Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1964, Page 78

86
Færeyinga saga, chapter forty
cause of their disappearance and sometimes the place where
their bodies lie1). The following notes are meant to clarify
some of the elements in the description. The world of
magic and popular belief is so vast that this can be no
more than a tiny step, but I hope it is in the right direction.
It is unlikely that the writer and his contemporaries
regarded Sigmundr, Tórir and Einar in their manifestation
merely as hallucinations or even as wraiths. There is abun*
dant evidence to show that it was generally believed that
the dead who visited the living had corporeal substance.
They usually appear in the shape they had at the moment
of death.2)
In magic of this kind fire may serve both to attract the
dead and to protect the living.3) As with many other
objects and practices in the domain of folk*belief, it may
have both functions at the same time, even though one is
dominant. Here it seems reasonable to assume that the
*) Cf. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1955—8), E 380,
E 231; stories in Jón Árnason, Islenzkar frjóðsógur og ævintýri (ed. Árni
Bóðvarsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 1954—61), I 221 ff. (dead usually
return in dreams), and Eva Wigstróm, Folketro och sagner (1888—1914;
Svenska Landsmál VIII 1, 3), nos. 630—33. Cf. draugen in Norway and
strandvaskaren in Sweden. In Sogn it is »druknede og ubegravede per*
soner . .. som blir drauger*, E. Birkeli, Fedrekult i Norge (Oslo Skrifter,
1938, no. 5), 179. The associations are too remote to justify Lid's refe«
rence to »ei viss form av fyreferd som skal visa seg nár den mann har
drukna som fyreferdet høyrde til. Sumtid viser dette seg utan hovud«
— Sigmundr Brestisson carries his head, after all, because he was de-
capitated when he was killed (Færeyinga saga, ch. 38; Flateyjarbók I 554).
2) H. Dehmer, Primitives Erzáhlungsgut in den tslendinga-Sógur (Von
deutscher Poeterey 2, 1927), 30; H.-J. Klare, ‘Die Toten in der alt»
nordischen Literatur’, Acta Philologica Scandinavica 8 (1933—4), 1—56;
F. Stróm in KL III (1958), 432—4. For similar conceptions in later folk*
belief cf. e. g. Jónas Jónasson, tslenzkir [rjóðhættir (2nd ed., 1945), 421—
33; Reidar Th. Christiansen, The Dead and the Living (Studia Norve»
gica I 2, 1946), 8-11.
3) Cf. the collection of material in S. Eitrem, Opferritus und Vor-
opfer der Griechen und Rómer (Oslo Skrifter, 1914, no. 1), 135—6, 153 ff.,
162 ff.