thematic thread
The Duel — Hólmganga & Einvígi
Kormák duels again and again — for Steingerð, against Bersi — the poet who can win every combat and never win the woman. The duel as the rhythm of a whole doomed love.
Chasing Bersi
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.
The source text · 1
Cormac took his horse and weapons and saddle-gear.— kormaks saga
Kormák chases and fights the duel-champion Bersi (Collingwood & Stefánsson 1901).
Gunnlaug and Hrafn fight for Helga, and the saga records the very moment the hólmganga was banned in Iceland — the duel outlawed even as these two insist on it.
The cloak, and the banned holmgang
At a winter wedding the two men met, and Gunnlaug made his grief into a gesture: he gave Helga the king's scarlet cloak, his most precious possession, before her husband's face — a poet's way of saying she was still his.[1] The insult could end only one way.
They challenged each other to holmgang — the formal duel — and fought at the Alþingi; but the fight was broken up inconclusively, and immediately afterward the Althing outlawed duelling in Iceland forever. Denied a lawful end at home, the two skalds agreed to settle it the old way, abroad: they would both sail to Norway and meet there, beyond the reach of the new law.[2] Helga, married and grieving, could only wait for news of which of the men she was bound to would kill the man she loved.
The source text · 2
Tells the tale of Raven, that he sat at his wedding-feast at Burg, and it was the talk of most men that the bridge was but drooping; for true is the saw that saith, Long we remember what youth gained us, and even so it was with her now.— gunnlaugs saga
Gunnlaug gives Helga the king's cloak (Morris & Magnússon 1901).
Now in summer men ride a very many to the Althing: Illugi the Black, and his sons with him, Gunnlaug and Hermund; Thorstein Egilson and Kolsvein his son; Onund, of Mossfell, and his sons all, and Sverting, Hafr-Biorn's son. Skapti yet held the spokesmanship-at-law.— gunnlaugs saga
The holmgang at the Alþingi; duelling then banned.
Their combat moves abroad to Dingnes, beyond the reach of the ban — two poets killing each other over a woman, the duel pursued past the law that tried to end it.
The duel at Dingnes
They met in Norway at Dingnes, and fought a long and terrible duel. Both were grievously wounded — and then came the moment the saga is remembered for. Hrafn, his leg cut from under him, said he could fight on if he might have water to drink. Gunnlaug fetched water in his helmet and held it out to his enemy — and as Hrafn took it, he struck Gunnlaug treacherously in the head with his sword.[1]
“Ill hast thou beguiled me,” Gunnlaug said, “and done a dastard's deed, when I trusted thee.” Hrafn answered that it was true, but he had done it because he could not bear to give up Helga the Fair to another man. They fought on, and Gunnlaug killed Hrafn — but his own head-wound was mortal, and he died of it a few days later.[2] Thorstein's dream was fulfilled to the letter: the two eagles had destroyed each other over the swan.
The source text · 2
But on a day in spring Gunnlaug was walking abroad, and his kinsman Thorkel with him; they walked away from the town, till on the meads before them they saw a ring of men, and in that ring were two men with weapons fencing; but one was named Raven, the other Gunnlaug, while they who stood by said that Icelanders smote light, and were slow to remember their words.— gunnlaugs saga
The duel at Dingnes; the water and the treacherous blow (Morris & Magnússon 1901).
Now this summer, before these tidings were brought out hither to Iceland, Illugi the Black, being at home at Gilsbank, dreamed a dream: he thought that Gunnlaug came to him in his sleep, all bloody, and he sang in the dream this stave before him; and Illugi remembered the song when he woke, and sang it before others:— gunnlaugs saga
News of the fight; both poets dead.
The berserk's challenge: a berserk demands a man's kinswoman and offers to fight for her — the duel as a tool of intimidation, single combat as extortion.
The berserks
Two Swedish berserks — men who fell into killing-rages, howling and biting their shield-rims, near-impossible to fight — come into the district in service to Snorri's rival. When one of them demands a wife above his station, a cunning plan disposes of them: they are set an impossible labour, a road and a wall across a lava-field, and then trapped and killed in a bath-house heated scalding while they lie exhausted from the work.[1]
The episode is pure Eyrbyggja — a supernatural menace (the berserk fury) defeated not by greater strength but by craft and trickery, the district's recurring method. The road and the wall the berserks built across the lava, the saga notes, can still be seen. The uncanny, again, is overcome by the cool intelligence the saga prizes above raw force.
The source text · 1
Now that happed to tell of next which is aforewritten, that the Bareserks were with Stir, and when they had been there awhile, Halli fell to talking with Asdis, Stir's daughter. She was a young woman and a stately, proud of attire, and somewhat high-minded; but when Stir knew of their talk together, he bade Halli not to do him that shame and heartburn in beguiling his daughter.— eyrbyggja saga
The berserks set an impossible task and killed in the bath-house (Morris & Magnússon 1892).
And the duel's shadow over a chieftain's rise — the man known for single combats, who pays weregild for no one, his standing built on his readiness to fight any man who crosses him.
The valley that took his name
A ship came into the eastern fjords in the days of Harald Fairhair, and off it stepped a settler named Hallfreðr with his wife and his son. The boy was fifteen, and the saga pauses on him the way it pauses on no one else in these opening lines — “a hopeful man, and a goodly.” His name was Hrafnkell.[1]
He grew restless on his father's land. He took to riding the heaths in the long summers, and on one of those rides he found it: an empty valley running up off the settled country, better than anything he had seen. He asked his father for his share, moved in, and built a hall he called Aðalból — the noble farm. He gave out the surrounding land to other men on one condition: that he be their chieftain.
And he loved a god. Not the careful, shared devotion of most settlers — Hrafnkell loved Frey above all others and gave him half of everything he valued, half his best beasts, half a horse. Men began to lengthen his name for it. They called him Freysgoði: Frey's priest.[2] He was generous to his own and hard to everyone else, fought duels readily, and paid no man compensation for anything he did. That was the measure of him before the trouble came.
The source text · 2
It was in the days of King Harold Fairhair that a man brought his ship to Iceland into Breiðdal, his name being Hallfreðr. Breiðdal is a countryside down below that of Fljótsdalr. On board his ship was his wife and son, who was hight Hrafnkell, who was then fifteen winters old, a hopeful man and a goodly. Hallfreðr set up household. In the course of the winter there died a servant-maid of foreign kin, whose name was Arnthrúðr; hence the name of the place Arnthruðr-staðir. In the spring Hallfreðr moved his house northward over the heath, and set up a home at a place called Geitdalr. One night he dreamt that there came a man to him, and said : "There liest thou, Hallfreðr, and rather unwarily; flit thy house away west across the Lagarfljót, for there all thy good luck awaits thee." Thereupon he awoke and flitted his belongings down valley across Rangá, into the Tongue, to a spot, which has since been called Hallfreðr-staðir, and there he dwelt into a good old age. In breaking up from Geitdalr he had left a goat and a buck behind, and the same day that Hallfreðr left, an earthslip struck the house, and there these two creatures were lost. Hence the name Geitdalr, which this place has borne ever since.— hrafnkels saga
The settlement, in Coles' 1882 translation.
Hrafnkell made it his wont to ride upon the heaths in the summer-seasons. At this time Jökuldalr was all settled as high as the bridge. Once Hrafnkell rode up along Fljótsdalhérað and saw that a certain void valley stretched up beyond Jökuldalr, which seemed to him to be a better settlement than other valleys which he had seen already. And when he came home, he asked his father to share him out his part in the property, saying, that he was minded to set up house in the valley. This his father granted him, and in the valley he had found, he made an abode for himself, which he called Aðalból. Hrafnkell got him for wife Oddbjörg, daughter of Skjaldúlfr, from Laxárdalr, with whom he begat two sons, the older hight Thórir, the younger Ásbjörn. But when Hrafnkell had hallowed for himself the land of Aðalból, he held a great sacrificial feast, and a great temple, too, he reared up there. Hrafnkell loved no other god before Frey, and to him he made offerings of all the best things he had, going half-shares. Hrafnkell settled the whole of the valley, bestowing lands on other people, on condition of being their chief; and thus he assumed priesthood over them. From this it came to pass that his name was lengthened, and he was called Freysgoði. He was a man of right unruly ways, but a well-mannered man notwithstanding. He asserted the authority of a priest over all the men of Jokuldalr. Hrafnkell was meek and blithe towards his own people, but stern and crossgrained towards those of Jokuldalr, who never got fair dealings with him. He busied himself much with single combats, and for no man did he pay a weregild, and one ever brought him to do boot for whatsoever he might have done.— hrafnkels saga
Aðalból, the temple, and the name Freysgoði.
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