The purpose of this and of the next three chapters is to examine the basic ingredients of the five genetically related analogues that critics claim to have found in Grettis saga against the relevant sections of Beowulf. Although a great deal of literature has accumulated around these five texts, comparisons have never been very detailed or thorough, even in the case of the most widely accepted analogues, namely, the Sandhaugar and Glámr episodes. Critical discussion has in most cases revolved around a few fragments of a given analogue, usually to reach the quick conclusion that they presented ample evidence to relate the two works. Differences have, for the most part, been ignored. In this respect, later scholars have too often followed the example of Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell, who only touched upon a few examples from the Sandhaugar and Glámr episodes and then pronounced their conviction that in the first text events described in Beowulf were repeated ‘with little alteration’ and that correspondence of incident was ‘so perfect’ in the second.¹

BEOWULF AND GRETTIR AS HEROES

The lives of Beowulf and Grettir are to a large extent dictated by the fact that as king and outlaw they inhabit opposite ends of the social spectrum. Before Guðbrandur Vigfússon lumped them together as monster killers no one had seen anything to compare in Beowulf and Grettir,² but soon after Vigfússon had published his findings critics began to peel away their differences to find a core of attributes that the two heroes might have in common. Four points seemed obvious: Beowulf and Grettir are sluggish youths; they possess great physical strength; they swim long distances; and, most importantly, they volunteer to overcome evil supernatural beings. But is this sufficient evidence to argue that as a character Grettir is partly fashioned with Beowulf in mind, or that the two share a common ancestor in their heroic exploits? Some critics have not found these apparent similarities enough to outweigh the differences. Guðni Jónsson, for instance, regards Grettir, in his land-cleansing efforts, merely as a new player in an old role,³ but other critics have insisted that the two heroes are basically cut from the same cloth.⁴ Textual comparison is always a treacherous business, and in this case it is more treacherous than usual because of the different techniques that the authors of the poem and the saga employ to present their main characters. Grettis saga is cast as the story of Grettir's life in the sense that it relates, in considerable detail, his origin, his career, and his death as an outlaw. Beowulf, on the other hand, is not a biographical poem, whether or not a king by that name ever existed. Only certain critical moments in Beowulf's life are ever described. Other information about him as a character is sketchy and incidental.

This lack of concrete information in the Old English poem has often forced critics who wish to claim a special affinity between the two heroes into a position of having to fall back on rather superficial comparisons and speculative arguments as evidence. We have, for example, already come across the observation that both Beowulf and Grettir come from afar to do their deeds and prefer to fight alone.⁵ It has also been pointed out that each is a lonely man, who only has one friend in the final struggle, and who ends his life unhappily.⁶ These factors do indeed apply to Beowulf and Grettir, albeit in different ways; but they are equally applicable to any number of heroes from Gilgamesh to Tin Tin. Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell believed that, like Grettir, Beowulf had been cursed (by Grendel), and suggested that the curse had been ‘a trait of the original legend which our poem has not preserved.’⁷ They saw the curse as a missing link which explained Beowulf's childlessness and his sad fate as a ruler. But in the poem Grendel is silent on this and other matters, except for one mighty howl, and efforts of this kind have not produced any firm ground for comparing the two heroes beyond the four points mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.

The first of these concerns the question as to whether a background as an inglorious or a sluggish youth can be claimed as a common trait for both Beowulf and Grettir. The idea was first proposed by Friedrich Panzer, who believed that both Beowulf and Grettir were derived independently from the folktale figure of the Bear's Son, a creature who is often unmanageable or lazy in his youth.⁸ The issue, however, is a great deal more complex than Panzer makes it appear. Grettis saga devotes a whole chapter (14) to Grettir's youth. We learn that he is not a precocious youngster, and the saga emphasizes this fact by specifically mentioning that Grettir is ten when he begins to show signs of any real growth. When his father asks him to pull his weight on the farm, Grettir promptly explains that he is not suited for such labour. Making the boy do domestic chores only results in a series of memorable, but nasty, pranks. Grettir obviously finds farm work demeaning and has presumably at the age of ten already decided on a career that involves more heroic exploits. In this sense, Grettir's youth may be disappointing or sluggish from a diligent farmer's point of view, but it is not necessarily inglorious for a hero to be. The question as to whether Grettir spent his youth as an ash-lad by the fire is addressed by the narrator of the saga and answered in the negative.⁹

We know that Beowulf is, on his mother's side, related to the royal family of the Geatas, but otherwise the story of his youth and upbringing is very unclear in the poem. The hero's undistinguished boyhood is alluded to only once (lines 2183b-9), where it is stated that he was long despised by the Geatas, who found him slack and lacking in courage and rewarded him accordingly until a change came about. But there are also passages in Beowulf that seem to contradict this statement. At the age of seven the boy is at the court of his grandfather, King Hreðel, enjoying treasures and feasts and being treated like one of Hreðel's own sons (lines 2428-31). Furthermore, when Beowulf, presumably still a very young man, arrives at the court of King Hroðgar to fight against Grendel, he does so with impressive credentials. According to the poem he has already performed many illustrious deeds (lines 408b-9a) and is an accomplished destroyer of sea monsters and giants (lines 418-24a and 549-76).¹⁰

Some scholars, especially those who believe that the poem seeks to depict a model prince, have found it impossible to reconcile these different pieces of information concerning Beowulf's youth and have therefore dismissed the reference to his inglorious early years as incompatible.¹¹ Others have sought to create a picture of Beowulf's youth that could accommodate his accomplishments as well as a period when something is seriously amiss.¹² There is, in other words, no clear-cut evidence to establish Beowulf as a youngster without promise of becoming a hero, and even if such a case could be made the comparison with Grettir as a boy would still be highly questionable because Grettir rebels against mundane tasks that he considers unworthy of a hero's attention.

Ever since Guðbrandur Vigfússon claimed that Grettis saga and Beowulf derived from the same legend, the great physical strength of the two monster killers has been considered one of the most obvious traits that they have in common. Ironically, this factor separates them no less than it unites them. The author of Grettis saga measures the strength of his hero on various occasions: he bails water like eight seamen (chapter 17); carries an ox single-handedly (chapter 50); and successfully wrestles against two men, each twice as strong as an ordinary person (chapter 72). These and other feats of strength that Grettir performs allow the saga author to conclude that he was indeed the strongest man in Iceland in his time (chapter 93). But strong though Grettir is, his physical prowess is always kept close to the borders of the humanly possible; what he might have become had Glámr's curse not stunted his growth by half we can only guess.

Beowulf, on the other hand, has no constraints of ‘realistic’ presentation imposed upon his strength. He is the strongest man alive (lines 789-90), with the strength of thirty men in his hand-grip (lines 379b-81a). These references would not necessarily indicate a strength of mythological proportions were they not coupled with descriptions of Beowulf's feats of swimming, which include five days in the sea in full armour (line 545a)¹³ and a five hundred mile swim home after Hygelac's disastrous raid on Frisia (lines 2359b-72). Scholars have quibbled over various details in these descriptions, but there is no question that the author of Beowulf endows his hero with superhuman qualities of strength and endurance.¹⁴ By comparison, Grettir's achievements in fresh or salt water are understandably paltry, as they are kept within the range of what a strong swimmer can actually do.¹⁵

The superhuman qualities of Beowulf make it very unlikely that the author of Grettis saga merely borrowed the physical attributes of his hero from the poem, but could the two hearken back to a legendary forefather—a strong swimmer who killed monsters? Larry D. Benson has argued along these lines in a well-known article entitled ‘The Originality of Beowulf,’ in which he maintains that whereas wrestling is a common accomplishment among Germanic heroes, great feats of swimming are more unusual. The idea of combining the two leads him to conclude that ‘the fact that both Grettir and Beowulf demonstrate skill at swimming and wrestling raises the possibility that both works are based on some longer work that included the Grendel episode and had other similarities to the central fable in Beowulf.’¹⁶ Benson's observation—i.e., that Germanic heroes who are both strong and can swim are few and far between—is incorrect insofar as it ignores the evidence of the later mythic-heroic fornaldarsogur, some of which are known to have influenced Grettis saga. Örvar-Odds saga, Hálfdanar saga Brönufóstra, Egils saga einhenda, and Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar all include swimming heroes, so in this respect Grettir and Beowulf are not as exceptional as Benson would like to think. If, in the original story, it mattered that the hero had to swim to reach a second monster, his journey is not easily reconstructed by comparing the poem and the saga. Beowulf, in full armour, sinks to the bottom of the mere where he is immediately attacked by Grendel's dam and her ilk, whereas Grettir dives beneath a waterfall and uneventfully scales the rock behind it to reach the giant's cave. The real swimming feats of both heroes are reserved for other occasions.

The mythical strength of Beowulf and the human limitations of Grettir do not point to a common ancestor; on the contrary, they indicate different concepts of what comprises heroic prowess. The attitudes of the poem and the saga towards supernatural beings also reveal a wholly different definition of what forces the hero must combat. In Beowulf, not only Grendel, his mother, and the dragon, but all mystical creatures, are evil. They are all enemies of man and God alike, and Beowulf fights them and overpowers them by virtue of superior strength (and divine assistance) until his final battle with the dragon. In Grettis saga, supernatural beings more or less mirror the world of people in the story: some are hostile, like Kárr, Glámr, and the Sandhaugar trolls, and Grettir destroys them in much the same way as he does his human enemies; others are friendly towards him, like the half-troll Þórir and the mysterious Hallmundr.¹⁷ Furthermore, the saga author always assumes that supernatural creatures are stronger than Grettir. This is abundantly clear in his wrestling bouts with Kárr, Glámr, Hallmundr, and the troll-woman. Grettir's victories against hostile supernatural creatures are won with the aid of good luck or cunning or both; either they trip over something in the course of the struggle and fall flat on their backs, like Kárr and Glámr, or they fail to avoid a wrestling trick, like the troll-woman at Sandhaugar.

GRENDEL AND HIS MOTHER

In their comparisons of Beowulf and Grettir, Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell paid little attention to differences in the heroes' supernatural opponents, although the nature of such creatures obviously mattered to the saga author and, even more so, to the Beowulf poet. Vigfússon and Powell regarded Grendel and his dam, Glámr, the troll-wife, and the giant at Sandhaugar primarily as hostile otherworldly creatures—‘friends’ and ‘monsters’—not the same thing, perhaps, but easily interchangeable in the two different versions of the legend.¹⁸ This trend has continued, and it is still common practice among critics to lump the supernatural adversaries of Beowulf and Grettir together on the facile assumption that they are all more or less the same, functionally speaking.¹⁹ A structural approach is in itself neither better nor worse than any other, but the problem begins when the same critics start extracting sundry details in the description of the monsters, such as the cannibalism of the Grendels and the Sandhaugar trolls or the evil eyes of Grendel and Glámr, and then proceed to serve them up as evidence to support the idea that the poem and the saga are related.

The shortcuts that have been taken by various comparatists have not stemmed from a lack of critical efforts to determine the origin and nature of Grendel and his mother. The earliest views, however, which favoured rather abstract interpretations of them, did little to support Vigfüsson's theory. The Grendels were most commonly thought to originate in nature myths and Beowulf's victory against them was seen in the context of the prevailing of spring against the forces of winter. Alternatively, they were taken to be symptoms of diseases like malaria or hallucinations by the Danes, brought on by too much drink and lack of proper ventilation. But gradually Grendel and his mother took on more concrete shapes, and scholars began to trace their ancestry to the male-female rulers of the underworld of Persian and Greek mythology.²⁰ These developments opened the possibility of finding a more immediate forefather of the Grendels, preferably with descendants in Grettis saga as well.

In 1912, W.W. Lawrence published an article that offered new and persuasive evidence to link Beowulf and Grettis saga.²¹ Lawrence was convinced that from the bewildering and seemingly contradictory description of the Grendels' abode in different parts of the poem it was possible to glimpse a reference to a waterfall in two places.²² The waterfall linked the description of the landscape in Beowulf to Sandhaugar and led Lawrence to conclude that the original story, a Märchen of the Bear's Son type, had been set in Scandinavia and involved waterfall trolls as the hero's adversaries. From such stock the author of Beowulf had eventually fashioned Grendel and his mother.²³ Lawrence found further support for his ideas on the habitat of trolls in Icelandic materials such as the Story of Grïmur Helguson and Orms þáttr, and in the presence of water sprites in Norwegian folklore. ‘A waterfall among high rocks, in which a supernatural being is believed to dwell, is a common and characteristic feature of Scandinavian mountain scenery,’ Lawrence declared.²⁴ It now seemed as though Vigfüsson's hunch about a Scandinavian homeland from which the legend had derived had been correct after all.

Although there are glaring weaknesses in his argument, Lawrence's ideas concerning the origin of Grendel and his mother have had a lasting influence on Beowulf studies.²⁵ To begin with his thesis hinges on the notion that there is indeed a waterfall with a cave behind it to be found in the poem; an assumption that has come under stinging criticism from Kemp Malone, as we shall see in chapter 5. Furthermore, there is nothing in the poem's complex and ambiguous description of Grendel and his dam—other than their enormous size—to support the idea that waterfall trolls were the raw material from which the Beowulf poet formed his monsters. But the weakest link in Lawrence's theory is probably the fact that Scandinavian trolls do not as a rule live in waterfalls. They are roaming creatures who traditionally choose to live in mountains or hills.²⁶

Grendel and his mother are no ordinary trolls; that much is certain from the poem. They may be huge, misshapen, diabolical, and beastly cannibals, but they are much more ‘aristocratic’ and have more human attributes than monsters in Scandinavian lore usually do. In Beowulf one of the first things we discover about the Grendels is their, criminally speaking, respectable background as descendants of Cain and inheritors of his curse. Like the Danes, they also keep their own court, in the sense that they occupy an underwater hall (niðsele) guarded by a band of water-monsters. Furthermore, we learn that for a number of years Grendel literally ruled over the Danes (rixode), until Beowulf put an end to his reign. The touch of magic that makes the Grendels immune to normal weapons also sets them apart from ordinary monsters in the poem, and as a tangible sign of family pride, mother and son possess an heirloom, a sword whose hilt records the history of their race. Other human touches are added as Grendel is on several occasions referred to as a man (rinc, wer, healðegn), and his misery as an outlaw equated with ordinary human feelings of loss and rejection (wonsœli, dreamum bedœled). His mother is similarly presented as a woman (ides), and in avenging her son she fulfils her duty as any self-respecting Germanic mother would.

Another factor that separates the Grendels from ordinary trolls in Scandinavian literature is the mystery in which the author of Beowulf shrouds them. His audience is never allowed to satisfy their curiosity by having a good look at them, or to discover a simple answer as to what kind of creatures they are. We have to imagine them to be unlike any known monsters, and their strangeness is emphasized by the frequent variation among terms that highlight their threefold nature: human, bestial, and diabolical. In the description of Grendel's mother the Beowulf poet goes still further by teasing his audience with contradictory statements about her. She is supposed to be weaker than a male warrior (lines 1282b-7) but, as Beowulf discovers, she is a far more dangerous opponent than Grendel.²⁷ With the proposed Sandhaugar analogue in mind, however, it is even more important that the poem refers to her with a masculine pronoun on four different occasions (lines 1260a, 1392b, 1394b and 1497b). Is this done to suggest that her sex is unimportant, as Lawrence and Goldsmith have argued,²⁸ or do we have to think of her separately as a mother and a monster, as Wrenn seems to think?²⁹ Whatever the answer is, these androgynous qualities make her more analogous to certain modern pop stars than to the troll-woman at Sandhaugar.

Grendel's name is of no help in determining family traits; it only adds to the mystery. Lawrence's theory that the word grendel may have been a generic term for a water monster in Old English³⁰ is pure guesswork, and there is no evidence to suggest that the poem's Anglo-Saxon audience had any more clues as to what the name actually means than modern scholars, who have proposed no less than five different etymologies to account for it:

1 / Old English grindan = ‘to grind’ (Old Norse grand = ‘evil’).

2 / Old English grindel = ‘bar,’ ‘bolt.’

3 / Old Norse grindill = a poetic term for ‘storm.’

4 / Latin grandis = ‘full-grown,’ ‘great,’ ‘large.’

5 / Old English grund = bottom, cf. Old Norse grandi = sand, bottom ground of a body of water.³¹

Not everything about Grendel is as enigmatic as his name and nature, however. The facts that can be gleaned from different parts of the poem about his physical attributes and behavior as a man-eating monster are briefly as follows:

• Grendel is an (in)famous rover³² of the fens and the moors that lie outside the borders of human habitation (lines 103-4).

• He is huge. Four men struggle to carry his head back to Heorot after Beowulf's final victory (lines 1637b-9).

• His fingers have nails that seem like steel-tipped spurs (lines 985-7b).

• An ugly, flame-like light emanates from his eyes (lines 726b-7).

• Unlike his mother, he does not care to fight with weapons (lines 433-4), and they do not wound him (lines 794-805b), except for his mother's magic sword (lines 1588b-90), if that is indeed the sword with which Beowulf decapitates him.

• Poisoned or corrosive blood runs through his veins (lines 1615b-17).

• Grendel is a ferocious cannibal who behaves much like an ordinary predator. For twelve years (line 147) he persecutes the Danes with frequent attacks at night (lines 1577b-9) to feast on them.

• Grendel's feeding habits have both predatory and human characteristics. He snatches as many as thirty Danes at a time, eats fifteen on the spot in one go, and carries another fifteen away with him for a later meal (lines 1581b-4a). He tears his victims apart, drinks the blood from their veins, and eats their bodies in huge mouthfuls, leaving nothing behind (740-5a).

• Grendel has a huge pouch or glove made of dragon skins (lines 2085b-8) in which he presumably carries victims that he intends to eat later.

• Grendel has no career as a ‘living corpse,’ (cf. Glámr and Kárr) either before or after Beowulf cuts his head off.

GLáMR

Glámr is an uncommon name in Old Norse. Although the origin and meaning of the name are somewhat uncertain, it does not appear to be related etymologically to that of Grendel in any way. Glámr comes from Germanic *glé, ‘to shine with a dim or a faint light’ (cf. Modern English ‘gloom’), and later derivations of the word are usually associated with light or whiteness of some kind.³³ Scholars are agreed that as a name, or a nickname, Glámr originally denotes someone who stares or looks foolish, but this association has attracted far less attention than the occurrence of his name as a poetic term for a giant and for the moon in Snorri's Edda. This latter connection has led some critics to believe that it might be indicative of his nature in the saga. Thus R.C. Boer associated Glámr with a moon myth and saw him (or rather his ghost) as the personification of the moonlight in winter.³⁴ Others, particularly Wolf von Unwerth, have stressed the giant-like size and nature of Glámr as a ghost.³⁵ But Glámr also occurs as an ordinary name in Sturlunga (Íslendinga saga), so it is by no means certain that the author of Grettis saga intended his audience to interpret it in a particular way, except to associate it with glámsýni (illusions), as he himself suggests.

It is not clear either what kind of creature Glámr is supposed to have been before he became one of the living dead. Boer and von Unwerth regard him as a demon or a magician who only feigns a human form and has evil intentions, whether he is living or dead.³⁶ No one, however, had seen any connection between the pre-ghostly Glámr and Grendel until James Carney found a way to unite them. In Beowulf (line 107) we are told of Grendel's descent from the exiled Cain, who becomes the progenitor of monsters and giants in medieval lore, and Grendel thus owes his monstrous form to inherited guilt. Carney maintains that this account in the poem has been transformed in the story of Glámr into his ‘personal guilt,’ because of his failure as a ‘normal human being’ to observe Christian rites, for which he is punished by becoming ‘not a mere ghost, but a physical monster’:

just as Hrothgar's palace was changed into an Icelandic farmhouse, so too the tale was brought up to date in medieval Iceland by discarding the idea of Cain's guilt for an analogical idea—failure to practice religious observance—that had some relevance in contemporary Iceland … Grettir slew the monster Glam who became a monster because he, in his own person, had refused to attend Mass and had eaten meat on a fast-day.³⁷

This is pretty far-fetched stuff, and Carney has to make a few shortcuts through the facts of the matter on his way to his conclusion. In the first place, Glámr hardly qualifies either as a ‘normal human being’ or as a ‘monster,’ the term under which Carney conveniently lumps Glámr and Grendel together. Secondly, he has no convincing means of explaining why the idea of monsters springing from Cain should have been replaced by a more relevant notion in medieval Iceland. There is indeed a hint of divine retribution in the tale of how Glámr meets his end, but there is no suggestion in Grettis saga that his existence as a ghost is a form of punishment or due to anything other than his own evil nature.³⁸ As opposed to Grendel, Glámr seems to enjoy his supernatural state; the punishment is reserved for Þórhallr's farm and the rest of the community.

Although Glámr as a ghost haunts farms and kills people, he is in most respects entirely different from Grendel. Glámr has no taste for human flesh, he can speak, he is as vulnerable to weapons as anyone else in the saga, and no mother or a female partner avenges his second and permanent death at the hands of Grettir. Icelandic ghosts are as a rule ‘more material than the ghosts of English tradition,’³⁹ as E. V. Gordon so aptly put it, and Glámr is no exception, so a physical presence after death does not per se make him a monster on par with Grendel, as some critics like to think. Glámr's ghostly exploits: riding housetops, making a whole region desolate, driving people mad, breaking the bones of and killing animals and people, are all well known ghost story motifs from Icelandic texts, many of which the author of Grettis saga has been shown to have been familiar with.⁴⁰ It is also possible, as Hermann Pálsson has suggested,⁴¹ that the account of Glámr's nature and powers is sprinkled with ideas that can be traced to medieval commentaries on the subject of ghosts and demons. But the main traits that Glámr and Grendel share—haunting places and killing people—are far too common among ghosts and monsters to establish any particular link between the two. Of the contact points between Glámr and Grendel that have been suggested, only three are specific enough to indicate that they might hearken back to a common origin or be directly related in some other manner: their great size, their evil eyes, and the matter of cursing or being cursed.

Grettis saga makes it quite clear that Glámr's size varies. As he enters the farmhouse where Grettir awaits him (chapter 35), he towers up to the ceiling, but a moment later the two wrestle in a manner that would be impossible if Glámr was the giant that he had just appeared to be. Hermann Pálsson has explained this with a reference to the illusionary powers that Antoníus saga ascribes to demons,⁴² and the note which the saga author inserts into his text to relate the word glámsýni to the story of Glámr supports Pálsson's reading. Grettir's vision of Glámr as a giant is only a fleeting illusion, whereas Grendel's gigantic size is an integral part of his ancestry from Cain.

It is only as Glámr is about to meet his death that his evil eyes and his stare begin to play a part in the story, whereas the ugly flame-like light from Grendel's eyes presumably scared the Danes all along. The idea that evil persons who possess magic powers can do harm by looking at someone at the moment of their death was, however, already well established in Icelandic literature before Grettis saga was composed⁴³ and has nothing whatsoever to do with Grendel.

Finally, there is the matter of the curse. James Carney includes Grettir in the second part of his Cain hypothesis and presents the following argument:

Part of the curse of Cain was that he was to be a ‘vagus et profugus in terra.’ When the monster Glam is dying he curses Grettir and part of his curse is: ‘Thou shalt be outlawed and doomed ever to dwell alone, away from men.’ This suggests that Cain figured in the author's source material; when Cain was eliminated the terms in which he was cursed were retained; but he is made, in the person of Glam, to utter the curse of which, in the source material, he was the recipient.⁴⁴

Carney's theory is based on his conviction that the author of Grettis saga had direct access to a manuscript of Beowulf, something which is very unlikely, as we shall see in chapter 6. But the most amazing part of Carney's speculation is that, having just explained how the author of Grettis saga felt compelled to substitute Grendel's ancestral guilt for Glámr's personal guilt in order to emphasize the importance of observing Christian customs in Iceland, the same author decided to cast the ghost of that stubborn heathen Glámr in the role of God almighty to banish and curse Grettir, as Cain was banished and cursed.

Whether Glámr's role in the ‘old legend’ is the same as Grendel's we have yet to examine, but nothing about the origin, nature, or behaviour of Glámr seems to point to any special affinity with Grendel. The differences between them for outweigh any superficial traits that they might seem to share, and statements to the effect that ‘after his death [Glámr] distinctly resembles Grendel’⁴⁵ are not based on much more than wishful thinking.

THE TROLL-WOMAN AND THE GIANT OF THE SANDHAUGAR EPISODE

Some scholars think that the Old Norse terms troll (‘trolls’) and jotnar (‘giants’) may have indicated a degree of difference between the two at a very early stage, i.e., that giants were considered to be remote, prehistoric figures in comparison to trolls. In late sagas (especially fornaldarsogur) and in folktales, trolls and giants have merged and for the most part share the same characteristics.⁴⁶ In this literature, trolls and giants are huge, supernatural beings who live in the mountains far to the north and are as a rule hostile towards people. This is, of course, not without exceptions, as we see in Grettis saga itself.

Unlike the battle against Glámr, whose curse follows Grettir to the end of his days, the Sandhaugar episode is self-contained and independent; much like a chapter in a picaresque novel. Late in the saga (chapter 64), the reader is informed that at a farm called Sandhaugar in Bárðardalur people are spooked by the presence of trolls. For two years in a row a man has been kidnapped from the farm at Christmas, a season that also inspired Glámr to do evil deeds; however, unlike Glámr, whose persecutions extended throughout the dark months of winter, these creatures only strike once a year. During the first attack, when the farmer was snatched away, there were other people present in the hall of the farmhouse, which clearly shows that these evil beings are only interested in taking a single person. The farmer disappeared without a trace, and no one saw anything, although a great deal of noise was heard by his bed. Then, in one sentence, the saga author makes a year go by and has nothing to say about anyone's reaction to the man's disappearance. It is only after the second attack, when traces of blood are found by the front door of the hall, that people conclude that some evil beings must be responsible for the kidnapping of the two men. Unlike with Grendel and his mother or Glámr, nothing is known about these trolls; they are (and remain) nameless, and no one knows where they come form. This is how matters stand when Grettir—who after his tangle with Glámr is the last person the reader expects to turn up in a haunted place—appears on the scene.

The above-mentioned account looks like a summary of a story, but in fact it is not; there is no more information in the saga concerning the famous hauntings at Sandhaugar prior to Grettir's fight with the trolls. What little we have is a disappointingly short and incomplete story, especially if we keep in mind that Vigfússon believed his ‘old legend’ to have been percolating in people's imaginations for hundreds of years. And it is not just that the saga version is short. As it stands, this first part of the Sandhaugar episode, i.e., the counterpart to the national disaster that Grendel brought on the Danes, leaves some awkward questions unanswered. There is no explanation as to why these evil beings only strike at Christmas,⁴⁷ why they kidnap people but only take one person at a time, or what they actually do with their victims. The fact that when the troll-woman attacks Grettir she is armed with a long knife and carries a trog,⁴⁸ and the discovery of the bones of the two missing men in the giant's cave, would seem to indicate that the Sandhaugar trolls are cannibals like Grendel. But if that is indeed the case, it does not say much for their monstrous appetite that they strike only once a year and take one person at a time. Grettir's discovery of the bones in the cave also shows that their eating habits must be a good deal more sophisticated than those of Grendel's. If, on the other hand, we are not meant to think of the Sandhaugar trolls as cannibals, there is no explanation as to why they kidnap people. These uncertainties, which affect the very nucleus of the story, do not give the impression of a legend polished by centuries of oral transmission. The hints which the author drops are inconsistent, as if he has not fully formulated the story that he wants to tell. The blood by the front door would, for example, seem to suggest that someone was attacked and perhaps eaten on the spot, and the troll-woman's long knife and trog could create the same impression. But the bones in the cave point in the opposite direction, i.e., towards people being abducted live and in one piece and killed there.

Grettir's involvement does not add a great deal of knowledge about the Sandhaugar trolls, as the reader is never given any information beyond what little Grettir actually sees. They remain without a background, there is no attempt to develop them as characters, and there is nothing about them to suggest that they enter the story with the identifying marks of a long tradition. The troll-woman is big and is armed with a long knife (skálm), as troll-women in Icelandic lore commonly are.⁴⁹ The trog she carries is, however, a more interesting and unusual prop. In his introduction to Beowulf, Klaeber states his belief that the trog and Grendel's glof (‘glove,’ ‘pouch’?) point to a connection between the two stories, as both articles serve the identical purpose of holding food,⁵⁰ but this comparison is somewhat misleading. Grendel obviously uses his glove to store and carry his victims, whereas the troll-woman's trog might be used as a cutting tray or a container in which to store food, but as a substitute for Grendel's ‘rucksack’ it will not do. The giant's entry into the story adds very little to what we know (or rather what we do not know); he is huge, black, and ugly, as giants in folklore are expected to be,⁵¹ and like the troll-woman, but unlike Grendel, he uses weapons.

Critics who wish to equate the Sandhaugar pair with Grendel and his mother have usually chosen to ignore the fact that Grettis saga suggests no relationship of any kind between the giant and the troll-woman, although in recent years some scholars have seen a ray of hope in one of the kennings that Grettir uses to refer to the giant in a stanza (no. 61) that he composes about the battle against him in the cave. The epithet in question is mellu vinr, which literally means ‘the troll-woman's friend.’ The two main editors of Grettis saga, R.C. Boer and Guðni Jónsson, take this kenning to mean ‘a giant’ and read nothing else into it. It is therefore somewhat surprising to encounter the giant as the ‘she-troll's ugly husband’ in the translation of this stanza in Beowulf and Its Analogues.⁵² Unfortunately, the translator does not explain how and when this match has come about. Another attempt to establish a relationship has been undertaken by Peter Jorgensen, who maintains that mellu vinr might be taken to mean ‘a lover,’ but the kennings for lovers that he points to as a basis for his reading are too far removed from mellu vinr to prove his point.⁵³

The only thing that the Sandhaugar trolls really have in common with Grendel and his dam is the fact that they are male and female, and even that evidence comes with certain caveats. It must be kept in mind that, unlike in Beowulf, their sex is of no importance, and that in the saga they appear in the wrong order. Critics who have the imagination to see Grendel and his mother ‘in all their monstrosity and superhuman powers’ in the giant and the troll-woman of Sandhaugar⁵⁴ are only testifying to the might of Glámr's eyes.

KáRR THE OLD

Nothing but the art of finding the lowest common denominator through a play on words can make Kárr the Old resemble Grendel or his mother. Kárr is a ghost (one of the living dead) who lives in a gravemound on Háramarsey. According to the saga he has managed to increase the wealth and power of his son, Þorfinnr, by scaring other farmers off the island and making Þorfinnr the sole owner of all property there. Only those who enjoy Þorfinnr's favour are unmolested by Kárr's hauntings.⁵⁵ R.W. McConchie, who, as we have already seen, maintains that the story of Kárr the Old is a genetically related and neglected Beowulf analogue, readily admits that Kárr is quite unlike Grendel, and that the whole episode is relatively unimportant in the context of the saga. Instead he chooses to emphasize the similarity of events and how the two heroes react to them. McConchie suggests that the first of ‘several points of similarity between Beowulf's struggle with Grendel's mother and Grettir's fight with Kárr’ is the fact that both ‘take place as a result of a series of violent hauntings.’⁵⁶ It is, of course, a matter of literary sensibility whether we see fit to equate a national disaster, like Grendel's reign of terror, and Kárr's spooking a few farmers away (he does not kill anyone) under the neat semantic umbrella of ‘a series violent hauntings.’ However, it is simply not true that Grettir tangles with Kárr as a result of his hauntings, as McConchie maintains. Grettis saga makes it quite clear that the hero's motive has nothing to do with cleansing the island of an evil being; Kárr has achieved his goal anyway, and there is nothing to be gained by his destruction except treasure. Like all others who break into gravemounds in the sagas, Grettir does so for precisely this reason.⁵⁷

THE BEAR

A.R. Taylor and A. Margaret Arent, the first scholars to maintain that the bear episode was analogous and genetically related to Beowulf, saw nothing in the description of the brown bear that Grettir fights except a brown bear. Their readers were thus spared a detailed comparison of the nature and characteristics of the beast and Grendel. But is there no way of equating the two? Recently, Arthur A. Wachsler has attempted to do so and presents his case as follows:

According to Norse Lore, a man was said to possess a soul called a ‘fylgja’ which could leave the body and reappear in the form of an animal. Indeed, the fylgja often shared the personality of its human partner. ‘The animal fylgja often had some corresponding aspect to that of the character of its owner - bulls and bears attended great chiefs, foxes people of crafty nature.’ Along with the bull, then, the bear, according to Norse tradition, was the spirit form of a great leader.

The supernatural and manlike qualities of the bear are attested also in the Norse belief in lycanthropy. Men who had the gift of shape-shifting frequently changed into animals, often appearing as bears as well as wolves …

Besides the Scandinavians, other northern races held the bear in special esteem. The Lapps, Finns, Ostiaks and Voguls regarded the bear as the most holy of wild animals and held feasts in its honor. They considered the animal to be more intelligent and stronger than a man. One northern race, the Votiaks, believed that the bear could understand human speech. In addition, these people believed that the bear, if provoked enough, could return from the dead to punish its enemies. The awe in which the Votiaks held the bear was based no doubt on its ghostly nature, on its ability to return from the dead …

The evidence in ancient northern lore suggests that the bear, along with more obvious examples, was considered to be a revenant, one of the draugar or animated dead. For that reason, the bear can be considered no less formidable and worthy an opponent than Glamr, the female troll at Sandhaugr and Kar the Old to all of whom the animal is related.⁵⁸

Wachsler's method puts the cart squarely before the horse. Even if we accept all his findings at face value, it is still not easy to see how they lead to the desired conclusion. If there is a connection to be made between Scandinavian beliefs in fylgjur, or shape-shifting—which, as it happens, only affect living persons—and the Votiaks' belief that the bear could return from the dead, it certainly does not turn the brown bear in Grettis saga into a draugr on par with Glámr and Kárr, as Wachsler would like us to think. None of this has anything to do with the bear in Grettis saga, unless we are meant to think of the animal as someone's fylgja, a chief who has taken on the shape of a bear, or the ghost of the beast rather than an ordinary brown bear of flesh and blood.

Various other points that concern the bear episode, in addition to Grettir's fight against the beast and the descriptions of its lair, have been thought to show contact with Beowulf. There is, first of all, Taylor's contention that the character and actions of Bjørn, the obnoxious relative of Þorkell, mirror those of Unferð. Taylor based his comparison on their ‘discourtesy towards guests and strangers,’ which he found so strongly emphasized in the saga writer's portrait of Bjørn that he believed it to have been a ‘characteristic of the prototype of the two men.’⁵⁹ However this comparison is not as simple as it looks. It is quite true that Unferð challenges Beowulf's credentials in the poem (lines 499-528), but it is by no means certain that he does so out of discourtesy or hostility. As Hroðgar's ryle (‘spokesman’?), it may well be that he is merely carrying out his duties.⁶⁰ Later in the poem, Unferð appears as Beowulf's friend and lends him Hrunting—the famous hœftmece—to use against Grendel's mother. Although Bjørn and Unferð may both be jealous men, there are too many other factors that separate them in the poem and the saga to suggest that they go back to a common ancestor. In the first place, Bjørn has no official position at Þorkell's farm, and he has no skeletons in his closet like Unferð (who is guilty of fratricide). Secondly, Unferð makes no attempt to tangle with Grendel, whereas Bjørn tries to kill the bear. Finally, it must be kept in mind that Bjørn is eventually killed by Grettir. As Geoffrey Hughes has rightly observed, there is no character in Germanic literature with whom Unferð can be readily compared, and Bjørn is no better than previous candidates.⁶¹

Wachsler, however, thinks that he can detect echoes from ‘the original stories’ in the way in which Bjørn and his companions arouse the ‘primal monster’:

It is not unreasonable to suppose that Bjorn and his company drank to excess and celebrated by playing instruments, singing loudly and generally behaving as drunk men do. They ‘lifted their voices’ (reysta) causing a din (háreysti). And there is nothing to suggest the Danes in Heorot were any less boisterous than their Icelandic [sic] counterparts. They expressed their joy by celebrating loudly (drēam). During their noisy celebration, both groups, apparently, provoked their neighbors who in great anger retaliated by attacking their inconsiderate tormentors. In keeping with his Christian background, the Beowulf poet places Grendel in league with the kin of Cain. In contrast, the author of the saga, with his monstrous bear, remains squarely in the pagan world, and he is probably closer to the original stories. In each case, however, it is loud noises or the sounds of celebration which arouse a primal monster and cause it to attack those who have disturbed its peace.⁶²

This may look convincing, but most of the analogous material that Wachsler claims to find in Grettis saga either is not there or is made to appear in a greatly emended form. In the saga Bjørn and his cronies are said to have loitered outside and to have made loud noises (74), but there is no mention of singing or drinking or other forms of celebration; nor are such activities normally practised outdoors in Scandinavia during the winter. It is a also a mere play on words to argue that both Grendel and the bear are ‘roused’ by noises, which cause them to attack, or to compare them as ‘primal monsters.’ Grendel is attracted—and presumably tormented—by the happy noises of celebration that he hears coming from Heorot every day; the brown bear is awoken from its hibernation and behaves as a hungry bear might be expected to do: it attacks sheep—anyone's sheep. Þorkell suffers more damage than other farmers simply because he is the wealthiest of the lot, as Grettis saga duly explains. To find in the brown bear episode of the saga essentially the same story line as in Beowulf can obviously be done, but only if we are prepared to emend both texts in the manner that Procrustes employed to make his visitors fit his infamous bed.

GRETTIR AS A MONSTER

The hypothesis that Grettir has an alter ego as a monster was first suggested by Nora Chadwick in 1959, and has since become increasingly fashionable among Beowulf scholars. Chadwick's transformation of Grettir seems to have come about as a result of her failure to fit him into a theory that would make Beowulf and Grettis saga (along with several other texts in Old Norse) ritualistic repetitions of an ancient story, which supposedly involved ‘a hereditary feud between a heroic member of a ruling Scandinavian dynasty and a closely knit group of supernatural foes [a draugr, an evil supernatural woman and a dragon], located to the east of the Baltic.’⁶³ Chadwick finds two of these foes in Grettis saga, but no trace of landscapes east of the Baltic or a dragon. As luck would have it, Bjarnar saga Hítdælakappa contains these missing elements, and that leads Chadwick to the following extraordinary conclusion:

It is strongly to be suspected that Grettir's adventures against monsters nowhere else associated with Iceland, but consistently located east of the Baltic in ‘Bjarmaland,’ have been derived by the author from traditions proper to Björn Hítdælakappi's Russian sojourn with King Cnut.⁶⁴

What Chadwick omits to explain is why, if these traditions are indeed associated with Bjørn, they are not included in his saga? And where does this leave poor Grettir? Given a family tree with half-trolls and warlocks on its distant branches and with no immediate prospects of qualifying as ‘a heroic member of a ruling Scandinavian dynasty,’ his fate at Chadwick's hands is rather predictable. As she meditates on Grettir's name—which she believes to be unusual and sinister—his metamorphosis from a hero to a monster is a matter of smooth speculation:

Is it possible that the name itself carries with it a troll connotation? What is its origin? Can it be a Norse form derived from grandi-, and is the corresponding Anglo-Saxon form Grend-il? Is it possible that in origin Grendel and Grettir are identical, and that in the Norse story the monster has been transformed into the hero—that a story, originally told from the monster's point of view, has left traces on this strange and capricious, pitiful yet very sinister, outlaw?⁶⁵

Nora Chadwick's ideas have been firmly opposed by Anatoly Liberman, who, as we have already seen, also rejects the notion that there could have been an Old English text in which Grendel's story was related from the monster's point of view. But is it possible that the names Grettir and Grendel are related through grandi-⁶⁶ or grenja (‘to bellow’), as Margaret Arent has proposed?⁶⁷ Grettir's name is normally traced to grantian (i.e., related to words meaning ‘to snarl’ or ‘to growl’), but it has also been argued that the name might not be of Norse origin and hence that it is uncertain what it means.⁶⁸ Liberman, who has discussed the possible etymologies of the names Grettir and Grendel in detail, sees no possibility of tracing their origin to the same root. His argument may be summarized as follows:

1 / Although the etymology of Grendel is debatable, the root grend is probably the umlauted form of *grand.

2 / Another Germanic root, gran-, is related to the root grant-, as in *grantjan, from which we have the verbs grenja and gretta, and eventually Grettir as a name.

3 / The relevant question is thus whether the roots *grand- and *grant- can be related, which they cannot be unless we can find a way of explaining the last consonant in each word: i.e., the d in *grand- and the t in *grant-. This was indeed attempted during the last century by Sophus Bugge, but his hypothesis was demolished by historical linguists a long time ago. In short, the bottom line is that *grand- and *grant- have to be taken to be two separate and unrelated etyma and, given that conclusion, there is no possibility of tracing the names of Grettir and Grendel to the same root.⁶⁹

Arent and Chadwick have also used chthonic connotations, which they claim to be present in the names of Grettir and Grendel, as evidence to link them. It goes without saying, however, that in the final analysis the argument stands or falls on etymological evidence, and any speculation about common connotations, chthonic or otherwise, which critics may feel that they share, is simply irrelevant.⁷⁰ It may well be that Nora Chadwick's ideas represent ‘the most daring questioning to date,’ as Richard Harris has stated,⁷¹ but there is not a shred of reasonable evidence to support her hypothesis concerning Grettir's monstrous origin.

As we saw in chapter 1, the fifth analogue that Harris claimed to have found in Grettis saga represents an attempt to develop Chadwick's ideas much further than she herself was prepared to do. Harris looks for textual evidence and finds that ‘the death of Grettir resembles in at least eleven details the first part of Beowulf, particularly the fight at Grendel's Mere.’⁷² Harris's evidence inevitably consists of sundry events and details that are extracted from the two texts. Apart from this, his approach to the two texts does not appear to follow any particular method, except to connect them at any cost.⁷³ Sometimes the order of these elements, as they originally appear in Grettis saga and Beowulf, seems to matter—and is kept; in other instances it must be re-shuffled to make a comparison.⁷⁴ But this is not the only liberty that Harris takes in the presentation of his evidence. There is also a tendency to ‘emend’ some of it in the process. Take points 2 and 3, for example:

Grettir has a hut on Drangey;
nearness to the sea.
Þorbjörn arrives at Drangey
toward the end of the day.
Grendel has a waterfall cave,
possibly near the sea.
Beowulf takes most of day
to reach bottom of mere.

Grendel has no waterfall cave like the giant at Sandhaugar; he has an underwater hall, and according to the poem it takes Beowulf hwil dæges (line 1495)—‘a good part of the day,’ not most of it—to reach the bottom of the mere.

In the course of Harris's discussion these seemingly unrelated items are stitched together with literary exegesis of the kind that Isidore of Seville practised to perfection in the seventh century. Take point 4, for example:

Þorbjörn climbs a ladder
to reach Grettir's hut.
Beowulf plunges into mere.

For the reader who is slow to see a connection between >ÞorBjørn's climbing a ladder to reach Grettir's hut, and Beowulf's plunging into the mere, Harris offers the following explication:

Þorbjörn climbs a ladder to reach Grettir's hut. Panzer's description of the Bear's Son Tale includes the motif of the hero climbing to a world, the Demon Kingdom, above or below the earth to confront the monster. Presumably an ascent would be involved where the opening in the earth, by which access is gained to the other world, is on a mountain or the top of a hill. The monster is reached only by descent elsewhere in Beowulf and Grettis saga. The necessity of climbing in the opposite direction doesn't seem to me to rule out the possibility of this being an element parallel to the climbing in the other episodes. The ladder would simply be a modification of the rope used by Grettir in the Háramarsey and Sandhaugar adventures.⁷⁵

In Grettis saga, it is perfectly true that Grettir plays many and sometimes contradictory roles,⁷⁶ and in conclusion, I want to emphasize that I do not reject Nora K. Chadwick's role reversal theory because I find it shocking that Grettir could be cast as a monster; I reject it because there is no reasonable evidence to support that particular role reversal for Grettir, and Harris's attempt to develop the original theory further changes nothing in that respect. In essence, Harris's fifth analogue shows Grettir to be a sheep-eating outlaw whose death, scene by scene, does not mirror that of Grendel, unless we are prepared to suspend common sense altogether in reviewing the evidence. However, Harris's argument is neither better nor worse than others that we have examined in this chapter from the hands of critics who would like to equate Beowulf and Grettir as heroes or their various adversaries as monsters. Undoubtedly, these arguments are inspired by academic climates that place a great value on critical imagination in literary analysis, but some issues—like the questions we have examined in this chapter—simply cannot be resolved on the basis of what critics would like to imagine. Having considered the ingredients that make up the heroes and the monsters in Beowulf and Grettis saga, I do not think there is convincing evidence to suggest a relationship between the two. As ‘heroes’ Grettir and Beowulf have little in common, and as ‘monsters’ their supernatural adversaries have even less.

Notes

1. Vigfusson and Powell 1879, 404, and 1883, 502.

2. Gering 1880, 87, wonders aloud how earlier scholars like Grímur Thorkelin, N.F.S. Grundtvig, Eiríkur Magnússon, and W. Morris—all of whom knew both Beowulf and Grettis saga—could have failed to see the connection between them.

3. Jónsson 1936, lv.

4. See, e.g., Powell 1901, 396.

5. See the discussion of the Sandhaugar episode and Grettir's fight with the bear in chap. 1.

6. See, e.g., Stedman 1913, 26 and 17, and Benson 1970, 28.

7. Vigfusson and Powell 1883, 502 and n. 2 on the same page.

8. See Panzer 1910, 32-9 and 44-66, on how this feature is expressed in various tales, and 268-9 and 322-4 on his attempt to apply the idea to Beowulf and Grettir. Panzer's theory is discussed in chap. 7.

9. Jónsson 1936, 42.

10. The first section definitely relates Beowulf's exploits as a boy, but no chronology is given for the second, which may or may not refer to the same event.

11. See, e.g., Chambers 1959, 65 and Klaeber 1950, 207 (note on line 2183).

12. Arguments to this effect are summed up by Wrenn 1953, 218 (note on lines 2183-9), and Kuhn 1984, 245n. 11.

13. Seven days according to Unferð (line 517a).

14. Even Fred C. Robinson's well-known article, ‘Elements of the Marvellous in the Characterization of Beowulf,’ in which the author finds ways of rationalizing Beowulf's dive into Grendel's mere, his swimming contest with Breca, and his return by water from Frisia, does not alter this fact. I prefer the more traditional reading of the above-mentioned episodes of the poem, not just because it suits my argument, but because I find it futile to try to rationalize the main hero of a poem which is neither consistent nor rational, and which asks us to believe that this same hero fought and defeated a number of supernatural enemies. In short, I prefer the mystery in a mysterious poem like Beowulf, and taking it away feels like being told that the parting of the Red Sea took place because of strange and unusual weather conditions.

15. See, e.g., chaps. 38, 58, and 75. Grettir's most famous water adventure, his swim from the island of Drangey to the shore of the mainland of Iceland, has been repeated several times during this century by lesser mortals.

16. Benson 1970, 28.

17. Guðni Jónsson believes Hallmundr to be a half-troll as well; see his introduction to Grettis saga, l. The exact nature of Hallmundr is left undefined in the saga.

18. Vigfusson 1878, xlix, and Vigfusson and Powell 1883, 502.

19. See, e.g., Chadwick, 1959, 178-91; Chadwick's use of the term draugr for all kinds of supernatural beings is now widely accepted.

20. See Lehmann 1901, 191-2. Early theories on the origin of the Grendels are summed up, e.g., by Kögel 1892, 274-6, and Wardale 1965, 92-3.

21. ‘The Haunted Mere in Beowulf.’ Lawrence developed his ideas on the subject further in a later study entitled Beowulf and Epic Tradition.

22. Lines 1359b and 2128b. Lawrence interpreted the Old English term fyrgenstream, ‘mountain stream,’ to mean a waterfall.

23. Lawrence 1912, 241-5, and 1928, 162.

24. Lawrence 1912, 240.

25. See, e.g., Chambers 1959, 461-4; Liestöl 1930, 371-2; Fontenrose 1959, 527n. 12 and Kennedy 1940, xxi.

26. For a further discussion of this point see, e.g., von Sydow 1923, 31.

27. This has presented a dilemma to critics who look for rational explanations of everything in the poem. Klaeber 1950, 181 (note on lines 1282 ff.), for instance, offers the far-fetched but amusing theory that the reference to her weakness is ‘evidently to be explained as an endeavor to discredit the unbiblical notion of a woman's superiority.’

28. See Lawrence 1928, 181-2, and Goldsmith 1970, 104.

29. See Wrenn 1953, 209.

30. See Lawrence 1928, 163-4.

31. For further reference see Klaeber 1950, xxviii-xxix, and Chambers 1959, 309-10. ‘Grendel’ also surfaces in English place names, often attached to water, but apart from that they throw no light on the meaning of the word according to Chambers. On the place name ‘Grendill’ in Iceland, see Einarsson, 1956, 79-82. He believes that the name is modern, probably given by a recent surveyor.

32. Mœre mearcstapa. It has also been suggested, first by Edv. Lehmann 1901, 189, and later by Kiessling 1968, 191, that mœre (with a long ‘æ’)—normally taken to be an adjective—might be a noun, mœre (with a short vowel), meaning an incubus or a night monster (Old Norse mara).

33. See Jónsson 1936, 123-4n. 2; Janzén 1947, 51; Magnússon 1989, 252; and Jónsson 1954, 209 and 311.

34. See Boer 1898, 57-8, and 1900, xlii.

35. See von Unwerth 1911, 171-2. Von Unwerth also points to the presence of a giant named Glámr in Bárðar saga, chaps. 13-14.

36. See Boer 1900, xlii n. 1, and von Unwerth 1911, 171-2.

37. Carney 1955, 94-5.

38. It has been argued (see, e.g., Hume 1975, 473) that there is a causal relationship between Glámr's becoming a ghost and the fact that his death is caused by some kind of a monstrous creature. There is nothing in the text of Grettis saga which confirms (or denies) this view.

39. Gordon 1927, 83. Gordon, it may be added, sees little ingenuity in Glámr's behaviour as a ghost and suspects that his habit of riding the house-top ‘may have been suggested originally by the cattle of Iceland getting on the turf roof to nibble the grass.’

40. See von Unwerth 1911, 167-9, and Jónsson 1936, xvii-xxxi.

41. Pálsson 1980, 98-9.

42. Pálsson 1980, 98. …

43. It appears both in Eyrbyggja and Laxdœla saga.

44. Carney 1955, 96.

45. Kiessling 1968, 200.

46. See, e.g., Halvorsen 1974, 656.

47. Christmas is very often the time when such attacks occur, but here there is nothing in the text to indicate that these particular raids are inspired by animosity towards Christianity, like the account of Grendel's ongoing strife against God.

48. There is no single word in English for this vessel. Trog is a cross between a tray and a trough.

49. See, e.g., Jónsson 1936, 30n. 1, and Shetelig 1937, 378.

50. See Klaeber 1950, xv n. 2.

51. See, e.g., Motz 1982, 72-3.

52. Garmonsway et al. 1968, 316.

53. Jorgensen 1973, 56. The compounds ástvinr and málvinr, which occur in the kennings for lovers that Jorgensen found (‘ástvinr meyja’ and ‘ekkju málvinr’), indicate more than just a friendship. It is difficult to see how they can be used as evidence of the semantic range of the uncompounded form vinr in Old Norse.

54. See, e.g., Malone 1958, 307.

55. Like the Sandhaugar episode, chap. 18 of the saga is somewhat inconsistent. The story of the high-handed practices of Kárr and his son does not accord well with the description of Þorfinnr's character, and his reaction to Grettir's robbing Kárr's gravemound makes little sense.

56. McConchie 1982, 482-3.

57. It is a fire burning on a promontory on the island that first attracts Grettir's attention, and he immediately interprets what he sees as a sign of a buried treasure. After having broken into the gravemound, Grettir pays no attention to the presence of Kárr; he merely assembles his booty and is about to leave when Kárr attacks him (cf. Jónsson 1936, 57-8). McConchie's statement (p. 484) that ‘Grettir's interest in the grave-mound is not given a precise motivation’ is only true in the sense that the saga author does not spell it out any clearer than this.

58. Wachsler 1985, 382-3.

59. Taylor 1952, 17.

60. It is very uncertain what þyle really means and what Unferð's role in Heorot is. See, e.g., Rosier 1962, 1-8, and Eliason 1963, 267-84.

61. For further discussion see Hughes 1977 and Rosenberg 1975.

62. Wachsler 1985, 386.

63. Chadwick 1959, 193.

64. Chadwick 1959, 192.

65. Chadwick 1959, 193.

66. It is not clear what meaning Chadwick wants to assign to this form.

67. Arent 1969, 184-5.

68. Janzén 1947, 155. …

69. Liberman 1986, 389-90.

70. For discussion along these lines see, e.g., Arent 1969, 184-5, and Chadwick 1959, 193.

71. Harris 1973, 40.

72. Harris 1973, 36.

73. Anatoly Liberman's objections to Harris's methods were noted in chap. 1.

74. Cf., e.g., item 6 regarding Grettir's death and items 6 and 7 from Beowulf.

75. Harris 1973, 43-4.

76. For a thorough investigation of the different roles that Grettir is made to play in the saga itself and in later tradition see Hastrup 1990, 154-83.

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