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  • Thou Fearful Guest: Addressing the Past in Four Tales in Flateyjarbók by Merrill Kaplan
  • Thomas A. DuBois
Thou Fearful Guest: Addressing the Past in Four Tales in Flateyjarbók. By Merrill Kaplan. Folklore Fellows’ Communications, 301. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2011. Pp. 236. EUR 30.

Merrill Kaplan’s Thou Fearful Guest offers an insightful and stimulating contribution to the philological examination of Icelandic þættir, particularly as these figure in the important manuscript Flateyjarbók. She also contributes to the important examination within the field of history of religion regarding attenuated images of the god Óðinn in Christian Icelandic literature of the high middle ages. Grounded in philological methods and concerns, the study also takes inspiration from modern folkloristics, suggesting parallels between the images of interviewing and learning of the past in the þættir examined and the concerns of the antiquarians and folklorists who shaped the formative stages of the modern field of folklore studies. Written in a lively and often witty style, Kaplan’s study makes engaging reading and can serve as a useful entry into the rich scholarly tradition surrounding the þættir and late medieval textual representations of Óðinn.

The main aim of Kaplan’s work is to explore the narrative structure and thematic mechanisms of four episodes contained within Jón Þórðarson’s rendering of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar and Óláfs saga helga in his magnificent late fourteenth-century Flateyjarbók (hereafter F). All four episodes involve a wandering Odinic figure who appears unannounced at a king’s court and converses with the monarch about the pagan past. Two of these are designated as þættir: Nornagests þáttr (F 45 v-47 r) and Tóka þáttr Tókasonar (F 96 r a-b). Two are more-or-less [End Page 271] independent episodes within larger sagas: Óláfr Tryggvason’s encounter with a visitor at Ogvaldsnes, and King St. Óláfr’s encounter with an Odinic interlocutor at Oslofjord (F 96 r a). Sometimes these accounts have close counterparts in other manuscripts, as Kaplan details, but the combined significance of the four episodes in Jón’s work is a particular focus of attention in the present study. Kaplan is not the first to examine these four narratives in tandem; indeed, as she points out (p. 49), this critical act is now nearly two centuries old. Nor is Kaplan the first to examine F as a creative whole in itself rather than merely as a repository for earlier materials—such well-founded regard for the manuscript has a long history, most notably furthered recently by Elizabeth Rowe’s The Development of Flateyjarbók (2005), to which Kaplan’s text serves at times as a rejoinder. Yet Kaplan’s readings of her texts are fresh and enlightening and have a great deal to say about the ways in which high medieval redactors in general approached the materials they assembled. Most saliently, Kaplan explores the textual anxiety that can arise from the irruption of the past in the saga compiler’s present, that is, the seemingly sudden and potentially unsettling way in which the pagan past, with all its intrigue and danger, intrudes into the writer’s present, where it must be explained or contained by the textual apparatus.

Kaplan’s study is divided into seven chapters grouped into three parts: “Boundaries,” “Witnesses,” and “Echoes.” Chapter 1 examines the narratives in relation to questions of temporal ordering, particularly as instituted by the Christian church but also in terms of narratological structure. Different strategies of narratological embedding allow the narrators of the tales to resist or contain instances of temporal irruption, a process that Kaplan compares with portrayals in Ari Þorkilsson’s Íslendingabók and Þorsteins þáttr skelks. Chapter 2 explores the varying meanings of the term gestr (guest) to suggest some of the imagistic background of the narrative visitors in the four accounts, drawing in part on Old Norse legal texts, particularly Konungs skuggsjá and Hirðskrá. Chapter 3 examines the creative use of standards of witnessing and history in constructing narratives of figures who claim to have been present at events that transpired centuries earlier. Chapter 4 develops concepts of genre as related to the...

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