The Icelandic connection - 01.06.2010, Síða 25

Vol. 63 #1
ICELANDIC CONNECTION
23
occur during her dialogues with the
Reverend SigurSur, where “her self-
assurance and self-will assert themselves
against his demands for humility before
God and the authorities.” In one of the
lengthiest dialogues in the novel, when
the Reverend admonishes Snasfri5ur
“concerning her way of life,” at once
praising her character, and cursing her
choices, failing through words to convert
her to a life virtue, and, as a final effort,
with hands trembling, he shows her a
contract by which her husband had sold
her a cask of brennivm. Snaefricbur,
“took the document from him and
read, and as she did, his eyes were pre-
pared to swallow any movement on her
face. Her face, however, was still; her
mouth was closed, her expression perfect-
ly empty, having returned to the state it
always preferred, ever since childhood,
whenever her smile disappeared. She read
the contract carefully twice, then started
laughing.
“You laugh,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, and continued read-
ing and laughing.”
The Reverend - possibly along with
the reader - finds her response incompre-
hensible, and is at a loss to understand
how a proud woman could respond to,
what should be, devastating news in such
a fashion. Even if the Reverend fails, the
reader can surely hear an echo of
HallgerSur in Smefrf&ur’s laugh. But, at
this point, the question might arise as to
whether a woman who would respond to
this news in such a way, whether
Snaefribur could be considered a proud
woman at all?
Certainly, it must be the case that she
is proud woman; however, to realize this
we must again look to the sagas, and to
SnsefriSur's own words. Recalling her
dialogue with the Baron of
Marselisborg, the reader need only read
the powerful sentiments - which, them-
selves, recall the Eddie poem Havamal -
that bookend the earlier quoted passage
to realize her conception of pride. She
says that,
“There is a verse by an ancient
Icelandic poet ... which goes something
like this: Though a man loses his wealth
and his kin, and in the end dies himself,
he loses nothing if he has made a name
for himself.”
and that,
“there is one thing we can never lose
while one man of this race, rich or poor,
remains standing; and even in death this
thing is never lost to us; that which is
described in the old poem, and which we
call fame: just so my father and mother
are not, though they are dust, called
ignoble thieves.”
Snaefn5ur’s pride runs much deeper
than the merely personal, and she dis-
plays this through the final third of the
novel in her pursuit to clear her father’s
name. Like the characters of the saga her
greatest concern is her family’s honour,
and, after a series of deaths, she alone
was left to pursue her father’s case.
Again, it might stand to reason that such
a powerful sense of pride on a familial
level, and such a - seemingly - lack of
pride on a personal level is a glaring
contradiction, but to the female charac-
ters of the sagas, standing lovingly by
your husband, and taking part in his toil
was only natural, generally, it was only
in extreme cases where the wife stepped
forward with “the passion of a fury.” In
this case, Snaefri5ur, in many ways, is
no different, when she finds her husband
lying on the ground with a broken leg,
after having sold her for a cask of bren-