by Tom Birkett
Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (Oxford, 2005), pp. 55–78.
5 Unattributed review of Mathias, Runic Odes (see Timeline below), Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Review 51 (1781), 430; see further Margaret Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse in Britain 1750–1820 (Trieste, 1998), pp. 25–6.
6 Hervǫr, Lausavísa, 8 ( Heiðr 25). Edition and translation mine, prepared for Poetry in Fornaldarsögur, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8 (Turnhout, forthcoming). The published version may appear in slightly different
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Thus opens the verse dialogue between Hervǫr and Angantýr. The night-time scene on the island of Sámsey (modern-day Samsø, Denmark), where Angantýr and his
eleven brothers have been buried after their deaths in battle, is il uminated by supernatural fires. With the dead is a cursed sword, Tyrfingr, which Hervǫr has come to
claim as her birthright. Initial y, Angantýr is reluctant to give it up, first claiming he does not have it, then warning Hervǫr of the dangers of being on the island. When
she persists, he forebodes that Tyrfingr ‘mun spil a allri ætt þinni’ (‘will destroy all your family’).7 Final y, Angantýr agrees to yield up the sword with a grudging admiration for Hervǫr’s courage: ‘Mey veit ek enga / moldar hvergi / at þann hjör þori / í hendr nema’ (‘I know no girl anywhere on earth who would dare to take that sword
in her hands’).8 Hervǫr allows her trepidation to be revealed only in the final stanza:
‘brótt fýsir mik / … heðan vil ek skjótla’ (‘I long to be away … I wish to go from here quickly’).9
Hervarar saga exists in three medieval redactions, which exhibit some differ-
ences in the poetry as well as the prose.10 This fact is not of great significance to the following discussion, but it should be borne in mind that the later ‘translators’ are
not all working from the same base text. The poem contains twenty-three stanzas
according to my edition, which takes account of all three redactions.11 The stanzas
are composed in fornyrðislag (‘ancient story metre’), an alliterative metre commonly employed in the poems of the Poetic Edda and other poetry in fornaldarsögur.
In all the extant manuscript contexts the stanzas are preserved as part of a
prosimetric saga text, and form part of a longer narrative which is recounted in the
preceding and following prose, rather than being a stand-alone poem. It is, however,
general y held that most if not all of the poetry in the saga is older than the surviving prose,12 and in two of the three redactions the stanzas are all but uninterrupted by
prose interjections. Since the stanzas have on the whole been treated as a discrete
poem in their English incarnations, I will follow the same practice here, using for
convenience, and since The Waking of Angantyr is by no means the only English
title the poem has been granted, the (non-medieval) title Hervararkviða when not referring to a specific English version.
form. Subsequent quotations are from this edition, and references follow a slightly expanded version of the Skaldic Project’s stanza sigla.
7 Angantýr,
Lausavísa, 4/4–8 ( Heiðr 34).
8 Ibid., 7/5–8 ( Heiðr 39).
9 Hervǫr, Lausavísa, 19/2, 4 ( Heiðr 47).
10 On the three redactions see e.g. Alaric Hal , ‘Changing Style and Changing Meaning: Icelandic Historiography and the Medieval Redactions of Heiðreks saga’, Scandinavian Studies 77 (2005), 1–30.
11 Seven preceding stanzas describing Hervǫr’s arrival on Sámsey and a dialogue she
holds with a shepherd are sometimes included as part of the poem, especial y in more recent versions (e.g. Larrington – see Timeline below).
12 E.g. Christopher Tolkien, Saga Heiðreks Konungs ins Vitra/The Saga of King Heiðrek the Wise (London, 1960), p. xi.
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Timeline
Here I present a list of all the English versions of Hervararkviða I have found to date. This will be referred to throughout the rest of the discussion.13 I have excluded from the timeline works which may draw on aspects of Hervararkviða but are not intended or claimed to be based on it.14 Worthy of note, however, is a footnote
in James Macpherson’s Temora, an epic poem supposedly by ‘ancient’ Celtic bard Ossian.15 Although the publication of the ‘Ossian’ poems and subsequent controversy over their authenticity are often discussed hand-in-hand with the rise of
interest in Old Norse poetry in Britain, it seems to have gone unremarked, at least
in recent scholarship, that Macpherson presented as ‘the only part now remaining,
of a poem by Ossian’ a text which bears a remarkable resemblance to Hervararkviða
in its themes and form.16 In Macpherson’s text one Gaul goes to the tomb of his
father Morni to retrieve an ancestral sword, bidding for a hearing. Morni asks who
‘awakes’ him, and Gaul entreats, ‘Give the sword of Strumon, that beam which thou
hidest in the night.’ Morni is rather more forthcoming than Angantýr, thereupon
giving up the sword immediately. Malcolm Laing, in his critical (in all senses of the
word) edition of Macpherson’s work, observes tartly that the text ‘is a plain imitation of the sword of Angantyr … appropriated, as usual, to the Highlands of Scotland’.17
1705 George Hickes [untitled]. In Linguarum vett. septentrionalium Thesaurus I.
The Old Norse is set out as verse; the English translation as continuous prose,
and scholarly notes are included. Source: Hervarar Saga på Gammel Gotska, ed.
Olaus Verelius (Uppsala, 1672).18
1716 Verelius’ text and Hickes’s translation appear in The Sixth Part of Miscel any Poems. Containing Variety of New Translations of the Ancient Poets: Together with
Several Original Poems (London), pp. 387–91, 2nd edn (1727), pp. 315–20. The
13 A partial list can be found in Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse (compiled by Amanda Collins), but this is chronological y limited to the period 1750–1820; my research has uncovered a number of additional items during that date span not mentioned by Collins.
14 E.g. a graveyard scene in William Morris’s The Pirate: see Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2000), p. 79.
15 James Macpherson, Temora, An Ancient Epic Poem, in Eight Books: Together with Several Other Poems, Composed by Ossian, the son of Fingal (London, 1763). Although alleged to be translations from ancient Celtic poetry, Macpherson was never able to produce any originals and was widely believed to have composed the poetry himself. It is likely his material came from contemporary oral informants. On Macpherson and the Ossian texts see Ian Haywood, The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction (Rutherford, NJ, 1986).
16 Macpherson, Temora, pp. 48–49n.
17 Malcolm Laing, ed., The Poems of Ossian &c, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1805), II, pp. 88–9.
18 Sources are noted where they are stated by the redactor. On Verelius’ edition of the stanzas and Hickes’s adoption of them, see Christine E. Fel , ‘The First Publication of Old Norse Literature in England and its Relation to its Sources’, in The Waking of Angantyr: The Scandinavian Past in European Culture, ed. Else Roesdahl and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen (Aarhus, 1996), pp. 27–57.
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English is presented to look more like verse, though the line divisions do not
match the Old Norse.
1761 Hickes’s translation, with minor emendations mainly to the spelling and punctuation, appears in the Annual Register 4:2, 236–7, under the heading ‘Fragments of Celtic Poetry, from Olaus Vereliu
s, a German writer; literal y translated’.
1761 Thomas Percy, trans., ‘The Incantation of Hervor’, Lady’s Magazine, 487–9.19
Rpt. Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, Translated from the Islandic Language (London, 1763), pp. 1–20.20 With an introduction and scholarly notes. Sources: Verelius,
Hickes, Thomas Bartholin, Antiquitatum Danicarum De Causis Contemptae
A Danis Adhuc Gentilibus Mortis (Copenhagen, 1689). Included in the 1809
reprint of Percy’s Northern Antiquities (Edinburgh; orig. pub. London, 1770),
pp. 289–303.
1774 Dr Goldsmith, ‘The Inchantment of Hervor. A Fragment of Ancient Poetry’, St James’s Magazine, 240. Rpt. Joseph Retzer, ed., Choice of the Best Poetical Pieces of the Most Eminent English Poets (Vienna, 1783), pp. 232–5.21
1775 William Bagshaw Stevens, ‘Hervor and Angantyr. An Ode, Imitated from an
Antient Scald, Author of a Book Intitled Hervarer Saga, Published by Olaus
Verelius’, Poems, Consisting of Indian Odes and Miscel aneous Pieces (London), pp. 87–98. Source: Hickes.
1781 Thomas James Mathias, ‘Dialogue at the Tomb of Argantyr’, Runic Odes.
Imitated from the Norse Tongue. In the Manner of Mr. Gray (London), pp. 15–22.
Source: Hickes. Rpt. Bel ’s Classical Arrangement of Fugitive Poetry 13 (London, 1791), pp. 130–5, with il ustration by Francis Edward Burney.
1790 W. Williams, ‘The Hervarer Saga, A Gothic Ode’, Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle 60:3, 844. Source: Hickes.
1792 ‘K.’, ‘The Incantation of Herva’, in Poems, Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwal , ed. Richard Polwhele, 2 vols (Bath), II, pp. 114–20.22 Rpt. in Anthologia Hibernica 1 (1793), 467–9. Source: Percy.
1793 George Butt, ‘Hervor and Anganture’, in Poems, 2 vols (Kidderminster), II, pp. 111–17. Source: [Hickes], via Annual Register 1761. Footnoted ‘A fragment of Celtic poetry from Olaus Verelius, a German writer’.
1794 Joseph Sterling, ‘Ode from the Hervarar Saga’, in Odes, by the Rev. Joseph Sterling (London), pp. 3–9. Source: Hervararsaga ok Heidrekskongs, ed. P. F. Suhm (Copenhagen, 1785).
1795 J[ohn] L[eyden], ‘The Incantation of Hervor. A Runic Ode’, The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscel any, 382–3. Source: ‘Olaus Verilius’.
19 I have been unable to access a copy of this periodical.
20 Reprints are included where they suggest a different or wider audience.
21 I have been unable to access a copy of the original. The citation comes from Retzer.
Oliver Goldsmith died in April 1774 but a few others of his works seem to have appeared posthumously in that year. Goldsmith knew Percy (who wrote his biography), but ‘The
Inchantment’ does not appear in Goldsmith’s Complete Works (latest new edition 1911), and I can find no other reference to his authorship.
22 In his introduction (p. v) Polwhele claims he is ‘not at liberty’ to disclose any further information about the author.
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1796 Anna Seward, ‘Herva at the Tomb of Argantyr. A Runic Dialogue’, Llangol en Vale, and Other Poems (London), pp. 22–36. Sources: Hickes, Mathias.
1801 M. G. Lewis, ‘The Sword of Angantyr. Runic’, in Tales of Wonder, 2 vols,
(Dublin), I, pp. 32–41. Sources: ‘Hick’s [ sic] Thesau. Ling. Septen.’, Seward.
1827 ‘S. W.’, ‘The Incantation of Hervor’, The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British-India and its Dependencies 24:144, 701–3.
1834 E[lizabeth] F[ries] E[llet], ‘The Incantation of Hervor: Imitated from a Norse Legend’, The American Monthly Magazine 2, 19–21. Rpt. Poems: Translated and Original (Philadelphia, 1835), pp. 66–8.
1835 William Bell Scott, ‘The Incantation of Hervor’, in The Edinburgh University Souvenir (Edinburgh and London), pp. 228–34. Rpt. Poems (London, 1854), pp. 191–7, and, with an il ustration engraved (by Scott) from a painting of the
same name by Alice Boyd, in 1875, pp. 231–6.
1849 John Kenyon, ‘Grammarye’, in A Day at Tivoli (London), pp. 178–82.
1883 ‘The Waking of Angantheow’, Corpus poeticum boreale: The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue, from the Earliest Times to the Thirteenth Century, ed. Gudbrand Vigfusson [ sic] and F. York Powel , 2 vols (Oxford), I, pp. 163–8.
1889 Frederick Corder, The Sword of Argantyr: A Dramatic Cantata in Four Scenes (London and Manchester). Performed at the Leeds Festival 1889.
1900 Beatrice Barmby, ‘Hervör’ and ‘The Waking of Angantyr’, in Gísli Súrsson: A Drama (Westminster), pp. 135–6 and 176–81.
1912 E. M. Smith-Dampier, ‘The Waking of Angantheow’, in The Norse King’s Bridal: Translations from the Danish and Old Norse, with Original Bal ads (London),
pp. 3–9.
1921 Translated within saga context by N. Kershaw, Stories and Bal ads of the Far Past (Cambridge), pp. 94–100.
1936 Lee M. Hol ander, ‘The Lay of Hervor (Hervararkvitra)’, in Old Norse Poems: The Most Important Non-Skaldic Verse not Included in the Poetic Edda (New
York), pp. 59–70. Source: Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, ed. Finnur Jónsson (Copenhagen, 1912–15).
1960 Translated within saga context by Christopher Tolkien, Saga Heiðreks Konungs ins Vitra / The Saga of King Heiðrek the Wise (London), pp. 12–19, 78–9.
1969 W. H. Auden and Paul B. Taylor, ‘The Waking of Angantyr’, in The Elder Edda Reprinted in 1981 in Norse Poems (London), pp. 39–43.
1969 Patricia Terry, ‘The Waking of Angantyr’, in Poems of the Vikings: The Elder Edda (Indianapolis), 249–54. Source: E. V. Gordon, An Introduction to Old Norse (Oxford, 1927).
2003 Translated within saga context by Peter Tunstall at the Northvegr website, http://www.northvegr.org/ and 2005 at http://www.oe.eclipse.co.uk/nom/
Hervor.htm Sources: G. Turville-Petre, ed., Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks (London, 1956), Hauksbók udgiven efter de Arnamagnæanske håndskrifter no. 371, 544 og
675, 4to, ed. Finnur Jónsson (Copenhagen, 1892–6), Suhm.
2004–5 Todd B. Krause and Jonathan Slocum, ‘The Waking of Angantýr’, Old Norse Online, Lesson 8 (online at http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/norol-8-X.html).
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2009 Marie Brennan, ‘The Waking of Angantyr’, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly 2 (online at http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=304).
2012 S. R. Hardy, ‘The Waking of Angantýr’, Eternal Haunted Summer – Pagan
Songs and Tales (online at http://eternalhauntedsummer.com/issues/
winter-solstice-2012/the-waking-of-angantyr/).
2013 Rebecca Perry, ‘How the Earth Increases’, in Modern Poets on Viking Poetry: An Anthology of Responses to Skaldic Poetry, ed. Debbie Potts (online at http://www.
asnc.cam.ac.uk/resources/mpvp/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/An-Anthology-
of-Responses-to-Skaldic-Poetry.pdf), pp. 3–4. Source: Burrows forthcoming (see
below).
2013 Sarah Hesketh, ‘The Waking of Angantýr’, in Modern Poets on Viking Poetry, pp. 5–8. Source: Burrows forthcoming (see below).
2013 Adam Kirton, ‘Hear My Heart’, in Modern Poets on Viking Poetry, pp. 9–12.
Source: Burrows forthcoming (see below).
2014 Carolyne Larrington, ‘The Waking of Angantyr’, in The Poetic Edda, 2nd edn (Oxford), pp. 268–73. Source: Burrows forthcoming (see below).
Forthcoming. Edited and translated with the poetry from Hervarar saga by Hannah Burrows, Poetry in Fornaldarsögur, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8 (Turnhout).
Translating Early Medieval Poetry for the Eighteenth Century
The first part of this story is already well told, but it is an important one, and twenty-first-century research resources (ever larger online databases; digital editions of
texts; web search engines and more sophisticated text recognition capabilities)
allow it to be expanded. The text in Hickes’s Thesaurus (1705) was based upon the editio princeps of Hervarar saga by Olaus Verelius, published in Uppsala in 1672
with facing Swedish translation and Latin notes. Hickes, ‘Britain’s first old northern philological giant’,23 aimed to compare the Norse with Old English poetry, in
particular the so-called Fight at Finnsburg which it follows in the Thesaurus.24 This endeavour brought Hervararkviða into a world where ‘Septentrionalism’ offered a model of (supposedly) libertarian politics and a democratic legal system, a positive
attitude towards women, and more troublingly, fuel for Romantic nationalism and
the idea of a European north-south divide.25 It was a world where, following James
23 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, p. 19.
24 Fel , ‘The First Publication’, p. 46.
25 On the rise of interest in the North in Britain see e.g. Frank E. Farley, Scandinavian Influences in the English Romantic Movement (Boston, 1903); Susie I. Tucker, ‘Scandinavica for the Eighteenth-Century Common Reader’, Saga-Book 16 (1962–65), 233–47; Edward J. Cowan,
‘Icelandic Studies in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Scotland’, Studia Islandica 31 (1972), 107–51; Margaret Omberg, Scandinavian Themes in English Poetry, 1760–1800 (Uppsala, 1976); Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse; Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians; O’Donoghue, English Poetry and Old Norse Myth, esp. pp. 28–103. Hervararkviða’s popularity was not exclusive to Britain; for its reception in Germany at the same time, for example, see Anne Heinrichs, ‘Der Kanon altnordischer Poesie im 18. Jahrhundert’, in The Audience of the Sagas: Proceedings of the Eighth International Saga Conference, 2 vols (Göteborg, 1991), I, pp. 201–10.
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Macpherson’s alleged translations of ‘Ossian’s’ Celtic poetry (1760–63), ancient
poetry from the British Isles and related Germanic traditions was sought after for
its ‘primitivism’, epic heroism and cultural heritage,26 factors highly influential to the development of the cult of the sublime, and later Romanticism and the gothic. It
was also a world where literary translations of all sorts were in ever-higher demand,
