Orð og tunga - 2023, Blaðsíða 17

8 Orð og tunga
purpose to name them all; this should be enough to ascertain that in
Njáls saga, fiends and demons walk the earth and have an impact
on the narrative. Consequently, one may conclude that it is far from
meaningless or harmless to summon the trolls with a curse.
The close interaction of trolls and regular humans is also notewor­
thy, and it is not only Hallgerðr who has such interactions or is ac­
cused of fraternising with the trolls. In another verbal skirmish late
in the saga, Skarpheðinn Njálsson, one of Hallgerðr’s many enemies
from the Rangárvellir region, accuses his antagonist Flosi of having
performed a sex act with – presumably being anally penetrated by
– the god or elf of Svínafell, a taunt that once uttered precludes all
possibility of settlement and peace. While the accusation might be
blatantly untrue, and we do not even know if Skarpheðinn means it
literally or intends it as an colossal exaggeration, it can nevertheless
hardly be denied that Skarpheðinn is conjuring up a vision of a sexual
relationship between a man and a demon. If a magnate on Svínafell
can be buggered by a troll, then clearly it could be hazardous to sum­
mon them in a curse (Brennu­Njáls saga 1954:314).10
Skarpheðinn is not the first, nor indeed the last, Njáls saga char­
acter to attribute demonic acts to his adversaries; in fact, this could
be a trick he picked up from his own enemy, the aforementioned
Hallgerðr. The feud between Hlíðarendi and Bergþórshváll reaches
its zenith when Hallgerðr indirectly suggests that magic was involved
in Skarpheðinn himself growing a beard and that his father is a witch,
that is to say, another type of troll. The reason for this was the old
man’s skilled usage of dung to make the grass grow, and Hallgerðr
plays on this by calling his sons, Skarpheðinn and his brothers ‘dung­
beardlings’, thereby associating the symbol of their manhood with
faeces in the face. Like most other things I am mentioning here, faeces
are also far from innocent in medieval Iceland or medieval Europe,
having rather a close connection with the devil himself and hell.11 So
the taunt about the dung­beard is not only a humiliation – in the Mid­
dle Ages, much like today, the posterior and references to it are often
used to humiliate an opponent in various ways – but also an accusa­
10 The Old Icelandic habit of ridiculing men by referring to them as female livestock
or insisting they were ‘the passive’ partner in a sex act was analysed by Sørensen,
(1983).
11 The relationship between faeces and the demonic is discussed, for example, in
Ármann Jakobsson (2017:127–131), building on the studies of Davíð Erlingsson
(1994).
tunga25.indb 8 08.06.2023 15:47:14