Gripla - 2022, Page 88

GRIPLA86
destiny and is consonant with the curse, but such a destiny and behavior
are also in part determined by his combination of short-sightedness and
recklessness. Seemingly genetically conditioned by his mother Dalla, he
is blind to his own best interests, as Steingerðr symbolically senses. We
recall that his half-brother Fróði “the wise” (named in Steingerðr’s stanza)
died en route to Iceland. How this interacts with Kormákr’s poetic gift is
considered below.
The witch-mother’s curse recalls the supernatural female who appears
to Óláfr pái Hǫskuldsson in a dream in Laxdœla saga, when he, insensi-
tive to the true source of his material well-being as a stockman, kills the
preternatural ox Harri after its snow-clearing fourth horn drops off with
age. The next night Óláfr has an ominous dream in which a large, angry
woman appears to him. “Hon tók til orða: ‘Er þér svefns?’ Hann kvazk
vaka” (She spoke: “Are you asleep?” He said that he was awake).35 The
spectral woman’s question is actually wider-ranging than the present mo-
ment and might be interpreted, in view of the consequences, as “Aren’t you
yet aware?” The woman continues:
Þér er svefns, en þó mun fyrir hitt ganga. Son minn hefir þú drepa
látit ok látit koma ógørviligan mér til handa, ok fyrir þá sǫk skaltu
eiga at sjá þinn son alblóðgan af mínu tilstilli; skal ek ok þann til
velja, er ek veit at þér er ófalastr.
(You are asleep but it will all come down to the same thing. You
have had my son killed and returned to me butchered, and for that
reason you will have to see your son covered in blood by my doing;
and I will choose the one that I know you would least want to part
with.)36
Óláfr can get no satisfactory explanation for the dream from his household
or is unwilling to understand its true meaning, preferring to think it a false
prediction of future events. Collective community experience, Icelandic
“wisdom,” seems to trump reason and analysis here. Although Óláfr him-
35 Laxdœla saga, ed. by Einar Ól. Sveinsson (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1934), ch.
31, 84–85.
36 The Saga of the People of Laxardal, trans. by Keneva Kunz, in The Complete Sagas of
Icelanders, ed. by Viðar Hreinsson, 5 vols. (Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríksson Publishing, 1997),
5: ch. 31, 42.