Translating Early Medieval Poetry
Page 30
and the rise of literary periodicals meant wider audiences and new publication plat-
forms for budding poets and authors.27 These magazines also published (not always
accurate) accounts of the geography and customs of Scandinavia, adding to popular
understanding and enthusiasm for the subject.28
Though Hickes was acquainted with Icelandic, a letter reveals that he requested a
Mr Leyenkroon or ‘any other ingenious Swede’ to undertake the translation, and it
is recognisably made from Verelius’ Swedish rather than from the Old Norse itself.29
Hickes did not versify the translation, employing a heightened prose that had proved
popular from French translations of classical poetry in the first half of the eighteenth century.30 This style was retained by Thomas Percy in his Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (1763), perhaps intended to shore up the stature of Norse poetry.31 Though Percy’s
‘considerable emendations’ to Hickes’s text are actual y rather minor, he did go back
to the original, with help from his friend Edward Lye,32 inching his work closer to
being a genuine translation from the Old Norse. Percy’s scholarly introduction and
textual notes, though largely taken from Verelius, attest to his interest in the original and his desire to transmit it in a form which did not need to be altered too far in
order to be understood in an eighteenth-century cultural context.
In 1768, however, the landscape for working with Old Norse material changed,
when Thomas Gray published two ‘imitations’ of Norse poetry – the choice of word
is his, though Dryden might have preferred ‘paraphrases’. Where Percy and others
thought the expression of the sublime to be found in its purest form in ancient
poetry, Gray (who worked from Latin translations) was unafraid to heighten, elabo-
rate and intensify key elements, and to infuse his own poetry with descriptive adjec-
tives essential to eighteenth-century pictorialism.33 He may have planned a version
of Hervararkviða, but it was never realised.34 However, Gray’s success meant that the idea of creating new artistic products based on Norse originals took flight.
Indeed, Margaret Clunies Ross points out that ‘without exception, late eight-
eenth-century reviewers were unable to conceptualise the Icelandic “original”
other than in terms of the version[s] “so finely translated by Gray”.’35 Thomas
26 See e.g. Fiona Stafford, ‘Ossian, Primitivism, Celticism’, in Gillespie and Hopkins, 1660–1790, pp. 38–51.
27 Stuart Gillespie and Penelope Wilson, ‘The Publishing and Readership of Translation’, in Gillespie and Hopkins, 1660–1790, pp. 38–51.
28 Tucker, ‘Scandinavica’.
29 Gillespie and Wilson, ‘The Publishing’, p. 51.
30 Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse, p. 68.
31 Ibid.
32 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, pp. 26–7 and n. 176.
33 Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse, p. 108.
34 Omberg, Scandinavian Themes, p. 39.
35 Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse, p. 208, citing a review in The Gentleman’s Magazine 58:1
(1788), 138.
156
Hannah Burrows
Mathias, indeed, dropped the third part of his title Runic Odes. Imitated from the Norse tongue. In the manner of Mr. Gray for subsequent editions, after cruel but not entirely unfair reviewers felt he had set himself too much to live up to (‘Mr Mathias
has merit, though not so much as he has ascribed to himself, following Mr. Gray
indeed.’36). Literary reviewers may have demanded ‘accuracy’ in renditions of Norse
poetry (and continued to talk about ‘translat[ion]’ for all the theorists could debate the finer distinctions), but for some this had less to do with linguistic literalism or metrical and figurative recreation, and more to do with preconceived understandings of the grandeur and spirit of ancient poetry. For Hervǫr and Angantýr, this
meant a heightened sensory and emotional experience. ‘K.’s Herva must ‘bid fare-
well to joy’, while Butt’s Hervor ‘weeps … tears of rage’. Butt’s Anganture, meanwhile, has ‘sad eyes’ while, in his ‘love’ (Leyden), he bids Seward’s Herva to ‘spare thy heart its long regret’. Darkness, sights and sounds are all emphasised, while the viðar
rætr (‘roots of trees’), under which Angantýr is buried in the original,37 become
‘twisted roots’ (Mathias) of ‘shady trees’ (Williams) in a ‘sepulchral wood’ (Seward).
The roðinn geirr (‘decorated (rather than ‘reddened’) spear’) the Old Norse Hervǫr speaks of,38 translated ‘bloody spear’ in Hickes, multiplies into spears ‘bathed …
in gore’ in Sterling. The original’s dauða menn (‘dead men’)39 become ‘slaughter’d warriors’, ‘bleed[ing] chiefs’, and ‘heroes bit[ing] the bloody strand’ in Sterling.
Seward’s Tyrfingr will be ‘in blood of millions dyed’, once retrieved from beneath
‘Argantyr’s’ ‘mouldering arm’. Supernatural elements in the original – strange fires,
poison said to be embedded in Tyrfingr’s edges, and Angantýr’s description of
Hervǫr as ful feiknstafa (‘full of curses’)40 – are capitalised on, as swords ‘in terror drest’ (Mathias), the ‘tomb’s blue fires’, ‘runic rhymes’ and ‘mystic rites of thrilling power’ (all Seward).
Contemporary poetic styles also fashioned concepts of ‘accuracy’, with most late
eighteenth-century renditions employing, like Gray, some form of rhymed tetram-
eters. This stirring metre and the dynamism of the stanzaic form were anyway
growing in popularity, offering a rejection of the mannered heroic couplets that
had characterised earlier poetry.41 An almost wilful belief that Norse poetry was
end-rhymed persisted, perhaps because it was a convenient one for contemporary
tastes.42
Anna Seward provides an insight into poets’ attitudes to their material in notes
36 Unattributed review in Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Review 51 (1781), 430.
37 Hervǫr, Lausavísur, 9/4 ( Heiðr 26).
38 Ibid., 9/8 ( Heiðr 26).
39 Angantýr Arngrímsson, Lausavísur, 1/8 ( Heiðr 29).
40 Ibid., 1/3 ( Heiðr 29). The phrase literal y means ‘full of portentous or terrible staves’, which probably does refer to runes, but this is not likely to have been known to Seward, since it is translated ‘spel s to wake the dead’ in Hickes. Her usage reflects a wider tendency to refer to Norse poetry as ‘runic’, stemming from a seventeenth-century theory that all Norse poetry was original y written in runes (Judy Quinn and Margaret Clunies Ross, ‘The Image of Norse Poetry and Myth in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Northern Antiquity: The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and Saga, ed. Andrew Wawn (Enfield Lock, Middlesex, 1994), pp. 189–210, at p. 192).
41 Omberg, Scandinavian Themes, p. 62.
42 See Quinn and Clunies Ross, ‘The Image’.
Reawakening Angantýr
157
to her own version (1796). She writes, ‘A close translation, in English verse, will be found in a valuable collection of Runic Odes, by the ingenious and learned Mr.
Mathias’ (p. 22). Seward’s apparently acclamatory (if somewhat inaccurate) descrip-
tion of Mathias’s effort as ‘a close translation’ is actual y rather barbed. Seward
provides Hickes’s version below her own, ‘to show that it is used only as an outline,
and that the following Poem is a bold Paraphrase, not a Translation’. Original
artistic creativity is clearly valued by Seward above the mere task of ‘close transla-
tion’, though her own version remains essential y true to the shape of the original.
; Reviewers lauded her approach, considering that ‘The sublime terrour of the scene
and the action is throughout well supported by the animated language of poetry’.43
If Seward considered Mathias not creative enough with his vision, there were
limits. Matthew Lewis, author of the notorious gothic novel The Monk: A Romance, notes with some relish in regard to his own ‘The Sword of Angantyr. Runic’ (1801):
‘The original is to be found in Hick’s [ sic] Thesau[rus]. I have taken great liberties with it, and the catastrophe is my own invention.’44 Although actual y closer to
Hickes’s translation in the first part of the poem than several previous renditions,
his is the only reworking to ‘translate’ Hervǫr to the role of victim, via some rather misogynistic changes counter to the original’s presentation of her as courageous and
capable. Where the original Angantýr declares ‘Mey veit ek enga / … at þann hjör
þori / í hendr nema’ (‘I know no girl … who would dare to take that sword in her
hands’),45 Lewis’s Angantyr claims, ‘[The sword] endures no female hand’ (p. 54, my italics). Where the original Hervǫr successful y claims the sword from her father
and goes on to win fame as a viking, Lewis’s Hervor, replete with ‘raven hair’ in
‘ringlets’, comes to a messy end, exclaiming:
Curses! Curses! oh! what pain!
How my melting eye-bal s glow!
Curses! Curses! through each vein
How do boiling torrents flow!46
Seward’s verdict was that Lewis must be ‘a supreme coxcomb’.47
Hervararkviða’s place as a cultural reference point by the end of the eighteenth century is evidenced in a letter from Coleridge to Humphrey Davy about Words-worth’s procrastination over a completely unrelated poem (‘The Brothers’): ‘I trust
… that I have invoked the sleeping bard with a spell so potent, that he will awake
and deliver up that sword of Argantyr.’48
43 The Analytical Review 23 (1796), 386–90.
44 Lewis, ‘The Sword’, p. 51 (see Timeline above).
45 Angantýr, Lausavisur, 7/4–8 ( Heiðr 39).
46 Lewis, ‘The Sword’, pp. 60–2 (see Timeline above).
47 Letters of Anna Seward, Written between the Years 1784 and 1807, 6 vols (Edinburgh, 1811), V, p. 342.
48 Earl Leslie Griggs, ed., Col ected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols (Oxford, 1956–71), I, pp. 611–12.
158
Hannah Burrows
Changing Interests, New Resources
Andrew Wawn writes that ‘if the eighteenth century was the age of eddic myth,
the nineteenth century developed rapidly into the age of saga’.49 Prose texts were
in increasing demand, but the Íslendingasögur and kings’ sagas, particularly Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, were favoured over the fornaldarsögur. Hervarar saga was not translated in complete form into English until 1921, although synopses and
extracts had been available in English long before.
Having been accused of being ‘Celtic’, ‘Gothic’ and, more usual y, ‘Runic’,
the poem is correctly identified in the Asiatic Journal of 1827 as being ‘from the Icelandic’, but an interesting take on the nature of the material is offered nonetheless. An editorial note to S. W.’s translation explains it ‘may very properly appear
in the Asiatic Journal. Iceland was peopled by a Norwegian, and Norway itself by
a Scythian, colony … The present poem is so purely Asiatic, that were it not for
certain expressions and al usions peculiar to Scandinavia, we should scarcely suspect
it had been composed west of the Caspian.’50 William Bell Scott has yet another
perspective, listing it under the heading ‘Norwegian Poetry’. His ‘The Incantation of
Hervor’ (1835) is quite different from its eighteenth-century precursors. Composed
of unrhymed, differently-accented lines, it moves towards the bal ad form Scott
favoured in other poems; he notes, ‘the following resembles the original only in part
of the dialogue’ (p. 228). Scott’s autobiographical notes reveal his youthful plans of
‘going off … to a Norwegian fjord’ to ‘make all the sagas and northern stories and
poetry known to the English public’.51 Since he also admits that he had ‘versified’ his Norse pieces ‘from literal or Latin translations’, a wider translation project treating the originals is unlikely to have been on the cards.52
John Kenyon’s ‘Grammarye’ (1849) is the most extreme thus far of what Dryden
would have classed ‘imitations’. Kenyon quotes an altered version of Lewis’s opening
stanza – and then goes on to describe how a ‘Wizard’ is able, where ‘Beldames three’
were not, to rouse a corpse by playing the violin. But for Lewis’s stanza, ‘Gram-
marye’ would hardly be seen as related to Hervararkviða at all (at least to the modern reader): the ‘Dead Man’ is raised by music (albeit of a supernatural, occult
kind), not kinship ties; there is no ancestral sword, cursed or otherwise; the newly-
awakened Dead Man remains zombie-like, ‘puzzled’ and enthralled to the Wizard’s
whims; and, of course, Hervǫr is absent, replaced by the unsuccessful Beldames and,
ultimately, the (male) Wizard. Other than the much-changed situation, the point of
stimulus appears to be Lewis’s line ‘Magic chords around thee break’, unparalleled
in the original, but inspiring Kenyon’s musical y-controlled corpse. Nevertheless,
the three witches, to the twenty-first-century mind unavoidably associated first and
foremost with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, had earlier been strongly tied to Old Norse in the public literary consciousness, thanks in no small part to Gray’s translation
of the Old Norse poem Darradarljóð as ‘The Fatal Sisters’, and a belief even by 49 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, p. 32.
50 ‘S. W.’, ‘The Incantation’, p. 701 (see Timeline above).
51 W. Minto, ed., Autobiographical Notes of the Life of Wil iam Bell Scott, and Notices of his Artistic and Poetic Circle of Friends, 1830 to 1882, 2 vols (New York, 1892), I, p. 97.
52 Ibid.
Reawakening Angantýr
159
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Shakespeare scholars that the weird sisters were
inspired by northern legend.53 Kenyon’s poem thus takes its place as an ‘imitation’,
albeit one at least three removes from the original.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century there were increasing resources for
interested parties to work with. Richard Cleasby and Guðbrandur Vigfússon’s An
Icelandic-English Dictionary came out in 1874 (the same year Guðbrandur was made Reader in Scandinavian at Oxford), allowing direct engagement with Old Norse
texts in a manner not previously possible. The seventeenth version of Hervararkviða I have found (see Timeline above), published almost one hundred and eighty years
after Hickes’s Thesaurus, is perhaps the first that can actual y be called a direct translation from Old Norse to English: F. York Powel ’s ‘The Waking of Angantheow’, in
his and Guðbrandr Vigfússon’s Corpus poeticum boreale (1883). The introduction speaks of the difficulties of ‘transfus[ing]’ the style, diction, syntax, and technical and cultural details, noting the aim of being ‘a help to the scholar, and a faithful
rendering for those who wish to know the contents’ (p. cxiv), and as such prefer-
ring ‘the quality of suggesting the real meaning’ over a ‘poetical rendering’ (p. cxvi).
‘Angantheow’ is thus translated into prose. Powell is highly critical of ‘the affectation of archaism, and the abuse of archaic, Scottish, pseudo-Middle-English words’
he felt ‘too many’ saga translators employed, considering that idiomatic English best
conveyed the idiomatic expression of the originals (p. cxv, italics original). Powel ’s
‘idiomatic’ English, though, reinforces the maxim that a translation is only for its
time;54 to give an example that now sounds positively obsolete: ‘thou hast done wel ,
thou son of the wickings, to give me the sword out of the howe’ (p. 167).
The award for least embellishment must go to Beatrice Barmby, however, who
produced both a close translation and ‘Hervör’, a short ‘imitation’ of thirty-six lines, imagining Hervǫr’s approach to Sámsey. The whole dialogue, so keenly dramatised
by previous poets, is dealt with by Barmby in two simple lines:
Up came Hervör to the hil ,
Sang her charm and gained her wil .55
I have not been able to find any stand-alone twentieth-century versions of Hervar-
arkviða, and those that appear in collections of Old Norse poetry or translations of Hervarar saga actual y are (versified) translations from the Old Norse. However, it seems that enthusiasm for creative use of the material had died down. Old Norse
material in general did not completely stop being productive in creative contexts:
Heather O’Donoghue has recently highlighted, for instance, explorations of the links
between Christianity and Norse paganism, Ragnarǫk and the twentieth-century
world, in modernist poetry.56 But standing outside the canon of eddic poetry, and
possibly having become tired and clichéd from its earlier exposure, Hervararkviða
53 See, for example, [n. a.] The Plays of Wil iam Shakspeare. Volume the Tenth (London, 1803), p. 36 n.6 (attributed to William Warburton).
54 E.g. F. Regina Psaki, ‘Verse versus Poetry: Translating Medieval Narrative Verse’, in The Medieval Translator, vol. 10, ed. Jacqueline Jenkins and Olivier Bertrand (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 419–33.
55 Barmby, ‘Hervör’, p. 136.
56 O’Donaghue, English Poetry, pp. 175–99.
160
Hannah Burrows
fell out of creative favour for a time. The same cannot be said in the latest chapter
of this story, however: in the twenty-first century Angantýr is being practical y defi-bril ated by exciting new media and cutting-edge new research.