07

Appendix 7

We want to stress the point that the haughty verdicts as given by Genzmer, Olrik, and others on Snorri’s tale are not unknown to us. Their opinions run along these lines: “The last part of the story of Grotti and Mysing is ‘How the sea grew salt.’ This is a different motif, in no wise connected with the peace of Frothi.” [1] Genzmer’s wording is more arrogant still. The transportation of the mill by Mysing and the grinding of salt aboard the ship is “die Anschweissung einer zweiten selbständigen Sage; der grossartig einfache, ahnungsvolle Schluss unserer Dichtung wird durch ein solches Anhängsel tödlich geschädigt.” [2]

It would be more adequate to state that the myth has been “fatally damaged” by the modern experts, and not by Snorri. When we come to the little salt-mill of Kronos, the reader will understand the plot better. Olrik (pp. 457f.), however, has some pretty survivals to offer:

In 1895, Dr. Jakob Jakobsen, the well-known collector of the remnants of the ancient “Norn” language of the Western Islands, was informed by an old Shetlander, whose parents had come from the Orkneys (Ronaldsey) that near the most northerly of these islands there was an eddy called “the Swelki” (that is, Snorri’s svelgr, “sea-mill, where the waters rush in through the eye of the mill-stone”). On that spot a mill stood on the bottom of the sea and ground salt; and a legend of Grotti-Fenni and Grotti-Menni was connected with it. In the course of later investigations in the Orkneys themselves (South Ronaldsey) he learned about the sea mill in the Pentland Firth grinding salt. In 1909, Mr. A. W. Johnstone was told by a lady from Fair Isle that Grotti Finnie and Lucky Minnie were well known in her native island, being frequently invoked to frighten naughty children. Although the legend in those parts is in a fragmentary condition, reduced to incoherent survivals, the tenacity of the oral tradition shows how deeply rooted the legend is in these islands. Outside of the Orkneys neither Mysing nor his salt mill are known to tradition except in the songs of the Edda which themselves bear the stamp of Western provenience.

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  1. A. Olrik,The Heroic Legends of Denmark (1919), p. 460.

  2. Edda, trans. F. Genzmer (1922), Thule 1, p. 181.