The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2008, Side 20

18
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #1
Olafur:
“It so happened one morning that
Hoskuld was out of doors seeing to his
farm; it was a fine day and the dawn sun
was shining. He heard the sound of voices
and went over to the stream at the foot of
the sloping homefield. There he saw two
people he knew well; it was his son Olaf,
and the boy’s mother. He realized then that
she was not speechless at all, for she was
talking busily to the child. Hoskuld now
went over to them and asked her what her
name was, and told her there was no point
in concealing it any longer. She agreed and
they sat down on the slope of the home-
field.
Then she said. ‘If you want to know
my name, I am called Melkorka.’ Hoskuld
asked her to tell him about her family. ‘My
father is called Myrkjartan, and he is a king
in Ireland. I was taken captive and enslaved
when I was fifteen.”
Whether or not Melkorka is a mere fig-
ment of the imagination of the author of
the saga, Icelanders take great pride in
being descended from her, even though this
may mean, in the words of Halldor
Laxness, that, as a rule, Icelandic people are
descended from books. But the preceding
story about Melkorka raises an interesting
question about the use of language. Were
Melkorka and her son (3lafur speaking
Irish or Icelandic, we may wonder, when
Hoskuldur happened to find them in con-
versation on a sunny morning? The author
does not deal with that question directly.
Also, one is bound to suspect that
Hoskuldur himself neither spoke nor
understood Irish. Melkorka must therefore
have told him the story of her life in
Icelandic, an admirable acomplishment on
her part, considering the fact that from the
time of her arrival in Iceland she had, to the
best of people’s knowledge, never said a
word in any language. Yet she was found to
have had secret conversations with her
young son Olafur. Later on in the saga, its
author, almost unwittingly, it seems, sheds
important light on the problem at hand.
Having reached adulthood, Olafur the
Peacock makes a voyage to Norway where
King Haraldur Grey-Cloak not only enter-
tains the young man from Iceland, making
him a member of his court but gives him, in
addition, a set of scarlet clothes and a ship.
He then sets sail for Ireland and finally
meets his maternal grandfather King
Myrkjartan, who immediately recognizes
that Olafur is a man of noble birth who
speaks exceptionally good Irish. This kind
of information about the use of languages is
rarely offered in the Icelandic sagas, even
though their authors often embroidered
the known historicity of 9th- and 10th-
century characters. Uninitiated saga read-
ers are therefore likely to assume that, in
the Middle Ages, Icelandic was spoken and
understood, not only throughout
Scandinavia, but in the Baltic regions and
even Russia and of course in the British
Isles. This imaginary expansion of geo-
graphic language territory seems to have
been almost an unconscious attempt on the
part of medieval Icelandic poets and story-
tellers to elevate their own past to the level
of myth or legend to make it acceptable.
The author of Laxdtela Saga, however, is
realistic enough to inform us that Olafur
the Peacock had to use his impeccable Irish
when he met his grandfather King
Myrkjartan, From this we may deduce that,
about the time Christianity was being
introduced in Iceland, a somewhat con-
strained brand of bilingualism may have
been in existence at the odd farm in the dis-
trict of Dalir in western Iceland. Whether
or not the Irish princess Melkorka, who
became a slave girl in Norway and was
brought from there to Iceland, ever existed,
her story depicts a situation which may not
have been uncommon in 9th-century
south-west Iceland. A number of people of
Celtic descent and others who had been liv-
ing in Scotland, Ireland and the Hebrides
then settled in that part of the country
where at many a farm an Irish mother may
have taught her child her mother tongue.
Unfortunately, many of these people came
to Iceland as slaves and were then relegated
to an inferior social status. In his book
Gaelic Influence in Iceland Gfsli
SigurSsson has this to say about our previ-
ously mentioned Melkorka: “Melkorka is
worthy of special mention. The only rea-
son why she is acceptable as a mother for
an Icelandic hero, is that she is in fact a