Lost in Transmission: Reconstituting Forgotten Verses in Gísla saga Súrssonar

Abstract

This paper re-examines the passage in Gisla saga Surssonar in which Gisli relates a pair of dream visions he has had regarding the killing of his brother-in-law Vesteinn. Gisli claims that the dreams point to the identity of Vesteinn’s murderer, who is traditionally viewed as being symbolized first by a viper (hǫggormr) and then a wolf (vargr), which bite Vesteinn to death. However, a close reading of the text reveals a number of incongruities, which suggest that the entire episode was composed and added on to an earlier version of the text, and that the reading of the viper and wolf as fetches, or representations of Vesteinn’s killer, was based on the misconstruing of a poetic fragment from another source.