Kristeva Fatalism and Textuality

A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Intersections of Fatalism and Textuality in Old Norse Literature.

This essay will look at three Old Norse texts which, despite their

significant historical disparity both of composition and manuscript

compilation, as well as their formal and topical heterogeneity may

nevertheless be read sui generis for their treatment of fatalism and

their reflexive preoccupation with modes of artistic production in the

creation of the textual object. They are, the Vǫluspá, a vatic

cosmogony written in the fornyrðislag metre characteristic of Eddaic

mythological verse; Nornagests þáttr, a framed narrative detailing

heroic action of the Migration period and sharing the dynastic topoi of

the MHG Nibelungenlied and the ON Vǫlsunga saga; and the

Darraðarljóð, the supernatural lausavísur, also in fornyrðislag, that

irrupt the 157th episode of Brennu-Njáls saga.1 Not only are these

texts divergent between themselves, they are significantly discrete

from surrounding material in their manuscript contexts; particularly

Nornagests þáttr and the Darraðarljóð. The Vǫluspá, as both

cosmogony and eschatalogy describes an enclosed teleological

system, which stands before, wraps around and underscores the rest

of the poems in the Codex Regius: it provides an epistemological

framework for the texts which follow, as well as to take the measure

of their ontology.2 Nornagests þáttr lodges an example of

fornaldarsaga narrative within the konungasaga of Óláf Tryggvasson,

and is but one of over thirty such interpolated þættir (threads,

strands, tales) that comprise the ‘Longest Saga’ found in the

Flateyjarbók MS.3 The Darraðarljóð similarly forms a quasi-

independent semiotic loop: its composition long predates that of the

1 Vǫluspá, preserved in Codex Regius (GKS 2365 4to) and in Hauksbók (Codex AM 544 4to); all references to Dronke’s edition (Oxford, 1997) as ‘V’ with stanza number(s) in parenthesis in text. Nornagests þáttr, intercalated in Óláfs saga Tryggvassonar in the Flateyjarbók MS (GkS 1005 fol); all references to Vigfússon-Unger edition (Christiania, 1860) as ‘Ng’ with page-number(s) in parenthesis in text. Darraðarljóð, intercalated in Brennu-Njáls saga MSS Reykjabók, Oddabók, Mǫðruvallabók and Gráskinnuauki; all references to Íslenzk Fórnrit edition (Rekjavík, 1954) as ‘ÍF’, volume, and page number(s) in parenthesis in text.2 Heidegger writes that ‘[m]an’s dwelling depends on an upward-looking, measure-taking’ of the span between the earth and the sky in ‘...Poetically Man Dwells...’ trans. Hofstadter (1984).3 See Carol Clover, Medieval Saga, (Ithaca, 1982), 81-83.


Njála text and its integrity with that narrative is questionable, while

the febrility of its drives seems radically to propel it through and

beyond the potential of symbolic discourse, as well as the domain of

the sign. To paraphrase Derrida, its invagination within the textual

object creates ‘an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the

outcome of this division and of this abounding remains as singular as

it is limitless.’4

These latter two units (Nornagests þáttr and Darraðarljóð),

embedded within textual frameworks of largely coherent, more or

less plausible, predominantly descriptive pseudo-historical prose

(Óláfs saga Tryggvassonar and Brennu-Njáls saga) enact a mythic

reflex (and reflux), enfolding (and flowing back to) a plane of fatalism

consisting before and behind historical time as it obtains in saga-

narrative. Such points of contact and rupture between the discrete

realms of linear causal time and fate—which has no operation as

such, but to exist through itself, an always already, and ineluctable,

given—witness the shattering of commonsense representation and

give place to a mode of artistic reflexivity in which the skeletal

structure of the signifying practice is suddenly, if ephemerally,

thrown into relief. Insofar as these structurally sub-dependent units

(þáttr and –ljóð) trace out the contours of an exchange with uncanny

agents of fatalism (nornir and valkyrjur) they are essentially

transgressive. Yet Gestr’s sublime trajectory underscores the limits

of an ideologically normative discourse in which the ethics of

heroism, martial prowess and dynastic virtue are valorised, even as

the social and political value of narrative in itself is enshrined by the

device of oral performance within which the semiotic loop is framed.

Dǫrruðr’s experience of voyeuristic abjection on the periphery of the

gynæceum at Caithness is stretched across the boundary between

the mundane and fantastic; a site through which the oscillating drives

of desire and disgust are drawn. As the weaving song unfolds it

4 ‘The Law of Genre’, trans. Avital Ronell, in Critical Inquiry, vol. 7 no. 11, (Autumn, 1980), 55-81, 59; from Glyph 7(Spring, 1980).


radically disrupts the mechanism of representation: the terror of the

real overwhelmingly threatens the imaginary-symbolic continuum as

the Death-drive is cathected through a moment of production into a

product by which it cannot be accommodated. In the Vǫluspá the

disembodied vǫlva stages a traumatic parturition from a gestative

state to the genesis of earthly phenomena and participation in the

symbolic order, describing a process by which signification itself is

inaugurated.

Psychoanalytic theory will provide the intellectual framework of

this essay. Concepts—such as ‘sublimation’, ‘abjection’, the

‘maternal object’, ‘the symbolic’, ‘the real’ and the ‘objet petit a’—

derived from Lacan, and developed by Kristeva, will be employed in

order to unpeel some of the tissues of meaning that cohere in

representations of fatalism in the primary texts. Moreover these

concepts will provide particular insights into the way such

representations reflect the very process and product of

representation back upon itself. What seems to be at stake, when

fatalism is adduced in Old Norse literature, is nothing less than

‘meaning’ in its totality, for every member of the discursive matrix:

whether composer, audience, or critic. Lacanian analysis provides a

powerful tool for understanding how such meaning is generated and

recirculated, for it is a theory in which language, before all, gives

place to the subject. Furthermore, as developed by Kristeva, its

interdisciplinary potential has been demonstrated as the

psychoanalytic model can be seen to cut across methodological and

experiential boundaries, whether social, political, historical,

theological, ontological, or poetic. It is an implicit aim of this paper to

articulate these registers and their interpenetrations as they bear

upon the creation of the textual object. In what follows then

psychoanalytic concepts will briefly be introduced and explained and

tested against the primary textual evidence. It is hoped that the

theoretical and literary discourses may be engaged in collaboration:


for texts are not the dumb objects of analytic practice but may be

regarded as witnesses that are themselves capable of illuminating

the analytic process in which they participate.

The Vǫluspá provides an auspicious point of departure for it is a

poem, in its early phase, of beginnings: an opening and unfolding of

the cosmos. Yet when this composition is viewed in its historical

context—now generally agreed to have been around the turn of the

eleventh century—it is possible to witness the dialectical tension from

which these extraordinary verses spring.5 As Germanic polytheism

was systematically displaced by the advent of Christianity at the

dawn of the new—and twilight of the old—millennium, participants of

Scandinavian culture experienced both loss and renewal; energies

reflected in the cosmogonic and eschatological patterns of the

Vǫluspá.6 Implicit in this dynamic and giving place to the very media

which enable us to assess it are the adoption of the Roman alphabet

and the institution of scriptoria which the Church had brought.

Ironically it was only by dint of conversion to Christianity, as a religion

of the Book, that material preconditions for the textual expression of

the pagan mythos were satisfied.7 This dialectic is tautened by the

historical gaps between the composition of the Vǫluspá and its

textual emergence in the sources now extant; first in the Codex

Regius MS (GKS 2365 4to) c.1270 and then in the Hauksbók MS

(Codex AM 544 4to) c.1330.8 Thus the extent to which Christian

doctrine has impinged upon native beliefs as available to us in these

texts is still an open site of conjecture and debate.9

5 On dating Vǫluspá, see John Lindow, ‘Mythology and Mythography’ in Clover and Lindow (eds.), Critical Guide, (Toronto, 1985; 2005), 48.6 On the millenial conversion period, see Jenny Jochens, ‘Late and Peaceful’ in Speculum, vol.74, no.3 (Jul., 1999), 621-655.7 On the advent of alphabetic literacy in Iceland, see Judy Quinn, ‘From orality to literacy’ in Clunies-Ross (ed.), Old Icelandic literature and society, (Cambridge, 2000), 30-31.8 On dating the Codex Regius see Harris, ‘Eddic Poetry’, (Toronto, 1985; 2005), 75. On Hauksbók, see Sveinsson, Dating the Icelandic sagas, (London, 1958), 12. 9 A brief summary of some key positions in this debate is provided by Lindow in ‘Mythology and Mythography’ (1985; 2005), 40-41.


Julia Kristeva observes that ‘crises’ of ‘social structures and

their ideological, coercive, and necrophilic manifestations…have

occurred at the dawn and decline of every mode of production,’

arguing that such crises are the midwives to an exhaustive turn in

the signifying practice.10 With the paradigm shifts—religious, cultic,

and textual—transpiring around the millenial period, and

repercussing throughout succeeding centuries, Icelandic self-

expression within the new institution and technology of literature was

fringed with the trauma of parturition. The Mirror Stage identified by

Lacan is the phase during which the infant develops understanding of

the relation duelle, not only between the body and the Ego, but

between the imaginary and the real:

[the] jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans

stage...would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic

matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is

objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before

language restores it, in the universal, its function as subject.11

The moment of subject-formation precipitates abjection from the

hitherto dyadic relationship with the maternal object: where ‘[t]here

is language instead of the good breast...[d]iscourse is being

substituted for maternal care.’12 To enter discourse then is to be

driven at once by desire and disgust: the subject is driven against its

abjection from the maternal object by desire, but at once militates, in

disgust, against the dissolution of its subjectivity that such a return

would entail.13 Through the Vǫluspá one may trace a trajectory of

parturition, from the primordial pre-symbolic to object-relations, the

preliminary acquisition of meaning, and the issue of textuality as a

bounded set.

10 Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Roudiez, (New York, 1984), 15; Kristeva argues for a particularly explosive manifestation of this tendency in modernity but acknowledges that it punctuates cultural history all the way back to Homer and Pindar.11 Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York, 1977), 1-7, (2).12 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, (New York, 1982), 45.13


The language of negation that structures the third stanza reads

like the primordial ur-state that obtains a priori language-acquisition:

a formless void, the pre-symbolic semiotic chora:14

Ár var alda, It was in the early ages

þar er Ymir byggði: when Ymir made his dwelling

vara sandr né sær there was not sand nor sea

né svalar unnir. nor chill waves.

Iǫrð fannz æva Earth was not to be found

né upphiminn: nor above it heaven

gap var ginnunga, a gulf was there of gaping voids

en gras hvergi, and grass nowhere

(V 3)

Interwoven with and seeding these images of primordiality are tropes

of gestation and fashioning:

Áðr Burs synir Before Burr’s sons

biǫðom um ypðo, lifted up seashores

þeir er miðgarð they who moulded

mæran skópo. glorious Miðgarðr.

(V 4)

Chronological priority, suggested by the preposition Áðr, segues into

the creation-image in the preterite, so that cosmogonic inertia is

evoked through a backward glance upon events that have yet to—

although foreordained to—come into being from the vatic perspective

of an ‘I’ whose vision encompasses the patterns of fate and time in

their totality. The translation ‘moulded’ for skópo is somewhat

reductive for skapa (v, inf.) has a semantic plurality that cuts through

and shapes events on the physical, linguistic, and fatalistic planes.15

14 Kristeva adapts this term from the Platonic Timæus. In her discourse the chora is the vessel through which the drives, undefined and inarticulate, pour and are emptied out: ‘a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated’, Revolution, 25-30, (25); see also Desire in Language, trans. Gora, Jardine, Roudiez, (1981; 1989), 133.15 For examples see Cleasby-Vígfusson, (Oxford, 1847), 537-38.


The metaphor for the drawing up and shaping of Miðgarðr as a

shoreline against the primordial waveless Ginnungagap, describes

the moment of articulation where formlessness resolves into form,

and this shaping and measure-taking, of space, meaning, and fate as

the ‘middle-yard’ stakes out the teleological enclosure of human

agency.

Ursula Dronke observes that the Vǫluspá synthesizes three

independent myths of origin: ‘that of the giant birth of the world

tree...that of the lifting of the first earth out of the primordial ocean...

[and] that of the primordial giant-corpse from which the earth and

sky were fashioned.’16 Returning later to the topos of the world-ash

Yggdrasill, let us first make the transition between the second and

third of these mythic metaphors. The Codex Regius text of the

Vǫluspá, in fact, does not elaborate the conceit by which corporeal

details of the giant Ymir’s physical existence provide the prima

materia for the cosmogony.17 The primary extant evidence of this

myth is provided by the Gylfaginning section of the Snorra Edda:

Ór Ymis holdi From Ymir’s flesh

var jǫrð of skǫpuð was earth created,

en ór sveita sjár, and from blood, sea;

bjǫrg ór beinum, rocks of bones,

baðmr ór hári, trees of hair,

en ór hausi himinn; and from his skull, the sky.

en ór hans brám And from his eyelashes

gerðu blíð regin the joyous gods made

Miðgarð manna sonum, Migard for men’s sons,

en ór hans heila and from his brains

váru þau hin harðmóðgu were those cruel

16 The Poetic Edda: Mythological Poems, 2 vols., (Oxford, 1997) II, 32.17 See Gabriel Turville-Petre, who squeamishly sees this as one of ‘the grotesque motives of pagan mythology’ in Origins of Icelandic Literature, (Oxford, 1953), 61.


ský ǫll of skǫpuð.18 clouds all created.19

Ymir, the monadic ur-form of humanity and first in the race of

hrímþursa (frost-giants) is himself generated by a synthetic

contamination of the Ginnungagap with the heat of Muspell and the

cold of Niflheim.20 The first phases of this cosmogony then are

essentially gestative, consisting in the pure motility of physics and

the biological outgrowth of physicality as earthly phenomena that are

mapped onto and through the anatomical model. The mode is

anaclitic: the universe, in the full range of its natural manifestation—

geological, arboreal, marine, celestial and meterological—inheres in

the totality of the monadic body-model.21 It is through parturition

from this totality that the potential for significance itself is realised.

The dyadic prototype is provided by Yggdrasill, the world-ash:

the structural axis of the universe and parent of life:

Ask veit ek standa, An Ash I know there stands,

heitir Yggdrasill, Yggdrasill is its name,

hár baðmr, ausinn a tall tree, showered

hvítaauri. with shining loam.

(V 19)

Yggdrasill’s species, the Ash, links its materiality with that of the Ask

ok Emblo discovered by the three Æsir of the seventeenth stanza:

Fundo á landi They found on land,

lítt megandi little capable

Ask ok Emblo Ash and Embla,

ørlǫglausa. without destiny.

(V 17)

18 Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, ed. Anthony Faulkes, (Oxford, 1982), 12.19 Edda, trans. Faulkes, (London, 1987; 2003), 13.20 See Edda, (1982), 10, ll.10-15.21 On anaclisis, see Kristeva, ‘Place Names’ in Desire in Language, (1980), 271-94 (280-86).


The raw material of humanity, here in its unpotentiated pre-symbolic

state is of a piece with the material conditions of Yggdrasill, the

parent-object. Yet the Ash and the Embla are abjected from the

centrality focussed upon the parent, stranded upon a shore which

demarcates the outermost extent of Miðgarðr’s spatial limits.

Immediately supervening upon this splitting off from dyadic integrity

is the extraordinary sequence describing language-acquisition and

subject-formation through which the object-relations of the cosmos

are resolved by restorative entry into the symbolic order:

Ǫnd þau né átto, Breath they had not,

óð þau né hǫfðo, spirit they had not,

lá né læti no film of flesh nor cry of voice,

né líto góða. nor comely hues.

Ǫnd gaf Óðinn, Breath Óðinn gave,

óð gaf Hœnir, spirit Hœnir gave,

lá gaf Lóðurr film of flesh Lóðurr gave

ok líto góða. and comely hues.

(V 18)

The symmetrical antithesis describes, and re-scribes, the state and

process of lack and its fulfillment: of abjection and restoration. The

human subject, thus rendered, understands itself through its relation

to, and difference from, the parent stock. Its separation and

invagination in a ‘film of flesh’ or limit (lá) constitutes and reseals its

division and release from the anaclitic phase, as breath or animus

(ǫnd) and vitality or being-there (óð) confer autonomy. This is now a

separate subject in a world of objects, yet one bound up in the very

grain of its texture with the biological materiality of its maternal

origins. The restorative function of entry into the symbolic redresses

the condition of lack (ørlǫglausa). The human subject may now

participate in the Law of the Father and address itself to the

signifying apparatuses through which human thought, activity, and


language are constituted. Bound up in this transition is the

prescription of fate as an ontological imperative.

The nineteenth and twentieth stanzas dealing with this

operation perform a syntagmatic abstraction that mirrors an

estranged apprehension of time:

Ask veit ek standa,

heitir Yggdrasill,

hár baðmr ausinn

hvítaauri,

þaðan koma döggvar

þærs í dala falla,

stendr æ yfir grœnn

Urðarbrunni.

Þaðan koma meyjar,

margs vitandi,

þrjár ór þeim sæ

er und þolli stendr.

Urð hétu eina,

aðra Verðandi,

- skáro á skíði -

Skuld ina þriðjo.

Þær lǫg lǫgðo,

þær líf kuro

alda bǫrnum,

ørlǫg seggja.

(V 19-20)

In thus far tacitly re-ordering the stanzaic sequence to nineteen-

seventeen-eighteen I have deliberately situated Yggdrasill a priori the

Ask ok Emblo of the seventeenth stanza. However in the surface

structure of the text, the parturition sequence occurs before the

description of Yggdrasill, the parent-object. This felicitously reflects

the sequence of the Mirror Stage model developed by Lacan, for it is


indeed necessary for the subject to be abjected from the anaclitic

phase as a precondition of the recognition of its parent as an extrinsic

object-relation. The text performs a further analepsis, however, in

deferring the description of Urðarbrunni (Urðr’s well) and its function

until the twentieth stanza. The well of fate nourishes the world-ash,

parent-tree of human life. Thus the raw material from which the

human form is hewn has ab aevo drawn vitality and growth from the

liquor of fatalism. The biological metaphor thus structures the

profoundly radical integrity of fatalism with the affairs of human

agency. Furthermore, in restructuring the timeflow, the double

analepsis reflects the human recognition of destiny. The pattern of

fate is the abstract ur-plane consisting beyond the limit of language

and cognition, yet impinging upon and protracting the events of

history and ‘reality’, as understood by commonsense empiricism.

Human recognition of fate plays strange tricks with time: the

discovery of the foreordination of the patterns of causality—which

consist both before time and outside of time and yet determine how

and to which extent time itself will elapse for the subject—is

predominantly a post facto experience. We may feel the hand of

history on our shoulder, but its destinal operation is never entirely

clear, in an imagistic totality, until the thread of life itself is cut.

The appearance of the nornir, Urðr, Skulðr and Verðanði

completes the textual set which describes the cosmogonic phase and

which occupies approximately the first third of the poem. Their

textual determination of the fate of Miðgarðr (skáro á skíði)

completes the trajectory of creation and gives place to the continuum

of history by investing it with significance. It is they who consolidate

and fulfil the totality of meaning and finalise restorative entry into the

symbolic order (Þær lǫg lǫgðo / þær líf kuro / alda bǫrnum, / ørlǫg

seggja). Fatalism thus comprises a form of linguistic and textual

agency, as the teleological continuum, in its entirety, from the first

resolution of the formless Ginnungagap to the eschatalogical twilight


at Ragnarǫk, is patterned by a single utterance in the form of a runic

inscription at the dawn of cosmic time. Yet the operation of fate

resists linguistic and cognitive apprehension, and instead forms part

of the mechanism of ‘the real’. ‘The real’, in the Lacanian sense is ‘a

traumatic residue which infuses speaking subjects with the anxiety

that language is not “everything” but rather breached by a gaping

hole.’22 It is precisely that which is outside the symbolic, and so

outside “reality” as it is represented by the subject to itself.23

The gap thus manifested in the symbolic is conceptualised by

Lacan as the objet a: ‘an abstraction of all that underlies our

obsessive fabrication of objects...in its imaginary dimension, an

endless lure for the subject; at the same time it is a position set up

for us by the deceits of the symbolic, a presence summoned to plug

the absence behind it.’24 The objet a, then, is a vortex at the centre

of the symbolic, endlessly stimulating an imperative to generate that

which might mask and seal over this void, and so occlude the

terrifying penumbra of the real. Such subrogation is endemic in

culture—indeed throughout social practice in general—providing a

basis for metaphor and imagery and driving, in essence, the very

creation of the textual object. An element of contradiction thus

obtains in the textual reflexivity with which the Vǫluspá—as well as

the next two texts under discussion—frames the topic of fatalism:

their expression of the mechanism of fate in terms of, and as, a

significative object or textual event, both excavates and fills in that

space in which fate itself is inscribed and worked through.

22 Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions, (Stanford, 2001), 31; citing Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 25-26.23 ‘Increasingly, Lacan becomes preoccupied with the incapacity of the symbolic to take account of what is there in reality; this lack in the symbolic both reflects and generates a sense that reality has a profoundly traumatic dimension which exceeds language. Thus although the symbolic orchestrates all the resources of language, it also itself stands in a relation of negation, and contradiction, to the real’, Kay, ibid, 29-30.24 Kay, ibid, 33.


Nornagests þáttr survives in only one manuscript, the Flateyjarbók:

the most imposing textual object in the Old Icelandic corpus. Lavishly

illuminated (by Old Norse standards) and extending to over 220

single folio vellums, this is also a manuscript which is uniquely

privileged with a full codicological history.25 The compilatorial zeal

with which the kings’ sagas were copiously amplified—to the point,

practically, of the distortion of their narrative fabric—attests to and is

perhaps the high point of the antiquarian impulse animating the

Icelandic literary culture of the fourteenth century. With the

extensive intercalation of þættir into the larger textual frameworks of

the konungasǫgur, the scribe-compilators Jon prestr Þórðarson and

Magnús prestr Þórhallzson, under the aegis of the book’s patron Jonn

Hakonarson, performed the generous conservation of an extensive

range of material that would otherwise have been lost to obscurity;

including, and not limited to, Orkneyinga saga, Færeyinga saga, Eiríks

saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga. That an acute awareness of the

shape and function of the textual object should have obtained during

the undertaking of such an ambitious cultural project is in no way

surprising. It is equally to be expected that such reflection would

work its way into the text itself. In marking out the limits of the

textual subset, and attempting its suture to the larger narrative

frame, the compilator(s) controlling the inclusion of Nornagests þáttr

foregrounded its textuality through tropes of authentication that

ironically disclose its outstanding artificiality.

In the manuscript witness the limits of the textual subset are

defined by its own rubrication—her hefr þaatt af NornaGesti—and

that of the following tale—þaatr Helga Þorissunar (Ng 346, 359).

Sidling up against these paratextual signifiers are the framing terms

of the text itself in which Gest is warmly brought into the circle of

Ólafr Tryggvasson’s court (Konungr tok honum uel) and the final

reflection upon this guest’s worth and the validity of his story (þotti

25 Codex Flatöiensis MS GkS 1005 fol. …


konungi ok mikit mark at sǫgum hans ok þotti sannazst um lifgada

hans sem hann sagde). The trajectory of Nornagests þáttr thus

describes an arc of great promise fulfilled and is lodged with a truth-

claim that belies the fantasmatic excesses of its heroic mythological

topoi. It is a narrative that fully embraces those characteristics

defined by Kristeva as inhering in le texte clos (‘the bounded text’):

for it is, ‘as ideologeme, closed and terminated in its very

beginnings.’26 The ‘ideologeme’ is ‘that intertextual function read as

“materialized” at the different structural levels of each text, and

which stretches along the entire length of its trajectory, giving it its

historical and social coordinates.’27 The difficulty remains of squaring

this ideologically normative anchorage with the circle of uncanny

diegesis that Gestr relates in his romantic account of the

fornaldarsaga narrative, and the acceptance of its truth-claim by

Ólafr Tryggvasson; a genuine historical character deposited within

and in relation to a patent fabrication.

In order to resolve this quandary it will be valuable to return to

Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Within and beyond the textual and

paratextual markers already mentioned, which outline the limits of

the textual subset, is a framing trope which although only disclosed

in the final stages of the þáttr determines, in itself, the trajectory and

extent of Gest’s ontology. I refer of course to the vǫlurs’ prophecy,

and the candle as the object in which the fatal curse of the norn is

invested:

Kallar hon þa hatt ok ræidiliga ok bad hinar hætta sua godum ummælum

uit mig. Þuiat et skapa honum þat at hann skalæigi lifa leingr en kerti þat

brennr er upp er tendrat hea suæininum. Eftir þetta tok hin ellri uoluan

kertit ok slokti ok bidr modur mina uardueita ok kuæikia æigi fyrr en a

sidazsta degi lifs mins....Þa er ek er þat nu med mer roskinn madr fær

modir minn mer kerti þetta til uarduæitzslu. hefui ek suarar.

26 See ‘The Bounded Text’ in Desire in Language, (1981; 1989), 36-63, (41).27 Kristeva, ibid, 36.


(Ng 358)

She called out fiercely and in anger, commanding them to desist in their

good prophecies for me, declaring instead that I should not live longer

than that candle shall burn. After this the eldest vǫlur took the candle and

snuffed it out and gave it to my mother for safekeeping, telling her not to

light it till the last day of my life. Once I had fully come of age, my mother

gave me the candle to look after. I have it with me now.

In Lacan’s seventh seminar (1959-60) he formulates a model of

sublimation as that fulfilment of jouissance that transpires in the

“zone between two deaths.”28 Sarah Kay writes that the ‘sublime

results from lethal destructiveness, and yet it also occludes the

reality of death, into the uncanny form of the victim’s preternatural

beauty or ethical significance.’29 The whole of Gest’s life—several

centuries of it—is suspended in the anticipation and holding at bay of

the death which will inevitably supervene upon the final extinction of

this enchanted candle. He thus occupies a charmed existence, which

is simultaneously, and continually, circumscribed by a deathly halo.

The conservation of this object thus enacts a displacement and

deferral of the real and gives place to the trajectory of sublimation in

which the ever-threatening aura of the death-drive is cathected and

redistributed into a symbolic-imaginary representation of superlative

magnificence.

Gest is unequivocally admitted to the inner sanctum of the

royal court where he evinces prowess and beauty: Konungr suarar.

Gestr muntu her uera huersu sem þu hæitir [‘the king said “you shall

be a guest here, whatever your name is”’]...Þrifligr madr ertu śegir

kongungr. Gestr sia uar diarfr j ordum ok mæiri en flestir menn adrir

sterkligr ok nokkuat hniginn j efra alldr [‘“You are a handsome man”,

said the king. Gest was forthright in speech, more so than previous

men, and strong and seemed older’] (Ng 346). His accomplishments,

28 First published as L’éthique de psychanalyse, (1959-60); translated as The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, (London: Routledge, 1992).29 Courtly Contradictions, (2001), 218.


at playing the harp and storytelling, are similarly valorized and he is

deemed, in all respects, a singular hirðmaðr: er honum skipat utar fra

gestum. Hann uar sidsamr madr ok latadr uel. uar hann ok

þokkasamr af flestum monnum ok virdizst uel. [‘he was seated away

from the other guests. He was a polite man and behaved well. He

was beloved of many and highly thought of’] (Ng 347). His noble

status is consolidated by the wager in which he proves that his

fragment of a golden saddle-ring—gold being so often the index of

valour in romance as in later saga literature—is of exemplary value

(allgott gull) (Ng 348). Having thus enshrined this character with a

full range of courtly virtues, and legitimated his authenticity the

stage is set for his own voice to take over the narrative and lodge its

mythic history within the larger textual frame: Þo uilium uer heyra

segir konungr med þui at þu hefir oss adr hæitit sǫgu þinne [‘“Now,”

said the king, “I’d like to hear the story of how you came by that gold

in your possession”] (Ng 349).

Nornagest’s affiliation with the population of the mythic

Nifelung-Vǫlsung dynasty (J þessi ferd uar med Sigurdi Hamundr

brodir hans ok Reginn duergr. Ek uar ok þar ok kolludu þeir mig þa

Nornagest. Uar Hialpreki kunnlæiki a mer þa er hann uar Danmork

med Sigemunde Uolsungssyne) simultaneously affirms and denies

the authenticity of the narrative (Ng 350). Its affirmation consists in

Gest’s empirical value as an eyewitness to these events, even as the

historical impossibility of the subjective analepsis denies its affiliation

to the real and underscores its significative function as process and

product of sublimation. Upon producing forensic evidence of the

particularly implausible narreme of the lock of horse hair, seven ells

in length, (var hann .vik. elna harr) the narrative diegesis is

punctured, the frame hoves in, and Gest’s audience unanimously

communicate their approval: Lofudu nu allir frasagnir hans ok

fræklæik (Ng 354). In its staging of the performance of oral texts,

and particularly in the dialectic mode which structures the latter


phase of the Saga Gestz, Nornagests þáttr provides some of the only

contemporary, or at least near-contemporary, evidence we have for

the way that narrative art may have circulated prior to the advent of

alphabetic literacy.30 Its normative coordination of enjoyment in a

narrative with multiple points of intertextual imbrication—with Óláfs

saga Tryggvassonar, Vǫlsunga saga and Reginsmal, as well the

Meleagros cycle as found in Hesiod, Homer, Appollodorus and Ovid—

underscores the political value of sublimation as a socially cohesive

force. The antiquarian project which furnished this text for posterity

sets the textual object between the reading subject and the traumatic

exertion of the real as it is revealed in history. In like manner Gest’s

frame narrative posits a lustrous syntagmatic structure that becalms

anxieties of origin through its privileged assertion of heroic value and

dynastic affiliation. The reward for which is an effortless admission

to, and integration with, a higher power, through baptism, that

renders the value of the sublime object of the candle nugatory as

Gest is cathartically laid to rest at the close of the textual set (Ng

359).

The verses of the Darraðarljóð are thought to have been composed

as early as the tenth century but survive through their inclusion in

Njáls saga, a text composed some three to four hundred years later,

as a lausavísur in its one-hundred-and-fifty-seventh episode. Its

situation in the narrative frame is late then, occurring some way

beyond the central praxes that reach crisis at the deaths of Njáll

Þorgeirsson and Gunnarr Hámundarson. Once again a brush against

the supernatural intervention of the destiny of human agents

powerfully re-inflects our understanding of the foregoing narrative,

which has consistently been framed in terms of the operation of fate.

A synchronic design of deterministic fatalism is the structuring

30 See ars Lönnroth, ‘The Founding of Miðgarðr’ in Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington (eds.) The Poetic Edda, (New York, 2002).


principle of the sagas. Carol Clover has demonstrated how stranding

and simultaneity are employed as ‘a technique of binding together

the narrative mass by a system of “forecasts and concordances.”’31

Both Njáll’s characterisation as ‘langsýnnr ok langminnigr’, meaning

far-sighted and with good memory is part of such an organisational

system: his prophetic agency directs and coordinates reader-

response to the narrative, which is understood, as it were in the

totality of the round, or as single, and complete, image. The reception

groups of the Njála would have had a substantial command of the

historical facts of these stories, and certainly of their main action.

This grants the original saga audience a privileged perspective on the

orchestration of events and the patterning of narrative causality

within the diegesis. The expression of fatalism in the textual object

then, accords with a narrative blueprint that will not admit of

significant deviation. And yet, when the mechanism of fate is luridly

disclosed in the horrific activity transpiring within the weavers’

gynaecium, the schismatic rupture of the signifying fabric attests to

nothing less than an outrageous excess in the capacity of the

symbolic to circumscribe and contain the terror of the real.

The twelve valkyrjur determine the outcome of the battle through

the medium of song as they weave a visceral fabric upon a warp-

weighted loom with human heads for weights and entrails for the

warp and the weft. This mythological conceit, organising the

activities of weaving, wordcraft and warfare, simultaneously

describes the energy of violent prolapse, as the domestic limit of the

skin—itself a fabric of signification—is hideously breached to expose

the abject viscerality which it encloses and masks off. The

extraordinary kenningar oscillate between the limits of subjective

interpretation and the performance of fatalism as operant through

time and human agency:

Nú er fyrir geirum Now, with the spears


grár upp kominn a grey woven fabric

vefr verþjóðar of warriors is formed32

This wordplay characteristically compresses multiple meanings

into a single poetic image. The warriors in their grey metal armour,

swarming in lines, are imaged as the threads of grey piece of fabric.

The pattern repeats itself closer to the action, with the interlocking

spears similarly envisaged as forming a type of grey cloth. The

opposition of the grár...vefr verþjóðar’to the rauðum vepti’[‘red weft’]

(116), enacts a dizzying foveation as the imagery sustains a

simultaneous awareness of the structuring patterns determining both

the array of human agents engaged in international warfare, and the

matrices binding blood vessels and muscle tissue together at the

most intimate level of biological interiority.33 This fantasmatic

weaving of fate as a universal activity, a deterministic force, informs

the centripetal energy of the Darraðarljóð which, with the

illocutionary force of its refrain vindum, vindum, winds together

feminine with masculine, creative with destructive, organic with

synthetic, and domestic with international spheres of agency. Nature

itself comes under the sway of the looming, with the conventional

meteorological tropes of blood rain, (116, 118) and the vǫllr roðinn

[‘the field dyed red’] (118) which are respectively identified with the

hanging warp, and the resulting crimson fabric. The centripetal

tendency undergoes a spectacular reversal, however, when the

valkyrjur tear their gory cloth to pieces and gallop their separate

ways. Non-accommodation of the cathexis of the death-drive is

explosively revealed through this violent disruption of the textual

object, and the dissolution of geo-spatial parameters: a centrifugal

sequence of supernatural visitations occurs simultaneously in the

Faeroes, Iceland, the Orkneys, and the Hebrides, conveying a sense

that the pattern of fate has violently unfurled itself throughout the

North Atlantic region (ÍF 12: 459).34


In Old Norse literature representations of fatalism consistently give

place to a reflexive consideration of the signifying practice. The

advent of alphabetic literacy and the institution of scriptoria had

inaugurated the conditions of a novel and vibrant textual culture.

The chiliastic crisis ‘of social structures and their ideological

manifestations’ witnessed the shattering of the planes and surfaces

of representation and stimulated the analytic self-reflection that we

have traced through the tropes of subject-formation and object-

relations in the Vǫluspá. The shape of the textual object, as a

bounded set with its own teleological parameters bears structural

affinity with the concept of fate as an utterance that preconditions

the shape and extent of events in history. The trope of fate,

moreover, is coordinated by the subrogation of a narrative object that

plugs the terrifying void of the objet petit a located at the empty

heart of the symbolic order: a runestone, a candle, a fabric made of

men’s intenstines. These diegetic subrogations themselves mirror

the intervention of the textual object itself between the reading

subject as a participant of the symbolic order and the truth of the real

as it is revealed in history. In Nornagests þáttr the sublime object of

the fantasmatic discourse seals over the terror of the real, and

provides an ideologically normative cohesion of the social and

political order. Conversely, the explosive transgressions of the

Darraðarljóð run up against the very limits of symbolic discourse and

are thus freighted with the horror of abjection and the trauma of the

real. In seeking to give an expression to the mechanism of fate, the

writers of these texts were concerned to define the limits of meaning

in its totality; the ramifications of the textual objects which emerged

from this project, cut a swathe right through to the very heart of the

nature of the subject in its relation to the universe.

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Kristeva Fatalism and Textuality

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