Old Norse Made New

i OLD NORSE MADE NEW ESSAYS ON THE POST-MEDIEVAL RECEPTION OF OLD NORSE LITERATURE AND CULTURE EDITED BY DAVID CLARK AND CARL PHELPSTEAD VIKING SOCIETY FOR NORTHERN RESEARCH UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON 2007 ii © Viking Society for Northern Research 2007 Printed by Short Run Press Limited, Exeter ISBN: 978-0-903521-76-5 The printing of this book is made possible by a gift to the University of Cambridge in memory of Dorothea Coke, Skjaeret, 1951. Front cover: ‘A Funeral of a Viking’ by Francis Dicksee (1893), © Manchester Art Gallery, reproduced with permission. iii CONTENTS Preface Foreword v ANDREW WAWN Thomas Gray’s Translations of Old Norse Poetry 1 ALISON FINLAY Translating the Poetic Edda into English 21 CAROLYNE LARRINGTON William Morris and the Volsungs 43 DAVID ASHURST In Search of the Lakeland Saga: Antiquarian Fiction and the 63 Norse Settlement in Cumbria MATTHEW TOWNEND Tolkien and Old Norse Antiquity: Real and Romantic Links 83 in Material Culture DIMITRA FIMI From Runic Inscriptions to Runic Gymnastics 101 HEATHER O’DONOGHUE A Viking Pacifist? The Life of St Magnus in Saga, Novel, and 119 Opera CARL PHELPSTEAD Old Norse Made New: Past and Present in Modern 133 Children’s Literature DAVID CLARK iv PREFACE Earlier versions of most of the essays in this collection were delivered at the Viking Society Student Conference on the theme of ‘Old Norse Made New’ held at the University of Oxford on 25 February 2006 (Clark, Fimi, Finlay, O’Donoghue, Phelpstead, and Townend). Following the conference it was felt that the papers could be published alongside others on medievalist topics from previous Viking Society Student Conferences (Ashurst and Larrington). We hope that the resulting volume will appeal to students and others with an interest in the ways in which Old Norse literature and the medieval culture of Iceland and Scandinavia have influenced writers, especially writers in English, after the Middle Ages. In recent years the study of medievalism, the post-medieval reception and influence of medieval literature and culture, has become an increasingly productive field of research as scholars have realized that interrogating past constructions of the medieval is a valuable way of reflecting on their own relationship to the material they study. The essays collected here cover a wide chronological span (from the eighteenth cen- tury to the twenty-first) and a range of literary genres (poetry, novel, libretto, children’s literature, fantasy fiction); we very much hope that the variety of subject matter examined in this collection will inspire others to pursue further research in this rich field. We would like to thank the organizers of the Oxford conference, Caro- lyne Larrington and Heather O’Donoghue, for encouraging us to edit the papers for publication. We are also grateful to Alison Finlay for oversee- ing the production of the book and join her in thanking Anthony Faulkes and Peter Forshaw for technical assistance with the illustrations. We must also thank Andrew Wawn, not only for contributing a characteris- tically bracing Foreword to the collection, but also for generously casting an expert eye over the essays. Publication of the volume has been assisted by a substantial grant from the Dorothea Coke Fund. We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright illustrations: Manchester Art Gallery for ‘A Funeral of a Viking’ by Francis Dicksee (front cover); the Tolkien Estate, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., and Houghton Mifflin Company for J. R. R. Tolkien’s sketch of the Crown of Gondor (fig. 5); the Tolkien Estate and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for Tolkien’s drawing of the Winged Crown of Gondor (fig. 8); and Kevin Brown for his drawing of the Crowns of Egypt (fig. 4). David Clark Carl Phelpstead Foreword v FOREWORD ANDREW WAWN The trail of links and implications from three little-known books may serve to launch this collection of essays on making Old Norse and the old north new. All three volumes were written in the 1920s by the same author, who was born in Adel, in north-west Leeds, within a stone’s throw of where the present writer now lives. The author’s father, Octavius (no less!), was a prominent civic figure and stalwart of the local Philo- sophical and Literary Society, and the author himself was Ernest Rücker Eddison (1882–1945). In Eddison’s three volumes, two novels and a translation, we may observe many of the processes and priorities of the old northern medievalism explored in the present volume. The first novel, The Worm Ouroboros (1922), begins with a scene set in North Yorkshire: it is evening in a country house in Wastdale in the 1920s, and a middle-aged couple have just finished dinner; while their daughter plays the spinet in the next room the wife has a suggestion for post-prandial entertainment—‘Should we finish that chapter of Njal’s saga?’ And that is just what they do. She reads the saga chapter out loud from the household copy with its faded green cover—a detail that iden- tifies it as the celebrated Story of Burnt Njal (1861) translation of Njáls saga done by the accomplished Victorian Icelandicist George Webbe Dasent. The chapter, accurately quoted in the novel, describes one of the portents that preceded the burning of Njáll and his family at Bergþórshváll. Hildiglúmr Runólfsson sees a man on horseback bearing a burning brand; after singing a verse about Flosi and fire the man hurls the brand at the mountains, which are duly set ablaze; he then dis- appears—and soon afterwards Njáll and his family are burnt to death. Our Wastdale couple finish the chapter and retire to bed, only for the sleeping husband to have a vision even more disturbing than that of Hildiglúmr. The remainder of the novel describes that vision. We read of conflict between two mighty cosmic forces, and of a vulnerable young hero and his friend compelled to undertake epic journeys; on the way they encounter wizards, dwarfs, and goblins; there are magic spells, swords and cloaks, aged kings, councils of war, and a ring of symbolic importance. The story is told in archaized language, and there are Old English, Old Icelandic (and William Morrisean) echoes in the landscapes vi Old Norse Made New and nomenclature, as, for example, with references to Trentmar from ‘Scorradale’. ‘Skorradale’ appears in the second Eddison book to which I draw attention. It can be found on a map accompanying his Egil’s saga; done into English out of the Icelandic with an introduction, notes, and an essay on some principles of translation (1930). As the sub-title sug- gests, this is no broad-brush version of the saga by a blundering amateur. Published by Cambridge University Press, the painstakingly accurate text is accompanied by thoughtful annotation that acknowledges the assistance received from major scholars in the field, among them Bertha Phillpotts (Eddison’s Cambridge contact), Sigurður Nordal, Finnur Jónsson, and Bogi Ólafsson, a teacher of English at the Menntaskóli in Reykjavík. The preface and notes also confirm that Eddison, like many Victorian enthusiasts before him, had visited the saga-steads of Borgar- fjörður, and was proud of the fact. He had stayed at the district school at Hvanneyri, just south of Borg, and dedicates the volume to his Anglo- phile hostess Svava Þórhallsdóttir. It may be that Eddison shared an interest in the kind of visionary spiritualism reflected in her published Icelandic translations of several such English works. Alongside the 1922 fantasy novel and 1930 saga translation stands Eddison’s historical novel Styrbiorn the Strong (1926). By the 1920s novelistic versions of Old Icelandic sagas were nothing new—in Eng- lish that trail had already been blazed in works about heroes such as Grettir Ásmundarson, Leifr Eiríksson and, latterly, Gísli Súrsson, cour- tesy of Maurice Hewlett’s The Outlaw (1924). The eponymous hero of Eddison’s narrative was a less familiar figure. Styrbjörn, nephew and ward of King Eirekr of Sweden, who eventually challenged his uncle for the throne at the battle of Fýrisvellir, is mentioned briefly in a handful of sagas, and more extensively in Styrbjarnar þáttr Svíakappa (Flateyjar- bók, ed. Sigurður Nordal 1945 II 146–49). Only a serious and imaginative Icelandicist would have had the wit to make such a figure the subject of a novel, and the knowledge to flesh out his tale with material from other sagas, and the confidence to narrate the tale so deftly. Three books, then, by the same author, and if we add up his score we find an Oxford graduate with a not very English-sounding middle name, who had lived in Leeds, was an accomplished Icelandicist, was known to learned Icelanders, and had authored an heroic fantasy novel with a strong Icelandic and Old English inflection. This could almost be a pen- portrait of J. R. R. Tolkien. The two men seem never to have met in Leeds during Tolkien’s tour of duty as Reader in English Language at the Foreword vii university 1920–24, and Professor 1924–25. However, their paths did eventually cross on at least one occasion in Oxford during the war, Eddison by this time having moved to London, where he spent much of his later life as a senior civil servant. The medievalist template established by Eddison’s three publications involves a well-informed philological awareness, an instinctive region- alism, an unrelenting commitment to outreach through translation and novelistic recreation (both historical and futuristic), and a wide-ranging engagement with Old Icelandic poetry and prose (not least the visions in Njáls saga). It is the exploration of just such elements that lies at the heart of the essays in Old Norse Made New.

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