SOURCE: “Withdrawal and Return: A Ritual Pattern in the Grettis Saga,” in Arkiv för Nordisk Filologi, Vol. 88, 1973, pp. 91-110.

In the following essay, Motz provides instances in which the main characternof the Grettis Saga, Grettir, conforms to patterns of the hero in myth, tradition, and ritual, with the result that his individuality is sublimated.

Grettir Ásmundarson, one of the strongest men of his time, a victim of both ill luck and the tempestuousness of his character, lived almost all of his adult life as an outlaw and was slain according to the saga written about him, as a mortally sick man on the lonely island which had sheltered him and his faithful brother Illugi. He was, his saga asserts in its closing chapter,¹ the most notable of all outlaws for his strength and his many victories over the fiends of darkness, the length of his exile and...