Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1964, Page 87

Færeyinga saga, chapter forty
95
boundary line and thus in itself belonging neither to one
side nor to the other, a sort of no*man’s land, comparable
to the threshold, the line of the eaves of a house, the
ridge between two valleys, places with a kind of magic
potential of their own conferred by their very neutrality.1)
Fences and gates are places where supernatural forces are
likely to be encountered (it is on a piece of fencing that
the witch rides, cf. the V'ástgótalag passage, note 1 p. 88,
and the Norse word túnriða, German zúnrite),2) and where
figures from other worlds are likely to congregate. On the
basis of such notions it might be argued that the purpose
of í>ránd’s grindr in the midst of the reitar was not pro»
tective but hilastic: if the dead are Iikely to linger by fences,
let us put up fences to attract them.3) But it would be
*) On the supernatural significance of the boundary see e. g. H. F.
Feilberg, Sjæletro (1914), 158—64; Hwb. IX 991—4.
2) See E. Noreen, ‘Om ordet háxa’, Uppsala Universitets Arsskrift
(1924, no. 8), 53—61; Hwb. IX 994—5; Á. Holmbáck och E. Wessen,
Svenska Landskapslagar V (1946), 125—6.
3) Olsen somehow equates the inanimate giindr with the vólva's
living circle of women whose song attracts (and holds?) spirits.
This is hard to see. I know one other context in which wattles
figure as part of a practice designed to evoke spirits. O’Rahilly
describes an ancient Irish practice from the account by Keating (c.
1570—1644) thus: »Upon wattles of mountain»ash they spread, raw side
uppermost, the hides of bulls that had been offered in sacrifice, ‘and
in this way they had recourse to their geasa to evoke the demons,
for the purpose of winning knowledge from them, even as the tog-
harmach (evoker of spirits) does in the circle today’« (T. F. O’Rahilly,
Early Irish History and Mythology (1946), 324). The wattles were called
cliatha fis, »wattles of wisdom«, a phrase which occurs fairly often
(ibid., 324 notes 2—3). In other contexts the hide is not mentioned but,
as O’Rahilly concludes, Keating’s account clearly suggests that the
procedure was some form of incubatio, a divinatory rite well known
among Greeks, Romans and Celts, and referred to in Icelandic and
Faroese sources (cf. the story of St Barbatus, p. 00 above; Jón Árnason,
fslenzkar fijóósógur (1954—61), I 422—4, 684; V. U. Hammershaimb,
Færesk anthologi (1891), 1 342—3; Meissner, 102—5, where the references
show that sitting on the hide was sufficient for the divinatory purpose,