Note to ǪrvOdd Ævdr 62VIII (Ǫrv 132)
[4] skegg gekk af flagði ‘the beard left the ogre’: This clause alludes to one of Oddr’s encounters with Ǫgmundr, following the death of Vignir, in which Oddr comes near to killing Ǫgmundr, who, however, manages to get away by being swallowed up by the earth. An earlier stage in this episode is also the subject of ǪgmEyb Lv 1-3 (Ǫrv 31-3). At a particularly desperate point in a hand-to-hand encounter between Oddr and Ǫgmundr, Oddr cuts off his rival’s buttocks (ON klámhǫgg ‘shame-stroke’, a shaming act symbolising castration; cf. Meulengracht Sørensen 1983, 68-70) and then gets hold of his beard with both hands, jerking it so hard that the whole beard and the face beneath it right up to the forehead are ripped off (cf. Ǫrv 1888, 136). Although Oddr can never kill Ǫgmundr outright, according to the saga, these two acts of cutting off his buttocks and removing his beard and face are to be interpreted as a symbolic castration and forced submission; see Ǫrv 32, Note to [All].
References
- Bibliography
- Meulengracht Sørensen, Preben. 1983. The Unmanly Man: Concepts of Sexual Defamation in Early Northern Society. Trans. Joan Turville-Petre. VC 1. [Odense]: Odense University Press.
- Ǫrv 1888 = Boer, R. C., ed. 1888. Ǫrvar-Odds saga. Leiden: Brill.
- Internal references
- Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.) 2017, ‘Ǫrvar-Odds saga 31 (Ǫgmundr Eyþjófsbani, Lausavísur 1)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry in fornaldarsögur. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 844.
- Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.) 2017, ‘Ǫrvar-Odds saga 32 (Ǫgmundr Eyþjófsbani, Lausavísur 2)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry in fornaldarsögur. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 845.