BJARNE FIDJESTØL The sudden death on February 9, 1994, of Bjarne Fidjestøl, Professor of Nordic Philology at the University of Bergen, at the age of 56, is a particularly sad blow to the Viking Society, of which, over the past few years, he had become an increasingly close friend. Many of the Society’s members attended the Seventh Biennial Conference of Teachers of Scandinavian Studies in Great Britain and Northern Ireland held at University College London in March 1987, at which Bjarne gave, at the invitation of the Conference organisers (who have since published it in the Proceedings) a paper in Norwegian on scaldic poetry and the Conversion, with special reference to the kingship of Haraldr hárfagri. At the Society’s centenary symposium in 1992 Bjarne also gave, at the Society’s invitation, a paper in English on the contribution of scaldic studies to current scholarly engagement with the problem of the extent of the Christian impact on pagan beliefs in the Viking Age; this paper is published in Anthony Faulkes and Richard Perkins, eds, Viking Revaluations (1993), the volume in which the papers given at the symposium are collected. Bjarne’s books Sólarljóð: Tyding og tolkingsgrunnlag (1979) and Det norrøne fyrste- diktet (1982) are, as it happens, reviewed by the former and current Presidents of the Society in Scandinavica 20 (1981), 219, and 25 (1986), 74–76, respectively. Neither review does justice to the book with which it deals, but each at least offers a way into the book in question for readers whose nynorsk may not be entirely up to scratch. At the Conference in 1987, mentioned above, Bjarne was asked by Michael Barnes in my hearing to make an after-dinner speech on behalf of the Norwegian delegates at the end of the Conference. He immediately replied: ‘Oh, no; I can’t possibly give a speech in English.’ ‘But we want you to do it in Norwegian,’ said Michael. ‘Oh; then I’ll have to think of some other excuse,’ Bjarne replied. Fortunately he was persuaded to give the speech in Norwegian, and did so to the great pleasure of his hosts and no doubt also to that of his fellow Norwegian guests. In addition to the unassuming modesty and gentle sense of humour that this story illustrates, Bjarne also had a moral courage and integrity that led him to risk making himself unpopular in order to stand up for what he believed in. Not everybody will have agreed with his position on the Seventh International Saga Conference at Spoleto in 1988, which included in its programme a contribution from a representative of the University of South Africa, but few can have failed to admire the openness and painstaking persistence with which Bjarne made his position clear, both at the Conference itself 60 Saga-Book and in letters written to many of its members beforehand. It is a particular sadness that he did not live to hear of the forming of the new government in South Africa; he would have rejoiced at the news. Our deep sympathies go to his wife Eva, to his children Mari, Ragna, Alfred and Ane, and to his students and colleagues at the University of Bergen. R. W. MCT. PETER HALLBERG January 25, 1916–March 4, 1995 It is a great sorrow to find oneself in the position of writing two obituaries in the same number of Saga-Book. Although Peter Hallberg was perhaps not as well known personally to members of the Viking Society as Bjarne Fidjestøl, his books on The Icelandic Saga and Old Icelandic Poetry, available in English from 1962 and 1975 respectively, must for many members of the Society have formed part of their basic introductory reading when they first encountered Old Icelandic literature. Peter at- , tended one of the Society s meetings in London early in 1981, when on a lecturing visit to Leeds from Gothenburg; and in 1987 he gave a lecture on , ‘Recent Trends in Saga Research at a plenary session of the Seventh Biennial Conference of Teachers of Scandinavian Studies in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, held at University College London in March of that year, and attended by many of the Society’s members; this paper is published in the Conference Proceedings (1987), 78–95. Perhaps the most significant of his visits to Britain for the advancement of Northern research, however, and certainly the most dramatic of them, was the one he made in 1944. In the previous year, as he explains in a lecture on Laxness published in Elín Bára Magnusdóttir and Úlfar Bragason, eds, Halldórsstefna (1993), 11–19, he had been offered the post of Swedish lecturer at the University of Iceland, but had been prevented from taking it up by the sheer difficulty of reaching Iceland from Sweden in wartime. In order to do so, he had to travel first to Britain; but Swedish aeroplanes flying to Britain at that stage of the war were exposed to the risk of German attack. He managed eventually to fly to Edinburgh, however, and proceeded from there by train to Hull, where he boarded an Icelandic trawler for a six-day voyage to Iceland, arriving in time to take up the lecturing post just under a year late. On this journey he had with him a well-filled mailbag, ‘about the size of , myself , as he puts it, which he had been enjoined by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs never to let out of his sight and to deliver without fail to the Swedish diplomatic mission in Reykjavík. Although this was not Peter’s first visit to Iceland, it was surely the one that was most important for the course his life was later to take. He remained in the lecturing post until 1947. In 1951 he became Docent in Literary History at the University of Gothenburg, and in 1975 Professor of Comparative Literature, also at Gothenburg. In 1945 he married Rannveig Kristjánsdóttir, from Dagverðareyri, just north of Akureyri, in northern Iceland; she died in 1952 62 Saga-Book at the tragically early age of thirty-five. They had two children, Kristján and Maria. In 1955 he married Rannveig’s sister, Kristín, who died, also after an heroic struggle against illness, in 1985. Both marriages were, in their different ways, wonderfully happy ones, as was clear to anyone who knew Peter well. It would need more than just a mailbag—even one of the size Peter describes—to contain all his publications on Old and Modern Icelandic literature and related subjects. Indeed, when introducing his lecture at the London conference in 1987, his namesake Peter Foote said that Peter Hallberg, with his tall, imposing figure, towered above most of us physi- cally as well as academically, and that his list of publications was ‘even , longer than himself . While some might think that his statistical investiga- tions of saga authorship (set out most fully in his Stilsignalement och författarskap i norrön sagalitteratur (1968), and summarised in Ture Johannisson, ed., Språkliga signalement (1983), 81–102) have been largely superseded by the advent of the computer, he may be said to have prepared the way for the use of computers in Northern research by his wise assessment of the kind of information that needs to be fed into them; and it should be remembered that his statistical approach was by no means confined to problems of saga authorship, but touched on matters as widely different as sacral kingship in ancient Scandinavia and free indirect style in the novels of Halldór Laxness. Even if his methods and conclusions are questioned, his work will remain an inexhaustible source of valuable insights and observations. It is perhaps in his work on Laxness that he comes across, as a scholar, at his most humane. In his Halldór Laxness (1971), 128, he praises Laxness for ‘placing Iceland in the midst of the , world . This is something that Peter Hallberg may be said to have done for Halldór Laxness, by providing in his books Den store vävaren (1954) and , Skaldens hus (1956) an international context for the study of Laxness s work, which he discusses in relation to the work of writers as varied as André Breton, Dante Alighieri, Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Lao-tse. For the magnificent example of the breadth and depth of his reading, and for his authoritative presence as a bastion of Northern research over many years, we thank him warmly, while sending our deep sympathies to his relatives in Iceland and Sweden. R. W. MCT. THE MILL IN NORSE AND FINNISH MYTHOLOGY BY CLIVE TOLLEY HE MILK ocean is churned, in Indian myth, with an outlier of the T world mountain to produce the soma of immortality, as well as a host of other guarantors of the world’s fertility and well-being, such as the sun and moon, along with destructive forces such as the poison Kalaku– t– a˘ and the goddess of misfortune.1 No myth relating anything precisely compara- ble to this striking event appears to exist in Norse, yet the image of a cosmic mill, ambivalently churning out well-being or disaster, may be recognised in certain fragmentary myths. The image of the cosmic mill is better developed by the neighbours of the Norsemen, the Finns. The tale of the sampo provides a poetically elabo- rated myth against which the Norse remains may be assessed; I shall also consider some of the possibilities of Norse/Finnish influence. The Sampo The Finnish sampo is never described in detail, nor is its precise function determined; nonetheless, investigation reveals that it represents a highly developed expression of the image of the world mill: the cosmic turning regulates fertility, ‘grinding out’ well-being like a mill.