Lost in Transmission: Reconstituting Forgotten Verses in Gísla saga Súrssonar

This paper re-examines the passage in Gísla saga Súrssonar in which Gísli relates a pair of dream visions he has had regarding the killing of his brother-in-law Vésteinn. Gísli claims that the dreams point to the identity of Vésteinn’s murderer, who is traditionally viewed as being symbolized first by a viper (hǫggormr) and then a wolf (vargr), which bite Vésteinn to death. However, a close reading of the text reveals a number of incongruities, which suggest that the entire episode was composed and added on to an earlier version of the text, and that the reading of the viper and wolf as fetches, or representations of Vésteinn’s killer, was based on the misconstruing of a poetic fragment from another source.