Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1970, Page 165

On legal terms in Færeyinga saga
173
the past50. From the notes above it appears that he was some-
times willing to emphasize that his story was taking place
outside Iceland by using legal terms that appear inappropriate
or less appropriate to Icelandic conditions. The question natu-
rally arises whether or not he transferred elements from Nor-
wegian practice to the Faroes because he really thought that
in these matters there were no differences between the two
nations. In the first of those chapters only known to us in
Snorri’s Óláfs saga helga it says that the king told the leading
men from the Faroes at hann vill hafa skatt af Færeyjum ok
pat með, at Færeyingar skyldu hafa pau Iqg, sem Óláfr kon-
ungr setti peim. Later on the Faroese leaders swore to King
Óláfr to keep pau Igg í Færeyjum ok pann rett, er hann setti
peim, ok skattgildi pat, er hann kvað á5í. If these are the
author’s words, not essentially modified by Snorri, it would
be natural then to think that he believed that Norwegian and
Faroese legal conventions were generally the same. But we
have small hope of discerning how far his belief was justified52,
and it seems safer on the whole to conclude that the author
used his knowledge of Icelandic law to help his story on and
his knowledge of Norwegian law to reinforce the impression
of a strange setting — foreign parts where Prándr, Sigmundr
and the others and all their splendid mummery become perhaps
that much more credible.
50 The word tún is used twice in the saga, once of a Norwegian and
once of a Faroese farm, in both cases with the sense of »gaardsplads«, in
accordance with Norwegian and Faroese usage. The usual Icelandic sense
is »enclosed home-field«, but in commenting on this point Ólafur Hall-
dórsson (119, note 3 to ch. 12) observes that the Norwegian-Faroese sense
»einnig hefur tíðkazt í Eyjafirði«. The word could nevertheless be taken
as another piece of local colour introduced by the author.
51 FJ 60—1, ÓH 83. It does not seem possible to make any useful
distinction between Igg and rettr or the preferable variant landsrettr, cf.
Fritzner, Ordbog, under the last word, and Maurer, Vorlesungen I 305—6.
52 The existence of an independent codification of Faroese law is of
course attested by the rettarbót of 1273 (Jakob Jakobsen, Diplomatarium
Færoense (1907), 24), but how it may have differed from Norwegian law
in any of the matters considered here is impossible to say.