07/07/2024, by aezcr

A Clerical Conundrum

Two anecdotes in the Saga of the Earls of Orkney involve close encounters between the 12^th-century Earl of Orkney Rǫgnvaldr Kali Kolsson and some strange-looking clergymen.

In Chapter 71, we’re told that ‘Earl Rǫgnvaldr had arrived in Westray’, and in Chapter 72 that:

On Sunday Earl Rǫgnvaldr attended the service there in the village, and they were standing outside by the church. Then they saw sixteen men, unarmed and bald, pass; they struck them as strangely attired. The earl’s men discussed who they could be. Then the earl spoke a verse:

I have seen sixteen [women] all at once, denuded of the old age

of the ground of the serpent-field, and a fringe on their forehead,

walking together. We bore witness to the fact that, here in the west,

most maidens are bald; that island lies out in the direction of storms.

The word menn, translated twice above as ‘men’, is more ambiguous than that would suggest, and can (and should) often be translated as ‘people’. The stanza plays with this ambiguity and the fact that these people look like women. This is revealed by the fact that the inflected past participles ‘seen’ and ‘denuded’ are grammatically feminine. The unusual kenning ‘old age of the ground of the serpent-field’ also refers to women. The field of the serpent is ‘gold’, alluding to Old Norse legends of serpents guarding treasure; the ground of gold is ‘woman’, alluding to women’s predilection for jewellery; and women’s ‘old age’ hints that elderly women have facial hair, which these people have been ‘denuded of’. So they are clean-shaven monks, the ‘fringe on their forehead’ referring to a tonsure which makes them partially ‘bald’. Quite a contrast with the hirsute, betrousered and armed Norsemen.

The beginning of Chapter 77 takes place at the earl’s estate at Knarston:

It was the sixth day of Christmas that a ship was seen sailing from the south across the Pentland Firth. The weather was good and the earl stood outside and many people with him and studied the ship. … And when these men landed, they went from the ship and the earl’s men were able to count that there were fifteen or sixteen men. Walking at the front of the troop was a man in a blue cape who had hidden his hair under a hood; he was clean-shaven around the front of his chin, but unshaven around his cheeks and that hung down low. This man seemed to them somewhat strange…

The situation is similar: the earl and his men standing outdoors, at a specific time in the Christian calendar, watching the approach of (fifteen or) sixteen men, wondering who they are and discussing their strange appearance. This time, however, they are not monks, but a group accompanying ‘Bishop Jón down from Atholl in Scotland’ and this time there is no jocular stanza from the earl, but an appropriate welcome for the bishop.

Alexander B. Taylor, who translated the saga in 1938, thought the anecdote in chapter 72 was actually a version of the story told in chapter 77, and that both the anecdote and the verse really belonged in the latter chapter. Certainly the sixteen ‘maidens’ seem out of place among the political machinations on Westray which are the topic of chapters 71-72. Nevertheless, as many have pointed out, one place it might have been possible for Rǫgnvaldr to encounter strangely-tonsured (Celtic) monks was on the neighbouring island of Papay, which takes its very name from such clerics and which was an important ecclesiastical centre. And a Westray/Papa Westray location is certainly suggested by the wording of the stanza.

We have to ask, did the encounter with Scottish clergy as told in chapter 77 really happen? And if so, did it then inspire the more colourful anecdote of chapter 72? Could it be that Rǫgnvaldr was inspired by this meeting with strange clergymen to compose the stanza, which then further spawned its own anecdote poking fun at them? If so, we could imagine that this new anecdote developed a life of its own and found its way into a different part of the saga, where it is presented as a separate event and moved to a different location. Were there two lots of sixteen men or just one?

Trying to untangle such conundrums are the fate of the would-be saga translator.

Judith Jesch

Further Reading

For the poem, see Judith Jesch (ed.) 2009, ‘Rǫgnvaldr jarl Kali Kolsson, Lausavísur 4’ in Kari Ellen Gade (ed.), Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2: From c. 1035 to c. 1300. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 2. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 579-80.

Alexander Burt Taylor, The Orkneyinga Saga, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1.

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