Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes, page 4
Original Old Norse text and English translation of the Eddic poem Hávamál, in which the Norse god Óđin offers his practical advice for wise living. A critical monument of the early Norse culture that is reflected in Hervor and to a lesser extent in Hrólf.
Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (translators). Seven Viking Romances. Penguin, 2005.
The “romances” of the title are not love stories but adventures. This volume contains The Saga of Arrow-Odd, a long, amusing, episodic tale that includes its own very similar version of the battle on Samsø that takes place in The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek.
Klaeber, Frederick, Robert E. Bjork, R. D. Fulk, and John D. Niles (editors). Klaeber’s Beowulf, Fourth Edition. University of Toronto, 2008.
The standard scholarly edition of Beowulf in Old English. Includes a vast and authoritative introduction with detailed notes on parallels with other works, such as The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions.
Kunz, Keneva (translator). The Saga of the People of Laxardal and Bolli Bollason’s Tale. Penguin, 2008.
One of the most celebrated of the “Sagas of Icelanders,” more realistic sagas focused on early Icelandic settlers. King Hrólf Kraki’s sword Skofnung makes an unexpected appearance here.
{xxxv} Ringler, Dick (translator). Beowulf: A New Translation for Oral Delivery. Hackett, 2007.
A remarkably well-done translation of the Old English Beowulf, which focuses on different members of the Skjoldung (or Scylding) royal family in early Denmark, while clearly deriving from many of the same narrative traditions that produced The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions in Iceland. In particular, Beowulf’s arrival in Denmark and his fight with Grendel have marked similarities to Bođvar’s arrival in Denmark and his fight against the monster at Hrólf’s hall.
Sagas of Warrior-Poets. Various translators. Penguin, 2002.
Contains Kormák’s Saga, another of the Sagas of Icelanders in which Hrólf Kraki’s sword Skofnung reappears generations after his death.
Saxo Grammaticus (author), Karsten Friis-Jensen (editor), and Peter Fisher (translator). Gesta Danorum (The History of the Danes), Volume I. Clarendon Press, 2015.
A work of medieval scholarship by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, who died in approximately AD 1220. Several stories in Books 2, 5, and 7 offer close analogues to the two sagas in this volume and are clearly derived from related traditions of the mythical heroes circulating in Scandinavia in Saxo’s time.
Suzuki, Seiichi. The Meters of Old Norse Eddic Poetry. De Gruyter, 2014.
A work of profound scholarship, with a revolutionarily detailed and clear analysis of the workings of Eddic poetry (including the original poems that appear in the sagas translated in this volume).
1. The profound resemblance of the earliest form of the runic alphabet, the Elder Futhark, to certain provincial variants of the Greek alphabet, might also point to contact with Greeks (or an intermediary culture with close Greek contacts) at an earlier date than otherwise documented. See Richard L. Morris’s study, Runic and Mediterranean Epigraphy (Odense University Press, 1988).
2. These five are the manuscripts catalogued as AM 285 4to; AM 109a 8vo; Sth. Papp. 4to nr. 17; AM 9 fol.; and the oldest, AM 11 fol. Desmond Slay produced an exhaustive study of the numerous manuscripts of this saga in The Manuscripts of Hrólfs saga kraka (Munksgaard, 1960).
3. When a Norse name occurs in narrative, or when I am discussing a character, I write the name using the anglicization rules explained in “A Note on Language and Spelling,” below. The most visible change in so doing is the removal of the -r at the end of most men’s names and some women’s names, so that I usually write Hrólf (not Hrólfr), Hróar (not Hróarr), Hlođ (not Hlǫðr). But when I discuss these names as names per se, I use the conventional Old Norse spellings (Hrólfr, Hróarr, Hlǫðr). Where these Old Norse spellings differ from the more anglicized spelling used in the narrative, they are given in parentheses after the applicable name in the Glossary.
4. The names of the twelve brothers given there are Hervarđ, Hjorvarđ, Hrani, Angantýr, Bíld, Búi, Barri, Tóki, Tind, Tyrfing, and two named Hadding. Twin brothers named Hadding or something similar are known elsewhere in Norse literature, including another pair who are allies of Hjálmar and Arrow-Odd in the same The Saga of Arrow-Odd. It is also intriguing to see Angantýr’s sword’s name Tyrfing given here to a brother of his. The Hauksbók text of Hervor gives similar names.
5. Saxo gives the names of the twelve brothers here as Brander, Biarbi, Brodder, Hiarrandi, Tander, Tirvingar, duo Haddingi (“two Hadding’s”), Hiorwarth, Hiarwarth, Rani, Angantir, thus closely approaching the list given in Arrow-Odd.
6. The observable unevenness in line length within the poem can be attributed to the loss of unaccented syllables from some words, which occurred as the poem was passed down with its original wording even as the language was undergoing significant changes in subsequent centuries.
7. The grave Bj.581 is a particularly striking example, because it was excavated in 1878 and has remained famous ever since as a splendid example of a wealthy (male) warrior’s grave. When twenty-first-century science revealed that the skeletal remains were in fact those of a woman, a vigorous and ongoing debate in the scholarly community erupted over what this might mean for the woman’s status in life. Scholars today disagree over whether she was herself a war leader, or perhaps, for example, buried with tributes left to her by prominent male relatives.
8. In that volume, only the twenty-six letters used in English are employed, so the length of vowels is ignored, and both þ and ð are printed as th. Meanwhile, I rendered the Old Norse name Óðinn in that book as Odin because of its familiarity to English readers, while in later translations, consistent with the anglicization used for other names, I have written Óđin.
{1} The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek
(Hervarar saga ok Heiđreks)
Chapter 1
There was a king named Sigrlami, who ruled the Kingdom of the Rus. His daughter was Eyfura, who was the most beautiful of all women. This king had acquired a sword named Tyrfing from some dwarves, and this was the sharpest of all swords, and whenever it was drawn, it shone like a ray of sunlight. And that blade could never be unsheathed without killing a man each time, and it always had to be sheathed with warm blood on the blade. And no living thing, either human or animal, could live to see another day if it was wounded by that sword, no matter if the wound was large or small. This sword had never left a swing uncompleted or failed to cut all the way through a man to the earth beneath him, and the man who bore this sword in battle would be victorious if he fought with it. This sword is famous in all the old sagas.
A man was named Arngrím. He was an outstanding Viking. He went east into the Kingdom of the Rus and spent some time with King Sigrlami and became a leader in his army, protecting both land and men, because the king was now old. Arngrím became such a great chieftain that the king gave him his daughter in marriage, and made him the preeminent man in his kingdom. He then gave him the sword {2} Tyrfing. Then the king sat quietly at home, and nothing more is said about him.
Arngrím went with his wife Eyfura north to the lands he had inherited from his family, and they settled at the island called Bólm. They had twelve sons: the oldest and most famous was named Angantýr, the second Hjorvarđ, the third Hervarđ, the fourth Hrani, then the two named Hadding. No others are named. All of them were berserkers, such strong and mighty champions that they would never travel in a larger army than just the twelve of them, and yet they never entered a battle without taking the victory. Because of this they became famous throughout all lands, and there was no king who would refuse to give them whatever they wanted.
Chapter 2
It happened one Yule Eve that men were swearing oaths while drinking, as is customary, and Arngrím’s sons swore oaths. Hjorvarđ swore an oath that he would marry the daughter of Ingjald, King of the Swedes, a woman who was famous in all lands for her beauty and achievements, or else he would marry no woman. And in the spring the twelve brothers went together on a journey to Uppsala and went before the king’s table where his daughter sat beside him.
Then Hjorvarđ told the king why he had come, and the oath he had sworn, and everyone inside the hall listened. Hjorvarđ asked the king to tell him quickly whether he would get what he came for or not. The king thought about this, considering what great men these brothers were and what a famous family they were from. But in that moment a man named Hjálmar the Bold stepped forward over the king’s table and said, “My lord king, please recall what great honor I have won for you ever since I came to this land, and how many battles I have fought in order to subjugate lands for you. It is to you that I have given my service. Now I ask you that you reward me with honor and give me your daughter, a woman my heart has long been set on. It is more appropriate to reward me with what I ask for than to reward {3} these berserkers, men who have done nothing but evil in your own kingdom and in many other kings’ lands.”
Now the king considered this twice as seriously, and he considered it a great dilemma that these two noble men were competing so vigorously for his daughter. Then the king answered in this way: “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.
She answered that, if it were hers to choose, and if her father really wanted her to marry, then she would choose the one who she knew was good, and not the one that she knew only from stories—and all the stories about Arngrím’s sons were stories of evil.
Then Hjorvarđ challenged Hjálmar to a duel south on Samsø and cursed him to be called a coward by every man if he married the woman before the duel was fought. Hjálmar said he wouldn’t hesitate to fight the duel. Then the sons of Arngrím went home and told their father what had happened, and he said that never before had he feared what might happen to them.
Next the brothers went to Jarl Bjarmar, and he welcomed them with a great feast. Angantýr wanted the jarl’s daughter, named Sváva, and at this feast they were married.
Then Angantýr told the jarl a dream he had had. In this dream, he and his brothers were on Samsø where they saw many wild birds, and they killed all of them. Then they turned around, and they saw two eagles coming toward them. Angantýr thought that he fought one of them, and they had a hard battle, and both he and the eagle were forced to the ground before it was over. But meanwhile the other eagle was attacking his eleven brothers, and he thought that the eagle won that battle.
The jarl said that there was no need to try to interpret this dream, and that Angantýr had foreseen the fall of powerful men.
{4} Chapter 3
When the brothers came home, they prepared for the duel, and their father escorted them to their ship and there he gave the sword Tyrfing to Angantýr. “I think,” he said, “that now there will be need for good weapons.” He told them farewell, and they parted.
And when the brothers came to Samsø, they saw where two ships of the kind called askar were anchored in the harbor called Munarvág. They thought these ships must belong to Hjálmar and to Odd the Traveler, also known as Arrow-Odd. Then the sons of Arngrím drew their swords and bit on the ends of their shields, and the berserker fury came upon them. Six of them went out onto each ship.
There were such good warriors on these ships that they all drew their weapons, and none of them fled, and none of them spoke a downcast word. But the berserkers went from stern to prow and back again, and killed all of them. Then they went back to land howling.
Hjálmar and Odd had been on the island trying to discover whether the berserkers had arrived. Now they returned from the forest to their ships, and at this moment the berserkers came off of their ships with bloody weapons and drawn swords, and the berserker fury had left them. And this left them weaker than they were during the fury, as if they were recovering from some kind of illness. Then Odd said:
“I feared them,
once only,
when they howled
and left the ships,
and hollered
and came on land;
there were twelve
of those honorless men.”
Then Hjálmar said to Odd: “You surely see that all our men are now dead, and it’s likely all of us will be Óđin’s guests in Valhalla tonight.” Men say that these were the only words of despair Hjálmar ever said.
{5} Odd answered, “I would advise that we flee into the forest. Two of us won’t be able to take on twelve of them, who have already killed twelve of the boldest men who lived in Sweden.”
Then Hjálmar said, “Let’s never flee from our enemies, but instead let’s face their blades. I’d rather go fight the berserkers.”
Odd said, “I don’t care to visit Óđin this evening, and all these berserkers ought to be dead before evening, and the two of us still alive.” This conversation of theirs is proven by these stanzas, which Hjálmar spoke:
“Fierce men walk
off their warships,
twelve honorless
men together,
the two of us
foster-brothers
will visit Óđin tonight,
and those twelve will live.”
Odd said:
“These words
will be my answer:
Those twelve,
the berserkers,
will visit Óđin tonight,
and the two of us will live.”
Hjálmar and Odd saw that Angantýr had Tyrfing in his hand, because it shone like a ray of sunlight. Hjálmar said, “Would you rather fight against Angantýr alone or against all eleven of his brothers?”
Odd said, “I’ll fight Angantýr. He’ll cut hard with Tyrfing, but I trust more in my shirt than in your armor as protection.”
Hjálmar said, “Where did we ever fight that you went ahead of me? You want to fight with Angantýr because you think it’s the greater honor. But I am the one who started this fight; I promised something {6} else to the king’s daughter in Sweden than to let you or anyone else enter into this duel for me. I will fight Angantýr.” And he drew his sword and went forth against Angantýr, and they showed each other the way to Valhalla, turning against each other and leaving little space between the great swings they took at each other with their swords.
Odd called out to the berserkers and said:
“One ought to fight
against one, unless
one of them is a true coward—
or his courage fails.”
Then Hjorvarđ came forth, and he and Odd had a hard exchange of weapon-blows. But Odd’s silk shirt was so hardy that no weapon could harm it, and he had a sword so good that it bit through armor like through cloth. He took only a few swings at Hjorvarđ before he fell dead. Then he went to Hervarđ and it went the same way, then Hrani, then each after the other, and Odd made such a tough attack on them that he cut down all of the eleven brothers.
As to Hjálmar’s duel with Angantýr, it can be told that Hjálmar sustained sixteen injuries, but not before Angantýr fell dead. Odd went to where Hjálmar was, and said:
“What’s the news, Hjálmar?
Your color’s changed,
and I think many wounds
are weakening you.
Your helmet’s split,
your armor sags,
now I suspect
even your life has left you.”
Hjálmar said:
“I have sixteen wounds,
my armor’s ruined,
{7} my sight turns black,
I can’t see to walk.
Angantýr’s sword
struck my heart dead—
that sharp blade,
hardened in poison.”
And then he said:
“I had, at my best,
five farms altogether,
but I never loved
that way of life.
Now I must lie here
with my life gone,
wounded by a sword
on Samsø.
“Good men are
in the hall of my father,
gifted with his rings,
drinking his mead.
Drinking is what
maims many men.
As for me,
the sword’s trail shows.
“I departed from
the lovely lady
on the shore
of Agnafit.
And what she told me
in that place
will be proven true,
that I’d never return.
{8} “Take from my hand
the golden ring,
take it to the young
Ingibjorg.
It will be hard news
for her ears
that I’ll never return
to Uppsala.
“I departed from
the singing of women.
With no joy or comfort,
I went east to Sóti.
I hurried that journey,
and I went in an army
for the last time,
leaving faithful friends.
“The raven flies west
off a high tree,
the eagle flies behind
in tight formation.
For the last time,
I’ll give that eagle food;
that bird will get a taste
of my own blood.”
After this, Hjálmar died. Odd told the news at home in Sweden, where the king’s daughter could not live after Hjálmar, and killed herself. Angantýr and his brothers were laid to rest in burial mounds on Samsø with all their weapons.
{9} Chapter 4
Bjarmar’s daughter Sváva was pregnant, and gave birth to an especially beautiful girl. She was sprinkled with water and given a name, and called Hervor. She grew up with the jarl and was as strong as men are. When she came of age, she was more interested in archery and shields and swords than in weaving or tapestries. And she more often did evil than good, and when she was banned from doing this, she went into the forests and killed men for their money.
