Ívars þáttr Ingimundarsonar
Ívars þáttr Ingimundarsonar (The Tale of Ívarr Son of Ingimundr) is a short episode in the kings' saga Morkinskinna (often referred to as a þáttr),[1] which emphasizes king Eysteinn's goodness.
Ívarr, an Icelander, lived at the court of king Eysteinn, who liked him much. His brother Þorfinnr went to Norway too, but he was jealous of Ívarr and soon came back. Before his departure, Ívarr asked him to tell the woman he loved to wait for him. But Þorfinnr married her. When he learned that, Ívarr got very upset. The king asked him what was on his mind and soon discovered. He then proposed his support so that he could marry the woman, but Ívarr explained that she was his brother's wife. Eysteinn made many unsuccessful attempts to find how he could take Ívarr's mind out of his sadness and eventually suggested that they could talk about the woman every day, for a grief could be relieved if it was shared. So they did, and Ívarr soon recovered.
The story is often framed within the context of a proto-form of Freudian talk therapy.[2]
References
- ^ For a discussion of þættir (sg. þáttr) as a genre, see Rowe, Elizabeth Ashman. “The Long and the Short of It.” In The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas, edited by Ármann Jakobsson and Sverrir Jakobsson, 151–63. New York: Routledge, 2017, and Rowe, Elizabeth Ashman and Joseph Harris. “Short Prose Narrative (þáttr).” In A Companion to Old Norse–Icelandic Literature and Culture, edited by Rory McTurk, 462–87. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. For a case against the applicability of the term, see Ármann Jakobsson (2013). 'The life and death of the medieval Icelandic short story'. JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology. 112. pp. 257–291.
- ^ Linn Getz, Anna Luise Kirkengen, Halfdan Petursson & Johann A. Sigurdsson, “The Royal road to Healing: A Bit of a Saga.” (with excerpt translated by Christopher Crocker), The British Medical Journal 343, Dec. 2011, pp. 1312–13. See also Crocker, Christopher and Ármann Jakobsson. “The Lion, the Dream, and the Poet: Mental Illnesses in Norway’s Medieval Royal Court.” Disability in the medieval Nordic world, a special issue of the journal Mirator 20 (2) edited by Christopher Crocker, 2021, pp. 91–105.