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narrow spheres of art and plunder is comprehensible and can be valued, if
only in terms of cultural history and as preparation for a more enlightened
and faith-led Christian era. We have seen how another mál, skaldic poetry
with its demanding metrics and mythological and metaphorical apparatus,
was also preserved for only a limited transitional period after the conver-
sion, during which its thematics were Christianized, as in Lilja. The third
mál ‘affairs’ chiefly concerns the pursuit – and manipulation – of marriage
contracts and judicial duels, and these two will also be transformed under
Christian canon and civil law. Kormáks saga will continue to challenge
modern readers, in no small part because of the strained effort of the
prose to make sense of the allusions in the poet’s many verses.75 Although
Kormáks saga as a narrative of thwarted and thus static love has long been
viewed through a romantic lens, the theme of competence and dynamic
personal agency – open to measure and comparison as explored under the
aegis of the polyseme mál – now emerges with clarity, as does the larger
topic of Iceland’s fitness for incorporation in a greater Christian Europe.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
P R I M A R Y S O U R C E S
Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappi. In Borgfirðinga sǫgur, ed. by Sigurður Nordal and Guðni
Jónsson. Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1938, pp. 109-211.
Brennu-Njáls saga. Ed. by Einar Ól. Sveinsson. Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornrita-
félag, 1944.
Eddukvæði. Ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason. 2 vols. Reykjavík: Hið
íslenzka fornritafélag, 2014.
Egils saga Skallagrímssonar. Ed. by Sigurður Nordal. Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka forn-
ritafélag, 1933.
Guta lag och Guta saga jämte ordbok. Ed. by Hugo Pipping, Copenhagen: C. F.
Møller, 1905-1907.
75 Due to its choice of theme, this essay has chiefly addressed the prose text in which poems
ascribed to Kormákr are embedded; stanzas in which the various topics incarnated in the
polysemantic mál are less evident. The historical Kormákr may also be less than fully evi-
dent there too. Evidence from the saga of King Haraldr suggests that impromptu versifying
on assigned or challenging topics, e.g., the altercation of a smith and a tanner described as
might be Þórr, Sigurðr, and their opponents, could have been in the nature of a “parlor (or
hall) game” in the medieval North, with the results added to the Kormakian corpus; see
Sneglu-Halla þáttr, ch. 3, 269–70.
RINGING CHANGES