Kari Ellen Gade
Personal names are an important component of skaldic poetry. Whereas Eddic poetry commemorated characters from a dim and heroic past, skaldic poems, with a few exceptions, addressed contemporary persons and events. By incorporating a name into a stanza, the skald would tie a person to a specific action and furnish his own comments on that person's behavior; that is, he would praise or punish. In encomiastic poems the poets used names to extol chieftains and humiliate their enemies; although a chieftain might not at once have grasped the content of a stanza, he would surely have been able to recognize his own name, especially when emphasized by rhyme and alliteration, and show his immediate gratification to the composer. The lausavísur (loose stanzas) in the sagas provided the skald with the opportunity to describe contemporary events and relate his own experiences. He could address his beloved, taunt an enemy, lament a dead son, or praise his own talents as a warrior, lover, or poet. The so-called níðvísur (defamatory poems) were intended to destroy an enemy, often by mentioning his name and hinting at his connections with homosexual behavior or bestiality.1 In mansongr (love poetry) the skalds described coveted women in erotic terms, praised their beauty, and hinted at their promiscuous inclinations. Both níðvísur and mansongr incurred severe penalties in Old Norse law. A man who heard a slanderous poem recited about him was entitled to a large financial compensation and under certain circumstances he could kill the offender with impunity.2 The Old Icelandic law Grágás contains the following section on mansongr:
Under such circumstances it is not strange that the skalds, with their love
In the following I shall examine the poetic language in one skaldic saga, Bjarnar saga hítdœlakappa. The discussion will show that the kennings in Bj&ocedil;rn's lausavísur contain numerous allusions to both the name and the nickname of the woman he covets (Oddný, Eykyndill) and, moreover, that these names incorporate elements with overt sexual references. In the second part of the paper I shall explore further this erotic imagery. It will become clear that the skalds, in their composition of injurious poetry, drew on a stereotyped inventory of sexual puns and that this erotic meta-language may enable us to shed new light on hitherto unexplained stanzas.
Bjarnar saga hítdœlakappa describes two skalds, Bjorn Arngeirsson hítdœlakappi and Þórðr Kolbeinsson, competing for the love of one woman, Oddný. According to the prose text Oddný goes by the nickname Eykyndill (island candle) because she allegedly came from the island of Hj&ocedil;rsey (sword island).7 In his lausavísur Bj&ocedil;rn never uses the name Oddný, but Eykyndill occurs four times (Bjhít. 2, 1:4; 2:4; 3:8; 5:1), once in a very obscene stanza that will be discussed below. The nickname "island candle" incorporates the features "land," "sharp," and "fire," of which the latter two echo the two elements of the compound name Oddný, since "odd-" means "point of weapon, sword," and "ný" is an Old Norse word for moon. Of the thirteen kennings Bj&ocedil;rn uses to refer to Oddný eykyndill, four contain a qualifier with the semantic sphere "sharp," namely "Jorð olreyrar" (land of the alereed, 5:5-6); "skorða þornteigar" (prop of the thornland, 8:1-4); "Þrúðrþorns" (goddess of the thorn, 12:7-8), and, finally, "þorngrund" (thornland, 13:6), which for
It seems then that Bj&ocedil;rn consciously attempted to make puns on both the name and the nickname of Oddný eykyndill. This circumstance may explain an awkward man kenning in another of his lausavísur. Consider the following lines (Bjhít. 12:1-4; emphasis added):
This half-stanza contains the man kenning "Ullr odds B&ocedil;ðgefnar" (the god ["Ullr"] of the valkyrie ["B&ocedil;ðgefn"] of the point ["odds"]). According to Sigurður Nordal (Bjarnar saga, 149-50) "Ullr B&ocedil;ðgefnar" (the god of the valkyrie) is a perfect kenning for warrior, but the apparently superfluous element "odds" (of the point) cannot be connected with anything else.9 However, in light of the circumlocutions discussed above, I would like to suggest that the kenning "odds B&ocedil;ðgefn" (the valkyrie of the point) contains a pun on the name Oddný and that "odds" was deliberately put there by Bj&ocedil;rn to characterize Þórðr in the capacity of Oddný's husband, "the Ullr of the valkyrie of the point," that is, "the Ullr of Oddný."
The same saga describes Bj&ocedil;rn and Þórðr meeting at a horsefight. Arriving early, they passed the time composing scurrilous poems about each other's wives. Þórðr composed a series of stanzas called Daggeisli (moon or beam of the day) about Bj&ocedil;rn's wife, Þórdís, whom Þórðr had nicknamed Landaljómi (radiance of the lands). Bj&ocedil;rn retaliated with the Eykyndilsvísur about Oddný (Bjarnar saga, 174). None of these poems have survived. It seems that the nickname Landaljómi was made up expressly for the occasion by Þórðr to match the nickname Eykyndill. It also seems that both names, far from being laudatory labels, carried erotic connotations, such as "fire/sexuality" and "sharpness/phallus" (cf. the discussion below). This interpretation is corroborated by such similar constructions as Nattsól (sun of the night) applied to a woman of loose character in Njálssaga.10
To sum up: the incorporation of a personal name in a skaldic line would immediately have caught the attention of the audience and
Most critical editions and translations of skaldic poetry are based on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century research.11 Only recently have scholars become increasingly aware that apparently innocuous stanzas contain sexual innuendoes that were unheard of in earlier scholarship.12 When Egill Skallagrímsson lamented the infirmities of old age with the following words (lv. 44; emphasis added),
Finnur Jónsson (Skj. 1B, 52) interpreted the kenning "bergis fótar borr" (the drill of the mountain of the foot) as "the tongue" (that is, "the mountain of the foot" is "head," its "drill" is the tongue). According to him, Egill bewailed his inability to compose poetry, as brought on by old age. The thirteenth-century poet Oláfr Þórðarson, on the other hand, had no problem understanding the source of Egill's trouble. In his poetic treatise málskrúðsfrœði (knowledge of poetic ornament) he writes:13 "Karientismos er þat, ef vf&ocedil;gr n&ocedil;fn talaz grannligarr, sem egill qvað ..." (It is called Karientismos if dirty words are spoken in a nice way, as Egill said ...); then follows the stanza.
Some lausavísur contain references to body parts that were too obvious to be overlooked even by the most prudish Victorian reader. Grettis saga (pp. 240-41) describes Grettir falling asleep in the hall naked, covered only by a small blanket. He tosses about in his sleep, the blanket falls off him, and he is awakened by the snickering of two servant women who ridicule the small size of his penis. Grettir allegedly retorts with the
Such explicit phallic symbolism leaves little room for imagination, and no scholar has ever mistaken the meanings of "sword" and "horse" in this stanza.15 That was not the case, however, with a lausavísa composed by Bj&ocedil;rn hítdœlakappi upon hearing about Þórðr Kolbeinsson's marriage to Oddný eykyndill (1v. 2; Bjarnar saga, 123-24). Standing on his ship, seething with anger, he recites the following poem:
The obscenity of the first half-stanza was recognized by Sveinbjörn Egilsson, but most scholars take the second helmingr literally and claim that Bj&ocedil;rn, when composing the poem, was standing by the railing of the ship so that his oar became wet from the seaspray.16 However, there can be no doubt that the oar mentioned by Bjorn on this occasion did not belong to the ship and that the last four lines have another and more indecent meaning than the standard interpretations allow for. As Roberta
The corpus of skaldic poetry offers yet another verbal echo of Grettir's lausavísa. Kormáks saga (pp. 272-74) describes the meeting between Kormákr and his lover, Steingerðr, on a farmstead in Iceland. They spend the night together, but Kormákr is unable to perform sexually. He complains about his failures with the following words (Iv. 41:1-4):
The main content of the helmingr is clear: "We slept five terrible nights together in the house, the glorious woman and I." Scholars have come up with various suggestions in their attempts to unravel the words "hress" (physically fit, able), "hornþeyjar" (the melting, thawing of the horn, genitive), and "Freyja fjarðarleggs" (Freyja of the fjord bone, i.e., the goddess of the stone). Finnur Jónsson (Skj. 1 B, 79) emended "fjarðarleggs" to "fjarðarlogs' (of the fjord fire, i.e., of gold) and "hress" to "Hnoss" (goddess), thus obtaining two women kennings: "Freyja fjarðarlogs" (Freyja of the fjord fire) and "Hnoss hornþeyjar" (Hnoss of the melting, thawing of the horn, i.e., the goddess of ale). Kock (NN, §289) kept the emendation "fjarðarlogs," but connected it with the adjective "frægr"
I would like to conclude this survey of skaldic erotic double entendre by offering an interpretation of a hitherto unexplained stanza, an anonymous niðvísa about Steingerðr in Kormáks saga. According to that saga, Kormákr's enemies commissioned a poet to compose a slanderous poem while pretending it was the work of Kormákr, thus attempting to destroy his reputation and to make him subject to legal prosecution (Kormáks saga, 277-78). The first helmingr of this stanza reads as follows (Skj. lA, 178):
The content of these four lines is quite clear. However, the second helmingr has created problems for scholars:
Nobody has yet been able to explain satisfactorily how "gaupelds" and "garða" fit into the kennings of this stanza. There are no such Old Norse words as gaup- (except gaupi 'lynx'). Einar Ól. Sveinsson (Kormáks saga, 278) connected gaup with Modem Icelandic gopi- 'opening, crevasse' and suggested that "gunn&ocedil;rðigra geira gaupelds garða" meant "phallus," but it is not clear how he translated the individual parts of that kenning. Finnur Jónsson (Skj. lB, 168) emended the first part of the compound to gaupn- 'hand' and read "gaupnelds" (of the fire of the hand), but he did not know where to assign this qualifier.23 Kock (NN, §528) took "gaupnelds" as a qualifier for "garða" and translated the whole complex "gunn&ocedil;rðigra geira garða gaupnelds" as "the battle-eager spears of rich farms." He contended that that kenning contained a veiled reference to Steingerðr's having had illicit relations with the rich farmers in the district. However, "gaupnelds" closely resembles the kenning "handar fasta" in Bj&ocedil;rn's lausavísa 2, above, and might have contained the same pun on "fire" ("eldr" is used in skaldic poetry for both "fire" and "sword"). It follows then that "gaupnelds" should be taken as part of the woman kenning "Þrúðr þráða gaupnelds" (Þrúðr of the threads of the fire of the hand, i.e., the goddess of gold threads). Yet the words "gunn&ocedil;rðigra geira garða" remain to be explained. The key to unraveling this puzzle lies in the following lausavísa by Magnús inn góði (Skj. lA, 330; emphasis added):
The phrase "gera garð of hestreðr" refers to the custom of applying a bandage (garðr) to the phallus of a stallion to prevent it from mating with the mares.24 If we assume that "garðr" has the same meaning in the anonymous niðvísa in Kormáks saga, the kenning "gunnórðigrar geirar garða" needs no further explanation: it simply meant "the battle-erect
It emerges from the discussion above that many scurrilous skaldic poems contained the same imagery and, in some instances, similar circumlocutions and verbal echoes. That is most clearly illustrated by the woman kennings "Hrist hreðju kvista," "Hrist handar fasta," "Þrúðr gaupnelds þráða," "Freyja fjarðarleggs," and "Freyja eyleggjar," but also by the phallic kennings "velstinn ár," "borr bergis fótar," and "gunnórðigrar geirar garðda." It is noteworthy that the latest of these poems, the lausavísa in Grettis saga, is the least sophisticated in its sexual imagery, and its many textual correspondences with the vísur by Bj&ocedil;rn and Kormákr cannot be fortuitous. Whoever composed the lausavísa attributed to Grettir did so within a specific poetic tradition; he must have known the earlier poems by Bj&ocedil;rn and Kormákr and deliberately tried to make the audience aware of that connection by employing similar words and kennings. That is shown by his imitation of Kormákr's "Freyja fjarðarleggs" (="Freyja eyleggjar"): in Kormákr's poem that woman kenning contains a pun on the name Steingerðr, but in Grettir's lausavísa, which is addressed to the servant woman, this subtle reference is lost.
The erotic imagery and sexual puns in skaldic poetry must have been familiar to the medieval audience and readily appreciated by listeners. An examination of the entire corpus of skaldic poetry would surely yield a rich harvest of such examples, and there is clearly more to be read in and between skaldic lines than can be gleaned from the standard editions and translations.