The Sagas of the Icelanders (110 page)

8
In the spring, Halli asked the king for permission to go to Denmark on a trading expedition.

The king said that he could go as he wished – ‘and come back soon because we find good entertainment in your company, but go warily on account of Einar Fly. He will be ill-disposed toward you, and I hardly know of any other time when he slipped up so badly.’

Halli took passage south to Denmark with some merchants and then went to Jutland. A man named Raud had the stewardship there, and Halli got food and lodging with him.

At some point it happened that Raud was to hold a large assembly, and when people were to plead their cases, there was so much uproar and noise that no one could bring his case forward. With that people went home that evening.

And that evening when people came to drink, Raud said, ‘It would be a cunning man who could find a plan so that all these people would be quiet.’

Halli said, ‘I can manage it, whenever I wish, so that every mother’s son here will be quiet.’

‘You can’t manage that, Icelander,’ said Raud.

The next day people came to the assembly, and then there was as much shouting and noise as the day before and no settlement was reached in any case. At that, people went home.

Then Raud asked, ‘Halli, do you want to bet that you can manage to bring silence to the assembly?’

Halli said he was ready to do this.

Raud responded, ‘You bet your head and I will bet a gold arm ring which weighs one mark.’

‘So it will be,’ said Halli.

In the morning, Halli asked Raud if the bet was on. Raud said it was. Then people came to the assembly, and there was as much shouting as on the preceding days, or more.

And when people least expected anything, Halli jumped up and shouted as loudly as he could, ‘Listen everybody! I need to speak. I’ve lost my hone and honing grease and my bag with all its tackle which is better for a male to have than to lose.’

Everyone fell silent. Some men thought he had gone mad, others thought that he would announce some message from the king. And when all was silent, Halli sat down and took the ring. But when people realized that this was nothing but mockery, there was as much uproar as before, and Halli ran away because Raud wanted to take his life and thought this had been an enormous cheat. Halli did not stop until he got to England.

9
Then Harold Godwin’s son was ruling England. Halli went straight to the king and said he had composed a drapa about him and asked for a hearing. The king gave him a hearing. Halli sat down at the king’s knee and delivered his poem. When the poem was finished, the king asked his poet, who was with him, how the poem was. He said he thought that it was good. The king asked Halli to stay there with him, but Halli said that he was already prepared to go to Norway.

The king said then that it would go the same way, ‘in rewarding you for the poem as it goes in our benefiting from it because no fame accrues to us from a poem no one knows. Now sit on the floor and I will have silver poured over your head. Keep what sticks to your hair. It seems to me the prospects look the same on both sides because we will not get to learn the poem.’

Halli responded, ‘It’s true both that only small rewards are due and that the rewards will be small. But, my lord, you will surely allow me to go out and answer nature’s call.’

‘Go just as you wish,’ said the king.

Halli went out to where the shipwrights were and put tar on his head and shaped his hair so that it would be like a dish and then went inside and asked them to pour the silver over him. The king said that he was crafty. And it was poured over him and he got a lot of silver.

Then he went where the ships were that were sailing for Norway, but they had all gone except for one which was taken by many people with very heavy cargo. Halli had plenty of money and wanted very much to get
away because he had not composed a poem about the king but had just recited rubbish, and on that account he could not teach it. The skipper told him to find a scheme so that the people from southern lands would leave the ship and then he would gladly take him. At that time winter was at hand. Halli was there with them in common sleeping quarters for a while.

One night Halli was much troubled in his sleep, and it was a very long time before they could awaken him. They asked what he had dreamed.

He said that he was finished with asking for passage away from there – ‘It seemed to me as if a terrible-looking man came up and recited this:

And when the men from the southern lands heard about this dream, they left the ship and thought it would be their death if they sailed in it. Then Halli immediately took passage on the ship and said it was a trick and no dream.

They put out to sea as soon as they were ready and reached Norway in the autumn, and Halli immediately went to King Harald. He welcomed Halli warmly and asked if he had composed poems about other rulers.

Then Halli spoke this verse:

The king grinned at this and it seemed to him that Halli was always entertaining.

10
In the spring, King Harald went to the Gulathing Assembly. And one day the king asked Halli how he was doing for women at the assembly.

Halli answered:

From there the king went north to Trondheim. When they sailed past Stad, Thjodolf and Halli were assigned the cooking and serving. Halli was very seasick and lay under the ship’s boat and Thjodolf had to serve alone. And when he was carrying the food, he fell over Halli’s leg which was sticking out from under the boat.

Thjodolf spoke this verse:

Halli answered:

And then the king continued on his way until he reached Kaupang.

Thora the queen was on the expedition, and she disliked Halli, but the king liked him and thought that Halli was always entertaining.

It is said that one day the king was walking in the street and his followers were with him. Halli was in the procession. The king had an axe in his hand; its blade was inlaid with gold and the shaft was wound round with silver and it had a large silver band on the upper part of the shaft and a precious stone was set into it. It was an excellent possession. Halli kept looking at the axe. The king noticed that at once and asked Halli if he liked it. Halli said he liked it very much.

‘Have you seen a better axe?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Halli.

‘Will you allow yourself to be fucked for the axe?’ said the king.

‘I will not,’ said Halli, ‘but it seems understandable to me that you should want to sell the axe for the same price that you paid for it.’

‘So it will be, Halli,’ said the king. ‘Take it and use it for the best – it was given to me and so will I give it to you.’

Halli thanked the king.

That evening when people came to drink, the queen spoke to the king and said it was scandalous – ‘and it’s not a reasonable exchange to give Halli goods which are hardly meant for commoners to reward him for his obscene language when some men receive little in return for good service’.

The king said that he would decide to whom he would give his possessions – ‘I don’t wish to take those words of Halli’s which are ambiguous in a bad sense.’

The king had Halli summoned and it was done. Halli bowed to him.

The king ordered Halli to make an ambiguous statement about Queen Thora – ‘and I’ll see how she endures it’.

Then Halli bowed to Thora and spoke this verse:

‘Seize him and kill him,’ said the queen. ‘I won’t put up with his abusive obscenities.’

The king ordered that no one be so bold as to lay hold of Halli for all of this, ‘but it can be changed, if you think that another woman is more suitable to lie beside me and be my queen – you hardly know how to hear your praise’.

The poet Thjodolf had gone to Iceland while Halli was absent from the king. Thjodolf had shipped a good stallion from Iceland and intended to give him to the king, and Thjodolf had the stallion led into the king’s courtyard and shown to the king. The king went to see the stallion, and it was big and fat. Halli was there when the horse stuck out his prick.

Halli spoke this verse:

‘Tut tut,’ said the king, ‘he will never come into my possession at this rate.’

Halli became one of the king’s followers and asked permission to go to Iceland. The king told him to go warily because of Einar Fly.

Halli travelled out to Iceland and settled down. His money ran out and he took up fishing, and one time he and his crew had such great difficulty rowing back that they just reached land. That evening the porridge was brought to Halli, and when he had eaten a few bites, he fell backward, dead.

Harald learned of the deaths of two of his men from Iceland, Bolli the Elegant and Sarcastic Halli.

He said of Bolli, ‘The warrior must have fallen victim to spears.’

But of Halli he said, ‘The poor devil must have burst eating porridge.’

And so I conclude the story of Sarcastic Halli.

Translated by
GEORGE CLARK

1
It is said that the following summer King Olaf attended feasts in the east around Vik and elsewhere. He feasted at a farm called Reim with a large company of men. There was a man accompanying the king at that time named Thorstein Thorkelsson. His father Thorkel was the son of Asgeir Scatter-brain, who was the son of Audun Shaft. Thorstein was an Icelandic man, who had come to the king the previous winter.

In the evening while people were sitting at the drinking tables, King Olaf made a speech. He said that none of his men should go alone to the privy during the night, and that anyone who had to go must have his bedfellow accompany him, or else be guilty of disobeying him. Everyone drank heartily that night, and when the tables were taken down they all went to bed.

Now in the middle of the night, Thorstein the Icelander woke up and had to go to the toilet. The man lying next to him was sleeping soundly, and Thorstein certainly did not want to wake him. So he got up, slipped into his shoes, threw on a heavy cloak and went out to the privy. The outhouse was big enough for eleven people to sit on each side of it. Thorstein sat on the seat nearest the door. When he had been sitting there a few moments, he saw a demon climb up on to the seat farthest in and sit down.

Thorstein asked, ‘Who’s there?’

The fiend answered, ‘It’s Thorkel the Thin who fell upon corpses with King Harald War-tooth.’

‘And where did you come from?’ asked Thorstein.

The demon answered that he had just arrived from Hell.

‘What can you tell me about that place?’ asked Thorstein.

He replied, ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Who endures the torments of Hell best?’

‘No one endures them better,’ replied the demon, ‘than Sigurd Fafnisbani (Killer of the Serpent Fafnir).’

‘What kind of torment does he suffer?’

‘He kindles the oven,’ answered the ghost.

‘That doesn’t strike me as much of a torment,’ said Thorstein.

‘Oh yes it is,’ replied the demon, ‘for he is also the kindling!’

‘There is something in that then,’ Thorstein said. ‘Now who has the hardest time enduring Hell’s torments?’

The ghost answered, ‘Starkad the Old takes it worst, for he cries out so terribly that his screaming is a greater torment to the rest of us fiends than almost anything else, and we never get any reprieve from it.’

‘What torment is it,’ asked Thorstein, ‘that he takes so badly, as brave a man as he is said to have been?’

‘He stands up to his ankles in fire.’

‘Why, that doesn’t seem like much to me,’ replied Thorstein, ‘as great a hero as he was.’

‘Then you don’t see it,’ said the ghost. ‘Only the soles of his feet are sticking up out of the flames!’

‘That is something,’ said Thorstein. ‘Now let me hear you scream once the way that he does.’

‘All right,’ said the demon.

He then threw open his jaws and let fly a great howl, while Thorstein pulled the fur trimming of his cloak up around his head.

He was not very impressed and asked, ‘Is that the best he can scream?’

‘Far from it,’ replied the ghost, ‘for that is the cry of us petty devils.’

‘Scream like Starkad does once,’ said Thorstein.

‘All right,’ said the demon.

He then began to scream a second time so terribly that Thorstein thought it monstrous that such a little fiend could howl so loudly. Again Thorstein wrapped his cloak around his head, but the crying paralysed him, and he fainted.

Then the demon asked, ‘Why are you so quiet now?’

When he had recovered, Thorstein replied, ‘I’m silent because I’m amazed at what a horrible voice you have, as little a demon as you appear to be. Was that Starkad’s loudest cry?’

‘Not even close;’ he answered, ‘rather his quietest.’

‘Stop beating about the bush,’ said Thorstein, ‘and let me hear the loudest cry.’

The demon agreed to it. Thorstein then prepared himself by folding the cloak, winding it around his head and then holding it there with both hands. The ghost had moved closer to Thorstein by three seats with each cry, so that there were now only three seats left between them. The demon then inflated his cheeks in a terrible manner, rolled his eyes and began to howl so loudly that it exceeded all measure for Thorstein.

At that very moment, the church bell rang out, and Thorstein fell unconscious to the floor. The demon reacted to the bell by tumbling to the floor. The sound could be heard for a long time down in the ground. Thorstein recovered quickly. He stood up and went to his bed and lay down.