Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1978, Page 29

Sniolvs kvæði
37
The next two tættir, Sniolvs táttur and Ásmundar táttur,
tell about Ásmund’s second misdeed: first the young Sniolv is
introduced, and we are told how he woos and wins the sought-
after Adalín. In the second táttur the villain Ásmund slays
Sniolv in single combat by using unusual tactics (kastar svørð-
um umkring »swings his sword around« — in other variants
he uses magic), and Adalín dies of sorrow upon seeing her
husband’s severed head tied to Ásmund’s saddle.
The last táttur, Gríms táttur, relates Ásmund’s third and
most infamous deed. Having established himself as a slayer of
champions, he challenges the famous warrior Grím to do battle,
but Grím refuses to fight Ásmund because he is protected by
the magic of his wicked mother. He offers instead to fight
any champion that Ásmund might send him. Ásmund gets
Hildibrand to take up the counter-challenge, and armed with
the sword Ásmund has given him (which is, as we know from
Golmars táttur, Hildibrand’s own sword), Hildibrand slays
Grím and then dies of sorrow when Ásmund tells him that
he has slain his own son.
Not only is Svabo’s text of Sniolvs kvæði a sequentially
narrated account of Ásmund’s adventures, the typical struc-
ture for heroic ballad cycles in Faroese tradition, but it also
has the structure of a frame story. The first and last tættir,
comprising the frame, tell the age-old story about how a father
kills his son. The central part of the ballad, the second and
third tættir, tells the otherwise unknown story of the hero
Sniolv who is killed by the evil Ásmund. The frame structure
of the Svabo text suggests that this version of the Sniolv cycle
might have originally come about through the combination of
two separate stories by means of (1) the association of the
figure Ásmund known to the Nordic variant of the father-
kills-son story (Ásmundur saga kappabana) with the villain
Ásmund of at pre-existing Sniolvs kvæði in two tættir and (2)
the subsequent embedding of the older Sniolvs kvæði into the
father-kills-son story. Certainly the so-called E and F texts
of the Sniolv cycle support such a theory — they contain only