Talking Ships

by Dr. John Lindow

Margaret and Richard Beck Lectures
Icelandic Symposium
University of Victoria
November 20, 2004

The first Scandinavian to overhear talking ships was an unnamed servant—a kitchen boy—who worked for some outlaws who inhabited a few islands in Eiríksfjörðr, the heart of the Greenlandic eastern settlement, not terribly far from Eiríkr the Red’s own farm, Brattahlið. The story is told in Flóamanna saga, which chronicles the life and adventures of Þorgils Örrabeinstjúpr Þórðarson, the otherwise not well-known grandson of Hallsteinn or Hásteinn Atlason, one of the original settlers of the area around Flói in Ölfus on the western part of the south coast of Iceland. Flóamanna saga is a work of the Icelandic fourteenth century and delights in the unusual. Today the most famous exploit attributed to Þorgils appears to be his nursing his infant son after the death of the boy’s mother by cutting off his own nipple, out of which flowed first blood, then a mixture, then milk; when the boy later dies the despondent Þorgils says he knows the grief that women feel—a decidedly unusual comment in the world of the sagas of Icelanders. Þorgils’ journeys take him from southern Iceland to Norway, possibly to the Baltic or even beyond (Þórhallur Vilmundarson 1991: 254–55, fn. 3), to the Hebrides, Ireland, and Sweden, then back to Iceland. There he becomes one of the first to convert to Christianity. Shortly thereafter he accepts an invitation from Eiríkr the Red, whom he had met in Norway, to travel to Greenland. One of the constants of this wretched journey is a series of dreams in which Thor berates his former follower’s treachery. On this journey Þorgils loses most of his men and also his wife and must therefore suckle his infant son Þorfinnur. When he finally reaches the area settled earlier by Eiríkr the Red, the two have a gradual falling out, and Eiríkr abandons Þorgils when the two have agreed to root out the outlaws on the islands in Eiríksfjörðr.

Þorgils goes ashore alone and (like Gísli on Hergilsey [Ingjaldsfífl]) plays the fool. Declaring that he is Án the foolish, he learns from the outlaws’ kitchen boys that the outlaws are due home that evening. Later he mounts a raid and kills them.

After parting from the kitchen boys, Þorgils rows out and capsizes his boat for good measure. The cookery boys laugh at him.

Things are turning out strangely now, one said.

How is that? said his companion.

A man has arrived in the district, big and famous, and so our chief won’t go to the mainland, and our luck has changed now. I heard the ships say this in the morning, when I came out. The ship which is called Stakanhöfði said this:
Do you know, Vinagautr, that Þorgils is to own us?
I didn’t know that, said the other ship, but it seems good to me.

And I’d call that big news, said the kitchen boy.

Editors and commentators have had little to say of these talking ships, other than to note their existence. Finnur Jónsson regarded them as among the fairy tale motifs mixed into what he thought was otherwise the most trustworthy part of the saga, the journey to Greenland (Finnur Jónsson ed. 1932: xii). Piet Onno Niehoff used the same expression, fairy tale motif, but said that the whole had a literary turn (1937:83). Þorhallur Vilmundarsson limited himself to pointing out the ancient Greek and more recent Icelandic analogues which I will discuss below (Þorhallur Vilmundarsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, ed. 1991: 308 fn. 1; the Icelandic parallels are also cited in Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1940: 139, fn. 1). Indeed, talking ships are relatively rare in the world’s folklore, as far as I can tell. The handbooks indicate that Jewish tradition has a talking stone to indicate the impending end of the world (motif A1002.2.3 in Thompson 1955-58), and North American Indian tradition has talking private parts and even talking excrement (Thompson 1929: 296, cited in Vogelin 1972), but talking ships are rare even in the exotic world of folklore.

Certainly they are unique in medieval Icelandic literature. Still, there are similar items that can help us to understand how the medieval Icelandic audience might have responded to the story about them. The first of these is Friðþjófr the Bold’s ship Elliði, to which the author (or a redactor) of the longer version of Friðþjófs saga thought that Friðþjófr addressed a verse encoding an order to the ship. Friðþjófr, his men, and the ship have been having a very tough time of it because their enemies have hired some troll women to work magic against them. When, battered by waves and wind, the ship shudders to a halt, Friðþjófr climbs the mast and sees that the ship is encircled by whales with the troll women atop them. The rest of the passage begins with his uttering a verse.

I see troll women,
Two on the wave,
Helgi has
Sent them hither.
Elliði will slice
Through the middle
Of their backs,
Before it leaves the sea.

It is said that Elliði could understand human speech.

Then Björn said: Now we can see the valor of those brothers against us. And Björn went to the stern, and Friðþjófr grabbed a pole and went to the bow and spoke a verse.

Hail Elliði!
Leap on the wave.
Break the trollwomen’s
Teeth and forehead,
The chin and jaws
Of the evil woman,
A foot or both
Of this witch.

Then he threw the pole at one of the shape-changers, and Elliði’s armed prow came down on the back of the other one and broke the back of both.

[Larsson 1901: 26–27]

This is a handy ship, to be sure, but it is fundamentally dissimilar from the talking ships of Flóamanna saga. They speak to each other, but Elliði’s use of language is directed only toward the human community or, specifically, to Friðþjófr. Nor does Elliði ever speak, even if it does take orders.

Indeed, the only other talking objects in the sagas of which I am aware are the talking head of Eyrbyggja saga and the talking cloak of Laxdœla saga (cited in Þorhallur Vilmundarsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, ed. 1991: 308 fn. 1). The head is human, trunkless, and uncovered atop an old landslide near Álftafjörður, according to chapter 43 of Eyrbyggja saga. It utters a ditty overheard by Freysteinn bófi predicting that the area of the landslide will be reddened by men’s blood and will come to conceal men’s skulls. Not long thereafter a pitched battle takes place there.

The dark blue cloak speaks a verse while it is spread out to dry on the wall of the booth of Þorgils Hölluson, its owner, at the Alþingi, in ch. 67 of Laxdœla saga. It is not a technically demanding verse, but then perhaps we have no right to expect an article of clothing to master the intricacies of skaldic verse.

Hangir vát á vegg,
Veit hattkilan bragð,
þvígit optar þurr,
þeygi dylk, at hon viti tvau. (Einar Ól. Sveinsson ed. 1934: 198)
It hangs wet on the wall,
The hooded cloak knows one trick,
For it will not dry more often,
Though I would not conceal that it knows two.

As the saga says, people thought this was the strangest occurrence. One of the tricks the cloak knows is obviously the plan to kill Þorgils while he is counting out the money to compensate the sons of Helgi for killing their father. The other would appear to be the killing of Helgi, and what joins the two is the role of Snorri Goði in arranging each. Although the shift from third person to first person at the end might enable an argument that the verse might have originally been the utterance of an observer, the saga author is perfectly clear in attributing the verse to the cloak.

The following similarities join the utterances of the inanimate objects in the three sagas.

Common to Flóamanna saga and Laxdœla saga are these points.

The last of these may seem to be purely coincidental, but I mention it because of the bricolage characteristic of the author of Flóamanna saga. He is famous for borrowing or adapting material from other sources, including sagas, and it is not completely out of the question that he knew Laxdœla saga or some anecdote about the talking cloak—the eastern end of the Breiðafjörður, where Laxdœla saga is set, is not greatly distant from Ölfus, with which the Flóamanna saga author was well acquainted. Even if we could show that he was influenced by Laxdœla saga’s anecdote of the talking cloak, however, we would need to explain why the talking objects are ships in Flóamanna saga.

To this question a standard response would rely on the author’s willingness to borrow from other sources, in this instance presumably the Argo of ancient Greece. The Argo’s ability to speak is known from the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, the reworking of the story of Jason and the Argonauts. The prow of the Argo contained a piece of oak from the oracular grove at Dordona sacred to Zeus, and thus could speak to utter prophecy.

One problem with this analogue is that it is not precise. The ship Argo speaks with humans, not with other ships, and although like Stakanhöfði what it says constitutes prophecy, Argo means to be heard by its human audience. According to Flóamanna saga, the talking ships in Eiríksfjörðr were just having a conversation, passing along the news while at rest (that is, there is no indication they were at sea, working as we might say). We are to assume that the kitchen boy who overheard them talking did so wholly by accident, presumably while passing by where they were moored.

Stakanhöfði and Vinagautr belonged to outlaws during the very early years of the settlement of Greenland. They presumably came to Greenland along with the settlers from around Breiðafjörður in western Iceland, although we cannot rule out the possibility that they would have been built in Norway or even in Greenland. What sort of vessels the saga author and his audience might have imagined is also difficult to discern. If they were ocean-going ships from Iceland or Norway, they were presumably of the deep rather bluff bowed sort called knörr in Old Norse-Icelandic. If local they may have been lighter craft. Or perhaps the author imagined them to be light warships (longships) suitable for the raids the outlaws carried out and characteristic with the heroic stature of their new owner Þorgils. In any case, Þorgils does not seem to have brought them with him when he left Greenland, for the saga refers only to a single ship being used on this voyage. Ultimately, he returned to his farm Traðarholt in Flói.

[The two ships’ names have occasioned comment. The name Stakanhöfði suggests a head of some sort, rather like the human head that adorned the prow of St Olaf’s ship Karlshöfði (human head). The first component, stakan, is not clear. If the first component were staka hide or verse we would expect the ship to be named not Stakanhöfði but Stökuhöfði.]

Five centuries after Flóamanna saga, talking ships turn up once again in Iceland. They might well have turned up sooner, but it was not until the nineteenth century that systematic collection and publication of folklore got underway there. The great collector Jón Árnason included a story about talking ships in his 1862–1864 Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri. It was supplied to him by Jóhann Briem (Gunnlaugsson), the parson at Hruni in Árnessýsla, who contributed eight other texts, either local to Hruni and the environs or bird lore. Séra Jóhann’s text is not localized to any particular place, although obviously the western part of the south coast is the nearest logical setting.

Sometimes there is a creaking in ships even if it is calm and they are in boathouses. That is the speaking of ships, which few can understand.

Once there was a man who understood the speaking of ships. He came to the sea where two ships stood and hears that one ship says: We have been together for a long time, but tomorrow we must part.
It will never happen that we will part, said the other ship. We have been together for thirty years now and have grown old, and if one of us is lost then we will both be lost.
Still, that will not happen. The weather is good this evening, but it will change tomorrow and no one will row out except your skipper, and I and all the other ships will remain behind. You will go out and never come back. We won’t be standing here together any longer.
That will never be, and I will not go out.
You will nevertheless have to go out, and tonight is the last night we will be together.
I will never go out if you do not go out.
Even so, that is how it will be.
Not unless the Devil himself shows up. After that the ships spoke so quietly that the listener in the forest couldn’t hear their conversation.
The following morning the weather was very ominous, and nobody thought it was advisable to row out except one skipper and his crew. They went to the water along with many others who were not going to row out. Put on your foul weather gear, in the name of Jesus, says the skipper, as was customary. This they do. Let us launch the ship, in the name of Jesus, says the skipper, as was customary. They set to work, but the ship did not move forward. Then the skipper calls on other sailors who were nearby to help them, but it didn’t help. Then he calls on everybody who was there to launch the ship, and the men were chockablock together, and now the skipper calls out Let us launch the ship, with the same formula as before. But the ship still would not move. Then the skipper calls out loudly: Launch the ship in the name of the Devil! The ship jumped forward, so hard that it was not controllable, and straight out to sea. The crew had a lot of work [getting it under control]. Then they rowed out, and nothing has been seen of this ship since then or heard about anyone who was on it. (Jón Árnason 1961, Vol 2: 12, my translation)

As the parson at Hruni, Séra Jóhann may have been particularly sensitive to stories about the Devil, since his church was the setting for one of Iceland’s most famous tales, that of the Christmas dance at Hruni. Instead of celebrating a mass on Christmas, the parson led a dance. His mother went off to get another clergyman, and when the two returned to Hruni they found that the dancing parson and all the parishioners had been dragged down to Hell inside the church, from which sounds could still be heard. This was indeed one of the stories Séra Jóhann reported to Jón Árnason. Jón Árnason must have seen a connection between the two texts, since he chose to print the two stories one after another, with the talking ships following the Christmas dance at Hruni.

Jón Árnason had another version of this narrative but chose not to publish it, although it seems apparent that it was a better text, in that it was localized and had more detail. He had it from Brynjólfur [Jónsson] frá Minnanúpi, who sent about three dozen texts to Jón altogether. This one is part of Lbs 242. It was published in Jón Þorkelsson’s 1899 collection, and once again in the 1961 expansion of Jón Árnason’s collection done by Árni Böðvarsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson. The relevant part of the text concerns the tólfæringur—a boat with twelve oars—named Skúta, which was usually launched from and landed at Strandarsund—the Strönd channel—in Selvogur, on the south coast of the Reykjanes peninsula. It is important to recall that although the traditional wooden fishing boats were small open vessels that depended on rowing and sometimes had to range some distance offshore to find a catch, the most vulnerable moments were launching them off the beach through the surf and then landing them again.

Brynjólfur begins this version of the legend by writing that Skúta had a lull (break in the surf) at noon every day, however high the surf was running. He adds that some people say that there was a general lull at noon, and that Strandarsund used to be the best channel in Selvogur for launching and landing boats.

…it is said that the night before this happened one of Skúta’s crew couldn’t sleep. He got up and went down to the boathouse. Two ships stood there which were going about in Strandarsund that winter, Skúta and another twelve-oared vessel called Mókollur. When the sailor came to the boathouses he heard that the ships were talking together. Mókollur started: Now we will have to part tomorrow.
No, said Skúta, I don’t plan to let myself be rowed tomorrow.
You’ll have to, said Mókollur.
I won’t let anybody move me, said Skúta.
Your skipper will command you in the name of the Devil.
Then I will have to, says Skúta, and it will go the worse.
After that they were quiet. The man went back and was heavy-hearted and lay down. The next morning the weather was suitable, and men were getting ready to row out to sea. The man who had heard the strange talking said he was ill and could not row, and he asked the skipper not to row out. But to talk like that did no good at all. They went to launch both of them. Mókollor ran down the rollers, but it was impossible to budge Skúta, and people quit with that. After they had rested the skipper called them back and ordered them to grab hold in the name of Jesus, as he was accustomed to doing, but still Skúta did not move. They tried three times and it didn’t move an inch. Then the skipper became angry and called the men the fourth time and said in a rage: Grab hold in the name of the Devil! They obeyed. Then Skúta ran down so powerfully that men could barely keep their feet.
Now they rowed out to the fishing grounds. As the day wore on the surf began to grow and people went ashore. The twelve-oared boats from Strönd stayed together longer but then went back. When they had come into the sound Mókollur’s skipper said: “I don’t think it’s noon yet, and let’s wait for that.” Skúta’s skipper said that noon had come and gone. They argued about that until the Skúta’s skipper decided to land at Herdísarvík and left. Right afterwards the surf fell. Then Mókollur’s skipper called out: “Here’s Skúta’s lull.” Skúta’s skipper did not hear that and continued forward out to Herdísarvík and ran ashore at Bót. But the surf was so high that Skúta wrecked there and was smashed into bits, and all the men drowned. Mókollur made use of Skúta’s lull and got ashore safe with all hands. Then the man told about what he had heard. (Jón Þorkelsson 1899:74-76; Jón Árnason 1961, vol. 4: 52-53. My translation.)

This version differs from that of Séra Jóhann in only a few ways: Séra Jóhann implies that being able to understand the speech of ships was something special, and he omits the notion of the noonday lull, probably because he was not as familiar with or interested in the issue of beaching a boat in the surf. From the point of view of European folklore the legends are identical in that they embody the didactic message against naming Satan, and especially naming him in connection with getting a specific job done. This message was what interested Séra Jóhann, and he did not care how the blasphemous skipper and his crew died. He does, however, seem to implicate the doomed ship in the blasphemy, since it is Skúta who first brings the Devil into the story in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: Not unless the Devil himself shows up. In Brynjólfur’s version, the other ship states that Satan will be invoked, and Skúta replies that that will settle the issue, to no good. That Skúta will not go out when Jesus is invoked but must when Satan is named is somewhat curious but in keeping with the didactic message: when one calls on Satan for help, one is powerless thereafter.

[Séra Jóhann invokes the rule of three in the actual launching: first the crew, then some others, then all who are on the scene push the recalcitrant Skúta.]

Brynjólfur tells a longer and more complete story. In the manuscript it follows on a description of the tale-worthy cruelties of Erlendur lögmaður Þorvarðsson, the last höfðingi (aristocrat) to dwell at Strönd. He dates the loss of Skúta to many years, possibly fifty-seven, after Erlendur’s death, which would put it in 1632. He specifies that the boats are tólfæringar and names each of them. Unlike Séra Jóhann, he has both ships launched, and the loss of Skúta turns on the blasphemous skipper’s uncertainty about the noon lull and his decision to head for another harbour (Herdísarvík, which is about three nautical miles from Strönd).

What joins the two versions of the legend, besides the didactic message, is the conversation overheard between the ships. The substance of the conversation is identical. One ship tells the other that they must part tomorrow, and the other responds that it will not set out. Then there is mention of the circumstance that will cause it to be launched (and lost), namely the involvement of the Devil. This conversation constitutes the first scene of the legend, and the subsequent, inevitable loss of the ship the second.

According to Brynjólfur, this legend was widely known in Strönd and beyond (Jón Þorkelsson 1899:73; Jón Árnason 1961, vol. 6: 666). What beyond (víðar) means in this context is unclear, but it is hard to imagine that the legend was not known across the western part of Iceland’s south coast. From Strönd to Þorlákshöfn it is not more than twenty kilometres by bridle trail, or about ten nautical miles by boat, and there one reaches the mouth of the Ölfusá and the rich farmlands of Breiðamýri. And we know for a fact that one person knew the legend in that area, since Brynjólfur lived the last part of his life in Eyrabakki. Furthermore, Séra Jóhann reported the legend from Hruni, which is about seventy kilometres northeast of that area, as is Minninúpur, where Brunjólfur lived. In short, the Greenlandic talking ships of the Middle Ages and the talking fishing boats of the nineteenth century meet in the landscape around the mouth of the Ölfusá. It was the home of Þorgils, who came to own the Greenlandic talking ships, and after obtaining them he returned there to end his days at the ancestral farm at Traðarholt. In addition, it was the nearest reasonable harbour to the beaches off which the later talking ships were launched and where Skúta was wrecked.

The similarities in the medieval and modern stories go beyond the mere fact of the ships’ talking. In both cases they are overheard talking, and one ship makes a prediction. The prediction is about parting: the medieval ships will part from the outlaws and will be acquired by Þorgils, the fishing boats will be parted one from the other. In both cases the prediction comes true.

Although five centuries separate Stakanhöfði and Vinagautur from Skúta and Mókollur, it is not difficult to imagine that the stories are related, that ultimately they are variants of a local legend from the western part of the south coast of Iceland about talking ships. In folklore, when things that do not usually talk are overheard in conversation, what they say is important and portentous, as turns out in both the medieval and modern variants of the legend. It would be reasonable to assume that the original centre of the legend may have been Traðarholt and that it spread from there west to Selvogur and north to farms such as Hruni and Minninúpur.

We do have another text that may indicate a link between the medieval and nineteenth-century texts. That text is the eighteenth-century picaresque novel, Saga Ólafs Þórhallasonar by Eiríkur Laxdal (1987). The eponymous hero lives through a number of adventures from Icelandic folklore, one of which appears to reflect the legend reported from Strönd and Hruni in the nineteenth century. Ólafur is mate aboard an unnamed fishing boat belonging to the parson at Krísuvík, which is about fifteen kilometres west of Strönd on the Reykjanes peninsula. Krísuvík is not directly on the coast, and where the boat itself is based is not made clear. After a great catch the first day out Ólafur tells of something he has seen that bodes no good: after the boat was taken out of the water and turned over, when it was completely dry, he saw water drip from it. The skipper laughs this off, but the next time they are to launch he too sees the same sight and calls off the outing. He resolves to launch the next day, however, despite Ólafur’s request to wait. When the time comes to launch, however, the men cannot move the ship at all. The skipper has them launch it in the name of all the devils.

It was as though there was a push on the prow, for it went by itself in such a way that fire shot out of the rollers and the whole beach shook. [Eiríkur Laxdal 1987: 74]

Here Eiríkur is obviously playing with Snorri Sturluson’s presentation of the launching of Baldr’s funeral ship, Hringhorni, by the giantess Hyrokkin.

Þá gekk Hyrokkin á framstafn nökkvans ok hratt fram í fyrsta viðbragði, svá at eldr hraut ór hlunnunum ok lönd öll skulfu. [normalized from Finnur Jónsson 1931: 65]

Then Hyrokkin went up to the prow of the boat and shoved it forward as soon as she touched it, so that fire shot out from under the runners and all the lands shook.

But Eiríkur must also be playing with something else. A ship being launched in the name of all the devils, especially one based on the south coast of Reykjanes, sounds very like Skúta, and one is not surprised to learn, reading on, that the skipper chooses to stay out as the seas grow, that first one and then another landing place proves unusable, and that as they approach a third they capsize and everyone is lost except for our hero. He clings to the keel of the overturned ship and washes up days later more dead than alive in Hornafjörður at the other end of Iceland’s south coast.

Eiríkur must almost certainly have taken the blasphemous skipper, failed landings and loss of ship and crew from an oral version of the legend of Skúta and Mókollur. In doing so he focused on the didactic message and eliminated the talking ships, which would not have fit the picaresque realism he was attempting. Although Eiríkur was, as his name indicates, from Laxdalur, and although he went to school at Hólar, he does put the events in question in the same waters as the legend recorded later. If we assume that he heard a version with talking ships but omitted them, the legend existed in the eighteenth century, and the number of years separating Flóamanna saga’s talking ships from those of the folklore texts is reduced by nearly a century. That still leaves a big gap, but if anything it increases the proposition that the early and later texts are variants of a southern Icelandic oral legend.

One reason to be willing to accept that a legend of talking ships circulated for five centuries in southern Iceland is that there was little change in fishing techniques during this time. Boats built of wood were launched through the surf and rowed or sailed to the fishing grounds, then landed through the surf with their catch, for all that time. Such boats were used until they wore out or were lost. The big changes came not long after our legend was collected: motors for propulsion, steel for the hulls. The old wooden boats were still around, but the Icelandic fishing industry was not to be built on them. Kristian frá Djúpalæk wrote a poem not about doomed wooden fishing boats but lovesick trawlers. They can be parted by love and jealousy, but not by the condition of the surf.

Kristján frá Djúpalæk, Togarnir talast við
Nú er hann Ingólfur Arnarson
svo ásfanginn, líkt og forðum,
—og heimurinn þekkir hvernig fer,
er hjartað gengur úr skorðum—,
hann dreymir stöðigt, um dægur löng
og dimmar fárviðrisóttur,
og sér ekki annað um höf og höfn
en Hallveigu Fróðadóttur.
Og Hallveigu, dóttur Fróða, finnst
svo fallegur Ingólfs vangi.
Er mikið þótt byrinn meti þau
og mætast i hafi langi?
Þá talast þau við einsog togarum ber
sem tengd væru hjónabandi.
En hvað það er, sem þau hvíslast á,
er hulið öllum á landi.
Og þegar þau liggja hlið við hlið
Í höfn, gerast ævintýri.
þau horfa hvort annað hrifin á
Frá hvalbak aftur að stýri.
En hafnarysinn að eyrum berst
Og æskuna fangar galsinn,
þau saman á legunni fugal dátt
og dansa Sjómannavalsinn.
Svo halda þau út gegn hrönn og ís,
á hafinu stormar gnauða.
En sigli Hallveig á Selvogsgrunn
Í samfylgd með Agli rauða,
í fjarska sjást Ingólfs augu heit
Af afbrýðisemi loga.
—Ó, megi þau sæinn sigla heil
og saman í friði toga.
Now Ingólfur Arnason
Is so in love, as has happened before,
—and the world knows how it goes
when the heart goes haywire—,
he dreams constantly, through long days and nights
and dark hurricane pre-dawns,
and sees nothing else in seas and harbours
that Hallveig Fróðadóttir.
And to Hallveig, the daughter of Fróði,
Ingólfur’s cheek seems so handsome.
Is it too much that the fair wind should value them
And they should meet on the far sea?
Then they speak together as trawlers must
Who might be bound in marriage.
And what it is they murmur about
Is hidden from all on land.
And when they lie side by side
In the harbour, strange thing happen.
They gaze, infatuated, at each other,
From the forecastle aft to the stern.
But the harbour noise is borne to the ears
And high spirits take over youth,
Together on the water they flirt merrily
And dance the Seaman’s Waltz.
And so they put out through wave and ice;
On the sea, storms moan.
And if Hallveig were to sail on Selvogsgrunn
Together with Egill the red,
In the distance Ingólfur’s eye would be seen,
Burning hot with jealousy.
—Oh, may they sail the seas in good health
and trawl together in peace.

Works Cited

Einar Ól, Sveinsson. Um íslenzkar þjóðsögur. 1940. Reykjavík: Á kostnað Sjóðs Margrétar Lehmann-Fihlés.

Einar Ól. Sveinsson, ed. 1934. Laxdœla saga: Halldórs þættir Snorrasonar: Stúfs þáttr. Íslenzk fornrit, 5. Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag.

Eiríkur Laxdal. 1987. Saga Ólafs Þorhallasonar: Álfasagan mikla: Skáldsaga frá 18. öld. Ed. Þorsteinn Antonsson and María Anna Þorsteinsdóttir. Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfan Þjóðsaga.

Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1931. Edda Snorra Sturlusonar: Udgivet efter håndskrifterne. København: Gyldendal–Nordisk forlag.

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