Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 367

“SHOULD SHE TELL A STORY …” 365
regard to this same initial history.”34 The most powerful twist comes
when Álfgerður of Drangey finds an opportunity to tell Ólafur the whole
story from her point of view. By her own account, she has fallen victim
to slander, to the evil spells cast by her own stepmother, and to Ólafur’s
unreliability, as he has placed his faith in Þórhildur and Álfhildur’s rumors
about her. Álfgerður criticizes him especially harshly for this last point,
“því að þegar þú fannst og reyndir að ég elskaði þig byrjaði þér að gjöra
sama við mig og gegna ekki annarra mælgi. Því að hverjum skyldir þú
betur trúa en sjálfum þér?” (“for when you came to see that I loved you,
you began to do the same, ignoring the words of others. For whom should
you be better able to believe than yourself?” 329). Furthermore, Álfgerður
reveals that she herself wrote the message that Þórhildur asked Ólafur to
take to Álfhildur in the first place and is, consequently, largely responsible
for everything that has happened so far. At this point in the story, Ólafur
has married Þórhildur, who is pregnant with his child. Shortly thereafter,
it is revealed that she has gone into labor too early and delivered a stillborn
child, probably due to her own carelessness. Now Þórhildur is taken to
court, facing a death sentence.
A fair share of the characters in Ólafssaga turn out to be under magic
spells and therefore hardly acting of their own accord or fully responsible
for their own actions. Both Álfhildur and Álfgerður are trying to break
the spells cast by their stepmothers, and that struggle shapes their inter-
action with Ólafur.35 For most of the story, he believes that he is under
Álfgerður’s spell, but this turns out to be only partially true. In the end,
Álfgerður is acquitted of willful wrongdoing. In her place, Þórhildur ends
up being the primary culprit of the story, with Ólafur coming in at a close
34 Todorov. The Poetics of Prose, 136.
35 The “stepmother-and-casting of-spells-motif” is, as Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir has un-
derlined, exceptionally common in Icelandic fairy tales (mainly collected in the nineteenth
century) and can at least partially be traced back to medieval Icelandic literature. The con-
nection between Icelandic stepmother-tales and Ólafssaga is briefly addressed by María
Anna Þorsteinsdóttir, primarily in view of Eiríkur Laxdal’s biography, but this is a topic
worthy of further attention. Cf. Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, “Stjúpur í vondu skapi,”
Tímarit Máls og menningar 55/3 (1995): 25−36; Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, “Enchantment
and Anger in Medieval Icelandic Literature and Later Folklore,” Fictional Practice: Magic,
Narration, and the Power of Imagination, eds. Bernd-Christian Otto and Dirk Johannsen
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021), 68−90; María Anna Þorsteinsdóttir, Tveggja heima sýn,
249−52.