Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes, page 1
Two Sagas of
Mythical Heroes
Hervor and Heidrek
&
Hrólf Kraki and His Champions
Two Sagas of
Mythical Heroes
Hervor and Heidrek
&
Hrólf Kraki and His Champions
Translated and Edited, with Introduction, by
Jackson Crawford
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Indianapolis/Cambridge
Copyright © 2021 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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For further information, please address
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
P.O. Box 44937
Indianapolis, Indiana 46244-0937
www.hackettpublishing.com
Cover and interior design by E. L. Wilson
Photo of Jackson Crawford by Jon Wilson
Composition by Aptara, Inc.
Cataloging-in-Publication data can be accessed via the Library of Congress Online Catalog.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021934959
ISBN-13: 978-1-62466-995-8 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-62466-994-1 (paperback)
Epub3 ISBN: 978-1-64792-022-7
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-64792-023-4
Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing
The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes. Translated and Edited, with an Introduction, by Jackson Crawford.
The Saga of the Volsungs: with The Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok. Translated and Edited, with an Introduction, by Jackson Crawford.
The Wanderer's Hávamál. Translated and Edited, with Old Norse Text and Related Texts, by Jackson Crawford.
Beowulf: A New Translation for Oral Delivery. Translated, with an Introduction, by Dick Ringler.
The Nibelungenlied, with The Klage. Edited and Translated, with an Introduction, By William T. Whobrey.
Contents
The page numbers in curly braces {} correspond to the print edition of this title.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
In a Nutshell
The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek: Cast of Characters, Family Tree, and Synopsis
The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions: Cast of Characters, Family Tree, and Synopsis
Ancient Stories, Medieval Sagas
Literary Style
Parallels in Other Sources
Men and Women in the Sagas
Poems of the Sagas
Note on Language and Spelling
Pronunciation
A Note on This Volume’s Translations
Further Reading
The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek
The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions
Appendix: Chapter 1 of The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek, from Hauksbók
Glossary for The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek
Glossary for The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions
Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing
To Faith Ingwersen,
Standing Tree of Absaroka
Acknowledgments
I thank my students at the University of Colorado, especially Aaron Aaeng, Gabriela Abramovich, Michelle Aicega, Hussain Al Jabr, Zade Alfalah, Hesham Alsaigh, Sam Bateman, Nate Bennett, Anna Bodnar, Mallory Britz, Sarah Bustamante, Rachel Coates, Chris Creery, Lane Daigle, Graham Dean, Rachel Donati, Alienor Doremieux, Aidan Duggan, Conor Ezarik, William Fagan, Colleen Feuerborn, Michael Fruge, Sami Garner, Kelsie Gering, Calvin Good, Jacob Haimes, Toby Ann Halamka, Jacob Hans, Will Hartley, Xavier Lawrence Jackson, Aynsley Johanna Jessip, Paul Kim, Jackson Kistler, Gavriel Kleinwaks, Angela Korneev, Hayden Lewis, Heather Lewis, Lisanne Lopez-Audet, Rachel Miller, Varun Narayanswamy, Kelly Nemeth, Sylvie Novins-Montague, Steven Pearson, Candice Perrotta, Kelsey Pool, Victoria Prager, Rachel Reifsteck, Carly Romig, Elora Morgaine Root, Peter Rosenthal, Garrett Roybal, Israel Sanchez, Brian Satchell, Olivia Sidoroff, Alyson Skeens, Derek Smith, Matthew Spallas, Zachariah Talley, Alexis Thomson, Brian Tranchetti, James Tranchetti, Caitrin Wright, and Maya Yanez, for their input on these translations in the courses in which they first saw the light of day.
For their kindness, help, and friendship while this project was being completed, I thank Thomas Allen; Anouk Bachman; Robert T. Bakker; Tom Bauer; Kevin Bigley; Aleese Block; De Lane Bredvik; Gordon and Dian Bredvik; Taylor Flint Budde; Andrew and Brenna Byrd; Bodil Cappelen; Richard Cooper; Lance Cox and Averi and Scott Hoffman; Carl Day, Jenn Green, and Skylar Day; Christine Ekholst; Teresa Escalle; Kitt Euler; Nate Freeman; Kelsey Fuller; Pat Gallagher; Jason Gallmeyer; Noah Goats; Paul and Jo Ellen Gonzales; Luke Gorton; Brad Graham; Patrick Greaney; Kurt Gutjahr; Bob and Suzanne Hargis; Anne Hatfield; Karen Hawley; Merlin and Barb Heinze; Amanda Hollander; Ashraf Ismail; Bob Janke; Patrick Jones; Willie Kirby; Casey Koehler; Jimmy Lakey; Mark Leiderman; Patty Limerick; Peter and Marilyn Llewellyn; Ron and Laura Mamot; Shea McClain; Darby McDevitt; Fr. Jude McPeak; Nina Melovska; Perry Morris; Matthew T. Mossbrucker; Stella Nathaniel; Jeff Newton;Jordan Phillips; Ryan Picazio; Brian Rak; Rob Rhiner; Lei Autumn Roberts; Simon Roper; Caley Smith; Justin Snow; Bill, Suzie, and Blake Stubblebine; Aiko Sugano; Autumn Torres; Will Tuleja; Joe and Candy Turner; Tess Van Laanen; Rob Waller; Jon Wilson; Liz Wilson; Zach Yarrow and Cara Cooper; and Donny Zwisler. I thank the staff of the Boulder Book Store for their extraordinary kindness to an unconventional local writer through four book releases. And I thank the many kind people who, with their support on Patreon for my educational video series, have allowed me to make a living from teaching.
Luke Annear and Vicki Grove deserve special thanks for their extraordinarily helpful and thorough comments on early drafts of these translations, as do the two anonymous reviewers for Hackett, who gave a generous amount of time to this project.
Finally, I thank my family, especially Katherine, Claire, Travis, Shelley, Kent, Kerri, Dad, and Mom, and the reasons why pose no riddle. Of course, I alone am responsible for all errors in these pages.
Jackson Crawford
Lake George, Colorado
April 9, 2021
{ix} Introduction
In a Nutshell
Both of the two sagas in this volume are based on ancient, pre-Christian Norse tales that survived in oral tradition for centuries before they were written down in medieval Iceland. In the case of The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek, these ancient roots are clear, both in the timeworn poetry spoken by its protagonists, and in the raw, archaic nature of its action and horror scenes. In the case of The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions—a loose collection of adventures centered around the court of the Danish king Hrólf and such legendary champions as Bođvar Little-bear—equally ancient material has been reworked in the Arthurian-inspired chivalric style popular all over Europe at the time of its writing. But each of the sagas, whatever its particular literary flavor, shares many of the characteristics that make the greatest Norse sagas such enduring favorites of medieval and modern storytellers alike: enchanted and cursed swords, the doomed courage of men and women who face death in battle with cool resolve, and the unpredictable meddling of witches and gods.
The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek: Cast of Characters, Family Tree, and Synopsis
{x} Family Tree for The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek
Except for its final two, extraneous chapters, The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek is virtually a saga of the sword Tyrfing, which is mentioned in every significant incident of combat in the first fourteen chapters. The sword, which must draw blood before it is resheathed, is originally the property of a king named Sigrlami, but it is when it is in the hands of his grandson Angantýr that the action of the saga truly begins. Angantýr and his eleven brothers are berserkers, a kind of frenzied warrior who feature in many sagas, and their fate is sealed when one of them, Hjorvarđ, challenges a man named Hjálmar to a battle for a {xi} Swedish princess on the cursed island of Samsø. All twelve brothers are killed, and the sword Tyrfing is buried with Angantýr.
Years later, Angantýr’s daughter Hervor finds out where Angantýr is buried and travels there to confront her undead father in his grave and demand the sword Tyrfing from him. The living woman and her father exchange threats in an archaic poem, usually known as The Waking of Angantýr, embedded in the centuries-younger text of the saga. Armed with the sword, Hervor returns home and has a son named Heiđrek. Heiđrek grows up to father three children with a succession of wives and concubines, and becomes a powerful king. Before the end of his reign, Heiđrek answers the riddles of the god Óđin delivered in another embedded poem known as The Riddles of Gestumblindi.
Following the death of King Heiđrek, his son Angantýr succeeds him. Heiđrek’s illegitimate Hunnish son Hlođ soon appears at Angantýr’s court demanding half of the inheritance from Heiđrek, which Angantýr denies him, leading to battle. Angantýr’s sister Hervor, a warrior like her grandmother, dies in an early skirmish before Angantýr and Hlođ face off directly. It the end, Angantýr kills his half-brother Hlođ and utters a famous stanza about the injustice of his own, and his half-brother’s, fate. Much of the action of this part of the saga is extrapolated from, or quoted from, a very archaic poem referred to in Old Norse as Hlǫðskviða “Hlođ’s Poem” but in English usually called The Battle of the Goths and Huns.
The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His C
The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions is a much more chaotically organized text than The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek. While it loosely follows the fortunes of the ancient Danish royal family known as the Skjoldungs, from King Hálfdan to his grandson King Hrólf, it is full of digressions about the champions at King Hrólf’s court, and even about the families of these champions, which takes up a great deal of space and creates an impression of a storyteller trying to include everything he knows about anyone connected to the central characters.
{xii} Family Tree for The Saga of Hrólf Kraki
{xiii} The saga is broken up into seven “parts” or “tales” (Old Norse þættir, literally “threads”). Part 1 (“The Tale of Fróđi”) comprises chapters 1–5 and tells of the vengeance that the young Danish princes Hróar and Helgi take for their father Hálfdan on their wicked uncle Fróđi. Part 2 (“The Tale of Helgi”) comprises chapters 6–17 and tells of how Helgi rose to be king of Denmark. During his reign, he rapes Queen Ólof of Saxony and then unknowingly marries their daughter Yrsa and has a son named Hrólf with her (he also has a daughter, named Skuld, with an “elf-woman”). When Helgi’s wife Yrsa discovers she is also his daughter, she leaves him and subsequently is married to King Ađils of Sweden, who lures Helgi under false pretenses to Sweden and has him killed there.
Part 3 (“The Tale of Svipdag”), chapters 18–23, tells the origin of the Swedish hero Svipdag and his brothers, and how they serve first with King Ađils of Sweden before leaving him to join the court of King Hrólf, Helgi’s son and heir to the throne of Denmark. Part 4 (“The Tale of Bođvar”), chapters 24–36, tells the memorable story of the Norwegian hero Bođvar “Little-bear” and his half-animal brothers, the sons of a man cursed to spend his days as a bear. Like Svipdag before him, Bođvar sails south to Denmark and joins the court of King Hrólf, following a fight with a monster that bears a strong resemblance to Beowulf’s fight with Grendel and no doubt shares a common origin with that Old English legend. Part 5 (“The Tale of Hjalti”), chapter 37, is only nominally focused on the hero Hjalti, who begins life as an abused young boy rescued by Bođvar and is later turned into a fierce warrior by drinking a monster’s blood. Part 6 (“Concerning Ađils, King at Uppsala, and King Hrólf’s Journey to Sweden with His Champions”), chapters 38–46, chronicles Hrólf Kraki’s journey to Sweden to avenge his father Helgi on King Ađils, and the encounters he has on the way to and from with the god Óđin in disguise. In Part 7 (“Concerning the Battle with Skuld, and the Fall of King Hrólf and His Champions”), chapters 47–52, years after returning victorious to Denmark, Hrólf is attacked and defeated by the army of his sister Skuld in a final battle marked by strange, long speeches, the appearance of Bođvar (like his father before him) in the form of a bear, and a remarkably “loud” narrative voice that dwells in long paragraphs on {xiv} the virtues of Hrólf and his champions and the shame of their lack of Christian faith.
The internal consistency and narrative continuity between these parts or tales is often weak. For example, in chapter 49, near the beginning of Part 7, Bođvar Little-bear is introduced with a brief retelling of his story, as though he were a new character and not one of the most memorable actors in the saga since chapter 27. By contrast, King Hrólf’s sword Skofnung is treated as an important attribute of his that must already be familiar to the reader from the first time it is abruptly mentioned in chapter 45.
Ancient Stories, Medieval Sagas
Like The Saga of the Volsungs (see The Saga of the Volsungs with The Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok, Hackett, 2017), neither of these sagas represents an undiluted transmission of legends from the Viking Age, but rather a refraction of those legendary materials through the literary and linguistic lens of the later Middle Ages when they were written down.
In the case of The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions, this writing occurred during the 1400s AD, a time when a style heavily influenced by Arthurian romance was popular everywhere in Catholic Europe, including in Iceland. Thus, while the kernel of Hrólf’s story surely is even older than the Viking Age (to judge from the oblique references to some of its characters in Beowulf, a poem composed between AD 800 and 1000), he and his champions are seen strutting their horses in knightly magnificence when they approach King Ađils’s city.
Contrasting with the neutral presentation of pre-Christian ideas and rites in The Saga of the Volsungs is this saga author’s attitude toward the earlier pagan religion of Scandinavia. Consider the conclusion of chapter 48 of The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions:
And it is not told anywhere that King Hrólf or his champions sacrificed to the gods at any time, but rather that they believed in their own strength and abilities. This was because, at the time, the holy faith had not been preached yet here in the Northlands, and thus the men who dwelled in the northern part of the world still had little knowledge of their Creator.
{xv} Not only is the polytheistic pre-Christian religion dismissed in this passage, but the heroes of the story (not observant of noticeably Christian virtues) are emphatically described as what the authors of the earlier Sagas of Icelanders called “godless men.” These were not atheists, but rather men who lived in a time before Christianity came to the north and yet rejected the worship of their contemporaries’ gods. King Hrólf even calls Óđin, chief of the Norse gods—and a being he personally encounters in the flesh!—“an evil spirit” (ch. 46). Such a man, if he encounters missionaries of the new religion, is sure to accept it, but as the narrative voice of this saga even admonishes the hero directly in chapter 52: “One thing prevented your victory, King Hrólf, that you did not know your Creator.”
Nonetheless, traces of the old beliefs, or at least of the language of the old beliefs, show through at different points in The Saga of Hrólf Kraki and His Champions. In chapter 51, only one chapter previous to the one in which the narrator scolds Hrólf for his lack of faith, his hero Hjalti comments encouragingly that he and his fellows will be guests in Óđin’s hall, Valhalla, after their deaths—a fitting reward in the afterlife for a slain Viking warrior.
In The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek, the echoes of the deeper past ring much louder. Most famously, the place name given as Harvaðafjǫll “Harvađa-mountains” in one stanza of The Battle of the Goths and Huns must go back to the name of the Carpathian Mountains, Greek karpátēs, as transmitted to a Germanic language before these languages had undergone the consonant shift known as Grimm’s Law, in which an older [k] became [h], and older [p] and [t] eventually became (in unstressed position, as here) [v] and [ð], respectively. This sound change was completed long before the first attestations of a Germanic language in writing (ca. AD 160), and so the presence of this name testifies to much earlier contact between Scandinavians (or perhaps Goths or other peoples speaking closely related languages) and Greek-speakers than is otherwise in evidence.1
{xvi} The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek is known from three important Icelandic manuscripts and their later copies. The well-known Hauksbók (ca. AD 1300), which also contains a variety of other texts that intersect with Norse mythology (including a version of the Eddic poem Vǫluspá), has an incomplete copy of the saga, called the “H-”text, which is the oldest known written text of this saga (Hauksbók is preserved in fragments; Hervor is contained in the part catalogued as AM 544 4to, beginning on p. 72v). Unfortunately, as with other texts in that manuscript (such as The Saga of Eirík the Red), the text of The Saga of Hervor and Heiđrek in Hauksbók is poorly edited, as if the scribe had worked under orders to abridge its length but had no clear idea of where to make cuts. Most scholars consider the “R-”text, in the manuscript catalogued as GKS 2845 4to (ca. AD 1400s), which also lacks the ending of the saga, to be the best-preserved version of the text as far as it goes. A third manuscript (known as the “U-”text), produced in the 1600s and now lost, is known from two early copies and is the only source for much of the latter part of the saga. The U- and H-texts are nearer to one another in wording than either is to the R-text, which is the usual basis of printed editions and translations, including this one.
