Grettis Saga - Legacy

Legacy

Grettir Ásmundarson was reported to have been from Bjarg in Miðfjörður. At Bjarg, Grettir Ásmundarson always had refuge with his mother Ásdís. Many place names in the neighbourhood of Bjarg and indeed throughout the county bear the name of the outlaw e.g. Grettishaf, Grettistak and Grettishöfði at Arnarvatn. A memorial was erected to his mother Ásdís at Bjarg in 1974. The memorial displays a relief from Grettis Saga made by Icelandic artist Halldór Pétursson.

Grettir is celebrated in the long poem Eclogue from Iceland in the 1938 collection The Earth Compels by Irish poet Louis MacNeice, who had developed a love of Norse mythology while at school at Marlborough College. In it, the ghost of Grettir speaks with two men, Craven and Ryan, who have been 'hounded' from a decadent and war-threatened Europe 'whose voice calls in the sirens of destroyers'. He urges them to recover their underlying human values, and to assert, as he has, 'the sanctity of the individual will'. He tells them to return home as an act of duty, which he calls - remembering his own defiant choice to be an outlaw - 'Your hazard, your act of defiance and hymn of hate, hatred of hatred, assertion of human values' and (in the poem's final words') 'your only chance'.