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Otherworld Adventures in
an Icelandic Saga
by
JACQUELINE
SIMPSON
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IN
AN ICELANDIC
SAGA
The first of his adventures is a variant on an international folktale concerning fairies - or, as the Icelanders would call them,
'elves' or 'hidden people'. One day Thorstein came by chance to a
forest clearing with a hillock:
Up on the hillock he saw a crop-headed boy who was saying:
'Mother, hand me out my crook-stickand my mittens, for today I want
to go riding the magic ride. Today is a feast-day in the Lower World.'
Then a crook-endedstick, just like a fire-poker,was thrust out of the
hillock. The boy sat himself astride the stick and put the mittens on,
and spurredoff, as children often do. Thorstein went up to the hillock
and spoke in the same words as the boy, and at once a stick and some
mittens were thrown out, and a voice said: 'Who is taking these now?'
'Your son Bjalfi,'said Thorstein. Then he sat himself astridethe stick
and rode after the boy.
Following this boy (whose cropped hair is a mark of a young
troll in Icelandic tradition), Thorstein comes to a great river,
plunges into it, and so reaches a fair land beneath the waters,
where in a fortress a king and his court are feasting. Thorstein
notices that both he and the boy are invisible to these revellers,
and that the boy is going to and fro stealing food from the tables.
Thorstein himself snatches a ring and a jewelled tablecloth ;2 there
is tumult, the fine food turns to dirt, and the Underworld revellers
pursue him. In his haste he drops his stick, and is forced to fight for
his life; but the crop-headed boy retrieves the stick for him, and
together they escape back to the hillock in the clearing. It is
standing open, and inside there are women weaving and rocking a
cradle (typical occupations of fairy-folk in their own world). The
boy tells of the adventure, and the hillock then closes itself.
Thorstein goes home to Olaf's court with the treasures he has won.
This story finds a close parallel in a folk-tale that has often been
recorded in Denmark and Sweden, which can be summarized as
follows: a boy passing near a mountain hears trolls inside calling
out 'Give me my cap!' (i.e. a cap of invisibility, a regular attribute
of Danish trolls). The boy too demands a cap, and after some
argument one is thrown out to him; he can now see the trolls, but
2
This tablecloth has a gold border and 'those twelve jewels which are the best
of all' - details that are probably due to the popularity of the lapidaries, with
their comments on the jewels of Aaron's breastplate. See Joan Evans, Magical
Jewels, 1922, 72-80.
2
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Folktales,
4
1959, 134.
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gifts from the grateful dwarf. Grateful dwarves are fairly common
in romantic sagas, and also in modern Icelandic folk-tales;9
usually their gratitude is won by a gold ring given to their child,
and I know of only one other instance where the dwarf-child is
saved from peril, the threat in that case being from an ogress.10 Is
the eagle here due to the influence of some continental romance ?
Or is it again a folk-tale motif? According to Elizabeth Hartmann,
some Scandinavian versions of Type 531 ('Ferdinand the True and
Ferdinand the False') open with the hero receiving gifts from a troll
whose child he has saved from a wolf or eagle, or from drowning.12
Thorstein's dwarf gives him four gifts; the first three are merely
what one writer called 'the customary magic bric-a-brac': a shirt
of invulnerability, a ring bringing wealth, and a stone that makes
one invisible when held in the palm of the hand. Parallels to these
can easily be found in medieval literature,l3 and even more easily
in folk-tales; the dwarf's fourth gift, however, is distinctly
unusual:
He took a pebble (hallr)14 out of his pouch; there was a steel spiketo
go with it. The pebble was three-cornered;it was white in the middle,
9Egils saga einhenda ok Asmundar berserkjabana, Ch. 2I; Porsteins saga
Vikingarsonar, Chs. 22-3; Hqralds saga Hringsbana, Ch. Io; Sigurdar saga
pQgula, Ch. 6; Hektors saga, Ch. 7; J6n Arnason, op. cit., II, 3II, 413; A.
Rittershaus, Die Neuisldndische Volksmdrchen,Halle, 1902, 10, 109, 171 ff., 227.
10 Ambales
saga, Ch. 19; see I. Gollancz, Hamlet in Iceland, I898, 112-15.
11 Occasionally romances using the plot of the St Eustace legend may have a
child carried away by a griffin or eagle instead of the more usual land-beast. See
G. H. Gerould, 'Versions of the Eustachius Legend', PMLA, XIX (1904),
335-448. The eagle motif occurs in Bcerings Saga, ed. G. Cederschiold, Fornsogur Sudrlanda, Lund, 1884.
12 E.
Hartmann, op. cit., 175.
13
Magic shirts that are proof against weapons and/or give tireless strength in
swimming occur in at least nine other sagas; see the notes to Egils saga einhenda
ok Asmundar berserkjabanain A. Lagerholm, Drei LygisQgur,Uppsala, 1927, 69.
A ring that provides riches is given to the hero of the French lay Desire. In
Chretien's Ivain and the Welsh Lady of the Fountain there is a stone set in a ring
which will make the wearer invisible when he turns it so that the stone is hidden
in the clenched hand, and there is a similar stone, without the ring, in Peredur
(The Mabinogion, trans. G. Jones and T. Jones, 1949, 164, 211-12). The 'stone
of invisibility', hulinhjdlmsstein, is well known in later Icelandic folklore; it is
said to be found in a raven's nest, a feature which shows the influence of the
general medieval lore concerning magic stones (J6n Arnason, op. cit., I, 650).
14 The Cleasby-Vigfusson Icelandic
Dictionary glosses it as 'jewel' with reference
to this passage, and compares the modern Icelandic glerhallr, 'crystal'. But in all
other passages the word refers to stones of various kinds, including a quernstone and a boulder; from the context, the author seems to have visualized it as a
flat object, small enough to be carried in a pouch, but not tiny; 'pebble' therefore
is a preferable rendering.
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red on the other side, and a gold rim round it. The dwarfsaid: 'If you
prick the spike againstthe pebble where it is white, there will come so
heavy a hailstormthat nobody will dare look straightinto it. But if you
want to melt that snow away, then you must prick the part where the
pebble is gold, and then there will come such sunshine that it will all
thaw. But if you prickit where it is red, then there will come from it fire
and embersand such a showerof sparksthat nobody will be able to look
straightinto it. Also you can hit anythingyou like with the spike or the
pebble, and it will come backto your handas soon as you call it.'
The appearance of this stone, the method of rousing it to action,
and the effects it produces seem to be quite unique; there are no
references to anything comparable in the Stith-Thompson MotifIndex, and Dr Joan Evans has kindly informed me that there is
nothing similar in medieval lapidaries either. There is indeed the
stone by the fountain in Chretien de Troyes' Ivain, which rouses a
hailstorm followed by sunshine, though by a quite different
technique;15 this romance was translated in Norway in the fourteenth century, so it is conceivable that Thorstein's pebble might
be inspired by this episode. However, there are parallels in Icelandic tradition which make a native origin considerably more
likely.
Thorstein, as will be seen when we come to his third adventure,
is the hero of exploits originally ascribed to the god Th6r, so it
would not be strange if the pebble which becomes his weapon had
points in common with Th6r's famous weapon, the missile hammer
MjQllnir.16One such point is obvious at once: MjQllnir and the
pebble both have the power of returning to the thrower's hand.
Another similarity is with Th6r's hammer as it appears, not in
myths, but in later magical practices. In the nineteenth century a
charm was recorded in Iceland in which a small metal hammer
called a 'Th6r's Hammer' was used in conjunction with a spike;
the aim was to discover thieves and force them to restore the goods:
If one has a Th6r's Hammer,one can find out who has robbed one if
one has lost something. For this hammerone must have copper from a
church bell, three times stolen; the hammermust be hardenedin man's
blood on Whitsunday between the Epistle and Gospel. A spike must
15 Water is poured on it, in accordance with a well-known rain-making
technique. Striking a stone to bring rain is rare, but is known at Audeby in
see Bett, English Myths and Traditions, 47.
Lincolnshire;
16
On Mj9llnir see H. R. Ellis Davidson, 'Th6r's Hammer', Folklore, 76, I-I5.
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also be forged out of the same materialas the hammer.With this spike
one must prick the head of the hammerand say: 'I drive this into the
eye of the Father of Battles [Vigfadir,i.e. Odin], I drive it into the eye
of the Father of the Slain [Valfadir,i.e. Odin], I drive it into the eye of
Th6r of the Aesir.' Then the thief will get a painin his eyes.17
Such a hammer was seen by Dr Maurer in 1858; he described it
as roughly made of copper, about three inches long, with a short,
loose handle that could be detached and used for striking the head.
A disproportionately short handle is also, as Maurer noted, a
feature of MjQllniritself.18
Thorstein's pebble resembles this nineteenth-century hammer
in the method of its use by the three-fold stabbing with a spike; the
words pjakka 'prick, stab' and broddr 'a spike' occur in both
accounts. Of course the aim of the proceedings is different,
but a charm associated with a god of such wide powers as
Th6r could surely have very varied uses;19 in fact the effects of the
pebble - snow and hail, sunshine, and fire - all come within the
sphere of Th6r's powers. His association with hailstorms is obvious,
and his control over the sun is implied by Adam of Bremen: 'They
say he rules the air which controls the thunder and lightning, the
winds and showers, the fair weather and the fruits of the earth'.20
As for the showers of sparks, Th6r is lord of the lightning, and
hammers strike sparks from a smith's anvil; it has indeed been
suggested that a ceremonial striking of fire formed part of his cult.21
17 Jon Arnason,
op. cit., I, 445; he also describes an alternative method
whereby one draws a face on one side of a sheet of paper, and on the other a
swastika-like sign also called a 'Thor's Hammer', and then sets the spike on the
eye of the face and drives it in with the hammer. W. A. Craigie, summarizing
Jon Arnason's information (Scandinavian Folklore, 16-17, 420), adds a note that
'the practice is also known in Sweden and Denmark, according to A. A. Afzelius,
Swenzka Folkets Sago-hdfder, Stockholm, 1839-40, I, 20; J. M. Thiele, Danmarks Folkesagn, 1843, III, 360'.
18
K. Maurer, Isldndische Volkssagen, i860, IoI.
19There
is, for instance, the Lincolnshire charm against ague reported at the
end of the last century by the Rev. R. M. Heanly, Folklore, 9 (1898), i86;
Saga-Book
A Book of
English Folk Lore, 77. He speaks of a horseshoe being nailed to the bedstead with
three hammer-blows, accompanied by a rhyme to say that the blows are 'One for
God and one for Wod and one for Lok'. Dr Ellis Davidson has recently expressed
scepticism about the reliability of this account ('Folklore and Man's Past',
Folklore, 74 (1963), 534-6); but the similarity with the triple blows and triple
invocation of deities in the Icelandic thief-catching charm greatly strengthens
one's confidence in the Rev. R. M. Heanly's report.
20 Adam of Bremen,
History of the Bishops of Hamburg, IV, 26.
21 H. R. Ellis Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern
Europe, 1964, 78-9.
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way into the home of the giant GeirrQth, where Th6r broke the
backs of the giant's daughters. Then GeirrQth hurled an iron bar
at Thor, who caught it, rammed it against the giant's belly, and
then crushed him with his hammer.
Over two hundred years later, Snorri Sturluson gave a very
similar account in his Prose Edda (c. i220),26 using Eilif's poem as
his main source. But in some details he differs from it; for instance,
he says Th6r did not have his hammer with him, and that his companion was Loki; also he gives a slightly different account of the
climax. According to him, GeirrQth challenged Th6r to a game,
and 'seized a mass of glowing iron with his tongs and threw it at
Thor, but Th6r caught it with his iron gloves and raised it in the
air; but GeirrQthran behind a pillar to protect himself. Th6r threw
the glowing iron and hurled it through the pillar, and through
GeirrQth,and through the wall of the house, and so into the ground
outside.'
At almost the same period as Snorri (c. I2I5 or a little later), the
Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus wrote a version27in which the
theme has undergone striking changes and elaborations. The hero
is now a human being, an Icelander named Thurkillus, who guides
a band of Danes to the realm of Geruthus, a region of eternal
darkness and icy deserts beyond the uttermost ocean. The aim of
the expedition is to acquire treasures. There is a sea-voyage beset
with perils and marvels, which resembles the Irish imrammamore
closely than anything in older Scandinavian traditions.
An important new character enters the story, a figure whom
Saxo calls Gudmundus and who appears in several late sagas as
Guthmund of Glasisvellir or Glesisvellir. According to Saxo,
Gudmundus is a giant and brother of Geruthus, yet he helps
Thurkillus in his quest. He is lord of a strange land with rich
fruit-orchards, has twelve noble sons and twelve fair daughters,
and is pressing in offers of hospitality; yet Thurkillus warns his
companions not to eat the food he offers, nor touch his servants nor
his goblets, nor accept the love of his daughters - those who do
will 'lose recollection of everything' and dwell in his land for ever.
Saxo, intent on moralizing, paints this fate in grisly colours; all the
26
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theme.33 Yet this is not the only occasion when the motif appears in
Scandinavia.34In this case, as in that of the supernatural mist, it is
not certain whether the author of porsteins saga would have thought
of himself as borrowing foreign material, for whether or not it was
originally Celtic it may well have been fully naturalized by the
time he came to use it.
So Thorstein and Guthmund (and the twenty-four giants who
are the latter's followers) set out for GeirrQth's realm. To reach it
they must cross a perilous icy river, as Th6r and Thjalfi did in
Eilif's poem; but instead of wading, they cross on horseback,
protected by magic clothing that keeps them dry. Thorstein alone
gets one toe wet, and has to cut it off because it is frostbitten - a
detail which the author has adopted from another old myth, that of
Th6r and Aurvandil,35 bringing it up to date with touches of the
more romantic magic popular in his own period.
Once the river has been crossed, Thorstein makes himself
invisible, presumably by using the little black stone which was one
of the dwarf's gifts, and so watches the reception Guthmund gets
at Geirr9th's court. The general situation here is much like Th6r's
visit to the giant-magician Titgartha-Loki;36 there is the same
barely-hidden hostility, the same mixture of feasting, quarrelling
and tests of strength. Some of the tests are identical: competitive
drinking, and wrestling. There is also bone-throwing; also an
unusual form of ball-game, when the giant-king GeirrQthsends for
his 'gold ball', and this turns out to be:
33
K. H. Jackson, The International Popular Tale and Early Welsh Tradition,
I96I, 127; J. Baudis, 'Mabinogion', Folklore, 27 (I9I6), 35; K. Liestol, Norske
Trollevisor och Norr6ne sogur, 1915, 70 ff.; E. Hartmann, op. cit., 98, 152-3.
34
The hero of borsteins pdttr uxafdts is led into a burial-mound by the leader
of one party of dead men so that he should join in an everlasting fight against a
second party, and so bring it to an end. In the Norwegian folk-tale of Vogel Dam
(Type 301), one troll asks the hero to kill another, so that the first troll may
become king of the trolls (P. Chr. Asbjornsen and J. Moe, Norske Folkeeventyr
no. 3; transl. R. Th. Christiansen, Folktales of Norway, 1964, 243-52). There is a
similar episode in the Danish folk-tale of Svend Felling (E. T. Kristensen, Danske
Sagen, 1872-9I, I no. 968; transl. T. Keightly, Fairy Mythology, 1889, 128-9).
35 Snorri
Sturluson, Prose Edda (Skdldskaparmdl XVII), ed. cit., 87-8. Amputation of a frozen toe was also connected with Th6r in one episode of the lost
JQkuldcelasaga, which told how a certain Hakon used to walk barefoot to Thor's
temple, every day when weather permitted. This he did one day when he was
due to fight a duel, despite frost on the ground; his little toe froze, and for fear
it should make him clumsy, he cut it off. He won his duel. (A. van Hamel,
'(O6inn Hanging on the Tree', Acta Philologica Scandinavica, VII (1932), 281.) I
am grateful to Mrs. Audrey Meaney for this reference.
36 Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda
(Gylfaginning XLV-XLVII), ed. cit., 45-54.
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A seal's head that weighed one hundred pounds; it was glowing hot,
so that sparks flew from it as from the hearth of a forge, and the fat
dripped from it like glowing pitch. The king said: 'Now take this ball
and throw it to one another. Whoever falls shall go into outlawryand
lose all his possessions, and whoever dares not handle it shall be called
shamefuland base.'
The game causes some casualties among the evil giants, and
continues till someone accidentally sends the ball flying out of the
window and into the moat, where a blazing fire leaps up.
Already in Snorri, the sports in GeirrQth'shall had been part of
the story, for there the flinging of the red-hot iron is called a
'sport'; Saxo has the theme too, for he mentions in passing some
'hideous doorkeepers' who 'played a gruesome game, tossing a
goat's hide from one to the other'. (This is simply skinnleikr, a
game popular in medieval Iceland and played with a rolled-up
hide.) But why is the ball now a seal's head? I think it possible that
this may reflect some game actually played in real life in Iceland;
Mr Alan Smith has recently studied evidence for semi-ritual
games with animal heads in England,37and something similar may
have existed in Iceland. Why the seal's head is aflame I am not
sure; it could be a reminiscence of the glowing iron in the older
versions, it could be inspired by real-life games with burning
objects,38or it could be due to the widespread tendency to include
some ordeal by fire among the perils of the Otherworld.
And why does GeirrQth call this head his 'gold ball', when it is
neither gold nor, in view of its huge size, a normal ball? Two
medieval poems are of interest here, as having a similar sardonic
jest in closely analogous circumstances. The first is the twelfthcentury French Pelerinage de Charlemagne,that tells of a visit to
Constantinople, in which many authorities see a rationalized
version of a visit to the Otherworld.39 In the course of this visit,
William of Orange hurls a vast stone at the palace wall, battering it
to the ground; this huge stone is jestingly called a pelotte, which is
37A. W. Smith, 'The Luck in the Head: A Problem in English
Folklore',
Folklore, 73 (1962), 13-24; 'The Luck in the Head: Some Further Observations',
Folklore, 74 (I963), 396-8.
38 M. Williams ('Apropos of an episode in Perlesvaus',
Folklore, 68 (I937), 266)
tells of a game played in Cardigan on i November in which a large ball of tarred
sacking was set on fire and kicked through the streets till it disintegrated; it was
referred to as 'the head'.
8 Ed. E.
Koschwitz, 1923, vss. 507-14, 744-52.
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235-40.
'The Strong Tsar and the Beautiful Jelena'; even here the Helper, Nikita
Koltoma, is only invisible at the end of the contests, not throughout.
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II1-17.
46 It was
briefly noted by Margaret Schlauch, Romance in Iceland (1934), 31,
but her remark seems to have passed unnoticed by other scholars.
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their company can only drink as much as will clear this band, but the
king drinksit dry in one draught.Every man has to give Grim treasure.'
In due course this horn is ceremonially carried into the banqueting hall; the giants all worship it, offer it gold, and drink from it.
On Thorstein's advice, Guthmund gives it his own crown and
vows to honour it even more zealously than GeirrQth does; but
he only pretends to drink, for he fears that the liquor may be
poisonous. Nevertheless the speaking head is apparently won
over by his gift, for it does not betray the secret of Thorstein's
presence.
Several ideas are blended in this strange scene. There is the test
of drinking from the inexhaustible horn, as in the well-known story
of Th6r's visit to iJtgartha-Loki. Then there is the idea that drink
proffered by Otherworld beings may be not merely magical but
literally poisonous; this occurs fairly often in sagas,47and becomes
very common in modern Scandinavian versions of the folk-tale of
'The Drinking-Vessel Stolen from Fairies'.48 But the oddest and
most mysterious feature is the oracular head that grows from the
end of this horn. Oracular heads on their own are of course to be
found in many sources in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, the
more archaic ones being actual human heads, either mummified
or freshly severed, and later ones being of metal, usually brass;49
47 Helga pdttr IPdrissonartells of two
men, both called Grim, who were sent by
Guthmund of Glaesisvellir to give two horns, also both called Grim, to King
la6fTryggvason, and it says that the liquor in these horns would have poisoned
him had he not made the Sign of the Cross before drinking; this tale is evidently
related to that of Grim the Good. There are also tales of a she-troll trying to
poison Olaf with drink from a horn (Flateyarbdk, ed. cit., I, 398-9), and of a
demon in the guise of a woman trying to 'beguile' him by the same means (Oddr
Snorrason, ladfs saga Tryggvasonar, Ch. 47). Such stories may be Christian
distortions of an old heathen association between kingship and the acceptance of
a drink offered by an Otherworld being, such as can be clearly seen in Irish tales
(e.g. those of Niall of the Nine Hostages, of Conn and Lug and the 'Sovereignty
of Ireland'); when Geirroth hands the horn to Guthmund he says it will seal the
agreement whereby the latter is to hold the kingship of Glaesisvellir as the
former's vassal.
48 E. Hartmann, op. cit., i8; W. A.
Craigie, op. cit., 13I-3, 429-30; E. S.
Hartland, The Science of Fairy Tales, 137-60.
49 A. Dickson, Valentine and Orson: A
Study, 1929, 20z0-6; A. Ross, 'The
Human Head in Insular Pagan Celtic Religion', Proceedings of the Society of
Antiquaries of Scotland, XCI (1960), 10-43. Icelandic speaking heads are comparatively rare: that of Mimir mentioned in two Eddic poems and by Snorri;
that in Eyrbyggja saga, Ch. 43; and that which a later sorcerer named Thorleif
Galdra-Leif is said to have revived by magic and kept hidden in a chest or a
crevice among rocks (J6n Arnason, op. cit., I, 523).
B
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taunting an old giant who had done badly in the wrestling, and
this giant had to take three draughts before he could drain the
horn.)
I believe that this series of similarities goes beyond coincidence,
and that the author of porsteins saga (or some predecessor of his)
knew stories about Bran's horn and severed head as talismans of
plenty and protection, and modelled his Grim the Good upon
them. Many masterpieces of French romance - the lays of Marie
de France, the works of Chretien, and so on - were translated
and imitated in the North in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, and it is intrinsically probable that other French lays
and tales, now lost, also reached the North at the same period. The
more such tales had kept their pagan, Celtic, non-Arthurian
features, the more readily they could have blended with native
Scandinavian material. If the cycle of stories about Bran was
indeed as popular and influential as Professor Loomis maintains,
its reappearance in Norse disguise is only one more example of the
influence of Continental literature on the sagas; nor would this be
the only case where an Icelandic text can cast light on a problem
in the field of romance.
We have once more wandered far from the actual adventures of
Thorstein, which are now drawing to their climax. After the great
horn has been removed from the hall, Thorstein decides to reveal
himself, and enters, visible. The giants are amazed to see so small
a creature, and take him simply as a figure of fun; Guthmund
declares that this is his page, who 'knows many little tricks'.
Geirrgth asks to see some, and so with the dwarf's three-cornered
pebble and spike Thorstein produces in turn a storm of hail and
snow, then hot sunshine, then a shower of sparks. The evil giants
are blinded and thrown into confusion, and Thorstein closes the
performance by flinging the pebble and spike at GeirrQth, 'and the
pebble went in one of his eyes and the spike in the other, and he
crashed down dead on the floor.'53
So Guthmund of Glasisvellir became king of all Giant Land,
and rewarded Thorstein with the gift of three magic objects: a
53 In all other versions Geirroth dies
from a blow that pierces his body, not his
eyes; the change of method must be due to some version of the widespread
Polyphemus story (Type 1137), and is particularly reminiscent of the killing of
Balor of the Evil Eye.
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20