Gunnar and Seamus
Irish Heaney writes about Gunnar and lifts our hearts with his magic words.
We have read the saga and learned from Njál how men struggle with themselves to sit still:“Stritaðist hann við að sitja.”
Even in his tomb Gunnar cannot. He must chant and turn “to look at the moon.”
This sounds right to us who know the story, the monumental Icelandic saga.
Like a textby a Dante of the North—“scriba Dei”— that part of his creation God closed in ice to see what kind of poet could write in wind and cold only bears and whales can endure a lifetime of.
No one can even name him much less follow himinto caves and fjords and hearts dark with honor, stained with revenge, and dank with murder, not to mention the stench of burning flesh, Skarphéðin biting his beard so he doesn’t cry outto shame himself and his family’s fame.
“Funeral Rites,” he calls his poem: Irish dead in the Irish Troubles, which we see in his verse are the troubles of men wherever they live.
If they live anywhere, life being there,death is also there, who still sits and sits still, collecting his tribute as he smirks at the lies men claim are laws of the land:
“ólögum,” is Njál’s word, “unlaw,” not “outlaw,”but the “un-being of law,” autocrats’ dream,as they rape the people of all that is theirs,not just their wealth but their poetry as well,since poetry is the being of law,the magic words that lifted men’s heartsto imagine an order that binds them free.
Irish Heaney writes about Gunnar and lifts our hearts with his magic words.
We have read the saga and learned from Njál how men struggle with themselves to sit still:“Stritaðist hann við að sitja.”
Even in his tomb Gunnar cannot. He must chant and turn “to look at the moon.”
This sounds right to us who know the story, the monumental Icelandic saga.
Like a textby a Dante of the North—“scriba Dei”— that part of his creation God closed in ice to see what kind of poet could write in wind and cold only bears and whales can endure a lifetime of.
No one can even name him much less follow himinto caves and fjords and hearts dark with honor, stained with revenge, and dank with murder, not to mention the stench of burning flesh, Skarphéðin biting his beard so he doesn’t cry outto shame himself and his family’s fame.
“Funeral Rites,” he calls his poem: Irish dead in the Irish Troubles, which we see in his verse are the troubles of men wherever they live.
If they live anywhere, life being there,death is also there, who still sits and sits still, collecting his tribute as he smirks at the lies men claim are laws of the land:
“ólögum,” is Njál’s word, “unlaw,” not “outlaw,”but the “un-being of law,” autocrats’ dream,as they rape the people of all that is theirs,not just their wealth but their poetry as well,since poetry is the being of law,the magic words that lifted men’s heartsto imagine an order that binds them free.
Njál's saga manuscript from Sögubók