Feelings for Orm

‘Now that the living outnumber the dead,' is an evocative line from Laurie Anderson’s song, Speak my Language.  But the question is not always an issue of the quality of this lived moment set against the background quantity of the dead, or even of the monstrous proliferating of the living as a thing in itself. The question of the dead sometimes concerns the low quality of remembrance which is illuminated within the blessed quality of forgetting – the memory of one unexpectedly retrieved from the process of decomposition that is the forgetting within forgetting. 

Poor Orm, his fate is to be remembered as a supporting character. Over three or so pages, he is introduced, flares to life briefly as a recognisable 'character' caught up in an awkward situation, and then dies miserably. Better perhaps, that he were not remembered at all. Better perhaps that he had remained nameless, than be condemned for a thousand years to the status of narrative function. 

Most of us die nameless and are buried by others of the same order whilst a few achieve some measure of trans-historical greatness. But there is a further category of the dead, those named but unknown figures who are stuck somewhere between the poles of forgetting and remembrance. They are remembered because they play a part in the life of a greater figure, they continue to exist as a named object, and belong in a similar order of topographic significance to those places the Icelanders casually called, for want of any other names, Straumsey, Hop, Bjarney, Kjalarnes, Furdustrandir. 

Orm was married to Halldis, he was a good farmer, he lived in Arnastapi, they fostered the girl Gudrid, the daughter of Thorbjorn of Laugarbrekka. He was friends with Einar, a handsome and capable man, with a liking for fine dress, who was the son of Thorgeir, a freed slave. Einar asked Orm to put his proposal of marriage to Thorbjorn. Orm, knowing this was a delicate matter, given Einar was the descendent of a slave, was not enthusiastic, even though Einar was his friend. At last he agreed, and at an autumn feast hosted by Thorbjorn, Orm advanced Einar's cause. 

Thorbjorn was contemptuous, and even more so when Orm raised the matter of  Thorgeir’s wealth, ‘I never expected to hear such words from you...’  and he ended the fostering relationship between Orm and Gudrid, on the grounds that Orm did not value her highly enough. 

Sometime later, Thorbjorn sold his lands and bought a ship. Orm of Arnastapi and his wife were amongst the 30 unnamed others who accompanied him on his journey, all because they did not wish to part from him. The favourable wind that greeted them at the outset of their voyage dropped and they made little progress during the summer, then illness plagued them. Then Orm and his wife amongst 15 of the company died. The snows have fallen and melted, and the tides have turned and turned again for more than a thousand years since Orm played go-between in a proposal of marriage that was never to be.