Introduction

An old man began to farm —
That can be clearly proclaimed —
In a remote valley . . .

Chapter 52 of Grettir’s Saga mentions a poem, Grettisfærsla, an obscene, versified account of Grettir’s sexual exploits.  The roughly 400-line poem survives in only one manuscript dating from the last quarter of the 15th century, and only barely so.  

In around the 16th century, the entire poem was meticulously scraped off the pages of the manuscript, and so for centuries the poem languished.  In the 1950s, however, the use of ultraviolet light allowed it to be recovered in part, with only 52 lines remaining illegible. This allowed the creation of a diplomatic edition of the text by Ólafur Halldórsson in 1960. In 2006, UC Berkeley professor Kate Heslop authored an English-language edition and translation based on Halldórsson’s work. Her continued efforts with multi-spectral imaging have allowed for the creation of a new edition and translation, which is currently pending publication.

Despite this promising work, and the enduring popularity of Grettir’s Saga, Grettisfærsla has received relatively little scholarly attention. The poem, however, offers a unique lens into the intersubjective landscape of medieval Iceland. Very little in the way of sexual material, let alone what are essentially dirty jokes, are passed down in the literary record. Further, the state of the manuscript itself lends insight into what censorious contemporaries found too obscene to allow.

The title of this exhibit comes from Kate Heslop's edition of the poem, and refers to the ironic nature of the poem's preservation. In the manuscript, Grettisfærsla is appended to the text of Grettir’s Saga. This copy of Grettir's Saga, however, is missing the very leaf which, in other manuscripts, refers to the poem. Thus, every surviving copy of the saga alludes to a poem it lacks, and the one surviving copy of the poem lacks its allusion.

This exhibit has been designed with closing that gap in mind. The next page will describe the context, which is to say Grettir's Saga— the following page, the text, or rather, Grettisfærsla. The rest of the exhibit is concerned with the continuing life of the sagas in the modern tradition, both their reconstruction and their ongoing construction. The hope of this project is that the poem will find a more prominent place in that process.