Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes, page 3
There is also a possibility that two names in The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek are connected to two historical Gothic tribes’ names: the name of the sword Tyrfing to the people known as the Tervingi and the name of the Grýting tribe to the people known as the Greutungi. While the means by which these names survived and became applied as they are in the saga cannot be known with certainty, their presence suggests further links with a very deep past for parts of this saga, potentially reaching back into a fundamentally real (though heavily distorted) history of the warfare of Gothic and Hunnish tribes in the waning days of the Roman Empire.
Men and Women in the Sagas
The relationships between men and women, and the roles taken by men and women, in the two sagas in this volume are at once both demonstrative of the norms of medieval Norse society and of striking deviations from those norms.
While it is misleading to describe medieval Norse society as feminist, it is striking that the saga with more foreign, chivalric influence is also the one with a more contemptuous view of women. In The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions, the sexes are at war, with men {xxvi} decidedly getting the upper hand in imposing their will, and women reduced to subterfuge and magic (for both of which they are condemned) in order to have any chance of imposing theirs. The overall tone of their meetings is reminiscent of those stanzas of Hávamál in which the god Óđin observes that “Faithlessness is planted at their [women’s] core” (st. 84) but equally that “I know both men and women: / men lie to women” (st. 91).
In chapter 7 of The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions, we are introduced to Queen Ólof of Saxony, who “led her life in the way of war-kings” (hon var á þá leið sem herkonungar). The narrator in this chapter seems to vacillate rapidly between disapproving of her unconventional lifestyle (“she was beautiful in appearance, but grim and arrogant in behavior”) and regarding her as an unusually desirable woman (“It was said by men that, of all women anyone had heard tell of during that time in the Northlands, she would be the best choice in marriage, but she wanted to marry no man.”). By chapter 13, the news that she has married her daughter Yrsa to Yrsa’s own father, King Helgi, results in Yrsa’s remark that Ólof is “the worst and the cruelest of all mothers,” without a moment’s mention of Helgi’s own violent rape of Ólof, which Ólof had sought to avenge by arranging this marriage.
Helgi’s later relationships with women are no less marked by force. When, in chapter 15, he is visited by an elf-woman whose looks he likes, he tells her she has no choice in whether or not she will sleep with him. The woman submits (“It is yours to decide, lord”) but leaves the next day with instructions as to how Helgi is to meet the child conceived in this meeting two years later. The encounter ends only with a note that Helgi is more cheerful than he had been previously.
When Hjalti, nicknamed “the Righteous” (inn hugprúði) bites off a woman’s nose for her answer to a poorly worded question in chapter 49, the modern reader recoils in horror. But the narrator quickly moves on from the scene, and does not cease to call Hjalti by his “Righteous” nickname. In fact, this is fairly consistent with the contemptuous portrayal of women who are even suspected of infidelity in knightly literature in medieval Europe. In Mǫttuls saga, for example, an Icelandic version of a tale widespread in European chivalric literature, a cloak made by an “elf-woman” (álfkona) is brought in what the {xxvii} saga calls “a strange and entertaining incident” (kynligum ok gamansamligum atburð) to King Arthur’s court. The mantle publicly demonstrates the infidelity of each woman who tries it on by becoming either too short or too long for her to wear (though it looks perfectly sized before it is tried on). The final woman who tries it on is the only one who has been faithful, and she cheerfully acknowledges as legitimate the rage that the men direct at all the other women.
Meanwhile, the depiction of women in The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek is almost the opposite of what is seen in The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions. Two of the most famous examples of warrior-women in Old Norse literature are the two women named Hervor, a grandmother and granddaughter, in this saga. While the warrior-woman (or in Old Norse, skjaldmær, “shieldmaiden”) is a stock figure in Norse sagas, typically she is either a two-dimensional figure (such as Ólof in The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions) or a woman who takes up arms on only one occasion (such as Guđrún in The Saga of the Volsungs, who fights alongside her brothers in their last stand). The two Hervors are truly unique in Old Norse literature for the way combat defines their lives and characters. While the Valkyries of Norse mythology share their desire to be present in battles, and many supernatural “giant” (jǫtunn) women, such as Skađi, freely defy gender norms and wear men’s weapons and armor, the Hervors are mortal human women whose routine warlike behavior is not condemned by the narrator, but instead seems to make them unusually desirable and praiseworthy.
Even the men in the saga—excepting Bjarmar, the maternal grandfather of the first Hervor, early on—seem to approve of the women’s martial lifestyles. Hofund, in chapter 5, actually seems particularly attracted to Hervor after learning this part of her story. Although it is not likely that such literary characters represent a common lifestyle for real women during the Viking Age, there is some debatable archaeological evidence for women fighters in the form of the graves of women buried with weapons of war (such as the famous Bj.581 grave from Birka in Sweden).7 More directly, the Hervors show us that the early {xxviii} Norse did not find it inconceivable or ridiculous that a woman might aspire to live outside of a narrowly defined range of roles, an open-mindedness that seems suppressed in the later, chivalric Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions.
Poems of the Sagas
While both of these sagas preserve poetry, it is striking that The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions preserves so little, given that the characters and scenes memorialized in this saga are referenced in some very old poems preserved outside the saga. For example, poems by Eyvind skáldaspillir (“Eyvind the Plagiarist,” died ca. AD 990) and Thjóđólf Arnórsson (died 1066) mention events from the fight at Fýrisvellir (ch. 45).
One of the poems in The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek, called Hervararkviða (“Hervor’s Poem”) in Old Norse and usually The Waking of Angantýr in English translation, was the first Eddic poem ever translated into English, by clergyman and early linguistic scholar George Hickes in 1705. Before the explosion of interest in all things Viking in the twentieth century, this poem (in a variety of different translations) was one of the few examples of genuine Old Norse literature well-known to the reading public in the English language.
The poem quoted in pieces across chapters 11–14, often called Hlǫðskviða (“Hlođ’s Poem”) or The Battle of the Goths and Huns when printed outside the context of the saga, is among the oldest known poems in Old Norse, potentially older than even the very archaic Atlakviða and Hamðismál in the Poetic Edda.
Both of these long poems are in the meter called fornyrðislag “old sayings meter,” the meter also used in most of the narrative poems of the Poetic Edda (see Seiichi Suzuki’s work, in the Further Reading section, for an in-depth review of the characteristics of this and other Old Norse meters). Note that the meters of Eddic poetry in Old Norse {xxix} rarely require a fixed number of syllables or a fixed rhythmic pattern (in contrast with well-known meters in traditional English poetry, such as iambic pentameter or tetrameter). Instead, each line will have a certain number of stressed syllables that are counted as “lifts,” with the number determined by the specific meter, and a certain pattern of alliteration among the lifts.
A lift must be a syllable with primary or secondary stress. Unlike the less predictable situation in English, all words in Old Norse have their primary stress on the first syllable, and only the first syllable of a word may take part in alliteration.
A typical fornyrðislag stanza consists of eight lines, with each odd line joined to the following even line by alliteration. Each line will have two lifts (less often one) and one to four other syllables (rarely zero or up to six); at least one of the lifts in the odd line alliterates with at least one of the lifts in the following even line. There is no coordination between the alliteration in one couplet and the next. An example is the famous last stanza of Hloðskviða, uttered by Angantýr, printed here in the original Old Norse with a slash above each lift and with the first letter of each alliterating lift underlined (note that any vowel alliterates with any other vowel):
/ /
Bǫlvat er okkr, bróðir,
/ /
bani em ek þinn orðinn.
/ /
Þat mun enn uppi,
/ /
illr er dómr norna.
As seen in this example, very often the first syllable of the even line is an alliterating lift, and typically the second lift in the even line does not participate in alliteration.
While Old Norse meters can be successfully imitated in original English compositions, Old Norse is a much more “compact” medium of expression than English overall, requiring fewer words to express {xxx} the same thought, because the language uses a rich system of inflectional endings and vowel mutations to indicate the relationships of words to one another. Old Norse also has no indefinite article (English a, an), and the archaic language of these old poems makes little use even of the definite article (English the), so these words require extra space in the line in English. Because I favor communicating the meaning of an Old Norse stanza over compromising its meaning to preserve its form, I have therefore made it my practice to translate Old Norse poems into rhythmic free verse in English.
The riddles in The Saga of Hervor and Heidrek are often collectively referred to as a poem under the title The Riddles of Gestumblindi. Some of these stanzas are also in the fornyrðislag meter, while some are in the related ljóðaháttr meter (see the Introduction to The Wanderer’s Hávamál, Hackett, 2019, for a discussion of this meter). It has often been said that these are the only riddles preserved in Old Norse, but in fact the manuscript AM 625 4to (Iceland, 1300s) has some similar riddles about birds on its p. 77r (beginning Bóndi nǫkkurr sendi húskarl sinn . . .).
Note on Language and Spelling
The sagas translated in this volume were composed in Old Norse, the written vernacular language of medieval Iceland and Norway. This language, sometimes called Old West Norse, is the direct ancestor of today’s Icelandic, Norwegian, and Faroese languages and is very closely related to Old East Norse, the ancestor of Danish and Swedish. Old Norse is also a “first cousin” to other old Germanic languages, such as Gothic, Old English, and Old High German, and thus distantly related (as an “aunt” or “uncle”) to modern Germanic languages such as English, German, and Dutch. Old Norse was written using the Roman alphabet (the alphabet used for English and most other Western European languages today) beginning in approximately AD 1150, with the addition of some new letters for sounds that the Roman alphabet was not designed to accommodate.
In the English translations in this volume, I have rendered Old Norse names in a less anglicized form than in my translation of the {xxxi} Poetic Edda,8 consistent with the anglicization used in my two later volumes of translations, The Saga of the Volsungs and The Wanderer’s Hávamál. The names of humans and gods are written essentially as they are in standard Old Norse, with the following modifications and considerations:
1. The letter þ (called “thorn”), capital form Þ, is rendered as th (thus Þórr becomes Thór, and Þórir becomes Thórir). The letter þ represents the sound of th in English worth or breath or cloth or thin (not worthy or breathe or clothe or then).
2. The letter ð (called “eth”), capital form Ð, which in origin is a rounded medieval letter d with a crossbar, is rendered as a straight-backed, modern d with a crossbar, đ (thus Hervarđ, Heiđrek, Óđin, Bođvar). This letter represents the sound of th in English worthy or breathe or clothe or then (not worth or breath or cloth or thin).
3. The letter ǫ (called “o caudata”) is rendered as o (thus Hervǫr is rendered as Hervor). In Old Norse, the letter ǫ represented the sound of o in English or. This vowel has become ö in Modern Icelandic and usually o in Modern Norwegian.
4. In accordance with the usual convention of modern translators, the -r that ends many names in the subject (nominative) case is removed. However, the -r at the end of a name is left intact when it is part of the name’s root and not simply a grammatical ending; the most important name of this kind is Baldr. By convention, the final -r is also left intact in names that end in -ir, thus Thórir.
I have followed the same guidelines in rendering Old Norse place-names, but I have substituted Modern Scandinavian or English-language place-names when these are available, in order to facilitate comparison with good modern maps (thus Denmark, Lejre, Sweden, rather than Old Norse–derived Danmork, Hleiđargarđ, Svíthjóđ). In dealing with some well-known names for which an English rendering {xxxii} of the Old Norse word is already widespread and popular, I have used that instead of directly transliterating the Old Norse word according to the guidelines above: thus, I write Valhalla and Valkyrie instead of the more authentic or consistent Valholl and Valkyrja.
Pronunciation
The pronunciation of Old Norse in the mid-1200s AD (the early period of saga-writing in Iceland) can be reconstructed with great confidence using the tools of historical linguistics, and this reconstructed medieval pronunciation is easier to learn and more historically authentic than the Modern Icelandic pronunciation favored by many today.
In reading Old Norse aloud, keep in mind that the accent is always on the first syllable of a word, thus ING-i-bjorg, not ing-i-BJORG, and so on. The Old Norse pronunciation of most consonants is similar enough to the Modern English pronunciation to require no comment. In addition to the pronunciation of the letters unique to Old Norse (see above), the most important facts to note are these:
f is pronounced as v, unless at the beginning of a word; thus, the name Hrólf is pronounced close to what might be written in English as HROALVE.
g is pronounced as in go, never with the sound of j as in gin; thus, the second syllable of Helgi begins with the g of geese, not the g of geode.
j is pronounced as the English y in young, or the German j in ja; thus, Jǫtunheimr is pronounced YAWT-une-hame-r. The sequence hj is pronounced hy, as the h in English Houston or hue.
r is a trill, as in Scottish English or Spanish. In many words, final -r after another consonant constitutes its own separate syllable, not unlike the way that the final syllable in American English water or bitter is really only a syllabic r pronounced without a “true” vowel before it.
s is pronounced as in bass, never with the sound of z as in has; thus, Áslaug is pronounced OSS-loug, not OZ-loug.
Vowels without the acute length mark (´) are pronounced as in Spanish, so a is the o of American English got, e is the e of pet, i is the ee of feet, o is approximately the oa in boat, and u is the oo of boot.
{xxxiii} The vowel y is similar to u, but farther forward in the mouth, like the German ü or the vowel in a “surfer” pronunciation of dude or tune. The letter y is not used as a consonant in Old Norse (see j, above). The vowel æ is pronounced as the a in cash, and the vowel ø has a pronunciation somewhat like the i in bird (more authentically, the German or Swedish ö or the Norwegian or Danish ø). A vowel with the acute length mark (´) is pronounced with the same sound as the equivalent unmarked vowel, but the syllable lasts a few fractions of a second longer (compare the words hat and had in English, where the vowel is longer in the second word than in the first). The exception is long á, which is pronounced with more rounding of the lips than the short vowel, similar to the o in many older American pronunciations of on, or to the o in a northern New Jersey pronunciation of coffee. The short version of the same “coffee” vowel is written ǫ in classical Old Norse.
The diphthong au is pronounced like the ou of house, while ei is the ai of rain. The diphthong ey is somewhat similar to the oy in boy, if pronounced with pursed lips (a more authentic parallel would be the Norwegian øy).
A Note on This Volume’s Translations
The translations in this volume were prepared from the standard Old Norse texts edited by Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson in Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, vols. 1 and 2 (Bókaútgáfan forni, 1943–44). I have generally followed the chapter divisions and divisions into “parts” and “tales” printed in that volume as well, while occasionally dividing chapters a sentence earlier or later. Decisions about punctuation (including quotation marks), capitalization, and the divisions of the Old Norse text into sentences and paragraphs are my own, and reflect natural breaks in the narrative as perceived by a reader accustomed to contemporary prose. The Old Norse text vacillates between the present and past tense in narration, but I have regularized all narration into the past tense, and I have freely translated the conjunctions between clauses and sentences to ensure an unmonotonous rhythm and style in English.
{xxxiv} Further Reading
Crawford, Jackson (translator). The Saga of the Volsungs, with The Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok. Hackett, 2017.
The two sagas in this volume are more widely known examples of the genre of mythical-heroic sagas to which both Hrólf and Hervor belong.
Crawford, Jackson (translator). The Wanderer’s Hávamál. Hackett, 2019.
