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Making History Essays on the Fornaldarsögur MAKING HISTORY ESSAYS ON THE FORNALDARSÖGUR EDITED BY MARTIN ARNOLD AND ALISON FINLAY VIKING SOCIETY FOR NORTHERN RESEARCH UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON 2010 © Viking Society for Northern Research 2010 Printed by Short Run Press Limited, Exeter ISBN: 978-0-903521-84-0 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: The Levisham Slab. Late tenth- or early eleventh-century Viking grave cover, North Yorkshire. © Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, University of Durham. Photographer J. T. Lang. The editors are grateful to Levisham Local History Society for their help and support. CONTENTS Introduction RORY McTURK v S†gubrot af fornkonungum: Mythologised History for Late Thirteenth-Century Iceland ELIZABETH ASHMAN ROWE 1 Hrólfs saga kraka and the Legend of Lejre TOM SHIPPEY 17 Enter the Dragon. Legendary Saga Courage and the Birth of the Hero ÁRMANN JAKOBSSON 33 Þóra and Áslaug in Ragnars saga loðbrókar. Women, Dragons and Destiny CAROLYNE LARRINGTON 53 Hyggin ok forsjál. Wisdom and Women’s Counsel in Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar JÓHANNA KATRÍN FRIÐRIKSDÓTTIR 69 Við þik sættumsk ek aldri. Ñrvar-Odds saga and the Meanings of Ñgmundr Eyþjófsbani MARTIN ARNOLD 85 The Tale of Hogni And Hedinn TRANSLATED BY WILLIAM MORRIS AND EIRÍKR MAGNÚSSON INTRODUCTION BY CARL PHELPSTEAD 105 The Saga of Ásmundr, Killer of Champions TRANSLATED BY ALISON FINLAY 119 Introduction v INTRODUCTION RORY MCTURK There has recently been a welcome revival of interest in the fornaldarsögur, that group of Icelandic sagas known variously in English as ‘mythical- heroic sagas’, ‘legendary sagas’, ‘sagas of times past’, and ‘sagas of Icelandic prehistory’. Gwyn Jones indicated the need for such a revival, for English readers at least, in 1961, finding that these sagas had been ‘neglected not so much by choice as for lack of opportunity by the English reader’.1 This presumably meant that at that time there were not enough translations or introductory accounts of them in English. This situation is now largely remedied. A bibliography of manuscripts, editions and translations of these sagas, and of secondary literature relating to them, is currently being compiled, under the title Fornaldarsögur norðurlanda, by M. J. Driscoll and Silvia Hufnagel, and is accessible on the Internet in an advanced state of preparation. The revival of critical and scholarly interest in these sagas, heralded at book length by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards in 1971,2 and by Stephen Mitchell twenty years later,3 is now in full swing. Two collections of essays—not all of them in English, it is true—based on fornaldarsaga conferences held in Uppsala and Copen- hagen and edited by the Icelandic-Swedish-Danish team that organised both conferences, appeared in 20034 and 20095 respectively, and that same team, having organised yet another such conference last year in Reykjavík, is currently preparing its proceedings for publication. The present volume arises out of the Viking Society Student Conference organised by Martin Arnold and hosted by the University of Hull’s Andrew Marvell Centre on 28 February 2009. An indication of its contents may be given here. 1 Gwyn Jones, trans., 1961. Eirik the Red and other Icelandic sagas, xv. 2 Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards 1971. Legendary fiction in medieval Iceland, Studia Islandica 30. 3 Stephen A. Mitchell 1991. Heroic sagas and ballads. 4 Ármann Jakobsson, Annette Lassen and Agneta Ney, eds, 2003. Fornaldar sagornas struktur och ideologi. Handlingar från ett symposium i Uppsala 31.8– 2.9 2001. Nordiska texter och undersökningar 28. 5 Agneta Ney, Ármann Jakobsson and Annette Lassen, eds, 2009. Forn- aldar sagaerne: myter og virkelighed. Studier i de oldislandske fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda. vi Making History Comparing Saxo’s account (in Book VIII of his Gesta Danorum) of the legendary battle of Brávellir with the account of the same battle in the late thirteenth-century Icelandic S†gubrot af fornkonungum, Elizabeth Ash- man Rowe argues that in the latter account the minimisation of Óðinn’s role in the battle itself is due not to rationalisation—since the pre-battle generation here shows marked Odinic features—but rather to a wish by the author to present the Danish king Haraldr hildit†nn, leader of one of the battle’s two warring parties, as a kind of pre-Christian martyr, and to suggest parallels between him and the Norwegian kings Haraldr hárfagri and Óláfr Tryggvason. Tom Shippey gives a straightforward analysis of the structure of Hrólfs saga kraka, explaining its inconsistencies and superfluities in terms of its author’s evident wish to include everything he knows, however remotely relevant. Shippey further summarises the other medieval Scandinavian accounts of this saga’s eponymous but for the most part purely formal hero, showing the ways in which they contra- dict and agree with each other. He compares in passing King Hrólfr with King Arthur and finds Hrólfs saga kraka comparable to V†lsunga saga, both in its inclusiveness and, as he suggests, in its ultimate historicity— though this, he admits, is less easy to confirm than in the case of V†lsunga saga. Ármann Jakobsson, referring mainly to the dragon fights of Sigurðr Fáfnisbani and Ragnarr loðbrók, in V†lsunga saga and Ragnars saga respectively, sees the dragon in medieval tradition as symbolic of the fear which young people in particular are best equipped to conquer—hence the greater success of Sigurðr and Ragnarr in fighting dragons than that of Beowulf. At the same time the dragon, in giving birth to a hero through its death, becomes a parental figure as well as an emblem of teenage power. Carolyne Larrington concentrates on Ragnars saga, showing that Ragnarr’s slaying of a serpentine dragon in order to win his first wife Þóra is a rite of passage for her as much as for him, and that the snake- like birthmark in the eye of his son Sigurðr by his second wife, Áslaug, is a pointer to Ragnarr’s relative inferiority as a hero, since only when he sees this mark on his newborn son does Ragnarr deign to acknowledge Áslaug as the daughter of Sigurðr Fáfnisbani. Larrington’s discussion includes a comparison of Áslaug with the Mélusine figure of French legend, another woman with serpentine connections, and an analysis of some of the verses of Ragnars saga. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir shows how Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar gives the lie to the proverbial statement, found not in this saga but not infrequently elsewhere, that ‘cold are the counsels of women’. This saga, she argues, under the four headings of foresight, loyalty, caution and hospitality, imparts wisdom to its audience Introduction vii by conveying it through female characters juxtaposed with less than wise males, and does so in terms that are applicable generally as well as to the saga’s specific concerns, somewhat in the manner of Hávamál. Martin Arnold makes use of textual criticism and modern literary theory in show- ing how Ñgmundr Eyþjófsbani, a mysterious, loose-end figure in the older redactions of Ñrvar-Odds saga, becomes in the younger redactions not so much an alter ego of Ñrvar-Oddr, or a figure of death, as a personification and reminder of the fate prophesied for him by the sybil at the beginning of the saga. Carl Phelpstead reprints and introduces, as a tribute to William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, their translation, published in 1875, of the story now known as S†rla þáttr but entitled in their translation, hardly less appropriately, ‘The Tale of Hogni and Hedinn’. In this tale, established as part of the fornaldarsaga canon in C. C. Rafn’s three-volume edition of 1829–30, the hero S†rli functions as little more than a bridge between the story of the theft of Freyja’s necklace or collar (referred to elsewhere as the Brísingamen) and that of the potentially everlasting fight between H†gni and Heðinn. The language of the Morris-Magnússon translation, Phelpstead finds, is not so much archaic as Icelandicised. Alison Finlay, finally, produces and introduces her own translation of Ásmundar saga kappabana, showing in her Introduction that this story of a fight to the death between two half-brothers, closely paralleled in Book VII of Saxo’s Gesta Danorum and relying heavily on poems of eddic type, versions of which were also known to Saxo, betrays only the faintest recollection of the tragic story of a fight between father and son which forms the subject of the Old High German Hildebrandslied, to which it is more distantly related. The present volume is thus fully in line with current trends in saga research and an essential supplement to the Uppsala, Copenhagen and Reykjavík volumes. There is a great deal more in it than this Introduction has revealed, as readers are hereby invited to find out for themselves. In John Gower’s terms, it contains both ‘lust’ and ‘lore’ in more or less equal measure, whether one is thinking of its articles or its translations. viii Making History S†gubrot af fornkonungum 1 SÑGUBROT AF FORNKONUNGUM: MYTHOLOGISED HISTORY FOR LATE THIRTEENTH-CENTURY ICELAND ELIZABETH ASHMAN ROWE Introduction The battle of Brávellir is one of the most famous battles of legendary Scandi navia, but its current use in Old Norse studies is as evidence of Óðinn’s fickle nature: after favouring the Danish king Haraldr hildit†nn all his life, Óðinn withdraws his help when Haraldr is an old man on the battle- field and gives the victory to the Danes’ enemy by teaching them a special military formation that previously he had taught only to Haraldr. In medi- eval Scandinavia, however, the battle of Brávellir had an important place in historiography.
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