Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1979, Qupperneq 81

The Case of »Hernilds kvæði«
89
53 Til tað svaraði Haki kall:
»Enn vil eg siga meir,
Halga hevur seg ein riddar lovað,
og nevndur Hergeiri.«17
However, after Hermundur returns to Saksland Halga is
clearly loyal to him: she helps him evade discovery at court
and sends a letter to his father to bring about the escape from
prison.
The ending of »Hermundur illi« causes special problems for
the interpretation of Halga’s character: Hermundur does not
become reconciled with Halga’s father as in the Norwegian
texts, but instead kills him, and Halga expresses her approval
of the deed:
111 Svaraði jomfrú Halga,
sum øllum tókti undur:
»Eg skoyti ikki um faðirs deyða,
so livir Hermundur.«18
Throughout the Fugloyarbók text of the ballad Halga’s
shifting loyalty makes her a very difficult character to sympa-
thize with and understand. Indeed, the ballad man himself
expresses his own sense of perplexity at her response to her
father’s death when he reports in the second line of stanza 111:
»sum øllum tókti undur« (which all thought strange).
Not only does the ending of »Hermundur illi« render
Halga’s behavior reprehensible, it also casts quite an equivocal
light on the ballad’s hero, Hermundur. In slaying King Atli
he kills his own blood relative, a deed sternly dealt with in
Faroese ballad tradition. For example, sometimes the slaying
of a kinsman is seen as the result of a cruel, unavoidable fate,
and the slayer himself dies soon thereafter, as in »Gríms táttur«
of Sniolvs kvæði (CCF 91) and »Norna-Grímur« (CCF 56).
Elsewhere the slayer is depicted as an evil man who afterwards
dies a violent death, as in »Snæulvs ríma« (CCF 92). Indeed,
the only justification in Faroese tradition for the killing of a
7 — Fróðskaparrit