the rockets' red glare

Get your gunpowder on.

The town is gearing up for New Year's Eve. Kids are setting off firecrackers and jumping frogs to the great dismay of the basement-apartment-living classes in post code 101. The other night in Grindavík a band of fun-seekers of varying ages and degrees of intoxication was apparently unable to fight down the urge to set things on fire a hair early this year, and it went roving through the downtown in search of flammables. Last night the start of firework sales was marked by the local Björgunarsveit with an early show set off near Perlan, giving me and another late-working scholar (standing with our heads stuck up between the accordian blinds and the window, noses to the glass) a prime view of some of this year's nifty whiz-bang items. The latest innovation seems to be things that go paff and then dissolve into shimmering nebulae of metallic red and green that drift on the wind.

And now the special advertising section has made it into my mail slot. I always like checking out the array of fireworks named after medieval battles and burnings-in: Flóarbardaga, Njálsbrenna, Flúgumýrarbrenna. This naming practice is, to a certain degree, tasteless, a point made annually by one or another columnist. However one feels about battles, there is something a bit off about commemorating brennur, the least honorable way of dispatching your opponents in feud.

But the stuff of violence is exciting, there is no getting around that. The tools of violence, especially old, romanticized violence, also make good names for fireworks: sverð, exi, spjót, and of course atgeir, the wonderful weapon owned by Gunnar á Hlíðarenda the exact nature of which is still not known. Knobby and pointy it must have been, though.

The kappar, the champions of old, also lend their names: Gunnar himself, Leifur heppni, Ari fróði ("fyrir þá sem vilja ekki of mikið læti"), Auður djúpuðga, Gunnlaugur ormstunga ... It is nice to see the women of saga represented, I suppose. Hallgerður langbrók, for example, is an explosive with a lot of flash and silver. This is only appropriate, for Hallgerður caught the eye of none other than Gunnar á Hlíðarenda with her colored clothes, her yellow hair, her silver bangles and neckrings amassed in the course of two prior marriages. (This blonde bombshell tended to outlive her husbands, and she won her lasting literary fame in large degree by proving the end of Gunnar when his bowstring broke in battle and she would not give him a lock of her yellow hair to replace it.)

This time I noticed the copy for Hallgerður:

Það verður enginn svikinn af þessari.

I'm sure I'm meant to read that as "no-one will be disappointed in this one" (and that one is grammatically feminine because it is a cake explosive, a kaka), en svik er svik; this is Hallgerður langbrók, and I can't help seeing this as a revisionist comment on this most reviled and yet beloved of saga women: "No-one will be betrayed by this woman."