Chapter XII: Section II: The Scandinavian Parallels--Grettir and Orm

The _Grettis saga_ tells the adventures of the most famous of all Icelandic outlaws, Grettir the strong. As to the historic existence of Grettir there is no doubt: we can even date the main events of his life, in spite of chronological inconsistencies, with some precision. But between the year 1031, when he was killed, and the latter half of the thirteenth century, when his saga took form, many fictitious episodes, derived from folk-lore, had woven themselves around his name. Of these, one bears a great, if possibly accidental, likeness to the Grendel story: the second is emphatically and unmistakably the same story as that of Grendel and his mother. In the first, Grettir stops at a farm house which is haunted by Glam, a ghost of monstrous stature. Grettir awaits his attack alone, but, like Beowulf, lying down. Glam's entry and onset resemble those of Grendel: when Grettir closes with him he tries to get out. They wrestle the length of the hall, and break all before them. Grettir supports himself against anything that will give him foothold, but for all his efforts he is dragged as far as the door. There he suddenly changes his tactics, and throws his whole weight upon his adversary. The monster falls, undermost, so that Grettir is able to draw, and strike off his head; though not till Glam has laid upon Grettir a curse which drags him to his doom.

The second story--the adventure of Grettir at Sandhaugar (Sandheaps)--begins in much the same way as that of Grettir and Glam. Grettir is staying in a haunted farm, from which first the farmer himself and then a house-carl have, on two successive Yuletides, been spirited away. As before, a light burns in the room all night, and Grettir awaits the attack alone, lying down, without having put off his clothes. As before, Grettir and his assailant wrestle down the room, breaking all {49} in their way. But this time Grettir is pulled put of the hall, and dragged to the brink of the neighbouring gorge. Here, by a final effort, he wrenches a hand free, draws, and hews off the arm of the ogress, who falls into the torrent below.

Grettir conjectures that the two missing men must have been pulled by the ogress into the gulf. This, after his experience, is surely a reasonable inference: but Stein, the priest, is unconvinced. So they go together to the river, and find the side of the ravine a sheer precipice: it is ten fathom down to the water below the fall. Grettir lets down a rope: the priest is to watch it. Then Grettir dives in: "the priest saw the soles of his feet, and then knew no more what had become of him." Grettir swims under the fall and gets into the cave, where he sees a giant sitting by a fire: the giant aims a blow at him with a weapon with a wooden handle ("such a weapon men then called a _hefti-sax_"). Grettir hews it asunder. The giant then grasps at another sword hanging on the wall of the cave, but before he can use it Grettir wounds him. Stein, the priest, seeing the water stained with blood from this wound, concludes that Grettir is dead, and departs home, lamenting the loss of such a man. "But Grettir let little space come between his blows till the giant lay dead." Grettir finds the bones of the two dead men in the cave, and bears them away with him to convince the priest: but when he reaches the rope and shakes it, there is no reply, and he has to climb up, unaided. He leaves the bones in the church porch, for the confusion of the priest, who has to admit that he has failed to do his part faithfully.

Now if we compare this with _Beowulf_, we see that in the Icelandic story much is different: for example, in the _Grettis saga_ it is the female monster who raids the habitation of men, the male who stays at home in his den. In this the _Grettis saga_ probably represents a corrupt tradition: for, that the female should remain at home whilst the male searches for his prey, is a rule which holds good for devils as well as for men[100]. {50} The change was presumably made in order to avoid the difficulty--which the _Beowulf_ poet seems also to have realized--that after the male has been slain, the rout of the female is felt to be a deed of less note--something of an anti-climax[101].

The sword on the wall, also, which in the _Beowulf_-story is used by the hero, is, in the _Grettir_-story, used by the giant in his attack on the hero.

But that the two stories are somehow connected cannot be disputed. Apart from the general likeness, we have details such as the escape of the monster after the loss of an arm, the fire burning in the cave, the _hefti-sax_, a word which, like its old English equivalent (_haeft-m[=e]ce_, _Beowulf_, 1457), is found in this story only, and the strange reasoning of the watchers that the blood-stained water must necessarily be due to the hero's death[102].

Now obviously such a series of resemblances cannot be the result of an accident. Either the _Grettir_-story is derived directly or indirectly from the _Beowulf_ epic, more or less as we have it, or both stories are derived from one common earlier source. The scholars who first discovered the resemblance believed that both stories were independently derived from one original[103]. This view has generally been endorsed by later investigators, but not universally[104]. And this is one of the questions which the student cannot leave open, because our view of the origin of the _Grendel_-story will have to depend largely upon the view we take as to its connection with the episode in the _Grettis saga_.

If this episode be derived from _Beowulf_, then we have an interesting literary curiosity, but nothing further. But if it is {51} independently derived from a common source, then the episode in the _saga_, although so much later, may nevertheless contain features which have been obliterated or confused or forgotten in the _Beowulf_ version. In that case the story, as given in the _Grettis saga_, would be of great weight in any attempt to reconstruct the presumed original form of the _Grendel_-story.

The evidence seems to me to support strongly the view of the majority of scholars--that the _Grettir_-episode is not derived from _Beowulf_ in the form in which that poem has come down to us, but that both come from one common source.

It is certain that the story of the monster invading a dwelling of men and rendering it uninhabitable, till the adventurous deliverer arrives, did not originate with Hrothgar and Heorot. It is an ancient and widespread type of story, of which one version is localized at the Danish court. When therefore we find it existing, independently of its Danish setting, the presumption is in favour of this being a survival of the old independent story. Of course it is _conceivable_ that the Hrothgar-Heorot setting might have been first added, and subsequently stripped off again so clean that no trace of it remains. But it seems going out of our way to assume this, unless we are forced to do so[105].

Again, it is certain that these stories--like all the subject matter of the Old English epic--did not originate in England, but were brought across the North Sea from the old home. And that old home was in the closest connection, so far as the passage to and fro of story went, with Scandinavian lands. Nothing could be intrinsically more probable than that a story, current in ancient Angel and carried thence to England, should also have been current in Scandinavia, and thence have been carried to Iceland.

Other stories which were current in England in the eighth century were also current in Scandinavia in the thirteenth. Yet this does not mean that the tales of Hroar and Rolf, or of Athils and Ali, were borrowed from English epic accounts of Hrothgar and Hrothulf, or Eadgils and Onela. They were part of the common inheritance--as much so as the strong verbs {52} or the alliterative line. Why then, contrary to all analogy, should we assume a literary borrowing in the case of the _Beowulf-Grettir_-story? The compiler of the _Grettis saga_ could not possibly have drawn his material from a MS of _Beowulf_[106]: he could not have made sense of a single passage. He conceivably _might_ have drawn from traditions _derived_ from the Old English epic. But it is difficult to see how. Long before his time these traditions had for the most part been forgotten in England itself. One of the longest lived of all, that of Offa, is heard of for the last time in England at the beginning of the thirteenth century. That a Scandinavian sagaman at the end of the century could have been in touch, in any way, with Anglo-Saxon epic tradition seems on the whole unlikely. The Scandinavian tradition of Offa, scholars are now agreed[107], was not borrowed from England, and there is no reason why we should assume such borrowing in the case of Grettir.

The probability is, then, considerable, that the _Beowulf_-story and the _Grettir_-story are independently derived from one common original.

And this probability would be confirmed to a certainty if we should find that features which have been confused and half obliterated in the O.E. story become clear when we turn to the Icelandic. This argument has lately been brought forward by Dr Lawrence in his essay on "The Haunted Mere in _Beowulf_[108]." Impressive as the account of this mere is, it does not convey any very clear picture. Grendel's home seems sometimes to be in the sea: and again it seems to be amid marshes, moors and fens, and again it is "where the mountain torrent goes down under the darkness of the cliffs--the water below the ground (i.e. beneath overhanging rocks)."

This last account agrees admirably with the landscape depicted in the _Grettis saga_, and the gorge many fathoms deep through which the stream rushes, after it has fallen over the precipice; not so the other accounts. These descriptions are {53} best harmonized if we imagine an original version in which the monsters live, as in the _Grettis saga_, in a hole under the waterfall. This story, natural enough in a Scandinavian country, would be less intelligible as it travelled South. The Angles and Saxons, both in their old home on the Continent and their new one in England, were accustomed to a somewhat flat country, and would be more inclined to place the dwelling of outcast spirits in moor and fen than under waterfalls, of which they probably had only an elementary conception. "The giant must dwell in the fen, alone in the land[109]."

Now it is in the highest degree improbable that, after the landscape had been blurred as it is in _Beowulf_, it could have been brought out again with the distinctness it has in the _Grettis saga_. To preserve the features so clearly the _Grettir_-story can hardly be derived from _Beowulf_: it must have come down independently.

But if so, it becomes at once of prime importance. For by a comparison of _Beowulf_ and _Grettir_ we must form an idea of what the original story was, from which both were derived.

Another parallel, though a less striking one, has been found in the story of Orm Storolfsson, which is extant in a short saga about contemporary with that of Grettir, _Ormsth['a]ttr St['o]r['o]lfssonar_[110], in two ballads from the Faroe Islands[111] and two from Sweden[112].

It is generally asserted that the _Orm_-story affords a close parallel to the episodes of Grendel and his mother. I cannot find close resemblance, and I strongly suspect that the repetition of the assertion is due to the fact that the _Orm_-story has not been very easily accessible, and has often been taken as read by the critics.

But, in any case, it has been proved that the _Orm_-tale borrows largely from other sagas, and notably from the _Grettis saga_ itself[113]. Before arguing, therefore, from any parallel, it must first be shown that the feature in which Orm resembles {54} Beowulf is not derived at second hand from the _Grettis saga_. One such feature there is, namely Orm's piety, which he certainly does not derive from Grettir. In this he with equal certainty resembles Beowulf. According to modern ideas, indeed, there is more of the Christian hero in Beowulf than in Orm.

Now Orm owes his victory to the fact, among other things, that, at the critical moment, he vows to God and the holy apostle St Peter to make a pilgrimage to Rome should he be successful. In this a parallel is seen to the fact that Beowulf is saved, not only by his coat of mail, but also by the divine interposition[114]. But is this really a parallel? Beowulf is too much of a sportsman to buy victory by making a vow when in a tight place. _G[=ae]dh [=a] wyrd sw[=a] h[=i]o scel_[115] is the exact antithesis of Orm's pledge.

However, I have given in the Second Part the text of the _Orm_-episode, so that readers may judge for themselves the closeness or remoteness of the parallel.

The parallel between Grettir and Beowulf was noted by the Icelander
Gudbrand Vigf['u]sson upon his first reading _Beowulf_ (see
_Prolegomena to Sturlunga saga_, 1878, p. xlix: _Corpus Poeticum
Boreale_, II, 501: _Icelandic Reader_, 1879, 404). It was elaborately
worked out by Gering in _Anglia_, III, 74-87, and it is of course
noticed in almost every discussion of _Beowulf_. The parallel with Orm
was first noted by Schueck (_Svensk Literaturhistoria_, Stockholm,
1886, _etc._, I, 62) and independently by Bugge (_P.B.B._ XII, 58-68).

The best edition of the _Grettis saga_ is the excellent one of Boer
(Halle, 1900), but the opinions there expressed as to the relationship
of the episodes to each other and to the Grendel story have not
received the general support of scholars.

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