Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes, page 2
The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions is later and known only from late manuscripts (the oldest surviving text was written no earlier than the 1630s). It was apparently very popular in the early modern period, as manuscripts are numerous, and versions from that era are found containing not only the original Old Norse text but sometimes a Latin translation of it as well. Five manuscripts of the Old Norse text, mostly written between 1650 and 1700, are considered important by modern philologists and do not differ significantly in the text they present;2 all five are probably copies from a single lost Icelandic manuscript produced shortly before 1600.
{xvii} Literary Style
Both of these sagas share some literary characteristics with other Icelandic sagas, namely the often sudden vacillation between the narration and a line of direct dialogue, with no transition, as in this excerpt from chapter 19 of The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions:
King Ađils now told Svipdag not to serve the king’s interests any less than all the berserkers had together, “Especially because the queen wants you to serve in the place of the berserkers.” So Svipdag remained there for a time.
Another example may be seen in chapter 2 of The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek:
“Each of these two men is so great and from such a good family,” he said, that he couldn’t deny his daughter to either of them, and he asked his daughter to choose which one she wanted to have.
Another characteristic of Icelandic saga literature is the web of relationships that the narrator seems to assume the audience can easily remember. Characters are often introduced with large numbers of relations, close and distant, who may suddenly appear in later chapters with little or no introduction or refresher at that point. Living in a society that prized family ties, it may be that the medieval Norse audience did not struggle to remember such networks of relations, but for the modern reader the effect is often jarring and calls for family trees and glossaries of names such as those printed in this volume.
The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions shows an especially marked predilection for hendiadys, repeating the same thing in two different ways as a means of emphasis: “burning everything and setting it to the torch” (ch. 1), “every danger and conflict” (ch. 16), “such beautiful and lovely women as they were” (ch. 24), “arrogant and proud” (ch. 25).
From the perspective of the reader of Old Norse, the vocabulary, grammar, and many idiomatic phrases of The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions will also make the impression of a late stage of the {xviii} language, well on its way toward Modern Icelandic. An example of this is in chapter 1, when Vífill says in the original, Hér er við ramman reip at draga, literally, “Here’s a strong rope to pull against,” an expression derived from the great popularity of tug-of-war games in early modern Iceland and most effectively translated as simply, “Here is a difficult task.” Noticeably late vocabulary includes the use of geta to mean “can, be able,” and the use of hvaða (rather than hverr) as the interrogative or indefinite pronominal adjective “which, what” (e.g., hvaða sveinar þeir væri, “what boys they might be,” ch. 3).
Other stylistic features of this saga probably owe something to the popularity of new and foreign models of storytelling that had begun to be absorbed by saga writers in later medieval Iceland. Earlier sagas had seldom if ever dealt in the internal monologue of their characters, and were apt to present both sides in a deadly rivalry as realistic men with conflicting interests—often with the best men from both sides of a conflict forced to kill one another for the sake of their family ties or sworn word. But influenced by the style of chivalric Europe, The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions is quite different, with competent, elaborately praised heroes arrayed against feeble, scheming villains who almost seem to twist their mustaches with glee as they carry out their evil deeds, as here in chapter 41:
It was done as he ordered, and he wanted to be sure where King Hrólf was, because he thought that he would not be able to stand the heat as well as his champions, and he thought that it would be easier to seize him if he knew where he was, because he truly wanted King Hrólf dead.
Or in chapter 48, where we see the narrator going to unnecessary, pompous lengths to aggrandize his heroes:
He [King Hrólf] was thinking more about his own grandeur and magnanimity and propriety, and about all of the courage that dwelled in his own heart. And he was eager to serve everyone who came, and his good reputation traveled far and wide, and he had every single thing that a king of this world might need to adorn his pride.
{xix} This may sound strange to a reader accustomed to the style of other Icelandic sagas, though not to that of, for example, The Saga of Amícus and Amilíus, a knight’s story probably translated into Old Norse from Low German about the same time as The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions was written down. There, too, the evil thoughts of duplicitous characters (especially women) are transparent to the narrator and the audience.
Also differing from the usually more terse style of Icelandic sagas (well exemplified in much of Hervor or Volsungs) is the large amount of meandering speeches in Hrólf, not only by the characters but by the narrator as well. These speeches mount in number as the end of the saga approaches, and by chapter 50 we have an example such as this, which King Hrólf Kraki launches into in the midst of battle:
King Hrólf said, “He must be somewhere, and I’m sure it’s somewhere that benefits us, as long as he has a say in it. Keep up your dignity and keep up your attack, and don’t slander him—not any one of you is equal to him. However, I don’t mean to scold any of you, because you are all among the most valorous of men.”
Parallels in Other Sources
Hrólf Kraki must have been an exceptionally well-known legendary hero in the medieval period, with the number of references to him elsewhere in Old Norse literature eclipsed only by references to the heroes of the Volsung family.
A short version of many of the same events as told in The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions is found in Ynglinga saga, “The Saga of the Ynglings,” the first constituent saga in Snorri Sturluson’s series of sagas about the Norwegian kings called Heimskringla. Here, King Ađils is introduced as a warlike Swedish king who takes Yrsa, daughter of Queen Álof of Saxony, back home with him after a raid. King Helgi of Denmark raids Ađils’s own kingdom in Sweden later, and in turn Helgi takes Yrsa home as his own bride. After they have had a son named Hrólf Kraki, Yrsa learns that she is her new husband Helgi’s own daughter, and returns to Ađils in Sweden. Helgi dies in battle (though not in Sweden), and eventually his son, the new king Hrólf {xx} Kraki, finds himself in Sweden, where he “sowed gold at Fýrisvellir” (though nothing more is told of that expedition, nor of its cause or resolution). Hrólf Kraki dies later at his capital Lejre, though how is not told. This abridged version is close enough in general profile, and distinct enough in some details, to suggest that Snorri knew a version of Hrólf Kraki’s story preserved in lost poems or sagas that did not entirely agree with the one in the saga preserved today.
Two versions of the story of the magical millstone Grotti, known from the Eddic poem Grottasǫngr and from Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda respectively, also include some alternative details about the early generations of Hrólf Kraki’s family. In Snorri’s brief account of the tale (which is quoted as a preface to the poem in The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes, Hackett, 2015), it is a “sea-king named Mysing” who kills Fróđi at the end of his long and peaceful reign, rather than his nephews who kill him in his burning hall.
The poem Grottasǫngr itself, however, tells a story closer to the saga; there, the giant-women who work the millstone foresee (in st. 22) that it is Hálfdan’s son who will kill Fróđi. The text of the poem in Old Norse does not name the son, though it names his mother Yrsa, and implies that the son is Hrólf Kraki, as this stanza includes the strange facts of Hrólf’s origins as narrated also in the saga: “He will be called / his mother’s son / and also her brother, / we both know that.” This appears to be (from the perspective of The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions) a conflation between Hrólf Kraki and his father Helgi, as Helgi was Hálfdan’s son in the saga, and he both fathered Yrsa and fathered his son Hrólf Kraki with her.
Further afield, in the famous Old English poem Beowulf, the Danish king Healfdene (= Old Norse Hálfdan) has three sons, Heorogār, Hrōđgār (= Hróarr3), and Halga (= Helgi); they and their dynasty are called Scyldingas (= Skjǫldungar). While in Beowulf it is the uncle {xxi} Hrōđgār/Hróar who rules when his hall is invaded by a monster, and in the Icelandic saga it is the nephew Hrōđulf/Hrólf, in both stories it is a non-Danish visitor from the north, Beowulf or Bođvar Little-bear, who (after receiving a rude welcome from some of the Danes, but not from the king) subdues the creature. And given that the name Beowulf “bee-wolf” has been interpreted as a poetic name for “bear” (bears and wolves are both predatory animals, but the “wolf” that attacks beehives is a bear), it is interesting to note that Bođvar Little-bear is the son of a bear, and turns into a bear in his final fight much later in the saga.
In considering the history of the legendary Danish dynasty of the Skjǫldungar, the Icelandic saga and Beowulf are nearly photo-negatives of one another. The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions has little to say of Hróar (Old English Hrōðgār) in his adulthood; after the tale of Helgi and Hróar’s vengeance for their father, Hróar fades quickly into the background, eventually dying as king of some part of England (not Denmark, as in Beowulf). In direct contrast, Beowulf has very little to say of his nephew Hrōđulf (Old Norse Hrólfr), the central protagonist of the Icelandic telling. In Beowulf, Hrōđulf lives with his uncle Hrōđgār in his court at Heorot in Denmark, though the poem darkly hints that perhaps their peace was spoiled later (þā gyt wæs hiera sib ætgædere, / ǣġhwylċ ōðrum trȳwe, we read in lines 1164–65 when Hrōđgār and Hrōđulf drink together: “At this time their kinship was still intact, / each true to the other”). These hints seem to be confirmed when Hrōđgār’s own queen, Wealhthēo, pleadingly toasts her nephew Hrōđulf for the kindness she trusts him to show her children when Hrōđgār dies.
Considering the distance of time and space between Beowulf and The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions—the pens that first wrote them were separated by one thousand miles of the North Atlantic and four to six centuries—the broad agreements in names, relations, and even scenes are surprisingly close. That different characters in the same family tree are emphasized, or that different strangers from across the sea vanquish the monster terrorizing the ruling family’s hall, are exactly the kind of minor divergences expected with so many intervening generations passing the story on in Iceland and England, respectively.
{xxii} The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, in book 2 of his Latin Gesta Danorum (History of the Danes) from approximately AD 1200, is another medieval source that relates the story of King Hrólf (Rolvo in his Latin text) in similar but not identical details to those of the Icelandic saga. Like the saga, Saxo tells that King Helgo (Helgi) had a daughter named Ursa (Yrsa) who was produced by rape, though as he tells it, the rape was of a virgin named Thora rather than of a queen. Subsequently, Thora instructs Ursa to sleep with Helgo in revenge, and the child of that union is Rolvo. After Rolvo has become king, his mother Ursa marries the Swedish king Athislus (Ađils). Rolvo visits them in Sweden at one point, where he boasts of his great physical endurance and is made to prove it by standing very close to a large open fire (reminding one of the tests that both Ađils and Óđin subject Hrólf and his men to in the Icelandic saga). Rolvo is awarded with many treasures by Athislus for undergoing this test.
Ursa and Rolvo then steal a great deal of treasure from Athislus and flee Sweden, with Ursa coming up with the idea to strew the ground behind them with treasure. Here, as in the Icelandic saga, Athislus himself stops to pick up a particular item, but in this source it is a heavy ornamental collar that he has previously awarded to Rolvo.
Bođvar Bjarki and Hjalti also make an appearance in Saxo’s telling, as Biarco and Hialto. Like in the Icelandic saga, some of Rolvo’s men throw bones at Hialto during a feast, but instead of his valiant protector, Biarco is simply a man accidentally hit by one of the bones intended for Hialto, and he throws it back and injures the man who threw it. A brawl then breaks out between Hialto and Biarco on the one hand and the remaining feasters on the other, during which for no apparent reason a bear appears in the midst of the fight for Biarco to kill. Biarco instructs Hialto to drink its blood in order to become stronger.
Saxo also relates his own version of another story in the saga, telling of a certain poor Wiggo who gives King Rolvo his nickname (kraki or “pole-ladder”) in a casual aside and is then rewarded for this “name-giving” with great treasure. Wiggo, as does his analogue Vogg in the saga, then pledges his fealty to Rolvo in exchange and swears to avenge his death.
{xxiii} Also as in the saga, Rolvo later has his sister Sculda (Skuld) married to one of his governors, Hiarwarthus (Hjarvarđ). Hiarwarthus leads a coup against Rolvo, at the start of which Hialto is amorously entangled with his lover. She asks him how old of a man she ought to marry if Hialto dies, a question that Hialto answers by cutting off her nose and telling her to decide for herself. Hialto then wakes Biarco and the other champions of Rolvo with a series of poetic lines in Latin (to which Biarco responds with some of his own) that likely go back to a lost Old Norse poem putatively titled Bjarkamál “words of/for (Bođvar) Bjarki.”
They lose the battle, and Rolvo and almost all of his warriors die. At the victory feast that follows, the sole survivor of Rolvo’s loyal men, Wiggo, kills Hiarwarthus in vengeance for him after pretending to consider swearing him fealty. In a curious postscript, Saxo adds in Book 3 of Gesta Danorum that Rolvo’s old enemy Athislus died of alcohol poisoning from drinking too much at a funeral feast he threw in Rolvo’s honor back in Sweden.
Saxo also knew a version of the story related in the saga’s first chapters, in which Fróđi kills his brother Hálfdan, and this is avenged by Hálfdan’s son Helgi, but in Saxo’s version Helgi is unconnected to the Helgi who is Hrólf’s father, and the story is told in chapter 7 of Gesta Danorum in a context unrelated to the Hrólf Kraki narrative (which is in chapter 2 of Gesta Danorum).
Back in Iceland, Hrólf Kraki’s sword Skofnung makes an appearance in some manuscripts of The Saga of Kormák, one of the classic sagas of the Icelandic warrior-poets known as the skálds. In this saga, Kormák is loaned the sword before a duel, and he is instructed that it has a magical snake that lives inside of it; Kormák must care for this snake in an elaborate manner in order for the sword to serve him well. However, Kormák disregards these instructions and mistreats the snake, negating the sword’s unspecified magical powers. Later (in the chronology of the saga narratives themselves), the sword appears in The Saga of the People of Laxárdal, where it is an important heirloom of the powerful Thorkel in the saga’s latest chapters. Thorkel carries Skofnung together with a magical stone, which is the only means to heal an injury given by the sword. Following Thorkel’s death at sea, the sword mysteriously “survives” him and washes up on an island later called {xxiv} “Skofnung Island.” In both of these sagas, the sword is explicitly the same as the one in Hrólf, and was at some unspecified point tekinn ór haugi Hrólfs kraka (“taken out of the burial mound of Hrólf Kraki,” according to Laxardál, ch. 78).
The events and characters of The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek have fewer parallels in other sources, but the fight on Samsø in chapter 3, between Angantýr and his brothers on the one hand, and Arrow-Odd and Hjálmar on the other, must have been a well-known and ancient tale. It is told in nearly identical language in chapter 14 of The Saga of Arrow-Odd, though with an expanded focus on Arrow-Odd’s preparations for the battle and his burial of the other participants afterward. In fact, the unanimous agreement of the combatants that the survivor(s) will bury the fallen with their weapons unplundered is a major plot point in Arrow-Odd, and though it is unmentioned in Hervor, it was a detail presumably known to its author (given that the sword Tyrfing must be left in Angantýr’s grave for his daughter Hervor to take much later). Curiously, Arrow-Odd also provides names for more of Angantýr’s brothers than Hervor.4
Another, very abbreviated, version of the story of the fight on Samsø is preserved in Saxo Grammaticus’s History of the Danes, Book 5. Here, the fight is the product of a chance meeting between the hostile parties, when both “Hialmerus” and “Arvaroddus” (a Latinized form of Ǫrvar-Oddr, “Arrow-Odd”) and their enemies, the twelve sons of “Arngrimus,” encounter each other there when the latter are raiding.5 As in the other versions, “Arvaroddus” is the only survivor, but here he defeats his enemies by beating them to death with a ship’s rudder.
Outside of the vast heroic literature preserved in Old Norse, the small remnants of Old English heroic poetry suggest that stories preserved in Hervor were known in England too; the Old English poem {xxv} Wīdsīð includes a Heaðoric (= Old Norse Heiðrekr) in a list of famous kings of Goths and Huns in the past. Other names mentioned here are Sifeca (= Old Norse Sifka), Hliðe (similar to Old Norse Hlǫðr), Incgenþeow (similar to Old Norse Angantýr), and Wyrmhere (= Old Norse Ormarr, “worm-warrior”). Given the very archaic language and certain telling peculiarities of meter6 in the poems of Hervor, especially The Battle of the Goths and the Huns, plus the subject matter of Gothic kings such as Heiđrek and Angantýr, it is also probable (but unverifiable) that parts of the action of at least the latter half of the saga go back to stories brought northward from Gothic-speaking lands at the end of the Roman Empire to their linguistic cousins in Scandinavia.
