Gripla - 2022, Page 100

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also be figured in this image, the speech that passed through his mouth
successively reducing his stature as a man. Kormákr suggests his craft-
manship is of a coarse kind, since he is familiar with the fél ‘rasp, file’ and
thus not with fine work. The reference to dung and even a sledge for the
transport of dung may indicate that Tinteinn used animal dung as fuel in
his workshop, not unreasonable in power-scarce Iceland but nonetheless
somewhat demeaning, one may assume. Kormákr’s mockery of Þorvaldr
is unprovoked and hinges on metonymy, the assumed superiority of the
poet over a craftsman engaged in making material goods smaller, as if vo-
cation were the equivalent of character. One recalls that Steingerðr found
the location of Bersi’s dueling wound sufficient symbolic cause to leave
him. Steingerðr judges Kormákr’s verse defamatory (“hróp þitt”) and says
it will not be tolerated.57 Her reputation is, after all, also at stake. Kormákr
retorts that if he wished he could craft slander with the best of them, even
cause stones to float on water (“skalk níða […] svát steinar fljóti”) – perhaps
like sausages in a kettle.58 But he refrains from doing this, as he will on a
later, more serious occasion, displaying here at least more moderation than
usually shown. The ill-favored pair part on unfriendly terms.
Kormákr and Þorgils go trading and raiding in continental Europe,
with the Icelanders’ near-compulsory stop at the Norwegian royal court.
As is usual in the sagas, the Icelanders shine in Norway, whatever prob-
lems they may have left behind them at home.59 After a profitable summer
raiding and trading in the British Isles, on the Atlantic or Baltic coast,
during which Kormákr’s verse is preoccupied with his situation and with
Steingerðr and Tinteinn, they serve with distinction in King Haraldr
gráfeldr (greycloak)’s military forces. His brother faults him for not mar-
rying Steingerðr when he had the chance. Like the trip abroad, his reply
suggests a greater degree of self-scrutiny and freedom from his Icelandic
matrix than previously shown – a step toward maturity, as it were – while
57 Kormáks saga, ch. 17, 264.
58 Kormáks saga, ch. 17, 265, st. 52.
59 See Jakub Morawiec, “In a Quest for a Fame and Recognition – on the role of the
útanferð motif in medieval Icelandic sagas of warrior-poets,” Quaestiones medii aevi novae
(2017): 37–52; Yoav Tirosh, “Icelanders Abroad,” Handbook of Pre-Modern Nordic Memory
Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. by Jürg Glauser, Pernille Hermann, and Stephen A.
Mitchell (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), 502–7; and Sayers, “Death Abroad in the
Skalds’ Sagas: Kormák and the Scottish blótrisi,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 121 (2006): 161–72.