342–57.
RINGING CHANGES