The Saga of the Volsungs
with The Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok
Translated, with Introduction, by
Jackson Crawford
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Indianapolis/Cambridge
Copyright © 2017 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
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Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Crawford, Jackson, translator, editor.
Title: The Saga of the Volsungs: with the Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok /
translated and edited, with introduction, by Jackson Crawford.
Other titles: Vèolsunga saga. English | Ragnars saga Loºbrâokar ok sona hans.
English.
Description: Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 2017. | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017008114 | ISBN 9781624666339 (pbk.) | ISBN
9781624666346 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Sagas—Translations into English.
Classification: LCC PT7287.V7 C73 2017 | DDC 839/.63—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008114
ePub ISBN: 978-1-62466-661-2
Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing
The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes
. Translated and Edited, with Introduction, by Jackson Crawford.
Beowulf: A New Translation for Oral Delivery
. Translated, with an Introduction, by Dick Ringler.
Contents
The page numbers in curly braces {} correspond to the print edition of this title.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
In a Nutshell
Cast of Characters, Family Tree, and Synopsis
The Making of the Sagas
Culture and Values
Language and Pronunciation
A Note on This Volume’s Translations
Further Reading
Map: Geography of the Sagas
The Saga of the Volsungs (Volsunga saga)
The Saga of Ragnar Loðbrók (Ragnars saga loðbrókar)
Glossary of Names and Terms
Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing
To Joe and Candy Turner,
the highest peaks in Wyoming.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my students at UC Berkeley, especially Preethi Bhat, Juliana Chia, Adrianna Gabellini, Victoria Glynn, Christopher Hall, Julia Hoyt, Stephan Kaminsky, Boping Kang, Marty Krakora, Dan Laurin, Nahkoura Mahnassi, Heather Newton, Brianna McElrath Panasenco, Joe Shamblin, Scott Shell, Nick Stevens, Matt Willett, Marthe Wold, Peter Woods, Talya Zalipsky, and Wendie Zhang, for reading these translations and providing feedback in the courses in which they were first used. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for many important suggestions that improved the book on several fronts, and in numerous different ways I am grateful for the kindness and feedback of Thomas Allen, Kathi Brosnan, Adam Carl, Matthew Colville, Michael B. Dougherty, Kate Elliott, Faith Ingwersen, Elizabeth LaVarge-Baptista, Arne Lunde, Bob Maloney, Amanda Minafo, Laet Oliveira, Jordan Phillips, Mark Sandberg, Caley Smith, Rich Stanley, Rosie Taylor, Bob and Barbara Townsend, Moriah VanVleet, Kirsten Wolf, and Reginald Young while this book was being written.
My most heartfelt thanks go to Masha Lepire for her invaluable input on my drafts, to Maths Bertell for many productive discussions about these sagas, to Claire and Travis Crawford for so often throwing a harp into my snake-pit, to Bob and Suzanne Hargis and Remington Bailey for wings and wheels, and to Katherine Crawford, who has often helped me see the vein of silver in translation's ore of words, and who first encouraged me to follow the Poetic Edda with a translation of the Saga of the Volsungs.
The mistakes and infelicities in this book are, naturally, attributable to me alone.
Jackson Crawford
Atlantic City, Wyoming
June 2, 2017
{ix} Introduction
In a Nutshell
The ill-fated romances, tragic murders, and larger-than-life wars of the Volsung family are alluded to and celebrated in numerous poems, sagas, and works of art produced in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, and the Saga of the Volsungs is the most cohesive form of their story that has survived to be read in the modern age. In it, we read of Sigurð the dragon-slayer, Brynhild the Valkyrie, and the iron courage of the brothers Gunnar and Hogni and their avenging sister Guðrún.
The Saga of the Volsungs was first written in Iceland around AD 1250 by an author who had a strong familiarity with the traditional Scandinavian legends about these heroes, but the earliest manuscript in which a copy of the saga survives was not written until ca. AD 1400. In that manuscript (NKS 1824 b 4to), the Saga of the Volsungs is followed directly by a "sequel," the Saga of Ragnar Loðbrók, which concerns a legendary Viking chieftain of Denmark. This saga was written by a different author than the Saga of the Volsungs, and perhaps up to fifty years later, but whoever copied these two sagas together in this manuscript must have felt that they jointly formed a cohesive epic of one heroic family.
Cast of Characters, Family Tree, and Synopsis
Reading from the beginning of the Saga of the Volsungs to the end of the Saga of Ragnar Loðbrók, the two sagas tell the tale of seven generations of one family, beginning with Sigi and ending with the sons of Ragnar, although the earliest two generations are passed over quickly in the first two chapters of the Saga of the Volsungs.
There are numerous named characters in each saga, and the relationships among them are sometimes complex. The accompanying family tree (located before the start of this Introduction) shows the relationships between the principal named characters in the family of the Volsungs and their kin, who include most of the {x} important characters in both sagas. Note that Brynhild and Guðrún both appear twice in the family tree, because of the multiple ways they are connected to other characters. Each occurrence of their names is parenthesized as a reminder.
It is important to note that Volsung is both the name of a single individual (the son of Rerir, and father of Sigmund and Signý) and of his family; Sigmund is thus considered "a Volsung" in addition to being the son of the man named Volsung. Inherited last names were unknown in medieval Scandinavia, but in the case of royal and otherwise outstanding families, a designation such as "the Volsungs" both honors a glorified ancestor and serves as a cohesive way of designating the family as a whole.1
What seem to be last names are in reality usually nicknames. For instance, while Ragnar Loðbrók is well known by that name, Loðbrók is not his last name but rather a nickname (literally, "shaggy pants" or "shaggy chaps"). Patronyms (names ending in -son) are also sometimes used, but they indicate that the person in question is in fact the son of the man named, so Sigmund Volsungsson is the son of Volsung, while Sigmund’s own son Sigurð is Sigurð Sigmundsson.
The Norse god Óðin precipitates the action of the Saga of the Volsungs. Óðin is a much more complex, anxious, and deadly personality than his portrayal in popular media would usually suggest. Óðin’s great purpose is his struggle to prevent or forestall his own death at Ragnarok, the foretold end of the world when the giants and monsters will ki
ll the gods in a final battle. To this end, Óðin sends his Valkyries, mortal women granted the ability of flight, to choose the best dead {xi} warriors from earthly battlefields and convey them to his hall, Valhalla, where the warriors fight one another all day in practice for Ragnarok. Only those who die in battle have the honor of entering Valhalla; men who die by other means (and apparently all women) go to Hel, a shadowy underworld ruled by the goddess of the same name.
Óðin often travels among human beings in disguise, usually appearing as an old man who may or may not be explicitly described as lacking one eye (Óðin is missing an eye, which he gave up as the price of a drink from the mythical well of wisdom). In such disguises, he often gives a false name that suggests something about his powers, appearance, or disposition, such as Hárbarð ("Graybeard") or Bolverk ("Evil-Doer"). Since Óðin is interested in "harvesting" accomplished warriors for his army in Valhalla, he typically appears among humans in order to help a champion accomplish great heroic deeds and later to ensure his death in battle at a young age before his declining years have robbed him of his strength. Óðin is particularly attentive to the Volsungs Sigmund, Sinfjotli, and Sigurð in the first half of the Saga of the Volsungs, but then he is not seen for a long series of chapters between the death of Sigurð and the death of Sigurð’s daughter Svanhild at the very end of the saga. He does not appear as a character in the Saga of Ragnar Loðbrók but is nevertheless mentioned there in a few poems that pertain to his realm of war.
Volsung is the first major human character of the Saga of the Volsungs, a king in the mythical realm of Hunland, where he builds a hall around the great tree Barnstokk (the name of the tree can be literally read as "child tree" or, more idiomatically, "family tree"). During the wedding of Volsung’s daughter Signý to Siggeir, Óðin appears in disguise and lodges a sword in Barnstokk, which only Volsung’s son Sigmund is able to retrieve. Siggeir later ambushes and kills his father-in-law Volsung and most of Volsung’s sons. Only Sigmund escapes to live in the forest for years, plotting his vengeance. Signý disguises herself and conceives a son with Sigmund, Sinfjotli, who becomes Sigmund’s apprentice and companion.
After Sigmund and Sinfjotli kill Siggeir and return to claim the throne of Hunland, Sigmund marries Borghild, who kills Sinfjotli with a poisoned drink. Sigmund remarries to Hjordís, but he dies shortly afterwards. Hjordís then gives birth to their son Sigurð. As a grown {xii} man, Sigurð later becomes famous for killing the dragon Fáfnir. After being advised by some wagtails,2
he then meets the Valkyrie Brynhild, who has sworn an oath to marry only the man who knows no fear. Sigurð passes her test of courage by riding through a ring of fire, and the two of them promise to marry, but Sigurð leaves her side for the realm of King Gjúki, where Sigurð is magically tricked into forgetting Brynhild and then marrying Gjúki’s daughter Guðrún. Disguised as Guðrún’s brother Gunnar, Sigurð later rides through the ring of fire a second time and wins Brynhild’s promise to marry Gunnar. Brynhild soon discovers that she has been deceived into breaking her oath, and orders Gunnar to kill Sigurð. Gunnar is unwilling to break his own oath of blood-brotherhood with Sigurð but gets his younger brother Guttorm to commit the murder. Brynhild kills herself at Sigurð’s funeral and joins him in Hel.
Guðrún is married a second time to Atli, who covets Sigurð’s treasure that is now owned by Guðrún’s brothers Gunnar and Hogni. Atli invites them to a feast, where he ambushes and kills them. Guðrún avenges them by killing Atli and her children with him. She then attempts to drown herself and Svanhild (her daughter with Sigurð), but the waves take her instead to Jónakr, who becomes the father of her sons Hamðir, Sorli, and Erp. After Jormunrekk, a neighboring king who had intended to marry Svanhild, kills her instead for her infidelity, Guðrún’s sons go to avenge their half sister, but Hamðir and Sorli kill Erp along the way, and without his help they are killed by Jormunrekk’s men.
The Saga of Ragnar Loðbrók begins with Sigurð and Brynhild’s daughter Áslaug, who is taken by Brynhild’s brother-in-law Heimir to Norway for her own protection after the death of Brynhild. Heimir is killed by two peasants who take Áslaug in as their own daughter, renaming her Kráka ("Crow").
Meanwhile, Ragnar is a young prince of the Danes who slays a dragon and wins his first wife Thóra. Following her death, he meets Áslaug/Kráka and marries her, and they have sons named Bjorn Ironside, Hvítserk, {xiii} Rognvald, and Ívar the Boneless (who is cursed to be without bones because his father slept with his mother too early, against her warning). Eventually Ragnar’s men persuade him to leave Kráka because of her peasant origins, and Ragnar arranges to marry the daughter of a Swedish king instead. Kráka finds out about Ragnar’s plan and reveals to him that she is the daughter of Sigurð and Brynhild, and as proof she prophesizes that their next son will have a snake in his eye. When she gives birth to this son, he does have an eye with this strange feature, and he is accordingly named Sigurð Snake-Eye. Realizing that his wife is in fact far nobler in origin than the Swedish princess, Ragnar breaks off the engagement, and Eirek and Agnar, his sons by his first wife, lead an invasion of Sweden in which they are killed. Áslaug changes her name once more, becoming Randalín, and joins her sons in a vengeful attack on the Swedes. Afterwards the surviving sons of Ragnar (collectively designated the Ragnarssons) engage in a number of celebrated Viking raids, and Ragnar himself is finally killed in a pit of snakes after he attempts to fulfill a boastful oath to conquer England with only two ships. His sons travel to England and avenge their father by conquering a large part of it and torturing Ella, the English king responsible for putting him to death.
The Making of the Sagas
Saga is a word borrowed directly into English in modern times from Icelandic. In Icelandic the word can mean simply "history" or "story," but in English it is used especially to refer to the long, novel-like stories written in Iceland during the 1200s and 1300s AD. During these centuries, the Icelanders were not only busy writing the relatively realistic sagas of their own adventurous ancestors but also were seeking to preserve the myths of the gods and legendary heroes who once had been venerated throughout Scandinavia. It was during this century that the Poetic Edda was compiled, containing several poems that are still our most important source for Scandinavia’s pre-Christian mythology. Among those poems are many that deal not with the gods but with the Volsung family, especially the dragon-slayer Sigurð.
The author of the Saga of the Volsungs knew many of these poems and quotes them often in the saga. Quoting from these old poems, some of which date back to the Viking Age, which was already long in {xiv} the past when this saga was written, might have helped establish an air of authenticity and tradition for the saga’s original audience. But the author of the saga does not simply retell the story of these poems in prose. Each poem in the Poetic Edda focuses on one or a few specific incidents, and many of the poems tell contradictory narratives, since they were composed at different times in far-flung places by poets who knew (and helped shape) variant forms of the stories. The saga, however, unites material from many different poems in the Poetic Edda, together with other sources, into one reasonably streamlined story.
While the saga author does a remarkably good job of rendering a readable, cohesive story out of these many conflicting traditions, the seams are still visible in places in the saga. For instance, in the poem Sigrdrífumál (Sigrdrifumal)3
preserved in the Poetic Edda, the hero Sigurð encounters a Valkyrie named Sigrdrífa who gives him advice after he awakens her from her enchanted slumber inside a ring of fire. Much of this poem is quoted and paraphrased in chapters 20–21 of the Saga of the Volsungs, but here the words of Sigrdrífa are attributed to Brynhild. It is unclear in the Poetic Edda whether Sigrdrífa and Brynhild are the same person, but the saga author unambiguously presents them as one, never mentioning the name Sigrdrífa.
After this first encounter with Brynhild, the saga has Sigurð ride away to the home of Brynhild’s foster-father Heimi
r, where he finds Brynhild again, living much as any other woman might. It is never explained how or why Brynhild has suddenly moved, and she and Sigurð hardly seem to know each other at all when they meet again in chapter 24. Moreover, in chapter 27, when Sigurð rides through Brynhild’s ring of fire a second time, the text explicitly says that no one has done it before, and in chapters 29 and 31 we read hints of another tradition in which Gunnar had to threaten her foster-father Buðli for her hand in marriage. It could be that some of the confusion arises from the mixing of traditions about the meeting and courting of two different Valkyries, one who was possibly originally named Sigrdrífa and the other Brynhild. Or perhaps Sigrdrífa (which means roughly "victory-driver") was not originally a {xv} separate woman’s name but rather a poetic title for the Valkyrie’s role as chooser of victors and losers on the battlefield, and in some branches of the tradition this became misunderstood as a name. Nevertheless, the way the saga author handles the multiple meetings with Brynhild shows a desire to incorporate as much traditional material as possible, while attempting to forge it all into a straightforward chronology of events.4
The Saga of Ragnar Loðbrók also frequently quotes short and long poems, but these are from a different school of Norse poetry. While the poems in the Poetic Edda are relatively simple in style, the Norse kings and noblemen of the Viking Age (and the first centuries afterwards) favored an extraordinarily complex style of poetry known in English as skaldic, from Old Norse skáld, "poet." Skaldic poems are typically eight-line stanzas, with rigid rules about what syllables in a line must alliterate and rhyme with what other syllables. In order to adhere to these rules, skaldic poets were required to create kennings, compact metaphors that require deciphering, such as "wound-reed" for "arrow" or "blood-swan" for "raven." Such kennings, in rephrasing the intended referent in new, cryptic words, allowed the skaldic poet ample room to demonstrate his creativity while enabling him to find words that alliterated or rhymed in the correct places when more conventional wording might have not.5
The Saga of the Volsungs Page 1
