Gripla - 2022, Page 138

GRIPLA136
parallels the phrasing used in Laxdœla saga to refer to the lyfsteinn that
accompanies the sword Sköfnungr: “tekr þá Skǫfnungs­stein ok ríðr ok
bindr við hǫnd Gríms, ok tók þegar allan sviða ok þrota ór sárinu” (then
he takes the Sköfnungr-stone and rubs it and binds it on Grímr’s hand,
and immediately it took all the pain and swelling out of the wound).117
Thirdly, the use of stones is explicitly associated with the preservation
and manipulation of “heilendi” (health) and with non-Christian faith
(the law punishes those who “trva” (believe) in stones). And fourthly,
stones can be used on both humans and animals (something on which the
literary record is otherwise silent: stones are used, as far as I am aware,
exclusively on human bodies).
While Grágás clearly codes the use of powerful stones as illicit, their
sustained appearance in the literature from the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries nonetheless indicates that they continued to pique the interest of
narrators and audiences, providing a useful narrative tool. As mentioned
above, natural magic offered a framework for lapidaries which did not
condemn the lore of stones as demonic or heretical, but rather understood
the power of stones as a consequence of God’s creation of the universe. In
turn, Christian symbolism was often implemented in lapidary texts (such
as the “Merking steina” fragment preserved also in AM 194 8vo), focusing
on the symbolism of gems mentioned in the Bible. Perhaps, then, when
lapidaries began circulating in medieval Iceland in the fourteenth century,
they were contextualised by this Christian framework that made allow-
ances for scholarly interest in powerful stones.
It is therefore instructive to compare the Grágás prohibitions to the
textual record (and specifically to lapidaries): the former places the use of
stones in the context of illicit, pre-Christian beliefs; the latter in the con-
text of Latinate learning, authorised, to a certain degree, by the Church.
This contrast serves to remind us that an interest or belief in the power
of stones was not always the province of “lay” communities (as Grágás
perhaps suggests), but something increasingly shared, though in differ-
ent forms, with monastic communities. It is particularly interesting, for
example, that the excavation of Reykholt’s churches produced one of the
117 Laxdœla saga, in Laxdœla saga, Halldórs þættir Snorrasonar, Stúfs þáttr, ed. by Einar Ól.
Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 5 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1934), 215. My
emphasis.