Kormák the Skald

Kormák — dark, black-haired, fierce-tempered, the son of a noted family in Miðfjörðr — was a poet almost before he was anything else. The saga's whole engine starts the moment he first sees Steingerð: he glimpses her feet, then her eyes, beneath a door, and is lost on the spot, breaking at once into verse about her ankles and her gaze.^[1]

From that first sight the saga becomes what it uniquely is — less a chronicle of deeds than a frame for the flood of love-poems Kormák makes about Steingerð, stanza after stanza of longing and praise. The love is real and returned. What stands in its way is not a rival or a feud, at least not at first, but something the sagas take entirely seriously: a curse.

Steingerð's family set men to waylay Kormák — among them the sons of Þorveig, a woman who, as the saga drily puts it, 'knew a deal too much.' In the fighting that followed Kormák killed her sons, and then drove Þorveig herself out of the district and refused to pay any blood-money for them.^[1]

So she cursed him. Hounded and unatoned, the witch told Kormák plainly that this would be her reward to him: he should never have Steingerð.^[2] He flung an insult back and thought no more of it — but the saga means the curse to be taken at its word, and everything that follows is its working-out. Kormák will love Steingerð his whole life and never, through any turn of events, manage to marry her. The sorcery does not strike him down; it simply, patiently, keeps the two apart.

For all that, Kormák won his suit: Steingerð was betrothed to him, the match agreed, the bride-fetching set. And here the curse did its quiet, devastating work. When the appointed day came for Kormák to ride and claim his bride, he simply — did not come. The saga gives reasons and delays, but the shape of it is the curse: the one thing he wanted above all, and at the moment of having it, he failed to take it.^[1]

The betrothal lapsed, and Steingerð's people married her instead to the duel-champion Bersi. Kormák, who had let her slip through his own fingers, was left with nothing but his longing and his verse — and a lifetime ahead of chasing, fighting for, and singing about a woman now another man's wife. It is one of the strangest tragedies in the sagas: a man undone not by an enemy's sword but by his own unaccountable failure to show up, which is to say, by the curse.

Kormák would not let her go. He pursued Bersi and Steingerð, picked quarrels, and fought the famous duellist — for Bersi was Hólmgöngu-Bersi, a champion of the formal duel, and not easily beaten.^[1] There were holmgangs and lawsuits and a second witch and magic swords; the saga fills these middle chapters with combat, much of it tangled with sorcery worked for and against the fighters.

Steingerð did in time leave Bersi — but never to Kormák. The curse held its line precisely: again and again the lovers came near, and again and again something turned them apart. Kormák's pursuit reads less like hope than like a man circling a thing he can never reach, making poetry of the distance the whole way round.

Like the other saga-poets, Kormák went abroad and won renown — voyaging to Norway and harrying in Ireland, serving in a king's fleet, earning the fame a skald's life demanded.^[1] But the centre of him never moved from Steingerð. Wherever he went, the verse came back to her; she had married again, to a man named Þorvald, and still Kormák's poems circled her.

The saga's distinction is exactly this: it preserves Kormák because it preserves his poetry, and his poetry is almost all about one unreachable woman. He is the saga world's purest love-poet, and the form of his love is permanent thwarting — the curse turned into a body of verse. Of all the skalds in the corpus, his case is the most extreme: the gift and the grief are the same thing, aimed at the same person, for a lifetime.

Late in the saga comes its most telling scene. Kormák, home from his voyages, fell in once more with Steingerð — and saved her, with his own hand, when pirates seized her and her husband's ship. He had the chance, in the rescue's aftermath, to keep her at last; her husband even offered to step aside.^[1]

And still it could not be. The curse held to the end: Steingerð chose to stay with her husband, and she and Kormák parted for good and all. He had braved everything for her and won her freedom, and could not win her — exactly as Þorveig had said by the firth years before. Kormák went away, and soon afterward died abroad of a wound, far from Iceland.^[2] The saga closes on what it calls his swan-songs: the last verses of a man who loved one woman his whole life and never, once, had her.