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You ll soon be finished, Finnur, and at that the builder was so taken by
surprise that he let the plank fall from his hands and disappeared, and he has
not been seen since.
This story exists all over Scandinavia. In Iceland it is reckoned among
stories of elves, but in continental Scandinavia, Finnur is a giant. The
mainland version is fuller inasmuch as St Olaf or St Lawrence, or
whoever it is, offers the giant the sun and the moon and his head or his
eyes if he cannot tell him his name. This is clearly an supernatural
element since a mere human being can have no disposal of the heavenly
bodies, but it also gives the story s origin away. It is descended from
the pagan story about the citadel built for the Æsir. Snorri Sturluson
tells this story in Gylfaginning ch. 42. A giant is promised the sun, the
moon and the goddess Freyja if he can build a fortification around
Ásgar: r in a single winter and the Æsir were entitled to promise the
sun and the moon, for these were their own handiwork.
Thus one principal element of the story can be traced back to a pagan
myth but the other is sprung from a superstition which is doubtless
older still. This is the requirement that the farmer must name the
58 THE FOLK-STORIES OF ICELAND
builder s name. On the surface this appears to be nothing very signifi-
cant, merely that the builder does not think the farmer has a hope of
finding it, so that when the farmer does come out with it he is so
disturbed that he vanishes. This story-element has long been under-
stood in this way and the analogous story of the giantess Gilitrutt will
have been similarly understood (JÁ I 181 82).
But there is a deeper undercurrent. A man s name is now only a
sound in the air and letters on a sheet of paper, but in earlier times an
extensive and varied belief was centred on it. A man s name was a
vital part of him, a part of his soul. To know a man s name was thus to
gain a certain power over him. Many things point to this belief as a
hidden force in the story. Various examples can be cited to show that
such a belief in names was by no means extinct in Iceland in earlier
times any more than elsewhere.
There has survived a medieval Icelandic prose romance called
Vilhjálms saga sjó: s. There we are told that Vilhjálmr plays chess
with a giant three times, and when he loses for the third time the giant
imposes a duty on him to return within three years to the giant s cave
and to name by name ninety trolls who dwell there. Later it turns out
that their lives are at stake, if any man is able to name them all, and
when Vilhjálmr rehearses the names, the trolls all die (LMIR IV 66).
Similar incidents occur in numerous Icelandic sources, and I shall do
no more than recall that the water-spirit in horse-shape, the nykur or
kelpy, cannot bear to hear his name. In Elenarljó: , an Icelandic ballad
surviving in a seventeenth-century manuscript, a nykur in the guise of
a young man is said to have caught little Elen, as she was going for
water, and was going to take her down into the lake with him. When
he asked her to marry him she answered, Eg flví ekki nenni (lit. I
have no mind for that ; nennir is a name for a kelpy) and with that he
vanished. Later folk-stories about kelpies have similar endings (Íslenzk
fornkvæ: i VIII 152 and references; JÁ I 137, Jfiork 365).
There is another example in the Poetic Edda. When Sigur: r Fáfnis-
bani had wounded Fáfnir, the dragon asked him his name, but Sigur: r
concealed his name, because it was the belief of men of old that a
dying man s word had great power if he cursed his enemy by name
(Fáfnismál, prose after st.1). One need hardly emphasise the point
that there is a vast body of superstition among many nations connected
with names, and all manner of precautions concerning them. Nor is
SURVEY 59
this merely among primitive people but among civilised nations as
well. One thinks of the Romans as having gained their mastery of the
world by their vigour and toughness, political acuteness and military
ability, with the other qualities that lead to dominance. But they did
not consider these all-sufficient. They took the greatest care to keep
the name of Rome s tutelary deity a secret so that their enemies could
not contact him and get a hold over him and so could not win power
over the Romans themselves.1
Before leaving superstition to do with names, I should like to men-
tion two things. Both in ancient and more recent stories we commonly
find that some being of great power tells someone to name his name in
his hour of need, and when this happens he comes to his rescue. Nowa-
days the motif occurs largely (or perhaps only) in wonder-tales (e.g.
JÁ II 390, 414, 447), but earlier it appeared in stories that had close
associations with folk-belief. Conversely it can be dangerous to name
evil beings or any creatures so imbued with magical power that they
are too much to face. At sea, it was perilous to name anything which
might suggest monstrous fish; and it was not safe to speak of evil
spirits or trolls, since talk of the Devil, and there he is .2 An amusing
example of this is in one of the manuscripts of Vilhjálms saga sjó: s
where alongside the versified list of trolls names the scribe added the
words ora pro nobis he had clearly become nervous. The Rev. Jón
Erlendsson says of the same list that these hateful names should not
be read out to any frivolous audience.3
The idea that a man s soul can leave his body during sleep and learn
many things in distant lands appears in many stories. This belief must
have gone hand in hand with belief in shape-shifting and the two must
have grown and dwindled together. Yet the wonder-tales contain even
stranger ideas about the soul s travels . Such is the very popular notion
of a fjöregg, life-egg , where the vital force of a being is thought to
reside in an egg, an object outside the body. One of the oldest Icelandic
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