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 Universityof 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
Forewordv

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 theNorse Settlement in Cumbria

63

MATTHEW TOWNEND

Tolkien and Old Norse Antiquity: Real and Romantic Links
in Material Culture

83

DIMITRA FIMI

From Runic Inscriptions to Runic Gymnastics
HEATHER O’DONOGHUE

101

A Viking Pacifist? The Life of St Magnus in Saga, Novel, and
Opera

119

CARL PHELPSTEAD

Old Norse Made New: Past and Present in Modern
Children’s Literature
DAVID CLARK

133

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 haveinfluenced 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 anincreasingly productive field of research as scholars have realized thatinterrogating past constructions of the medieval is a valuable way ofreflecting on their own relationship to the material they study. The essays
collected here cover a wide chronological span (from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first) and a range of literary genres (poetry, novel,
libretto, children’s literature, fantasy fiction); we very much hope thatthe variety of subject matter examined in this collection will inspireothers to pursue further research in this rich field.
We would like to thank the organizers of the Oxford conference, Carolyne Larrington and Heather O’Donoghue, for encouraging us to edit the
papers for publication. We are also grateful to Alison Finlay for overseeing 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 characteristically 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 copyrightillustrations: 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
Note: Certain illustrations in the print version of Dimitra Fimi's essay are not
reproduced in this online edition because of copyright restrictions; readers areadvised to consult the printed edition of this book.

Forewordv

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 theold north new. All three volumes were written in the 1920s by the sameauthor, 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 Philosophical and Literary Society, and the author himself was Ernest Rücker
Eddison (1882–1945). In Eddison’s three volumes, two novels and atranslation, we may observe many of the processes and priorities of theold 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 theirdaughter plays the spinet in the next room the wife has a suggestion forpost-prandial entertainment—‘Should we finish that chapter of Njal’ssaga?’ And that is just what they do. She reads the saga chapter out loudfrom the household copy with its faded green cover—a detail that identifies 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 atBergþórshváll. 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 disappears—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 ofconflict 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

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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 suggests, 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 theassistance 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 Borgarfjörður, 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 Anglophile hostess Svava Þórhallsdóttir. It may be that Eddison shared aninterest 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 English that trail had already been blazed in works about heroes such as
Grettir Ásmundarson, Leifr Eiríksson and, latterly, Gísli Súrsson, courtesy of Maurice Hewlett’s The Outlaw (1924). The eponymous hero of
Eddison’s narrative was a less familiar figure. Styrbjörn, nephew andward of King Eirekr of Sweden, who eventually challenged his uncle forthe throne at the battle of Fýrisvellir, is mentioned briefly in a handful ofsagas, and more extensively in Styrbjarnar þáttr Svíakappa (Flateyjarbók, 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 othersagas, and the confidence to narrate the tale so deftly.
Three books, then, by the same author, and if we add up his score wefind an Oxford graduate with a not very English-sounding middle name,
who had lived in Leeds, was an accomplished Icelandicist, was known tolearned Icelanders, and had authored an heroic fantasy novel with astrong Icelandic and Old English inflection. This could almost be a penportrait 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Forewordvii

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 regionalism, an unrelenting commitment to outreach through translation andnovelistic 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 theheart of the essays in Old Norse Made New. We learn of Thomas Gray’s
engagement with the supernatural in Njáls saga; of the traditions oftranslating eddic verse from 1797 to the present day; of the style andsubstance of Morris’ poetry and Tolkien’s prose; of regional fictions set
in the Lake district and in Orkney; and of old northern voices and values
in modern children’s literature. It is, in truth, hard to imagine Eddison
taking part in runic gymnastics, but it would not be difficult to identify
a cultural politics (albeit one less sulphurous than that of Guido von Listand his admirers) underpinning his medievalism.
Eddison seems not to have been a member of the Viking Society, butthere is every reason to believe that he would have relished the medievalist witness represented by the essays in this volume published under
the Society’s imprint. The editors and the present author hope that these
papers will also find favour with present-day readers eager to explore theways in which dedicated British enthusiasts over several centuries havesought to make Old Norse and the old north their own.

viii

Old Norse Made New

Thomas Gray’s Translations of Old Norse Poetry

1

THOMAS GRAY’S TRANSLATIONS OF OLD NORSE POETRYALISON FINLAY

According to a legend of the early nineteenth century General Wolfe,
who captured Quebec from the French in 1759, carried into the battle acopy of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’. The
night before the battle he reputedly read the poem aloud to his officers,
saying, ‘I would rather have been the author of that piece than beat the
French tomorrow.’1 To the reader of Old Norse literature this story irresistibly suggests a parallel with the story of St Óláfr, before the Battle ofStiklastaðir in 1030, calling on his Icelandic poet Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld to recite the Bjarkamál, a heroic lay calling on legends from theheroic Danish past in order to awaken the warriors to battle.2 Both stories
are likely to be apocryphal, but the parallel serves as a reminder that the
poetry of the eighteenth century, even in a meditative vein, had a public, generalizing function not dissimilar to that of the works producedby the Old Norse court skalds. The awakening appetite for the ‘Gothic’that Gray was among the first to exploit marks a new preoccupation withthe response of the reader, in terms of the evocation of emotions such as
fear and horror, that delves below the smooth surface of eighteenthcentury poetic decorum.
Gray’s ‘Elegy’ was published in 1751 and won instant success as
the iconic poem of its age: meditative, reflective, expressing a senseof mourning as its title implies, but in a generalized, abstracted veincharacteristic of the public voice of eighteenth-century poetry. Theremay be a foretaste of the empathy of later romantic poets for the simple
and rustic in the lamentation for the unsung lives of the ‘Rude forefathers of the Hamlet’, but this is broadened into the eternal philosophicalproposition that the rewards of pomp and riches are fleeting (Gray
1966, 38):
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the Poor.
For an examination of the legend, see Stokes 1929, 83–88.
The story is told in Óláfs saga helga in Heimskringla (Snorri Sturluson
1941–51, II 361–62).
1
2

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Old Norse Made New
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

The harmonious, balanced manipulation of metre and rhyme andthe Latinate diction conform to the principles of classical decorumthat prevailed in Gray’s time. The poem was enormously influential:
more than fifty separate editions were published in the first fifty
years after its composition, leaving aside its countless appearancesin periodicals and anthologies, where indeed it has featured as a staple
ever since.
Gray’s two translations, or imitations as he called them himself, of
Old Norse poems were also influential, but in a different direction. Written before 1761, though not published till 1768, they mark the beginningof the taste for the supernatural, craggy, and mysterious that becamea strong fashion at the end of the eighteenth century and sought its
narratives and conceptual schemes from cultures other than the classical
Latin and Greek models that had held sway for the past century. It is
this fashion for the dark and dramatic that leads the heroine of Northanger Abbey to startle her social circle with the announcement (Austen
1933, V 112),
I have heard that something very shocking indeed, will soon come out in
London. [. . .] I have [. . .] heard that it is to be more horrible than any thing wehave met with yet. [. . .] It is to be uncommonly dreadful. I shall expect murderand every thing of the kind.

Jane Austen, writing in the 1790s, was mocking the current fad for fantastic horror fiction, the Gothic novel; to Catherine Morland, ‘horrible’
and ‘uncommonly dreadful’ are terms of high praise. In fact the term
‘Gothic’ for this style of fiction harks back to the customary reference, in
Gray’s time, to the Germanic or Teutonic as ‘Gothic’. This can be seen in
Gray’s note at the beginning of ‘The Fatal Sisters’, explaining the meaning of ‘valkyrie’ (Gray 1966, 214):
Note—The Valkyriur were female Divinities, Servants of Odin (or Woden) in
the Gothic mythology: their name signifies Chuser[s] of the slain. They were
mounted on swift horses with drawn swords in their hands, & in the throng of
battle selected such as were destined to slaughter, & conducted them to Valhalla,
the hall of Odin, or paradise of the Brave, where they attended the banquet, &served the departed Heroes with horns of mead & ale.

The selection of poems that Gray chose to translate is, at first sight,
surprising. ‘The Fatal Sisters’ is a version of Darraðarljóð, a poem looselyThomas Gray’s Translations of Old Norse Poetry

3classified as skaldic although its metre is the eddic fornyrðislag. It
is found in chapter 157 of Njáls saga in the context of the saga’s
narrative of the battle of Clontarf, where it is supposedly chanted by agroup of supernatural females—identified by Gray as valkyries, as thepoem itself hints but does not state explicitly—who are depicted before
the battle weaving a cloth from the intestines of dead warriors, on aloom weighted with human heads. The second poem, ‘The Descent of
Odin’, is based on Baldrs draumar (called Vegtamskviða in some of
the manuscripts where it is preserved), a mythological poem of eddic
type although it is not actually found in the Codex Regius collection.
It narrates Óðinn’s descent into the underworld to interrogate a v†lva(Gray’s translation is ‘Prophetess’) from the world of the dead, about
the fate in store for his dead son Baldr. From a modern point of viewthe choice seems obscure, largely because both poems fall outside thegeneric and editorial categories imposed by modern scholarship:
Darraðarljóð as a poem neither fully eddic nor metrically skaldic,
divorced from the mythical and legendary narrative cycles of the
Poetic Edda and peripheral to the main narrative of the saga text inwhich it survives, and Baldrs draumar as part of the ‘Eddica minora’, thepoems relevant to the cycle found in the Codex Regius but not actually
included in it.
Gray’s choice needs to be seen in context, not only that of the limitedaccess that he had to Old Norse texts, but also the nature of the projectin which he originally intended to incorporate his translations. The‘advertisement’ preceding these texts (together with a third poem, ‘The
Triumphs of Owen’) in the 1768 edition of his poems, in which they
were first published, outlines this (Gray 1966, 27):
The Author once had thoughts (in concert with a friend) of giving the History
of English Poetry: In the Introduction to it he meant to have produced somespecimens of the Style that reigned in ancient times among the neighbouring
nations, or those who had subdued the greater part of this Island, and were ourProgenitors: the following three Imitations made a part of them. He has longsince drop’d his design, especially after he had heard, that it was already in thehands of a Person well qualified to do it justice, both by his taste, and his
researches into antiquity.3

The person of taste referred to is Thomas Warton, Professor of Poetryat Oxford from 1756 to 1766 (Lonsdale 1969, 210–14, Clunies Ross
1998, 24). His History of English Poetry appeared in 1774, without
3
A facsimile of the page can be viewed at <http://www.thomasgray.org/cgibin/view.cgi?collection=primary&edition=1768>, p. 75.

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Old Norse Made New

the Norse (or indeed Celtic or Anglo-Saxon) material originally includedin Gray’s scheme, though Warton makes some informed remarks aboutskaldic diction (Warton 1774; but see Clunies Ross 1998, 47–50).
Gray’s mooted history was planned in collaboration with his friend
William Mason. Warton’s competing history may have served as a convenient excuse for its abandonment, but Gray notoriously failed to finish
projects, as he acknowledged in a letter to his friend Horace Walpole
when he sent him a copy of his ‘Elegy’: ‘You will, I hope, look upon it in
the light of a thing with an end to it; a merit that most of my writings
have wanted, and are like to want’.4 The ‘advertisement’ underlines Gray’s
scholarly attitude to his material, but more significantly, the fact that hewas staking a claim to the products of Viking culture as a close extension of the English: ‘those who had subdued the greater part of thisIsland, and were our Progenitors’. In this context it may be significant
that he gives as source for ‘The Fatal Sisters’ ‘the Orcades of Thormodus
Torfaeus. Hafniæ. 1697’, only then adding ‘& also in Bartholinus’ (Gray
1966, 29), a reference to the work of Thomas Bartholin, which was infact Torfaeus’s source. The Orcadian relevance of Darraðarljóð perhaps
gave it a particular priority for Gray and caused him to cite this more
specifically Orcadian source. Also to be noted is the equivalence inGray’s mind, and that of his contemporaries, of early Scandinavian andCeltic cultures. Margaret Omberg (1976, 26) notes that the Ossianic
poems of James Macpherson, published in 1762 and 1763 and much
admired by Gray, not only stoked the enthusiasm of the eighteenthcentury literary world for the exotic charms of primitive poetry in general,
but were also
instrumental in the awakening of interest in ancient Scandinavia. Their inspirational effect on both Gray and Percy suggests that without this initial stimulus,
Gray would not have written his Norse odes, nor Percy produced his translations of northern poetry in Five Pieces of Runic Poetry.

Among the settings of the Ossianic poems is Inistore, that is, Orkney,at the time of Viking rule, and the Scandinavians feature as the traditional enemies of the Celtic protagonists—precisely the setting that forms
the backdrop to ‘The Fatal Sisters’. Macpherson’s attempts to differentiate Celtic and Viking cultures are at best superficial, though Omberg
argues that Macpherson’s dependence on information gleaned fromMallet’s Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc increased in the courseof his writing (Omberg 1976, 30). The fact that the third ‘specimen’ of
4June 12, 1750 (Toynbee and Whibley [1935] 1971, I 327); see also Walpole’s
remark cited in Note 13 below.

Thomas Gray’s Translations of Old Norse Poetry

5

early poetry carried over by Gray from the aborted History to the1768 edition of his poems was the Welsh ‘The Triumphs of Owen’supports the view that Gray did not strongly differentiate the Norse fromthe Celtic, although Margaret Clunies Ross (1998, 106) gives him credit
for a scholarly discrimination beyond that of many contemporaries:
His Commonplace Books reveal that he read very widely indeed in available
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scandinavian authors, and was not taken
in by fashionable hypotheses or confusions such as the Celtic/Teutonic one
perpetrated by Mallet.

Gray’s access to Old Norse texts was mediated through the worksof antiquarians writing in Latin, but his Commonplace Books confirm
the wide range of his reading in the available material. A considerable
amount of antiquarian literature was available, going back as early as
the Danish Ole Worm, whose Runer seu Danica literatura antiquissima
was published in 1636, and, in England, the works of William Temple(1690) and George Hickes (1705). More recently, in 1755 the Swiss
writer Mallet’s Introduction à l’Histoire de Dannemarc reached a wider
audience, and was enthusiastically read by Gray. Some of these works
were rare, but that was no problem for Gray who led a reclusive life in
Cambridge as a fellow of Peterhouse, moving to Pembroke College
when Peterhouse became too rowdy. When in 1759 he moved to London, he immediately retreated into the newly opened British Museum.
So he was well placed for access to scholarly collections. There isscholarly precision, too, in Gray’s citing of his source at the beginningof each Ode. As already noted, the ‘The Fatal Sisters’ is attributedto Thormodus Torfaeus, the Latinized name of the Icelandic scholarÞormóðr Torfason, who quoted Darraðarljóð in the preface to his
history of Orkney (1697). Gray acknowledges the presence of the poem
also in ‘Bartholinus’, who is also named as the source for ‘The Descentof Odin’.
The Danish scholar Bartholin’s Antiquitatum Danicarum de causis
contemptæ a Danis adhuc gentilibus mortis was published, also in
Copenhagen, in 1689. This work was highly influential, not only becauseof its many citations of Old Norse poetry and sagas, together with Latintranslations, which were a mine for authors like Gray, but also in terms ofthe contextual framework in which they were set. Bartholin, who held
the position of Antiquarius Regius—official antiquary to the Danish
Crown—had as his amanuensis and assistant the famous Icelandic
scholar and manuscript collector Árni Magnússon, who provided him
with the Icelandic texts and translations for his work (Már Jónsson

6

Old Norse Made New

1998, 37–40). Bartholin’s argument is suggested by the title of histreatise, which can be translated as ‘Danish antiquities concerning thecauses of the Danes’ contempt for death while they were still pagan’. He
aimed to represent the ancient Danes, by which he meant the Scandinavian
peoples in general, as stoical heroes whose indifference to bodily pain
and belief in an afterlife had something in common with Christianity,
despite their pagan status. Margaret Clunies Ross summarizes the thesis(1998, 83):
Whereas the Romans died for their republic, the Danes, obeying their kings,
chose to die in battle rather than in bed. The Danes also had a horror ofbeing taken as captives of war and they scorned the pain of torture.
The moral imperative of dying an honourable and glorious death wasthus a strong impulse to extraordinary courage. The other major reason why
the Danes scorned death derived from their religious beliefs in the survival of
the soul, particularly the warrior soul which was held to travel straight toValhalla.

We see here the origin of the stereotype of the Nordic hero who laughs in
the face of death, which has exercised a powerful influence on Englishspeaking enthusiasts for Old Norse literature ever since. Bartholin
illustrated his claim using a wide range of ‘old codices and monuments
until now unedited’,5 including laws, historical texts, and sagas as wellas poetry, sometimes whole poems and sometimes single stanzas quoted
as illustration to the argument. Since many of these texts had indeed notbeen published before, the range of Old Norse literature available to thescholarly world was greatly enlarged.
Gray’s choice of material for his two Odes, then, should be seen against
the background of the access to Old Norse literature afforded to him
in this generous anthology. The Commonplace Book in which he wrote
notes for these two poems, as well as the Latin texts from which
he translated them and, ultimately, drafts of the poems themselves,also includes, as it happens, the fragmentary Bjarkamál mentioned
above.6 Gray found this too in Bartholin, for whose thesis it provides
ample support. An earlier Commonplace Book contains a list of poems,
including those on which Gray based his Odes, under the heading
5

This translates the book’s sub-title, ‘ex vetustis codicibus & monumentis
hactenus ineditis congesti’ (Clunies Ross 1998, 83).
6
The Latin versions of Baldrs draumar, Darraðarljóð, and the Bjarkamál
fragment are transcribed in Gray’s Commonplace Book, III 1041–47; his autographtexts of ‘The Fatal Sisters’ and ‘The Descent of Odin’ appear on pp. 1068 and
1070 (Clunies Ross 1998, 106).

Thomas Gray’s Translations of Old Norse Poetry

7‘Gothic’,7 noting his sources for each. Omberg (1976, 39) reproduces
the list with the speculation that it was ‘presumably intended as a
guide for translations to be included in the projected history of English
poetry’:
Incantation of Woden’s (call’d Vegtams Kvitha) very ancient. in Bartholin p. 632.
Destroyed by Hella, in Ireland
Death Song of Regner Lodbrog, King of Denmark. About in Mallet and Wormius.
A.D. 859.
Hardraade
Harald the Brave, Prince of Norway’s Complaint of thecruelty of his Mistress Elissif, Daughter of Jarislas,
King of Russia, middle of the 11th Century (from the Olafs
Noregs Konunga)in Mallet and Barthol.
The Praises of Haquin, slain in battle in 960, and Ode
written by Eyvind, Chief of the Skalds, Cousin to thisPrince, who was son of Harald Harfax, First King of all
Norwayin Mallet.
Some parts of the Voluspa (cited so often in the Edda)or Oracles of Vola & the Havamaal, or Sublime Discourseof Woden, preserved by Saemund Sigfusson (inthe first Edda) who was born in 1057.
In Mallet and Resenius.
The song of the Weird Sisters, or Valkyries—
after A.D. 1029
In Tormodus Torfaeus, Orcad.
& Bartholin.
Dialogue of Hervor and Angantyr
In Peringskiold and Dr. Hickes.

The list shows the wide range, within the limits of his time and its Latinate
culture, of Gray’s reading, and a fairly eclectic choice of sources: poems
both eddic and skaldic, including praise poems, elegies, and love songs,
as well as the elements of incantation and ‘sublime discourse’, ranging
in date from ‘very ancient’ to ‘after A.D. 1029’ (though not strictly inchronological order, since the latter is followed by the ‘ancient’ Wakingof Angantýr).
In the absence of other evidence as to why the two extant lays were thefirst (and apparently only) adaptations actually undertaken by Gray, we
may deduce that what attracted him about these two poems was their
setting in a liminal space between the human and the supernatural or
between life and death, and their use of strong visual images. Gray’s
practice in his versions is to emphasize and expand the representation of
7
At the beginning of Commonplace Book II. A second list of Anglo-Saxon andCeltic pieces follows. The italics are Omberg’s and indicate Gray’s later annotations
to the list.

8

Old Norse Made New

these images, while keeping to a minimum any sense of their belonging
to a wider context: the fact that their mythological background was
unfamiliar to the reader adds to their mysterious power.
The reliance of the poems on dramatic visual images evidently contributed to their wide appeal and was picked up by two contemporary
visual artists who contributed strongly to the Gothic movement: William
Blake and the Swiss Henry Fuseli, who both illustrated ‘The Descent of
Odin’; Blake made ten watercolours of this and another ten of ‘The Fatal
Sisters’ as part of a set of illustrations to Gray’s collected poems, executed
between 1797 and 1798. The earliest sketch for Fuseli’s ‘Odin in the
Underworld’ can be dated to 1771, and is therefore a very early response
to Gray’s poem.8
Gray, then, was in the vanguard of the search for new and striking
images, which often in fact took the form of the old and primitive, His
aim was to regenerate the rigid conventions of eighteenth-century
classicism with a new interest in the sublime. At the same time Gray
makes no attempt to cut loose from the harmonious and regular form anddiction that characterized his ‘Elegy’. He was an accomplished classicist who composed more verse in Latin than in English, and was strongly
opposed to the view later proposed by Wordsworth in his Preface to
Lyrical Ballads (Coleridge and Wordsworth 1802, vii) that the languageof poetry should be ‘language really used by men’. Gray was happy toassert the opposite:9
The language of the age is never the language of poetry [ . . .]. Our poetry[. . .] has a language peculiar to itself; to which almost every one, thathas written, has added something by enriching it with foreign idioms andderivatives: Nay sometimes words of their own composition or invention.
Shakespear and Milton have been great creators this way; and no one morelicentious than Pope or Dryden, who perpetually borrow expressions from theformer.

His Norse poems maintain this elevated diction, not only in the choiceof Latinate terms—of blood, for example, the words ‘gore’, ‘carnage’,‘ensanguined’, and ‘crimson’ are used—but in phrases borrowed frompoets such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser. These he actuallyemphasizes by pointing out the parallels in footnotes: in ‘The Fatal
8
These and other illustrations of Gray’s works are analysed by Margaret
Clunies Ross (1998, 118–66), including reproductions in black and white. Blake’s
paintings can be viewed in colour at <http://www.blakearchive.org> (go to ‘Worksin the archive’, then ‘Illustrations to Gray’s “Poems” (c. 1797–98)’).
9
Letter to Richard West, April 1742 (Toynbee and Whibley [1935] 1971, I 192).

Thomas Gray’s Translations of Old Norse Poetry

9

Sisters’, following the explanatory note on valkyries, Gray has two notes
referring to echoes from Paradise Lost and Julius Caesar; and theinfluence on this poem of Macbeth has frequently been noted (Clunies
Ross 1998, 117). Blake, incidentally, replaces the twelve ‘sisters’ ofGray’s poem (which accurately follows its Norse source in this respect)with three, aligning them with the three ‘weird sisters’ in Macbeth but
also with the classical belief in three Fates. As Clunies Ross points out(1998, 118),
these overt canonical references [ . . .] embedded this new poetry with its
exotic subject matter in an accepted imaginative context and allowed [thereader] to feel secure in the minor adventure of discovering that the antique
Norse sublime [. . .] was not too different from Shakespeare, Milton and theclassics.

The exploration of unfamiliar and primitive cultures and the emphasison the supernatural and terrible was characteristic of the eighteenthcentury quest for the sublime in both visual and literary forms. As it was
described by theorists of the time, the objective was to shock the imagination into the abandonment of the reflective mode, so that the distinction
between the object being described and its representation is elided:10
and the brain being deeply penetrated by those impressions, the very objects
themselves are set as it were before us, and consequently we are sensible ofthe same passion that we should feel from the things themselves [. . .]; andtherefore when the imagination is so inflamed, as to render the soul utterly
incapable of reflecting, there is no difference between the images and thethings themselves.

In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful, published in 1757, Edmund Burke argued that ‘terror’
was ‘in all cases whatsoever [. . .] the ruling principle of the sublime’,elaborating the psychological mechanism by which this aesthetic principle was perceived to operate on the receiver (Burke 1757, I vii: 13):
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is tosay, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or
operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it
is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.

Terror, then, is thought of as a trigger, that shocks the reader’s mind intoa powerful emotional engagement with the work. Gray himself wrote tohis Scottish publisher Beattie that he was attracted by the ‘wild spirit’ of
10John Dennis, writing in 1704 of Homer and Virgil (cited in Clunies Ross
1998, 108).

10

Old Norse Made New

these poems,11 and many readers responded in similar terms, Beattie
stating approvingly in reply that12
The Fatal Sisters exhibits a collection of the most frightful images that everoccupied human imagination: some of them in the hands of an ordinary Poetwould have sunk into burlesque (particularly the circumstance of the warriors
heads) but You have made every thing magical and dreadful; Your choice ofwords on this, as on every other occasion, is the happiest that can be.

Such enthusiasm was not universal. Gray’s friend Horace Walpole, himself an early proponent of the Gothic whose novel, The Castle of Otranto,
was published in 1767, commented that ‘Gray has translated two noble
incantations from the Lord knows who, a Danish Gray, who lived the
Lord knows when’,13 and still more dismissively,14Gray has added to his poems three ancient Odes from Norway and Wales. The
subjects of the two first are grand and picturesque, and there is his genuine
vein in them; but they are not interesting, and do not, like his other poems,
touch any passion. Our human passions, which he masters at will in his
former pieces, are here not affected. Who can care through what horrors a
Runic savage arrived at all the joys and glories they could conceive, the supreme
felicity of boozing ale out of the skull of an enemy in Odin’s Hall?

It is interesting that Walpole reproduces, and by implication attributes
quite unfairly to Gray, the ubiquitous misconception that the Vikings
drank out of their enemies’ skulls—a belief arising out of the mistranslation by Magnús Ólafsson of Laufás, included by Ole Worm in Literaturarunica (1636), of the second of these lines from Krákumál:
Drekkum bjór at bragði
ór bjúgviðum hausa
let us drink beer boldly out of curved branches of skulls [a kenning for
drinking horns; the skulls are those of the animals on which the horns grew]translated as ‘ex craniis eorum quos ceciderunt’ (Gordon 1957, lxix–lxx).
11
Letter to James Beattie, December 1767 (Toynbee and Whibley [1935]
1971, III 983).
12
Letter of February 1768 (Toynbee and Whibley [1935] 1971, III 1011).
13
Letter to George Montagu, May 1761. Walpole further refers to the originalplan for the incorporation of the Odes in a literary history, with a waspish but
prophetic comment on Gray’s dilatoriness: ‘They are to be enchased in a history ofEnglish bards, which Mason and he are Writing; but of which the former has not
written a word yet, and of which the latter, if he rides Pegasus at his usual footpace, will finish the first page two years hence.’ (Wright [1840] 1842, III 123).
14
Letter to George Montagu, March 1768 (Wright [1840] 1842, III 516).

Thomas Gray’s Translations of Old Norse Poetry

11

Despite Gray’s energetic search for highly coloured images and his
popular success, the academic origin of the enterprise is still visible in
the presentation of the poems. Each has a learned apparatus of footnotes,
such as the accurate account of the valkyries referred to before, which is
attached to line 1 of the ‘The Fatal Sisters’. This includes the correct Old
Norse plural form valkyriur, although the word itself never actually appears in the poem or in its Old Norse original. Given that there are footnotes
at all, in fact, we might expect more explanation and contextualizationof what is going on in the poems. The footnotes are actually rather few,
and in both poems are concentrated at the beginning of the text, in orderto give the appearance of learned commentary rather than the reality.
The question whether Gray had any first-hand knowledge of Scandinavian languages has been debated at some length (Lonsdale 1969,
210–14; Omberg 1976, 41–42). It seems clear that he did not, although
he had read widely in the learned literature in Latin, still the lingua
franca of scholarship in this field, some of which cited the Icelandic
texts as well as translating them; and it is clear that Gray took someinterest in the original language: witness the citation of the first line ofeach poem in the original. His notes in his Commonplace Books include
the occasional addition of a word or more of the original. An example of
his awareness of the original language comes in the first line of ‘The
Descent of Odin’. Gray’s source began from the first line of stanza two of
Baldrs draumar: ‘Upp reis Óðinn’, which he renders ‘Up rose the King of
Men . . .’ reproducing the word order of the original and taking advantage of the linguistic similarity. Margaret Clunies Ross (1998, 116 n.
21) notes that in Gray’s autograph versions ‘uprose’ appears as one word,
imitating the Icelandic form which, in the version he used, was also
rendered as a single word.
The use made by Gray of his Latin sources is analysed by Lonsdale(1969, 213), and Clunies Ross and Omberg comment further. A full exploration of the subject would require the presentation of Gray’s texts infull, alongside the Latin texts and the Old Norse originals used by the
Latin translators, and is not attempted here. The comments below are
confined to some examples of how Gray’s texts differ from their Old
Norse originals, and the conclusions to be drawn from these about his
techniques of adaptation.
‘The Fatal Sisters’
Gray’s Ode ( Gray 1966, 27–31) follows the example of Njáls saga itself
by contextualizing the poem with a prose preamble, locating the

12

Old Norse Made New

gruesome vision of the weaving valkyries with reference to the battle of
Clontarf in 1014, in which Sigurðr, jarl of Orkney, assists the Irish kingSigtryggr silkiskegg against Brján, king of Dublin. This identificationin fact sits badly with the Irish victory recorded in Njáls saga, since thepoem refers to an apparently victorious young king (Sigtryggr?) presiding over disaster for the Irish, and it has been suggested that the poem infact belongs to a Viking victory of 919, a date which fits better with theheathen spirit of the poem.15 Gray’s preface allows this discrepancy topass without overt comment, rationalizing it with reference to Sigtryggr’s
near defeat and explaining the grief of the Irish, mentioned in the poem,
with reference to the death of Brján (Gray 1966, 27):
The Earl & all his forces were cut to pieces, & Sictryg was in danger of a total
defeat, but the Enemy had a greater loss by the death of Brian, their King, whofell in the action.

For Gray, as indeed for the author of Njáls saga, the circumstances of thebattle are of less importance than the symbolic effect of the weaving offate, and the metaphorical contrast established between the masculine
and extraordinary actions of war and the feminine and quotidian activity of weaving.
As in the saga, the vision is observed at a distance from the battle by ‘anative of Caithness’, named in the saga as D†rruðr—a name explainedby Russell Poole as ‘probably an etymological whimsy or blunder’ (1991,
142) based on the difficult phrase, vefr darraðar, from which the poem
derives its (modern) name—but anonymous in Gray’s version.16 Grayplaces the vision, and therefore the battle, on ‘Christmas-day’ rather
than Good Friday, the date named in the saga; more significantly for his
interpretation, the strange figures of the vision are seen riding towards,
and disappearing into, not a dyngja ‘women’s work-building’ with agluggr ‘window’ but ‘a hill’ inside which they are observed through ‘an
opening in the rocks’. They are ‘gigantic figures resembling Women’rather than the konur ‘women’ of the saga. Here we see Gray beginning
15

This was first suggested by Nora Kershaw; see Poole 1991, 120–25.
Gray’s modern editors refer approvingly (Gray 1966, 211) to his avoidanceof Torfaeus’s erroneous rendering of darraðar as a proper name, translating vefr
darraðar as Telam Darradi (though Torfaeus did, of course, have the authority of
the Njáls saga prose):
It should be noted that Gray was not misled by these renderings, having
written ‘web of war’ both times. Indeed it seems to the present editors, whoseknowledge of ON is also rather limited, that Gray did much better than he has
usually been given credit for in avoiding the pitfalls of this poem.
16

Thomas Gray’s Translations of Old Norse Poetry

13

to magnify the horrifying imagery of the poem, as he does repeatedly
throughout both Odes (and, in the locating of the vision within the hill,
perhaps conflating the Norse with the Celtic mythological landscape).
On the other hand, his preface does not follow the saga prose where it
details the horrific details of the weaving process (Njáls saga 454–59):
Mannah†fuð váru fyrir kljána, en þarma ór m†nnum fyrir viptu ok garn, sverð
var fyrir skeið, en †r fyrir hræl.
men’s heads served as loomweights and intestines from men as weft andwarp, a sword as the sword-beater and an arrow as the pin-beater.17

This is in line with the saga convention in which verses are offered as
corroboration of material presented less dramatically in prose, but Gray
more artfully reserves these details for his poetic text.
Apart from a reference to ‘the loom of hell’, Gray’s opening stanza
does not derive from his source but consists of an atmospheric prelude
establishing the metaphorical parallel between battle and storm:
Now the storm begins to lower,(Haste, the loom of hell prepare)Iron-sleet of arrowy shower
Hurtles in the darken’d air.

This metaphorical equivalence is a commonplace of skaldic poetry, as
Gray presumably knew from his wider reading of Norse sources in translation, but is not referred to in Darraðarljóð except in the terse rignirblóði ‘blood rains down’ (l. 4). Gray explicitly associates these lines notwith the Norse poetic tradition, but with the English, in footnotes highlighting his own echoing of Milton (Gray 1966, 215):
How quick they wheel’d & flying behind them shot
Sharp sleet of arrowy shower[s]—Milton Par[adise]: Reg[ained]. [iii. 323–4]

and Shakespeare:
The noise of battle hurtled in the air. Shakesp: Jul: Caesar [II. ii. 22].

This transformation perfectly illustrates Gray’s use of his Odes as a general introduction to the ‘spirit’ of northern literature rather than a faithfulrepresentation of his originals, and also his ambitions of transforming
this spirit into an idiom recognizable from—and by implication, related
to—the English poetic canon. It also, in fact, demonstrates the con17
I cite the translation of Russell Poole (1991, 119), who analyses the technological terms used in the poem in detail. As he points out, it ‘constitut[es] our only
detailed medieval account’ of the process (132–33).

14

Old Norse Made New

straints imposed by the scholarly limitations of his time, for the imageryof the cloud of arrows is clearly inspired by the misunderstood kenningrifs reiðiský. This phrase, translated by Russell Poole as ‘the hanging
cloud of the loom beam’ (1991, 132)18 refers to the ‘cloth’ produced by theweaving process, but was misunderstood by the Latin translator who
renders it nubes sagittarum ‘cloud of arrows’. A similar misunderstandingof Old Norse metaphor occurs at the end of Gray’s third stanza, where thevalkyries’ self-identifying reference to themselves as vinur Randvés bana‘female friends of the slayer of Randvér’ (i.e. of Óðinn who, according to
Old Norse heroic legend, brought about the killing of Randvér, son ofJ†rmunrekkr) was inaccessible to both Latin and English translators. Graychooses to imply that the name refers to an otherwise unmentioned victim of the fate determined by the valkyries, in a neatly constructed parallelwith the downfall of the Orkney jarl, alluded to in the prose preamble:
Weaving many a Soldier’s doom,
Orkney’s woe, and Randver’s bane.

Gray adapts the poem’s form to the conventions of his time. The elevenstanzas of Darraðarljóð, of variable length (8–10 lines, apart from thefinal quatrain) are rendered by Gray’s sixteen stanzas, in the regularmetre and rhyme scheme of the so-called ‘Horatian Ode’. The only concession to the form of the original is the rendering of the thrice-repeatedrefrain Vindum vindum / vef darraðar with ‘(Weave the crimson web ofwar.)’, which occurs twice in Gray’s version, though not at the same
points as in the original.
Gray’s regular intensification of the gruesome imagery of his originalis illustrated by his version of the second stanza. The Icelandic text iscited here with Russell Poole’s translation (1991, 116) alongside:sá er orpinn vefr
ýta þ†rmum
ok harðkljáðr
h†fðum manna;eru dreyrrekind†rr at sk†ptum,
járnvarðr yllir
en †rum ?hælaðr?.
Skulum slá sverðum
sigrvef þenna.

The fabric is warped
with men’s intestinesand firmly weighted
with men’s heads;
bloodstained spears serveas heddle rods,
the shed rod is ironclad
and ?pegged? with arrows.
With our swords we must strike
this fabric of victory.

The technical details of the weaving craft, inaccessible to the modern
reader, would presumably have been less so in Gray’s day, but rather
18

For detailed analysis of the kenning see Clunies Ross 1998, 114.

Thomas Gray’s Translations of Old Norse Poetry

15

than pursuing the minutiae of the metaphor, Gray heightens the language, mainly with the addition of intensifying adjectives (‘griesly’,‘gasping’, ‘trembling’):
See the griesly texture grow,(’Tis of human entrails made)And the weights, that play below
Each a gasping Warriour’s head.
Shafts for shuttles, dipt in gore,
Shoot the trembling cords along.
Sword, that once a Monarch bore,
Keep the tissue close & strong!

Gray’s choice of names for his valkyries is enterprising; he understands that the names given to these entities are representative, variableaccording to metrical requirements, and is able to draw on his own learned
researches for substitutes that fit his own purposes, so the Hildr [. . .] okH†rþrimul, Sanngríðr, Svipul and later Gunnr ok G†ndul of his original
are represented in
Mista black, terrific Maid,
Sangrida, and Hilda see[. . .]:
Gondula and Geira, spread
O’er the youthful King your shield.

The actual function of the valkyries—whether their weaving signifies
their actual determination, by a process conceived of as magic, of theoutcome of the distant battle or merely an omen or a visual representation of its events—is left obscure by the original poem (the point is
discussed by Poole (1991, 140–41)). The very last line of Gray’s rendition, ‘Hurry, hurry to the field’, suggests that this question was resolved
in his mind by an assumption that the valkyries are progressing from theprefiguring of the battle in the vision to actual participation in the slaughter, where Darraðarljóð itself simply has the speakers riding out á brautheðan ‘away from here’.
‘The Descent of Odin’
The somewhat less regular form of Gray’s second Ode (Gray 1966, 32–34) is partly determined by the casting of its original, Baldrs draumar,
like many eddic poems, in dialogue form: in this case, Óðinn’s interrogation of a v†lva, forcibly raised from the dead, about the fate in store forhis doomed son, Baldr. In this poem, as in Gray’s version, the dialogue
exchange determines the structure; but whereas the division of Baldrs

16

Old Norse Made New

draumar into eight-line stanzas is comparatively regular by eddic
standards, Gray divides his poem into blocks, varying in length, of rhyming couplets. The epic effect aimed for is intensified by his free expansionof the original, concentrating on effects he sees as particularly grotesqueor picturesque. For instance, Óðinn’s encounter with the canine guardian of the underworld is sparely narrated in the original:19mœtti hann hvelpi,þeim er ór Heliu kom.
Sá var blóðugr
um brióst framan,
ok galdrs f†ður
gó um lengi.

he met a hound-whelpthat came out of Hel.
It was bloody
down the front of its breast,and round wizardry’s father
went barking long.

This is considerably elaborated by Gray, clearly with the aim of injecting a note of terror, and with characteristic use of favourite terms such as‘gore’ and ‘carnage’:
Him the Dog of darkness spied:
His shaggy throat he open’d wide,
While from his jaws, with carnage fill’dFoam & human gore distill’d:Hoarse he bays with hideous din,Eyes, that glow, and fangs that grin,
And long pursues with fruitless yell
The Father of the powerful spell.

Probably also behind Gray’s selection of this image for expansion is his
eagerness to find parallels (in this case the hound Cerberus) in the classical mythology so familiar to himself and his audience; this also
underlies his footnote explicating the Norse belief in the underworld. In
the poem this is described as ‘Hela’s drear abode’ (rendering Heljar
ranni ‘the hall of Hel’ in Baldrs draumar 3), with the footnote
Niflheimr, the hell of the Gothic nations, consisted of nine worlds,20 to whichwere devoted all such as died of sickness, old-age, or by any other means thanin battle: Over it presided Hela, the Goddess of Death.
19

Text and translation are quoted from the edition of Ursula Dronke (1997, 154).
Starr and Hendrickson note that this reference, and the specifying of ‘nine
portals’ in the poem, seem to derive from the statement in Gylfaginning (Snorri
Sturluson 1982, 27) that Óðinn cast Hel í Niflheim ok gaf henni vald yfir níu
heimum ‘into Niflheimr and gave her power over nine worlds’, although thenine worlds referred to must be the nine regions making up the cosmos (seeV†luspá 2 (Dronke 1997, 7) and Anthony Faulkes’s note in Snorri Sturluson
1982, 65) rather than nine regions of Niflheimr as in Gray’s interpretation. It is
not known what access Gray had to Snorri’s reference (Gray 1966, 219).
20

Thomas Gray’s Translations of Old Norse Poetry

17This degree of detail, which is gratuitous from the point of view of comprehension of the poem, demonstrates Gray’s interest in Germanic
mythology for its own sake and his desire to share it with his contemporaries. He also inserts into the poem itself a specificity beyond that of theoriginal in referring to ‘the portals nine of hell’ and locating Óðinn’s
encounter ‘right against the eastern gate’ (fyrr austan dyrr ‘to the east of
the door’ in Baldrs draumar). Gray’s mythological preoccupations arerather specific, however: he is particularly interested in the conceptualizing of the underworld and the surrounding imagery of death and doom.
Óðinn is accorded little interest and the colourless epithet ‘King of Men’for the alda gautr, aldinn gautr of the original,21 and the Æsir are the‘sons of heaven’ without further distinction. Baldrs draumar implies
that Óðinn’s son Váli was conceived in order to achieve vengeance for
Baldr, and says outright that he did so at the age of one night; Graypasses over the drama of this story.
A different kind of expansion is seen in Gray’s elaborate image for themead which, the v†lva (or Prophetess, in Gray’s version) tells Óðinn,awaits Baldr in the underworld:
Pr. Mantling in the goblet see
The pure bev’rage of the bee,O’er it hangs the shield of gold;’Tis the drink of Balder bold.

The periphrastic elaboration of mj†ðr ‘mead’ as ‘the pure beverage ofthe bee’ represents a characteristic poetic habit of the poet who refers
elsewhere to the play of schoolboys who
succeedTo chase the rolling circle’s speed
22
Or urge the flying ball
21

This may be explained by the ‘motto’ Gray appended to the poem: ‘gautr is of
uncertain meaning’ (Gray 1966, 218). This is still only too true. Gautr is foundelsewhere as a name for Óðinn, and is usually identified with the tribal names for
the Goths and Gautar. But other explanations have been attempted: thus, ‘itseems to mean father, vide gjóta [to spawn]’ (Cleasby and Vigfusson 1874, s.v.
‘gautar’), and ‘one intended or consecrated as a sacrificial victim’ (La Farge andTucker 1992, 81), followed in Dronke’s translation, ‘aged god of sacrifice’ (1997,
154, 156). The latter interpretation appears to be pure conjecture, based on thecontext in Baldrs draumar. I am grateful for advice on this point to Anthony
Faulkes, who suggests ‘progenitor of the human race’ for alda gautr (based on theprobable relationship of gautr with gjóta).
22‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’ (Gray 1966, 8). On the artifice ofGray’s diction, see Spacks 1965.

18

Old Norse Made New

a generalizing tendency comparable to the metaphorical habits of mindof the skaldic poets, though its technique is different. It is classical inorigins and, in this case, probably represents Gray’s attempts to alignthis poem with the epic tradition.
Baldrs draumar concludes, like other dialogue poems involving Óðinn,with a riddling question that exposes the identity of the god; he in turnidentifies the v†lva as þriggja þursa móðir ‘mother of three monsters’.
The details are elusive; it is not clear why the god’s question is put or
indeed what the answer should be (it is usually taken to refer to thewaves), nor how it reveals his identity—except, perhaps, by the generalsituational similarity with poems like Vafþrúðnismál, where the mysterious inquirer into similar matters does turn out to be Óðinn. Gray offers
no speculation on these questions, nor on the identification, which the
mythologically informed Norse audience was no doubt intended to make,of the v†lva with Angrboða, the mother of Loki’s three monstrous children.
The giantess’s final taunt predicts the destruction of the world and thegods at Ragnar†k, and relies on allusiveness for its effect. The reference
to Loki has been prepared for by Óðinn’s implied identification of her;and the naming of ragnar†k of course conjures up, to those versed in its
mythological implications, the disaster that makes ironic the injunctionto Óðinn to ver hróðigr ‘rejoice’:
Heim ríð þú, Óðinn,ok ver hróðigr!
Svá komit manna
meirr aptr á vit,
er lauss Lokilíðr ór b†ndum
ok ragnar†kriúfendr koma.

Ride home, Óðinn,and exult!
No one will comeback again on such a visit,
when Loki, freed,
moves from his bonds
and Ragnar†karrives with ruin.

Gray’s paraphrase both provides his readers with some necessary exposition, and ends the poem in a melodramatic blaze:
Pr. Hie thee hence & boast at home,That never shall Enquirer comeTo break my iron-sleep again:
Till Lok has burst his tenfold chain,
Never, till substantial NightHas reassum’d her ancient right;
Till wrap’d in flames, in ruin hurl’d,Sinks the fabrick of the world.

The final footnote, though, reaffirms the scholarly impulse that underlay Gray’s quest for the sensational (Gray 1966, 220):

Thomas Gray’s Translations of Old Norse Poetry19

Lok is the evil Being, who continues in chains till the Twilight of the Gods
approaches, when he shall break his bonds; the human race, the stars, & sun,shall disappear; the earth sink in the seas, & fire consume the skies; even Odin
himself and his kindred-Deities shall perish. For a farther explanation of thismythology, see Mallet’s Introduction to the History of Denmark, 1755,
Quarto.

Thus Gray lays the climactic moment of Old Norse mythology before
his readers in two contrasting modes: one, the dramatic visionary effects
of poetry, the other, the authority of the learned note, complete withreference to an authoritative source. The dualism fittingly illustrates thetwo impulses behind his approach to his mythological sources.
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Stokes, Francis Griffin, ed., 1929. An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard byThomas Gray; The Text of the First Quarto with the Variants of the mss. &of the Early Editions (1751–71), a Bibliographical & Historical Introduction &Appendices on General Wolfe & The ‘Elegy’ & The Locality of the Churchyard
by Francis Griffin Stokes.
Temple, William 1690. Miscellanea. The Second Part. In Four Essays.
Torfæus, Thormod [Þormóðr Torfason] 1697. Orcades, seu rerum Orcadensium
historiæ libri tres.
Toynbee, Paget and Leonard Whibley, eds, [1935] 1971. The Correspondence ofThomas Gray. 3 vols.
Warton, Thomas 1774. The History of English Poetry I.
Worm, Ole 1636. Runir seu Danica literatura antiquissima.
Wright, J., ed., [1840] 1842. The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford.
Including Numerous Letters Now First Published from the Original Manuscripts. 4 vols.
The Thomas Gray archive: http://www.thomasgray.org/index.shtml

Translating the Poetic Edda into English

21

TRANSLATING THE POETIC EDDA INTO ENGLISH1CAROLYNE LARRINGTON

Early Knowledge of Norse Mythology
Norse mythology, and the poetry and prose which recounted or alluded
to it, was known about in England from the seventeenth century (seeQuinn and Clunies Ross 1994 for a summary and the unpublished thesis
of Bennett 1938 for detail). The Codex Regius, containing the great
majority of the poems that we now classify as eddic, was sent to Copenhagen from Iceland by Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson in 1643, and was
subsequently catalogued as GKS 2365 4to. In 1665 Peder Hans Resen
published an edition of V†luspá and Hávamál, providing them with a
Latin translation, though he did not make use of the Codex Regius as abasis for his texts (so Clunies Ross 1998, 180; contra Wawn 2000, 18
who suggests that Resen did employ the Codex Regius). With the addition of a text of Snorri’s Edda, the Resen volume introduced Norse
mythological poetry to the world (Quinn and Clunies Ross 1994, 193).
The first reference to this work in England is in the Preface to Robert
Sheringham’s De Anglorum gentis origine disceptatio, published in 1670
(see Quinn and Clunies Ross 1994, 193 n. 12). Moreover, a copy of
Resen’s Edda was given to the Bodleian Library in Oxford in the early
1670s. Aylett Sammes seems to have been the first to translate part of an
eddic poem (the Loddfáfnir stanzas of Hávamál) into English (Sammes
1676, 442ff), though his source was Sheringham’s citation of these verses
in Latin, rather than Resen’s Old Norse text.
The Swiss antiquarian Paul Henri Mallet wrote a two-volume accountof early Scandinavian beliefs and history in 1755 and 1766, entitled
Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc and Monumens de la mythologie
et de la poésie des Celtes. Like many of his contemporaries, Mallet
believed that the Northern races were Celtic in origin, hence his title. In
his work Mallet summarized parts of V†luspá, quoted from Hávamál in1
This essay originates in a talk given to the Viking Society Student Conference in 1997, before the publication of some substantial works on thereception of the Poetic Edda in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has been extensively revised to take account of Clunies Ross 1998 andWawn 2000.

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Old Norse Made New

French translation, and also reproduced the first few verses of Baldrs
draumar which had been published by the Danish scholar Thomas Bartholin (Bartholin 1689). Mallet’s Introduction was translated into English
by Bishop Thomas Percy under the title Northern Antiquities in 1770.
Thus it was primarily from Mallet and then from Percy that English
Romantic writers learned about Norse myth and heroic legend. They
made ‘versions’ of the Norse heroic poems they found in the earlier
works. Most notable was Thomas Gray’s ‘The Descent of Odin’, expanding upon Mallet’s excerpts from Baldrs draumar and the verses inBartholin (see Finlay in this volume). Gray published this and his other
Norse Ode in 1768 (Clunies Ross 1998, 105–09). Percy himself offered‘Five Pieces of Runick Poetry’ (Clunies Ross 2001) which were published in 1763. Although he was aware of the Resen versions of the firsttwo poems of the Codex Regius, Percy did not include any of the texts
normally considered part of the Poetic Edda in his collection. In 1787
the Arnamagnæan Commission in Copenhagen began to publish a fullyedited text of the Codex Regius and other eddic poems, at last permitting proper scholarly study and translation of the contents. The
Copenhagen Edda reserved re-editing V†luspá and Hávamál to the third
volume, on the grounds that Resen had already provided texts of them(however inadequate in terms both of textual soundness and of scholarly apparatus). Volume I of the Copenhagen Poetic Edda not only
furnished texts of the rest of the mythological poetry of the Codex Regius,
but also provided a useful Latin apparatus. This, as Clunies Ross puts it,
was ‘user-friendly for scholars who were neither native speakers of Icelandic nor trained in Old Norse studies’ (1998, 180–81). The possibilityof translating eddic verse into English from an Old Norse original, withthe help of a Latin translation and the substantial Copenhagen glossary,
now existed. This essay considers the translations of Cottle (1797),
Herbert (1804, 1806, and 1842), Thorpe (1866), Vigfusson and York
Powell (1883), Bray (1908), Bellows (1926), Hollander (1928), Terry(1969), Auden, Taylor, and Salus (1969) as well as Larrington (1996),
the expanded Auden and Taylor (1981), and Dronke (1969, 1997).
What is the Poetic Edda?
Translators are faced with choices about what to include in their versions of the Poetic Edda even before they begin to think about larger
translation principles. For early translators such decisions were limitedby the availability of edited texts. Although neither of the terms ‘eddic’and ‘eddaic’ was used in English until the middle of the nineteenthTranslating the Poetic Edda into English

23

century, ‘Edda’ is first used in James Macpherson’s An Introduction to
the History of Great Britain and Ireland (1771, 180) referring most
likely to Resen’s edition. Although the core of eddic verse is the collection of poems from V†luspá to Hamðismál contained in GKS 2365 4to,other poems in eddic metre such as Hrafnagaldur Óðins, Sólarljóð or
Svipdagsmál have been included in editions and translations at various
times, along with the now more-or-less canonical Baldrs draumar,
Grottas†ngr, Rígsþula and Hyndloljóð. Many fornaldarsögur containverses in eddic metre (edited in Ranisch and Heusler, 1903). ‘The Waking of Angantýr’, the ‘Riddles of Gestumblindi’, and ‘The Battle of theGoths and Huns’, all contained in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, are often
candidates for inclusion in eddic translations. The obscure HrafnagaldurÓðins appears in Thorpe’s translation of 1866, but is generally excluded
from the canon thereafter, although Annette Lassen (2006) has recently
argued that it may indeed be a genuine (late-) medieval poem. Hollander
asserts that Svipdagsmál is ‘undoubtedly genuine’, though this view
would by no means command universal agreement (Hollander 1936,xv). No later translators include it in their canon.
Early Translations: Cottle and Herbert
Problems of contextualization, the publisher’s and reader’s tolerance ofextensive apparatus and questions of contemporary taste have always
affected the choices Edda translators make. Clunies Ross points out thepractical difficulties facing early translators, who lacked Icelandic dictionaries and for whom the understanding of the complex mythology
underlying such an allusive poem as V†luspá was nigh impossible toobtain. Furthermore, since eighteenth-century literary theorists, and theirnineteenth-century followers, had ‘strongly-held ideas about what ancient poetry was like’ this led them ‘to seek out poems that they thought
exemplified their ideas, and thus to prefer a free over an exact translation’ (Clunies Ross 1998, 25). Such freedom of style and interpretation
is marked in Gray’s ‘The Descent of Odin’, and in the work of the earliest
translator of entire eddic poems: Amos Cottle. Cottle’s Icelandic Poetry,or the Edda of Sæmund was published in Bristol in 1797, and, as Wawn
notes (2000, 195–96), was based on the Latin translations in the first
volume of the Copenhagen Edda, available in the Bristol Public Libraryand borrowed by such notables as Robert Southey (Pratt 1994 gives afull account of the Bristol coterie).
Following the first volume of the Copenhagen Edda, Cottle thus includes the mythological poetry from Vafþrúðnismál to Alvíssmál, plus

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Old Norse Made New

Hrafnagaldur Óðins, Vegtamskviða (an earlier name for Baldrs draumar),Fjölsvinnsmál, and Hyndloljóð. V†luspá and Hávamál are omitted, as
they were from the first volume of the Copenhagen Edda. Cottle attaches
a substantial and learned introduction to his translations; since he rightly
assumes that his readership will be most familiar with Greek mythology
he develops a lengthy comparison between the Norse deities and the
Greek pantheon. Based on rather superficial resemblances, this results insome surprising assertions for the modern scholar of Norse myth. Thus
Odin ‘appears to be the Northern Adonis. He was beloved by Frigga, who
represents Venus, and is killed at last by a Wolf, as Adonis was by a boar’(Cottle 1797, xxiii). Likewise, ‘Lok may be compared to the Apollo of
the Grecians’ (Cottle 1797, xxiii). Cottle provides very little discussionof his translation methods, doubtless because of his ignorance of Old
Norse. This leads him into considerable error, most notably in Þrymskviða
(see below), but elsewhere too, where he proves incapable even of translating the Latin accurately. William Herbert, who could read Icelandic,
knew Danish, and who offered the first part of his Select Icelandic Poetry
to the public in 1804, criticizes the hapless Cottle without reservation:‘Mr Cottle has published, what he calls a translation of this ode, but itbears little resemblance to the original. [. . .] Mr C. has not even taken thetrouble of understanding the Latin’ (Herbert 1842, I, 179; see also 180
and 193). Cottle’s Edda, like Herbert’s, does not seem to have been
widely circulated. In the preface to the first volume of The Edda ofSæmund the Learned (1866, I) Benjamin Thorpe notes ‘this work [Cottle’s]
I have never met with; nor have I seen any English version of any part of
the Edda, with the exception of Gray’s spirited but free translation of the
Vegtamskviða’ (Thorpe 1866, vii). Notwithstanding Herbert’s justifiable criticism of his predecessor’s accuracy, Cottle often achieves aromantic grandeur in his versions of the poems.
Herbert’s own versions of eddic poetry were published piecemeal. Of
what is now considered to be the Poetic Edda corpus, Volume I of SelectIcelandic Poetry (1804) contained only Þrymskviða and a few verses ofBaldrs draumar. The second volume of 1806 added Helreið Brynhildar
and Skirnismál to the tally. In 1839 he translated Sigurðarkviða inskamma and Atlakviða from volume II of the Copenhagen Edda (seeClunies Ross 1998, 188). V†lundarkviða followed in 1840; all three
new poems were included in Horae Scandicae: Or, Works Relating to
Old Scandinavian Literature, the first volume of Herbert’s complete
works, published in 1842. Clunies Ross (1998, 183–202) gives a detailed
account of Herbert’s sources and assesses his relative success in translating

Translating the Poetic Edda into English

25Þrymskviða and Helreið in Select Icelandic Poetry. Herbert represents
his translations as ‘closely translated and unadorned; with a few exceptions they are rendered line for line; and (I believe) as literally, as thedifference of language and metrical rules would permit’ (Herbert 1842,167), modestly averring, ‘the only merit I have aimed at, is that of accuracy’ (1804, ix). As Clunies Ross shows (1998, 183–84), he amply
persuades his reviewers of his mastery of Icelandic language, even though
he often goes considerably beyond his source text, mostly in pursuit ofa rhyme. Herbert contrasts ‘the energetic harmony of these old poems:[. . .] the most ancient are the simplest and most beautiful’, with skaldic
verse, which he, like a number of other translators, understands as younger
than the Edda, ‘for the Icelandic poetry degenerated into affectation ofimpenetrable obscurity and extravagant metaphors’ (Herbert 1842, 167).
Herbert also composed poems based very loosely on Norse myth, such as
Hedin (from the Hjaðningavíg myth) and, from the Poetic Edda, The
Song of Vala, which was ‘freely imitated from a curious old poem called
Völospá hin skamre [sic], or the ancient Prophecy of Vala, which forms
part of the unpublished Edda’ (Herbert 1842, 147).
Victorian versions
The noted Anglo-Saxon scholar Benjamin Thorpe somewhat diffidently
issued the first volume of his translation of the Poetic Edda in 1866,
promising that ‘if a not unfavourable reception is given it by the British
public, the Second, or Heroic part shall be immediately sent to press’(Thorpe 1866, I viii). The Edda of Sæmund the Learned was based on a
German edition (Lüning 1859; see Wawn 2000, 196–97) and includes
the mythological poems of the Codex Regius, plus Fjölsvinnsmál,Rígsþula, Hyndloljóð, Gróugaldr, and Sólarljóð (a text which Cottle
had rejected on the grounds that it was ‘filled with little else but theabsurd superstitions of the Church of Rome’ (1797, xxix–xxx)). Thorpe’s
work is largely accurate and pleasingly simple; the translator modestly
claims, ‘it had no pretension to elegance; but I believe it to be a faithful
though homely representation of the original’ (Thorpe 1866, I viii).
Volume II did indeed follow later in the same year, after positive reviews:‘For not only has its reception been favourable, but in the United Statesof America it has been noticed in terms highly gratifying to the translator’ (1866, II iii). To the Codex Regius heroic poems, Thorpe added
Grottas†ngr and ‘Gunnars Slagr’ (1866, II 146–49), a poem preserved
only in paper manuscripts and translated from Rask’s edition publishedin Stockholm (Rask 1818). Thorpe’s translations, often surprisingly

26

Old Norse Made New

modern in tone, tend to eschew archaism and Latinisms. Wawn (2000,
196) suggests that Thorpe appears to take some liberties in re-ordering
the Icelandic text when he translates some verses from V†luspá (Neckel
and Kuhn 1962, vv. 45–46), an effect produced by the translator’s faithful rendition of Lüning’s text. The German editor collates lines from the
Hauksbók and Codex Uppsaliensis manuscripts of V†luspá with the
Codex Regius text, producing a Norse version that looks unfamiliar to
those used to the Copenhagen Edda (Thorpe 1866, I 9; Lüning 1859,
150–51).
No other substantial translations of the Edda appeared in the nineteenth century except for Vigfusson and York Powell’s work in Corpus
Poeticum Boreale (1883), though the notable Icelandic scholar Eiríkr
Magnússon had his translation rejected (Wawn 2000, 195, n. 65) andthat of his compatriot Jón Hjaltalín was never published (Wawn 2000,
362). Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris did, however, offersome versions of those heroic poems relevant to V†lsunga saga in their
1870 translation of that work, The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with certain songs from the Elder Edda; these are the last part ofHelgakviða Hundingsbana II, the wisdom section of Sigrdrífumál,
Sigurðarkviða in skamma, Helreið Brynhildar, Brot (rechristened
Fragments of the Lay of Brynhild), Guðrúnarkviða II, Atlakviða,Guðrúnarhv†t, and Hamðismál, with the addition of Oddrúnargrátr,‘which we have translated on account of its intrinsic merit’, the authors
note (Magnússon and Morris 1870, x). The authors make a close comparison between the eddic poems and the content of the saga, noting of
the episode of Sigrún and Helgi in the burial mound: ‘for the the sake of
its wonderful beauty however, we could not refrain from rendering it’(vii). The authors are aware that the material may offer some difficulty,
but exhort the reader to effort:
we may well trust the reader of poetic insight to break through whateverentanglement of strange manners, [. . .] such a reader will be intensely touchedby finding, amidst all its wildness and remoteness, such startling realism, such
subtilty, such close sympathy with all the passions that may move himself today (x–xi).

Vigfusson and York Powell divide up the poems of the Codex Regius
according to their presumed chronology, their hypothetical place oforigin, and their supposed author, such as ‘the Western Aristophanes’,
author of Lokasenna, Hárbarðzljóð, and Skírnismál. Vigfusson and York
Powell discuss the principles of their prose translations, which run along
the bottom of the page of their edition, in the introduction to volume ITranslating the Poetic Edda into English

27(cxiv–xvii). They maintain that the translation has no pretension toliterary merit, but is merely a guide to assist those who wish to read thepoems ‘without having mastered the tongues in which they are composed’(cxiv). The enterprise is not simple, despite its limited goals: for thetranslator must render the different styles of the poets: ‘the legal phrasesof the Greenland Lay of Attila and the Euripidean softness of the Gudrun
lays are very far removed from the antique Homeric beauty of the old
Attila and Hamtheow Lays’ (cxv), they note; like Cottle and Herbertbefore them they employ familiar parallels from classical literature tocharacterize the Norse. The sternest observations are reserved for themere philologist who becomes ‘a gerund-grinding machine’ (cxv), who
fails to immerse himself in a detailed study of the ‘old life’ (cxiv) andthus misses the literary qualities of the poems. Particularly castigated
are those translators of Norse who fall into ‘the affectation of archaism,
and the abuse of archaic Scottish, pseudo-Middle English words’ (cxv),
a criticism no doubt meant for such enthusiasts as Eiríkr Magnússon andWilliam Morris. Though Vigfusson and York Powell have opted for ‘thereal meaning’ rather than ‘the poetical rendering’ they omit obscure andobscene phrases, so as not to mislead or offend the reader. Noteworthy,
too, in this preface is the appeal to ‘Englishmen and Americans to seek
back for themselves into the Homeric age of their forefathers’ (cxvii);
like Thorpe, the two Oxford scholars are well aware of the importance of
the American market.
Twentieth-Century Translations
The early twentieth century brought a small flurry of eddic translations,with the first American versions appearing in the 1920s. Olive Bray’s
The Elder or Poetic Edda appeared in 1908, under the auspices of theViking Club (later to become the Viking Society). Bray was very conscious of the vivid visual images which the mythological poems
produced, and attributes some translation difficulties to their interference:
For their style is so essentially graphic without being descriptive that the morefamiliar we are with their works, the more difficult does it seem to translatethem into words instead of colour and form (Bray 1908, i).

No wonder then that the edition is freely illustrated with striking blackand-white drawings by W. G. Collingwood. Bray edits and translates
only the mythological poetry of the Codex Regius, plus the two
Svipdagsmál poems; her introduction captures the romantic aura which
the Old North held for enthusiasts of the Viking Club, at the same time as
it apologizes for its un-Greek qualities:

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Old Norse Made New
For mythology is itself a tangled garden of thought unless it has undergone
complete transformation in the hands of the artist. It is nothing less than themind of the nation laid bare [. . .] all stamped by past experience, but neverblended into unity (vi).

Her translation aspires to literalness:to satisfy truth and for fear of doing injustice to the original, we have endeavoured to keep the translation as literal as possible, though ambiguity inthe original occasionally necessitates interpretation by a somewhat freer rendering (i).
Quinn (1994, 120–22) discusses Bray’s edition in the context of theactivities and inquiring spirit of the Viking Club in the early years of thetwentieth century.
Bellows selected the poems of the Codex Regius, plus Baldrs draumar,
Hyndloljóð, and Svipdagsmál, for his translation, noting Thorpe’s translation as ‘conspicuously inadequate’, Vigfusson and York Powell’s as‘unsatisfactory’, but praising Bray’s work as ‘excellent’ (Bellows 1926,xi). Published by the American-Scandinavian Foundation in 1923, Bellows’s was the first American translation, offered with the hope that
greater familiarity with the chief literary monuments of the North will help
Americans to a better understanding of Scandinavians and thus serve to stimulate their sympathetic coöperation to good ends (Bellows 1926, facing title
page epigraph).

Bellows aimed to help scholars, and to stimulate others to learn thelanguage, but, in keeping with the aims of the Foundation, he ‘place[s]the hope that this English version may give to some, who have known
little of the ancient traditions of what is after all their own race, a clearer
insight into the glories of that extraordinary past’. Bellows implies areadership not simply of first- or second-generation immigrants from
Scandinavia to North America, but makes a larger assumption that the‘glories’ are the heritage of Anglo-Saxon and German Americans alike.
Cord’s foreword to a 1991 reprint praises the work in terms which havenot normally been employed since World War II:
the translator has overcome formidable linguistic barriers as well as certain
cultural implications to convert the original Icelandic (Old Norse) poems into
verse forms in English that retain, and even project, the essence of the original
Teutonic ambience (Bellows 1991, i).

‘Teutonic ambience’, produced largely by archaic diction, is precisely
what most postwar translators try to avoid—once, as Quinn notes, ‘thesinister potential of Aryan ideologising had become evident’ (1994, 124).

Translating the Poetic Edda into English

29

Hollander’s translation is still frequently reprinted, the eleventh printing of the second revised edition appearing as recently as 2004. The
selection is relatively conservative, consisting of the Codex Regius
poems, Hyndloljóð, with V†luspá in skamma printed separately, Rígsþula,Grottas†ngr, and Baldrs draumar. Svipdagsmál is included, and the
Dvergatal of V†luspá is also dealt with separately (Hollander 1936).
Hollander notes that ‘still other lays of Eddic quality’ exist, translated inan earlier volume (Hollander 1962, xv, n.). He is thoughtful about the
problems of reflecting the broad range of synonyms available in Norseand finds that these can only be reproduced in English through recourse
to archaic equivalents, despite Vigfusson and York Powell’s commentson this practice (see above): ‘I have, therefore, unhesitatingly had recourse, whenever necessary, to terms fairly common in English balladry,
without, I hope overloading the page with archaisms’ (Hollander
1962, xxix).
Auden and Taylor’s influential selection of poems was publishedin London in 1969, the same year that Patricia Terry’s Poems of theVikings appeared in Indianapolis. The introduction to the first of these,
written by Peter Salus and Paul Taylor, explains metre and quantity
and the details of Norse cosmology, with a particular excursus on
riddles and charms. No reflection on translation practice, beyond questions of rhythm and caesura, is offered, however, except for a warningof silent rearrangement of stanzas in the case of V†luspá and Hávamál.
The volume is subtitled ‘A Selection’, and contains the Codex Regius
mythological poems, Helreið Brynhildar and V†lundarkviða fromthe heroic poems, and, most unusually, ‘Innsteinnsljóð’ from Hálfs saga,
as well as Eiríksmál and ‘The Waking of Angantýr’. Auden died in
1973; in 1981 Paul Taylor reissued the 1969 volume with twenty-threefurther versions of eddic poetry by Auden (Auden and Taylor 1981).
The volume now included all the heroic poetry from the Codex Regius,‘Hjálmar’s Death-Song’, ‘Hildebrand’s Death-Song’, ‘Hl†ðskviða’,
the Riddles of Gestumblindi from Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, and Sólarljóð. Some poems, such as Atlamál, Sigurðarkviða in skamma,
and Grípisspá are scarcely versified, but remain as stanza-by-stanza translations into prose; the other additions are substantial poetic versions.
Now that Auden is dead, Taylor pays warm tribute to his qualities aspoet in the Foreword: ‘He went to the Icelandic itself. I gave him mytranslations in the best poetic line I could manage, and he turned thatverbal and metrical disarray into poetic garb. The product is his’ (Auden
and Taylor 1981, x).

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Old Norse Made New

Terry translates all the Codex Regius poems, plus Baldrs draumar,
Grottas†ngr, and ‘The Waking of Angantýr’; Rígsþula and Hyndloljóð
are rejected on the basis of inferior quality. Terry notes the lyrical qualitiesof the poems, but eschews imitation of the metre, beyond trying ‘tosuggest, if not reproduce the alliteration’ (Terry 1969, ix). She hopes toavoid the pitfalls of Hollander’s diction: ‘Apart from such embellishments (kennings), the language of the Edda is simple and free fromarchaisms; I have tried to keep mine the same’ (Terry 1969, x). In thesame year again, the first volume of Ursula Dronke’s edition of the Poetic
Edda was published (Dronke 1969). This contained important facingpage translations of the last four heroic poems in the Codex Regius(Atlakviða, Atlamál, Guðrúnarhv†t, and Hamðismál). Volume II (1997)
contains V†luspá, Rígsþula, V†lundarkviða, Lokasenna, and Skírnismál.
Auden may have looked at volume I. By 1969 he was beginning to think
about moving back to Oxford, and his former college, Christ Church,where he indeed lived for the last year of his life, was also the collegeof Gabriel Turville-Petre, then Vigfusson Reader in Ancient Icelandic
Literature and Antiquities. It seems plausible that Turville-Petre would
have brought Dronke’s book to Auden’s attention. If he saw it, though,he did not pay much attention to the commentary or apparatus: he mightotherwise have avoided such misinterpretations as, for example,Guðrúnarhv†t st. 5, which he takes as referring proleptically to the deathsof Hamðir and S†rli, rather than back to the deaths of Erpr and Eitill.
My translation appeared in 1996. I included all the texts edited in
Neckel and Kuhn 1962, except for ‘The Battle of the Goths and Huns’,‘Hildebrand’s Death-Song’, and some eddic fragments, poems which
would have demanded too much contextualization and explanation tojustify their inclusion. Like Auden and Taylor, I made no statement
about my aims in the translation, beyond discussing metre. My implied
reader was the ordinary reader, the regular buyer of World’s Classics
translations, who did not need a translation which reflected every subjunctive or plural-for-singular usage, but who was interested primarily
in the narrative and who would appreciate the humour, grandeur, horror,and suspense of the Norse originals.
Translators and Style
In comparison with the ‘impenetrable obscurity’ of skaldic verse, in
Herbert’s phrase, the language of the Poetic Edda is not particularly
difficult to construe, although there are a number of hapax legomena,and some passages which are obscure in their reference or damaged inTranslating the Poetic Edda into English

31

transmission. The poems’ narratives can be broadly understood with thehelp of Snorri (though of course Snorri’s interpretations cannot be
regarded as definitive). There are few kennings or complex metaphors.
Early translators, as we have seen, were constrained by the serial andslow publication of the three volumes of the Copenhagen Edda. By thetime Thorpe came to make his version, the German philological revolution meant that a better understanding of Old Norse, and a scholarly
edition with useful apparatus, were available to him. Bellows uses
Hildebrand’s 1876 edition, revised by Gering in 1904, but consults thenumerous commentaries which had by then appeared. Hollander follows
Bugge (1867), while subsequent translators have used Neckel and Kuhn’s
fourth edition of 1962, with the additions outlined above.2
Once the canon has been identified, the translator must decide which,if any, verse form should be employed. Rhyming verse is favoured by
Cottle and Herbert; Cottle tends to expand each individual Norse line
into at least a couplet. Later translators prefer longer or shorter lines ofprose, sometimes arranged as verse, or free verse, either imitating thehalf-line structure in rhythmic terms, or expanding it further. They mustalso decide how far the alliteration of the original is to be imitated. This
will throw up the problem of the relative lack of synonyms in English,
and invites the use of Latinate words or archaisms to fill the gap.
The adoption of rhyming couplets is not always successful. Cottle’s
verse sometimes gives a nicely epigrammatic turn to the eddic line:‘Remember once your hand was bit / By Fenrir in an angry fit’ (1797,
163) perhaps trivialises Ls 38, but there is some grandeur to the latterpart of Skírnir’s curse in Skm 36 (Cottle 1797, 95):
Mark the giant ! Mark him well!
Hear me his attendants tell!
Can’st thou with the fiends engage,
Madness, Impotence and Rage?
Thus thy torments I describe
The furies in my breast subside.

Internal rhyme can often be effective; Bray’s ‘quivering and shivering’in Þrk 1 is a striking example (1908, 127). The temptation to reproduce
exactly the Norse alliteration may produce over-emphatic lines: Auden
and Taylor’s ‘broken to bits was the Brising necklace’ in Þrk 13 is probably excessive, as well as going beyond the original (1969, 85). The
list from Skm 36, in the original ergi, œði ok óþola, produces a range
2

In the discussion which follows, poem titles are abbreviated according to thescheme used in Neckel and Kuhn 1962.

32

Old Norse Made Newof possible afflictions for Gerðr: from the gloriously personified ‘Madness, Impotence and Rage’ of Cottle (1797, 95), who fails to note thatthese are runic staves rather than demonic powers, to the intensively
alliterating ‘lechery, loathing and lust’ in Hollander (1962, 72), wholoses the implication of madness. Bellows gives ‘longing, madness, andlust’ (1926, 118), Terry, ‘frenzy, lewdness and lust’ (1969, 59) while‘filth, frenzy and lust’ is the choice of Auden and Taylor (1969, 123).
Larrington’s ‘lewdness, frenzy and unbearable desire’ makes explicit
the connection of óþola to its root, þola ‘to bear with or suffer’ (1996,67), as does Dronke’s ‘lust’, ‘burning’ and ‘unbearable need’ (1997,384). Thorpe keeps the words in their Icelandic forms, accentuating theirstrangeness by keeping the Icelandic orthography: ‘ergi, and œði, andóþoli’ (Thorpe 1866, 83).
Bellows is particularly concerned with retaining the rhythm of thedifferent metres, the characteristics of which he describes in detail (1926,
xxiii–xxvi), an effort which Terry explicitly eschews. Rhythm is a strong
point of Auden and Taylor’s work; their substantial discussion of itin the 1969 introduction perhaps reflects the keen ear of Auden as apractising poet. Their version of the curse (Skm 35) has a pounding,hypnotic beat (1969, 123):
Hrimgrimnir shall have you, the hideous troll,
Beside the doors of the dead,Under the tree-roots ugly scullions
Pour you the piss of goats;
Nothing else shall you ever drink,
Never what you wish,
Ever what I wish.
I score troll-runes, then I score three letters,
Filth, frenzy, lust:
I can score them off as I score them on,
If I find sufficient cause.

The greatest temptation for the translator is to employ archaisms or
etymologize; for Cottle, Herbert, Thorpe, and Vigfusson, ‘thou’ and ‘thee’naturally seem less archaic than they do to twentieth-century translators. Mær/mey encourages ‘maiden’ for ‘girl’ by assonance and alliteration.
The late nineteenth century brings a heightened philological awareness. Typical is Magnússon and Morris’s rendition of Fm 66: ‘Seldom
hath hardy eld a faint-heart youth’, or Fm 211: ‘Such as thy redes are I
will nowise do after them’ (Magnússon and Morris 1870, 61, 62).
Vigfusson and York Powell, despite their scathing remarks about the‘mere philologist’, enthusiastically render Norse words with their English

Translating the Poetic Edda into English

33

cognates, or coin philologically possible but unattested words, e.g.
‘Anses’ for Æsir, and ‘Ansesses’ for Ásynjor, ‘Tew’ for Týr, ‘Eager’ forÆgir, and Woden instead of Óðinn, as well as ‘bearsarks’; a spellingwhich commits them to a particular understanding of the ferocious warriors’ behaviour. They also use ‘methinks’ and ‘wight’. Bray has thearchaic ‘ye’, as well as ‘ween’, ‘olden’, ‘twain’, the dialectal ‘bairns’, andnot only ‘Wanes’ for Vanir, but the not entirely happy ‘Wanelings’ forvaningja. Hollander’s literalism and etymologizing instinct brings ‘fain’,‘I ween’, and ‘I wot’, as well as lines such as ‘if I wend with thee to theworld of etins’; Bellows has ‘methinks’, ‘fare’ for ‘journey’, and ‘doth’,though he has few other ‘-th’ endings in the present third person singular. Dronke generally captures a modern-sounding idiom, though thedemands of alliteration produce the obscure ‘Bayard and bracelets’ for
iós ok armbauga in Ls 13, more prosaically ‘horse and arm-rings’ (1997,
336). Bayard is a generic Middle English term for a well-bred horse.
Even Auden and Taylor, whose translations usually sound reasonably
contemporary, employ ‘thurse’, ‘maids’, ‘mighty-thewed’, and refer to‘garths’, ‘Vanes’ (for Vanir), and ‘orcs’. The latter may likely be ascribedto Tolkien’s influence—the volume is dedicated to him. ‘Busk yourself
Freyia’ demands Loki in Auden and Taylor, recalling Herbert’s ‘Now,
Freyia, busk, as a blooming bride’ (Herbert 1842, 176)—a usage whicheven in 1804 occasioned an explanatory note.
The problem of synonyms, if not solved by archaisms, leads to a repetition of ‘warrior’, ‘fighter’, ‘hero’ which is almost unavoidable. The
etymological attraction of ‘mare’ for marr ‘horse’ in Auden and Taylor
puts Skírnir on an animal whose connotations of effeminacy shouldhave given Auden’s expert advisers pause for thought; ‘mare’ is frequently used elsewhere in their translations. Fighting, of which there isa great deal, entails ‘smiting’, ‘slaying’, and ‘felling’ in Thorpe, Vigfusson
and York Powell, Bray, Bellows, and Hollander; Terry prefers ‘strike’
and ‘lay low’, while Auden and Taylor alternate between ‘fell’, ‘kill’,and ‘lay low’. I used ‘strike’, ‘batter’, and ‘kill’; ‘batter’ may be too
colloquial and perhaps not forceful enough.
Cottle shows no sensitivity to the question of the appropriateness of
Latinate or Romance diction: Þrymr’s sister, for example, becomes a‘sordid dame’. Herbert makes a point of avoiding Latin-derived words
where he can, though he etymologizes freely in his Introduction. Failingto identify the ‘Thursar’ as giants, he connects them with Turks, Tuscans,thus (Latin, ‘incense’), and, splendidly, those ‘murderous immolators of
the East’, the Thugs (1842, 187, n.). As a philologist Thorpe is aware that

34

Old Norse Made New

Latinisms are not appropriate, but he fails to avoid ‘compotation’ and‘celestial’ in Hym 1 and uses such terminology as ‘Fafnicide’ and ‘altercation’ in poem titles; the jingle of ‘Œgir’s Compotation, or: Loki’s
Altercation’ must indeed have been hard to resist for Lokasenna. Thereis less Latinism in twentieth-century translation, though Dronke has‘itemize’ for telia ‘reckon up’ in Ls 28 (1997, 339); the frequentlyrepeated charge against Loki in this poem that he is œrr ‘mad’, sherenders as ‘lunatic’.
The language of romance is also difficult: women and girls become‘damsels’, ‘wenches’, ‘that fair’, or the rather uncourtly ‘lass’ in Thorpe.
Auden and Taylor have ‘maids’, and Terry ‘maidens’; I tried to keep themaidens out, preferring ‘girl’. The sexual encounter in Hrbl 30 iseuphemized into ‘sweet colloquy’ (Cottle 1797, 116), ‘trysting’ (Bray
1908, 193), ‘dallied’ (Thorpe 1866, 76), or ‘granted me joy’ (Bellows
1926, 131). The same verse’s línhvít ‘linen-white’ is assimilated tomid-Victorian ideas of decorum in descriptions of female beauty by
Thorpe in ‘lily-fair’; Bray gives ‘linen-fair’, potentially rather puzzling; Hollander loses the comparison by glossing ‘white-armed’,followed by Terry, while Vigfusson and York Powell, Bellows, Auden
and Taylor, and Larrington stick to the literal ‘linen-white’. Sex will
always raise difficulties; incestuous sex is even trickier. When Freyja isaccused of having sex with her brother in Ls 32, Cottle completely misunderstands the charge, suggesting that Freyja has orchestrated ‘mortal
strife’ against her brother (1797, 160). Thorpe coyly gives ‘against thy
brother the gentle powers excited’ (1866, 95), while Vigfusson obscuresLoki’s words with an ellipsis (1883, 105). Hollander converts Loki’s
charge that Freyja is a witch (fordæða) into the accusation that she is awhore (1962, 97); Bray has the gods find her ‘at thy brother’s’ as if shewere merely visiting for tea and has her ‘frightened’ rather than farting(1908, 257). The fart that results when Freyja is discovered in flagrantewith her brother is first noted by Bellows (1926, 162): ‘Freyja her wind
set free’; Hollander is the first to translate the fart directly.
Scatology predictably causes problems. Skm 35’s geita hland is ‘urineof the unsav’ry goat’ for Cottle (1797, 95); ‘foul beverage from the goats’
is Herbert’s version (1842, 201). Thorpe gives ‘goat’s water’ (1866, 83);
Vigfusson and York Powell omit the phrase. Bray’s ‘foul water of goats’(1908, 151), like Herbert’s and Thorpe’s term, leaves it unclear as towhether the liquid is left-over goats’ drinking-water. Hollander’s impressive ‘staling of stinking goats’ depends on the reader recognizing
the archaic ‘staling’ (1962, 72). Bellows’s ‘horns of filth’ misses the linkTranslating the Poetic Edda into English

35

with Heiðrún, the mead-giving goat of Valh†ll (1926, 118). By the sixties ‘piss’ becomes possible; thus Terry (169, 59), Auden and Taylor(1969, 123), and Larrington (1996, 66); Dronke has the politer ‘goat’s
urine’ (1997, 384).
The daughters of Hymir (probably personifications of the mountain
rivers flowing into the sea) are mentioned in Loki’s insult in Ls 34 asurinating in Nj†rðr’s mouth. This proves too much for Cottle: ‘The sentiments and expressions of this and the following verse would not admit
with propriety of an English version’ (1797, 161). Thorpe gives themysterious ‘had thee for a utensil’ and apologizes: ‘the events related inthis strophe are probably a mere perversion, by the poet, of what weknow of Niörd’s history’ (1866, I 96); Vigfusson employs an ellipsis;
Bray’s ‘used thee as trough for their floods’ is rather vague (1908, 259),
while Hollander’s ‘pot’ and ‘midden’ suggests a product which is too
solid (1962, 97); Bellows’s ‘privy’ is more to the point (1926, 63). Terry(1969, 81) and Auden and Taylor (1969, 138) have the coy ‘made waterin your mouth’ while Larrington gives a perhaps dysphemic ‘piss-pot’and ‘pissed’ (1996, 90); Dronke has the etymologically related ‘pisstrough’, but also ‘made water into your mouth’ (1997, 340).
Insult is hard too: Hrbl 49’s halr inn hugblauði is literally if unimaginatively rendered ‘shameless coward’ and ‘coward’ by Auden and Taylor(1969, 131), and Larrington (1996, 49), respectively. Bellows’s ‘witlessman’ loses the connection with courage (1926, 135); Terry’s ‘faint-hearted
fellow’ (1969, 66) is, like Bray’s ‘faint-heart’ (1908, 197), perhaps notstrong enough. It is the older translators who excel here: Hollander’s‘craven knave’ (1962, 81) and Thorpe’s ‘dastardly varlet’ (1866, 77)with their internal rhymes, or Cottle’s marvellous, if very free ‘infernal
caitiff, wretch absurd!’ (1797, 121).
Some translators seize the opportunity for a witty idiomatic rendering.
In Þrk 32 Þrymr’s sister, who has expected good-will gifts from her new
sister-in-law, receives a blow from Mj†llnir, Þórr’s hammer, instead. Honscell um hlaut fyr scillinga tempts some translators to try to reproduce
the jingle of scell and scillinga. Vigfusson and York Powell do rather
well with ‘she got a pound instead of pence’ (1883, 180); Thorpe’s ‘shea blow got instead of skillings’ is confused by the archaism (1866, 66).
Bray and Bellows combine ‘stroke’ and ‘shillings’ for a near-alliterative
effect, but suggesting perhaps a friendly pat on the head (1908, 137;
1926, 182). Hollander has ‘shock’ and ‘shillings’ (1962, 108). ‘Blow’
and ‘money’ in Terry (1969, 92) and ‘blow’ and ‘gold’ in Auden andTaylor (1969, 88) miss the pun, which I tried to render with ‘striking’36

Old Norse Made Newand ‘shillings’ (1996, 101). Now that ‘shillings’ are no longer current,
the joke will probably disappear.
Though a relatively simple poem in terms of lexis, Þrymskviða provides a range of challenges to the translator. In the first stanza there ismuch emphasis on Þórr’s hair and beard; the mysterious loss of his hammer is experienced by the god as uncanny and literally hair-raising in its
implications: scegg nam at hrista, sc†r nam at dýia. Cottle’s version is,
as ever, over the top: ‘From his heaving breast uprear’d, / Gusty whirlwinds shake his beard’ (1797, 179). Bray’s ‘quivering and shivering’(1908, 127), as noted above, is effective, while Hollander’s ‘shaggy headgan shake’ suggests a certain wobbliness (1962, 104). Bellows (1926,
174–75) and Terry (1969, 88) understand the implications, but Auden
and Taylor’s ‘tossed his red locks’, not only makes Þórr sound a little
petulant, it also imports the idea of redness, which is attested only forÞórr’s beard (1969, 84). In stanza 13, problems of divine dignity areencountered. That Freyja is angry (reið) at the suggestion that she should
go to J†tunheimr to marry Þrymr produces ‘wrath’ in Herbert, Thorpe,
and Vigfusson and York Powell (1842, 176; 1866, 63; 1883, 177); Cottle
as usual expands mightily: ‘Passion in Freya’s cheek glowed hot / Cold
tremors thro’ her bosom shot’ (1797, 184). Freyja’s undignified snorting(fnásaði) is first recognized by Vigfusson and York Powell. Bray has her
panting (1908, 131), while Hollander (1962, 106) reports that she‘foamed with rage’ (perhaps even less dignified than snorting). When
Freyja refuses on the grounds that going to J†tunheimr would prove her
to be vergjarnasta ‘most eager for men’, Cottle (1797, 185) falls into thestartling error of having her agree to the journey, a consent which, as
Herbert tartly remarks, ‘destroys the sense of all that follows’ (1842,
180). Herbert himself settles on ‘wanton bride’ as a translation (1842,176), while Thorpe gives ‘lewedest’ (1866, 64). Vigfusson and York
Powell have the literal ‘man-maddest’ (1883, 178), varied by Hollanderas ‘most mad after men’ (1962, 106). Bray’s ‘most wanton’ and Bellows’s ‘most lustful’ are quite neutral (1908, 131; 1926, 177). Terry(1969, 90) spells out ‘I’ll have gone mad with hunger for men’, while
Auden and Taylor (1969, 85) too directly make Freyja a ‘whore’, losing
the superlative which is an important part of the comedy, for Freyja fears
to prove herself an outstanding example of what she already is. My own‘most sex-crazed of women’, I now think likely to date (1996, 98).
Thus far I have mostly considered the mythological poetry, since theearliest translators were most interested in the mythological parallels
with the Greek. Particular interest in the heroic poetry was probably

Translating the Poetic Edda into English

37

kindled by the work of Magnússon and Morris, reinforced no doubt by
the first performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in London in May 1882. It
is interesting to compare the versions of Magnússon and Morris, Auden’s
1981 texts and Dronke’s translations of the last four heroic poems. The
Victorian translators strive more for effect than for clarity; Auden isoddly literal and unpoetic in these last versions, while Dronke very
often finds the mot juste, creating a series of images which are coherent
in their implications. Space permits only one example: three versions of
Hm 20, chronicling the arrogant reaction of J†rmunrekkr to the news thatHamðir and S†rli have arrived at his hall. The verse lists a sequence of
the king’s self-conscious actions (Neckel and Kuhn 1962, 272):
Hló þá I†rmunreccr, hendi drap á kampa,
beiddiz at br†ngo, b†ðvaðiz at víni;
scóc hann sc†r iarpa, sá á sci†ld hvítan,lét hann sér í hendi hvarfa ker gullit.
Loud Jormunrek laughed,And laid hand to his beard,
Nor bade bring his byrny,
But with the wine fighting,
Shook his red locks,
On his white shield sat staring,
And in his hand
Swung the gold cup on high(Magnússon and Morris 1870, 255–56).
Then I†rmunrekkr laughed,with his hand stroked his whiskers,
spurred himself to wildness,grew battlesome over his wine,
flung back his brown hair,glanced at his white shield,
made the golden cup
swing in his hand.
(Dronke 1969, 165).
The stout-hearted king stroked his beard,
And laughed grimly, aggressive from wine;
He shook his locks, looked at his shield,
And twirled the golden goblet he held.
(Auden and Taylor 1981, 142).

Magnússon and Morris add elements not present in the Norse: loudness of laughter, a byrnie, redness to the hair; they muddy the relationshipbetween the wine and the fighting and break the rhythm of the series of
speedy actions by making J†rmunrekkr sit and stare, as if preoccupied,

38

Old Norse Made New

at his shield, while at the same time he swings his cup. Dronke nicely
captures the studiedness of J†rmunrekkr’s behaviour without recourse
to archaism, except perhaps in ‘battlesome’; the lexis is simple: ‘cup’,‘brown’, ‘white’. The ‘whiskers’, a description of facial hair which at thesame time evokes an alert animal, is better than ‘beard’. She keeps theswiftness of the successive gestures with ‘glance’, suggesting a fleetingawareness that he may indeed have to fight in person, and making thecup casually ‘swing in the hand’ underlines the self-consciousness of
the king, the focus of all attention in the hall. Auden’s ‘stout-hearted’,
there for the alliteration, is too conventional to be effective; though‘aggressive’ captures the sense of b†ðvaðiz quite well and echoes‘grimly’, it lacks the element of working himself up to fury which theNorse reflexives convey, and which Dronke retains in ‘spurred himself’.
‘Locks’ again alliterates, but at the cost of archaism; the series of colours, ‘brown’, ‘white’, ‘golden’, is lost, and the ‘twirling’, thoughstudiedly negligent, seems rather dainty for the leader of the Goths.
Comparing the three verses shows the compromises in subtlety whichfaithfulness to alliteration can demand; Magnússon and Morris lack the
precision which Dronke manages, though they have a strong sense ofrhythm—perhaps stronger than Auden’s here.
Beyond problems of tone and diction, translators must decide what to
do with Norse names, whether occurring singly or in the great lists ofGrímnismál or the Dvergatal of V†luspá, the varying status of which, as
Quinn comments, ‘has the dwarfs being marched in and out of the poem
throughout the last hundred or so years’ (1994, 127). Some translators,
such as Thorpe and Terry, keep the Grímnismál catalogue in its Norse
form; Vigfusson and York Powell make a start on listing the names instanza 46, then abandon the list with ‘etc’. Auden and Taylor and I choseto mix the translation of the more perspicuous names with the retention
in the original form of those whose meaning is obscure. Hollander (1962,xxix) comments sagely that the matterpresents a knotty problem to the translator. [. . .] I do not hesitate to say that on
the translator’s tact and skill in meeting this problem—for dodge it he cannot—will depend in large measure the artistic merit of his work and its modicumof palatableness to the modern reader.

Dronke gamely translates all the dwarf-names of V†luspá, in places guessing at possible etymologies, so that Nóri becomes ‘Shipper’. Ingeniously
she manages to keep some of the internal rhymes: Skirvir and Virvir
become ‘Joiner’ and ‘Groiner’, though this also results in ‘Trembler’ and‘Trumbler’ (a nonce word) for Biv†rr and Bav†rr (1997, 9–11). The

Translating the Poetic Edda into English

39

replacement of unfamiliar with familiar name forms can have unfortunate, even hilarious, results. Quinn has noted the unaccountable decisionof Auden and Taylor to begin their version of V†luspá by re-christening
the seiðkona Heiðr with the name of the Swiss goat-girl Heidi (Quinn
1994, 128).
Translators have also to make decisions about the fidelity with which
they render word order. The Norse case system allows inversion of subject and object as modern English does not; confusion can sometimes
arise when the Norse syntax is imitated too literally. Thorpe keeps theNorse word order for the final line of Þrymskviða quite successfully: ‘So
got Odin’s son his hammer back’ (1866, 66), but Hollander’s ‘Laughed
Hlórrithi’s heart within him / when the hammer beheld the hardy one’runs the risk of personifying Mi†llnir (1962, 108). Vigfusson and York
Powell opt for ‘This is how Woden’s son got back his Hammer’ (1883,180). Terry keeps the inversion but makes it sound natural, ‘That’s how
the hammer came back to Thor’s hands’ (1969, 92). ‘Thus Thor cameto recover his hammer’ (Auden and Taylor 1969, 88) alliterates,
where Larrington ‘So Odin’s son got the hammer back’ is strictly literal(1996, 101).
Understanding of Norse religious practices tests translators, nowheremore than in Hym 1, a truly difficult verse for those who have not immersed themselves in ‘the old life’ as Vigfusson and York Powell call it(1883, cxiv). Cottle has the gods examining entrails like classical soothsayers, ‘Till the teeming entrails tell, / Truth divin’d by mistic spell’(1797, 127). Thorpe’s bald ‘rods they shook’ leaves the divination highly
mysterious and he fails to register that Ægir does have some kettles(1866, 56). Vigfusson and York Powell’s ‘they cast the divining rods,
and inspected the blood’ (1883, 220), and Bray’s ‘they shook divining
twigs, scanned the blood-drops’ (1908, 113) make the process admirably clear, though Bray’s vision of the gods eating ‘dainties’ seems rather
effetely delicate. Hollander’s ‘on wassail bent their wands they shook’
complicates by use of archaism (1962, 83), while Bellows’s ‘blood they
tried’ makes it sound as if the gods are drinking the substance (1926,139), as does Auden and Taylor’s ‘relished blood’ (1969, 89). The latteralso elaborate the divination-twigs as rune-carving on wood, which is
not what the text says. Terry’s ‘by shaking small branches, steeped inblood’ may be over-explanatory, but her translation is probably clearer
than mine: ‘they shook the twigs and looked at the augury’ (1996, 78).
The translator’s task will always be fraught with anxieties. ‘At best
his version is to the original as the thin, muffled, meagre, telephone-40

Old Norse Made New

rendering is to the full rich tones which it transmits, faithfully, it is true,
but with what a difference to the hearer!’ exclaim Vigfusson and York
Powell (1883, cxvi). Translations are not for all time, but simply for theirown particular age, ‘a stop-gap until made to give place to a worthierwork’ as Thorpe modestly observes (1866, I viii). Translators ought toarticulate to themselves and to their readers what prejudices and predilections they bring to the project. As a teacher of Old Norse, I felt clarity
was more important than poetic effect in my translation, though every
now and again I rewarded myself with a little jeu d’esprit. It is both
salutary and educational to read earlier versions: translators generally
hope that their versions will stand the test of time, but through theirideas of appropriate diction, whether the lofty Latinisms of Cottle’s lateeighteenth-century Gothic, the more subdued romanticism of Herbert,
the simplicity of Thorpe, the coyness of Bray, the ‘Teutonic ambience’of Bellows, the archaisms of Hollander in pursuit of his sound effects,
the free additions in Auden and Taylor, and the occasional jaunty sixties note of Terry, each translator inevitably imparts a flavour of thecontemporary.
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Quinn, Judy and Margaret Clunies Ross 1994. ‘The Image of Norse Poetry andMyth in Seventeenth-Century England’. In Northern Antiquity: The PostMedieval Reception of Edda and Saga. Ed. Andrew Wawn, 189–210.
Ranisch, Wilhelm and Andreas Heusler, eds, 1903. Eddica minora: Dichtungeneddischer Art aus den Fornaldarsögur und anderen Prosawerken.
Rask, Rasmus, ed., 1818. Snorra-Edda ásamt skáldu og þarmeð fylgjandi ritgjörðum, eptir gömlum skinnbókum.
Resen, Peder Hans, ed., 1665. Edda Islandorum.
Sammes, Aylett 1676. Britannia antiqua illustrata; or the Antiquities of Antient
Britain.
Sheringham, Robert 1670. De Anglorum gentis origine disceptatio.
Terry, Patricia, trans., 1969. Poems of the Vikings: The Elder Edda.
Thorpe, Benjamin, trans., 1866. Edda Sæmundar hinns fróða: The Edda of Sæmund the Learned.
Vigfusson, Gudbrand and Frederick York Powell, eds and trans., 1883. Corpus
Poeticum Boreale. The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue from the Earliest
Times to the Thirteenth Century. Vol. 1 Eddic Poetry.
Wawn, Andrew 2000. The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in
Nineteenth-century Britain.

William Morris and the Volsungs

43

WILLIAM MORRIS AND THE VOLSUNGSDAVID ASHURST

William Morris’s interest in the Old North is already evident in his firstpublications, the pieces that he contributed, at twenty-two years of age,to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which appeared at intervals
during 1856. At this point in his life, when he had recently graduatedfrom the University of Oxford, Morris was a competent reader of Latin,
Greek, and French but his knowledge of Old Norse-Icelandic literatureand culture was secondhand and limited in scope. The Scandinavian
materials available in English were relatively scarce at this date but
those that Morris encountered clearly caught his imagination, as he himself declares in the apparently autobiographical, though possibly fictive,
preamble to the Magazine story called ‘Lindenborg Pool’ (Morris 1910–
15 (hereafter Works), I 245):
I read once in lazy humour Thorpe’s Northern Mythology,1 on a cold May
night when the north wind was blowing; in lazy humour, but when I came tothe tale that is here amplified there was something in it that fixed my attention
and made me think of it; and whether I would or no, my thoughts ran in thisway, as here follows. So I felt obliged to write, and wrote accordingly.

In this passage the phrase ‘the tale that is here amplified’ is particularly
significant because it announces the literary approach that would be
Morris’s chief modus operandi as a poet during the next two decades,
which culminated in the publication, in 1876, of The Story of Sigurd
and the Fall of the Niblungs (Works XII), a work that for many an admirerof Morris is quite simply ‘the greatest of all his poems’ (Paul Thompson
1977, 200) and which is based closely on V†lsunga saga and parts of the
Poetic Edda with a few elements taken from the Nibelungenlied. For
Morris in these decades, as for the medieval authors to whom he felt
closest, the act of literary creation was primarily and unabashedly one of
re-creation, of refashioning received material.
Malory and Froissart are the chief sources for the items in Morris’s firstbook of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, which was
published in 1858 (Works I). This collection contains some of Morris’s
1
Thorpe 1851–52. In addition to ‘Lindenborg Pool’, two other of the eight
Magazine tales have Scandinavian content with medieval settings.

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Old Norse Made New

most frequently anthologized works but the poems in it, with theirconcentrated expression and their evocative but sometimes puzzling
allusiveness, are not representative of his more mature style, in which heis characteristically expansive and at pains to elucidate whatever hethinks the reader needs to know.
More typical in every way is the next large-scale project that came tofulfilment: The Earthly Paradise (Works III–VI).2 This is a huge compilation of twenty-four stories in verse, originally published in three
volumes (1868–70), with a framing narrative in which a group ofvoyagers, referred to in the Argument of the Prologue (Works, III 3) as‘certain gentlemen and mariners of Norway’, flee the Black Death in the
fourteenth century and go in search of the Earthly Paradise, partly encouraged in this venture by stories of the Greenlanders’ discovery ofVineland (13); instead of Paradise, however, they come at last to an
unknown island where the inhabitants are, as they put it, ‘the seed of the
Ionian race’ (5), i.e. descendants of the Greeks; there they are made welcome and agree, at the islanders’ suggestion, to hold a gathering twice
every month; at each gathering one tale will be told for the sake ofentertainment and understanding—first by an islander, then by a voyager, and so on alternately for a year. Hence The Earthly Paradise consistsof twelve stories that might reasonably be called ‘southern’, of ancient
Greek origin and told by the hosts, alternating with twelve narratives
suitable for telling by medieval Scandinavians and their associates. This
scheme allows Morris maximum opportunity to range through his
favourite types of source material, the Classical, the mainstream medieval European, and the Nordic. In connexion with this, the weighting ofmaterial in favour of the Classical sources serves as a reminder that Morris
was by no means fixated on ‘northernness’ despite his growing love for
Old Norse literature: towards the end of the 1850s, after publishing the
Scandinavian-influenced stories in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine and the predominantly French-influenced pieces in The Defence of
Guenevere, he worked on a set of dramatic poems now known as ‘Scenes
from the Fall of Troy’ (Works XXIV), which he left as fragments; in the1860s he produced The Life and Death of Jason (see note 2) and the
Greek-derived stories of The Earthly Paradise; immediately before working on The Story of Sigurd, at the height of his involvement with Icelandic
2

The Life and Death of Jason was published first (1867, Works II) but hadoriginally been meant for inclusion in The Earthly Paradise. It quickly outgrew its intended context and took on independent life. A success with critics
and the public, it was Jason that made Morris’s name as a poet.

William Morris and the Volsungs

45

literature, he produced an impressive verse translation of Virgil’s Æneid
(published 1875 but dated 1876, Works XI); and in 1887–88 he issued apoetical version of Homer’s Odyssey (Works XIII), of which Oscar Wilde
wrote that ‘of all our English translations this is the most perfect and themost satisfying’ (Faulkner 1973, 302). These works represent an important aspect of Morris’s literary output to set beside his achievements as
a translator and re-fashioner of Old Norse material.
When Morris began working on The Earthly Paradise he still had torely on secondhand accounts for his northern stories. It seems likely, forexample, that he planned and possibly wrote what became the December
tale entitled ‘The Fostering of Aslaug’—in which the daughter of Sigurðr
and Brynhildr is brought up as the thrall of peasants but eventuallymarries Ragnarr loðbrók—at a time when he was not directly acquainted
with either V†lsunga saga or Ragnars saga, and that he adapted thestory from the account in Thorpe’s Northern Mythology (Hodgson 1987,
85, and May Morris’s comment in Works, VII xxxii). In the autumn of1868, however, Morris seized the opportunity to improve the state of his
knowledge when he was put in touch with the Icelander Eiríkr Magnússon. Eiríkr tells of his first meeting with the poet (printed by May
Morris in Works, VII xv–xvi): arriving at Morris’s residence, he wassoon drawn into enthusiastic conversation in which Morris displayed aknowledge of George Dasent’s translations of Njáls saga and Gísla saga
(1861 and 1866), Benjamin Thorpe’s translation of the Poetic Edda
(1866), Amos Cottle’s Icelandic Poetry (1797) and Percy’s Northern
Antiquities (1770 and 1847), also Sir Walter Scott’s account of Eyrbyggja
saga (1814) and several modern travel books about Iceland; 3 Eiríkr was
asked to visit three times per week to give translation classes and it wasagreed, at his suggestion, that the first work to be tackled would beGunnlaugs saga ormstungu. This was finished in a fortnight, whereupon the two men began work on Grettis saga. Eiríkr further explains(xvii) that it was their habit to go through a passage together, with Eiríkr
explaining points of grammar so that Morris could learn the subject
piecemeal since he was averse to memorizing grammatical paradigms,
after which the Icelander would go away and write out a close translation to be delivered at the next meeting; Morris would then go over thepassage again at his leisure and put Eiríkr’s translation into his own
3

The translators’ original preface to The Story of Grettir the Strong (Works
VII, xxxvii) also indicates that Morris had a knowledge, at least by early 1869, of
Edmund Head’s translation of Víga-Glúms saga (1866), Samuel Laing’s rendering of Heimskringla (1844), and Dasent’s version of Snorri’s Edda (1842).

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Old Norse Made New

preferred style. This last point indicates that Morris was intent on
publication from the very first, and in fact ‘The Saga of Gunnlaug WormTongue’ (Works X) appeared in The Fortnightly Review in January 1869,
only a few months after the first meeting, to be followed in May of thesame year by The Story of Grettir the Strong (Works VII), published by F.
S. Ellis, who was also at this time issuing The Earthly Paradise. Morrisand Eiríkr worked in addition on Laxdœla saga, but in this case the fruitof their labour did not appear as a joint translation; rather it formed thebasis for Morris’s poem ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’, which re-fashions thecentral story of the saga as something tantamount to a verse novel, andwhich forms the high point of the final Earthly Paradise volume as
published in 1870 (Works V–VI).
The same year also saw the publication of Völsunga Saga: The Storyof the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda
(Works VII). According to Eiríkr’s account of his first meeting with Morris (Works, VII xvi), the poet was on that occasion in 1868 ‘alreadypreoccupied with the grand types of the heroes (Sigurd the Volsung) andheroines (Brynhild, Gudrun) of the Elder Edda’, with which he was familiar from Thorpe’s translation (Thorpe 1851–52). Like many anotherreader who approaches V†lsunga saga itself from this direction, however, Morris seems to have been initially disappointed by it when he
finally made its acquaintance in the summer of 1869. At this point hewas taking a cure in Bad Ems, though working as ever; here he received
Eiríkr’s preliminary translation of the saga and wrote a letter home inwhich he described the saga as ‘rather of the monstrous order’ (Works,
VII xx); but it seems he had not made time to read beyond the first part ofthe story before his return to England. Eiríkr’s description of subsequentdevelopments is worth quoting at length (Works, VII xx):
I resumed lessons with him on the old system—three days a week— this timetaking the story of the men of Salmonriverdale (Laxdaela). Some time afterwards—I forget how long—when I came for the appointed lesson, I foundhim in a state of great excitement, pacing his study. He told me he had now
finished reading my translation of the ‘grandest tale that was ever told.’ Hewould at once set about copying it out, and procure the original for himself,
which he promptly did. On my suggesting that it would be desirable for him togo through the originals of the Edda songs on which the story was based, he
set aside for a while the Laxdaela Saga and we got to work on the heroic songsof the Edda.

Four points of interest arise from this passage, the first being that Morris
eventually found in the saga, or rather in the story underlying it, thegrandeur for which his earlier reading of the Poetic Edda in translation

William Morris and the Volsungs

47

had caused him to hope. This should be borne in mind when considering
the style that he adopted for his translation of the saga; it also has abearing on the fact, discussed below, that for several years he hesitatedover whether he could or should write a poem of his own on the basis of
the story. Secondly there is the matter of Morris’s ‘state of great excitement’, surely indicative of a strong personal and emotional involvementwith the story and its characters. This connects with the third point,
which concerns the role of Laxdœla saga in the evolution of Morris’s
response to the Volsung tale: Eiríkr implies that, having found the poetless impressed with V†lsunga saga than he had hoped, he suggested
working on the Laxdale story; if so, it was a canny move on his part
because there is a well recognized though inexact correlation between
the central story of Laxdœla saga, with its set of love-triangles involving Guðrún, Bolli, Kjartan, and Hrefna, and that of V†lsunga saga, with
Brynhildr, Gunnarr, Sigurðr, and Guðrún, and because the idea of thelove-triangle was peculiarly important to Morris. The relationships between Morris, his wife Janey, and his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
whatever their exact nature, caused Morris a certain amount of emotional stress during the late 1860s as he suffered jealousy aroused by
Janey’s involvement with Rossetti and yet to some extent acquiesced intheir liaison (MacCarthy 1994, 221–27);4 his imaginative portrayal oflove-triangles had begun much earlier than this, however, for they playa major role in his stories issued in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in 1856, particularly ‘The Story of the Unknown Church’ and‘Frank’s Sealed Letter’ (Works I). Even if Eiríkr did not engineer it,
therefore, the choice of Laxdœla saga as a subject of study was likely, inthe long run, to stimulate Morris’s interest in the kind of story that lies at
the heart of V†lsunga saga; it certainly did so in the short term, as isshown by the production of ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’. Finally it should be
noted that Eiríkr’s promotion of the lays of the Poetic Edda, given that
Morris was already predisposed to honour these works, surely encouraged the publication of the translation in the particular form it took, inwhich several eddic poems have been interpolated in the saga narrativeat points where they add to the aesthetic effect.
4
The generosity of Morris’s acquiescence in the period immediately after
the publication of the V†lsunga saga translation is shown by the fact that in1871 he secured Kelmscott Manor on a joint tenancy with Rossetti. As E. P.
Thompson (1977, 161) remarks, ‘There is no doubt that Morris hoped it
would provide a home where Janey and the children could share Rossetti’s
company during his own absence.’

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Old Norse Made New

In connection with the filling out of the text, it should be noted thatthe preface to The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs indicates anawareness that the saga is less than wholly satisfactory as it stands andthat the reader has to make an effort to get beyond the occasional defects
in the narrative so as to reach the heart of the matter (Works, VII 286):
As to the literary quality of this work we might say much, but we think we may
well trust the reader of poetic insight to break through whatever entanglementof strange matters or unused elements may at first trouble him, and to meet thenature and beauty with which it is filled.

Morris and Eiríkr were determined, therefore, to deliver the tale in a
way that would minimize the defects while still acknowledging their
existence. Their method does not involve any sleight of hand or deception of the public, for the preface and Eiríkr’s endnotes list the translators’interventions clearly and unambiguously, though in the text itself the
eddic interpolations are worked in seamlessly so as to improve, or atleast not to impede, the narrative flow. The most important of theseinterpolations are the following: the song of the birds to Sigurðr after hehas killed Fáfnir and Reginn, which is taken from Fáfnismál 40–44(eliminating the name Sigrdrífa) and serves to amplify the prose text’s
all-too-brief mention of Brynhildr as the woman whom Sigurðr shouldseek and marry (Works, VII 332);5 the verses associated with the wakingof Brynhildr, which are taken from the beginning of Sigrdrífomál andserve to balance the long passage borrowed from the same poem by the
medieval saga writer, as well as to increase the solemnity of the fatal
moment when Sigurðr and the valkyrie meet (Works, VII 335); and thewhole of Guðrúnarqviða in fyrsta, which is given a chapter of its own
just after Guðrún has declared that her kinsmen have slain her husband,and greatly increases the emotional impact of this climactic part of thenarrative (Works, VII 366). The preface, furthermore, outlines the pointsof contact between the saga and the Poetic Edda, indicating on eachoccasion whether the relevant eddic poems have been offered in the
appendix if they have not been subsumed into the main text. In short,everything reasonable has been done to give the novice reader a clear
idea of the story in its various ramifications as they appear in the saga
and the Poetic Edda (but not in Snorri’s Edda or Þiðreks saga) and at
the same time to provide the fullest, simplest, and most satisfying experience of story-telling. As regards the form of the V†lsunga sagatranslation, then, it can be seen that the work is above all that of men
5

All references to eddic poems are to Neckel and Kuhn 1983.

William Morris and the Volsungs49

who cared about their material and wanted others to share their enjoyment of it.
It has already been noted that Morris responded to V†lsunga sagawith strong emotion. He articulated this response in a letter to his friendCharles Eliot Norton (quoted by Paul Thompson 1977, 200):
The scene of the last interview between Sigurd and the despairing and terrible
Brynhild touches me more than anything I have ever met with in literature;
there is nothing wanting in it, nothing forgotten, nothing repeated, nothing
overstrained; all tenderness is shown without the use of a tender word, allmisery and despair without a word of raving, complete beauty without anornament, and all this in two pages of moderate print.

To be touched in similar fashion by the deep but restrained pathos of thesaga is what Morris and Eiríkr expected for ‘the reader of poetic insight’
who would take the trouble to overcome the initial difficulties of thework’s strangeness, as they say in their preface (Works, VII 286):
We cannot doubt that such a reader will be intensely touched by finding,amidst all its wildness and remoteness, such startling realism, such subtilty,
such close sympathy with all the passions that may move himself to-day.

It is clearly with the intention of heightening the reader’s emotional
response, as mentioned above, that the translators interpolate Guðrúnarqviða in fyrsta, which they say is the ‘the most lyrical, the most complete,
and the most beautiful of all the Eddaic poems’ (285); they add that it is‘a poem that any age or language might count among its most precious
possessions’. Though it chiefly portrays the grief of Guðrún, however,they say that they have inserted it ‘before the death of the heroine’ (285),
thus showing that their primary focus is on Brynhildr, as Morris also
implies in his verse prologue to the translation (290), when he says thatthe saga tells
Of Brynhild’s glorious soul with love distraught,
Of Gudrun’s weary wandering unto naught.

The nature of the emotional experience that Morris invites us to enjoy
is indicated in the first lines of the same stanza, which issue thisexhortation:
So draw ye round and hearken, English Folk,
Unto the best tale pity ever wrought!

We are to respond with compassion; and if we are moved to admirationalso, for the tale of the Volsungs is ‘the grandest tale that was ever told’,
it must be an admiration that cannot be severed from pity. This, indeed,is the response that Morris asks from us in the lines on ‘Iceland First

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Old Norse Made New

Seen’ (Works, IX 126), in which Brynhildr is held up as the emblem of
Iceland itself, apostrophized here as the land of bleakness and story:
For what is the mark on thy brow but the brand that thy Brynhild doth bear?
Lone once, and loved and undone by a love that no ages outwear.

This combination—of grandeur, of a love that moves one to admiration and pity, and of a story that endures through centuries—should beborne in mind while considering the implications of Morris and Eiríkr’s
announcement, made in the opening sentence of their preface to theV†lsunga saga translation (Works, VII 283), that what they are offering
the reader is ‘the great Epic of the North’. In the final paragraph of thesame preface they elaborate their meaning (286):This is the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what theTale of Troy was to the Greeks—to all our race first, and afterwards, when thechange of the world has made our race nothing more than a name of what has
been—a story too—then should it be to those that come after us no less than
the Tale of Troy has been to us.

Clearly this passage indicates a sense of kindred between all the Germanic peoples of northern Europe, for whom the Volsung story isconceived as providing a common literary bond; in this respect the writers are to some extent aligning themselves with the movement known as
pan-Germanism, which exerted so profound an influence on Richard
Wagner in his handling of the same material in Der Ring des Nibelungen(Árni Björnsson 2003, 68–117). Their remarks, however, should not be
understood as indicating a racist chauvinism of the north: in the firstplace Morris’s admiration for the epics of the Mediterranean, discussed
above and demonstrated by his translations of Homer and Virgil, shines
through the comments about the tale of Troy; in addition, the remarks
are striking for the emphasis they put on the fact that ‘our race’ will indue course become ‘nothing more than a name’—except that it will also
be a story. If there is any implied satisfaction in the achievements of thenorthern European peoples, the great imperial powers of the nineteenth
century, it is no more than that they will in time become the subject of
one story among others. Perhaps one may say ‘one epic among others’.
The use of the term ‘epic’ in the context of the industrial and imperial
world of the Victorian age has been problematized by several critics,
especially in connection with The Story of Sigurd, Morris’s own attempt
to write a poetic narrative on the subject of ‘the great Epic of the North’(see the unsigned article from the International Review reprinted in
Faulkner 1973, 263–67, and Dentith 1999). Dentith in particular sees it
as paradoxical that a poet who was one of the most committed to theWilliam Morris and the Volsungs

51

values of epic should also have been one of the most admirable critics ofthe British empire. Morris makes it clear, however, that what he means
by epic, in connection with his V†lsunga saga translation, is radically atodds with the pomp of empire. The verse prologue specifies that ‘theNorth’, to which this epic pertains, is primarily represented by Iceland(Works, VII 289):
O hearken, ye who speak the English Tongue,
How in a waste land ages long ago,
The very heart of the North bloomed into song
After long brooding o’er this tale of woe!
Hearken, and marvel how it might be so.

Far from being an epic of empire and power it is the expression of
those who have neither—nor do they have industry or material assets ofany kind (289):
Or rather marvel not, that those should cling
Unto the thoughts of great lives passed away,
Whom God has stripped so bare of everything,
Save the one longing to wear through their day,In fearless wise.

It has already been noted that the idea of greatness passing away andbecoming a story is crucial to Morris’s concept of epic as expressed in
the preface; so it is fitting, according to Morris’s view of things, that theGreat Story of the North should be produced by a people destitute of
everything except endurance and the gift of story-telling. Nor is thestory that they tell, after long brooding, one that hankers for the power
and riches that they lack; rather it is, as the penultimate line of the verse
prologue puts it, a tale ‘Of utter love defeated utterly’ (290). It is an epic
of defeat, therefore, and this is exactly what one would expect, according to Morris’s view; for the place where the heart of the North bloomed
into song is characterized, in ‘Iceland First Seen’ (Works, IX 126), as theland ‘of the courage that may not avail, / Of the longing that may notattain, / of the love that shall never forget’—and it is in this context that
Brynhildr is taken to be its emblem.
Even though the kind of epic conceived by Morris belongs to the poor
and is an epic of defeat, it is nevertheless grand; this fact has consequences for the kind of language to be used in the V†lsunga sagatranslation (and in the other translations from Old Norse, though theissue is particularly relevant to this work). The archaic diction and syntax employed by Morris, and the terms he coined on the basis of
etymological connections, have always been the focus of criticism: see,52

Old Norse Made New

for example, the 1870 review written by G. A. Simcox with the help ofGuðbrandur Vigfússon (Faulkner 1973, 152–56) and the comments by
Eiríkr himself printed in May Morris’s introduction to the 1911 edition(Works, VII xvii–xix). There are two main objections to Morris’s language, the first being that it misrepresents the style of saga prose, which
would not have seemed archaic to the audience for which it was written,
and the second being that it puts an obstacle in the way of the modern
reader who, as Morris and Eiríkr were aware and as discussed above,already has to cope with much strangeness on encountering thenarrative. In connection with the first point, however, it should be
acknowledged that much saga prose, in the original Old Icelandic, has apeculiar dignity which cannot be reproduced in modern English; a really close translation will inevitably be stiff, choppy, and strange, whilst
one in free-flowing colloquial language will miss the lapidary quality ofthe original and falsify its style just as much as Morris does, though in adifferent way. Although it is out of fashion, therefore, there is still something to be said for Morris’s solution. There is insufficient room here fora full discussion, but the point may be illustrated with an example drawn
from the final dialogue between Brynhildr and Sigurðr, which Morris so
admired: ‘Heldr en þú deyir, vil ek þik eiga, en fyrirláta Guðrúnu,’ segir
Sigurðr, en svá þrútnuðu hans síður at í sundr gengr brynjuhringar(Finch 1965, 56). Finch’s well-respected translation renders this as follows (56): ‘“Rather than you should die, I’ll marry you and leave Gudrun,”said Sigurd, and his breast so heaved that the links of his hauberk snapped.’
Compare this with Morris’s rendering of the same passage (Works, VII362): ‘“Rather than thou die, I will wed thee, and put away Gudrun,”said Sigurd. But therewithal so swelled the heart betwixt the sides ofhim, that the rings of his byrny burst asunder.’ Is the version by themodern scholar self-evidently better in either tone or accuracy of meaning? Morris has in fact managed to retain more of the Icelandic wording;also the climactic rhythm of the final clause and its onomatopoeic alliteration are rather fine, whilst the rendering of en as ‘but’, rather thanFinch’s ‘and’, captures more fully the dramatic irony of Sigurðr’s emotions, since he actually loves Guðrún to some extent, and thus it makes
better sense of Brynhildr’s immediate response, which is to dismiss
Sigurðr in anger.
The second objection to Morris’s language, concerning the obstacles
it places in the way of easy comprehension, is more damaging, however,for it is true that Morris is often likely to confuse a reader who is notalready immersed in medieval literature. Again a single example must

William Morris and the Volsungs

53

suffice here: in the interpolated poem which shows Guðrún lamenting
over the body of Sigurðr, Morris makes Brynhildr curse the woman ‘Who
gained greeting / For thee, O Gudrun’ (Works, VII 372). Here the word
‘greeting’ (= ‘weeping’) translates the Old Norse grátr (Guðrúnarqviða
in fyrsta, 23), so Morris has adopted an archaic word, which now survives only in Scots and northern dialects, 6 for the sake of alliteration andof using a term etymologically related to the original; but he has done soat the cost of possibly being misunderstood. It must be conceded, nevertheless, that in other contexts Morris’s interest in etymology and his
love of recovering uncommon usages may result in creative and illuminating amplifications of the text, for example when he makes Brynhildr,
speaking to Sigurðr in their final interview, say, ‘I might not see clearly,or divide the good from the evil’ (Works, VII 360), rendering fekk ek þó
eigi víst skilit (Finch 1965, 55). Eiríkr’s additional endnote (Works, VII484) says that the phrase ‘or divide the good from the evil’ is not in theoriginal; this is correct, but Morris’s amplification is one appropriate to
Brynhildr’s state of mind in the context and it is prompted by the factthat the basic meaning of the verb skilja (here ‘to discern’) is ‘to divide,
separate’. By introducing the idea with this justification, furthermore,
Morris has managed to touch on a theme that would be of major significance in his re-working of the story in his Sigurd poem, as discussed
below.
The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (Works
XII) was begun in October 1875 and appeared in November 1876, though
the book is dated 1877.7 For several years after publishing the V†lsunga
saga translation Morris had hesitated over the attempt to make a newpoem out of the saga material, in part because he thought ‘no verse
could render the best parts of it, and would only be a flatter and tamer
version of a thing already existing’, as he said in the letter to C. E.
Norton mentioned above (quoted by Paul Thompson 1977, 200). Thereis little that is flat or tame about the Sigurd poem as he eventually wroteit, however. Wisely, he chose not to compete with the saga on its own
terms but to give the story an essentially novelistic treatment, especiallyin the middle two books of the four, filling out the thoughts and emotions of the characters and floating the narrative on a stream of incidental
details. For the verse he adopted a line already used in ‘Iceland First
Seen’, a predominantly anapaestic hexameter with its caesura falling6

OED sub greeting, vbl. n.2
From this point on, names of characters will be spelled as they appear in
the poem.
7

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Old Norse Made New

almost always after the third foot, which is frequently followed by an
extra syllable. It is an incantatory measure, heavily accented but variable
enough when read intelligently as if out loud, and capable of sustaining
long sweeps of narrative or description. Particularly impressive among
the many evocative descriptions are the opening sequence, which brings
the dwelling of King Volsung before the reader’s eyes (Works, XII 1–2)
and the ascent of Sigurd to the Glittering Heath (102–08) through alandscape reminiscent of Iceland, which Morris had seen for himself in
1871 and again in 1873. The line is well adapted, also, to be the vehicle
for elevated set-piece speeches such as Signy’s prophecy of ragnar†kand the renewal of the world (22–23) or Regin’s power-crazed rant when
he pictures himself as possessor of the magic gold (88–89). If the poetry
does flatten out and grow tame anywhere it is in the love scenes between
Sigurd and Brynhild (147–48) or Sigurd and Gudrun (180–81), which
are decidedly Victorian; but the scene of casual sex between Sigmund
and his sister (29), in contrast, is thoroughly impressive though by nomeans sensationalist.
On the whole the story shadows that of the saga and the corresponding
poems of the Edda, but some changes have been made for the sake ofconsistent characterization and sustained drama. In the fourth book, forexample, Gudrun vindictively encourages her second spouse, Atli, totake action against her brothers for the slaying of her first husband,
Sigurd, as she does in Das Nibelungenlied but not in the Icelandic tradition. Thus Morris completes his picture of a woman who is led by emotion,
whose loving but dangerous nature is indicated by her jealousy, soonafter she has met Sigurd and before she knows anything of his relationship with Brynhild, when she perceives that he longs for someone else
‘and her heart grows cold as a sword’ (163), and concerning whose passionate nature the narrator, putting the thought into Sigurd’s mind, says,‘From the heart of a loving woman shall the death of men arise’ (205).
Other changes seem to have been made so as to preserve the heroic
dignity of the characters; hence Morris emphasizes Sigmund’s lupine
nature in the account of the fight with the she-wolf (21) and makes it
clear that Sigmund fought with his teeth while his hands were still fast in
the stocks, but he omits the saga’s comic grotesquery concerning thefact that Sigmund bit the tongue of the wolf while she was licking honeyoff his face. Though willing to relate the incestuous union of Sigmund
and Signy, furthermore, he preserves some of the Victorian proprieties
concerning cruelty to children: Gudrun does not kill the sons she has
had with Atli, as she does in the saga; nor is there any mention of Sigurd’sWilliam Morris and the Volsungs

55

infant son, whom the saga says was killed at Brynhild’s instigation andwho shared their funeral pyre; and the Sigmund of the poem, unlike thesame figure in the saga, does not kill the son (singular) of Signy and
Siggeir when the boy fails the test of the flour bag, but sends him home
to his parents (25–26). In making the last-mentioned change, it should
be noted, Morris not only gives Sigmund a more sympathetic nature but
also brings his behaviour into line with that revealed by his later refusal,
in the poem (36) as in the saga, to kill the children who discover his
hiding-place in King Siggeir’s hall—though in this case the outrage isthen committed by the wild and grim Sinfiotli.
As in the Old Norse sources, the gods play a role that is by no means
morally unambiguous or benevolent. The appropriate attitude to beshown towards them is outlined by Brynhild in the advice she gives
Sigurd at their first meeting (127):
Love thou the Gods—and withstand them, lest thy fame should fail in the end,
And thou be but their thrall and their bondsman, who wert born for their very
friend.

By implying that the gods can be tyrannical, Brynhild partly agrees
with their enemy Regin, who tells Sigurd that Loki ‘gathered his godhead together’ in order to kill Otter because he recognized in him ‘a kingof the free and the careless’ (77). Sigurd, however, gives his allegiance tothe gods as their friend in accordance with Brynhild’s words: when hemeets Odin, Sigurd declares that he will slay Fafnir for the god’s sake,and adds, ‘I love thee, friend of my fathers, Wise Heart of the holy folk’(109); and he addresses Regin as ‘Foe of the Gods’ moments before
cutting off his head (117). In striking the blows against Regin and Fafnir,
Sigurd is performing acts that the gods themselves cannot, for apartfrom their one ill-judged adventure concerning the kindred of Otter,they exhibit a strange passivity. The value of their friendship, furthermore, is to be doubted. As the dying Fafnir says with the percipience ofthe fey (111):
I have seen the Gods of heaven, and their Norns withal I know:
They love and withhold their helping, they hate and refrain the blow;
They curse and they may not sunder, they bless and they shall not blend;
They have fashioned the good and the evil; they abide the change and the end.

The gods, in fact, function chiefly as an audience within the narrative
itself (and thus exemplify the concept of the world as story, discussed
below). This can be seen best in the passage that describes the moment
when Sigurd, now married to Gudrun, sees Brynhild enter the Niblung
hall for the first time, recognizes her as the power of Grimhild’s magic

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Old Norse Made New

potion passes off, and understands that he must carry the burden of his
knowledge ‘till the last of the uttermost end’ (200–01):
The Gods look down from heaven, and the lonely King they see,And sorrow over his sorrow, and rejoice in his majesty.
For the will of the Norns is accomplished, and outworn is Grimhild’s spell,
And nought now shall blind or help him, and the tale shall be to tell.

In many ways Sigurd is presented as a conventional hero of a type
likely to appeal to an ethically-minded Victorian readership. He is
the golden boy (102, 160), in fact a nineteenth-century solar hero
(Hodgson 1999, 78), as is shown especially by his transfiguration before
the dragon slaying, when Regin turns from the newly risen sun andbeholds Sigurd as ‘another light’ (106). He is one to whom guile is alien(101) and who is troubled, after tasting the dragon’s blood, when heperceives the guile and malice of the world (115). At his birth, furthermore, it is recognized that ‘the best was sprung from the best’ (63) and hebecomes his people’s hope and joy (65–67); later the Niblungs, whom
he has joined, celebrate him as a bringer of law and order, of peace,
freedom, and prosperity (161):
Yea, they sing the song of Sigurd and the face without a foe,
And they sing of the prison’s rending and the tyrant laid alow, [. . .]And they tell how the ships of the merchants come free and go at their will,
And how wives in peace and safety may crop the vine-clad hill.

Even when his sorrow has fallen on him and he finds himself having toshare the Niblung hall with Brynhild and her husband, he is all the more‘the helper, the overcomer, the righteous sundering sword’ and ‘the eyebright seer of all things, that wasteth every wrong’; and although he has
become a kind of moral enforcer he remains ‘the loveliest King of theKing-folk’—‘and all children loved him well’ (205–06).
It is clear, nevertheless, that Sigurd, though an almost messianic figure, is only a ‘straightener of the crooked’ (206) in piecemeal fashion.
The world as seen by Morris, in this period when he was becoming
actively involved in politics (he became treasurer of the liberal Eastern
Question Association in November 1876) but was still several years
away from his adoption of Marxism (he joined the Democratic Federation in January 1883), is not capable of total and permanent transformation
for the better through human means. Such a transformation belongs to
the mythological ragnar†k which no power can either delay or hasten,for even the gods, having made the good and the evil as Fafnir says (111,quoted above), wait for the change and the end. In this poem, in fact,
Morris repudiates those who wish to bring about the wholesale

William Morris and the Volsungs

57

reformation of life and its conditions, for he portrays them as self-glorifying and self-deceiving. Hence Grimhild, who ‘deemed her life wasgreat, / And her hand a wonder of wonders’ (166), imagines that her
potions will enable her to do better than the gods (166):
For she thought: I will heal the smitten, I will raise up the smitten and slain,
And take heed where the Gods were heedless, and build on where they began,
And frame hope for the unborn children and the coming days of man.

In reality, however, all she does is create ‘the eyeless tangle’ (222) thatenmeshes Sigurd and her own royal kin. Similarly and more chillingly,
Regin imagines that if he can once obtain the accursed gold, on which
his brother Fafnir is lying in dragon form, he will become the unique god
who will have absolute control of a grateful world. Nothing at all would
be done, he thinks, ‘but the deed that my heart would fashion’ (89):
And there shall be no more dying, and the sea shall be as the land,
And the world for ever and ever shall be young beneath my hand.

Against this vision of a totalitarian paradise, Sigurd, Regin’s slayer,chooses the gods and the extant world with all its violence, its potential
for peace and plenty, its good and its evil. He says to Regin, who fears
that death may come upon him before the gold has been obtained (106):
It is me, it is me that thou fearest, if indeed I know thy thought;
Yes me, who would utterly light the face of all good and ill,
If not with the fruitful beams that the summer shall fulfill,
Then at least with the world a-blazing, and the glare of the grinded sword.

Contrasted with Sigurd, the warrior who illuminates good and ill inbattle, is his killer, Guttorm, who returns from seafaring ‘and is waxen
fierce and strong, / A man in the wars delighting, blind-eyed throughright and wrong’ (202). The ability to perceive good and ill, and to
distinguish them, is crucial: it is what Sigurd temporarily loses in ‘theeyeless tangle’, and even when his memory returns and he can see allthings clearly, the situation left behind by Grimhild’s plot, as Sigurd
understands it, is such that ‘seared is the sight of the wise, / And good is
at one with evil till the new-born death shall arise’ (205)—the death inquestion being that of Sigurd himself, and of Brynhild who brings it
about. It is with reference to the same situation in the V†lsunga sagatranslation, in fact, that Morris had made Brynhild say that she could notsee clearly ‘or divide the good from the evil’ (Works, VII 360), as discussed above. Making good and evil indistinguishable, furthermore, ispresented in the Sigurd poem as the worst of actions, for it is not only
Grimhild’s crime but also the thing to which Fafnir and Regin aspired, as

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Old Norse Made New

shown by the fact that Sigurd, having destroyed them, characterizes
them in death not as evildoers but as those who ‘would blend the good
and the ill’ (Works, XII 117). As to his own destruction, it is not clear
whether Sigurd looks ahead to it merely as the result of the situation inwhich good is at one with evil, or also as a possible remedy for it; butwhen the moment of death comes, he certainly looks back on his life(and forward to the telling of it as a tale) and sees it as it is. ‘I have done
and I may not undo,’ he says, but ‘nought now is left to repent of, and thetale abides to tell’ (230).
Sigurd’s thoughts concerning the eventual tale do not simply represent the heroic wish for fame at whatever cost, as perhaps Hogni’s dowhen he says that he will ride the steed of the Norns ‘till he see great
marvels and wonders, and leave great tales to be told’ (203); rather theyecho and answer the words spoken by Fafnir as he prepares to transform
himself into a dragon and do nothing other than lie on the accursed
hoard (86):Lo, I am a King for ever, and alone on the Gold shall I dwellAnd do no deed to repent of and leave no tale to tell.

It is a neat irony that in taking this course of action Fafnir fulfils theinjunction mockingly laid by his father, Reidmar, on Odin (80):Then curse the world, and depart, and sit in your changeless mirth;
And there shall be no more kings, and battle and murder shall fail,And the world shall laugh and long not, nor weep, nor fashion the tale.

Against the backdrop of these speeches it is clear that to Sigurd, thefriend of the gods, as opposed to Fafnir and Reidmar, their enemies, it isbetter that there should be a tale than that the world should be free of
weeping, battle or murder—even murder of himself. One of the morals of
this, it would seem, is that passivity is not an option, except possibly forthe gods in their role as audience (and hence for us in our role as readers),
even though action will implicate the actor in guilt and involve him or
her in pain; another is that a part of acting in the world must be thetransformation of actions into narrative. This much is clear and certain,
but we may be able to go further, albeit cautiously, since Morris makes
one notable foray into the realm of the eschatological.8 Early in thepoem he makes Signy steel her brother Sigmund to face the years of
8

Eschatology, the study of ‘the last things’, may be characterized as an
attempt to describe the world as it ought to be but has not yet become.
Eschatological thinking is predominantly religious but has clear relevance tosome political systems such as Marxism.

William Morris and the Volsungs

59

strife and hardship ahead by picturing him at ragnar†k; as the fight
begins, she says, he will review the history known to him, and though hewill have a clearer understanding of why things happen as they do, thiswill not change the categories of good and ill, which will remain distinct
to his perception (22):There as thou drawest thy sword, thou shalt think of the days that were,And the foul shall still seem foul, and the fair shall still seem fair.

Even after the transfiguration of the world, when the last battle has ended
and Baldur has returned, the memories of this life, as it now is, willremain clear and be transformed into story (22–23):
By the side of the sons of Odin shalt thou fashion a tale to be told
In the hall of the happy Baldur: nor there shall the tale grow old
Of the days before the changing, e’en those that over us pass.

To put this in other words, Signy imagines that the essential nature of
the world as it ought to be in its refashioned state will be one that preserves the essence of the present world by transforming it into narrative,
and in which this narrative transformation has become the sole remaining act. The passage needs to be treated circumspectly because it is apiece of rhetoric put into the mouth of a peculiarly grim woman andelaborates some elements of a mythology in which Morris, of course, did
not believe; nevertheless it is in no way at odds with the rest of the poem,
and it serves to show us how the theme of the perception of good and illmight be combined with that of the transformation of events into narrative, and how the two might then be taken to their logical, or at least
their eschatological, conclusion. If we take this aspect of the passage
seriously, we find Morris putting forward, on his own terms, the Aesthetes’ idea that the world exists for art, and perhaps anticipating themodern idea that its essential nature is that of a linguistic construct—theworld as narrative. On the ethical and political levels, finally, it may beseen that the eschatological vision of the poem has little in common
with the Marxists’ end of history, to which Morris would subsequently
give his allegiance, and even less with the Christians’ New Jerusalem,
which is more like Regin’s dream of a place where all thoughts are happy,
grateful, and centred on an absolute monarch; instead it is akin to what
Nietzsche would later call a yea-saying, in this case one in which theworld, with all its good and ill, its foul and fair, is perceived and affirmed
in a narrative that is forever repeated and renewed.
In the remaining twenty years of his life, Morris changed his politics
and shifted the focus of his literary output to prose, in which he produced,

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Old Norse Made New

among other important works, the romances that initiated the genre now
known as fantasy, but he never repudiated Sigurd or ceased to regard it
as the book ‘he held most highly and wished to be remembered by’,according to his daughter May (Works, XII xxiii). Many admirers ofMorris have agreed with the poet’s own valuation of Sigurd, and no
doubt there are many reasons for this, but there are two that make thejudgement especially appropriate. The first is that Sigurd, in execution,is the most accomplished essay in refashioning by a man for whom therefashioning of existent tales was the chief mode of his poetic creativity,
and who gave the idea of narrative transformation so prominent a placein his writings—above all in this poem itself. The second reason is that
the Old Norse material that Morris was here seeking to make new is thestory that he judged to be ‘the best tale pity ever wrought’ and in fact‘the grandest tale that was ever told’, irrespective of language or culture.
In addition there is the fact that for Morris, who came to regard Old
Norse-Icelandic culture so highly and who put so much effort into making its literature available in English, the story of the Volsungs was thequintessential product of that culture, the one that appeared when ‘thevery heart of the North bloomed into song’. As to whether Sigurd is
likely to be the literary work for which Morris will chiefly be remembered, this is more doubtful because some of his political pieces andromances are strong contenders in an age with little interest in narrativeverse. Anyone with an interest in Old Norse, however, really ought totake a good look at this poem. The saga translations have grown old—
indeed one could say that they were born old—although several,
including that of V†lsunga saga, have acquired a new lease of life on theinternet; but Sigurd, with its length and complex nature, has the qualityof all great poems: although the printed text is fixed, the telling is madenew every time it is read.
BibliographyÁrni Björnsson 2003. Wagner and the Volsungs: Icelandic Sources of Der Ring
des Nibelungen.
Dentith, Simon 1999. ‘Sigurd the Volsung: Heroic Poetry in an Unheroic Age’. In
Faulkner and Preston 1999, 60–70.
Faulkner, Peter 1973. William Morris: The Critical Heritage.
Faulkner, Peter 1980. Against the Age: An Introduction to William Morris.
Faulkner, Peter and Peter Preston, eds, 1999. William Morris: Centenary Essays.
Finch, R. G., ed. and trans., 1965. V†lsunga saga: The Saga of the Volsungs.
Hodgson, Amanda 1987. The Romances of William Morris.
Hodgson, Amanda 1999. ‘The Troy Connection: Myth and History in Sigurd theVolsung’. In Faulkner and Preston 1999, 71–79.

William Morris and the Volsungs

61

MacCarthy, Fiona 1994. William Morris: A Life for our Time.
Marshall, Roderick 1979. William Morris and his Earthly Paradises.
Morris, William 1910–15. The Collected Works of William Morris. Ed. May
Morris. 24 vols.
Neckel, Gustav and Hans Kuhn, eds, 1983. Edda. Die Lieder des Codex Regius.
5th edn.
Oberg, Charlotte H. 1978. A Pagan Prophet: William Morris.
OED = Oxford English Dictionary Online <http://dictionary.oed.com>
Thompson, E. P. 1977. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary.
Thompson, Paul 1977. The Work of William Morris.
Thorpe, Benjamin 1851–52. Northern Mythology. 3 vols.

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In Search of the Lakeland Saga

63

IN SEARCH OF THE LAKELAND SAGA:ANTIQUARIAN FICTION AND THE NORSESETTLEMENT IN CUMBRIA
MATTHEW TOWNEND

Few books in the nineteenth century sold more copies, or mademore of a splash, than Mrs Humphry Ward’s 1888 novel RobertElsmere, the foremost example of the so-called genre of ‘cassock-ripper’(Gilmour 1993, 89), in which a young clergyman painfully loses
his faith. In the third chapter of Robert Elsmere, the eponymous herois to be found making dinner-table conversation at a house in the fictional valley of Long Whindale, based upon the Westmorland valley ofLongsleddale (Lindop 1993, 30). A social solecism by the mercurial Dr
Baker leads to abrupt silence and conversational paralysis, at whichjuncture the young hero demonstrates the stuff of which he is made(1888, 65):
Robert Elsmere alone showed presence of mind. Bending across to Dr. Baker,
he asked him a sudden question as to the history of a certain strange green
mound or barrow that rose out of a flat field not far from the vicarage windows. Dr. Baker grasped his whiskers, threw the young man a queer glance,and replied. Thenceforward he and Robert kept up a lively antiquarian talk on
the traces of Norse settlement in the Cumbrian valleys, which lasted till theladies left the dining-room.

From this curious episode it would seem, then, that Norse settlement in
the area was a fertile and familiar subject at the dinner-tables of the
Cumbrian professional classes in the 1880s, and a good way of making
conversation. In late-Victorian Lakeland, in other words, the Vikings
were news, and worthy of discussion, and it is one aspect of this phenomenon that I want to look at in this essay. This was not, of course, aphenomenon restricted to the Lake District: as Andrew Wawn’s work has
shown, in nineteenth-century Britain ‘Old Northernism’ took many forms
and fuelled many enthusiasms (Wawn 2000). The present essay may
thus be regarded as a contribution from a distinctively regional perspective to this larger subject, so many aspects of which have been brilliantly
delineated and explored by Wawn.
The importance of the Norse influence on the Lake District was firstargued for in a sustained manner by no less a figure than Thomas De

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Old Norse Made New

Quincey, in a four-part essay in the Westmorland Gazette in 1819
and 1820. De Quincey noted that certain words in Cumbrian dialect
resembled comparable words in modern Danish, and suggested a link
between the two. As D. S. Roberts has shown (1999), the influenceof De Quincey’s insight can be increasingly seen in the successive
editions of Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes—for Victorian readers, ofcourse, the single most important publication on the region. The studyof Norse influence on the area received its next major stimulus in
1856, when Robert Ferguson published his influential—if variable—monograph entitled The Northmen in Cumberland and Westmoreland,
and from this point onwards the study of Norse antiquities in Cumbria
never looked back. Burials, sculpture, inscriptions, dialect, placenames, surnames, folk-customs, furniture, buildings, sheep, wrestling: inthe latter decades of the century all these and other subjects received
increasing antiquarian interest—some well-founded, scholarly, andperceptive, and some not. At the turn of the century, however, two men—
one a good antiquarian and the other a quite exceptional one—tried
to go one step further than this, and instead of simply studying Viking
antiquities in the Lake District they endeavoured to add to themthemselves, by the composition of some original native saga-literature
for the Lake District, modelled deliberately upon the great Family
Sagas of medieval Iceland. These men were William Gershom Collingwood and Charles Arundel Parker, and their sagas are Thorstein of
the Mere, The Bondwoman, and The Story of Shelagh, Olaf Cuaran’s
Daughter.
Collingwood is of course much the more famous of the two, and willtake centre-stage here, with Parker in something of a supporting role.
Born in Liverpool in 1854, Collingwood studied at Oxford and the Slade
School of Art, before settling down in the Lakes at Lanehead, a big
house overlooking Coniston Water, where he acted as unofficial secretary (and, in time, biographer and editor) to the elderly John Ruskin, andthrew himself whole-heartedly into the study of Lake District antiquities. Collingwood’s first paper on the Norse influence on the region was
published in 1894 (with footnotes supplied by Eiríkr Magnússon,
William Morris’ Icelandic collaborator); but that this first publication
was only the tip of an iceberg of prior research became clear in thefollowing two years, with the delivery of a seminal paper to the recentlyformed Viking Club in London (Collingwood 1896b), and the appearanceof his two fictional works on the subject: Thorstein of the Mere in 1895,
and The Bondwoman in 1896. The former was dedicated to Collingwood’s

In Search of the Lakeland Saga

65

young son Robin, in time to far outshine his father, as a philosopher andhistorian of Roman Britain.1
Charles Arundel Parker was just a few years older than Collingwood,
having been born in Chatham in 1851. He trained as a physician at
Edinburgh University, but in 1877 settled back at the family home near
Gosforth, at the entrance to Wasdale, where until his death he acted as,
variously, G. P., J. P., churchwarden, and general stalwart of the local
community. Unlike Collingwood, his main antiquarian interests were
not in origin Norse, but simply (and intensely) local, and were focussed
upon the remarkable array of pre-conquest stone sculpture associatedwith St. Mary’s Church, Gosforth (where, incidentally, for part of Parker’s time the rector was John Wordsworth, grandson of the poet) (Parker
1904, 74). In 1882 Parker discovered the so-called Gosforth Fishing
Stone, and in 1896, in the course of church renovations, he was instrumental in the discovery of the Gosforth hogbacks: these monuments,
and the more famous free-standing cross in the churchyard, he describedand analysed in a sequence of increasingly astute publications: a brief
pamphlet in 1882 (complete with a sonnet by Canon Rawnsley, friend of
Beatrix Potter and co-founder of the National Trust), a lengthier monograph in 1896, and a thorough guide-book in 1904. Finally, in 1909 hepublished a fictional account of the origins of these monuments: The
Story of Shelagh, Olaf Cuaran’s Daughter.2
Here, then, we have two antiquarian writers to consider, who, it should
be said, knew each other well and were friends, and even collaborated
on some publications: their co-authored 1917 article on the Gosforth
Cross remains foundational, and is also the main source for the guidebook still being sold at Gosforth Church. Here we have two writers
who respond to the importance of Norse antiquities in their beloved
1

On W. G. Collingwood’s antiquarianism and his influences on R. G.
Collingwood see Johnson 1994 and Parker 2001. For biographical accounts
see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and contemporary
obituaries in The Times (3rd October 1932) and the Transactions of the
Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society (New
Series 33 (1932–33), 308–12). More intimate portraits are offered by his
grand-daughter (Altounyan 1969, 1990) and Arthur Ransome (1976, 91–
97). On Collingwood’s Norse enthusiasms see Wawn 1992, 223–28, and2000, 335–40.
2
For Parker’s biography see his obituary in the Transactions of the Cumberland
and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society (New Series 18(1918), 243–45).

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Old Norse Made New

region of the country by writing fictional accounts of the activities of
Viking settlers in the Lake District in the ninth and tenth centuries.
These fictional accounts in many ways stand in a clear relation to
the sagas of medieval Iceland, and my argument is that in somesense Collingwood and Parker are endeavouring to supply a nativeequivalent to these famous medieval works—they are attempting to provide a saga-literature for the English Lake District. In what follows,
therefore, there are three questions I want to address. First, why did thesewriters want to attempt such a thing? Second (and most fully), how did
they go about doing so? And third (and in conclusion), how well did
they succeed?
First, then, why, and the simple answer is that the nineteenthcentury antiquarians came to see Iceland and Lakeland as parallelcolonies and parallel cultures, both being settlements made by
migrating Scandinavians during the Viking Age. Indeed, in somerespects one may say that Victorian scholars perceived this truth—that
Iceland and Lakeland were parallel and equal Viking colonies—rather
more clearly than contemporary ones: it is important not to think thatin some sense Iceland is primary and Lakeland secondary simply
because Iceland was the one Scandinavian colony that persisted into
the post-medieval period in recognizably Scandinavian form. At
the time of Viking-Age expansion Iceland was no more (or no less)part of the Scandinavian world than Lakeland: and the recognitionof this led the way in the later nineteenth century to a fuller explorationof the linguistic, cultural, and historical parallels between Lakelandand Iceland—for instance in lengthily-titled monographs in 1894
and 1895 by the Reverend Thomas Ellwood, rector of Torver near
Coniston, and an enthusiastic if under-informed student of Norse language and culture (see further Wawn 1995 and 2000, 228–30). But inone obvious and important respect these two Norse colonies were different: in literary terms, the settlement in Iceland had resulted in theimmense achievement of the medieval sagas; but the settlement in
Lakeland was silent and unrecorded, and it was this silence, this gap in
the cultural remains, that Collingwood and Parker were endeavouring torectify with their provision of Lakeland sagas. As Collingwood observesin the introductory pages to his 1902 guide-book The Lake Counties(1902, 4):
Story alone and scenery alone may interest specialists, but the thing that appeals
to us all, and charms us, and carries us out of ourselves, is the union of story
and scenery. Then you get poetry and romance.

In Search of the Lakeland Saga

67

Manifesto statements by both writers make it quite clear that thisprovision of Lakeland sagas was indeed their purpose, and both areworth quoting at some length. Collingwood writes as follows in his
postscript to Thorstein, entitled ‘Remarks on the Norse Settlement’(1895, 307–08):
Our antiquaries, however, have found us no Lakeland Saga. The reason is
simple. By the time when the Sagas were written down, the Norman Conquest
and the feudal organisation of England had cut these Norse colonists awayfrom their kindred [. . .]. Whatever songs and stories of Viking ancestors werethen current in the mouths of the people found no scribe such as Ari thelearned, or Hall Gizurson. One would have thought that in the abbeys of the
district some native monk might have noted them down, as the Icelandic
folklore was noted down at Flatey, and Helgafell. But the great abbeys hereabouts were founded by aliens, and their mental life had no room for local
patriotism. [. . .] The saga-period went by; and in another couple of centuries,
when the age of Border ballads had set in, there were new themes in plenty tosing about. The old legends were out of mind, except for isolated traditions
and surviving names.
And yet, even at this day, enough of these remain to give us glimpses of thepast. [. . .] And so to write this story of Thorstein of the Mere—the eponymus
of our Thurston-water (Coniston Lake)—is only as it were to string afresh ahandful of broken beads from an opened cairn. There was a Thorstein’s saga,no doubt, once upon a time; or at least ballads of the giants on the fell, and theinvasion of Eadmund. ‘Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung’
the local skald.

Parker, evidently drawing on Collingwood’s earlier formulation, confirms this view in his ‘Fore Word’ to The Story of Shelagh (1909, v–vi):
The reason why no Lake Country saga has survived is not far to seek.
The only person who had sufficient culture and leisure to write one out would
be a monk, who was not above associating with the people; and the monks
were either Norman or leaned to the Norman party then in power, whoregarded all Englishmen as barbarians; and not only made little distinction
between Norse, Angle, and Welsh, but knew little and cared less for their
history and belief.
Yet there must have been many a saga tale told round the fire on winterevenings in the homesteads of Cumberland. Not only those of old Norway,
but of heroes and deeds belonging to the Lake Country; while women spun,men made nets, carved woodwork and mended gear, and children listenedwith round eyes until bidden away to bed. Such a tale might mayhap take theform of this story.

The conditional tenses with which Parker and Collingwood con-clude
their reflections (‘might mayhap’, and the Byronic ‘would, or could, orshould have’) act as invitations to fill the silence, rather than deterrents.

68

Old Norse Made New

An alternative approach to the question ‘why’ would be in terms ofregional fiction. As Keith Snell has shown (1998), there was an upsurge
in interest in regional fiction—its writing and its reading—all over thecountry from the mid-1880s onwards, an upsurge clearly related to concurrent interests in, for example, local dialects and local antiquities.
Among the great Victorian novelists, one need only think of Thomas
Hardy to perceive the force of this movement. Regional fiction
often means regional publication and regional readership, and it is no
coincidence that Parker’s Story of Shelagh (like many of Collingwood’s
other works, including the 1909 reprint of Thorstein) was published byTitus Wilson of Kendal (until 1990 the printer of Saga-Book, the periodical of the Viking Society for Northern Research). As Snell comments(1998, 42),the regional novel in many of its forms provides a focus for the study ofreaders’ expectations about the locality and region vis-à-vis a wider area suchas the nation state, and for the study of those elements (e.g. speech, dialect,social relations, topography, local tradition) that form the basis for local consciousness and a sense of attachment.

In other words, regional fiction supplies a space in which issues of regional identity—often defined historically—can be thought throughand articulated.
So much, therefore, for the question, why write a Lakeland saga: there
was a parallelism between Iceland and Lakeland, but also a silence on
the Lakeland side that needed to be filled; and such an intention fitscogently into broader issues of regional identity in the late nineteenth
century. And there is no doubt at all that the works to fill it were to besagas, and not novels, or tales, or stories. Indeed, one can see in thesubtitles of these works a hardening of the conception and a proclamation of them as substitute sagas: Thorstein is labelled as a ‘saga’ from thevery beginning (and at an early stage Collingwood toyed with the idea
of calling it Fornesinga saga, or the saga of the people of Furness), but
The Bondwoman’s original status as a ‘story’ is altered in its later revision
to a ‘saga’ (indeed, to ‘a saga of Langdale’, like Fornesinga saga forming an obvious parallel to geographically-titled Icelandic sagas such asLaxdœla saga and Ljósvetninga saga). As for Parker, Titus Wilson’s
publicity flier advertised the forthcoming Story of Shelagh as a ‘saga
tale’ (Figure 1), but it had simply become a ‘saga’ by the time the titlepage was printed. In his postscript to Thorstein Collingwood playfully
characterizes himself as a ‘belated Sagaman’, and this self-presentation
informs much of what he is attempting in his two works. In scrutinizing

In Search of the Lakeland Saga

69

Figure 1: Advertisement for C.A. Parker, The Story of Shelagh, Olaf Cuaran’s
Daughter (Kendal: Titus Wilson, 1909)

70

Old Norse Made New

Figure 2: Title-page for W.G. Collingwood, Thorstein of the Mere: A Saga of
the Northmen in Lakeland (London: Edward Arnold, 1895)

In Search of the Lakeland Saga71

the illustrated title-page to the first edition of Thorstein, drawn by
Collingwood himself, sharp-eyed runologists will note that the decorated panel at the top contains the simple inscription in Norse runesÞorsteins saga (Figure 2).
Secondly, how did these two writers go about the composition of theirLakeland sagas? In antiquarian works such as these, it is more than usually difficult to distinguish the elements that go into their making fromthose that go into their meaning, as so many of the historical details
function as both source and allusion at one and the same time. Essentially, though, two obvious bodies of material condition the ways inwhich Collingwood and Parker construct their narratives: Norse Lakeland
antiquities, and medieval Icelandic sagas, and this twofold origin isapparent in terms of both substance and form. So, for instance, The
Bondwoman contains within its brief space such standard saga-episodes
and motifs as horse-fights, fostering, concubinage, the exposure of infants, haymaking, prophecy, and the feasts of vetr-nætr and Jólablót. As
for material culture, Collingwood observes in his endnotes to Thorsteinthat ‘It may be said here that the dress, manners, &c., of the story arebased on sagas or archaeological evidence, compared with Lake District
characteristics’ (1895, 319): examples of this occur in the forms of woodcarving, ironwork, bloomeries, weaponry, thing-mounts, head-wear, andhouse-remains. For Parker, the most important objects of material culture are the stone monuments of Gosforth. In The Story of Shelagh heoffers aetiological accounts of how each of these came into being: theFishing Stone is presented as the funeral cross of Shelagh’s husband
Vikar, one of the hogbacks is Shelagh’s grave-marker and the other thatof her son Griss, and the great Gosforth Cross itself is a memorial stone to
Shelagh, used as a preaching-cross and exemplifying her role in theconversion of the Gosforth settlers from paganism to Christianity.
The methodology here is plain enough. Tom Shippey, in his influential work on Tolkien, has written persuasively of the nineteenth-century
philological belief in what he terms ‘asterisk-reality’ (1982, 15–18);
that is, the reconstruction of older states of the language which are notrecorded in any extant documents, and hence are prefaced by an asterisk, but which can be recaptured through a scientific and dependable
methodology. What Collingwood and Parker are attempting in theirLakeland sagas is a form of what one might term ‘asterisk-history’—observing later forms and evidence, and from these reconstructing an
earlier state with a comparable belief in the accuracy, broadly speaking,of the reconstructive method.

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Old Norse Made New

This attempt at asterisk-history can be seen especially clearly when
one considers these works as tales of origins and settlement. Chronologically, the early history of Iceland is often separated into the so-called
Age of Settlement (from 870 to 930) and the so-called Saga Age (from930 to 1030), and this chronology is closely followed by Collingwood
and Parker—naturally so, since Iceland and Lakeland can be seen as
parallel settlements. In Thorstein of the Mere Thorstein’s father Swein
settles at Greenodd at the foot of the Crake valley in 913, and the eponymous outlaw-hero is finally killed in 945. The Bondwoman covers amuch briefer space of time, as befits its more local narrative, and is restricted to the years 970 and 971, right at the heart of the Saga Age;
while The Story of Shelagh begins with the settlement of Scandinaviansin the Gosforth district between 890 and 905, and concludes with thedeath of Shelagh’s son Griss in 1020. These dates are given in the chronological tables which both Collingwood and Parker supply as appendices,and, as well as corresponding to Icelandic saga-chronology, they arecarefully correlated with the few appearances of the region in the AngloSaxon Chronicle: namely the successive harryings of Cumberland orWestmorland by King Edmund in 945, Earl Thored in 966, and KingÆthelred in the year 1000, all three of which appear in the narrative of
one or other of these Lakeland sagas, as do other events recorded in early
medieval sources.
In terms of origins and settlement, an important principle is that manyof the dramatis personae, and some of the plot, of these narratives arederived from place-name evidence. The search for the Lakeland sagaarguably began to take concrete shape in 1893, when Collingwood began
to plot Norse settlement-names on a map of the Lake District, an exercisethat kick-started his local medieval interests as never before. Maps remain
an essential part of these three works in their published form (just as eversince Morris and Magnússon no modern edition or translation of an
Icelandic saga is complete without a map of the area of action—and
Collingwood and Jón Stefánsson’s 1902 translation of Kormaks saga is
no exception). On the maps in these works (Figure 3), both writers endeavour to plot Norse place-names in their postulated Old Norse form,
though of the two, Collingwood is by far the better philologist (indeed,
it is clear that Parker’s knowledge of Old Norse is fairly rudimentary);
and a similar Collingwood-influenced map occurs in Henry Swainson
Cowper’s 1899 history of the parish of Hawkshead.
An important appendix to Thorstein, earlier scrutinized by Eiríkr
Magnússon in draft form, carefully lists Lake District place-names withIn Search of the Lakeland Saga

73

Figure 3: Map of the Norse settlements in Furness, in W.G. Collingwood,Thorstein of the Mere: A Saga of the Northmen in Lakeland (London: Edward
Arnold, 1895), p. 32

74

Old Norse Made New

modern, medieval, and postulated Old Norse forms—showing an appreciation of the methodology of place-name study of the kind mostly
lacking in the work of Ferguson and Ellwood, and aptly demonstrating
why the great Swedish scholar Eilert Ekwall, a good friend, reckoned
Collingwood a shrewd toponymist (Ekwall 1922, vii). Collingwood andParker harness the energy of etymologies to supply events: for instance,
the narrative climax of The Bondwoman reconstructs the encounter
behind the place-name Orrest near Windermere (from Old Norse orrosta,
meaning ‘battle’), and from the very first Collingwood planned Thorstein
as a place-name-derived narrative.
Above all, Collingwood and Parker use place-names to recover a castof Norse actors: a form, one might even say, of ‘asterisk-biography’. In
Thorstein Collingwood unlocks the etymologies of Norse settlementnames in the area around Greenodd and Ulverston to recover a populationof settlers, the original Lakeland landnámsmenn who took land along
the coastal regions before their descendants—figures like Thorsteinhimself—later ventured inland to occupy the valleys (1895, 34–35; identifications in square brackets are added):
Beside Ulfar there settled others of the Northmen along the coast. There would
have been Raven at the south point of Foreness, from whom we call Rampsideand Ramsey. Beyond Barr-ey, that is Barley island there is Orm’s Gill, andround about it the villages into which his folk spread; Hawcott, the highcottage; Sowerby, the muddy farm; Sandscale, the shed by the sand; andso forth. [. . .] After a while, from these first settlements on the coast, land
was taken up inbank by the families and followers of the first viking settlers.
Around Ulfar’s town [Ulverston] there were Rolf’s seat [Rosset], and Asmund’s lea [Osmotherley], and Hauk’s vale [Hawkswell], and Máni’s riggs[Mansriggs].

Parker later employs the same technique, at one point in his narrative
cataloguing the various settlers who come together at the Thing or assembly place at Gallabanks near Gosforth (1909, 45):
Now there came to Gillibanc [Gallabanks] on the third morn after the sendingof the bodes, Rognvald Ormson, whose fore-elder was Avelin of the glas
[Ravenglass], Viberg Vibergson from the thwaite by Esk [Waberthwaite],and Korni from the fell [Corney], with their neighbour Siward from Langlifergh [Langley], the last in a great way about his young wife Langlif. To themcame Hamal from the head of the great mere [Ambleside], Hallbiorn fromhis oatfields on the Mealholm [Holborn Hill, Millom], Ailward from Borgartun [Broughton-in-Furness], Thurstan from Konungstun [Coniston], andArnold Ulfson from Duddon [Ulpha]. Bardi Haukson was there from hisbarrow in Vasdal [Wasdale]; Gudda from Guddathveit [Godderthwaite], Stefnir from Stefenergh [Stepheney]; and Hundi from his home among the

In Search of the Lakeland Saga75

rowans men still call Reynira [Rainors]; with a host of folk from Bekkjarmot[Beckermet] and the Egen [Ehen], and from every thwaite and garth and setr of
the Norsemen.

Conspicuous in both these passages is how localized these place-namederived narratives are. Indeed, exactly how localized (and, therefore,
personalized) becomes clear from the siting of Parker’s Thing meeting:at Gallabanks, which, as he points out in his guide-book The Gosforth
District, is directly opposite the old house called Parknook near Gosforth(1904, 61); what Parker does not point out, however, is that this is, infact, his own house, the Parker family seat. The obvious parallels tothese passages are the early chapters in many Family Sagas that detailthe arrival and settlement in Iceland of the ancestors of the main characters, and above all the Icelandic Landnámabók or ‘Book of Settlements’(unreliably translated by Ellwood in 1898).
Even from such a brief survey as this, one can gain some sense of how
the substance of these works derives from both Lakeland antiquities andIcelandic sagas; and the same is true of the form of the books, including
the style in which they are written. The Lakeland input comes from theheavy use of local dialect (as noted in Wawn 2000, 337–38), especiallyterms of a probable Norse derivation (as observed by De Quincey,
Ferguson, Ellwood, and many others): this ranges from simple vocabulary(for instance, stee, wath, to speer, to lait, to greet, and so on) to the use ofextended idioms and proverbs (‘go thy gate’, ‘riving and rugging like a
lad at his laiks’, ‘The plough gangs bain twixt rig and raine’). The Icelandic input comes from the degree to which Collingwood (as the better
Norse scholar) frequently endeavours to reproduce saga-style (again, as
noted in Wawn 2000, 335). This can be seen from a number of illustrative
practices: for example, by the calquing of English words and phrases on
Norse ones (for instance, ‘land-take’ for Old Norse landnám, ‘town’ for
Old Norse tún ‘home-meadow’, ‘hundred’ for Old Norse hundrað ‘120’);it can also be seen by the saga-formulae by which the tales end (‘So ends
the story of Thorstein’, ‘And that is the end of the story’, ‘So ends the storyof Shelagh’), and by which characters enter and leave the saga (‘There
was a man called Swein’, ‘And so Asdis goes out of the story’). For an
extended example one may glance at the opening of a related tale,
Collingwood’s ‘Story of Thurstan at the Thwaite’, in which the painfulness of the Norman division of Cumbria in 1163 is explored through theancien régime figure of Thorstein’s great-great-great-grandson (discussed
also in Wawn 2000, 335–36). The tale (which perhaps corresponds to an
Icelandic þáttr or short story) opens as follows (1899, 40–41):

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Old Norse Made New
Thurstan hight a man. He was Swainson: Swain was Thurstanson: andtheir fore-elder was Swain, the son of Thurstan of the Mere. He dwelt at
the Thwaite; that is at Conyngs-tun in the land of Hougun, by the side of
the mere that was his mere. He was a stout man and a strong man of hishands, but elderly, and stirred out little from his fields downbank along thewaterhead and the garths on the how aback of his hall. For he saw the way
things were going, and liked it not: being a man of the old sort, and not given
to change.

It would take no great effort to translate this into Old Norse sagaprose: one can observe the formulaic opening (Þorsteinn hét maðr), thesimple syntax, the emphasis when introducing a character on genealogy
and a few descriptive epithets, and the resultant implication that character is relatively set or fixed. Poignantly, one can also note that theprotagonist’s name is now Anglicized in form, rather than Old Norse likethat of his famous ancestor (Thurstan, not Thorstein): itself a linguistic
marker of the erosion and loss of Norse culture and autonomy which thestory explores. Such a conspicuous duplication of saga-style is by nomeans the only narrative style and point of view adopted by Collingwood, but it is sufficiently present to mark it out as a deliberate strategy
and one of the many ways by which the status of Lakeland saga is
attempted.
The third and last of my three main questions in this essay is, how well
do Collingwood and Parker succeed in supplying Lakeland sagas? It is
first worth noting that both writers clearly succeeded well enough toinspire later followers, in which respect Collingwood was arguably more
fortunate than Parker. Parker died in 1918, and was buried in Gosforthchurchyard, but The Story of Shelagh was thoroughly (and explicitly)
recycled and rewritten by Nicholas Size, proprietor of the Victoria Family Hotel, Buttermere, in his 1932 story Shelagh of Eskdale—a workthat can seem sadly deficient in literary and historical skills. Size’s betterknown book is his pseudo-history of Buttermere, The Secret Valley, andhe also published a novel about Óláfr Tryggvason (Size 1929 and 1933).
Collingwood’s later follower was, however, of a different order altogether. In 1896 Collingwood received a fan-letter praising Thorstein of
the Mere from the Professor of History at the Yorkshire College (later the
University of Leeds), and the following summer Collingwood’s family
met up with the Professor’s family for a pre-arranged picnic on Peel
Island on Coniston Water. In 1903 the Professor’s son pitched up in
Coniston as a struggling young journalist, and had the good fortune tobe befriended by the Collingwood family. The young journalist was
Arthur Ransome, and from these early days until his death in 1932

In Search of the Lakeland Saga

77

Collingwood acted as a substitute father-figure to the younger man. The
firstfruits of Ransome’s willing adoption was his 1904 Viking story ‘Rolf
Sigurdson’, dedicated to Collingwood’s daughter Dora and later reprinted
in his whimsical collection The Hoofmarks of the Faun (Ransome 1911);
but the true, more oblique homage, as opposed to direct imitation oremulation, was to come somewhat later. As indicated by its centrality on
Collingwood’s title-page (Figure 2), the climax of Thorstein of the Merecomes when the outlawed Thorstein takes refuge on Peel Island on Coniston Water (in an episode clearly influenced by the hero’s refuge on
Drangey in Grettis saga), while in Ransome’s Swallows and Amazonsseries Peel Island becomes Wild Cat Island. For those with ears to hear,
there is even a veiled allusion to Thorstein’s earlier outlawry in
Ransome’s novel: ‘What a place,’ muses able-seaman Titty on first landing on Wild Cat Island, ‘I expect somebody hid on the island hundredsof years ago, and kept his boat here’ (1938, 54). When Thorstein was
republished by Heinemann in 1929, Ransome gave it a lively publicity
puff in his regular Saturday column in the Manchester Guardian, whilelater in his posthumously-published Autobiography, he recalled life with
the Collingwoods in glowing terms and described Thorstein as ‘the bestloved book of my boyhood’ (1976, 81): a testament to the enormous
effect that this Lakeland saga was indirectly to have on twentieth-century
children’s literature.
In fact, Collingwood and Parker may have been more like Icelandicsaga-authors than they realized. Their works date from a time when there
was still a widespread belief in the detailed accuracy of the Icelandic
sagas as historical documents, as well as a strong degree of belief in theso-called ‘freeprose’ theory of their genesis (that is, the belief thatthe extant sagas are basically transcribed versions of originally oral
tales). But according to some later ‘bookprose’ thinking, of a type
epitomized by Sigurður Nordal and the so-called Icelandic school, theIcelandic Family Sagas were in fact composed and created in just thesame way as Collingwood and Parker’s Lakeland sagas: that is, by observing later forms and reconstructing earlier states, as for example in
the early chapters of Family Sagas that appear to invent figures andincidents of settlement from surviving place-names (the opening ofLaxdœla saga would be a good example). In other words, Collingwood
and Parker, and the thirteenth-century Icelandic saga-authors, might all
be regarded as antiquarians engaged in historical and imaginative
reconstruction, and with many of the same issues operative for bothgroups in terms of local identity and cultural inheritance; and this remains

78

Old Norse Made Newtrue in our current scholarly climate, with our renewed interest in oral
sources and local traditions in the genesis of the sagas (see for example
Gísli Sigurðsson 2004).
In reality, of course, these Lakeland sagas were never intended todeceive anyone. The intention, as has been seen, was to be as rigorous as
possible in reconstructive methods (especially with regard to settlementnarratives), and to avoid the prodigal inventiveness of deliberate fiction.
But even if there was truth in these works—even if the reconstructedsagas fitted the maps and the monuments—still there was no avoiding
the fact that these were after all modern productions, and not medieval
ones, and these belated sagas could never be anything other than wistfuland imaginative antiquarianism. Iceland and Lakeland were perceived
as parallel settlements; but they were not parallel in the heritage thatsurvived into the post-medieval period in general, and into the 1890s inparticular.
In the summer of 1897, after he had written his two Lakeland sagas(and translated, though not yet published, Kormaks saga), Collingwood
spent three months travelling round Iceland with the native scholar Jón
Stefánsson, drawing and painting the pictures that would illustrate thesumptuous account of their journey, A Pilgrimage to the Saga-steadsof Iceland (1899). Andrew Wawn has noted how on his return home toConiston Collingwood’s letters to Eiríkr Magnússon express distressand disillusion at the state of Iceland in the 1890s; and Collingwood’s
letters home to his family written in the course of his travels containsimilar sentiments (Collingwood 1996). Wawn suggests that one of theresults of this disillusion is that ‘there was a sense in which Collingwood
felt that the Lake District was now more Icelandic in spirit if not inscenery than Iceland itself’ (1992, 226), since it is in Lakeland that the
supposed Viking virtues of thrift, energy, and initiative are now to be
encountered. This may well be so in some respects (though the idea of atransfer of ‘Icelandicness’ implies a privileging of Iceland over Lakelandrather than an equality between the two), but in literary terms it could
never be the case.
I would like to end with another, briefer product of Collingwood’s
1897 pilgrimage, namely a short poem entitled ‘In Gunnar’s Country’,
which ponders the landscape around Hlíðarendi, the homestead of
the famous saga-hero Gunnarr Hámundarson of Njáls saga. Until its
1996 reprinting in Collingwood’s ‘Letters from Iceland’, edited by his
grand-daughter, this poem had only ever been published once, in the
September 1897 edition of Nothing Much: A Monthly Magazine—andIn Search of the Lakeland Saga

79

since this was an in-house, manuscript journal compiled by Collingwood’s children, one may assume that its readership was not great.
Dated ‘Fljótshlíð. Aug. 4. 1897.’, the poem reads as follows (Collingwood
1996, 74):
Because you bring a tale of old
Before these eyes made visible,
And tender words made audible
Within these ears, O mountains cold,
O desolate shores, O wasted wold,
I sit content beneath your spell.
Not for yourselves. Nay, take it not
Ill said; but sweeter hues elsewhere,
Forms fairer, lovelier lines are there
For eye to gloat on, unforgot:
Where crag and tarn, and glade and grot
Stand peerless yet, beyond compare:But voiceless; like the bride of stoneThat knew no childish rogueries,
Nor any girlish melodies,
Nor passionate words, though woman grown.
—Which would a man for very own?—
The image—or the memories?

This poem has been helpfully discussed by Andrew Wawn (1997),
who reads it, no doubt rightly, in the context of Collingwood’s increasing homesickness. My point here is a simple one (made also by Wawn),
which is that the poem expresses very clearly indeed the perceived
distinctions between the two Viking colonies. Iceland preserved thewords and the associations, but its harsh landscape was ‘cold’, ‘desolate’, and ‘wasted’. The landscape of Lakeland, on the other hand, was
not only comparatively ‘sweeter’, ‘fairer’, and ‘lovelier’ than Iceland,but superlatively ‘peerless’ and ‘beyond compare’. But, as Collingwood
makes plain with dexterous enjambement between stanzas, Lakeland
remains ‘voiceless’. It will be recalled that in The Lake Counties
Collingwood declared that ‘the thing that appeals to us all, and charms
us, and carries us out of ourselves, is the union of story and scenery’(1902, 4). This poem therefore crystallizes the contrastive blessings ofthe two parallel colonies, and, in its closing lines, the conflict that would
arise if one had to choose between them. No Lakeland saga-literature
can compare with the Icelandic, and no Icelandic landscape can compare with Lakeland. The two remain contrastive, in complementary
distribution: and it is perhaps only natural therefore that Lakeland

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Old Norse Made New

antiquarians should attempt to marry the two within the format of theLakeland saga, since otherwise one must choose, in the terms ofCollingwood’s own formulations, between image and memory, sceneryand story.
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Lakeland and Iceland.
Wawn, Andrew 1997. ‘W. G. Collingwood and Njála: An Unpublished Poem’.
In Bókahnútur brugðinn Ólöfu Benediktsdóttur fimmtugri, 4. febrúar 1997,
107–09.
Wawn, Andrew 2000. The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in
Nineteenth-Century Britain.
Obituaries of W. G. Collingwood:
The Times 3rd October 1932.

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Old Norse Made New

Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society. New Series 33 (1932–33), 308–12.
Obituary of C. A. Parker:
Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society. New Series 18 (1918), 243–45.

Tolkien and Old Norse Antiquity

83

TOLKIEN AND OLD NORSE ANTIQUITY:REAL AND ROMANTIC LINKS IN MATERIAL CULTURE
DIMITRA FIMI

Introduction: Tolkien and the Norse WorldFor anyone familiar with the Old Norse world and with Tolkien’s work,
the influences of the one upon the other are manifold and clearly evident. The reasons for this are not just that Tolkien was a philologist
specializing in Old English and very well-read in Old Norse, but alsothat he lived and wrote in a period when the Germanic tradition was
indissolubly linked with England’s own past. The preoccupation of Britain with its Northern past started in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, when scholars re-discovered and started studying texts in vernacular Northern European languages, including Old Norse andAnglo-Saxon, as opposed to the previous veneration of the Classicaltradition. This search for English identity in the Norse world was alsoenhanced by the movement of Romanticism. Tolkien (1892–1973) was
proud of his Anglo-Saxon descent, especially the strand of his mother’sfamily. He once wrote to his son Christopher:
Still I hope one day you’ll be able (if you wish) to delve into this intriguingstory of the origins of our peculiar people. And indeed of us in particular. For
barring the Tolkien (which must long ago have become a pretty thin strand)
you are a Mercian and a Hwiccian (of Wychwood) on both sides. (Carpenter
1981, 108)

He viewed England’s Anglo-Saxon past as part of a wider whole, including Germany and Scandinavia. In a 1941 letter he praised Northern
literature as a world apart from the Classical tradition, writing:I have spent most of my life [. . .] studying Germanic matters (in the general
sense that includes England and Scandinavia). There is a great deal more force(and truth) [. . .] in the ‘Germanic’ ideal. I was much attracted by it as anundergraduate [. . .] in reaction against the ‘Classics’. (Carpenter 1981, 55)

Tolkien was very young when he encountered the languages and literatures of Northern Europe. Already in his schooldays at King Edward’s
School in Birmingham he had encountered V†lsunga Saga. On 17 February 1911, he gave a paper for the Literary Society of the School on‘Norse Sagas’. As the school magazine reports, Tolkien gave a detailed

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Old Norse Made New

summary of the ‘strange and glorious tale’ of V†lsunga Saga, comparing
it with Homer’s epics, and defending its ‘highest epic genius strugglingout of savagery’. He also referred to other sagas, and read parts of them inthe original (Anon. 1911, 19–20). In Oxford Tolkien started as a studentof Classics but he switched to the English School and studied Old Norseand Old English, his syllabus including the Prose and Poetic Eddas,
Norse sagas, and a wide range of Old English texts (see Scull andHammond 2006, 39–40). In his first academic post in Leeds, Tolkien,
together with his colleague E. V. Gordon, played an important role informing a Viking Club among the undergraduates, which, according toTolkien’s biographer, ‘met to drink large quantities of beer, read sagas
and sing comic songs’ (Carpenter 1977, 105). When he returned to Oxford, Tolkien formed a new informal reading club that met to read
Icelandic sagas in the original, the Kolbítar (Coalbiters), meaning ‘those
who lounge so close to the fire in the winter that they “bite the coal”’(Carpenter 1977, 119–20). C. S. Lewis was introduced to the original
sources of the Northern world through this reading club.
The influences of Old Norse texts on Tolkien’s creative writing, interms of motifs, characters, and storylines, are abundant. Some are very
evident, like the names of the dwarves in The Hobbit, as well as Gandalf’s
name: these come from the Dvergatal in V†luspá. Another such unmistakable example is Tolkien’s tragic hero Túrin Turambar, whose story
features in The Silmarillion (1977, 198–226). Túrin is a blend of Kullervo
from the Finnish Kalevala and Sigurðr from V†lsunga Saga (Shippey
2005, 109–10; Helms 1981, 6–12). Tom Shippey, in his seminal study
The Road to Middle-earth, has identified and discussed numerous otherinstances where Tolkien borrows from Old Norse literature, often elaborating on or adapting his source material. Some examples are the dialogue
of Bilbo and the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit, which is based on theexchanges between Sigurðr and Fáfnir in Fáfnismál, and the tale of the
Númenórean mariner-king Aldarion and his wife Erendis, which seems
to echo the story of Nj†rðr and Skaði in the Prose Edda (Shippey 2005,
102, 277–78).1
As well as from texts, however, Tolkien seems also to have borrowed
from the material culture of the Scandinavian past, real or invented andromanticized. In The Lord of the Rings the human culture of Gondor
plays an important part in the politics of Middle-earth. Tolkien compared1
Tolkien’s Norse sources are also discussed in Ryan 1966, St Claire 1995a,
1995b, Evans 2000, and most recently Burns 2005.

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Gondor with Byzantium in its period of decline, with Rome and the
Roman Empire, as well as with ancient Egypt (Carpenter 1981, 157, 376,
281). However, there is enough evidence to suggest that an original
source for the culture of Gondor, and of its predecessor, the culture of
Númenor, could have been the Vikings.
Ship-burials and the Men of Númenor
The kingdom of Gondor, according to the fictional history of Middleearth, is only a remnant of the greater and much more majestic lost
civilization of Númenor. Tolkien did not create this distinct human culture until the 1930s, when he transformed his ‘Atlantis complex’—arecurring dream of a great wave, flooding and engulfing everythingaround him—into a new version of the Atlantis myth, and thus createdthe island of Númenor (see Carpenter 1977, 23, 170). According to themythical history of Middle-earth, at the beginning of the Second Age,
the Men who fought by the side of the Elves in the Last Alliance against
the evil Vala Morgoth were rewarded by being given as a new dwellingplace the Western island of Númenor, and a longer span of life, threetimes that of other Men. But one command had also been laid upon the
Númenóreans, the ‘Ban of the Valar’: they were forbidden to sail west
and attempt to set foot on Valinor, the land of the gods. For though along life had been granted to them, they still remained mortal. The
Númenóreans became very powerful and their island became the placeof an advanced human civilization. However, they also started to desire
the immortality of the Elves and to complain against the Ban. They
rebelled under the evil teaching of Sauron, sailed West in search of theUndying Lands, and thus brought about the Downfall of Númenor: theirisland was overwhelmed in a cataclysm and sank beneath the sea, killing its inhabitants. The only ones saved were a few faithful Númenóreans
who still respected the Valar, and who foresaw the disaster that was tobefall Númenor; they set sail in nine ships before the island fell, landedin Middle-earth, and founded the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor.
The story of Númenor is given in outline in Appendix A of The Lord of
the Rings (Tolkien 2004, 1033–1044), as well as in more detail in The
Silmarillion (Tolkien 1977, 259–82). The first emergence of the story,
however, was between 1936 and 1937, in two related and mostly unfinished works, published posthumously as ‘The Fall of Númenor’ and‘The Lost Road’ (Tolkien 1987, 11–35, 36–108). The story was further
developed and elaborated in another unfinished work that Tolkien started
writing between late 1945 and 1946, during the period in which he had

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temporarily stopped working on The Lord of the Rings. This work was
to be called ‘The Notion Club Papers’ and has also been publishedposthumously in The History of Middle-earth series (Tolkien 1992,
145–327). An original idea about the Númenórean civilization wasits advanced technology in terms of ships and ship-building. The
Númenóreans seem to be pictured as renowned mariners, undertaking
long voyages by ship to conquer and explore. This image seems to fitvery well with the Vikings, who are associated with legendary ships andnaval prowess, not only in the sagas and other Old Norse literature, but
in popular imagination too. This can be supported by the first writingsof Tolkien on Númenor. In the first sketch of the story, he writes that:above all their arts the people of Númenor nourished shipbuilding and seacraft, and became mariners whose like shall never be again, since the world
was diminished. (Tolkien 1987, 14)

Nevertheless, what can securely link the Númenóreans with Scandinaviaof the Viking period and earlier is their practice of ship-burial. In the‘original outline’ of the Númenor story Tolkien refers to ‘their shipburials, and their great tombs’ (Tolkien 1987, 12), and later on, in thefirst version of ‘The Fall of Númenor’, he elaborates on this concept andadds:
And they built mightier houses for their dead than for their living, and endowed their buried kings with unavailing treasure. [. . .] Wherefore the kingdoms
upon the west shores of the Old World became a place of tombs, and filledwith ghosts. And in the fantasy of their hearts, and the confusion of legends
half-forgotten concerning that which had been, they made for their thought aland of shades. [. . .] And many deemed this land was in the West, and ruled by
the Gods, and in shadow the dead, bearing the shadows of their possessions,should come there [. . .]. For which reason in after days many of their descendants, or men taught by them, buried their dead in ships and set them in pomp
upon the sea by the west coasts of the Old World. (Tolkien 1987, 16–17)

The same ideas about the ‘mortuary culture of the Númenóreans’, as
Christopher Tolkien has called it, are repeated in other versions of ‘The
Fall of Númenor’. In the later story of ‘The Lost Road’, Tolkien makes anote of his intention to add a chapter of ‘a Norse story of ship-burial’(Tolkien 1987, 13, 25, 28, 77).
It seems, then, that the original conception of Númenor bears great
cultural resemblances to the Norse world. Tolkien certainly knew of
Norse ship-funerals in textual sources, such as the ship-burial of Scyld
described in Beowulf (lines 26–52), the cremation on a ship of the bodyof Baldr in the Prose Edda (see Faulkes 1987, 49–50), as well as Ibn

Tolkien and Old Norse Antiquity

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Fadlan’s account of a ship funeral and cremation among the Rus (seeMontgomery 2000, 12–21). The image of the pagan Viking ship burial
was also vivid in the popular imagination of the time, as can be seen, forexample, in Francis Dicksee’s 1893 painting ‘A Funeral of a Viking’(see front cover).
Tolkien could also have had in mind Scandinavian archaeology, however, and especially the ship-burials excavated in Scandinavia in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth century. It might be relevant that at
the time that Tolkien was writing the earliest Númenórean material, hisformer colleague in the University of Leeds and very close friend, E. V.
Gordon, was just publishing his translation of Shetelig and Falk’s
Scandinavian Archaeology (1937). Tolkien at the time was already in
Oxford, and Gordon had moved to the University of Manchester, butthey still maintained a very close friendship, seeing each other in Oxford
where they both served as examiners from time to time, and also stillplanning to collaborate in scholarly work (Carpenter 1977, 55; Anderson
2003, 18, 20). The book Gordon translated, and to which he also added
some notes, discusses the archaeology of the Scandinavian countries
extensively, from prehistoric times up to the Viking age, and also contains numerous pictures from excavations and archaeological finds,
including the Oseberg ship, and gives detailed accounts of the boatgraves at Vendel, and of the Oseberg and the Gokstad ships (Sheteligand Falk 1937, 257, 282).
Apart from the references to ship-burials in his early work, Tolkien
also produced several drawings of stylized ships which looked like thestandard popular depiction of Viking ships during the period, illustrated
with decorated prows, usually in the shape of a dragon’s head. This
image of Viking ships was popular before the Gokstad and Oseberg
ships were excavated in 1880 and 1904 respectively, and althoughillustrators became more concerned with archaeological accuracy lateron, this same image persisted (see Wilson 1980, 228). The first map ofMiddle-earth, associated with ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ (c.1916–18), isa symbolic depiction of Tolkien’s cosmology, where the ‘Vessel of the
Earth’ is portrayed as a Viking ship (Tolkien 1983, 84). In a 1928 painting, again associated with his developing mythology, Tolkien drew the‘Halls of Manwë on the Mountains of the World above Faërie’. In theforeground, a ship of the Teleri figures, with a prow in the shape of aswan’s neck and head, but it is also ‘in general shape and with oars andsquare sails like Viking ships’ (Hammond and Scull 1995, 54, 56). Finally,
two more drawings by Tolkien, this time created as possible illustrations

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Old Norse Made New

for The Hobbit, include the same stylized ships: pencil drawings of‘Esgaroth’ and ‘Lake Town’ both include ‘Viking’ ships, again with aswan’s head prow, but this time without any sails (Hammond and Scull
1995, 132–33, 135).
After 1936–37 Tolkien’s interest in ship-funerals and burials and in
Viking ships seems to have waned. His later Númenórean story, the‘Notion Club Papers’, does not contain any references to such matters.
This is particularly striking as only two years after Tolkien wrote ‘The
Lost Road’ the Sutton Hoo ship-burial was excavated, arousing much
public interest. However, there is an instance of a boat-funeral in The
Lord of the Rings. When Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli decide against
building a ‘cairn’ over the dead Boromir, the former says:
Then let us lay him in a boat with his weapons, and the weapons of his
vanquished foes [. . .]. We will send him to the Falls of Rauros and give him
to Anduin. The River of Gondor will take care at least that no evil creature
dishonours his bones. (Tolkien 2004, 415)

The arrayal of Boromir in the boat for his last trip is described in detail:Now they laid Boromir in the middle of the boat that was to bear him away.
The grey hood and elven-cloak they folded and placed beneath his head. They
combed his long dark hair and arrayed it upon his shoulders. The golden beltof Lórien gleamed about his waist. His helm they set beside him, and acrosshis lap they laid the cloven horn and the hilts and shards of his sword; beneathhis feet they put the swords of his enemies. Then fastening the prow to
the stern of the other boat, they drew him out into the water. (Tolkien 2004,
416–17)

Although the decision for a boat-funeral, rather than the building of acairn for Boromir, depends really upon practical issues, since the threeremaining members of the fellowship are in need of haste, and such acairn burial would demand both time and labour (Tolkien 2004, 415), it
is significant that Boromir is a man of Gondor, the kingdom of Men on
Middle-earth descended from the faithful Númenóreans who were saved
from the great flood.
Tolkien’s fascination with ship-burials and Viking ships seems to havereturned later in his life. Among his manuscripts held at the Bodleian
Library in Oxford there are three newspaper clippings, which must haveattracted Tolkien’s interest. Two clippings concern the ‘pseudo-shipburials’ excavated in Norfolk in 1954 (Bodleian, Tolkien A23, fols
56–57). The third concerns the acquisition by the British Museum of aViking zoomorphic ship ornament (Bodleian, Tolkien A23, fol. 274). In
this clipping the ship’s figurehead is described as: ‘believed to be theTolkien and Old Norse Antiquity

89

only surviving example of the famous zoomorphic, or animal-headed,ornaments, which as we know from references in the Sagas and from
representations on tombstones, adorned the Viking ships’. Today, following more research and carbon-14 analysis on the wood, the ship’s
figurehead is described as ‘Provincial Roman or Germanic’, as it has
been shown to have been carved much earlier than originally thought(see Bruce-Mitford 1974, 175–87).
In addition to the ship-burials, Tolkien compared the material cultureof Gondor with Scandinavian archaeology on one further occasion.
This was in relation to Fornost, a city of the North Kingdom of the
Númenóreans in Middle-earth, Arnor, which was for a while the seat ofits kings. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Elrond describes Fornost as
follows:
In the North after the war and the slaughter of the Gladden Fields the Men ofWesternesse were diminished, and their city of Annúminas beside Lake
Evendim fell into ruin; and the heirs of Valandil removed and dwelt at Fornoston the high North Downs, and that now too is desolate. Men call it Deadmen’sDike, and they fear to tread there. For the folk of Arnor dwindled, and theirfoes devoured them, and their lordship passed, leaving only green mounds inthe grassy hills. (Tolkien 2004, 244)

When The Lord of the Rings was translated into Swedish in 1961, thetranslator, Åke Ohlmark,Ohlmarks, also wrote a biographical introduction on
Tolkien, in which he claimed in a humorous way that Tolkien’s movefrom Leeds back to Oxford was for him ‘like coming home again from a
trial expedition up to the distant “Fornost”’ (Carpenter 1981, 305).
Tolkien was quite angry about this as well as about other claims of
Ohlmark’s, and wrote to Allen and Unwin:
Ohlmarks’s,
I was devoted to the University of Leeds, which was very good to me, and toO[hlmarks]’s nonsense
nonsense was tothe students, whom I left with regret. [. . .] If O[hlmark]’scome to the notice of the University it would give offence, and I would have to
publicly apologise. As for ‘Fornost’, a glance at the book would show that it
is comparable rather to the Kings’ mounds at Old Uppsala than to the city ofLeeds! (Carpenter 1981, 305–06)

The mounds of the Kings at Old Uppsala, in Sweden, are among
Scandinavia’s most remarkable prehistoric remains, and include threelarge barrows dated to the fifth and sixth centuries. However, Tolkien’s
only description of Fornost (‘green mounds on the grassy hills’) is vague
and lacking in any specific detail, so much so that any other European
burial site containing mounds or barrows could fit as a source. Tolkien
might have chosen the Kings’ mounds at Uppsala as a comparison to90

Old Norse Made New

Fornost as a Swedish monument that would be familiar to the Swedishtranslator, and would emphatically convey the image of a landscape ofbarrows and ancient burial sites in contrast to the city of Leeds. Nevertheless, it is significant that Tolkien thinks of a place in the old kingdomof Gondor in terms of a well-known Scandinavian monument, which
again he could have known from Gordon’s translation of Shetelig andFalk’s book. Indeed, this book refers to the graves of the Kings at Old
Uppsala as being ‘among the largest monuments in Europe’, containing‘three massive barrows’, and goes on to describe in detail the boat-burials
and the finds from excavations there (Shetelig and Falk 1937, 257–58).
In the case of Fornost, then, Tolkien does not refer to ship-burial, but hecompares the place with a Scandinavian one that does contain suchburials and is regarded as one of the most important sites of the Norseworld.
The Valkyrie Helmet and the Crown of Gondor
When one bears in mind the influence of Viking material culture on thecivilization of Númenor, one is surprised to find that one more featurethat would reinforce this link was specifically denied by Tolkien. This is
the helmet and crown of Gondor, both of which are described as having
wings. When in 1958 Rhona Beare wrote to Tolkien asking for details
on how the ‘winged crown’ of Gondor looked, comparing it with ‘that ofa Valkyrie, or as depicted on a Gauloise cigarette packet’, Tolkien
answered:
The Númenóreans of Gondor were proud, peculiar, and archaic, and I think
are best pictured in (say) Egyptian terms. In many ways they resembled ‘Egyptians’—the love of, and power to construct, the gigantic and massive. And
in their great interest in ancestry and in tombs. [. . .] I think the crown of
Gondor (the S. Kingdom) was very tall, like that of Egypt, but with wings
attached, not set straight back but at an angle. The N. Kingdom had only adiadem (III 323). Cf. the difference between the N. and S. kingdoms of Egypt.
(Carpenter 1981, 281)

Tolkien refers here to the two crowns of Egypt, the deshret, or the
Red Crown (Fig. 4, right), which was the characteristic headgear of
the Pharaoh as King of Lower Egypt (North Kingdom), and the White
Crown, the hedjet (Fig. 4, left), which was to become the emblematic
headgear of the Pharaoh as King of Upper Egypt (South Kingdom)(Aldred 1965, 43–45). Later on, the two crowns were combined in
the Double Crown (Fig. 4, middle), which symbolized kingship overthe entire country (Redford 2001, 323). Tolkien supplied Rhona

Tolkien and Old Norse Antiquity

White crown ofUpper Egypt

Double Crownof Upper and Lower
Egypt

91

Red Crown ofLower Egypt

Figure 4: The Crowns of Egypt (© Kevin Brown)

For copyright reasons, figure 5 is not reproduced in this online
edition; readers are advised to consult the printed edition of thisbook or the reproduction of the illustration in Carpenter 1981, 281

Figure 5: The Crown of Gondor. Illustration from The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien,
edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien (1981),
p. 281. © George Allen & Unwin, 1981; reproduced by permission of the Tolkien
Estate, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., and Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights
reserved.

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Old Norse Made New

Beare with a drawing showing how he visualized the crown of Gondor(Fig.
5). 1981, 281).
(Carpenter
What is immediately obvious to the reader, then, is that Tolkien assigns
to the North Kingdom of Gondor a crown that resembles the Crown of
the South Kingdom of Egypt. Actually the two crowns look identical,
save for the wings that the crown of Gondor has as an additional feature.
It is not easy to demonstrate whether Tolkien meant to make such an
association, or whether his superficial knowledge of Egyptian archaeology is the reason for not identifying the crown of the South Kingdom of
Egypt with the crown of the South Kingdom of Gondor, and that of theNorth Kingdom of Egypt with the crown of the North Kingdom of Gondor.
The great resemblance of the crowns pictured in Tolkien’s sketch andtheFiguresand 5 showsthat
Tolkienhad
idea
the Egyptian
Egyptian crowns
crowns inshows
that4Tolkien
had anidea
of how
theanlatterof
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he refers
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that heandrefersthethat‘difference
betweenN. andbetweenthe N.ofandS. kingdomsof Egypt’
showsawarethat heofwas
S. kingdoms
Egypt’
also showsthat also
he wastheawaretwoof
the twocrowndifferent
crownstyles.
howmoremuch wide
more wideor detailed
different
styles.
But
howButmuch
or detailed
his
hisknowledgeof Egyptian
material
was cannot
be proven.
inknowledgeof Egyptian
material
was cannot
be proven.
Being inBeing
Oxfordhe could
have havebeen been
exposedto booksor oreven
Oxfordhe easily
could easily
exposedto booksevenlectures
lecturesandandphotographs concerning
concerningexcavations
excavationsin Egypt,nophotographs
andandfindsfindsin Egypt,but no but
concluconclusive
evidence
exists.
sive evidence exists.
However, this rejection of the idea that the crown of Gondor resembles
anything Norse is suspicious. For somebody with Tolkien’s academic
background, the most straightforward association of the crown of Gondor
would be with the headgear of the valkyries, as his reader pointed out,
although the winged helmet and its association with the Vikings was the
product of romanticism and not based on any historical or archaeological data. The winged and the horned helmets of romanticized Vikingsseem to have been established by the tradition of the costumes used in
Wagner’s operas, while their prototypes possibly originated in a confusion of Viking and Celtic helmets, the latter’s winged forms themselves
having sprung from classical images, such as that of Hermes (see Frank
2000, Langer 2002 and Wilson 1980, 214, 227, 231). Nevertheless, thedepiction of Norse heroes and deities with winged helmets alongsidehorned ones was commonplace in post-Wagnerian visual culture, as Figures 6 and 7 show. The costumes of Wagner’s operas, especially of Der
Ring des Nibelungen, played an important role in standardizing theimage of the Viking deities or heroes with highly decorated helmets.
Tolkien describes the crown of Gondor as a more lavish version of thehelmet of Gondor. When Gandalf and Pippin arrive in Minas Tirith inBook VI of The Lord of the Rings, they see that:Tolkien and Old Norse Antiquity

93

The Guards of the gate were robed in black, and their helms were of strange
shape, high-crowned, with long cheek-guards close-fitting to the face, andabove the cheek-guards were set the white wings of sea-birds; but the helms
gleamed with a flame of silver, for they were indeed wrought of mithril,
heirlooms from the glory of old days. (Tolkien 2004, 752–53)

Figure 6: The Chosen Slain (artist: K.
Dielitz), in Guerber 1908, 18

Figure 7: Odin and Brunhild (artist: K.
Dielitz), in Guerber 1908, 280

Tolkien’s fullest description of Gondor’s crown is found in the accountof Aragorn’s coronation:
Then the guards stepped forward, and Faramir opened the casket, and he heldup an ancient crown. It was shaped like the helms of the Guards of the Citadel,save that it was loftier, and it was all white, and the wings at either side were
wrought of pearl and silver in the likeness of the wings of a sea-bird, for it was
the emblem of kings who came over the Sea; and seven gems of adamant were
set in the circlet, and upon its summit was set a single jewel the light of which
went up like a flame. (Tolkien 2004, 967)

Indeed, in another instance where Tolkien made a drawing of thecrown, its depiction certainly brings to mind the romantic Valkyrie
helmet, rather than the White and Red Crowns of Egypt. This was in one

94

Old Norse Made New

For copyright reasons, figure 8 is not reproduced in this online edition;
readers are advised to consult the printed edition of this book.

Figure 8: The Winged Crown of Gondor
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Tolkien Drawings 90, fol. 30. © The Tolkien
Estate, reproduced by permission of the Tolkien Estate and the Bodleian Library,
Oxford.

Tolkien and Old Norse Antiquity

95

of the dust-jacket designs that Tolkien drew for the third volume of The
Lord of the Rings, but which was too expensive to reproduce (Hammondand Scull 1995, 183). The winged crown is found in the middle of thedrawing,
drawing. which has been reproduced as Figure 8.
Finally, in his very early work ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, Tolkien had
referred to a people he calls the ‘Winged Helms’, their other name being
the ‘Forodwaith’, in association with the story of Aelfwine of England(Tolkien 1984, 330, 334). In that story Tolkien constructs a pseudohistory of England, and its successive invasions by different peoples.
Christopher Tolkien has pointed out that ‘the Forodwaith are of course
Viking invaders from Norway or Denmark’ (Tolkien 1984, 323). It seems,
then, that (at least in his early writings) Tolkien himself would associate
winged helmets or winged crowns with Norse culture, and not with thecrowns of Egypt.
A possible explanation of this discrepancy is Tolkien’s reaction to
World War II. The appropriation of the ‘Germanic ideal’ by Nazi Germany was a source of aggravation for Tolkien. In the 1941 letter quoted
above, he continues:
Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge [. . .] against that ruddy
little ignoramus Adolf Hitler [. . .]. Ruining, perverting, misapplying, andmaking for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution
to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.
(Carpenter 1981, 55–56, emphasis added)2

The exaltation of the Northern past would not have gone down well in
post-World War II Britain. In addition, the memory of the controversial
position of some Scandinavian countries during the war could havemade things even worse. This might also explain why Tolkien suddenly
stopped mentioning ship-burials in his stories of Númenor before andduring the war, despite the spectacular discovery of the Sutton Hooship-burial, which could have—under different circumstances—strengthened such references. At the same time, though, by comparing Númenor
with Egypt, Tolkien might also have played on the contrast between
ancient archaeology, including Egypt and classical Greece (an archaeology with majestic and imposing remains, denoting a ‘highly civilised’culture), and that of northern Europe, which has much less magnificent
and readily recognizable archaeology to display, something that leads
2
For a comparison of Tolkien’s use of Germanic myth and legend and thatof the Nazis, and a discussion of Tolkien’s reactions to Nazi Germany,see Chism 2003.

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Old Norse Made New

to it being associated with a more ‘primitive’ culture (which for Tolkien
would also mean a ‘purer’ and ‘nobler’ one). Surely, in that case, Gondor
would be the classical civilization in decline, and that would make a
sharp contrast with the Anglo-Saxon culture of Rohan (see Tolkien 2004,
1136, Shippey 2005, 139–45 and Shippey 2001, 90–97) and its more‘primitive’ society.
Epilogue: Filming Tolkien’s Norse Materiality
Tolkien’s use of the material culture of the Vikings and pre-Viking
Scandinavia is an element of Middle-earth that can be easily missed,
having been too well hidden or played down by Tolkien himself.
As discussed above, this ‘borrowed’ Viking materiality is not only
associated with real archaeological finds, but, as we have seen, isalso based on misconceptions and romanticized interpretations ofpast civilizations. The winged helmet of Gondor is such a case, but so
also is the fascination with ship-burials and Viking ships in popularimagination. Tolkien might have known more about Scandinavianarchaeology through his contact with E. V. Gordon, but he was not an
archaeologist himself, and his response to archaeology was more
emotional than academic. Where Tolkien’s Middle-earth is concerned,
it is more the romantic envisioning of a remote heroic past that appeals
to the reader, rather than any accuracy in the depiction of the culturesof the peoples of Middle-earth or their modelling upon real historicalcultures. Tolkien’s admiration for the Norse world is evident not
only in his use of texts, motifs and stories, but in inventing a culture
that—at least to an average, non-specialist reader—would have a
Norse feel to it, incorporating both authentic material and romantic fabrications. And this is significant when one bears in mind that Tolkien
argued on occasion that Middle-earth is not really an imaginary place
but Northern Europe in a very remote past back in human prehistory(Carpenter 1981, 239, 376). It is only natural then that a human culture
echoing Old Norse antiquity would be present, as it also makes sensethat an Anglo-Saxon human culture would also appear (see Shippey
2001, 90–102).
Interestingly, the two film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings havechosen to deal with the Viking materiality of Gondor in different ways.
In Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation (1978), Boromir is pictured asa stereotyped Viking, with a fur tunic and a horned helmet. His funeralis much closer to the romanticized Viking funerals too: the little boat
he is placed in has a dragon-head prow, his body is covered, and theTolkien and Old Norse Antiquity

97

horned helmet is placed upon it. To make the Viking associations evenclearer, the filmmakers have added a set of four burning torches on
the boat, although we do not see the boat burning, but just sailing slowly
on the river. In Peter Jackson’s version (2001–03), the Viking elements
are rather played down. Boromir’s funeral is an iconic moment, but thefilm follows Tolkien very closely, and does not employ additional Viking
overtones. In contrast, when it comes to the winged helmets and crownof Gondor, the filmmakers seem anxious to avoid such connotations.
The Gondorian helmet of the Second Age, as briefly seen in the prologue of The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), has metal wings, but shapedand designed in such a way as not to draw attention to them. In the Third
Age helmet, as seen mainly in The Return of the King (2003), the wings
are imprinted on the surface of the helmet, and are very easy to overlook.
What appears to have been a headache for the design team was the helmet of the guards of the gate in Gondor. As the quotation above shows,Tolkien described those helmets very specifically as being winged. In
the ‘Appendices’ of the extended DVD edition of The Return of theKings, the two main conceptual designers of the design team (and also
well-known Tolkien illustrators before their participation in the film),
Alan Lee and John Howe, discuss the problem of the winged
helmets. Alan Lee points out that with Tolkien’s description ‘you
immediately think of Vikings’, although he goes on to assert that it
would really be a romanticized image of a Viking. John Howe calls thewhole affair of the winged helmets ‘an annoying idea’, which spoils theaesthetic of Middle-earth, and he adds ‘that would be heartbreaking tosee all of these Gondorians hopping about in Thor helmets, wouldn’t
it?’. Their eventual solution does not overcome the problem of Viking
associations, since the helmets figure two enormous sets of wings, but
the Guards are shown only once in the whole film, and the shot is very
brief, as if the viewer is actually encouraged to forget about this wholesorry affair.
Tolkien’s creation of the Númenóreans’ Gondorian materiality is one
more tribute to the Norse world, and one more attempt to root his mythology in the Old North and its legends. Tolkien’s initial impetus forwriting his legendarium was his romantic project to create a ‘mythology
for England’, associated with England’s Anglo-Saxon past (see Shippey
2001, x–xvi; Drout 2004). This is also why he insisted on using the term‘England’ rather than ‘Britain’, since the latter term conveys the historical result of all ethnic groups that inhabited the British Isles in the past,
including the Celts and Normans. Since Tolkien viewed the Anglo-

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Old Norse Made New

Saxons as the ‘real’ ancestors of the English, then the natural ancestorsof the Anglo-Saxons, the Germanic peoples, also had to be represented
in his mythology. The ship-burials and winged helmets of the people of
Númenor and Gondor place them securely—at least in the sphere of
popular imagination—within the cultural milieu of Viking and earlier
Scandinavian material culture, and offer a new perception of the Norseworld in one of the most influential works of modern fantasy.
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Anderson, Douglas A. 2003. ‘“An Industrious Little Devil”: E. V. Gordon as
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and Guide, Volume I: Chronology.
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Shippey, T. A. 2001. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century.
Shippey, T. A. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Revised and expanded edn.
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From Runic Inscriptions to Runic Gymnastics

101

FROM RUNIC INSCRIPTIONS TO RUNIC GYMNASTICSHEATHER O’DONOGHUE

In 1936 the German occultist Friedrich Bernhard Marby, inventor of
Runengymnastik (‘runic gymnastics’), was sentenced to imprisonmentby the Third Reich because his particular brand of mystic nationalism
was denounced as an anti-Nazi activity. He ended up in Dachau. In thisessay I hope to trace how the runic alphabet, especially as understood in
relation to Old Norse mythology, came to be associated with a bizarre
form of twentieth-century occultism which went beyond even National
Socialism’s tolerance of Nordic revivalism.
What we now call ‘Norse mythology’ is very largely encoded in texts
which were written down in medieval Iceland. In its written form, then—and whatever its origins—it belongs, indisputably, to Iceland itself.
However, the thriving settlement of medieval Iceland, which had beenuniquely productive in literary terms, suffered a very severe decline in
the early modern period. For a number of reasons, amongst them climatechange, internal instability, colonization, and the politics of mainland
Scandinavia, Iceland became isolated, culturally as well as geographically, and texts written in Iceland in the Middle Ages—a huge repositoryof literature, including mythological texts and treatises—were for atime lost to the wider European world. Given that Iceland had become aDanish colony, it is not surprising that it was at first Danish scholars whobegan to seek out Icelandic material which seemed to offer so much
valuable information about the early history and culture of the Scandinavian peoples (and it was believed then that some of this material
was extremely ancient—very much earlier than scholars nowadays
suppose). Scholars such as Ole Worm or Wormius (1636) and Peder
Hansen Resen or Resenius (1665, facsimile in Faulkes 1977) wrote on
and published Old Icelandic texts—crucially, in Latin, and with Latintranslations, thus ensuring their dissemination throughout all of learned
Europe, including Britain.
But the Swedes too had been pursuing their ancient national past,and two scholars in particular, Johannes Magnus and Olaus Rudbeck,are celebrated for their construction of elaborate, self-flattering, andlargely fantastic accounts of this ancient ‘history’. In the sixteenth century, Johannes Magnus in his Historia [. . .] de omnibus Gothorum

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Old Norse Made New

Sveonumque regibus (1554) had identified the Swedes with the descendants of Magog, Noah’s grandson, who had side-stepped the confusion ofBabel and had thus retained the original language of mankind, God’s
own tongue. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, in his bookAtlantica, Rudbeck claimed that the origin of the Swedish nation was
Atlantis, the birthplace of all European civilization.1 According to
Johannes Magnus, as well as besieging Rome, toppling Troy, and teaching philosophy to Plato, these ancient Swedes had also created a great
literature. This literature had, it was claimed, been written originally inrunes, the ancient Germanic alphabet. There were, after all, remnants ofthis writing—in the form of barely legible inscriptions on stone—throughout northern Europe. The Roman alphabet, so the theory went, was apapal plot, designed to suppress this pre-Christian native Germanic culture. In this way, runes, and runic inscriptions, came to be regarded as thelast traces of a great, lost, Scandinavian, pre-Christian, civilization.
Old Icelandic texts came to be venerated as precious written survivalsof this lost civilization, especially in their accounts on the one handof Old Norse myth, held to be an authentic reflection of ancient
Scandinavian religion and culture, and on the other, of early Scandinavian history. (It is ironic that those texts which were first taken toprovide historical information—the fornaldarsögur, most often set in alegendary Scandinavian pre-history—are precisely those which are nowadays understood as the most fictional, not to say fantastic.) The Danish
scholar Ole Worm also believed that Icelandic texts had originally been
written in runes, and laboriously transliterated the texts he quoted in his
appendix to Literatura runica. Peder Resen, thankfully, did not.
Both Worm and Resen believed in the extreme antiquity of the literature, the language and the runic alphabet, but runes themselves wereseen primarily as an ancient script, a vehicle for textuality. Nonetheless,the association of runes with pagan magic is a long-standing one. Nowadays, runes are popularly associated with divination—either in thepolitical, journalistic sense, ‘reading the runes’ being a cliché for having
an informed understanding of what news may be about to break; or in
New Age, mystical circles, in which runes seem to have replaced tarot
cards as fashionable instruments for fortune-telling. But apart from an
obscure reference in the Germania, in which Tacitus claims that theGermanic tribes predicted the future by means of small sticks with marks
1
The place of Johannes Magnus in Swedish historiography is well explained by Roberts 1979, together with a succinct account of his ideas. For an
account of Rudbeck’s theories, see Malm 1994.

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103

on them (Hutton 1970, 144–45),2 runes have not until recently beencredited with clairvoyant properties. On the other hand, authors of Old
Icelandic texts repeatedly presented runes as having magical properties,
and actual runic inscriptions have been reliably understood by modern
scholars as recording magic formulae (though many have been unreliably identified as such).3
Runic characters, which have been dated as early as the first century
AD, were in fact used for inscriptions of all sorts. It has been argued thatthe distinctively angular shape of each runic letter originally served tofacilitate carving on the grained surface of wood, though surviving inscriptions—for obvious practical reasons—are more often on stone orbone. That many runic inscriptions have survived on substantial monuments or valuable small items—again for obvious reasons—has no doubt
contributed to the sense that the runic alphabet itself was in some way
portentous. But there are two important counter-weights to this view. As
Birgit Sawyer notes, ‘scholars agree that most rune-stones are Christianmonuments’—Christian gravestones with runic inscriptions, the wordingof the inscription being a conventional Christian piety about the soul orGod’s mercy (Sawyer 2000, 125). In England, an inscription corresponding to part of a poem in Old English which has come to be known as The
Dream of the Rood—a vision of the cross on which Christ was crucified—
was carved on to an eighth-century stone cross in runic lettering (Swanton1970). Even more dramatically, a relatively recent find of runic inscriptions, mostly on wood, in a medieval cellar in Bergen (since followed bya number of similar finds elsewhere in Norway), makes it quite clear thatthe runic alphabet could be used for all manner of sometimes trivial
domestic and commercial texts: price tags, shopping lists, business letters (see Liestøl 1968 and 1974). An inscription inside a church on the
Swedish island of Oland might stand as an example of the range of nonmagical, non-pagan, non-portentous runic inscriptions. Dating fromabout the year AD 1500, it has many of the qualities of modern graffiti: it
playfully tells any reader that given the name of the church—Runsten—
one might expect its parish priest to be an expert in reading and writing
runes. Its author may have been the parish priest himself.4
Runologists have been accused of interpreting all obscure runic inscriptions as magical formulae. Certainly, there are indecipherable
2

Hutton notes tersely of these marks: ‘Too early for runes’ (1970, 144).
See McKinnell and Simek 2004, especially their warning against theuncritical assumption that runic inscriptions must be magical in some way (31).
4
For the story of this inscription see Brate 1928, 104–05.
3

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Old Norse Made New

sequences of runic letters. We should not automatically assume thatthese are magical, however. Perhaps they were simply mistakes—what
Seamus Heaney, in a poem about Viking carvings in a museum, ominously called ‘trial pieces’ (‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces’, in Heaney1975), and we might more prosaically identify as practice inscriptions
by apprentice runecarvers. Perhaps they are meaningless doodles, oreven purely decorative in function, like the Chinese or Japanese characters on European silks or porcelain. But there is no doubt that some runicinscriptions do encode magic formulae—though again, given that thepractice of magic invariably involves language—spells, magic words,
curses, and so on—and that any alphabet is a vehicle for language, wemight expect some inscriptions to be magical, especially given the preChristian origins of the runic alphabet.
Nevertheless, where runes are mentioned in Old Icelandic texts, thecontext is invariably one of mystery and sorcery. I want to look closely
at a few of the most celebrated instances of this, with a view to considering how authentically these accounts might reflect actual magicalpractices. Without doubt the most celebrated is the account in the eddic
poem Hávamál of how Óðinn, god of poetry and the dead, gained accessto the wisdom of the underworld, and learnt runes. And it is of the greatest importance to the whole story of runic gymnastics that Hávamál was
one of the first Old Icelandic texts to gain currency in post-medieval
Europe: the seventeenth-century scholar Peder Resen published it as anappendix to his edition and Latin translation of the Prose Edda.
Towards the end of Hávamál, a speaking voice which scholars haveunanimously identified as the god Óðinn himself describes how he hungfor nine nights on a windswept tree—perhaps the World Tree, Yggdrasill(Óðinn-steed). His agony is disturbingly reminiscent of Christ on the
cross (Evans 1986, st. 139):Við hleifi mik sældu
né við hornigi.
No bread did they give me
nor drink.
Óðinn continues:
Nam ek upp rúnar,œpandi nam,fell ek aptr þaðan.
I took up runes
took [them] screaming
I fell back from there.

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105

The verbal phrase nema upp is tantalizingly imprecise: ‘to take up’, or‘to pick up’, either literally or metaphorically. But it was enough topersuade seventeenth-century antiquarian scholars—including, as earlyas 1630, the distinguished British historian, Sir Henry Spelman, who
had been engaged in a scholarly correspondence with Ole Worm—thatÓðinn could be credited with inventing runes, especially given that
there was a pervasive early and lasting confusion around the adjective‘runic’ as qualifying both the alphabet and ancient Scandinavian poetry
itself.5
Hávamál continues with Óðinn’s account of how he learnt fimbulljóð
níu (‘nine mighty spells’) from his maternal uncle, the giant B†lþórr,and secured a drink of the mythical mead of poetry. A little further
on—and perhaps the speaking voice changes here—Hávamál tells us
more about the runes, directing the reader or listener to find a greatand powerful letter made by the powerful gods and carved by Hroptrr†gna—probably a circumlocution for Óðinn himself. And further
on again, the poet details several aspects of rune-carving, in the formof an incantatory interrogation of the audience’s skill and experience(st. 144):
Veiztu hvé rísta skal?
Veiztu hvé ráða skal?
Veiztu hvé fá skal?
Veiztu hvé freista skal?
Veiztu hvé biðja skal?
Veiztu hvé blóta skal?
Veiztu hvé senda skal?
Veiztu hvé sóa skal?
Do you know how to: carve, interpret, stain, test, ask, worship, send, sacrifice?

There follow eighteen spells with various objectives: to combat anxiety, to promote healing, to overcome enemies, to seduce women. And
slipped in at number twelve, a distinctly Odinic talent (st. 157):
ef ek sé á tré uppi
váfa virgilná,
svá ek rístok í rúnum fák
at sá gengr gumi
ok mælir við mik.
5

The classic account of the interaction of British scholars and Scandinavian
antiquarians is Seaton 1935. See also Quinn and Clunies Ross 1994.

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Old Norse Made New
If I see, up in a tree,a hanged corpse dangling,
I so carveand stain in runesthat the person walks
and talks to me.

There would seem to be plenty of material here for establishing the link
between Óðinn, magic, mystical otherworld wisdom, and runes.
While the wilder reaches of Old Norse myth came to thrill and inspiresome fashionable English literati in the eighteenth century (see Finlay
and Larrington in this volume), the dominant position taken by mostscholars on the identity of Óðinn himself followed the line taken by
Snorri in his Prose Edda, and disseminated by Resen’s Latin edition:that Óðinn was not originally a divine figure, but a semi-historical personage who had led his people out of southern Asia northwards into
Scandinavia, and who had been subsequently deified by that people.
But this still did not undermine the possibility of runic magic. Thus
Robert Sheringham, using Resen’s text, quotes Hávamál and explainsthat it was the employment of runes for magic purposes which had led tothe suppression of them and their literature by the Christian Church, and
Sir William Temple put forward the thesis that the magic use of runes
was a cunning plan on the part of the old poets ‘to Gain and establish thecredit and Admiration of their Rhymes’. Interestingly, Temple also advanced the proposition that individual runes had individual magicalproperties (see Seaton 1935, 230).
Much Old Icelandic poetry was first written down long after its composition—how long is not always known. Hávamál has been called by
one of its modern editors ‘a confusing, even bewildering, work’ (Evans
1986, 4): he declared it ‘inconceivable’ that its 164 strophes constituteone whole poem (Evans 1986, 7). Careful reading of the relevant stanzas
shows that the association of runes and magic with Óðinn is not as
straightforward as has been assumed—the eighteen spells, for example,
are not all necessarily runic. Hávamál was, however, very influential
when Old Norse myth was reaching its wider audience from the seventeenth century on, however imperfectly it was interpreted.
Other references to rune magic in Old Icelandic poetry may well reflect
some knowledge or memory of actual practice. In the poem Skírnismál
its primary speaker, Skírnir, an emissary sent by the god Freyr to woo thegiant maiden Gerðr, threatens her with all kinds of physical, mental andsexual violence, including the threat that he will carve the Þ rune at her

From Runic Inscriptions to Runic Gymnastics

107(Dronke 1997, st. 36). The name of this rune in Old Norse is þurs, whichmeans ‘ogre’, and in the Old Icelandic rune poem, in which each of theindividual runic characters is given a name, and a brief explanation, Þ isdescribed as kvenna kv†l—‘the torment of women’ (Page 1998, 5). The
verse in Skírnismál may refer to the Þ rune being carved three times, tointensify its power; some surviving runic inscriptions consist of arepeated single character, perhaps for the same reason, such as therepeated inscription of the T rune, týr, ‘victory’, carved on the blade of asword (McKinnell and Simek 2004, 33).
The eddic poem Sigrdrífumál, which recounts an exchange between
the hero Sigurðr and a valkyrie, Sigrdrífa, includes a detailed section
on rune magic, in which the valkyrie instructs Sigurðr, apparently to
reward him for freeing her from a Sleeping Beauty-like spell which Óðinn
has cast (Neckel 1962, 14–19). Sigrdrífa lists a series of runes useful forall sorts of different purposes: victory-runes, ale-runes, helping-runes(for women in childbirth), sea-runes (for safe voyages), limb-runes,
speech-runes, and mind-runes (for unsurpassed wisdom). It may be thateven in this poem, whose date is unknown, the information about rune
magic is already a little uncertain. The function of ‘ale-runes’, for example, is not very clearly set out: their usefulness ‘if you do not wantanother’s wife to beguile your trust’ does not seem to have a great deal to
do with ale, although the instruction which follows is to carve theserunes on a horn. It is possible that the poet has misunderstood the obscure but apparently powerful runic name alu for ‘ale’ (McKinnell and
Simek 2004, 35).
References in the Old Icelandic Family Sagas to the carving of runes
for magical purposes are even less to be trusted as transmitting reliable
information about authentic practice. In Egils saga, which is set in
the period before the Conversion of Iceland, the pagan poet Egill SkallaGrímsson is the planned victim of a poisoning attempt—with poisonedale, significantly enough. But before he drinks the deadly brew, he carves
runes on its horn container, and having drawn blood in the palm of hishand, smears his runes with it. The horn shatters, and the poison spills
harmlessly to the floor (Nordal 1933, ch. 44). This episode is built around
one of Egill’s verses, quoted in the text, and the prose echoes the verse
quite closely, suggesting that the anecdote was itself inferred from theverse. If the stanza is indeed older than the saga prose (as many scholars
assume, although without certainty), it could be that Egill (or its author)
knew the same slightly confused tradition of ale-runes represented in
Sigrdrífumál—or even, conceivably, the poem (or a version of it) itself.

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Old Norse Made New

There is no reason to assume that the saga author knew anything about
the actual practice of runic magic.
Further on in Egils saga, Egill comes across a farmer whose daughter
is very ill (Nordal 1933, ch. 72). Her father explains that a neighbour has
carved healing runes for her. Egill finds a runic inscription on a piece ofwhalebone under the girl’s bed, and at once sees that the runes havebeen miscarved, and are making her ill instead of better. He burns theoffending bit of bone, and recarves the inscription, which he places
under her pillow. The girl recovers at once. This story functions as awarning against inexperienced rune carvers, and the damage they can
inflict. Again, the narrative prose draws very closely on a quoted stanza,
and almost presents Egill—the pagan poet—in the role of miraculous
healer. Indeed, both episodes betray hagiographical influence: Bjarni
Einarsson detected an analogue to the story of the poisoned horn in alegend of St Benedict in Gregory’s Dialogues, and one to the magic
healing episode in the Gospels (1975, 176 and 257–59), and closer comparisons (where it is the writing that cures the sick girl) can be found insimilar miracle stories in European saints’ lives.6
A celebrated instance of malicious rune-magic occurs in Grettis saga(Guðni Jónsson 1936, ch. 79). Grettir’s enemies are frustrated by the factthat they cannot get at him in his fastness on Drangey, and enlist thehelp of an old woman, who carves blood-smeared runes on a log which ispushed out to sea so that it will drift ashore on Drangey:
Hon lét telgja á lítinn flatveg, þar gniðat var; síðan tók hon kníf sinn ok reist
rúnar á rótinni ok rauð í blóði sínu ok kvað yfir galdra. Hon gekk †fugandsœlis um tréit ok hafði þar yfir m†rg r†mm ummæli.
Where it [the log] had been rubbed smooth, she had a small flat area carved
out; then she took her knife and carved runes on the root, and reddened [them]with her blood, and recited spells over them. She walked backwards withershins
around the log, and chanted many powerful utterances over it.

When the log is indeed washed up on the shore of Drangey, Grettir
twice rejects it as Illt tré ok af illum sent (‘an evil log, sent by an evil
person’), but his lazy servant eventually drags it home, and Grettir hacks
at it for firewood without noticing. This careful delay with its third-timelucky structure suggests the inexorable progress of the supernaturally
charged log, and the inevitability of the witch’s success. And yet, thesaga author neatly side-steps the obvious direct connexion between the6
For instance, Jerome’s Life of Hilarion (White 1998, 99–100). I am
indebted to Dr Siân Grønlie for this reference.

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109

witch’s runes and Grettir’s demise. As he chops the log, Grettir’s axe
glances off the wood and slices into his leg. But nothing untoward ensues
until three nights later, when the wound understandably turns septic andGrettir becomes fatally enfeebled. The significant point here is that thesaga audience does not need to believe that it was the supernatural powerof the runes which led to Grettir’s downfall; the axe wound and theensuing infection are enough in themselves to motivate the narrative.
And whether or not a contemporary or near-contemporary audience liked
to believe in the efficacy of runic magic, the saga author has carefully
avoided committing himself.
This concludes the first part of this essay—an account of how there
came to be clustered around the runic alphabet a powerful mix of ideas.
We have a pervasive, if somewhat insecurely based, association between
runes and magical wisdom. We have the antiquarian thrill of runic inscriptions as the traces of a great, long-lost European culture. We have, on
the margins, the Church understood as an adversary of this culture. This
was to prove an irresistible package for later romantic nationalists witha mystical bent and some grounds for association with Scandinavian
culture—that is to say, those German-speaking proponents of mystic
nationalism who paved the way to the horrors of Nazi racism on the
one hand, and the relatively harmless delights of runic gymnastics on
the other.
The rise of German romantic nationalism in the nineteenth century has
been thoroughly documented by historians (Breuilly 1992, Scales andZimmer 2005, Geary 2002). Bolstered by the new science of IndoEuropean philology, it could claim that nationality depended to someextent on language, and that therefore those who spoke German—or, acrucial extension, some form of the readily apparent group of ‘Germanic’ languages—could identify themselves as belonging to a single,‘pan-Germanic’, nation. This identification was further confirmed by
new theories about race—the idea that certain physical and mental characteristic could define a people—in this case, the so-called ‘Nordic type’,
characterized as it happened by superior physical and mental features,and like their language, supposedly untainted by admixture, especiallyfrom the despised Mediterranean or Semitic nations. And the ancientorigin of this newly defined and superior people was well established: as
far back as Tacitus in the first century AD, a Germanic ethnicity had beenrecognized (and praised).
All that remained was to link the origins of the Germanic peoples
to Scandinavian pre-history. The place of the Scandinavian languages

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Old Norse Made New

in the Germanic group was indisputable. All of them could be traced
back to a form of ‘Proto-Germanic’ original. The theory that the
Scandinavians—including the Icelanders—were descendants of an originally Germanic people was widespread. Icelandic texts such as the Edda
thus miraculously preserved the ancient culture of the German nation—
preserved it because, as refugees from early Christian persecution, its
authors had escaped northwards, into Scandinavia, and even as far as
Iceland. Old Norse myth—and with it, runes and all their associations—came to be regarded as the cultural heart of the new idea of a pan-Germanic
nation. To study Old Norse myth and runic lore was to connect with thiscultural heart, and, in the view of its most extreme practitioners, to cause
it to beat again.
A key figure here is Guido von List, a German-speaking Austrian nationalist who not only adopted this whole package of ideas, but alsosignificantly advanced the pseudo-science of runic mysticism. Born in
1848, even as a teenager von List allied himself with what he believed
was Germanic paganism, abandoning his family’s Catholicism, andimmersing himself in Germanic folklore and legendary history. Von Listis credited with inventing ariosophy—a potent blend of theosophy, as
popularized by Madame Blavatsky and her followers, and racism:
ariosophy was thus the ancient mystical wisdom of the Aryan peoples.7
Theosophy, which became immensely popular throughout Europe, wasa fantastic and all-encompassing setting out of cycles of mystical history which claimed to connect with the philosophy and wisdom of themost ancient and superior races of mankind. Von List and his followers
matched Old Norse creation myths with Blavatsky’s cosmological cycles,
and identified their own Germanic roots with the Aryan races, as Blavatsky
defined them, yearning to share in their supposed wisdom, suppressed,
as was believed, by the enmity of the early Christian Church, but surviving in Norse myth, and encoded in runes.
Von List’s theories about the survival of a supposedly original Germanic culture not only in Norse myths, but also in place-names,monuments, and folk customs throughout Austria might be regarded asharmless, deluded antiquarianism. He believed that it was possible touncover evidence of temples dedicated to the gods of the Old Norse(that is to say, originally ancient Germanic) pantheon, throughout
Europe, even though their names had been cunningly changed to7
Blavatsky’s major works, key texts of the theosophical movement, are
Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888).

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111

the more familiar figures of Christian tradition: Michael had originallybeen Wotan; Peter, Donar; and so on. There were even odder attempts todistinguish ancient pagan traces. Von List advanced the theory that theheraldic devices of the Austrian aristocracy were disguised runic figures,and produced copious and elaborate examples (Goodrick-Clarke 1985,
71, especially plate 7); Philipp Stauff thought he could make out runicshapes in the complex patterns of half-timbered houses (Goodrick-Clarke
1985, 132). Even medieval architecture was supposed to encode ancient
wisdom in its decorative stonemasonry. This longing to see behind andbeyond the material world, to share in ancient wisdom kept secret fromthe common herd, has always proved tempting, and will no doubt continue to do so, as the success of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Codereadily illustrates. The tendency to read verbal messages in abstract
patterns is a diagnostic symptom of a form of dementia known as Lewy
Body disease.
Von List’s contribution to theories of runic magic came when, in 1902,
after a distinctly Odinic period of blindness following a cataract operation, he had a sudden major insight into a fundamental connexion
between runes and magic. Pondering the verses in Hávamál concerningÓðinn’s taking up of the runes, von List identified the eighteen spells of
which the speaker claims knowledge with what he himself regarded as
the original and ideal form of the runic futhark, or runic alphabet, which
had eighteen characters. Thus, von List reasoned, each individual runicletter carried its own runic spell, its own magical charge—just as Sir
William Temple had speculated, over three centuries earlier (Seaton
1935, 230).
It would be a mistake to overlook the serious ideological underpinning and, indeed, entailment, of these apparently foolish ideas. Von
List’s dismissal of Christianity was fuelled not only by a sort of misguided patriotism, but also by the pervasive anti-semitic convictionthat Christianity was fatally compromised by its Jewish roots. His celebration of the superior Aryan ‘racial’ origins of the Germanic nation wasboth ominous and influential in obvious and, with hindsight, predictable, ways. And von List drew on Tacitus’s ethnography of the Germanic
tribes to invent the Armanenschaft, a sort of ruling political priesthood,initiated into the sacred mysteries of ariosophy, and ready to establish asocial order in Germany in which Tacitus’s three Germanic tribes are recast as three estates (the name Armanenschaft is derived from Tacitus’s
old name for the Germanic people, the Hermiones). This new politicalorder would be characterized by patriarchy, racial purity, rule by a secret

112

Old Norse Made Newélite, and strong leadership. With the help of this strong leadership, a
new world order would be founded in Germany, thereby fulfilling theoccult prophecies of Madame Blavatsky and her followers. Von List’sbelief in this vision was confirmed by a verse from V†luspá (Dronke
1997, 87):Þá kemr hinn ríki
at regindómi,†flugr, ofan,sá er †llu ræðr.
Then comes the Mighty One
to divine judgement;
powerful, [he comes] from above,
he who rules all things

Von List translated this descending power as ‘Ein Stärke von Oben’ (‘astrong one from above’) and the imaginary figure became a key elementin his and his followers’ predictions for Germany’s glorious future(Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 88). It is ironic, then, that Dronke has dismissed
the stanza as a Christian insertion, not part of the original poem (Dronke
1997, 87).
With a specificity which is chilling to look back on, von List’s
ideological package even included German union with Austria. GoodrickClarke has shown how such ideas fed, both directly and indirectly, into
Nazi ideology, though von List’s pseudo-historical occultism was not
given much official credit: Hitler himself dismissed Wotanists—those
who claimed to have resurrected the original pagan religion of theGermanic people—and proponents of völkisch ideas out of hand (Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 200–02).
But if runic magic and Wotanism were disparaged by the Nazi leadership, the runic alphabet continued to carry associations of German
nationalism, Aryan racism, and the political and social order which was
supposed, triumphantly, to be at hand. German runologists declared(without the very least foundation for it, beyond discerning its shapein Egyptian pyramids) that the H rune—hagall—was the most powerful, and had first been spun to whisk the whole universe into being; its
name was used as the title of an influential National Socialist journal(Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 158), and it is currently the name of a white
supremacist website.8 Heinrich Himmler engaged a leading mystic nationalist, Karl Maria Wiligut, to design the iconography of the SS; in8<http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=8122>

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this way came into being the distinctive double S rune as part of theuniform.9 And research into Old Norse mythology, literature, and history was used as a cover for racist, proto-Nazi societies such as the ThuleSociety, or the Listian Edda Society.10
The founder of the Edda Society was Rudolf John Gorsleben, who
believed that the Edda itself was an incomparably valuable sourceof Aryan wisdom. His thought was basically Listian, and he believedthat the ‘zenith of power’ of the Aryan race was to be ‘remanifested
through a combination of eugenics and the systematic reawakeningof occult powers and abilities’ (Thorsson 1989, 15–17). In otherwords, he insisted that all racially pure Aryan individuals were united
not only by their (superior) racial identity, but also by their privileged
ability to re-connect with the driving force of the universe itself. The
instruments of this connexion were runes. Runes had magical properties; as Goodrick-Clarke puts it, Gorsleben ‘regarded runes as conductorsof a subtle energy that animated the entire universe, and therefore as
devices which could be used to influence the material world and thecourse of events’ (Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 157). But more mystically,
runes were a vital conduit between the Aryan god and Aryan man. The
declared aim of the Edda Society was ‘to conduct research into the ancient
Aryan religion through the interpretation, via the runes, of Norse
mythology’. But in 1933, the society’s own journal, Hag All All Hag
published an article which formally linked the society’s aims and ideals
with those of National Socialism. One wonders how welcome that was to
the Nazi party.
Of course, the ‘subtle energy that animated the entire universe’ was
not a mere fantasy on Gorsleben’s part. Throughout the latter part of thenineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, scientists weremaking extraordinary advances in the discovery and technology of all
kinds of invisible radiation—radioactivity, X-rays, the electromagnetic
radiation of radio waves, and so on. In 1936, Victor Hess (himself an
Austrian, as it happened) was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discoveryof cosmic rays, which he described as a powerful radiation which penetrates the universe from Outer Space. Any mystic with even the slightest
tendency to paranoia would be thrilled and horrified. Gorsleben’s twist
on all this new and exciting science was that runes could be used to9
For an indefensibly sympathetic account of Wiligut’s career and beliefs,
see Flowers [Edred Thorsson] and Moynihan 2001.
10
See Kavenna 2005 for an account of the Thule Society.

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Old Norse Made New

channel and harness these powerful sources of energy, like lightning
conductors, or radio antennae.
This brings us at last to Marby and his runic gymnastics. Like Gorsleben, Marby too saw the world as infused with an invisible, quasi-divine,
energy. But he developed the theory that runic characters were a schematic
illustration of the various bodily postures which devotees might adopt
in order to channel this cosmic energy (Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 160–61).
Marby’s aim was not primarily to establish a mystical connexion between Aryan man and Aryan god, but to draw down into individuals the
supposedly health-giving and healing properties of the invisible energy. Runic gymnastics was basically a form of revitalizing yoga. In
fact, one of Marby’s followers, Siegfried Kummer, developed a set oftechniques which he called Runenyoga (runic yoga) and he too wasdenounced for ‘bringing the Holy Aryan heritage into disrepute andridicule’ (Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 162).
Runic gymnastics, or runic yoga, is easier to illustrate than to describe.
It is not difficult to arrange the human body in ways which mimicquite closely many of the shapes of runic characters, although somepostures are evidently more challenging than others. As far as one cansee from Kummer’s own illustrations of the various postures, the(inauthentic) Z rune needs an imaginary bolt of energy through the
body to represent the cross bar, and it is clear that the shapes of somecharacters have been modified to fit the gymnastic scheme.11 Current
online instructions to would-be gymnasts note that Marby himself, inline with what little is known of pre-Christian worship from early texts,
claimed that energy levels were highest if the performance took placeout of doors. It is recommended that ideally practitioners should be
naked, aligned with the earth’s magnetic field, and prepared to wait
patiently for the vibrations which signal the currents of energy. The
perhaps unexpected side-effects of runic gymnastics are carefully set
out: twitching, cramps, and energy thrusts are healthy, as are yawning,
warm sweating, and increased bowel function. But a cold sweat is adangerous symptom: the gymnast is warned to release the posture
immediately.12
There were to be many other variations on rune gymnastics: rune
yodelling, rune humming, making runic shapes with fingers, and so on.
11

Most easily available online, at <http://www.geocities.com/odinistlibrary/
OLArticles/Articles/karlspiesberger.htm>.
12<http://www.kondor.de/runes/runengymnastik.html>. See also Thorsson
1989, especially ch. 7.

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According to Thorsson, for instance, Alpine ‘yodling’ [sic] represents‘ancient sacred mantric formulas’, and he claims that the strings of runicletters which make up some unintelligible runic inscriptions are actually
the notation of such protracted vocal formulas. 13 Rune humming, promoted by both Marby and Kummer, involves vocalizing the supposedphonetic value of the runic characters (obviously, one can hum vowels
and nasal consonants, but plosives have to be systematically stuttered,as ‘KA KE KI KO KU’) (Thorsson 1989, 63). And the cult continues: in
1958, for example, Karl Spiesberger published Runenexerzitien fürJederman (‘Runic Exercises for Everyman’). A current website advertising the book describes Spiesberger as ‘an initiate of the magical order
known as the “Fraternis Saturni” or “Brotherhood of Saturn”. This magical lodge was/is [. . .] the most prestigious, prominent and magical orderof German occultism’ (see note 11). Thorsson offers instructions formaking runic hand shapes based on Spiesberger’s theories: for instance,
one element in a ‘rite of success’ is prescribed as follows (Thorsson
1989, 76):
Next form the hand posture of the S-rune in front of the body at about eyelevel. When this is done, dynamically say, ‘The might in me is victorious!’
When this is said, you should feel an oscillation of power between the heart
center and the S-rune formed by the hands.

No doubt this requires a degree of practice. Thorsson’s instructions andillustrations for ‘Group Rune Rituals’ are very diverting (Thorsson 1989,
97–104).
Some contemporary practitioners of rune magic clearly echo the racist
ideology of figures such as von List and Gorsleben; for them, runicmagic is inextricably bound up with German nationalism and mystic
racism, a way of tapping into what they celebrate as the ancient Aryan‘race-soul’ of the Nordic people. It is sometimes (but not always)
symptomatic of racist sites and publications that the runic alphabet inquestion is based on the ‘Armanic system’ of eighteen runic characters.
The use of this, rather than a twenty-four-character futhark, betrays
its basis in Listian racist ideology, since it was von List who advanced
the connexion between the ancient Germanic Armanen—the priestlyélite whose name is taken from Tacitus’s tribe of Hermiones—
and the occult wisdom associated with Óðinn and his eighteen spells.
But as a trawl through the very many websites on runes will show,
13
Thorsson 1989, 89–90. The point is illustrated by representations ofsuch ‘calls’ in musical notation.

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Old Norse Made New

the majority of practitioners pursue a gentler, New-Age runic magic,
largely for telling fortunes. This most often involves the associationof each runic character, without obvious justification, with individual
items from apparently limitlessly various categories—genders, colours,
times of day, kinds of weather, seasons, trees, herbs, elements, semiprecious stones, emotions, diseases, and so on. In this way, each rune is
the supposed harbinger or predictor of a constellation of ailments, lucky
numbers, charms, personality traits, or favourable life-style choices. Avery contemporary twist is the association of each runic character with aparticular essential oil (Pennick 1998, 159). Any number of websites
will offer you a reading of your runes, for a very modest charge.
There is a postscript to the story of Friedrich Bernhard Marby and theNazi administration which imprisoned him in Dachau until it was liberated by the Allied Forces in 1945. Karl Maria Wiligut, to whom Himmler
had entrusted the iconography of the SS uniform, was a fanaticalariosophist, convinced that his own family was descended from an ancient royal Germanic master race whose religion—Irminism—had caused
them to be persecuted not only by the Christian church, but also by Jews
and Freemasons. Irminists regarded ‘Baldur-Chrestos’ as their prophet,murdered by Wotanists in 9600 BC.14 Wiligut wrote about runes andNorse myths under the pseudonym ‘Jarl Vidar’ (in Norse myth, Víðarr
was the son of Óðinn, who at Ragnar†k executed magnificent revenge
for the death of his father by tearing apart the jaws of the monstrous wolf
Fenrir). Wiligut (having changed his name to Weisthor) helped to create‘pagan wedding ceremonies for SS officers and their brides, at which[he] officiated with an ivory-handled stick [. . .] carved with runes’(Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 187). And this was the man who charged Kummer
and Marby with ‘bringing the Holy Aryan heritage into disrepute’. The
dividing line between Nordic revivalism such as Wiligut’s, which the
Nazis seemed to find acceptable, and what they regarded as its unacceptable face—runic gymnastics—is not a self-evident one to modern
commentators.

14
For a full account of Wiligut/Weisthor’s activities, see Goodrick-Clarke
1985, ch 14. Flowers and Moynihan 2001 contains translations of Wiligut’s
mystical writings. Flowers’s introduction implies that Wiligut’s incarceration
for insanity was unjust; a glance at these writings suggests quite the opposite.

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Wawn, 1–25.
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Sawyer, Birgit 2000. The Viking-Age Rune-Stones: Custom and Commemorationin Early Medieval Scandinavia.
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A Viking Pacifist? The Life of St Magnus

119

A VIKING PACIFIST? THE LIFE OF ST MAGNUS
IN SAGA, NOVEL, AND OPERACARL PHELPSTEAD

The composer Peter Maxwell Davies begins a synopsis of his opera The
Martyrdom of St Magnus with the remarkable assertion that ‘St Magnus[. . .] is the Patron Saint of Orkney. He was a Viking pacifist’ (Davies
1977, 7).1 Davies goes on to state that ‘The history of St Magnus is to beread in the Icelandic Orkneyinga saga’, but a reader of that saga mightquestion Davies’s characterization of Magnus as a ‘Viking pacifist’. Thisessay explores the transformations St Magnus underwent as the story of
his life in Orkneyinga saga was retold in the twentieth century in thenovel Magnus by the leading Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown(1921–1996), and then in the opera based on that novel by the eminent
British composer, Peter Maxwell Davies (b. 1934). 2 For these two
twentieth-century artists the Norse earl St Magnus is central to a sense ofa peculiarly Orcadian identity, yet they also present him as a figure ofwider resonance, a particular victim of violence who can stand for all
those killed for their beliefs or their desire to make peace. Magnus isuniversalized in these twentieth-century reworkings by means of typological connections with other victims of violence. In this way, I shallargue, Brown and Davies adopt a more ‘hagiographical’ approach totheir saintly subject than does the writer of Orkneyinga saga: they turn
Magnus into a more straightforwardly exemplary, and so less complex,
character than he is in the saga.
From the second half of the ninth century onwards the islands ofOrkney and Shetland formed an earldom owing allegiance to the Norwegian king. The islands passed to Denmark with the union of the Danish
and Norwegian crowns in 1380, and did not come under Scottish
1
The synopsis is printed in the libretto (Davies 1977, 7–9) and the booklet to
the CD recording of the opera (Davies 1990, 7–8).
2
Brown and Davies used the translation of Orkneyinga saga by Taylor (1938).
Since differences between this translation and the Norse text of Orkneyinga sagaas edited in Finnbogi Guðmundsson 1965 do not significantly affect the argumentof this essay, the saga is here quoted in Taylor’s translation and I follow Taylor,
Brown, and Davies in using anglicized spellings of Norse names: e.g. Magnus for
Magnús, Hakon for Hákon, Paul for Páll.

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Old Norse Made New

rule until 1468–69, when the Danish king proved unable to pay a dowry
he had secured on the islands. This Norse cultural inheritance has
been, and still is, fundamental to the regional identity of Orkney and
Shetland. A dialect of Norse, known as Norn, survived in the islands
until as late as the eighteenth century, and the English of the islands
still retains a high percentage of Norse loanwords (Marwick 1929,
Barnes 1998). Sir Walter Scott emphasized the Norse identity of
Shetland in his historical novel The Pirate (published in 1822), andseveral modern Orcadian writers have drawn on Viking history and Norse
literature in their novels, poetry, and drama (see Scott 1996, D’Arcy
1996, chs 10–12). Orcadians and Shetlanders living in London in1892 founded what is now the Viking Society for Northern Research, thepublisher of this volume of essays and sponsor of the conferences atwhich they were presented (on the history of the Viking Society see
Townsend 1992).
Vikings settled in, and ruled, many parts of the British Isles and Ireland, but of these areas only the Norse earldom of Orkney has a whole
Icelandic saga devoted to its early history. This text, Orkneyinga saga,
is the major surviving account of the history of Orkney between the
ninth and the late twelfth century. The saga was probably put together
with some input from Orcadian informants, and it incorporates a considerable amount of skaldic verse composed in Orkney or by Orcadians.
The saga was compiled c.1200, but survives in a revised version madec.1230 and preserved in the late fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscript, Flateyjarbók (MS GKS 1005 fol.).3
A large proportion of Orkneyinga saga (chapters 34–52 and 57) isdevoted to the life of Magnus Erlendson. His father and uncle were joint
earls of Orkney; the territory was often divided between two or threerulers and the earldom suffered from recurrent conflicts between rival
earls, as happened during the reigns of Magnus’s father and uncle, andlater when Magnus and his cousin, Hakon Paulson, were joint rulers of
Orkney. It was Hakon’s determination to be sole ruler of the earldom thatdrove him to have Magnus executed on 16 April 1117. Magnus was
soon regarded as a Christian martyr and saint, someone to whom one
could pray for miraculous assistance. Magnus’s nephew, Earl (later St)
Rognvaldr Kali Kol’s son (d. 1158/59), played a major role in the development of Magnus’s cult and began the construction of St Magnus
Cathedral in Kirkwall in 1137.
3

On the manuscripts, date, and sources of Orkneyinga saga see FinnbogiGuðmundsson 1965, v–lxxxi, cviii–cxxvi.

A Viking Pacifist? The Life of St Magnus

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Saga
The account of St Magnus in Orkneyinga saga is almost certainly basedon a Latin saint’s life, which no longer survives in its original form, butwhich is known to scholars as *Vita sancti Magni, and which may havebeen composed in 1137 (for a recent examination of the dating andauthorship of the Vita see Haki Antonsson 2004, especially 44–47 and
61–63). Besides the account in Orkneyinga saga there are also two otherbiographies of St Magnus in Old Norse: Magnúss saga skemmri (The
Shorter Saga of Magnus), from the mid-thirteenth century, and Magnússsaga lengri (The Longer Saga of Magnus), from the fourteenth. Both ofthese later sagas are based on Orkneyinga saga, but Magnúss saga lengri
also includes several extensive passages, mainly of a homiletic rather
than narrative nature, translated directly from the lost Latin *Vita sancti
Magni (on these texts see Finnbogi Guðmundsson 1965, cxxviii–
cxxxviii).
The Earl Magnus portrayed in the Old Norse sources is a more complex character than is usually found in medieval hagiography. Early in
Orkneyinga saga’s account of his reign (chapter 45) there is an idealized
description of Magnus as a model ruler which includes some remarks on
his attitude to Vikings: he was
hard and unsparing towards robbers and vikings. He put to death many men
who plundered the bonder and common people. He had murderers and thieves
seized, and punished rich as well as poor for robbery and theft and all misdeeds. (Taylor 1938, 205)In the next chapter, however, the narrator says of Hakon and Magnus
that
it is said in the poem on the subject, that they fought with the chief called
Donald [. . .] who was the second cousin to the Earls; and he fell before them.
There was a man of rank called Thorbjorn whom they put to death in Burra
Firth in Shetland. [And it is said that they took the house over his head andburned him in it] (Taylor 1938, 205–06).

The poem referred to here no longer survives, but as Thomson says, ‘The
poem, although lost, provides enough evidence to dispose of Magnusthe-pacifist’ (Thomson 2003, 52). The sentence Taylor places in brackets
at the end of the above quotation is found in a sixteenth-century Danishtranslation of Orkneyinga saga and in Magnúss saga skemmri, but notin the Flateyjarbók text of Orkneyinga saga: it is likely that at somepoint in the textual tradition a scribe deleted this sentence, recognizingthat saints ought not to burn people in their homes. These passages
reveal an ideal of the Christian ruler far removed from the kind of pacifist

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Brown and Davies later portray; moreover, the killing of his second
cousin, Duncan, and the burning of Thorbjorn suggest that some ofMagnus’s deeds were of a very dubious moral quality.
The description of Earl Magnus in chapter 45 continues with an account of his ten years of chaste marriage to an aristocratic Scottish woman:
He consorted with her ten years in such wise that he fulfilled the lusts ofneither of them and was pure and clean from all carnal sins. And if he felt
temptation coming over him, he bathed in cold water and prayed for theintercession of God. (Taylor 1938, 205)

This account of Magnus’s sexual abstinence needs to be seen in thecontext both of hagiographic commonplaces (for example, the motif ofimmersion in water as a prophylactic for sin (Ireland 1997)) and of thehistory of the institution of ‘spiritual marriage’ (see Elliott 1993;
McGlynn and Moll 1996). Dyan Elliott shows that in this period it wasusual for the wife rather than the husband to initiate a commitment to achaste or ‘spiritual’ marriage and she suggests that in this context
Magnus’s taking of the initiative associates his commitment to chastity
with remorse over a youth misspent as a Viking (Elliott 1993, 247). This
is not, however, a connection that is made explicitly by the medieval
writers.
The incident which, more than any other, lies behind Peter Maxwell
Davies’s characterization of Magnus as a ‘Viking pacifist’ occurs earlier
in the saga, before Magnus has become an earl. Magnus is forced by his
namesake King Magnus Bare-legs of Norway to accompany him on amilitary expedition to the Hebrides and then on to Wales. While on thisexpedition the Norwegian forces engage with those of two Welsh earls
in the Menai Strait. As the other men prepare to fight, Magnus sits down
on deck and refuses to arm himself: he says that he has no quarrel withanyone there, and ‘therefore I will not fight’ (Taylor 1938, 199). Insteadof fighting, Magnus ‘took a Psalter and sang through the fighting but
did not go into shelter’ (Taylor 1938, 199). Given what George Mackay
Brown and Peter Maxwell Davies do with this passage, it is worth drawing attention to the king’s statement that ‘I do not think that religious
belief is at the bottom of this’ (Taylor 1938, 199): this comment hints atother possible motivations for Magnus’s behaviour that are ignored byBrown and Davies (King Magnus had earlier deprived his namesake’s
father and uncle of the earldom of Orkney). The saga emphasizes that thebattle is long and hard, but Magnus miraculously remains unharmed. No
doubt it is Magnus’s behaviour in this battle which prompted Davies to
describe him as a ‘Viking pacifist’, but Peter Foote (1988, 200–02) has

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123

pointed out that unlike other soldier-saints, such as St Martin, who permanently renounce violence, Magnus is not actually a pacifist, but rather
a proponent of ‘Just War’ theory: at this point he refuses to fight notbecause he is against all fighting, but only because he does not have ajust cause against the Welsh (‘He said he had no quarrel with any man
there’ (Taylor 1938, 199)).
Magnus escapes after the Battle of Anglesey and does not return toOrkney until after King Magnus and Earls Paul and Erlend have died,when his cousin Hakon Paulson is persuaded to allow Magnus to reign
with him as joint earl. Some years later, however, Hakon tricks Magnus
into attending a peace meeting on the island of Egilsay. Although
Magnus’s subsequent ‘martyrdom’ is solely a result of Hakon’s politicalambitions, the accounts of it are influenced by the biblical narratives ofChrist’s Passion and by hagiographic conventions: Magnus’s spending
the night praying in a church after arriving on Egilsay, for example,
echoes Christ’s watching in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of
His arrest (Taylor 1938, 208 cf. Matthew 26: 36–46 and parallels).
Magnus faces death as befits a Christian martyr, ‘blithe as if he had
been bidden to a feast’ (Taylor 1938, 210). He prays for his enemies andthen asks his executioner to strike him on the head rather than beheadhim: ‘for it is not seemly to behead chiefs like thieves. [. . .] After that hecrossed himself, and bowed himself to the stroke’ (Taylor 1938, 211).
Magnus’s first posthumous miracle is recorded in the next chapter:
after his death the place of his martyrdom becomes a green field (Taylor
1938, 211). Further miracles are reported in chapter 52, including theappearance of a heavenly light over the grave, and chapter 57 of Orkneyinga saga comprises a collection of very brief accounts of Magnus’s
miracles, mostly healings, which further emphasizes the popular natureof the saint’s cult.
There can be no doubt that the writer of Orkneyinga saga believed
Magnus to be a saint, but this does not prevent him hinting at less thansaintly motives for some of Magnus’s actions, nor lead him to shrink
from recounting deeds, such as the slaying of Magnus’s second cousin,
Donald, and the burning of Thorbjorn, which are less than wholly
edifying.
Novel
George Mackay Brown was born in Orkney and, apart from a few years as
a student at the University of Edinburgh, he lived there for the whole of
his life. Much of his writing is inspired by the history of Orkney, and124

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informed by his sense of the Norse cultural inheritance of the islands,
but he never learned Old Norse, claiming not to have been able to afford
the textbook for the Old Norse course at Edinburgh University (D’Arcy
1996, 282 n. 39). Dependent therefore on translations, Brown used theversion of Orkneyinga saga produced by A. B. Taylor in 1938; when
Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards later published their translation they
dedicated it to Brown (Hermann Pálsson and Edwards 1981, 5).
References to the life and death of St Magnus can be found in writings
produced throughout George Mackay Brown’s career, with extended
treatments in An Orkney Tapestry (Brown 1973, first published 1969),
The Loom of Light (1984), Songs for St Magnus Day (1988), and thenovel Magnus (Brown 1988, first published 1973). Brown became aRoman Catholic in 1961, and his reworkings of material from Orkneyinga
saga are deeply influenced by Christian pacifist beliefs. This influenceis clearly seen, for example, when he refers in An Orkney Tapestry toMagnus’s words before the Battle of the Menai Strait:‘I have no quarrel with any man here’ —it was the first time in the recorded
history of the north that that remark had been made. [. . .] Some day soon allmen everywhere will have to speak it, if the nations are not to be involved in a
final holocaust; and after that, perhaps, the saints will inherit the earth. (Brown
1973, 74)

In An Orkney Tapestry Magnus’s martyrdom is represented as the turning point in Orcadian history, the moment when the inadequate ethics ofthe pre-Christian period (with which Magnus’s opponent Hakon is associated) begin to be superseded by a new Christian ethic. In this text
Brown remains close to his source material in Orkneyinga saga, including, for example, the information given in the saga about Magnus and
Hakon killing their own second cousin and burning another chieftain
inside his house (Brown 1973, 78). In his later, more extended, treatmentin the novel Magnus, however, Brown omits material that reflects poorly
on the eponymous saint and makes some significant alterations to otheraspects of the historical narrative provided by Orkneyinga saga.
Julian D’Arcy, who has written most illuminatingly on Brown’s use of
Old Norse sources, notes three specific changes of historical fact which
Brown makes in Magnus (D’Arcy 1996, 267–69). 4 First, whereas
4
Studies of the novel preceding D’Arcy 1996 include Huberman 1981, Rowena
Murray 1986, and D’Arcy 1994; the later reprint of Magnus includes an introduction by Isobel Murray (1998). Thomson’s recent brief remarks on the novel’s
relationship to its saga sources adumbrate a reading along lines similar to thosedeveloped in the present essay (cf. Thomson 2003, 43, 52, 54, 61–62).

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125

Orkneyinga saga says that King Magnus Bare-legs deposed Magnus’s
father and uncle, Earls Erlend and Paul, Brown claims the exact opposite, that the king confirmed them as rulers in Orkney (Brown 1998,
54–55). This removes the possibility of interpreting St Magnus’s refusal
to fight in the Menai Strait as merely a protest against the king’s having
deprived his family of power. Second, Brown stresses that Orkney had
been torn apart by civil strife for centuries before Magnus’s martyrdom:D’Arcy points out that this is an exaggeration, but Brown’s suggestionthat Magnus’s death brought to an end a long-running and bitter civil
war, rather than merely averting one, invests that death with greater
significance and emphasizes the value and efficacy of pacifism as ameans of ending bloodshed. Third, in Orkneyinga saga Magnus offers
his cousin alternatives that would not require him to order Magnus’s
execution, but in the novel these suggestions are made by others while
Magnus is absent: in this way Brown removes any hint that the saint had
an interest in preserving his own life.
Brown’s novel Magnus also includes new material which is designed
to enhance the image of Magnus as a perfectly exemplary figure. In
chapter 2 the young Magnus shows his concern for suffering creaturesby caring for a wounded seal; he renounces the worldly values of his
contemporaries by refusing to use his own name:I do not like my name. It means ‘great, powerful’. I don’t want to be great andpowerful. The world is sick because of people wanting to be great and powerful. (Brown 1998, 38).

As in the medieval sources, Magnus spends the Battle of the Menai
Strait singing from a Psalter, but the novel does not comment on Magnus’s
reasons for refusing to fight: whereas in Orkneyinga saga Magnus statesquite clearly that he will not fight because he has no quarrel with theWelsh, the lack of such an explanation in Brown’s account implies that
Magnus is a pacifist opposed to all violence on principle.
In chapter 4 of the novel, ‘The Temptations’, Magnus is seen grappling with, and ultimately resisting sexual temptation, the temptation to
deprive Hakon of his share of the earldom, and the temptation to retire toa monastery and so refuse the responsibilities put upon him by God.
Brown’s handling of Magnus’s chaste marriage displays a touching sympathy for Ingerth, the earl’s wife—much more sympathy than the
medieval saga-writers showed (Brown 1998, 61–65).
The most remarkable innovation in Brown’s Magnus occurs in chapter 7, ‘The Killing’. The peace meeting between Magnus and Hakon on
the island of Egilsay is here relocated to the twentieth century, so that

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the narrative suddenly leaps forwards eight centuries. Journalists interview witnesses of the events, and the execution scene takes place in a
Nazi concentration camp: the camp’s commanders force Lifolf, the camp’s
cook and butcher, to kill Magnus, and the execution is described fromthe perspective of this unwilling participant. Magnus himself is describedas ‘the Lutheran pastor whose books were burned at the start of the war’
(1998, 167). This statement, together with the fact that in the novel
Magnus is hanged rather than struck on the head as in Orkneyinga saga,
clearly identifies Magnus with the German Protestant churchman andmartyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged in the Flossenburg concentration camp on 9 April 1945 for his involvement in a conspiracy toassassinate Hitler.
By conflating St Magnus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in this way, Brown
identifies both men as manifestations of a trans-historical type of theChristian martyr: as in medieval hagiography, the attributes of the universal type become more important than the historical individuality ofeach particular martyr; what matters is the way they are assimilated to apattern, a paradigm that connects the saint’s life with the lives of othersaints and of Christ. Medieval hagiographers defended such a procedureon theological grounds. Gregory of Tours, for example, wrote in the
Preface to his Liber vitae patrum:
Et quaeritur a quibusdam, utram vita[m] sanctorum an vitas dicere debeamus.
[. . .] manifestum est, melius dici vitam patrum quam vitas, quia, cum sit
diversitas meritorum virtutumque, una tamen omnes vita corpores alit in mundo.
(quoted in Heffernan 1988, 7)
And it will be asked by some whether we ought to speak of the life or the livesof the saints. [. . .] It is clear that it is better to say life rather than lives of thefathers because, although there is a diversity of merit and virtue, in this world
one life nourishes all their bodies.

It did not even matter if a particular story was told about the wrong saint,provided that the story was edifying. Reginald of Canterbury admits in
the Preface to his Life of St Malchus that if he came across a good story
anywhere he included it on the grounds that all things are common in
the communion of saints (Jones 1947, 61).
Isobel Murray points out that in identifying Magnus with the Protestant Bonhoeffer ‘Brown’s analysis of suffering, virtue and sacrifice is
not confined to canonised, Catholic saints’ (1998, x). The narrator ofMagnus meditates at length on the nature of sacrifice in the chapter on
the killing of St Magnus, and in doing so ranges widely beyond Christian martyrdom to consider the meanings of prehistoric sacrifices in

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127

Orkney and human sacrifices among the Aztecs of Central America (Brown
1998, ch. 7).
This meditation points to the importance of Christ’s Crucifixion, themodel for both Magnus and Bonhoeffer, and an event the novel’s narrator
describes as ‘the one only central sacrifice of history’ (1998, 158). Magnus hears Mass the day before his execution, and the narrator reflects on
the Eucharistic sacrifice and that of St Magnus in a key passage that
encapsulates the aesthetic informing both this novel and Davies’s opera:
All time was gathered up into that ritual half-hour, the entire history of mankind [. . .]. That is to say, history both repeats itself and does not repeat itself.
One event; one group of characters that move in and through and out of theevent, and both make the event and are changed by it, collectively and individually—that event bears resemblances to another event that occurred ahundred years before, so that a man listening to a saga is moved to say, ‘This
is the same performance all over again.’ It is not: [. . .] Events are never thesame, but they have enough similarity for one to say tentatively that there areconstants in human nature, and constants in the human situation [. . .].
Poetry, art, music thrive on these constants. They gather into themselves ahuge scattered diversity of experience and reduce them to patterns. (Brown
1998, 129)

This justification for the typological identifications that Brown makes
is comparable to the theological defence of similar procedures by Gregoryof Tours and Reginald of Canterbury referred to above: both the medieval hagiographers and the modern novelist emphasize pattern over
diversity.
Brown’s additions and changes to Orkneyinga saga all seem to bemade with the same purpose in mind: as D’Arcy puts it, ‘to play down
the fallible and human aspects of Magnus and to emphasise his saintliness’ (D’Arcy 1996, 269). At the beginning of An Orkney Tapestry Brown
refers to a distinction made by a fellow Orcadian, Edwin Muir, between
Story, ‘the facts of our history’, and Fable, ‘the vision by which people
live’ (Brown 1973, 1–2). Brown’s versions of the life of St Magnus areclearly ‘Fable’ in Muir’s sense, a ‘vision by which people live’: Brown
invests the saga account with his own Christian pacifist vision and departs from his source in order to convey that vision the more effectively.
There is, however, a danger that this strategy might back-fire, as D’Arcysuggests:
the result may be a greater wariness and scepticism towards Mackay Brown’s
intentions, especially if these seem overtly didactic. In this sense, Mackay
Brown’s manipulation of the saga may have defeated his own ends. (D’Arcy
1996, 270)

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Brown’s departures from Orkneyinga saga may be justified in terms ofturning History into Fable, but his adaptation of the story for ideological and didactic purposes contrasts strangely and ironically with his
own lament in An Orkney Tapestry that ‘We cannot get a clear picture of
the man [Magnus] because his monkish biographer has smudged theoutline with conventional pious platitudes’ (1973, 71).
Opera
Brown’s simplification of Orkneyinga saga’s portrait of St Magnus iscarried even further by Peter Maxwell Davies in his opera, The Martyrdom of St Magnus, which sets the composer’s own libretto based on
Brown’s Magnus. Davies was born in Salford in 1934, but visited
Orkney in 1970 and has lived there since 1974 (Griffiths 1985, 20;
Seabrook 1994, 124, 144). Davies enjoyed a long and productive association with Brown, setting several of his poems to music and basingother works on Brown’s fiction. The Martyrdom of St Magnus was commissioned by the BBC in celebration of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee andwas first performed on 18 June 1977 at the opening of the first St Magnus
Festival in Kirkwall, Orkney.5 The piece is called ‘A Chamber Opera innine scenes’, and deploys modest forces of just five singers (who singtwenty-six roles!) and eleven instrumentalists (flute, clarinet, horn, trumpets, percussion, guitar, keyboards, and strings). In its ritualistic form,
and to some extent musically, the piece is highly reminiscent of Benjamin
Britten’s Church Parables. As in many of Davies’s other compositions, amajor influence on the music is Gregorian chant, an influence which ishere justified in terms of Magnus’s own familiarity with plainsong (Davies
1985, 163).6
Brown’s Magnus is as much a meditation as a novel. But it also has
obvious dramatic potential: some parts of the novel are arranged on thepage as if they were part of a play, with the names of speakers printed
before their parts of the dialogue and no intervening narrative prose;
Murray (1998, ix) writes that the book is ‘A series of tableaux, deliberately isolated from each other’, and this tableaux structure transforms
easily into the nine scenes of Davies’s small-scale chamber opera.
5
On the original production and subsequent tour taking in the Proms andseveral English cathedrals see Seabrook 1994, 165–66. The opera was also revived as part of a retrospective of the composer’s work at the South Bank in 1990
(Seabrook 1994, 232).
6This composer’s note on the opera is printed in Davies 1985, 162–63 and in
the booklet accompanying the CD recording of the opera (Davies 1990, 4–5).

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129

Davies openly acknowledges that his portrait lacks the paradoxical
complexity of the saga accounts:
Inevitably, there had to be simplification—Magnus, for instance, is not such acomplex character in the opera as in the novel, and certainly not as multifaceted as in John Mooney’s study in depth. (Davies 1985, 162; the reference
here is to the extensive study of the medieval accounts of St Magnus in
Mooney 1935.)

In this passage there is both an implicit recognition that Brown’s portrait is already a simplification of the complex character that Mooneyfound in the medieval sources, and also an open acknowledgement thatthe opera takes this process of simplification still further.
The first scene of the opera is ‘The Battle of Menai Strait’, in which a
Welsh and a Norse herald converse, interrupted briefly by Magnus’s
singing from his Psalter. As in Brown’s novel, Magnus offers no explanation for his refusal to fight and it is therefore logical to assume that heis a pacifist, with a hatred of all fighting. The scene which follows shows
Magnus tempted to marry: whereas in Orkneyinga saga and the novel heenters into a chaste marriage, in the opera he refuses to marry at all; hisbride to be then turns away and ‘The reverse of her mask is seen to be a
Beast’ (1977, 16). In this way Davies shows Magnus dealing with sexual
temptation in a way that no longer has to be interpreted in terms of thepeculiarly medieval theological framework of the chaste marriage.
The most significant change, as opposed to simple omission, that
Davies makes to Brown’s novel occurs in Scenes VII and VIII, the representation of Magnus’s martyrdom. Davies writes that
The novel has Magnus martyred in a (Nazi) concentration camp; I decided tobring the martyrdom forward to the present, and set it in the country where theopera is performed—an attempt to make audiences aware of the possibilities
with us for such a murder of a political or religious figure, whatever his
convictions. (Davies 1985, 163)

In Scene VI of the opera Hakon rejects proposed alternatives to having
Magnus murdered. Scene VII, ‘The Reporters’, then leaps forward nearlynine hundred years to show the modern mass media reporting on eventson Egilsay as the peace meeting fails: reporters make brief reports andlocal residents provide interviews. This chronological disruption isaccompanied musically by ‘a brilliant series of pastiches’ (Griffiths 1985,94) culminating in a foxtrot, a dance that represents ‘an image of total
corruption’ in Davies’s musical language (Griffiths 1985, 67).
The setting of the following scene, ‘The Sacrifice’, is no longer tied tosuch a specific place and time as Brown’s Nazi concentration camp, and130

Old Norse Made New

the Military Officer’s justification for the execution of Magnus—that‘The enemy we fear is the enemy within our borders’—can easily be readin contemporary terms by the opera’s audience. As in Brown’s novel,
Magnus is hanged, rather than struck on the head as in the saga, and in so
far as hanging is less obviously associated with particular places andperiods than execution with a weapon, this small detail assists inuniversalizing Magnus’s execution. The opera, like the novel, ends withthe martyred Magnus miraculously granting sight to a blind beggar
women called Mary. Blind Mary is granted not only sight, but also aspirit of prophecy, becoming what the libretto calls ‘a Seer, a Prophetess’. Her words echo the meditation on sacrifice in chapter 7 of Brown’s
Magnus (Davies 1977, 31):Blind mouths, crying, still crying for sacrifice, for more sacrifice.
There was one central sacrifice: ‘I am the bread of Life.’ [. . .]But men still crave sacrifice, so King Olaf died for you.
So Earl Magnus died for you [. . .].
And you shall know
(Pointing, seeing)
who else will die, who among you will be sacrificed, among the blind, hungry
mouths;(pointing)
who the victims, who the persecutors, the sacrificed, the slayer.

Mary’s words link the sacrifices of Christ, the Norwegian royal protomartyr St Olaf (d. 1030), and St Magnus with possible, indeed inevitable,
future sacrifices.7
Mary’s pointing implicates members of the audience in these futuresacrifices, whether as victims or as perpetrators, and Davies writes
that his opera is ‘an attempt to make audiences aware of the possibilities
with us for such a murder of a political or religious figure, whatever
his convictions’ (Davies 1985, 163). Unlike Brown, the composer
does not identify as a Christian, and the opera presents Magnus as perhaps even more widely representative than in the novel. By bringing
Magnus’s death fully up to date, the opera goes even further than
the novel in claiming that there are what we have seen Brown (1998,
129) refer to as ‘constants in human nature, and constants in the humansituation’.
7

In an interview Davies reveals that he was also thinking of St Thomas Becket
during the composition of this scene (Griffiths 1985, 109), an interesting observation given the connections between the cults of Magnus and Thomas recently
detailed by Haki Antonsson (2004).

A Viking Pacifist? The Life of St Magnus

131

That George Mackay Brown and Peter Maxwell Davies chose to retellthe life of St Magnus of Orkney is easily explicable in terms of thesaint’s prominence in Orcadian cultural history, his status as the islands’
patron saint, and his importance to an Orcadian sense of regional identity. Despite this intensely local interest, however, both the novelist andthe composer find in the Icelandic Orkneyinga saga a figure of universal, not merely local, resonance, one in whose self-sacrificial acceptanceof death a perpetually recurring pattern of human experience is mademanifest.
Bibliography
Barnes, Michael 1998. The Norn Language of Orkney and Shetland.
Brown, George Mackay [1969] 1973. An Orkney Tapestry.
Brown, George Mackay 1984. The Loom of Light. In Three Plays.
Brown, George Mackay 1988. Songs for St Magnus Day: The Seven Jars ofSorrow and Comfort.
Brown, George Mackay [1973] 1998. Magnus.
D’Arcy, Julian Meldon 1994. ‘George Mackay Brown and Orkneyinga saga’. In
Northern Antiquity: The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and Saga. Ed. Andrew
Wawn, 305–27.
D’Arcy, Julian Meldon 1996. Scottish Skalds and Sagamen: Old Norse Influence
on Modern Scottish Literature.
Davies, Peter Maxwell 1977. The Martyrdom of St Magnus: A Chamber Operain Nine Scenes: Libretto by the Composer after the Novel Magnus by George
Mackay Brown.
Davies, Peter Maxwell 1985. ‘The Martyrdom of St. Magnus’. In Griffiths 1985,
162–63.
Davies, Peter Maxwell 1990. The Martyrdom of St Magnus: A Chamber Operain Nine Scenes. Music Theatre Wales, Scottish Chamber Opera Ensemble. Conducted by Michael Rafferty. Unicorn-Kanchana DKP (CD) 9100.
Elliott, Dyan 1993. Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock.
Finnbogi Guðmundsson, ed., 1965. Orkneyinga Saga. Íslenzk fornrit 34.
Foote, Peter 1988. ‘Observations on Orkneyinga saga’. In St Magnus Cathedral
and Orkney’s Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Ed. Barbara E. Crawford, 192–207.
Griffiths, Paul 1985. Peter Maxwell Davies.
Haki Antonsson 2004. ‘Two Twelfth-Century Martyrs: St Thomas of Canterbury
and St Magnús of Orkney’. In Sagas, Saints and Settlements. Ed. Gareth Williams
and Paul Bibire, 41–64.
Heffernan, Thomas J. 1988. Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in
the Middle Ages.
Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards, trans., [1978] 1981. Orkneyinga Saga: The
History of the Earls of Orkney.
Huberman, Elizabeth 1981. ‘George Mackay Brown’s Magnus’. Studies in Scottish Literature 16, 122–34.

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Ireland, Colin 1997. ‘Penance and Prayer in Water: An Irish Practice in Northumbrian Hagiography’. Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 34, 51–66.
Jones, Charles W. 1947. Saints’ Lives and Chronicles in Early England.
Magnúss saga lengri. In Finnbogi Guðmundsson, ed., 1965, 335–83.
Magnúss saga skemmri. In Finnbogi Guðmundsson, ed., 1965, 311–32.
Marwick, Hugh 1929. The Orkney Norn.
McGlynn, Margaret and Richard J. Moll 1996. ‘Chaste Marriage in the Middle
Ages: “It were to hire a greet merite”’. In Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. Ed.
Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, 103–22.
Mooney, John 1935. St. Magnus—Earl of Orkney.
Murray, Isobel 1998. ‘Introduction’. In Brown 1998, vii–xi.
Murray, Rowena 1986. ‘The Influence of Norse Literature on the Twentiethcentury Writer George Mackay Brown’. In Scottish Language and Literature,
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Orkneyinga saga. In Finnbogi Guðmundsson, ed., 1965, 1–300.
Scott, Sir Walter [1822] 1996. The Pirate. With a foreword by Andrew Wawn.
Seabrook, Mike 1994. Max: The Life and Music of Peter Maxwell Davies.
Taylor, Alexander Burt, trans., 1938. The Orkneyinga Saga: A New Translation
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Thomson, William P. L. 2003. ‘St Magnus: An Exploration of his Sainthood’. In
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Past and Present in Modern Children’s Literature133

OLD NORSE MADE NEW: PAST AND PRESENTIN MODERN CHILDREN’S LITERATUREDAVID CLARK

The academic analysis of children’s literature is associated with various
problems.1 In the third edition of the critical collection Only Connect:
Readings on Children’s Literature, Peter Hunt questions the very existence of the genre of the children’s book, quoting Marcus Crouch’s
opinion that ‘there are no children’s books’ (Hunt 1996, 2; his emphasis).
After a discussion in which he evaluates the process of definition itself
and then how to define literature, the child, and children’s literature, hecomes uneasily to a definition of the last as ‘books read by, especiallysuitable for, or especially satisfying for, members of the group currently
defined by children’, an accommodating definition, but one of limited
practical use, as he admits (Hunt 1996, 15). The remit of the genre is not its
only problem; many of the books it includes are of a popular and ephemeral nature, and this causes the editors of Only Connect to remark that wherechildren’s literature is concerned, ‘overview articles are almost passé’(Egoff et al. 1996, xiv). Hundreds, even thousands, of new titles are produced every year, many of which quickly go out of print, and so generalsurveys of the field are impractical and of limited use. It is perhaps thiselement of transience which led to a third problem associated until comparatively recently with children’s books: a lack of status within theacademy. In her article on the critical reading of children’s books, Julia
Briggs remarks on the neglect of the academic study of children’s literature, particularly in the United Kingdom, until the 1980s when, largely
in connexion with the Bodleian Library’s major acquisition of the Opie
Collection and the University of Oxford’s series of public lectures, efforts
were made to have children’s literature recognized in this country as alegitimate field of research (Briggs 1996, 19, 29–30). Nevertheless, anacademic snobbery about children’s literature, as about (and perhaps connected to) fantasy literature and science fiction, persists in certain circles.2
1
Recent overviews of and critical collections on children’s literature include Hunt
1990, 1992, 2001, and 2004, Lesnik-Oberstein 2004, Rudd 2004, Sarland 2004.
2
Further problems associated with children’s literature and the relation of adultto child, and of both to the children’s book, are explored in Rose 1992 and LesnikOberstein 1994.

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Old Norse Made New

However, more recently it has been recognized that as well as being
legitimate objects of research in their own right, children’s books are
particularly interesting in terms of the cultural work that they perform
and what this can reveal about their implied audience and its anxieties
and concerns (see further, passim, Egoff et al. 1996). Like fantasy, children’s literature can ask ‘What if?’—that is, it can explore unasked orunanswered questions and possibilities; it can work through the commonly felt need to belong and have a place and a purpose; it caninvestigate issues of empowerment, good versus evil, right versus power
or authority, personal struggle and how one can transcend or cope withthat struggle. Additionally, it often explores notions such as the ideathat magic and special gifts come with associated problems (while theysolve other problems like boredom, feeling alone or different), or that
one needs to adapt to the situations in which one finds oneself whilst
simultaneously needing to discover and maintain a sense of self, and tofind a place where that self can feel fulfilled and appreciated.
After outlining the definition of children’s literature quoted above,
Hunt goes on to argue for a distinction between children’s books which‘are essentially contemporary’ (that is, those which are still read by children) and ‘historical children’s books’ (older or outdated works which are
now more often read by reminiscing adults or by academics studying the
genre than by children themselves). The present essay, then, is somewhat paradoxical, in that it observes this distinction between the pastand present in terms of the period of writing, but simultaneously explores the present’s rewriting and appropriation of the past. This essay isparticularly interested in books in which, in exploring the issues andthemes outlined above, the Norse past affects or invades the present, as
will be explained shortly. It sprang from the basic question: why mighta children’s writer want to take Old Norse culture or literature as his or
her inspiration? Various answers to this question are possible on more orless complex levels, and naturally more than one motivation may coexist. Nevertheless, such answers provide material for at least a partial
discussion and analysis of wider trends in the modern reception of Old
Norse and what this may reveal about contemporary perceptions of theViking and Scandinavian past. There are far too many children’s books
which make reference to, or use, Norse motifs and material to discussthem comprehensively or definitively here, and so this essay concentrates in detail on just a few individual works.
In considering an author’s possible reasons for writing children’s literature in the first place, one may assume that the primary motivation isPast and Present in Modern Children’s Literature135

not merely a financial one, since (Harry Potter and Mysterious Incidents
aside) it is not the most lucrative field a mercenary author could choose.
However, commercial concerns are certainly one potential reason forusing Norse motifs within that field. The stereotyped image of the Vikings
as violent but exciting barbarians is an attractive one, as shown by the
popularity of Vicious Vikings, Terry Deary’s Norse contribution to the
Horrible Histories books, which capitalize on the sensational and goryelements of the past (Deary 1994).
A subtler form of commercialism is seen in what might be termed‘exploitation novels’—that is, novels which use Norse mythic motifs or
Scandinavian names or merely the stereotyped image of the Vikings as asort of colouring or semiotic shorthand, without really engaging withthe original material in any meaningful way. For instance, Odin’s Voiceby Susan Price is set in a sort of ‘cod’ medieval future, where society is
divided into freemen and freewomen on the one hand and ‘bonders’ on
the other, but there is a colony on Mars and technology is advanced
enough to let a freeperson genetically modify his or her hair with jellyfish genes to change colour according to the owner’s mood. The society
is pluralistic, everyone believing comfortably in his or her own god,with the temple of Apollo next to that of Odin, and personal names like‘Affrodite’ and ‘Thorsgift’ coexisting with ‘Kylie’ (Price 2005).
What is disappointing, however, is that there is actually very little use
made of Norse material. The book begins promisingly, as we listen in ona shamanistic trance and a bonder girl prophesies the future. At thispoint there are the obligatory details of how Odin lost his eye to gain
wisdom, and an interesting description of him as ‘the shifty, deceitfulGod’ who betrays those who trust him, a characterization which fits inwell with the eddic depictions (cf. Grímnismál and Larrington’s comment in Larrington 1996, 50). However, it quickly becomes apparent
that the Norse elements merely provide colour for a run-of-the-mill scifi fantasy novel. Rather than exploring genuine medieval social
categories, ‘bonder’ and ‘freeman’ are merely convenient labels for richand poor, and there is almost no genuine engagement with Norse myth
here.
Nevertheless, in general what one might call Norse-ploitation seems
to be more characteristic of the adult market, where a sensationalizedversion of Norse culture can provide a colourful setting on which tohang a journeyman plot, as with the decidedly adult novel Shadow of
the Wolf by Robert Holdstock (advisedly hiding under the pseudonym
Chris Carlsen). This novel, which even the author regards as shameful,

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applies Conan the Barbarian’s principles of pornographic violence toother aspects of the so-called Dark Ages, and explores the more lurid andseedy possibilities of the berserker trope (Carlsen 1977a).3
A rather more nuanced appropriation of Norse material comes in RobertWestall’s novel The Wind Eye, published in 1976. It is a book mainly
concerned with the supernatural interaction of St Cuthbert and seventhcentury Northumbria with a troubled mid-twentieth-century family.
However, there are some important Norse-related motifs in the novel.
The first is the use of the Vikings who attacked Lindisfarne as a means ofemphasizing Westall’s thematic exploration of violence. The boy character Michael in chapter 6 is shown having a fight with his father Bertrand,
an amusingly sour caricature of an academic, who has been pontificating to his children on the Viking names of the Farne Islands. Michaeldeliberately tries to annoy his father by saying ‘Bet the Vikings thumped
hell out of the monks.’ Westall continues:
Bertrand winced at such crudeness; then controlled himself and said, ‘Yes, theVikings burnt Holy Island twice; in A.D. 793 and again in 875.’‘Murderous bastards,’ said Mike appreciatively.
‘That’s a rather imprecise way of seeing it,’ said Bertrand coldly. ‘There
was certainly a conflict of cultures, but it’s too easy to condemn the Vikings as
mere villains. They were, after all, obeying their own ethical code. Doing theirown thing, as you would say. They were superb navigators, discovered America
five hundred years before Columbus, and their wood-carving is magnificent.
They weren’t just thugs.’‘Bet old Cuddy wouldn’t have agreed with you,’ said Mike. ‘Not when hesaw them burning his monastery.’ (Westall 1976, 33)

The historical violence associated with the Vikings (sometimes unfairly,
as Bertrand points out) serves here to bring out the latent violence of thefather-son relationship.
An actual Viking attack on Lindisfarne features later in the novel
when the children find an old boat aptly called the Resurrection. They
sail out to sea in it and suddenly find they are no longer in the present,
but have somehow returned to the seventh century and to the time of
Cuthbert, whom the locals know as the Wind Eye of the novel’s title.
3
Shadow of the Wolf is the first in the Berserker Trilogy, a rebirth cycle in which
each time the ‘hero’ dies he is reborn into an earlier era, retreating from the era of
the Norse raids into an Arthurian fifth century (Carlsen 1977b) and then Roman
Britain at the time of Boudicca’s uprising (Carlsen 1979). In an interview with
Raymond H. Thompson, Holdstock admits that these were ‘hack books’, and that
he is ‘very ashamed’ of ‘the violence and the appalling misogyny’ of these earlyworks (Thompson 1989).

Past and Present in Modern Children’s Literature

137

This name is explained towards the end of the book in a nice passage inwhich a character gives the etymology of the word ‘window’—‘Derived
from Icelandic vindr meaning wind and auga meaning eye [. . .]. The old
Norse for window is wind eye’ (Westall 1976, 154). St Cuthbert is thus
envisioned in the novel as a kind of window or portal enabling the childand adult characters to see—not from inside to outside, but from thepresent to the past, and to see themselves and others with more insight.
What is significant about the Viking attack, though, is that it is notjust described as a violent raid of murderous Vikings upon innocent
monks, although that element is certainly present. First of all, there is an
explicit recognition of the element of myth-making in the usualpresentation of Vikings—that, as Westall says, ‘huge figures with wings
on their helmets, and great flowing beards [only exist in] Victorian historybooks’ (Westall 1976, 137). The novel’s description of the raiders ismuch more realistic—they are a bunch of short, badly-organized smelly
bullies, whose swords are dented and rusty: ‘Like a mob of Irish tinkers
dressed up badly for a fancy-dress ball.’Westall’s treatment of violence is more nuanced than this, however. At
various points throughout the novel, he shows the violence of emotionally manipulative behaviour, or of the use of superior intelligence towound and belittle. As a result of his interaction with Saint Cuthbert, thefather character, Bertrand, repents of his own intellectual aggression andintolerance, which he has realized masks or displaces an impulse toward
the physical violence which he condemns and despises in others.
There is a more than slightly anti-academic element to the novel, suggesting that Westall perceives a nasty edge to (at least the public side of)academia. For instance, the passage where Bertrand’s son Mike rather
unfairly tries to explain him to his sister, who has been upset by theirfather’s appalling behaviour:
You know how he can’t stand being proved wrong. Don’t you remember thetime the Oxford bloke attacked him in the Observer? He was just like this—until he’d written that book to prove the bloke wrong. He’s O.K., Bertrand—till
somebody stubs him out, and then he turns into a bloody sadistic maniac.
(Westall 1976, 105)

In fact, there is a sense at the very end of the novel that Bertrand has been
converted from an academic into something more meaningful. He decides
to resign his fellowship and comb the shores of the Farne Islands forevidence of Cuthbert and study the objects he finds, with the eventual
aim of being able to sail back on the Resurrection and, as he puts it,‘someday, somehow, slip through the time-curtain again and meet Cuddy

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face-to-face and never return to the dry-as-dust twentieth century’(Westall 1976, 156–57). In the context of the novel as a whole, this is aninteresting association between a materialistic twentieth century, overly
obsessed with science and rational explanations, and the activity of thescholar, studying history and the past, but not being able to see its point,
and indeed hiding from it. Westall, in his Author’s Note, speaks of
exploring the ‘relationship between truth, belief and legend’ (Westall
1976, 159), and, presumably, in this semi-historical, semi-contemporary
novel Westall sees himself as not only making the past live, but also
showing that past and present are inextricably linked and intertwined
and influence each other.
I want to explore the relation of past and present in more detail shortly,
through various types of what may loosely be called ‘historical novels’.
However, first I want to look at modern retellings or reworkings of medieval Norse texts, to introduce a theory or methodology which I hope toshow can be applied productively to other Norse-influenced texts.
In terms of what one might think of as straightforward ‘retellings’ of
the Norse myths, there is, I think, an instructive difference between modern retellings and the kind produced in the Victorian and Edwardian
periods. One thinks of the many reprints of Annie and Eliza Keary’s The
Heroes of Asgard. This book was first produced in 1857 with the longer
title The Heroes of Asgard and the Giants of Jotunheim; or, The Week
and Its Story and was set within a frame narrative which was omitted insubsequent editions (Keary 1857 and 1870). It quickly became popular
as a schoolbook, and it is in fact still in print with Dover Publications(Keary 2005). The book contains stories with ‘Just So’ titles such as‘How Thor Went to Jotunheim’, ‘The Wanderings of Freyja’, and ‘The
Punishment of Loki’, and it is very much in line with nineteenth- andearly twentieth-century approaches to mythology for children—to tell
bowdlerized versions of the stories in a simple and elegant style, tointerleave the texts with beautiful plates in brown or grey tone, and to
make the books to all intents and purposes homogeneous with retellingsof any other set of myths, whether Roman, Greek, Celtic, or Babylonian.
One might compare the thick uniform multi-set volumes one still finds
thronging second-hand bookshops with series titles like ‘Told Throughthe Ages’, or ‘Myth and Legend in Literature and Art’, where Legends ofAncient Egypt sits alongside Told By the Northmen: Stories from the
Eddas and Sagas, and Myths and Legends of Babylonia and Assyria
accompanies Myths of the Norsemen (Brooksbank 1923, Wilmot-Buxton
1903; Spence 1916, Guerber 1908). One finds a concerted effort to tone

Past and Present in Modern Children’s Literature139

down or absorb anything alien or potentially upsetting in the original,
presumably reflecting a desire to educate but not to disturb children.
Some of them are nevertheless beautiful in both style and visual appearance, and can still have a huge imaginative impact on children.
In more recent times, one finds a rather more sophisticated approach toretelling, for instance, in Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Axe-Age, Wolf-Age,first published in 1985. Again one finds stories interspersed with
illustrations, but these versions are much closer to the originals, and lesskeen to derive bourgeois morals from them. Crossley-Holland is clearlyanxious to foreground his awareness that he is adding or reworking. In
his Foreword he says that he has closely followed the Prose and Poetic
Eddas, but ‘did not hesitate to develop hints, flesh out dramatic situations and add snatches of dialogue’ (Crossley-Holland 1985, 13). He
also says he has used other sources to provide what he calls a ‘descriptive background’ to the myths. What is interesting, however, is that hefeels the need to take two further actions: first, to use ‘good, blunt words
with Anglo-Saxon roots whenever I could do so.’ This clearly proceedsfrom the popular association of Anglo-Saxon elements in English withstraightforward, frank bluntness, as opposed to Latin and French elements deemed to be more sophisticated and polysyllabic. But it also
makes an interesting link between Anglo-Saxon and Norse cultures—
there is a sense that it is appropriate to retell Norse stories in a languagethat emphasizes its Anglo-Saxon elements, and perhaps that this somehow helps an English audience to appropriate the Norse myths as part oftheir own heritage. The second decision, however, which is editorial innature, is to order the myths in such a way as to provide ‘a psychologically satisfying sequence, leading inescapably toward Ragnarok’ and to
reduce ‘contradictions and chronological inconsistencies to a minimum.’Crossley-Holland is well aware of the multifarious origins of the Norse
myths and that a unified mythology is itself a myth, but feels the need tocreate for a modern audience a metanarrative which unifies and gives
consistency to these myths.
There is an interesting tension between the process of familiarization
he describes here, and his implicit justification for retelling these myths
earlier in the Foreword. There he seems at first to validate the unfamiliar:
the Norse myths which describe creation or reveal how the world works,
he says, ‘provide explanations which enable us to see the old world
around us with new eyes’ (Crossley-Holland 1985, 12). Here, it may be
helpful to invoke the theory of ‘defamiliarization’, which the formalist
critic Shklovsky defines and sees as integral to literature. He states:

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After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in
front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it—hence we cannot say
anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism ofperception (Shklovsky 1988, 21).

Although he is perhaps one of the first theorists to see literature as primarily defined by this process, Shklovsky is, of course, not the first writer tobe aware of or explore the concept of ‘making strange’.4 An often-cited
example of the process is the riddle, where an object or concept may bedescribed from an unusual perspective with the intention not merely of
confusing the audience, but of challenging them to see the thing describedin a new way.5 However, Shklovsky provides a convenient term for andtheorization of the process and a place from which to begin to explore it
further within the present context.
After invoking this trope (consciously or unconsciously), CrossleyHolland goes on to talk about what the myths tell us of the people who
created them: ‘their spirit and confidence and wit, [. . .] their cunning andruthlessness and fatalism’ (Crossley-Holland 1985, 12). But he immediately seeks to counter any impression that the myths are not therefore
relevant to the twentieth century:
like all great imaginative literature, the myths are not imprisoned in their own
time and place; they tell us of their makers but they also tell us a lot about
ourselves—our own deep longings and fears.

We shall return shortly to this concept of a dual attitude that myths areboth familiar and unfamiliar, and that their familiar elements can serve
paradoxically to defamiliarize things we take for granted and thus areblind to.6
First, however, we shall consider a text which is perhaps more areworking than a retelling of a Norse text, the recent novel by Melvin
Burgess, Bloodtide (Burgess 1999a), which recasts V†lsunga saga as a
bloody story of gangland feuds, genetically-modified human-animals,
murder, rape and incest, set in a post-apocalyptic London and the surrounding Wasteland. Burgess is the controversial author who brought
4
The English translation ‘defamiliarization’ renders the Russian word ostranenie,
literally, ‘making strange’.
5
On this process in the Old English riddle (although he does not explicitly use
the term defamiliarization), see Smith 2000, especially 80.
6
One might compare with Crossley-Holland’s methodology Isabel Wyatt’s
Thorkill of Iceland, which uses compounding, word-formation, and other techniques to recreate a ‘saga style’ in which to retell stories reminiscent of the more
episodic legendary sagas (Wyatt 1997).

Past and Present in Modern Children’s Literature141

drug-abuse and underage sex to the world of children’s literature inbooks such as Junk and Doing It (Burgess 1999b and 2003). He himself
describes Bloodtide on his website in the following terms:
Set in a decaying, futuristic London taken over by gang-law, it is a tragic storyof love and hate, revenge and destiny. Described as repulsive, compulsive,
disgusting and classic, its imagery is drawn from computer games, film andcomics, and the story itself from the ancient Icelandic Volsunga saga. (Burgess
2006)

Burgess is clearly keen to emphasize the sensational and up-to-dateelements of his novel, but, although he implies that they stem from theinfluence of contemporary media, the reader of his medieval source
knows that the inference that V†lsunga saga provided plot only is disingenuous. In Bloodtide, the bloodthirsty Volsung clan transform quite
successfully into London mafiosi who hang the corpses of their enemies
in a disused lift which spans their vast multi-storey skyscraper. Thereis a wry humour in Burgess’s account of the Volsungs’ attempt to hangthe ‘hanging-god’ Odin, which of course turns out to have unforeseenand dire consequences. What is fascinating is the way that the weird
post-apocalyptic scenes and grotesque array of deformed or geneticallymodified characters provide a rationale for several elements of theoriginal story which one would expect otherwise to jar in a modern
setting, such as the corporeal appearance of a god, or a knife that can cut
through stone but then only be withdrawn again by Burgess’s version of
Sigmundr, or men who turn out to be werewolves. The novel follows theplot of the original saga extremely closely, and in many ways it also
captures the amoral elements of the original too.7 These are dark andbloody books, but their popularity and their promise to win popularity
for their Norse sources is witnessed to by Cordelia, ‘aged 17’, who sayson the inside of the cover of Bloodtide: ‘This was a really good book!
Imaginative, intense and clever . . . Gruesome and gory, but so were theold myths.’
In The Wind Eye, Westall uses the image of the Vikings to explore thethemes of violence and the interaction of past and present in his novel.
Crossley-Holland’s collection tries to create an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Norse7
Bloodsong (Burgess 2005) continues the story and contains even more (perhaps overly) ingenious futuristic matches for the original elements (particularly
the forgetfulness potion motif), but the narrator is more intrusive and the style lesssure, at least at the beginning of the novel. There is ample material for a fuller
study of Bloodtide and its sequel Bloodsong. For a brief consideration of Bloodtide
and Bloodsong in relation to V†lsunga saga, see O’Donoghue 2007, 190–95.

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mythology which makes the past familiar and defamiliarizes the present.
Burgess recasts a medieval Norse text as a futuristic novel which preserves many elements of the contents and quality of his original. All
three engage imaginatively not only with Norse material but also with
the implications of what they are doing and the relation of past andpresent. The genre which performs this kind of work par excellence is, ofcourse, the historical novel, and the rest of this essay is concerned withthis genre, loosely conceived.
The traditional historical novel will not receive extended consideration here, although its existence cannot be ignored.8 There are of course
many children’s novels based in medieval Scandinavia, or around Viking
or Norse characters (often seen through the eyes of children themselves).
The most famous of these writers (and justly so) are Henry Treece andRosemary Sutcliff. Each of them wrote many historical novels set invarious periods, including several which touch on Viking or Scandinavian characters and events. Most notable perhaps are Treece’s Viking
trilogy, written between 1955 and 1960, and Sutcliff’s The Shield Ring,
Blood Feud, and Sword Song, the first written in 1956 about the Viking
defence against the Norman conquerors in the Lake District, the secondin 1976 about an English boy sold as a slave to the Northmen, the thirdin 1997 about the adventures of a boy banished from a Viking settlement in north-eastern England (Treece 1955, 1957 and 1960, Sutcliff
1976 and 1999). A recent example of this genre is Nancy Farmer’s novel
The Sea of Trolls (although it adds heavy fantasy elements to its
reimagining of the historical past; Farmer 2004).9 These books are perennially popular and the complex relation of their contents to the historicalpast, and what this indicates about their implied audience, would repay
extended discussion. Some of these texts try to encourage contemporary
moral virtues, mediated by the distancing effect of the historical setting.
For instance, Molly Holden’s The Unfinished Feud takes the familiar
saga plot of a feud between families and uses the protagonist to show(rather heavy-handedly) how a courageous individual can bring an end
to the cycle of revenge (Holden 1970). The publication of this book at
8For an overview of the genre with reference to children’s literature, see Fisher
2004. For earlier historical fiction, see McGarry and White 1963 (especially sections II.A.1.b.3 and II.A.2.b.3).
9
Notable too is Pauline Clarke’s Torolv the Fatherless, which retells andcontextualizes the story of the Battle of Maldon (Clarke 1959). See Mary Moffat’s
online annotated bibliography for further examples and discussion (Moffat 2006),
and Hotchkiss 1972, 22–26.

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the beginning of the 1970s, after Vietnam and during the détente periodof the Cold War, might suggest the motivation for this work. On theother hand, texts such as Treece’s and Sutcliff’s seem to delight in
exploring the past for its own sake, along with the differences of the wayof life of medieval children from that of their contemporary readers; they
perform a delicate balancing act between (meticulously researched) historical authenticity and the exploration of recurring themes ofchildhood.10 In fact, child characters seem ideally placed to function as
mediators for the historical novelist—not yet adult, not fully part ofsociety, they can both provide a link to their modern counterpart and a
relative outsider’s perspective on their culture and society. Much further work remains to be done in this area, and particularly interesting
would be a comparative discussion of the cultural work performed byhistorical novels aimed at the adult market, such as those by Bernard
Cornwell, whose Saxon Stories tell the story of Alfred the Great throughthe eyes of an English boy captured and adopted by the Danes (Cornwell
2004, 2005, and 2006), or Tim Severin, whose Viking series recounts thetravels and adventures of Thorgils, son of Leif the Lucky (Severin 2005).
However, the number of these texts is such that an overview would be
impractical here, and, moreover, this essay is less concerned with attempts to recreate Norse history and culture than with exploring literary
uses of that history or culture in other contexts, and specifically in texts
in which the past invades the present.
Linda Hall has characterized such texts as one form of the ‘time-slip
story’, tracing this sub-genre back to 1906 and the publication of Rudyard
Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Edith Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet,
and including in the tradition authors such as Lucy M. Boston, Penelope
Lively, Philippa Pearce, and Alison Uttley (Hall 2001, 43–45).11 However, Laura Smith’s sub-genre of the ‘domestic fantasy’, which introduces‘a touch of magic’ into ‘a realistic setting within a realistic family’, isalso helpful for the two texts discussed below (Smith 2004, 447). As an
example from adult fiction one might adduce Tom Holt’s famous 1988
comic novel Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? which resurrects King Hrólfr
10

On Sutcliff, see further Spenser 1965, and the author’s own comments on her
work in Sutcliff 2001; on Treece, see Clarke 1966.
11
Unlike traditional historical novels, which are squarely set in the past (as with
Treece and Sutcliff), ‘time-slip’ novels make characters from the present invade
the past (Uttley, Nesbit), or the past invade the present (as with the novels discussed in the following sections), or explore a complex interaction of past andpresent (as with Boston, Pearce, or Westall). See further Hall 2001.

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kraki and Ñrvar-Oddr, and in which the medieval and the modern collide
in a very amusing but thoughtful dynamic (Holt 1988) or, with a wider
mythological remit, Neil Gaiman’s recent American Gods (2001). Here,specifically, I want to look in detail at two children’s books in whichcharacters and events from Old Norse mythology invade modern reality.
The first is Warriors of the Raven, published in 2001 as the final partof a trilogy by Alan Gibbons. Here, Norse myth enters the computer age,as part of a—not Virtual Reality but—Parallel Reality computer gamewhere the players enter the world of the Norse gods (Gibbons 2001, 9).
However, it quickly becomes clear that this process is not just about
bringing Norse myth alive and allowing children to become vicarious
heroes. In this book, something utterly Other is trying in the form of
Loki to enter human reality through human myths and stories, and it has
selected Norse myth for what it thinks is the final battle because, as itsays, it is a mythology ‘Where man and god are both mortal. Where thepower of Evil can triumph’ (118). Details from the story of Ragnar†k areskilfully and accurately woven into the narrative, and the perception of
the Norse world as gloomy and pessimistic clearly parallels the author’s
depiction of the real world. The audience is given a conventional binary
choice between good and evil, and moralizing comments about themonster inside us all, but the ending of the novel is far from facile. Thereis no guarantee that good will win, there are fatal consequences to failure, and both storytelling and technology are presented as addictive,
seductive media with the power to draw children into a dangerous adultworld, where playing the game and entering the myth (whether imaginatively or physically) can lead to mental and even physical destruction(Gibbons 2001, 11, 148). Even the hero in this book, a fourteen-year-old
boy portentously named Phoenix, defeats Loki only temporarily, andthe price he pays is to be cut off from his human existence, family, andfriends, and to be endlessly reborn in a world where every myth, dream,
and legend exists (Gibbons 2001, 164–66). That heroism demands sacrifice is a literary commonplace, but it is less common in children’s
literature to find the notion that a child might not only feel he or she
does not belong, but perhaps really does not belong in this world at all.
The final text to be considered here is Diana Wynne Jones’s book,
Eight Days of Luke, which was originally written in 1975, but is still inprint, and remains popular with both children and adults (Jones 1975).12
12
For another account of Eight Days of Luke, in the context of a discussion of
the concept of the ‘double audience’ (one knowledgeable, the other ignorant about
the Norse influences behind a work), see O’Donoghue 2007, 190–95.

Past and Present in Modern Children’s Literature145

The novel is told from the perspective of its central character, a fourteenyear-old boy named David. David’s parents are both dead and he dreads
the school holidays because he has to stay with his Great Aunt andUncle and his cousins, all of whom are obnoxious in different ways andall of whom blame David for everything and continually try to make him
feel guilty for not expressing enough gratitude to them for allowing him
to exist (Jones 1975, 9–10, 99–100). One day, however, David is soangry at the constant injustice that he begins to invent curses in a madeup language. Suddenly the ground shakes and opens, snakes start toslither out, and a strange boy appears who calls himself Luke and seems
to think that David has saved him from a dreadful prison (Jones 1975,
33–40). The book’s trajectory is clear from here on. Luke is evidently
the Norse god Loki. Rather strangely he is continually associated with
fire, which seems to be Jones’s conflation of Loki with Logi, the personification of flame Snorri describes during his account of the tricking ofÞórr in Gylfaginning (Jones 1975, 43, 61, 65).13 The rest of the Æsir turnup at David’s house looking for Loki, appropriately on the days of theweek which are named after them, so a character called Mr Chew turns
up on Tuesday, Mr Wedding turns up on Wednesday, Mr and Mrs Fry
turn up on Friday.14
What is interesting in the present context is the way that Jones, likethe other authors considered above, both familiarizes and defamiliarizes
by this narrative process. Óðinn (or Mr Wedding) now has a ‘posh’ car
driven by a lady chauffeur, instead of the horse Sleipnir and a valkyrie,
and he talks to David in terms which are rather strange for a modern-day
adult, but which are very reminiscent of Hávamál—for instance when hetalks of the laws of hospitality (Jones 1975, 99–100). In this same scene,
while David is looking at Wedding, he suddenly notices that he only
has one eye, although he had clearly had two before. We are told thatDavid senses somehow that this is Wedding’s ‘true face, and his realnature’ (Jones 1975, 104). Jones seems to suggest a dynamic where thegods can manifest themselves in various ways in different periods orcontexts, but that this is just a mask, that their true nature lies behind:something that cannot be fully assimilated to modern life.
13
O’Donoghue argues that Jones is here modelling Luke on Wagner’s Loge
(O’Donoghue 2007, 194–95), although Jones has expressed her dislike of anddesire to break free from the influence of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen(Jones, personal communication).
14
The gods’ names thus appear in their Anglo-Saxon forms, although they areclearly based on the Norse accounts of their attributes and history.

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Jones also exhibits in Eight Days of Luke, though, a clear desire to findthe appropriate equivalent from modern life for Norse motifs, as for
instance when David goes to see Sigurðr and his einheriar, here refigured
as a crew of teenage bikers in leather jackets and tattoos playing pinballmachines in a men-only club (Jones 1975, 175). There are various otherelements of Norse mythology that Jones aptly and entertainingly conveys. However, it is the changes that Jones makes which are perhaps
more interesting, and the most important of these is her refiguring of
Loki. Her Luke is someone who at first seems to be a sixteen-year-old
boy with family problems. When David expresses annoyance early on at
his family going on at him all the time, Luke sympathizes, saying: ‘Oh,
I know what that feels like [. . .]. My family was just the same’ (Jones
1975, 52). Later Luke claims that he has no idea what he did to be tied up
with snakes dripping poison on him, rather he says: ‘Somebody did
something, and they blamed it on me [. . .]. They always blame it on me’(Jones 1975, 117). And when David replies: ‘Just like they blame me’,the unmotivatedly malevolent Loki of Gylfaginning or Warriors of theRaven suddenly becomes a hard-done-by boy from an unreasonable andtroubled family.
This manipulation of her material fits into the rationale that Jones
herself intelligently describes for the novel. She is clearly far from theunacademic writer she often portrays herself as being. For instance, in an
email to me she claimed that she could not remember any of her sources
for the Old Norse material in Luke, that it all came from childhood memories (Jones, personal communication). This may well be true, but elsewhere
Jones is clearly well aware of what she is doing when she makes use of
medieval material, as one might expect of the wife of the distinguishedmedievalist John Burrow, and someone who attended the lectures ofLewis and Tolkien as an Oxford undergraduate in the 1950s.
In her essay ‘Inventing the Middle Ages’ Jones amply demonstrates
her wide and careful reading in medieval literature, particularly Middle
English, and she also makes a couple of significant comments about
Eight Days of Luke. These comments come in the context of a discussionof the medieval idea of what she calls ‘story-time’—the concept thatwhatever time stories come from, it is ‘conceived as being contemporary
with their own’, for instance, the way that Troilus and Criseyde contains
a mixture of historical details and elements more appropriate to fourteenth-century England (Jones 1997). Jones comments:
I took this idea up with enthusiasm. It is why most of what I write is set in thismodern age whenever possible. For instance, writing an early book calledPast and Present in Modern Children’s Literature

147

Eight Days of Luke [. . .] I was quite consciously imitating what I took to be amedieval treatment of ‘story-time’.

However, in common with the dynamic outlined earlier with regard to
Crossley-Holland’s collection, Jones’s remarks on her work show a tension between the desires to familiarize and to defamiliarize. Indeed, shesees her role as a sort of translator of stories, quite akin to CrossleyHolland’s. She goes on in ‘Inventing the Middle Ages’ to discuss various
ways to write about different situations, including the following:[Do you want to write about] a boy struggling into adolescence in the face ofan unkind family? Have the boy’s feelings appear in the shape of the Norse
gods. But in all these instances you must not cheat. You must have the magicaloccurrences strongly effective in their own terms—they must leave their markon the everyday life of the characters in the story. (Jones 1997)

In contrast, in her essay on ‘Heroes’, Jones says that Eight Days of Luke
sprang out of her fascination with the fact that we daily talk about thedays of the week using the names of the Germanic gods. As she says,
just as Woden’s Day and Thor’s Day are part of our everyday lives, so are thebig things for which these gods stand. And we respond to them as people
always have done. (Jones 1992)

This idea of the interconnectedness of the extraordinary and the everyday is exemplified in the scene when David goes to seek counsel of thethree Norns, next to Mímir’s Well and the World-Tree. When one of theNorns takes their single shared eye out of her eye socket, we are given
the following description of it from David’s perspective:
It came out rather more easily than Astrid’s contact-lenses and in much thesame way. Alan, who had never seen Astrid take a lens out, looked sick.
(Jones 1975, 162)

This comparison is not only very apt and designed to delight children
with its combination of the familiar and the squeamish, but it also encapsulates the idea that one needs a link to the familiar, a ‘hook’, inorder to be able to understand a new concept: an author needs to invoke
a world-view onto which the new concept can be mapped. On a larger
level than detachable eyes, the Norse gods are explicable to the children’s audience via the familiar scenario of a misunderstood teenager
with an unreasonable family, but the Norse gods also allow the issues
and situation of a misunderstood teenager to be worked through at aslight distance and from a different perspective.
The desire to re-familiarize the past and the hidden thus coexists with thedesire to defamiliarize modern situations by the shock of the past or the

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mythic entering the present. In Eight Days of Luke this dynamic mayconnect to Jones’s avowed dislike of unhappy endings. In one of herinterviews she describes worrying away at how to come out with a happy
ending, talking in terms of problem-solving, even of a ‘Eureka’ moment
when she finds the solution (Rosenberg 2002, 67, 168). It is, of course, thecommon understanding that if one steps outside a problem and distances oneself from it, one can often solve or resolve it—to solve the
Exeter Book Riddles, for instance, certainly takes lateral thinking. And
this concept seems to work with Eight Days of Luke—the defamiliarizing
elements of the Norse gods’ interaction with modern life allow the main
character’s problematic situation to be resolved. David’s intervention in
Luke’s troubled family situation is paralleled by Mr Wedding’s intervention in David’s life, which results in the promise of a happy family
dynamic (199–200). It is a much more positive slant on childhood than we
saw in Gibbons’ Warriors of the Raven, reflecting the earlier period atwhich Jones wrote the novel but also her personal philosophy as an author.
The concepts of familiarization and defamiliarization are, of course,
not unique either to Old Norse literature or to children’s literature. However, I would like finally to examine the idea that they are particularly
appropriate to both in conjunction with one another. Old Norse as one ofmany past cultures and literatures raises the much-debated question fora modern devotee, whether editor, translator, or adapter: how does one
best reproduce or represent past texts or world-views? Edward Irving
sees the issue in these terms:
do we present the poem as Then, stressing its alien condition, embedded as it
is in a remote time, or do we present it as Now, trying to bring out its still living
qualities as a still possible experience for today’s reader? (Irving 1998, 14)

Irving is writing on the editing of Old English poetry, but his remarks areequally applicable to translation, or film adaptation. One answer to
Irving’s question is that a balance between both needs to be achieved, as
was argued with regard to Sutcliff above. In terms of texts aimed at thegeneral public, the Norse in the guise of Vikings are familiar from childhood, but only in a stereotyped or at least limited version of the historicalreality, and an author needs to capitalize on the audience’s familiarity
whilst ideally extending its understanding and making it more nuanced:
essentially to balance familiar with unfamiliar aspects. The idea ofdefamiliarization is also commonly associated with children in our culture—that is, the idea that children are unfamiliar with things that wetake for granted, but also that their fresh and naïve perspective can often
result in us seeing these things from a new angle or discovering newPast and Present in Modern Children’s Literature149

aspects of them. Certainly, it is frequently employed as a narrative technique in modern children’s literature. Since Old Norse material on the
one hand demands both cultural and linguistic translation, and on theother hand often seems particularly exotic and contains elements perennially popular with children, it is perhaps unsurprising that authors who
work with it have been particularly thoughtful about the balance of thefamiliar and the unfamiliar necessary in representing it to a modern audience. It will be interesting to see how the use of Norse material develops
over the next decades, but what is certain is that authors’ intellectual
and imaginative engagement with Norse mythology, culture, and literature will continue to draw children and adults alike back to the sourcesof their inspiration, and that Old Norse will continue to inspire the desire
to ‘make it new’.
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