Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/433

 Reviews. 413

the knee by means of the charmed log. But, Uke Glam, she cannot take away his real gifts, his strength, valour, endurance, fame, wit; she can only nullify them. Grettir was still wise, but his wisdom was of no effect ; he was still strong, but he could not walk ; he was still famous, but his highest fame was to come when he was dead. Luck and wealth and even health up to a point she could influence, but Glam himself could do no more than haunt him and so indirectly injure him. The evil one's power is broken, but not wholly destroyed, by the christening of Iceland. The holy king saw the unluckiness of the man long before and warned him (just as the wicked earl warned Sigmund Brestisson), but " no man may flee his fate."

Glam's spell is as follows : " I lay this spell on thee that these eyes of mine be ever before thy sight, and not easy shalt thou deem it to be alone, and this shall draw thee to thy death." The alliteration of these carmina is of course characteristic of all charms, good or evil, and of all \2i\w forrnulee, proverbs and saws, as well as of the poetry of the old Scandinavians.

There are many bits of archaic speech and lore scattered throughout the story. A corpse's head is " thigh-forked" {cf. the Greek arm-pitting), a usage that I remember an instance of in Sardinia in the sixties in the case of a priest who was killed for a social offence, and one reads that when Marin Falier's tomb was discovered and opened his head was found laid between his knees. The insulting epithet " son of a sea-giantess," that led to the breakdown of Grettir's contemplated clearing by ordeal, is illus- trated by the Eddie poems of the Helge cycle, as ^ is also the ogress in Bard-dale who was turned to stone by the day-dawn bursting on her. Thorbiorn Angle is playing fox and geese (apparently) when his stepmother and he quarrel. The Christian feeling (shown in Beowulf's Lay) that barrow-hid treasure is badly bestowed is noted. Ancestral arms are mentioned, Grettir is made to own three. The barbed spear, Karr's loom, with which he slew Oxmain ; the old short sword his mother gave him, JokuFs lootn;"^ and the short sword he got in the barrow of Karr the

' Cf. also Alvismal.

- This sword disappears in the story without notice. Here is another of those needless doublets, like the behaviour of Andrew and of Stein, the priest from Eydale river. The Beowulf sword incident, too, was probably difficult to reconcile with what was known of Grettir and his weapons.