The Medieval North and Its Afterlife: Essays in Honor of Heather O’Donoghue (The Northern Medieval World) [1 ed.] 1501524836, 9781501524837

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The Medieval North and Its Afterlife

The Northern Medieval World

On the Margins of Europe Editorial Board Carolyne Larrington, St. John’s College, Oxford (Chair) Oren Falk, Cornell University Dawn Hadley, University of York Kate Heslop, University of California, Berkeley Jana Schulman, Western Michigan University Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Universitetet i Oslo

The Medieval North and Its Afterlife Essays in Honor of Heather O’Donoghue Edited by Siân Grønlie and Carl Phelpstead

ISBN 978-1-5015-2483-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-1659-7 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-1660-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023943012 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Manuscript detail, AM 350 fol. 44r, © The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, Reykjavík, Iceland Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments

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Siân Grønlie and Carl Phelpstead 1 Introduction Carolyne Larrington Heather O’Donoghue: An Appreciation

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Gareth Lloyd Evans 9 Heather

Part I: Old Norse Poetry and Saga Siân Grønlie Chapter 1 “There Is Hope for a Tree”: Two Laments on the Loss of Sons

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Annemari Ferreira Chapter 2 A Wave of Sound: Rhythmicizing the Formal Artifice of Skaldic Poetry

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Matthias Egeler Chapter 3 Inspiring Storytelling in Saga Literature: Toponymic and Topographic 47 Perspectives from Icelandic Folklore Sarah Baccianti Chapter 4 Healing Hands, Holy Water, and Hellish Diseases: Some Accounts of Medical Performance in Medieval Iceland 67

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Laura Gormley Chapter 5 A Question of Balance: Excess and Lack in Njáls saga

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Christian Carlsen Chapter 6 Queenship, Learning, and Good Counsel in Flores och Blanzeflor

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Philip Lavender Chapter 7 When Grímr and Gunnar Met Hálfdan and Harold: Women Dressed as Men in 111 Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar and Walter Scott’s Harold the Dauntless

Part II: Related Languages and Literatures of the Medieval North Amy C. Mulligan Chapter 8 Seaworthy: Irish Immrama, Old Norse Voyage Tales, and the Women of the 135 North Atlantic Emily Kesling Chapter 9 Christ’s Letter to Abgar in England and Ireland

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Eleanor Parker Chapter 10 Norse, Irish, and English Songs: Communal Entertainment and Cultural Exchange in the Gesta Herwardi 165 Erin Michelle Goeres Chapter 11 “No Good Song Is Ever Sung of a Traitor”: The Death of Earl Waltheof in Verse and Prose 177 Hannah M. Bailey Chapter 12 Norse Names and Narratives in Havelok the Dane

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Richard Dance Chapter 13 Strong Language: An Old Norse Word and Northern English

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Part III: Afterlives Jessica Clare Hancock Chapter 14 Mighty Men at Home: Domestic Environments and Heroic Masculinity in William Morris’s The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs 229 Matthew Townend Chapter 15 Tolkien and Mirkwood

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Carl Phelpstead Chapter 16 Past and Present Identities in Margaret Elphinstone’s Islanders

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David Clark Chapter 17 It’s not the End of the World: The Neo-Norse Cosmology of Joanne 267 Harris Tom Birkett Chapter 18 “Here Are the Words of the Æsir Themselves”: Retelling the Master Builder Myth between Translation and Adaptation 283 Notes on Contributors Index

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List of Figures 2.1: 2.2:

Sentence in iambic pentameter. Phrasal arrangement of a helmingr from the twelfth strophe of Hofgarða-Refr Gestsson’s poem about Þorsteinn. 3.1: Hjalli, Hvalsárdrangur, and Hjallaklettur. Photo © M. Egeler, 2019. 3.2: The Skáruklettar rocks as seen from the neighboring peninsula of Akranes. Photo © M. Egeler, 2019. 3.3: The view from the Skáruklettar rocks towards the skerry of Skáruklettaneshólmi (or Skáruklettahólmi). Photo © M. Egeler, 2019. 3.4: Kastali and Þjófalaug as seen from the ridge of Heiðarbæjarheiði, looking north towards Steingrímsfjörður. Photo © M. Egeler, 2019. 3.5: Knights, thieves, and the footprints of a troll: Kastali, Þjófalág, Fremstaskál, Miðskál, Heimstaskál. Photo © M. Egeler, 2019. 8.1: Signed copy of fourth edition (1891) of America Not Discovered by Columbus, with dedication by Rasmus B. Anderson to Alice E. Hoffman. (Author’s own copy). 13.1: The EDD entry for ram adj. 13.2: The NED entry for rammish a.1. 13.3: The NED entry for rammy a.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-001

Acknowledgments The editors are deeply grateful to Heather O’Donoghue for her wise guidance, unfailing support, and warm friendship sustained now over three decades. Carolyne Larrington gave helpful advice at an early stage of planning the book and Andy Lewin had the excellent idea of using an Icelandic illuminated letter H for the cover illustration. Carl Phelpstead is grateful to Cardiff University’s School of English, Communication, and Philosophy for a semester’s research leave in autumn 2021 which created time for some of the editorial work; he would also like to thank Gareth Lloyd Evans for prompting him to begin planning the book and helping to compile a list of potential contributors. Most of the planning, writing, and editing of this book took place during the Covid-19 pandemic: public health measures often restricted contributors’ access to libraries and their offices, and several contributors had to complete their essays while juggling additional caring and schooling responsibilities. We appreciate our colleagues’ commitment to this project in such difficult circumstances, itself testimony to their affection for and gratitude to its honorand.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-002

Siân Grønlie and Carl Phelpstead

Introduction

This book showcases the variety and vitality of contemporary scholarship on Old Norse and related medieval literatures and their modern afterlives. The contributors are all former students, mentees, or colleagues of Professor Heather O’Donoghue, who retired from the chair in Old Norse at the University of Oxford in 2021 and whose seventieth birthday in 2023 this collection celebrates. Heather has had an extraordinary influence on the current state of Old Norse and related studies, not only through her books and other publications on Old Norse sagas and skaldic poetry, Norse mythology, Old English literature, and modern medievalism, but also as the doctoral supervisor for an exceptional number of students who have gone on to academic posts across the world. With the exception of Carolyne Larrington, Heather’s longstanding colleague at Oxford, all the contributors to this volume were taught or supervised by Heather and nearly all of them completed their doctorates under her supervision at the University of Oxford during the last three decades (Baccianti, Bailey, Birkett, Carlsen, Clark, Egeler, Evans, Ferreira, Goeres, Gormley, Grønlie, Hancock, Kesling, Mulligan, Parker, Phelpstead, Townend). Contributors now teach and research in universities in England, Germany, Ireland, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, the USA, and Wales. Other former students maintain their interest in Old Norse and continue to publish research after leaving university life. All those invited to contribute to this Festschrift obtained their doctorates before the planning of the volume began at the start of 2019, but since then several more of Heather’s supervisees have completed their DPhil and some of them have also obtained academic posts. As Heather’s former students, the contributors to this Festschrift are indebted to her scholarship and teaching, but they now take the study of Old Norse poetry and saga, related languages and literatures of medieval northwestern Europe, and the afterlife of Old Norse in modern English literature forward in new directions. The contents of the volume reflect the range and variety of Heather O’Donoghue’s own contributions to the study of Old Norse and related literatures, while coalescing around three main interconnected fields. Just over a third of the essays in the collection are concerned primarily with Old Norse literature, ranging across prose and verse, and examining some relatively neglected texts alongside more centrally canonical writings; a further six essays extend coverage to other literatures and languages of northwestern Europe in the Middle Ages, shedding light on connections between the languages and literatures of the North Sea and North Atlantic worlds; the final five essays honor Heather’s significant contribution to study of the influence of Old Norse literature on modern literature in Enghttps://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-003

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lish and reflect the increasing prominence of this sub-field within Old Norse studies by offering new readings of Norse influence on Anglophone literature from the nineteenth century to today. The book begins with an account of Heather O’Donoghue’s contribution to Old Norse and related studies as both teacher and researcher by her colleague at Oxford, Carolyne Larrington. This is complemented by a brief tribute from one of Heather’s former DPhil students (Evans). The essays in part one on Old Norse poetry and saga then exemplify the variety of both Old Norse literature and current critical approaches to it, with essays on skaldic verse (Grønlie, Ferreira) and several different saga genres (Egeler, Baccianti, Gormley, Lavender). Welcome attention is given to some relatively neglected texts, such as the bishops’ sagas (Baccianti), an early saint’s life (Grønlie), and an Old Swedish verse romance (Carlsen). This section of the book also showcases the variety of approach characteristic of contemporary Norse studies, complementing close textual analysis with comparative study of various kinds (Grønlie, Egeler, Lavender), and ranging from technical poetics (Ferreira) to folklore studies (Egeler) and the medical humanities (Baccianti). The section shows that while traditional forms of analysis remain productive of valuable new insights, there is also great potential in bringing newer approaches into dialogue with Old Norse literature. Comparative study continues to animate contributions to the second section of the book, on other languages and literatures of the medieval north. Essays illuminate literary connections within the Anglo-Celtic archipelago (Parker, Kesling) and both literary and linguistic relationships between these islands and the Norsespeaking communities of Scandinavia and Iceland (Mulligan, Parker, Goeres, Bailey, Dance). These essays demonstrate the value of considering Old Norse-Icelandic literature within a broader north or northwest European context. The final section of the book includes five essays offering new readings of the influence of Old Norse texts on modern Anglophone literature. That influence is charted across nineteenth-century poetry by William Morris (Hancock) and various genres of twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, including Tolkienian fantasy, the historical novel, and writing for young adults (Townend, Phelpstead, Clark). The afterlife of Norse mythology—on which Heather O’Donoghue has written extensively—is also prominent in this final section (Clark, Birkett). Scholarly interest in Anglophone Norse medievalism is fostered by the historical accident of Old Norse studies often being located within university English departments, especially in Britain and Ireland. By explicating ways in which English-language literature is indebted to Old Norse, the essays in this final section of the book make a strong case for continuing that fruitful institutional relationship between Old Norse and English literary studies.

Introduction

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There are connections and echoes across the three parts of the collection. Lavender’s essay in Part I shares an interest in medievalism with the essays in Part III, for example, and Phelpstead’s essay analyzes a novel set in Norse-speaking Shetland that reimagines the interconnected medieval north European world examined by essays in Part II. The relationship between Norse literary texts and medical knowledge explored by Baccianti in Part I is echoed in the healing powers associated with Christ’s letter to Abgar discussed by Kesling in Part II. Gender is a key concern of several essays across the book (Carlsen, Lavender, Mulligan, Hancock, Phelpstead, Clark): as well as texts by or about women, interest in gender extends to masculinity and non-binary and trans identities, areas only recently beginning to receive sustained attention in Old Norse studies. Heather O’Donoghue has herself written on gender in Njáls saga and, given the continuing gender inequalities in academic life, we are pleased to note that more than half the contributors to this volume honoring a leading female academic are women. The rigorous and innovative scholarship assembled in this collection demonstrates the lively state of contemporary research on Old Norse and related subjects. It both reflects the current variety of approach and subject matter within the field, and also takes research in fruitful new directions. In doing so, it celebrates Heather O’Donoghue’s extraordinary and enduring influence on the discipline, as manifested in the wide-ranging and original research of her former students and colleagues.

Carolyne Larrington

Heather O’Donoghue: An Appreciation

Everyone who has contributed to this book has been tutored, supervised, examined, or mentored by its honorand—except for me. Yet, in the summer of 1979 and quite unwittingly, Heather decisively changed the course my life would take: I owe her as much gratitude for that as any of the other contributors, and so I am delighted to have been invited to write this appreciation of her many achievements. That Trinity Term, Heather was lecturing on connections between Old English and Old Norse literature, and I showed up out of mild interest in the topic, having spent some months the previous year working in Norway. She mentioned Roseberry Topping, a hill-name that encodes the god Óðinn in the heart of the Cleveland landscape, the part of the country from which she hails, and where I spent much of my childhood. Along with the recognition this triggered came the intoxicating realization that Old Norse myth and literature were proper academic subjects and that they could be studied in Oxford, as part of the very degree course that I was enrolled in. By the next day, I had informed myself all about Course II, the specialist medieval course; by the end of the next week I had been sent to see Ursula Dronke who would teach me weekly for the next two years, and a lifelong passion had been set in motion. Heather has been a fine colleague and a good friend for more than thirty years. We have shared many adventures: there were a series of expeditions to Norway with groups of international graduate students studying across the UK; a week-long workshop in Orkney in 2013 for which we jointly composed the funding proposal, possessed by a strange inspiration that allowed us fluently to ventriloquize the key terms and persuasive language that would release the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s largesse; and the different heritage-based projects of 2014, grouped under the umbrella of “Languages, Myths, and Finds.” This was a project that encompassed a range of once-in-a-lifetime experiences. While I and the rest of Team Isle of Man were performing a dramatized Viking funeral ritual at a reconstructed longhouse high in the hills of Man, Heather’s team were making a notable discovery: a hitherto unknown runic inscription found among other early medieval stones in Conyers Chapel at Sockburn Hall in Cleveland. Alas, the stone was subsequently stolen and has never been recovered, but at least it was recorded and documented, and displayed for a couple of years in the local church. Heather was a sensible and steadying presence when thirty or so UK-based students and academics found themselves marooned in Bergen in 2010 as Eyjafjallajökull erupted in Iceland; another wonderful, and much less stressful adventure, was spending a few days in Cork in company with both Heathhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-004

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er and her husband Bernard for the conference on translation and reception, organized by Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons. For all the jollity and junketing we have enjoyed, much hard work was going on at home in Oxford. Heather was inspiring generations of students across Oxford humanities with an interest in Old Norse that usually lasts long beyond their student days. This book is a testament to Heather’s capacity to nurture graduate students—future academic stars—who have produced doctoral theses across an extraordinary range of topics. But it’s also important to remember the hundreds of students who did not go into academic careers or undertake advanced study, people who still yearn to travel to the north and who take down their saga translations from their bookshelves, proud that once they studied these intriguing texts in detail and became immersed in the unique world of medieval Iceland. There have been so many classes and lectures, from the boldly titled “Learn Old Norse in Eight Weeks” to “Myth, Legend, and Saga,” so many tutorials about the set texts which, since they work so well to introduce the wonderful variety of Old Norse saga and poetry, have barely changed in forty years, so many undergraduate and master’s dissertations that have opened doors into different kinds of narrative space in so many young imaginations. Heather has carved out, and made her own, particular domains in the study of Old Norse literature, often anticipating future trends by some years. Her doctoral thesis, published as The Genesis of a Saga Narrative: Verse and Prose in Kormaks saga in 1991, was a landmark study in the relationship between skaldic poetry and the prose in which it is embedded—a field that has garnered much current attention as a range of international projects on prosimetrum bear witness. This fundamental interest in the ways that sagas and their verses work as literary texts, with a particular focus on the insights that various aspects of narratology and narrative theory can generate, can be traced through other monographs: Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative from 2005 and, most recently, Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga: Meanings of Time in Old Norse Literature which appeared from Bloomsbury in 2021. Alongside this intellectual strand runs a second interest, again one that Heather developed well ahead of others working in the field: the medieval and post-medieval reception of Old Norse myth, legend, and literature. The first fruit of this turn was the 2007 From Asgard to Valhalla: The History of the Old Norse Myths, a book that combined deep scholarly knowledge with accessibility, and which found a good home at the innovative independent imprint I. B. Tauris. A deeper dive into the relationship between Old Norse myth and English poetry came with the invaluable English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History published by Oxford University Press in 2014. These are Heather’s monographs. Beside them of course are edited collections: the early Festschrift for Rosemary Woolf, another distinguished Somervillian, and

Heather O’Donoghue: An Appreciation

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the Cambridge History of Old Norse-Icelandic Literature, currently underway. There are innumerable journal articles and book chapters, often exploring the domains of prosimetrum, narrative theory, and reception outlined above, but as often opening up new, sometimes surprising, insights into other aspects of Old Norse literature. The Medium Ævum journal article from 2003 that pointed out the similarities between the tale of Lamech and Snorri’s account of the slaying of Baldr and raised questions about how far the myth that we think we know can be regarded as genuinely pre-Christian in its details still continues to unsettle received wisdom about the relationship between Eddic poetry and Snorri’s mythography. Besides this are articles and chapters that elaborate the variegated research that underpins the two books on reception, from Victorian novelists to Moby-Dick, to Seamus Heaney and Hugh MacDiarmid, William Morris, and Günter Grass. Heather has always been generous with her time and energy in promoting and explaining Old Norse and Old English literature to the public; she has a longstanding commitment to what we have now learned to call “impact” and “knowledge exchange.” Her expertise in Old English as well as Old Norse takes her to summer schools in Sutton Hoo, and to lead saga-tours of western Iceland, to talk about Beowulf and Old Norse myth on the radio, to lecture engagingly to a whole range of audiences and to share her enthusiasms in public and private forums. Her knack for finding both unusual topics—her memorable exposition of the concept of runic gymnastics was received with great hilarity—and unexpected angles is unparalleled: her wise insights into Neil Gaiman’s ground-breaking novel American Gods or her memorable Dorothea Coke lecture on “Figura in Njáls saga” are truly illuminating. This last was delivered to a large audience that had struggled to University College, London in the teeth of the mighty snow-storm nicknamed “The Beast from the East” in 2018. Alongside her interest in Old Norse, Heather also has a considerable public profile as a critic of crime literature. She has been a frequent judge in the national Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards. Articles about crime writers as various as Kazuo Ishiguro, Joan Smith, and Stieg Larsson have resulted; Heather generously offers reading recommendations, and surplus books, along with thoughtful views on what makes a good crime novel, and what emphatically does not. Heather took her first degree at University College, London and came to Oxford to study for the MPhil and then DPhil with Ursula Dronke, for whom she wrote a vivid, warm, and thoughtful obituary in The Guardian in 2012. Heather was a Fellow of Somerville and Tutor in medieval English literature before she moved to Linacre when taking up the Vigfússon-Rausing Readership. Although Old Norse has been studied in Oxford since the days of Guðbrandur Vigfússon in the nineteenth century, it was only in 1941 that Gabriel Turville-Petre was appointed as the first Reader in the subject at the university, a post he held until

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1975—a splendid thirty-four years of service. Ursula Dronke followed him in 1976, and held the position until 1988. Heather’s appointment followed in 1991, after Ursula’s assiduous fundraising to secure the post’s future funding had borne fruit, through the generosity of the Rausing family. Her thirty years of leading Old Norse study in Oxford has seen her maintain and expand undergraduate teaching in the subject, bringing in students from Modern Languages in addition to English students, nurturing young people who would go onto graduate studies either in Oxford or elsewhere. She has established and developed a world-leading graduate programme which has attracted the very finest students in Old Norse literature from across the globe. She has worked hard to tie Oxford Old Norse studies into a national and international network of scholars and departments, cementing powerful ties within the UK with Cambridge, Nottingham, York, and Cardiff, with Cork and Belfast, across Europe—particularly with the University of Bergen—and in the US. These past decades have seen the study of Old Norse and Scandinavian studies contract in many places across the world, but where it has survived, it flourishes. In part, this is a testament to Heather’s allyship and support for younger academics, struggling with the precarity that seems now endemic to higher education, particularly in the humanities, until they find a permanent position. I remain very grateful for her quiet encouragement and support in all kinds of ways during those years when for me a future in academic life seemed for ever out of reach. More writing (several books are on the go), continued doctoral supervision, travel, and doubtless more crime, as well as more time for the family and grandchildren—all these things lie in the future, along with further invitations to share her knowledge in person and in prose. And time for more attentive and critical reading—absolutely Heather’s forte—beginning with the wide-ranging, engaging, and thoughtful pieces that are gathered in this book.

Gareth Lloyd Evans

Heather

These remarks were delivered on May 26, 2021 at a meeting of the Oxford Medieval English Research Seminar held to mark Heather O’Donoghue’s retirement. Professor Heather O’Donoghue held the Vigfússon-Rausing Readership in Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities at the University of Oxford for three decades, having taken up the post in 1991. She was the Fellow in Medieval English Literature and the History of the English Language at Somerville College, Oxford, for over a decade before this. At the time of her retirement, this, by my reckoning, made her the longest continually serving medievalist in the University of Oxford’s English Faculty. During her tenure as Reader and then Professor of Old Norse, Heather oversaw, and shepherded, the movement of Old Norse studies in Oxford (and, indeed, within academia more broadly) from a niche, peripheral subject into a lively, popular, and even—without too much hyperbole—mainstream field. This is a result of her intellectual leadership within the field but also her commitment to fostering and developing the community of Old Norse scholars, both within and beyond Oxford. In her own research, Heather has ranged extremely widely, covering topics including saga poetics (in three vitally important books), Norse mythology, Eddic and skaldic poetry, Old English poetry, crime fiction, and the reception of Old Norse literature and its narratives, ranging from Beowulf to Viking Heavy Metal. All her work is characterized by subtlety, precision, and—above all—a clear concern for the appreciation of the literariness of the texts with which she works. Beyond her own work, Heather has also supervised a huge number of doctoral students, themselves also working on a very wide range of often inter- and multidisciplinary subjects. For example, her recent students have worked on topics as diverse as runes in Old Norse and Old English literature, storytelling in Old Norse literature, gender in the reception of legendary narratives, Old English medical collections, Old English metrical charms, classical influences on Old Norse literature, and narratology in the kings’ sagas. In considering Heather’s impact on the field, I once began sketching out a doctoral family tree, with Heather at the head, but it quickly became apparent that the students she has supervised, and the students that they themselves have in turn supervised, are far, far too numerous to fit on a single page or, indeed, several pages. Suffice it to say that there are a lot of us: Heather really has given rise to an academic dynasty, with a number of her former students now full professors themselves. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-005

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Gareth Lloyd Evans

And that’s not surprising, not only because of her brilliant academic work (although that is of course a significant part of it), but also because Heather is the perfect doctoral supervisor: alongside her depth of knowledge, her rigorous standards for scholarship, and her inspiring enthusiasm for Norse literature, she is also incredibly supportive, constructive, and intellectually generous. One of the most valuable parts of Heather’s mode of supervision for me was being given the space and time to explore and grow intellectually (I remember at my first supervision she just told me to spend the entire first term reading whatever took my fancy and to follow my interests)—but it was also clear that whenever I needed support or advice, she was there to offer it. And this is very much the experience of everyone else who was supervised by Heather with whom I have spoken about it: it’s a recurring theme that her students say that they cannot imagine a better supervisor than Heather. And now, as her colleague, I genuinely believe that Heather represents the best of academia: intellectually rigorous, but also welcoming and supportive, opening the field up to all.

Part I: Old Norse Poetry and Saga

Siân Grønlie

Chapter 1 “There Is Hope for a Tree”: Two Laments on the Loss of Sons Trees, as the anthropologist Maurice Bloch has commented, are “good to think with” and, from the classical period on, our affinity or kinship to trees has provided a way of reflecting on some of the most profound experiences of human life: human mortality, human endurance in the face of suffering and loss, and the organic nature of human relationships, our flesh-and-blood connection to those who are closest to us.¹ Humans, as is often pointed out, are both like and unlike trees; so when Myrrha in Ovid’s Metamorphoses becomes a tree, the transformation seems almost natural, an extension of the human body: Roots thrusting from her toes Spread sideways, firm foundations of a trunk; Her bones gained strength; though marrow still remained, Blood became sap. Her fingers twigs, her arms Branches, her skin was hardened into bark.²

In Ovid and Virgil, trees suffer in recognizably human ways: they weep, they bleed when limbs are torn from their bodies, they bear the scars of what has happened to them and, by their very presence, they “signal grief.”³ In the Aeneid, Troy is uprooted like a mountain ash, while Aeneas, although beset with “unendurable pain,” remains rooted to the ground like an ancient oak.⁴ Moreover, trees have a lifecycle that is recognizably like a human one: they grow up from a seed, mature and bear fruit, grow old, wither, and die. At the same time—unlike individual humans— trees have powers of self-regeneration; even when cut down, their vitality is not 1 Maurice Bloch, “Why Trees, Too, Are Good To Think With: Towards an Anthropology of the Meaning of Life,” in The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism, ed. Laura Rival (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 39–56. 2 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 10.490–94 (p. 240). 3 Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.142, trans. Melville, 229; see Lindsay Ann Reid, “Virgilian and Ovidian Tree Similes in Troilus and Criseyde 2.1373–84,” Explicator 72 (2014): 158–62; Emily Gowers, “Trees and Family Trees in the Aeneid,” Classical Antiquity 31, no. 1 (2011): 87–118; Richard F. Thomas, “Tree Violation and Ambivalence in Virgil,” TAPA 118 (1988): 261–73. 4 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. David West (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 2.626–34, 4.441–49 (pp. 49, 94– 95). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-006

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lost. So trees are also symbols of seasonal and generational renewal in a tradition that goes all the way back to ancient Greece and continues into the Middle Ages: “As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning. So one generation of men will grow old while another dies.”⁵ Trees can stand for lone individuals, beset by grief and yet holding in their pain, but they can also express the organic growth and decay of a family and the renewal of generations over time. By the twelfth century, the image that expresses all of these things is the tree of Jesse: a tree of life that encompasses the whole of salvation history.⁶ In this essay, my focus will be on the tree as an image of loss and renewal in two laments on the death of sons. The first of these is well known. One of the great pleasures of being one of Heather O’Donoghue’s undergraduates was sitting in the Turville-Petre Room in the gloom of a winter’s afternoon with cups of instant coffee (which the librarian chose to overlook), poring over A3-sized photocopies of Old Norse poetry annotated in Heather’s tiny handwriting. One of these was Egill Skalla-Grímsson’s Sonatorrek, “On the Grievous Death of Sons”: the poem that Egill wrote upon the death by drowning of his son Bǫðvarr and in the aftermath of his loss of another son, Gunnarr, to fever. Egill’s saga tells us that, when Egill heard about Bǫðvarr’s death, he shut himself up in his bed-closet to die. Instead, his favorite daughter Þordís persuaded him to compose a poem for Bǫðvarr which eventually assuages his grief.⁷ While the analogy between people and trees runs throughout this poem, there are three images that stick in the imagination. The first is in stanza 4: Því at ætt mín á endr stendr, hræbarnir

5 Homer, Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Chicago of University Press, 2011), 6.146–49 (p. 175). On the history of this simile, see Robert Fitzgerald, “Generations of Leaves: The Poet in the Classical Tradition,” Perspectives USA 5–8 (1954): 68–85; Joseph Luzzi, “As a Leaf on a Branch…: Dante’s Neologisms,” PMLA 125, no. 2 (2010): 322–36. 6 Andrea Worm, “‘Arbor autem humanum genus significat’: Trees of Genealogy and Sacred History in the Twelfth Century,” in The Tree: Symbol, Allegory and Mnemonic Device in Medieval Art and Thought, ed. Pippa Salonius and Andrea Worm (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 35–67; Gerhard B. Ladner, “Vegetation Symbolism and the Concept of Renaissance,” in his Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages: Selected Studies in History and Art, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Studi e Testi, 1983), 2:727–63. 7 Egils saga, ed. Bjarni Einarsson (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2003), 145–54. The main manuscript of Egils saga, Möðruvallabók, contains only the first stanza of Sonatorrek, but the poem is found in full in the seventeenth-century manuscripts Ketilsbók (AM 462 4to) and in AM 453 4to.

Chapter 1 “There Is Hope for a Tree”: Two Laments on the Loss of Sons

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sem hlynir marka, era karskr maðr sá er kǫgla berr frænda hrørs af fletjum niðr. (Because my family stands at an end, beaten to scraps, like forest maples. It is not a cheerful man who bears the limbs of his dead kinsman down from the benches.)

The compound hræbarnir (beaten to scraps) has been understood in different ways: barnir is sometimes emended to barmr as a form of baðmr (a poetic word for “tree” or “branches”), while some editors emend hræ to hregg (storm) so that the compound as a whole translates as “storm-beaten.”⁸ However, hræbarnir does make sense as it stands: hræ here means “scraps” or “chips of wood”—that which is left over when a tree is cut down—but it also means “corpse” in an analogy between a tree trunk and the lifeless body of Egill’s drowned son.⁹ So Egill imagines his ætt (family) come to an end like felled trees in the forest: all that is left is scraps of wood, strewn like corpses across the ground. This analogy is followed through in the gnomic second half of the stanza, where kǫglar perhaps aligns human “joints” with the gnarled “limbs” of a tree, and hrør (body, corpse) recalls the verb hrørna (to wither, decay) which links the end of human life to that of all organic matter. This initial bleak picture of forest trees cut down like corpses is transformed in the following stanzas. In stanza 5, Egill describes how: Þat ber ek út ór orðhofi mærðar timbr máli laufgat. (I bear out from the temple of words the timber of praise leafed with speech.)

In a beautiful image that draws on the power of trees to self-regenerate, the branch that puts forth buds even after it has been severed, Egill endows his poetry—the “timber of praise”—with the ability to make something new out of the raw material of human life, to fill the gaps and absences left by the death of those we

8 For the different emendations of this stanza, see Magnus Olsen, “Commentarii Scaldici,” Arkiv for nordisk filologi 52 (1936): 209–55, at 219–22; Gabriel Turville-Petre, Scaldic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 31; Bjarni Einarsson, Egils saga, 147–48. 9 Helle Degnbol, Bent Chr. Jacobsen, Eva Rode, Christopher Sanders, and Þorbjörg Helgadóttir, Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog / A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (Copenhagen: Arnamagnæanske Kommission, 1989–), https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php?o37296, s.v. hræ.

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love; he celebrates the capacity of language for renewal and rebirth in the face of mortality and decline. While the “uncheerful” man of stanza 3 bears away wood that is dead and dry, the poet bears “leafed timber,” like Homer’s “live timber” that comes to life again every spring. This life-affirming poetics is echoed towards the end of the poem, when Egill recreates his family tree at its height: Þat man ek enn, es upp um hóf í goðheim Gauta spjalli ættar ask, þann er óx af mér, ok kynvið kvánar minnar. (st. 21) (I still remember, when the friend of the Gautar raised up to the world of the gods the ashtree of my family which grew from me and the rooted kin-tree of my wife.)

This is sometimes taken to refer to the moment when Óðinn (“friend of the Gautar”) took from Egill in death his sons Gunnarr (“the ash-tree of my family”) and Bǫðvarr (“the rooted kin-tree of my wife”), although the idea of being lifted up into the world of gods at death is unusual.¹⁰ However, in view of the fact that it is presented as a distant memory (“I still remember”) and that the next stanza recounts Óðinn’s betrayal of Egill’s friendship as if this came afterwards, it seems more likely that Egill is here remembering how his “family” tree once flourished, when it stretched from its roots in the ground (viðr as “rooted tree”) right up to the heavens, in contrast to how it is beaten down in stanza 3. Through poetry, Egill recreates the image of this living, growing tree, so that the poem moves backwards from the scraps of the present—an apparent dead-end—through the “leafed” timber of poetry, to the tall tree towering erect once more in Egill’s memory and in his verse. This recuperation of what is lost through poetry is the “bǫlva bœtr” (reparation for ills) which Óðinn has given Egill as poet: the ability, through poetry, to contain his overwhelming pain, to restore the continuity that death has threatened, and to find the strength to live on.¹¹ Recently, some persuasive readings of this tree imagery in Sonatorrek have tied it closely both to Old Norse poetry and mythology, and to the ecology of Iceland. Michael Bintley has shown how characters in Eddic verse often describe 10 Michael Bintley, “Life-Cycles of Men and Trees in Sonatorrek,” Opticon1826 6 (2009): 1–3. 11 For an account of how Sonatorrek allows Egill to move through the stages of grieving, see Sif Rikhardsdóttir, Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts (Cambridge: Brewer, 2017), 85–97.

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themselves in terms of plant life, and two examples in particular throw light on Egill’s poem: the parallel in Hávamál between a fir tree without bark and needles and a man without friends, and Guðrún’s image of herself in Hamðismál as a lone tree from which the branches have been severed.¹² Trees are depicted as vulnerable and sentient: the second image in particular derives its power from the likeness between branches and human limbs, so that the gentle pastoral image of a woman collecting firewood is violently supplanted by the brutality of bleeding limbs. Likewise, in skaldic verse, tree kennings are used of both men and women, and sometimes these metaphors are extended at length, so that the warrior is imagined splitting heads like tree stumps or chopping down bark-less birches.¹³ Building on this, Christopher Abram has argued that plants and people are not ontologically distinguished in Norse paganism: Egill’s kynviðr (kin-tree) is not a metaphor for his kin so much as a recognition of the kinship between people and trees.¹⁴ We see this in the creation myth of Askr and Embla, in which—according to Snorri—the first humans are formed from driftwood that has washed up on the shore.¹⁵ For Abram, then, Sonatorrek is not just about Egill’s loss of his sons: Bǫðvarr washed up dead on the beach in an “ironic inversion” of the creation myth, the cutting short of Egill’s family line like a forest that has been ruthlessly felled. Rather, it is a “nature-cultural attempt to come to terms with deforestation”: the scraps of wood that mark the end of Egill’s family line are also all that remain of the dense forest and brushwood that once covered Iceland’s shores, before the early settlers cut it down.¹⁶ In this essay, though, I would like to investigate a further possibility: that Egill was influenced not just by Norse myth, tree kennings, and Iceland’s ecological disaster, but also by another lament on the loss of sons that circulated more or less

12 The Poetic Edda, vol. 1, Heroic Poems, ed. Ursula Dronke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 161–62; Michael Bintley, “Plant Life in the Poetic Edda,” in Sensory Perception in the Medieval West, ed. Simon C. Thompson and Michael Bintley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 227–44. 13 Michael Bintley, Trees in the Religions of Early Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), 129–36. 14 Christopher Abram, Evergreen Ash: Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 92–93. Abram draws here on the work of Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011). 15 For an alternative interpretation of this myth, in which Askr and Embla are imagined as rooted trees growing from the earth, see Anders Hultgård, “The Askr and Embla Myth in a Comparative Perspective,” in Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspective: Origins, Changes and Interaction, ed. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert, and Catharina Raudvere (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006), 58–62. 16 Abram, Evergreen Ash, 99–102.

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contemporaneously with his own. This lament too is part of a larger story: it is spoken by a father on the loss of his two young sons, a father whose grief—like Egill’s —feels so unbearably intense that he contemplates suicide. This father too compares himself to a tree that has been stripped of its branches, which are beaten and tossed about by strong winds. The father in question is St. Eustace, also known as Plácidus, and his Latin passio, well known in Carolingian circles from the eighth century on, was translated into Old English towards the end of the tenth century, and became one of the earliest saints’ lives to be translated into Old Icelandic, as well as the first translated life to become the subject of a skaldic poem.¹⁷ It is extremely unusual to find a lament in a saint’s life, for the perhaps obvious reason that death, for the saint, is a victory to be celebrated, an entry into eternal life. But the Life of Eustace is no ordinary saint’s life. With roots in the Greek novel and in Eastern mythology, it tells the story not of an individual, but of a family who are separated and then reunited, before they undergo martyrdom and sanctification en famille. ¹⁸ After his baptism, Eustace—like Job—is tested by God through the loss of his wealth, social status, and family. He goes into exile with his wife and children, but his wife is abducted by a pirate, leaving him alone with his two boys. When they come to a deep river, he carries one son over and then returns to fetch the second; mid-river, he sees a lion carry off his second son, then turns back to see a wolf carrying off the first. In his grief and sorrow, he thinks first to drown himself, but divine grace strengthens him with patience. Instead, he speaks a lament in which he grieves for his wife and sons and for the loss of his previous way of life. In the Latin passio, his lament is in prose rather than verse, but it is carefully patterned into three sections of three, clearly marked by repetition and parallelism.¹⁹ The first section consists of a series of three apostrophes—beginning “Heu mihi” (Woe to me), “Heu me” (Woe is me), “Heu me” (Woe is me)—which

17 Robin Norris, “Reversal of Fortune, Response and Reward in the Old English Passion of Saint Eustace,” in Anonymous Interpolations in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, Old English Newsletter Subsidia 35 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), 97–117; John Tucker, “St. Eustace in Iceland: On the Origins, Structure and Possible Influence of the Plácitus saga,” in Les sagas de chevaliers (riddarasögur), ed. Régis Boyer (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris, 1985), 327–39. 18 On the origins and narrative motifs of the Latin legend, see Thomas J. Heffernan, “An Analysis of the Narrative Motifs in the Legend of St. Eustace,” Medievalia et Humanistica 6 (1975): 63–89; Pascal Boulhol, Anagnorismos: La scène de reconnaissance dans l’hagiographie antique et médiévale (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1996), 80–84; Elke Koch, “A Staggering Vision: The Mediating Animal in the Textual Tradition of St. Eustace,” Interfaces 5 (2018): 31–48. 19 The standard edition of the Latin Life is Boninus Mombritius, Sanctuarium seu Vitae Sanctorum, 2 vols. (Paris: apud Albertum Fontemoing, 1910), 1:466–73, with the lament at 469.

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contrasts Eustace’s happy and successful past to his painful losses in the present: “nudatus sum” (I am stripped bare), “desolatus sum” (I am made desolate), “relictus sum” (I am abandoned). The second section compares Eustace’s experience with that of Job, complaining that Eustace has suffered more than him: three times, it pits “ille” (he, that one) against “ego” (I). Eustace points out that Job got to keep his dunghill, his wife, and his friends, while Eustace has lost all of these. The final section is a threefold plea to God in prayer: for forgiveness, for “guard” over his speech and his heart (echoing Psalm 141:3–4), and for rest from his tribulations. As in Sonatorrek, Eustace’s lament is given coherence through a succession of images of trees. Eustace begins by comparing himself to a flourishing tree that has now been stripped bare: “Heu mihi, quondam pollenti ut arbor : modo uero nudatus sum” (Woe to me, once like a powerful tree, truly now I am stripped naked). Then, in the comparison with Job, Eustace uses the metaphor of branches and roots to describe the family as an organic whole from which he has been cruelly cut off: “Ille et si ramis caruit : radicem tamen uxoris respiciens secum consolabatur. Ego uero infelix undique sine radice factus sum” (He, though without branches, yet consoled himself by looking upon the root of his wife. I truly unhappy in every way am made without a root). He completes the second part of the lament with a simile that recalls the opening, except that now he is no longer like a tree whose branches have been cut off, but like branches that have been cut from the tree: “sum similis ramis in deserto : qui undique procellis conquassantur” (I am like branches in the desert, which are beaten on every side by violent winds). His misery has expanded to encompass not just the tree, but the deserted landscape in which it once stood, an inhospitable wilderness that the wind strips bare. It is only when Eustace has reached this point of utter and apparently irreversible desolation that he finally turns to God and seeks consolation in prayer. The parallels between Egill and Eustace are striking: both have lost two sons, both wish to die, and both are in some sense diverted from that wish through transforming their pain into words. Although Eustace’s lament lacks Egill’s focus on poetry as a force for renewal, both share the contrast between the past tree that flourished and the present tree that is stripped bare. In stanza 7, Egill describes himself as “ofsnauðr at ástvinum” (cut off from dear friends), just as Eustace describes himself as “nudatus” (stripped bare) and laments his friendless state. Eustace speaks of Job’s sons as “ramis” (branches) and his wife as “radicem” (root), while Egill speaks of his “ættar ask” (family ash-tree) and “kynvið kvánar minnar” (the rooted kin-tree of my wife). Eustace’s final simile of “ramis in deserto qui undique procellis conquassantur” (branches in the wilderness, which are beaten on every side by violent winds) is strikingly like Egill’s “hræbarnir hlynir marka,” especially if one emends “hræbarnir” to hreggbarnir (storm-beaten)

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and/or translates mǫrk as wilderness rather than forest (it is used elsewhere to translate Latin desertus and eremus): trees of the wilderness beaten to shreds, or storm-beaten trees of the wilderness.²⁰ So Eustace’s lament appears to end where Egill’s lament begins. At the same time, through voicing their pain, both Egill and Eustace are able to find a way to live with the fact of human mortality. The sources of Eustace’s tree imagery are primarily biblical: he draws on the poetry of the Hebrew Bible, where people and trees are viewed as interconnected and interdependent (as they are in Norse mythology).²¹ There are close parallels in the Psalms, in the book of Wisdom and in Daniel, but the immediate source is the book of Job:²² Lignum habet spem: si præcisum fuerit, rursum virescit, et rami ejus pullulant. Si senuerit in terra radix ejus, et in puluere emortuus fuerit truncus illius, ad odorem aquæ germinabit, et faciet comam, quasi cum primum plantatum est. Homo vero cum mortuus fuerit, et nudatus, atque consumptus, ubi, quæso, est ? Destruxit me undique, et pereo : et quasi evulsæ arbori abstulit spem meam. (A tree hath hope: if it be cut, it groweth green again, and the boughs thereof sprout. If its root be old in the earth, and its stock be dead in the dust: at the scent of water, it shall spring, and bring forth leaves, as when it was first planted. But man when he shall be dead, and stripped and consumed, I pray you, where is he? He hath destroyed me on every side, and I am lost, and he hath taken away my hope, as from a tree that is plucked up.)

The first image poignantly contrasts the lives of trees and humans: while a felled tree retains, mysteriously, the power to self-regenerate, individual humans do not. In the second image, Job compares himself to a tree that has been utterly uprooted, without hope of restoration, just as Eustace envisages himself as without root, just dry branches tossed by the wind. At the same time, the bleakness of Eustace’s lament is tempered by the reader’s knowledge that this is not the end of his story: his wife and sons will be restored. The wilderness is not his final destination, but a place of testing and sanctification. The bare tree is a reminder that life, like nature, has seasons: Eustace flourished once, and he will flourish again.

20 Degnbol et al., Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog / A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, s.v. mörk. 21 See, for example, Kirsten Nielsen, There Is Hope for a Tree: The Tree as Metaphor in Isaiah (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988); Patricia Tull, “Persistent Vegetative States: People as Plants and Plants as People in Isaiah,” in The Desert Will Bloom: Poetic Visions in Isaiah, ed. A. Joseph Everyson and Hyun Chul Paul Kim (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), 17–34. 22 Psalm 1:1–4; Wisdom 4:4; Daniel 4:10–23; Job 14:7–10 and 19:10.

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In the Latin hexametrical versions of Eustace’s life, the lament is usually shortened, leaving only the first of these three tree images.²³ In the Old English translation, however, Eustace’s lament is given in full, and the tree images are not only all included but actually expanded so that the first connects more closely to the last:²⁴ Wala wa hu ic nu greow . swa þæt treow þe mid wæstmum bið fægre gefrætwod . and eom nu swa þæt twig . þæt bið acorfen of þam treowe . and aworpen on micclum ystum . and eghwanon gecnissed [my emphases]. (Woe is me, how I have now grown like the tree that is beautifully adorned with fruit and now am like a twig that is cut from the tree and cast into great gales and battered on every side.) Ic witodlice æghwanane eom ungesælig buton westme […] ac eom gelic þam bogum þe on westene æghwanane mid ystum slægene [synt] [my emphases]. (I truly am unhappy in every way without fruit/offspring […] but I am like the boughs in the desert that are beaten around on every side by the gales.)

As Robin Norris has commented, these images form an envelope pattern around the central lament that both orders and contains it. The vocabulary of root and branch has gone, but the translator has drawn out instead the implications of fruitfulness and the double meaning of wæstm as both “fruit” and “offspring.” Although the lament is in prose, it is given a poetic feel by the use of alliteration and various types of rhyme and assonance (emboldened), as well as through the echoic patterns (italicized). It looks as if the translator has recognized and drawn out the close affinity of Eustace’s lament to Old English elegiac poetry. Norris has argued that one of the purposes of the Old English Eustace is to warn against excessive tristitia—sorrow at the loss of worldly things.²⁵ Yet the inclusion of the full lament together with the expanded tree imagery suggests that the translator’s aim may have been more complex. It is so unusual to find a lament at the heart of a saint’s life that it must at some level serve to sanction, if not to sanctify, the importance of creating space for human grief, for vocalizing and at the same time containing it.²⁶ Eustace may end his lament with a plea to God to

23 See, for example, Ernst Dümmler, “Rythmen aus der carolingischen Zeit,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 23 (1879): 261–80, at 275–76. 24 Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. Walter W. Skeat, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 2:189–212. 25 Norris, “Reversal of Fortune,” 99–102. 26 Compare Mary Ramsey’s discussion of Old English elegiac poetry in “Dustsceawung: Texting the Dead in the Old English Elegies,” in Anglo-Saxon Emotions: Reading the Heart in Old English Lan-

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guard his lips, but within these boundaries he is still allowed to voice in full his anger, his desolation, and his despair. It is only after he has recognized and rehearsed in words the reality of his loss that he can move on to the next stage of his life. The expansion of the tree imagery in the Old English is not matched in any of the Old Norse translations. There are four different versions of Plácidus saga in Old Norse, but disappointingly only two of these (the A and C version) contain his lament, and only one (the A version) retains the opening image. In the C version, Eustace describes himself as deprived of “bǽdi bỏrn og kona” (both children and wife) but does not speak directly about his emotions.²⁷ The only full version of the lament, then, is in A, exemplified by the seventeenth-century manuscript Sth. papp. 8vo nr. 8 (A2), since the medieval manuscript AM 655 4to X (A1) breaks off dramatically while Eustace is still mid-river. A2 keeps only the first of the three tree images: “Harmur er mier, er fordum daga blomgadyst sem hid fegursta gras. enn nu em eg sem forn fauskur” (Woe is me, who in days of old blossomed like the fairest grass, and now I am like old dry wood).²⁸ The flourishing tree, however, has been replaced with grass, probably through the influence of the familiar wording of Psalm 89:5–6. Instead of using the lifespan of a single tree, the lament juxtaposes two different images: on the one hand grass that springs up as quickly as youth and, on the other, an old dry log (fauskr)—an image that figures the effects of grief in terms of premature aging. The tree image has also disappeared in Plácitusdrápa, the skaldic poem about Eustace, despite its use of tree kennings for people, which one might expect the poet to have exploited here. In this poem, the lament is concentrated into a single stanza and two helmingar (half stanzas): the central stanza focuses on the contrast between Eustace and Job, while each helming contains an elaborate kenning for God.²⁹ The two helmingar of the central stanza mirror each other: Job was “at home,” Eustace is “in exile”; Job’s friends came to visit, Eustace is far from his friends; Job has his wife with him, Eustace’s wife is away. The kenning for Job— “keeper of the fire of the hawk-table”—evokes just for a moment, before it resolves, a cozy domestic interior (the fire, the table laid ready for visitors, one’s wife) that contrasts painfully with Eustace’s utter desolation:

guage, Literature and Culture, ed. Alice Jorgensen and Frances McCormack (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 45–66. 27 Plácidus saga, ed. John Tucker, Editiones Arnamagnæanæ B. 31 (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1998), 39. 28 Plácidus saga, 37. 29 “Plácitusdrápa,” ed. Jonna Louis-Jensen and Tarrin Wills, in Poetry on Christian Subjects. Part I: The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 179–220, at 197–99.

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Hyrgeymi frák heima (hans vitjuðu) sitja – kvôn vas hǫlds með hônum – hauksborðs (vinir forðum). Ek em í útlegð stokkinn afkárr vinum fjarri; kvôns braut frá mér; mína meindýr gripu sveina. (st. 27) (I have heard that he sat at home—friends came to visit him, the man’s wife was with him— the keeper of the fire of the hawk-table. I am driven into exile, distraught, far from my friends; my wife has been taken from me; fierce beasts have seized my sons.)

His losses accumulate across the lines in ascending order of magnitude: exile, loss of friends, the absence of his wife, and finally the cruel loss of his boys. Yet the emotional impact of all this on Eustace is packed into a single word: “afkárr.” The meaning of afkárr is not at all clear: the Lexicon poeticum translates it as “very powerful,” “violent,” or (in this occurrence only) “distraught.”³⁰ Guðrún is described as “afkár dís” when she sacrifices her two sons to Atli, where Dronke suggests that it means “exceedingly (and for a woman, unnaturally) forceful in her purposes.”³¹ The use of this word in two contexts involving the death of children does suggest that it relates to an extreme or violent state of emotion. CleasbyVigfússon notes a possible connection to modern Icelandic kári (gust of wind), which would link Eustace’s emotions to the fury of the elements, as in the Latin “procellis conquassantur” (where procella means “violent wind, storm” but also “tumult,” “violence,” or “commotion”).³² There is, in fact, a hint of this inner turmoil in the kennings for God found on either side of the central stanza: “éls […] frægr valderir foldar” (famous ruler of the land of the storm) and “gagls leiðar […] ítrs stillis” (powerful calmer of the path of the goose). If an internal storm rages in the Eustace of the skaldic poem, it is fully contained by a God who holds in check the extremes of his emotions. It there is a connection between Egill’s and Eustace’s laments, it clearly isn’t mediated through the Old Norse translations. This makes sense if we assume that the historical Egill, who died towards the end of the tenth century, really

30 Sveinbjörn Egilsson, Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis (Ordbog over det norskislandske Skjaldesprog), 2nd ed. rev. Finnur Jónsson (Copenhagen: Møller, 1913–1916), s.v. afkárr (“meget kraftig, hæftig, voldsom” and, in the case of Plácitus, “uhyggelig til mode, oprørt el. lign.”). 31 The Poetic Edda, vol. 1, Heroic Poems, ed. Dronke, 10–11 and notes at 69. 32 Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2nd ed. with a supplement by Sir William A. Craigie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), s.v. afkárr adj.

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did compose the lament.³³ But could Egill have known this story of another bereaved father grieving the loss of his two sons? The Life of St. Eustace circulated widely in Carolingian circles from the eighth century on, and this would not be the first time that Carolingian literary influences have been discerned in Egill’s poetry. Russell Poole has argued persuasively in a series of articles that Egill’s poetry was shaped by knowledge and imitation of Carolingian models, and these include poetic laments that match his own in their intensity and introspection.³⁴ In the case of Sonatorrek, Poole argues not just for the influence of Carolingian lament, but specifically of Old English poetry. He suggests that what we see here is “a cultural grafting of, on the one side, ancestral narratives and ideologemes with, on the other side, Christian scripture and doctrine, the latter as cultivated in ninthand tenth-century Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon centres.”³⁵ Larrington, likewise, has noted parallels between the tree images in Egill’s poem and those found in Old English wisdom poetry.³⁶ Finally, Torfi Tulinius has suggested a link between Egill’s “timber of praise leafed with speech” in stanza 3 and Aaron’s rod in Numbers 17:1–9.³⁷ While he argues that Sonatorrek must have been written in the thirteenth century, this is not a necessary outcome: the blossoming of Aaron’s rod is, for example, discussed in Ælfric’s tenth-century homilies and so was familiar in an Anglo-Saxon cultural context.³⁸ The related motif of the staff that buds and flowers into an ash tree (like Egill’s “ættar ask”) appears frequently in Anglo-Latin saints’ lives, including the lives of Dunstan, Kenelm, and Eadwold.³⁹ This all suggests that Egill may have first encountered the motif of the blossoming rod or staff in the literary culture of Anglo-Saxon England. 33 On the historical Egill’s authorship of Sonatorrek, see the discussion in Russell Poole, “‘Non enim possum plorare nec lamenta fundere’: Sonatorrek in a Tenth-Century Context til minningar um Stefán Karlsson,” in Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature, ed. Jane Tolmie and M. J. Toswell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 173–99, at 177–81. 34 Russell Poole, “Non enim possum plorare,” 173–99; Poole, “Ekphrasis: Its ‘Prolonged Echoes’ in Scandinavia,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 3 (2007): 245–67; Poole, “Scholars and Skalds: The Northwards Diffusion of Carolingian Poetic Fashions,” Gripla 24 (2013): 7–44. 35 Poole, “Non enim possum plorare,” 198. 36 Carolyne Larrington, “Egill’s Longer Poems,” in Introductory Essays on Egils saga and Njáls saga, ed. John Hines and Desmond Slay (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1992), 49–63, at 57–58. 37 Torfi Tulinius, “The Prosimetrum Form 2: Verses as an Influence in Saga Composition and Interpretation,” in Skaldsagas: Text, Vocation and Desire in the Icelandic Sagas of Poets, ed. Russell Poole (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2001), 191–217, at 195–96. 38 Aelfric, “De Natale Domini,” in Aelfric’s Catholic Homilies. The Second Series: Text, ed. Malcolm Godden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 4. 39 Della Hooke, Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore and Landscape (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), 77.

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If Egill did know the lament in the Life of St. Eustace, he is likely to have come across it at the court of King Æthelstan, although the Old English translation of the Life of Eustace probably postdates Egill’s time in England. Æthelstan was well known as a patron of poetry, and his court was celebrated for its intellectual and scholarly pursuits, and the lively exchange of ideas, objects, and manuscripts.⁴⁰ It was strikingly cosmopolitan in character, and he had particularly close contacts with Carolingian rulers through marriages and other alliances.⁴¹ Æthelstan also had “a substantial, indeed a remarkable, interest in the cult of saints” and owned his own sizable collection of relics.⁴² While I can find no direct connection between Æthelstan and St. Eustace, there is an intriguing connection between this saint and one of Æthelstan’s young advisors, Æthelwold, who formed part of his circle from the late 920s on, overlapping with Egill’s stay.⁴³ Æthelwold later became abbot of Abingdon, and Abingdon was one of the few places in England where we know that St. Eustace was venerated; there were both relics and an altar dedicated to him there.⁴⁴ Later, in 970, while Æthelwold was bishop of Winchester, he made a donation to the monastery of Peterborough which included a vita of St. Eustace.⁴⁵ Lapidge has argued that this may well be the hexametrical version of the Eustace story in Bodleian Library, Laud Misc 410 (sx/xi).⁴⁶ St. Eustace would have enjoyed great popular appeal in Æthelstan’s circle, as he did among the Carolingian ruling classes: as a virtuous layman with aristocratic status and a leading military role (to which he is briefly restored after his tribulations), he offered a prominent model for lay sanctity. Moreover, the close focus of the passio on his love for his wife and sons made a refreshing contrast with those saints whose virtue consisted in their rejection of family, wealth, and social status. No doubt the literary popularity of Eustace in early Christian Iceland is due precisely to the things that make him so unconventional a saint. In both Egill’s and Eustace’s laments, trees are useful “to think with”: they provide a way of reflecting on loss and renewal, about the ways in which human mor-

40 Sarah Foot, Æthelstan: The First King of England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 110–17; Michael Lapidge, “Some Latin Poems as Evidence for the Reign of Athelstan,” Anglo-Saxon England 9 (1981): 61–98, reprinted in his Anglo-Latin Literature, 900–1066 (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), 87–104. 41 Foot, Æthelstan, 91–93; Poole, “Non enim possum plorare,” 183–84. 42 Foot, Æthelstan, 188–98. 43 Foot, Æthelstan, 107–8. 44 Michael Lapidge, “Æthelwold and the Vita S. Eustachii,” in Scire litteras: Forschungen zum mittelalterlichen Geistesleben, ed. Sigrid Krämer and Michael Bernhard (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1988), 255–65. 45 Lapidge, “Æthelwold,” 255–56. 46 Lapidge, “Æthelwold,” 264.

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tality is part of larger natural cycles of growth, maturation, and decay. While the lone tree in the wilderness—vulnerable to wind and storm, its branches strewn about by the elements—creates a bleak picture of human isolation in the face of death and destruction, this is not the final word. The tree also offers hope and healing: hope that the dry branch will bud, that the severed stump will put forth shoots, and that new words will burst into life like leaves in spring. For Eustace, this hope is fulfilled in the restoration of his lost wife and sons; for Egill, it is poetic, the building of a lasting monument to his loss. Probably Egill didn’t have to know Eustace’s lament to find a way, through roots, leaves, and branches, of coming to terms with his grief. But perhaps he also harbored memories of a saint he had heard about in England, another father who, in the face of unbearable loss, sought and found comfort in lament.

Annemari Ferreira

Chapter 2 A Wave of Sound: Rhythmicizing the Formal Artifice of Skaldic Poetry Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves suck back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow.¹

It is clear from the textual evidence available to the modern reader that the perception of skaldic verse as crafted or artificed is already, more-or-less overtly, demonstrated by skalds and medieval grammarians concerned with skaldic poetry. This perception is expressed in the self-reflexive language of the poetry as well as the terminology employed in later medieval treatises on poetic subjects that actively draw on the vocabulary of craftsmanship (particularly relating to metal- and wood-work).² Certain skalds refer to their compositional process as a “forging” (smíðandi) or a “building” (hlaðandi) of praise,³ while Snorri, in a later medieval context, employs an illustrative term derived from metal-work—that is, stál (steel) —in Háttatal to denote the inlay of intercalary clauses within skaldic stanzas.⁴

Acknowledgment: I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the editors, Siân Grønlie and Carl Phelpstead, for their meticulous corrections and helpful suggestions. I must also express my eternal gratitude to Heather O’Donoghue, without whose tremendous insight, knowledge, and kindness, so generously offered throughout the course of my doctoral studies, I should never have completed the work which constitutes the bulk of this essay. 1 From “Dover Beach,” in Matthew Arnold, New Poems (London: Macmillan, 1867), 112. 2 For a detailed account of this semantic transferal see especially, Margaret Clunies Ross, A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 84–91. 3 See, for example, King Haraldr harðráði, Gamanvísur, ed. Kari Ellen Gade, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2: From ca. 1035 to ca. 1300, ed. Kari Ellen Gade, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 35–41, st. 4, p. 39; Hallar-Stein, Rekstefja, ed. Rolf Stavnem, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1: From Mythical Times to ca. 1035, ed. Diana Whaley, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 893–938, st. 1, p. 897; and Egill Skallagrímsson, Arinbjarnarkviða, in Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, ed. Sigurður Nordal, Íslenzk fornrit 2 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1933), 267. 4 Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Háttatal, ed. Anthony Faulkes, 2nd ed. (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, University of London, 2007), 10. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-007

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This essay will be concerned with the nature of such skaldic craftsmanship. I will, in particular, explore the possible ways in which poetic artistry may have been conceptualized by Norse poets and audiences. To do so I will take as my starting point the recurrent Norse collocation, sundrlaust eða samfast orð (sundered or continuous words), which distinguishes between poetry as continuous or bound speech, and prose or ordinary language as loose or sundered speech. Unlike the self-reflexive language surrounding skald-craft mentioned above, this characterization of poetic or prosaic speaking is not expressed by early medieval skalds themselves. It is instead employed, for the most part, by the authors and scribes of later medieval texts. The earliest extant occurrence can be found in a passage from Steins þáttr Skaptasonar which appears in the thirteenth-century manuscript Holm Perg 2 4to. In this reference Steinn is said to rebuke King Óláfr inn helgi Haraldsson in both sundrlꜹsum orþom oc samfꜹstom orþom (disconnected speech and connected speech).⁵ The collocation also makes a partial appearance in Óláfs saga helga in the same manuscript where Sigvatr Þórðarson’s excellent skaldic ability, though not explicitly called samfast orð in this instance, is nevertheless contrasted with his lack of agility in what the narrator terms sundrlaust orð. ⁶ Other early manifestations survive in a number of fourteenth-century manuscripts, including Flateyjarbók (GKS 1005 fol.) and AM 232 fol.⁷ Though there is no direct evidence to support the notion that Viking Age skalds conceived of their poetry in a similar vein, the relative formulaic consistency with which the collocation is configured in these later sources does suggest earlier origins. If, as John McKinnell posits, collocations tend to be conservative in nature and “preserve traditional […] attitudes,” it does not seem wholly unreasonable to apply the distinction between poetic and “everyday” speech that the expression articulates to a reading of skaldic artifice.⁸ This distinction is interesting not only because it potentially illuminates a medieval Norse perspective on the nature of poetry, but also because the idea that poems are separate entities in which the use of language is different from an ev-

5 Saga Óláfs konungs hins helga: Den store saga om Olav den hellige efter pergamenthåndskrift i Kungliga Biblioteket i Stockholm nr. 2 4to. (1–2), ed. Oscar Albert Johnsen and Jón Helgason (Oslo: Dybwad, 1941), 374. 6 Saga Óláfs konungs hins helga, ed. Johnsen and Jón Helgason, 454. 7 See Halldórs þáttr Snorrasonar, in Flateyjarbok: En samling af norske konge-sagaer med indskudte mindre fortællinger om begivenheder i og udenfor Norge samt annaler, ed. Carl Rikard Unger and Guðbrandur Vigfússon, Norske historiske kildeskriftfonds skrifter 4 (Christiania: P. T. Mallings Forlagsboghandel, 1860), 1:507. See also Jóns saga baptista II, in Postola sögur: Legendariske Fortællinger om Apostlernes Liv, deres Kamp for Kristendommens Udbredelse, samt deres Martyrdød, ed. Carl Rikard Unger (Christiania: B. M. Bentzen, 1874), 884. 8 See John McKinnell, “Eddic Poetry and the Uses of Anonymity,” in Old Norse Poetry in Performance, ed. Brian McMahon and Annemari Ferreira (London: Routledge, 2022), 117.

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eryday use of language (what I have elsewhere called, quotidian language)⁹ is reflected in modern theories surrounding the nature of artistic expression more generally. Mikhail Bakhtin, for example, notes that “artistic representation” is differentiated from “everyday speech” through an active “[recognition of ] images lying behind the isolated utterances of social language” and these images are likened to the “hewn and carved” products of a “sculptor’s chisel.”¹⁰ William Rickert too notes that poetic craftsmanship (employing “intentionally artificial, conventional device[s]”) has the ability to separate poetic language from daily speech: The language becomes significant as an aesthetic object worthy of attention and not merely a vehicle for the conveyance of a message. Thus, [the poem is set] apart from ordinary conversation; […] isolating it from “dailiness”; and it signals “that language is going to be used in an unusual, often serious and memorable, way.”¹¹

In a Norse context this distinction between quotidian and poetic language, according to the above-mentioned collocation at least, seems to be conceived in terms of verbal separation and connectivity.¹² What one might tentatively call the phenomenological perception of “connectedness” within the poetic artifact has important implications for the ways in which we read the formal components of skaldic poetry. In particular, it allows us to approach skaldic material through a complex understanding of rhythm which seems, more than any other “intentionally artificial device” employed by skalds, to situate poetry as a divergent entity within the verbal soundscape of regular speech acts. A more complex approach to rhythm is one which does not restrict an understanding of rhythmic artifice to that which is constituted by metrical elements relating to poetic pulse (meter being a concept with which rhythm is often conflated). Poetic rhythm must, instead, be understood as a phenomenon shaped by—and experienced through the perception of—the tensions that exist between discreet temporal units within a verbal utterance. It occupies, as it were, the temporal thread between (and throughout) moments that are connected within an artistic framework. These units may or may not also constitute components that give rise to a

9 Annemari Ferreira, “The Politics of Performance in Viking Age Skaldic Poetry,” DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. 10 Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 355–58. 11 William Rickert, “Structural Functions of Rhyme and the Performance of Poetry,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 62, no. 3 (October 1, 1976): 250–55, at 251. 12 Relevant, too, is the case Hallvard Lie makes for the aesthetic use of kennings in skaldic poetry as purposefully “a-naturalistic.” See, “Natur” og “unatur” I skaldekunsten,’ in Hallvard Lie, Om sagakunst og skaldskap: Utvalgte avhandlinger (Øvre Ervik: Alvheim & Eide, 1982), 201–315.

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distinct poetic pulse and meter: that is to say, such units may, if metrical, be measured, repetitive, and predictable. It is precisely this perception of connecting tensions between temporal units in the poetic frame—bestowed on the poetic utterance by its rhythmicity—which distinguishes the utterance from surrounding quotidian speech acts and seems to be so clearly conveyed by the notion of “connected” or “bound” (that is, samfastr) speech. Aside from meter, certain poetic characteristics such as tone and symbol can also act as “rhythmic agents” (a term employed by Susanne Langer in her consideration of the correlation between form and rhythm in art).¹³ The prelude to Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold (1869) is a prime aural example of how a strong rhythmical character can be shaped and sustained by such agents as dynamic variance and orchestral texture as opposed to a strict metrical pulse, whilst Joseph Mallord William Turner’s Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842) demonstrates how rhythm can be produced even in a seemingly temporally static visual medium such as painting. Langer’s conceptualization of “rhythmic agents” stems, notably, from her understanding of rhythm as “a relation between tensions rather than [the] matter of equal divisions of time”¹⁴—a view echoed in the writing of Stuart Grant who approaches the subject of rhythm from a phenomenological perspective: Grant describes rhythm as a phenomenon which shapes, directs, holds and gives forth the actuated events of our movements, to which the actuated events of our movements bear witness, and which, although […] partially co-constituting reciprocal relationship[s] with the actuated events of our movements, is not, in its invisible, driving, shaping, directional, irreal substance, the same thing as the actual events of our movements, but rather their condition.¹⁵

One can therefore conclude, as Grant does, that the nature of the rhythmic “condition” is one in which respective intensifications and relaxations of sound (and/or light) contribute to a larger “temporal structure [… which] is anticipatory, a lived time of expectations [… and hence] a futural essence.”¹⁶ This description of the rhythmic condition is useful when attempting to discern those formal features of skaldic verse that contribute to poetic rhythmicity and, hence, to skaldic artifice. Indeed, Langer provides the criteria for these features in much the same terms as

13 Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), 129. 14 Langer, Feeling and Form, 129. 15 Stuart Grant, “Some Suggestions for a Phenomenology of Rhythm,” in Philosophical and Cultural Theories of Music, ed. Eduardo de la Fuente and Peter Murphy, Social and Critical Theory 8 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 153. 16 Grant, “Some Suggestions,” 165.

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Grant when she states that “[e]verything that prepares a future creates rhythm; everything that begets or intensifies expectation, including the expectation of sheer continuity, prepares the future.”¹⁷ I would suggest, therefore, that those formal elements of skaldic verse that can be shown to “prepare a future” in a similar anticipatory fashion can be said to contribute to the rhythmic mechanism of skaldic verse, and hence, to its formal artifice. As I shall attempt to demonstrate presently, these features in the context of skaldic poetry are: meter (to which the subfeatures of stress, alliteration, rhyme, and syllabic length contribute), grammatical structure, and framing conventions.

Meter Meter is the most conspicuous rhythm-contributing element of skaldic verse and can certainly be said, in the words of Mieczyslaw Kolinski, to provide “a framework for rhythmic design” in skaldic poetry.¹⁸ Such a metrical framework is defined by Martin Clayton as one which is “temporal […] based on the differentiation between individual pulses [by which Clayton means ‘regular beats perceived by the listener to fall at equal intervals of time’] in a sequence, in a regular and therefore predictable manner.”¹⁹ It is exactly this predictability of the metrical unit that, in the context of temporal co-connectivity or co-tension with other such units, provides the recurring anticipations necessary for the experience of rhythm. In those musics and poetries that employ meter, these predictable units are often understood as: a repeating pattern of “strong” and “weak” beats—although these terms may be misleading in that this relative strength is not necessarily marked by dynamic accenting or de-accenting, but may be a quality inferred on the basis of perceived structural functions.²⁰

In much poetry such relative strength is based on the natural syllabic or moraic stresses within words and syntactic stresses within sentences that can be arranged to produce distinct metrical pulses. In this way a relatively quotidian sentence such as, “the bird there was chirping upon the branch,” may produce iambic pentamet-

17 Langer, Feeling and Form, 129. 18 Mieczyslaw Kolinski, “A Cross-Cultural Approach to Metro-Rhythmic Patterns,” Ethnomusicology 17, no. 3 (1973): 494–506, at 499. 19 Martin R. L. Clayton, “Free Rhythm: Ethnomusicology and the Study of Music without Metre,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 59, no. 2 (1996): 323–32, at 327, 328. 20 Clayton, “Free Rhythm,” 328.

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er when rearranged, with a more-or-less arc-shaped syntactical stress development of intensification and relaxation (see figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1: Sentence in iambic pentameter.

This example, though trite, is indicative of how a quotidian utterance can be transformed into an artifact by means of formal artifice alone. The semantic content of the two arrangements is no different, and yet the formal structure of the latter delineates the utterance at least somewhat and sets it apart from everyday speech— although a single and contextless line of iambic pentameter is hardly the most artificial example of metrical craft. The more artificial the arrangement, the more discernible the artifact. This is certainly the case with skaldic utterances of which the strict and controlled metrical structures are so artificial that skaldic speaking is not only distinct from everyday speaking, but even requires special skill, instruction, and exercise as a prerequisite for being spoken. One example of such a tightly controlled metrical framework in skaldic composition is dróttkvætt (court meter) which, as its name might suggest, is also the most frequently employed meter in the extant encomiastic corpus.²¹ Although the current essay does not occasion a full exposition of the structure of dróttkvætt (a subject expertly and extensively treated by such scholars as Hans Kuhn and Kari Ellen Gade), a brief description may serve to illustrate the importance of meter as a mechanism of formal artifice in skaldic texts.²² Dróttkvætt is an extended variant of fornyrðislag, an “old story metre” commonly employed in the composition of Eddic poetry. The use of dróttkvætt demands, in the first place, that each strophic line consist of six syllables corresponding to six metrical positions—though I shall

21 For a comprehensive overview of all meters employed in skaldic poetry, see Diana Whaley, “The Metres of Skaldic Poetry,” in “General Introduction,” in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2, li– lxvii. 22 Hans Kuhn, Das Dróttkvætt (Heidelberg: Winter, 1983); Kari Ellen Gade, “Hans Kuhn’s ‘Das Dróttkvœtt’: Some Critical Considerations,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 88, no. 1 (1989): 34–53; Kari Ellen Gade, The Structure of Old Norse Dróttkvætt Poetry, Islandica 49 (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 1995).

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temporarily, for the sake of clarity, describe this sound-defined skaldic unit not as a “line,” but as a “measure” (that is, a metrically complete segment of time), since the overt visual conceptualization of such metrical units as “lines” may hamper the perception and expression of those rhythmic phrases structuring each fjórðungr (quarter strophe).²³ Of the six syllables that constitute the dróttkvætt measure, then, three must be stressed with the final two syllables forming a cadence, that is, a “long-stemmed stressed syllable carrying internal rhyme plus a short, enclitic unstressed syllable.”²⁴ Internal rhymes must, in each odd measure, consist of partial internal rhyme (skothending) whilst even measures should present full internal rhyme (aðalhending). Finally, and arguably most significantly, each fjórðungr must incorporate a specific alliterative arrangement. In accordance with this arrangement each odd measure should carry two alliterating staves (one of which almost always falls on the first cadential pulse in the fifth metrical position), whilst one corresponding alliterative stave should initiate a paired even measure, punctuating the first stressed syllable of that even measure. The example in figure 2.2, from Hofgarða-Refr Gestsson’s eleventh-century Poem about Þorsteinn, demonstrates the basic metrical features of skaldic dróttkvætt to great effect.²⁵ What is clearly exemplified by the helmingr (half-strophe) below is the rhythmic movement generated by the meter of the verse. In this respect the metrical features of alliteration and rhyme complement each other perfectly to create, in the first place, a sense of anticipation—through the structuring and development of expectation—that builds towards the first stressed syllable in each even measure (that is, the center of each rhythmical phrase or periodic sub-phrase as illustrated in figure 2.2); and secondly, a sense of anticipation for rhythmic closure in the final cadence of each fjórðungr. The feeling of expectation which builds the phrase towards the second measure is achieved, primarily, through the use of alliteration. Owing to the listener’s anticipation of especially the third alliterative repetition which almost invariably occurs in the same metrical position within every fjórðungr, the rhythmic tension increases sharply after the sounding of the second alliterating stave in each odd measure when the audience becomes

23 The term, measure, is also more consistent with Snorri Sturluson’s use of the term vísuorð (lit. strophe-word) to indicate the metrical “line” since orð in this sense represents the smallest linguistically meaningful unit that can be measured in syllables. Vísuorð becomes, indeed, a unit for the strophic measurement of syllables. See Snorri Sturluson, Háttatal, 4. 24 Whaley, “The Metres of Skaldic Poetry,” lxi. 25 Hofgarða-Refr Gestsson, “From a Poem about Þorsteinn,” ed. Edith Marold, in Poetry from Treatises on Poetics, ed. Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 250–53, at 250.

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Figure 2.2: Phrasal arrangement of a helmingr from the twelfth strophe of Hofgarða-Refr Gestsson’s poem about Þorsteinn.

aware of what sound to expect in the corresponding even measure (that is, in the predictable third alliterative position). The approach of the anticipated moment in which this final alliteration occurs is signaled, moreover, by the manifestation of skothending in the penultimate syllable of the odd measure which indicates and emphasizes the initial cadence, thus contributing to the rhythmic propulsion which drives one measure into the next. After the moment of alliterative culmination—that is, the moment in which the listener encounters the first stressed and alliterating syllable of the even measure—the rhythmic tension steadily recedes, and the listener is guided towards the final cadence of the fjórðungr which provides a feeling of “closure” largely due to the occurrence of aðalhending and, in the case of the second phrase in HofgarðaRefr’s helmingr above, additional end rhyme. Although the phrasal length, determined by the consistent and repeated syllable-count of the dróttkvætt measure, already generates the listener’s anticipation of each phrase-ending, the arrival of this ending is indicated by the full-rhyming cadence, especially since “the completion of a rhyme” in skaldic verse “[tends to bring] a structural sequence to a close.”²⁶ This tendency of rhyme to effect a sense of closure can, in the case of skaldic verse, be attributed to the ability of rhyme to “arrest the [listener’s] expectation of continuation,” thus bringing the rhythmic flow (which drives, always, towards an anticipated future) to an end.²⁷ The greater the similarity of the sound repeti-

26 Rickert, “Structural Functions of Rhyme,” 253. 27 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 71.

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tion in these cadential rhymes, the greater the sense of closure achieved. As can be seen above, a variance in rhyme-strength is employed by Hofgarða-Refr in order to achieve a relatively stronger cadence—compared to the cadence at the end of the first fjórðungr—through the use of both full internal, as well as end rhyme in the conclusion of the helmingr, thereby providing a greater sense of closure to the final cadence. This construction is similar to that which one would describe, in musical terms, as a “period”: that is, a structure comprising two sub-phrases of which the antecedent phrase ends in a weaker, and the consequent phrase in a stronger cadence. By way of example one might think of Greensleeves, in which the melody comprises two consecutive musical periods. The skaldic example by Hofgarða-Refr given above is significant for understanding the relationship between rhythm and meter in skaldic verse, not only as a specimen displaying various metrical features, but also as a self-referential portrayal of skaldic poetry. Of particular interest is the metaphorical image employed as a component of the kenning for “poetry” in the second fjórðungr (lines 3–4).²⁸ This image is bára (wave), which in the kenning “berg-Mœra bára” (wave of the rock-Mœrir) represents liquid—and more specifically, ale or mead as consumable liquid.²⁹ In the context of the kenning this mead is, furthermore, mythologically situated as a mead belonging to giants and thus, ultimately, as the “Mead of Poetry.” By employing this oceanic image of the wave as a signifier for Óðinn’s poetic mead, Hofgarða-Refr is employing a fairly common trope in skaldic composition and there are a number of similar examples scattered across the skaldic corpus: Arnórr jarlaskáld describes poetry as the roaring Alfǫður brim hrosta (the surf of the malt [=>Ale] of Allfather [Óðinn]);³⁰ Rǫgnvaldr jarl Kali Kolsson’s poetry is portrayed as Gauts gjalfr (Gautr’s [Óðinn’s] sea-din);³¹and Sturla Þórðarson imagines the poetic mead as a hunangsbára (honey-wave).³² The trope is itself indicative of the poetic perception of the wave-like nature of rhythmic utterances and articulates the similarities relating to the phenomenolog-

28 Having now completed the metrical analysis of dróttkvætt meter, I shall again reference skaldic “lines” as the more conventional alternative to “measures.” 29 For a more in-depth study of knowledge or poetry as consumable liquid, see Judy Quinn’s “Liquid Knowledge: Traditional Conceptualisations of Learning in Eddic Poetry,” in Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations and Their Implications, ed. Slavica Rankovic, Leidulf Melve, and Else Mundal, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 20 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 175–217. 30 Arnórr jarlaskáld Þorðarson, Þorfinnsdrápa, ed. Diana Whaley, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2, 229–60, at st. 1, p. 231. 31 Rǫgnvaldr jarl Kali Kolsson, Lausavísur, ed. Judith Jesch, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2, 575– 609, at st. 11, p. 588. 32 Sturla Þorðarson, Hákonarkviða, ed. Kari Ellen Gade, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2, 699–727, at st. 29, p. 721.

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ical experiences of, on the one hand, rhythmic rise and fall and, on the other, the swelling lift and collapsing drop experienced at sea as a ship moves over the billows. The term bára as a signifier for the phenomenological experience of rhythm in Hofgarða-Refr’s Poem about Þorsteinn is, moreover, interesting in that it often “denotes the smaller waves […] (on the surface of larger billows).”³³ If bára is understood in this sense, one is presented not only with an image of wave-like rhythmic phrasing, but also with an image of punctuating ripples that move along the surface of a wave—ripples such as those alliterative staves that seem to “clatter” or “rattle” (that is, glymja, as does the “rock-Mœrir’s wave” in Hofgarða-Refr’s poem) over the greater rhythmic forces beneath. This example furthermore occasions a return to a consideration of the collocation with which I began this essay. I do so by citing Óláfr hvítaskáld Þórðarson, a thirteenth-century skald and scholar who—explicitly in the context of examining the rhetorical function of paranomeon in the second part of his Third Grammatical Treatise, a part more commonly known as Málskrúðsfræði—employs an image of naval craftsmanship.³⁴ He writes: Þæssi figvra ær miok hofð i mals snilldar list, ær rethorica hæitir, oc ær hon vphaf til kvæðanndi þeirrar, ær saman helldr norænvm skalldskap, sva sæm naglar hallda skipi saman, ær smiðr gerir, ok ferr svndrlast ælla borð fra borði. sva hælldr ok þæssi figvra saman kveðandi iskalldskap með stofvm þeim ær stvðlar hæita ok hofvðstafir [my emphasis].³⁵ (This figure is much used in the art of eloquence known as Rhetorica, and it forms the origin of the alliteration that holds together Norse poetry. Just as the nails hold together a ship made by a builder, in which otherwise the boards would fall asunder, likewise this figure holds together the alliteration of poetry, by means of the letters which are called stuðlar (supporters) and hofuðstafir (head staves) [my emphasis].³⁶)

33 Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2nd ed. with a supplement by Sir William A. Craigie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), s.v. bára sb.f. Fritzner similarly describes bára as, “Ujevnhed paa Vandets Over flade, som frembringes derved, at denne sættes i Bevægelse” (Unevenness on the surface of water which is produced by setting it in motion) in the 1883–1896 edition of his Ordbog over det gamle norske Sprog, 3 vols. (Kristiania: Den norske Forlagsforening), 1:113. 34 For more on Óláfr’s role in the emergence of medieval skaldic scholarship see, Judy Quinn, “Eddu list: The Emergence of Skaldic Pedagogy in Medieval Iceland,” Alvíssmál 4 (1994 [1995]): 69–92. 35 Den tredje og fjærde grammatiske afhandling i Snorres Edda tilligemed de grammatiske afhandlingers prolog og to andre tillæg, ed. Björn Magnússon Ólsen (Copenhagen: Knudtzon, 1884), 96–97. 36 Lucy Grace Collings, “The Málskrúðsfræði and the Latin Tradition in Iceland,” MA thesis, Cornell University, 1967, 98.

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It is clear from Óláfr’s writing that alliteration serves as the rhythmic “glue” that connects and binds the units of each poetic entity. Yet, equally striking is the skald’s choice of analogy which likens verse to vessel: it is meter that allows the skaldic poem to rise and fall as a distinct artifact, preventing it from breaking apart into ordinary speech. Worth considering also is Kari Ellen Gade’s important observation that skaldic composition demonstrates an “interplay between syllabic cohesion, the placement of internal rhymes, and sentence boundaries”:³⁷ There can be no doubt that these features were audible during recitation, and that the skalds used the placement of rhymes and syllabic length to mark syntactic breaks during recitation, thus delineating their convoluted syntax and facilitating the audience’s comprehension during the performance.³⁸

It is therefore plausible to assume that pauses and stresses that, according to Gade, likely accompanied these syntactic breaks, may have variously strengthened or weakened the anticipatory flow of the underlying metrical structure, thereby contributing to the rhythmic artifice of each verse (despite Gade’s misgivings that “this picture accords badly with the notion of a musical recitation of skaldic poetry”— perhaps more narrowly understood as the ability to “sing” skaldic poetry).³⁹

Grammatical Structure Another rhythmic force which often contributes to the formal rhythmic structure of skaldic verse, but which can nevertheless function independently of skaldic meter, is the grammatical construction of clauses within each poetic stanza. The flexibility in the arrangement of word placement that the complex inflections of Old Norse allow is often exploited by skalds in a manner which is designed to engender rhythmic anticipation. Egill Skallagrímsson’s Berudrápa—a drápa composed in response to a shield-gift from Þorsteinn Eiríksson—offers a prime example of such grammatical craftsmanship:

37 Kari Ellen Gade, “On the Recitation of Old Norse Skaldic Poetry,” in Studien zum Altgermanischen: Festschrift für Heinrich Beck, ed. Heiko Uecker (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994), 145. 38 Gade, “On the Recitation,” 145–46. 39 Gade, “On the Recitation,” 146. For more on the complexities of vocality in Old Norse poetic recitation, see Annemari Ferreira, “A Song from the Mound: The Female Voice as a Repository for Genealogical Knowledge in Hyndluljóð,” in Female-Voice Song and Women’s Musical Agency in the Middle Ages, ed. Anna Kathryn Grau and Lisa Colton (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 351–87.

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1. Heyri fúrs á forsa fallhadds vinar stalla, hyggi, þegn, til þagnar þinn lýðr, konungs, mína. Opt skal arnar kjapta ǫrð góð of trǫð Hǫrða, hrafnstýrandi hrœra hregna, mín of fregnask.⁴⁰ (1. [They] should listen to my waterfalls of the long-haired friend of the fire-altar [Óðinn’s mead => poetry] your people; [you] should consider in silence, king’s thane. Often shall my eagle’s beak’s good harvest [mouth’s feast => praise] in the land of the Hǫrða [Norway]— raven-steerer of the stirring storms [warrior in battle => Þorsteinn]—be heard.)

In both of the helmingar in the strophe above an important sentence-element is delayed until the final line, creating a sense of anticipation for semantic closure. Modern English equivalents for similar tensions caused by grammatical delays can usually be found in the form of parentheses. One might consider the following sentence as mimicking the feeling of anticipation effected in Berudrápa: “shining in the sky—that blue dome over the earth which brightens with each dawn—is the sun.” Here “the sun,” as the subject of the main clause, is delayed until the end of the sentence both as a result of the employment of the passive voice and the interpolation of the descriptive parenthesis. After the initial introduction of the verb, “shining,” tension is created which is resolved, finally, upon the arrival of the subject. In the first helmingr of Egill’s Berudrápa the clausal subject, lyðr (people), which is qualified by the possessive adjective þinn (your) is similarly delayed until the final line of the helmingr. The thematic content of the strophe—the call for silence and attention—is thus emphasized on the level of structural artifice. Having arrested the recipient’s attention with the first verb of the primary independent clause of the compound-complex sentence, heyra (to hear), the suspense is released when the subject is finally revealed as þinn lyðr. The possessive adjectives, konungs (the king’s) and mína (mine), are likewise delayed until the very end of the helmingr, and also contribute to the rhythmic artifice of the strophe to great effect.

40 Egils saga, ed. Sigurður Nordal, 275–76.

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The method of grammatical tension in the second helmingr of the strophe reverses the pattern of delay found in the first, and it is now the main verb, fregna (to hear), as opposed to the clausal subject, which is postponed until the end of the strophe. The anticipation for the main verb, which is reflexive and serves therefore as a sort of passive participle within a verbal catena, is spurred by the introduction of the modal verb skal (shall) in the first line of the helmingr. The incomplete nature of the verb generates the rhythmic tension that is only resolved in the very final moment of the verse. The anticipatory effect is otherwise prolonged by the employment of a parenthetical form of address directed towards Þorsteinn as an intercalary kenning, that is, hrafnstýrandi hrœra hregna (“the raven-steerer of the stirring storms” => a warrior [steerer] who directs a bird of prey [raven] as a scavenger of battle [stirring storms] => Þorsteinn). I should note that my translation of hrafnstýrandi hrœra hregna as “ravensteerer of the stirring storms” is tentative. Both Finnur Jónsson and Bjarni Einarsson interpret the kenning as one that refers to a sailor: that is, one who steers the Raven (a name for a horse) of the sea (signified by hrœra hregna).⁴¹ Bjarni Einarsson suggests “movable mountains” as a metaphor for “waves” with hrœra serving as an adjective (movable) and hregna as the equally corrupt genitive plural of, presumably, hryggr (“ridge” or “mountain”). Although this reading would tie in well with my discussion on waves and formal rhythmicity, the translation is less than ideal. Hrœra ought to be in the genitive plural form also, which might suggest the plural form of hræ (corpse). However, this would require an emendation of hrœra to hræva, an alteration that would disturb the line’s skothending. “Storms of corpses” as a kenning for battle is, furthermore, unusual. Hrœra cannot be translated as a verb (to stir) since it does not correspond with hrafnstýrandi (raven-steerer) which is in the nominative singular. I have therefore opted to translate hrœra hregna as “of the stirring storms,” serving as a descriptive metaphor for battle, so that the resultant “raven of battle” may be understood as a beast of battle, perhaps an eagle, and its “steerer” as the warrior who provides carrion.⁴² 41 Egils saga Skallagrímssonar: Nebst den grösseren Gedichten Egils, ed. Finnur Jónsson, 2nd ed., Altnordische Saga-Bibliothek 3 (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1924), n. st. 58, p. 269; Egils saga, ed. Bjarni Einarson (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2003), n. st. 56, p. 167. 42 It might also be possible to interpret “stirring storms” as a reference to the ocean rather than to battle. Such an interpretation would allow for the reading of hrafn as a heiti for horse—a heiti usually employed in ship-kennings, as in Bjarni Einarsson’s translation mentioned above. However, the alternative reading proposed in this essay has the advantage of additional poetic consistency: the thane’s provision of carrion to a bird of prey mirrors the arnar kjapta ǫrð (“harvest of the eagle’s beak” => the skald’s praise) at the beginning of the helmingr. The implication of this mirroring may be that the military feat of the thane constitutes the skald’s material for praise. It is important to note, however, that favoring one interpretation does not necessarily invalidate the other. Multi-

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From the perspective of grammatical structure, what is significant about the parenthetical delay in the second helmingr is that it is phrasal rather than clausal, ensuring that there is no verb which can muddy, as it were, the rhythmic waters. After arresting the audience’s attention so effectively in the first helmingr the poet subsequently guides the listener and reader with assured expertise to what he has determined, through his poetic arrangement, shall “be heard.” What one “hears” by the end therefore completes, very neatly, the frame that begins with an instruction “to listen.”

Framing Conventions As a mode of formal artifice, the frame is, arguably, the most important structural element in any artistic performance. It marks the encounter with a performance in that the recognition of a frame instantaneously generates a mental shift in perception and assessment which instigates the audience’s conceptualization of specified semantic material as representational. Framing is concerned with the provision and delineation of context. If one were to turn to the example of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) while incorporating the idea of the formal frame, then one might construe the recontextualization of the famous urinal as the semantic resituating of a urinal from “the everyday” to the special framework of the art-gallery as a spatially and temporally defined construct that imbues the objects within it with new signifying potential. Framing cordons off the rhythmic experience that serves as the connective tissue of a performance-form, so that the performance may be distinguished as a discrete entity, thus differentiated from its quotidian surroundings. The frame itself activates rhythmic movement since it is the primary instigator of the expectation of “meaning” relating to that which lies within its bounds. In the context of skaldic poetry, one of the most common framing mechanisms is the skald’s call for an attentive silence into which poetry can be spoken—although it should be noted that the framing positions in which these strophes occur are based on the assumptions and speculations of scholars who reconstruct these verses and who may frame poems with strophes that they deem to be suitable according to modern ideas regarding modern framing tropes. There is, therefore, some danger of circular argument here. However, it might be useful, given the lack of conclusive evidence, to accept that certain assumptions regarding performance framing are not wholly unwarranted given cross-cultural and cross-tempo-

farious readings of skaldic kennings in modern scholarship may be useful in facilitating our embrace rather than our preclusion of open-endedness in skaldic discourse.

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ral performance tendencies, and particularly when these assumptions are given credence by examples such as the introduction to Berudrápa in Egils saga which clearly indicates that the poem, at least according to the saga author, begins with its attention-seeking strophe (ok er þetta upphaf at or “and this is how it begins”). If one allows oneself to speculate that strophes which call for attention are likely to be opening strophes, then one may examine the manner in which such strophes act as poetic frameworks. The presumed opening strophes of longer drápur in which the call for attention is employed as a potential framing device are usually explicitly self-referential and state the skald’s intention to perform their own (or in the case of recitation, possibly another skald’s) verse. The plea for a listening audience serves two functions. As a highly self-referential act which necessarily informs the performancerecipient that “poetry is being made” or that “poetry is to follow,” it very effectively separates the poetic utterance from the quotidian realm beyond its borders. The announcement serves, first and foremost, to demarcate the skaldic composition as a special utterance and, since the announcement is itself made in skaldic verse, at once also defines the nature of the special utterance as poetic. The second function of the announcement which is simultaneously a request for silence and attentiveness is the initiation of the rhythmic experience inherent in skaldic performance precisely because it is concerned with “preparing a future” and even generates an anticipatory silence that launches the rhythmic tension. One might imagine an orchestral conductor raising their hands and gesturing for up to an entire measure in silence to prepare the instrumentalists for the opening measures of a symphony. At this point the performance has already commenced and the rhythmic tension is palpable, even before the sounding of a note. It is telling that the self-referential frameworks of skaldic compositions often incorporate imagery relating to rhythmicity, such as the aforementioned wavetrope which imagines poetry in terms of the rhythmic movement of, and within, various bodies of water—a conceptualization which is metonymically consistent with the liquid nature of the Mead of Poetry. The helmingr from Hofgarða-Refr’s Poem about Þorsteinn, mentioned earlier in this chapter with particular reference to the skald’s comparison of his poetry to a clashing wave, is no exception. It, too, frames its poetic content with a skaldic plea for attention: “Berg-Mœra glymr bára, / bið[k] lýða kyn hlýða” (The rock-Mœrir’s wave [giants’ wave => poetry] clatters; I bid the kindred of people listen).⁴³ Nowhere in the skaldic corpus is the wavetrope more fully developed as a means of establishing a formal framework than

43 Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Ska´ldskaparma´l, ed. Anthony Faulkes, 2 vols. (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, University of London, 1998), p. 12, ll. 18–19.

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in Einarr skálaglamm’s tenth-century encomium, Vellekla, composed in praise of the powerful Hákon Sigurðarson. Over the course of five (and arguably six) strophes, Einarr develops the metaphor of a poetic wave which swells, surges, and crashes over the jarl’s retinue in roaring cadences, all the while appealing to the court’s attentive listening. Einarr’s prologue presents the image of a rhythmic wave growing as the Mead of Poetry within the mythical vat Boðn (one of the three containers into which the dwarves Fjalarr and Gjalarr pour the poetic mead): “Nús, þats Boðnar bára / […] tér vaxa” (Now, the wave of Boðn waxes).⁴⁴ It then draws audibly closer to the audience as the simmering contents of the kettle Óðrœrir (another of the dwarves’ mead-filled containers): “Eisar vágr fyr vísa / […] Rǫgnis […]; / þýtr Óðrœris alda / ǫldrhafs við fles galdra” (Rǫgnir’s wave [Óðinn’s wave => the Mead of Poetry] rushes before the ruler; the wave of Óðrœrir thunders against the skerry of chants).⁴⁵ Ofljóst is potentially effected by the word vísa (the accusative form of vísi, meaning “ruler”) which can also refer to a poetic “strophe” when used in the nominative, and this wordplay may well indicate that Einarr’s verse is itself rushing forth like the swelling surf, thus solidifying the metaphoric likening of poetry and wave. The narrative rhythm, based on the listener’s rising anticipation regarding the fate of the metaphorical wave, builds towards, and culminates in, the image of the billow breaking over the ruler and his retinue: “gengr of alla / asksǫgn […] // bergs grynnilǫ́ dverga” (the shoal-wave of the dwarves of the rock [the mead of the dwarves => poetry] reaches over the entire host of the ship).⁴⁶ The term used for “host” (sǫgn) can also, notably, signify “tale,” reinforcing the idea that Einarr’s poetic wave extends over the skaldic narrative.⁴⁷ The rhythmic tension then recedes with the aid of humor as the doused skald begins to bail out the poetic mead from the flooded ship: “Hljóta munk […] at ausa austr vín-Gnóðar” (It will be my lot to bail out the bilge-water of the wine-Gnóð [the bilge-water of the ship of wine => the liquid of the vat => the Mead of Poetry]).⁴⁸ However, the poet will not long endure his audience taunting him with regard to this task (“né hlítik frýju of þat”) since he must now, having gained the full

44 Einarr skálaglamm Helgason, Vellekla, ed. Edith Marold, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1, 280– 329, at st. 2, p. 284. 45 Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1, st. 3, p. 285. 46 Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1, st. 4, p. 287. 47 Cleasby and Vigfusson, Dictionary, 620. See also, Helle Degnbol, Bent Chr. Jacobsen, Eva Rode, Christopher Sanders, and Þorbjörg Helgadóttir, Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog / A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (Copenhagen: Arnamagnæanske Kommission, 1989–), https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp. php?, s.v. sǫgn sb.f. 48 Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1, st. 5, p. 289.

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attention of the court, commence the praise of Jarl Hákon. In this respect I would tentatively agree with Finnur Jónsson’s placement in Den Norsk-Islandske Skjaldedigtning of the strophe beginning, “Þvít fjǫlkostigr flestu…” (For many-virtued much…), in immediate succession to the strophe (just mentioned) beginning, “Hljóta munk, né hlítik…” (Will fall, not endure…):⁴⁹ 37. Þvít fjǫlkostigr flestu flestr ræðr við son Bestlu – tekit hefk morðs til mærðar – mæringr an þú færa.⁵⁰ (37. Because most many-virtued famous men control with the son of Bestla – I have begun to praise the battle – much less than you.)

The strophe above (which praises the extent and reach of the jarl’s power) is incorporated, almost reluctantly, into the slœmr (that is, the concluding section) of Vellekla as it is arranged in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2 due to perceived thematic incongruities. The strophe may, however, serve as a fitting bridge between the introduction and the main body of the drápa if the employment of the familial kenning for Óðinn, that is, Bestlu sonr (the son of Bestla), is understood as an intertextual reference to a strophe from Hávamál in which Óðinn learns “mighty songs” (fimbulljóð) from his maternal uncle (that is, Bestla’s brother).⁵¹ In this particular strophe from Hávamál, Óðinn, as Bestla’s implied son, is said to have drykk of gat ins dýra mjaðar (got drink of the treasured mead) which is subsequently poured over the god in a baptism-like manner so that he is ausinn Óðreri (bedoused from Óðrœrir).⁵² It is striking that Einarr, himself metaphorically soaked with poetic mead, employs the same verb (ausa) which describes Óðinn’s state in Hávamál, to illustrate the bailing out of the ship’s bilge-water. This allows him to conclude his introduction by daringly drawing a parallel between himself and the god of poetry with the sentiment that he, along við son Bestlu (with the son of Bestla)—and one may take this as meaning “like the son of Bestla”—has tekit til mærðar morðs (begun to praise the battle).⁵³

49 Finnur Jónsson, Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning AI (Copenhagen and Kristiania: Gyldendal, Nordisk forlag, 1912), 123. 50 Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1, st. 37, p. 329. 51 Eddukvæði, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Véstein Ólason, 2 vols., Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 2014), 1:416. 52 Eddukvæði, 1:350–51. 53 Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1, st. 37, p. 329.

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One final element of the introduction to Vellekla merits discussion in relation to the formal rhythmicity of skaldic framing. This feature is the metaphorical equation of the poetic wave which engulfs the framing strophes, and blood—a comparison which is most obviously presented in the assumed opening strophe of the drápa which likely, therefore, serves as a framing device for the introduction itself: 1. Hugstóran biðk heyra – heyr, jarl, Kvasis dreyra – foldar vǫrð á fyrða fjarðleggjar brim dreggjar.⁵⁴ (1. I bid the lofty-minded listen, – listen, Jarl, to Kvasir’s blood – earth-warden, to the warriors of the firth-bone’s yeast-surf.)

The blood of Kvasir—a figure epitomizing wisdom and knowledge and whose blood constitutes the principal ingredient of the Mead of Poetry—is likened to waves in fermenting liquid. Both Kvasis dreyri (Kvasir’s blood) and brim dreggjar fyrða fjarðleggjar (the yeast-surf of the men / warriors of the firth-bone [the mead of the dwarves]) are mythological kennings for the Mead of Poetry as illustrated by Snorri in Skáldskaparmál. ⁵⁵ Both kennings are, furthermore, connected aurally and thematically through the similar-sounding dreyri (blood) and dregg (yeast): just as blood animates man, yeast as a living substance animates man’s nourishment, causing dough to rise and expand and ale to breathe and froth. Kvasis dreyri therefore reflects a metaphorical parallel between leaven and blood as poetic mead. This parallel seems even more likely if one considers the potential wordplay of fjarðleggr (firth-bone) and fjaðr-leggr (spear-shaft), since the sonically emphasized unit of fjaðr-leggjar brim dreggjar (the yeast-surf of the spear-shaft) could be interpreted as a kenning for blood so that the waves of the surf (brim) not only metaphorically, but also metonymically represent Kvasir’s blood.⁵⁶ What is particularly striking about the parallels drawn between the poetic wave and the substance of blood is Einarr’s emphasis on the aural perception involved in the comparison. Einarr enhances the generic call for attention through repetition and rhyme: not only do heyra (listen) and heyr (hear) follow each

54 Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1, 238. 55 Snorri Sturluson, Ska´ldskaparma´l, 11. 56 Fjǫðr can be understood as representing a feather-shaped spear-blade (as in fjǫðrbroddr), while leggr can signify a spear-shaft: Cleasby and Vigfusson, Dictionary, 158, 380. See also Fritzner, Ordbog, 1:432, 2:453. The powerful aural connection between dreggjar and leggjar resulting from internal rhyme is also of note.

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other in immediate succession, contributing to the insistence of the skald’s bidding, but the internal and end rhymes between heyra, heyr, and dreyra create a highly memorable and repeatable entity within the helmingr which entices the listener into attendance. What might a poetic recipient hear, then, when listening (with their mind’s ear) to blood, as the poet stresses they do? The most perceptible sound of blood is, of course, its pulse—particularly apparent in the pounding of a heart or the pounding of blood in one’s ears after physical exertion. It is here that the skald consciously portrays the rhythmical nature of the poetic wave which, likewise, pulses throughout the skaldic composition. The soundscape evoked—of pulsing blood (dreyri) and lapping waves (brim)—is one of swell and recession and serves as a metaphorical expression of the audience’s engagement with poetic rhythm so that Jarl Hákon, commanded to “listen!” through the vocative Jarl and the imperative heyr, is drawn into the action of the skaldic performance through nothing so much as an emerging, and engineered, awareness of the strophe’s rhythmicity. The rhythmic framing refocuses the view of the poetic utterance as a performative utterance by self-consciously drawing attention to its formal artifice.⁵⁷ Blood runs with its own pulse through the body and it is blood’s rhythm that gives life to the individual within whom it flows; the poetic wave, in turn, rushes through the mind with its own rhythmic essence in order to sustain the art-body that it generates and holds together.

57 Clare Finburgh notices a similar phenomenon in the plays of Jean Genet which she aptly describes as “rhythmical micro-systems [which] crystallise into self-conscious essences of artifice.” See Clare Finburgh, “Facets of Artifice: Rhythms in the Theater of Jean Genet, and the Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture of Alberto Giacometti,” French Forum 27, no. 3 (2002): 73–98, at 88.

Matthias Egeler

Chapter 3 Inspiring Storytelling in Saga Literature: Toponymic and Topographic Perspectives from Icelandic Folklore Introduction: Making a Saga in Hvalsfjörður

Deep inside the western Icelandic Hvalsfjörður, a narrow peninsula juts out into the water, ending in a sharp point. Viewed from the fjord’s south shore, this peninsula looks like the blade of a spear put on edge: perpendicular cliffs, an elongated leaf-shaped ridgeline, and the point at its end combine to form a remarkable likeness of the weapon. The point at the end of this peninsula bears the name Geirstangi. According to Harðar saga (ch. 35),¹ it received this name when a certain Geirr was killed with a javelin and his body washed ashore there: the man’s name provided the first element of the compound Geirs-tangi, and the second element tangi simply means “a spit of land, a point projecting into the sea or river.”² This is what the saga tells, but of course there is more to the story. Þórhallur Vilmundarson may be the most prominent scholar to have realized that the saga seems to be turning a toponym into storytelling by reinterpreting it against its obvious meaning: geirr simply is an Old Norse word for “spear,” which suggests that Geirstangi, being the pointy end of a spearhead-shaped spit of land, should be interpreted as “Spear Point” rather than “Geirr’s Point,” and that Geirr the person in

Funding note: This research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—project number 453026744, and supported by the Institut für Nordische Philologie of the LMU Munich, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Folklore Centre of the University of Iceland at Hólmavík (Þjóðfræðistofa HÍ á Ströndum), and the community of Strandabyggð. I owe particular thanks to Jón Jónsson, not least for granting me access to the Folklore Centre’s holdings of place-name files for the Strandir region, and to Hafdís Sturlaugsdóttir and the Environmental Institute of the Westfjords (Nátturustofa Vestfjarða) at Hólmavík for granting me access to the maps and field notes that resulted from the research undertaken by Hilmar Egill Sveinbjörnsson in 1999. All archival material quoted in this article was consulted at these institutions and is quoted with permission. 1 Harðar saga, ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, Íslenzk fornrit 13 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1991). 2 Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2nd ed. with a supplement by Sir William A. Craigie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), s.v. tangi. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-008

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all likelihood is a secondary creation based on the place-name.³ That Geirr (Spear) according to the saga furthermore was killed with a javelin (gaflak, ch. 35), and thus again a kind of spear, seems both to suggest that this creation of a person out of a place-name was a conscious literary game, and to continue this game. In his introduction to the Íslenzk fornrit edition of Harðar saga, Þórhallur almost, but not quite, developed this approach into a general theory of saga literature which reads saga episodes as based on re-interpreted place-names: he seems to imply such a theory, but consistently stops just short of formulating it as such.⁴ Nevertheless, his results have been groundbreaking, and since his time much further work has been done on the use of place-names in medieval Icelandic literature.⁵ In the present contribution I do not, however, want to pursue the perspective of place-names per se. Rather, in a manner of speaking, I want to return to the view of Geirstangi that one has from the southern shore of the fjord: from there, the place where the body of a man named “Spear” was washed ashore looks like a spearhead. I want to pursue the question of how Icelandic storytelling is connected not only to the names of places, but also to their topography. If one tries to investigate the interlink between story and topography in Icelandic saga literature, however, one faces the challenge of actually identifying saga places. While a striking number of medieval place-names can still be found on the map today,⁶ Sigurður Nordal’s classic study of Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða has highlighted a fundamental problem: much of the continuity suggested by the current use of saga place-names is antiquarian reception rather than actual continuity of saga toponymy, as many place-names are derived from the literary saga text, sometimes after places were resettled after long periods of abandonment.⁷ Fur-

3 Þórhallur Vilmundarson, “Formáli,” in Harðar saga, ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, v–ccxxviii, at xxxvi–xxxvii. 4 Rory McTurk, Review of Harðar saga, ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1991), in Saga-Book 24 (1994–1997): 164–72, at 166–70; cf. Emily Lethbridge, “The Icelandic Sagas and Saga Landscapes,” Gripla 27 (2016): 51–92 at 60, 63–64, 66–68. 5 For instance, see Pernille Hermann, “Founding Narratives and the Representation of Memory in Saga Literature,” ARV Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 66 (2010): 69–87; Joonas Ahola, Outlawry in the Icelandic Family Sagas, PhD thesis, University of Helsinki, 2014, 256–58; Lethbridge, “Icelandic Sagas”; Matthias Egeler, “Constructing a Landscape in Eyrbyggja saga: The Case of Dritsker,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 132 (2017): 101–20; Matthias Egeler, Atlantic Outlooks on Being at Home: Gaelic Place-Lore and the Construction of a Sense of Place in Medieval Iceland (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2018); Matthias Egeler, “The Narrative Uses of Toponyms in Harðar saga,” NORDEUROPAforum 2018: 80–101, https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/handle/18452/20300. 6 Cf. Emily Lethbridge (Principal Investigator), Mapping the Icelandic Sagas, http://sagamap.hi.is/is/. 7 Sigurður Nordal, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða: A Study, trans. R. George Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1958), 24.

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thermore, over the centuries also the Icelandic landscape has changed deeply. What a place looks like now, even if we can identify it, does not necessarily tell us what it looked like in the heyday of medieval literary activity. To explore the relationship between place-names, topography, and storytelling, I have therefore chosen a different approach. In this essay, I will not engage with medieval stories, but with stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This has the advantage that the places that the stories are connected with are clearly identifiable, and we can be sure that the story was told about the place as we can still see it today. While this, of course, does not allow direct conclusions about the relationship between topography and medieval storytelling, it does give some indications of which kinds of relationships could have been possible. Thus, modern Icelandic storytelling can be a good tool with which to think about what “narrative mechanics” we might have to look out for. That there might even be some very concrete continuities in narrative techniques is suggested by material like the treatment of Geirstangi in Harðar saga: instances of a directly comparable re-reading of place-names to create stories are also found in modern Icelandic storytelling, suggesting that at least some of the mechanics of modern Icelandic narrative culture could be very old indeed. If such continuities exist for the relationship between place-names and stories, they may also exist for other narrative strategies of engaging with the landscape. In this essay, I will discuss three examples of storytelling about places from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All three are located on the fjord of Steingrímsfjörður in Strandir. The first is connected with Hjallaklettur, a cliff on the fjord’s south coast. This will prepare the ground of the discussion by showing how deeply ingrained storytelling of the “Geirstangi type” is in the local storytelling culture—though with an interesting twist. Then I will discuss the two examples of the Skáruklettar rocks and the western slope of the valley Miðdalur, which will bring us first to the fjord’s northern and then back to its southern side. Step by step, these examples will move further away from “Geirstangi type”-storytelling which is based on etymologizing place-names. They will illustrate possibilities for interrelationships between place and story which in a medieval text may be much more difficult to pin down than etymological word-play, but which might still be worth thinking about, if only as a possible layer of meaning of medieval texts that was present for their medieval audience but is inaccessible to us. To keep the material manageable, some of the “stories” I will discuss are very concise, up to and including simple belief statements that do not actually have a plot in any classic sense. Yet they are enough of a story to show how thinking about places can work. In fact, in their extreme minimalism they make the underlying mechanics better visible than more elaborate narratives might have done.

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Steingrímsfjörður, South Shore (I): Hjallaklettur In 1976, Guðrún Magnúsdóttir conducted an interview with Ágúst Benediktsson of Hvalsá. Ágúst at that time was an old man of seventy-six years, who had farmed at Hvalsá for forty-three years from 1929 to 1972; thus, he was intimately acquainted with its lands. About a crag overlooking the shore north of the farmhouse, he gave the following explanation: “Þar er klettur, sem nefndur er Hjallaklettur eða Hjallar. Sennilegt er, að við hann hafi staðið fiskhjallar”⁸ (There is a crag, which is called Hjallaklettur or Hjallar. It is likely that fish-drying sheds [fiskhjallar] once stood by it). Ágúst’s description places Hjallaklettur/Hjallar beyond a triangular rock-outcrop called Hvalsárdrangur (Sea Stack of Hvalsá).⁹ Above Hvalsárdrangur, and thus directly east of Hjallaklettur/Hjallar, he locates Hjalli (figure 3.1): “Ofan við Hvalsárdrang er hjalli miðhlíðis, sem nefndur er Hjalli”¹⁰ (Above Hvalsárdrangur is a ledge in the middle of the slope, which is called Hjalli). What makes these statements interesting is the close entanglement of the topography of this land with the semantics of its names. The name Hjallaklettur and its abbreviated form Hjallar are both linguistically ambivalent. Hjallaklettur, in a way very typical of Icelandic place-names, is formed of a base word that is qualified by a genitive noun. The base word is unambiguous: klettur, “rock, cliff.” The genitive noun, however, is less clear: hjalla can be the genitive of two different words, the genitive singular or plural of hjalli (a shelf or ledge in a mountainside) or the genitive plural of hjallur (“a shed,” mostly a shed to dry things in, such as clothing or fish).¹¹ The two words hjalli and hjallur form their plural in all cases in an identical way; so in the plural, they are morphologically indistinguishable. Consequently, also Hjallar, the abbreviated form of the place-name, could be derived from either hjalli or from hjallur. Ágúst chose to interpret Hjallaklettur by postulating that hjalla- here was derived from hjallur, and from this he concluded that in former times buildings of the hjallur type had stood close to the crag of Hjallaklettur. Or in his own words: “It is likely that fish-drying sheds (fiskhjallar) once stood by it.” Since hjallur is a very common word that, among other things, refers to the fish-drying sheds that were scattered plentifully along the fjord, this interpretation

8 Guðrún S. Magnúsdóttir, Örnefnastofnun Þjóðminjsafns, 30 September 1976: Örnefnaskrá Hvalsár (Kirkjubólshreppur, Strandasýsla), Heimildamaður Ágúst Benediktsson, https://nafnid.is/ornef naskra/17647, 3. 9 Guðrún S. Magnúsdóttir, Örnefnaskrá Hvalsár, 2–3. 10 Guðrún S. Magnúsdóttir, Örnefnaskrá Hvalsár, 3. 11 Cf. Cleasby and Vigfusson, Dictionary, s.v. hjalli; hjallr.

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Figure 3.1: Hjalli, Hvalsárdrangur, and Hjallaklettur. Photo © M. Egeler, 2019.

makes for a perfectly plausible narrative. Whether it is very likely to be historically correct, however, is a different matter, and both the local topography and Ágúst’s own further description of this section of the shoreline speak against it. Topographically, the shoreline at Hjallaklettur is dominated by a black cliff with a marked rock terrace that forms a giant step in the slope (figure 3.1). This is exactly what Hjallaklettur would mean if the first element of the name were derived from hjalli: “Ledge Cliff,” or “Cliff of Ledges/of the Ledge.” So if one looks at the topography of the cliff Hjallaklettur, then the impression is that Hjallaklettur might not be a name referring to historical buildings, but rather just represent a very common type of Icelandic place-name that is topographically descriptive: a cliff with a ledge is simply called Cliff of the Ledge. This impression is reinforced by the name which Ágúst quoted for the adjacent section of the mountainside: this section was simply called Hjalli: “Shelf,” or “Ledge.” While the plural forms of hjalli and hjallur are morphologically identical, the singular forms are distinct, and so Ágúst had no doubt that Hjalli was called Hjalli because it was a hjalli or “shelf, ledge.” In the original Icelandic, the tautological character of his explanation is very marked: over Hvalsárdrangur “er hjalli […], sem nefndur er Hjalli” (is a hjalli [‘ledge’] which is called Hjalli [‘Ledge’]). This is interesting not only as a good example of the often remarkably straightforward Icelandic naming practice—a ledge being named Ledge—but

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also because it provides context for Hjallaklettur: if one section of a mountainside is called “Ledge” and the name of the immediately adjacent section of the same slope can be interpreted both as “Cliff of Fish-Drying Sheds” and as “Ledge Cliff,” Ockham’s Razor would suggest the latter rather than the former interpretation as the “correct” one. Here it is important to distinguish between the meaning of a place-name in the moment of its formation and how a place-name is understood by later users. The latter has often been termed a “folk etymology,” and been much looked-down upon by academic interpreters, even though how a culture understands its place-names frequently is much more revealing than their “real” meaning as it would be defined by historical linguistics.¹² In the present case, both the local topography and the adjacent Hjalli strongly suggest that, originally, Hjallaklettur meant “Ledge Cliff.” Ágúst, however, even though he was perfectly aware both of the neighboring names and of the topography of Hjallaklettur itself, interpreted it as “Cliff of the Fish-Drying Huts.” Ágúst’s deep familiarity with both the names and the lay of the land cannot be emphasized enough; after more than four decades of working this land, he would have been intimately familiar with it, and both hjalli and hjallur are common Icelandic words that he would have known as a matter of course. For Ágúst as much as for the academic interpreter, reading Hjallaklettur as “Ledge Cliff” would have been the obvious way of understanding the place-name. Yet this is not how he explained it. Rather than interpreting Hjallaklettur through the ledge that still is there, he interpreted it through fish-drying sheds which he argued would once have stood there. In a way that strikingly recalls the treatment of Geirstangi in Harðar saga, the old farmer preferred an interpretation that read the place-name as a reflex of past human action over the more obvious topographical one. The place-name becomes a source of a reading of the land which appears to prioritize an ascription of human story and history over a mere description of its geology, and which thus creates a narrative—even if this “narrative” does not tell of heroic deeds but merely of fish-drying huts. But importantly, the mechanism for the creation of heroes and of fish-drying huts is the same, illustrating that the same forces were at work in the twentieth century that centuries earlier had given rise to the narrative of a text like Harðar saga. The modern example, however, pointedly seems to suggest that choosing such a “narrative” interpretation over a more straightforward geographically descriptive one seems to be the result not only of conscious literary play, but of some deeper urge

12 For criticism of rash dismissals of such etymologies, cf. Rolf Baumgarten, “Etymological Aetiology in Irish Tradition,” Ériu 41 (1990): 115–22, at 115.

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to increase the human presence in the land—not just in the form of heroes, but even just in the form of fish-drying huts.

Steingrímsfjörður, Northern Shore: Skáruklettar On the northern shore of Steingrímsfjörður, about five kilometers west of the fishing village of Drangsnes, a rocky promontory juts out into the sea. On its eastern side, it ends in a rock face maybe 90 meters long (figure 3.2). The water in front of this rock face is deep enough to make it a convenient place for loading boats. About this promontory, a description of the local parish from 1847 notes the following: Skáruklettar Á Hafnarhólmslandi eru klettar við sjó, kallaðir Skáruklettar. Sagt er, þeir spönsku ræningjar hafi skorið þar féð og fleygt slátrinu af klettunum í bátana, því að þar er aðdjúpt.¹³ (Skáruklettar [They-slaughtered-Rocksfrom that, that the sheep were slaughtered]. On the land of the farm Hafnarhólmur are rocks by the sea, called Skáruklettar. It is said that the Spanish robbers slaughtered the livestock there and threw the butchered meat from the rocks into the boats, because there the deep water reaches all the way up to the land.)

This note assumes that the reader is aware of some historical background, which today can be supplied from local traditions collected in the 1970s and 1980s.¹⁴ The “Spanish robbers,” according to these local traditions, were Basque whalers who operated in the area in the years around 1600 and were notorious for helping themselves to the animals of local farmers without ever compensating them, and who therefore came to be referred to simply as “Spanish robbers.”¹⁵ Their depredations sometimes led to retaliation, or at least that is how local storytelling chose to remember it. The bay to the west of the Skáruklettar rocks is named Spánskavík, “Spanish Bay.” Jón Ingimar Jónsson, who lived on the farm Hafnarhólmur,

13 Ólafur Davíðsson, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur, ed. Þorsteinn M. Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 4 vols. (Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfan Þjóðsaga, 1978–1980), 3:216; Jóhannes Jónsson, “Spænskir hvalveiðimenn og dysjarnar í Spönskuvík,” Strandapósturinn 23 (1989): 67–72, at 69. 14 Guðrún Magnúsdóttir, Örnefnastofnun Þjóðminjasafns, 20 November 1975: Örnefnaskrá Hafnarhólms (Kaldrananeshreppur, Strandasýsla). Heimildamaður Jón Ingimar Jónsson, https://nafnid.is/ ornefnaskra/17489. Jóhannes Jónsson, “Spænskir hvalveiðimenn.” Jóhannes Jónsson’s article does not represent conventional historical research, but a collection of local oral traditions still current in the area in the 1980s. For the present purpose, this is an advantage, as my discussion focusses on the way certain place-names were understood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and not on the question of their historical “truth.” 15 Jóhannes Jónsson, “Spænskir hvalveiðimenn,” 67.

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to which this land belongs, from 1917 to 1945, related an oral tradition according to which in the year 1615 a group of such plundering Spanish whalers was killed at Spánskavík, and their graves were thought to be located above the bay and on a neighboring peninsula.¹⁶ The same story, but told in much more detail, was also collected and published by Jóhannes Jónsson in the 1980s. In this version of the story, a Spanish whaling ship cast its anchor near Hafnarhólmur, and a large group of whalers started rounding up livestock. The local Icelanders, however, gathered men, armed themselves, and attacked the raiders. The farmers came upon the whalers on the shore, where the latter were busy slaughtering the sheep they had gathered. In the following fight, three of the Spaniards were killed, while the rest escaped back to their ship. The story then concludes:¹⁷ Þeir dauðu voru dysjaðir í víkinni innan við nesið og má sjá dysjarnar enn í dag. Upp frá því var víkin kölluð “Spánskavík” en nesið “Skáraklettanes,” og hlaut nesið nafn af því að þar voru kindurnar skornar. Hellan sem þær voru skornar á liggur enn óhreyfð á sama stað. (The dead were buried in the bay inwards from the peninsula, and one can still see the graves today. From that the bay was called “Spánskavík” and the peninsula “Skáraklettanes,” and the peninsula got the name from that, that the sheep were slaughtered (skorna) there. The slab of rock on which they were slaughtered still lies untouched on the same spot.)

According to this account, the deaths of the Spanish whalers and of the sheep they stole create the place-names of the bay and the rocks adjacent to it. The story also mentions physical traces—graves and a stone slab used as a slaughtering table— but, at least now (2019), these are conspicuous only by their absence. The type of graves mentioned here would in any case never have been particularly prominent: a dys is not a “proper” grave, but rather a pile of stones and gravel quickly heaped over a body, often that of a criminal or somebody who died in a fight, and often associated with some doubt as to whether it really is a grave, rather than just a heap of stones. In the present context, what is important is the way the narrative describes the creation of place-names: the bay is called Spánskavík, “Spanish Bay,” from the whalers killed there, and the peninsula receives its name from the slaughtering of the sheep they stole. The genesis of a toponym out of the alleged sheep slaughter is especially remarkable. The slaughter of the sheep is reflected in the name of the rocks that form a natural quay at the site, and in some place-names derived from this primary name. The oldest source, quoted at the beginning of this section, simply speaks 16 Guðrún Magnúsdóttir, Örnefnaskrá Hafnarhólms, 2. 17 Jóhannes Jónsson, “Spænskir hvalveiðimenn,” 70.

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of “Skáruklettar” (They-slaughtered-Rocks), referring directly to the rocks (klettar). From this, the name “Skáruklettanes” is derived, which refers to the whole peninsula (nes), the “They-slaughtered-Rocks Peninsula”; this place-name as well has already been mentioned. The third pertinent name is that of a skerry located southeast of the peninsula: the skerry Skáruklettaneshólmi, “Skerry of the Theyslaughtered-Rocks Peninsula,” or simply Skáruklettahólmi, “Skerry of the Theyslaughtered-Rocks” (figures 3.2 and 3.3).

Figure 3.2: The Skáruklettar rocks as seen from the neighboring peninsula of Akranes. In this perspective, the quay-like character of the formation becomes particularly clear. Photo © M. Egeler, 2019.

These names stand out markedly from the normal patterns of Icelandic toponymy. Normally, Icelandic toponyms consist of a base noun which can be further specified by the addition of adjectives or genitive nouns. The two types are well-exemplified by, respectively, the toponym “Hjallaklettur” discussed above (noun + genitive noun, “Cliff of the Ledge/Ledges”) and “Spánskavík” (noun + adjective, “Spanish Bay”). However, flying in the face of this general pattern, the folkloric tradition about the Skáruklettar rocks claims that their name is formed with a verb: according to the story of the whalers, the name is derived from the verb skera, “to slaughter (livestock).” The account of Gísli Sigurðsson from 1847 spells the name of the rocks as Skáruklettar; the first element of this word appears to have been un-

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Figure 3.3: The view from the Skáruklettar rocks towards the skerry of Skáruklettaneshólmi (or Skáruklettahólmi). Note how the Skáruklettar rocks fall vertically down into the sea, allowing boats to sail directly up to the rock formation. Photo © M. Egeler, 2019.

derstood as the third person plural preterit of skera—that is, skáru, “they slaughtered.” Skáruklettar thus would be the “They-slaughtered-Rocks.” Morphologically, there is nothing else that skáru can be; yet within the broader framework of Icelandic toponymy, analyzing a place-name in this way breaks with all established patterns of Icelandic place-name formation.¹⁸ Skáruklettar, “They-slaughteredRocks,” is impossible as a toponym; yet nevertheless, this is clearly how local tradition interprets the place-name. Even in this local tradition, however, there was a lingering awareness of the impossibility of the form Skáruklettar/Skáruklettanes/Skáruklettaneshólmi, which presupposes formation with a verb. This is betrayed by the various spellings in which the name occurs. Gísli Sigurðsson in 1847 writes Skáruklettar, presupposing a derivation from the verb skera: “They-slaughtered-Rocks.” Old maps give the name in

18 For a morphological analysis of a substantial corpus of Icelandic place-names, cf. Oskar Bandle, “Die Ortsnamen der Landnámabók,” in Sjötíu ritgerðir helgaðar Jakobi Benediktssyni 20. júlí 1977, ed. Einar G. Pétursson and Jónas Kristjánsson, 2 vols. (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1977), 1:47–67.

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the same form: the map of the Danish General Staff (1912) spells “Skáruklettanes,”¹⁹ and so does its revised edition from 1933.²⁰ The current online map of the National Land Survey of Iceland, in contrast, gives the name of the peninsula as “Skáraklettanes” (with -a‐), but the name of the skerry as “Skáruklettaneshólmi” (with -u‐).²¹ Even more decisively, Jóhannes Jónsson and the protocol of the interview with Jón Ingimar Jónsson spell the names as Skáraklettanes and Skáraklettaneshólmi, both with -a- instead of -u-. The same spelling is also found in an undated historical account of the place-names of Hafnarhólmur by Matthías Helgason, who wrote in the first half and middle of the twentieth century.²² The variant spelling Skára- instead of Skáru- is highly significant: skára cannot be derived from the verb skera, as in the explanation of the place-name by the story. Rather, skára is the genitive (singular or plural) of skári, which is an old word for a young sea gull.²³ In this spelling, the rocks simply are called “Sea Gull Rocks.” Such a name would represent a very common type of place-name: morphologically, this place-name follows the standard pattern of being formed as “genitive + base noun,” and in terms of its semantics, it follows the well-attested pattern of naming coastal features after sea birds. Examples for such bird-toponyms would be names derived from kría, the Arctic tern, like Kríubakki (Tern’s Bank), Kríuból (Tern Abode), and Kríueyri (Tern Sand Bank); the various skerries and rocks called “Skerry of the Birds,” Fuglasker, and “Rock of the Birds,” Fluglastapi; names derived from örn, “eagle,” such as Arnarbakki (Eagle’s Bank), Arnarborg (Eagle’s Rock), or Arnarbrekka (Eagle’s Slope); or the many places whose name is derived from the droppings of sea birds, including various skerries named Dritsker (Bird Shit Skerry) and Dritvík (Bird Shit Bay).²⁴ Even place-names formed with skári are not particularly rare. Already Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson noted that this word was productive in place-name formation,²⁵ and the Icelandic Land Survey lists a number of clear examples, such as the “Sea Gull Valley” Skáradalur in Fljótsdalshérað, the “Sea Gull Mound” Skárahaugur in Húnaþing vestra, and two farms called

19 Generalstabens topografiske Afdeling, Generalstabens topografiske kort: Tröllatunga – 33 Óspakseyri N.V. (Copenhagen: Generalstabens topografiske Afdeling, 1914) (measured 1912). 20 Geodætisk institut, Uppdráttur Íslands. Blað 33: Óspakseyri (Reykjavík and Copenhagen: Geodætisk institut, 1933) (measured 1912, revised 1930). 21 Landmælingar Íslands, Örnefnasjá, https://ornefnasja.lmi.is/. 22 Matthías Helgason (n.d.), Örnefnaskrá Hafnarhólms (Kaldrananeshreppur, Strandasýsla), https:// nafnid.is/ornefnaskra/17491, 1. He gives the name of the skerry as Skáraklettahólmi. 23 Cleasby and Vigfusson, Dictionary, s.v. skári; Geir T. Zoëga, A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), s.v. skári. 24 Landmælingar Íslands, Örnefnasjá, https://ornefnasja.lmi.is/. 25 Cleasby and Vigfusson, Dictionary, s.v. skári.

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Skárastaðir (roughly: “Sea Gull-Steads”) in Húnaþing vestra and Þingeyjarsveit.²⁶ Thus, a place-name like Skáraklettar—that is, “Sea Gull Rocks”—would be a very normal, even ordinary, toponym. Considering all this, why has local storytelling foregone the unproblematic form Skáraklettar (Sea Gull Rocks) in favor of a linguistically impossible form Skáruklettar (They-slaughtered-Rocks)? While it is, of course, not possible to be certain about the reason for this eccentricity, the comparison with the case of Hjallaklettur might suggest an answer. In the case of Hjallaklettur, it looks as if Ágúst Benediktsson preferred an interpretation of the toponym “Cliff of Ledges”/“Cliff of Fish-Drying Sheds” which read it as a reflex of human action over an interpretation which understood it as purely topographically descriptive—just as is the case with the Geirstangi of Harðar saga. The case of Skáraklettar/Skáruklettar could be similar: here as well, the reading preferred by storytelling favors human action over a simple description of nature; the imagined deeds of people of the past are deemed more interesting than natural history and the presence of birds. From these two examples, therefore, it appears that, where at all possible, place-names are made the basis for a telling of stories about human beings—even if this means that the normal rules of language and place-name formation have to be bent to breaking-point. At the same time, the example of the “They-slaughtered-Rocks” also suggests that storytelling is not only about place-names, it is also about topography: the story of the Skáruklettar can only tell what it tells because the physical shape of these rocks makes them a natural quay which can accommodate the (possibly fictional) boats of the robbers. The story is not developed out of toponymy alone, but toponymy and topography combine to create the tale.

Steingrímsfjörður, South Shore (II): Miðdalur To reach the logical next step—to have a story created primarily out of topography rather than toponymy—we need only to cross back over the fjord to its southern shore. Roughly opposite the Skáruklettar rocks on the southern coast of the fjord is the valley of Miðdalur. This valley today still contains a handful of working farms: Heiðarbær, Miðdalsgröf, Klúka, and Gestsstaðir. Its landscape is densely filled with stories both implied in toponyms and told in extenso; but for our current purposes, we will bypass most of them and just look at the slope that forms the western edge of the valley. There, the valley bottom steeply rises up to the ridge of Heiðarbæ-

26 Landmælingar Íslands, Örnefnasjá, https://ornefnasja.lmi.is/, s.v. skára*.

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Figure 3.4: Kastali and Þjófalaug as seen from the ridge of Heiðarbæjarheiði, looking north towards Steingrímsfjörður. Photo © M. Egeler, 2019.

jarheiði. The slope is anything but smooth; it increases its gradient in waves and fits interrupted by rock outcrops and troughs, until it reaches the dark cliffs crowning it. Like in the case of the Skáruklettar rocks, parts of this slope have names and stories that suggest an amalgamation of toponymy and topography to form narratives. In Miðdalur, however, the balance between toponymy and topography is different from how it was at the Skáruklettar rocks. While in storytelling about the Skáruklettar rocks the place-name seems to have been the primary factor, on the western slope of Miðdalur the primary role is played by topography. In the middle part of the valley, high up on the incline and directly underneath a towering cliff, an outcrop protrudes from the slope whose steep rock walls evoke the contours of an early modern fortress. This is Kastali, the “Castle,” which is named just how it looks and by both look and name seems to evoke the knightly heroes of the Sagas of Chivalry (figure 3.4). A bit further down the valley, but higher up on its slope, a trough in the side of the mountain forms a small hollow that is sheltered from view from everywhere except the top of the ridge. This is Þjófalág: the “Hollow of the Thieves.” Ingvar Guðmundsson, then farmer at the now-abandoned farm of Tindur in Miðdalur, in the 1970s described Þjófalág as “located in such a way as to be a good hiding place” (þannig staðsett að vera góður felu-

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staður)²⁷—just as you would expect a place of thieves to be. A more detailed tradition about the place was recorded by Gísli Jónatansson in the late 1980s:²⁸ Þjófalág Uppi undir fjallsbrún ofan við leið, sem farin var áður frá Tindi að Tungu yfir hjá svonefndri Leiðaröxl, er nokkuð djúp dæld, sem Þjófalág nefnist. Þar átti eitt sinn að hafa sést reykur að vori eða sumri til og þótti tíðindum sæta. Álitið var að þarna hefðu þjófar verið á ferð og haft stutta viðdvöl. Í tali manna um þennan viðburð bárust böndin að Fjalla-Eyvindi og Höllu, enda á þeirri tíð sem þau voru uppi. En aldrei var þó grennslast eftir hver valdur var að reyknum í Þjófalág. (Þjófalág [Thieves’ Hollow] Up under the edge of the mountain above the path that in the past used to be taken from Tindur to [Trölla‐]Tunga across at the so-called Leiðaröxl [Shoulder of the Way], is a somewhat deep depression, which is called Þjófalág [Thieves’ Hollow]. It was said that once smoke was seen there one spring or summer and that was thought to be big news. It was thought that thieves had been on their way there and made a short stop. In the talk of people about this occurrence the suspicion was directed towards Fjalla-Eyvindur and Halla, also it was at this time that they lived. But still enquiries were never made about who was to blame for the smoke in Þjófalág.)

Here, “Thieves’ Hollow” is connected with the most famous of all modern Icelandic outlaws: Fjalla-Eyvindur and his wife Halla, who stand at the center of a multitude of stories about their twenty-year-long life as outlaws in the second half of the eighteenth century,²⁹ and whose mythology in the early twentieth century experienced a strong revival through the success of Jóhann Sigurjónsson’s play Fjalla-Eyvindur, first staged in 1911.³⁰ What is interesting about this local reception of Fjalla-Eyvindur is how it is interconnected with local topography. The story appears to have been created around a hollow that was widely known because it was bypassed by a path, but which also was impossible to see into from the farms at the bottom of the valley. The latter point particularly deserves highlighting: the landscape of Miðdalur is dominated by wide, open vistas, as the shallow bowl of

27 Ingvar Guðmundsson, Örnefnaskrá Tinds (Kirkjubólshreppur, Strandasýsla) (1977), https://naf nid.is/ornefnaskra/17669, 3. 28 Gísli Jónatansson, “Nokkur örnefni í Kirkjubólshreppi,” Strandapósturinn 23 (1989): 121–26, at 124. 29 Jón Árnason, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og ævintýri, 2nd ed., ed. Árni Böðvarsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 6 vols. (Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfan Þjóðsaga – Prentsmiðjan Hólar, 1961), 2:237–45. 30 Jóhann Sigurjónsson, Fjalla-Eyvindur: Leikrit í fjórum þáttum (Reykjavík: Heimskringla, 1950). First English translation already in 1916: Jóhann Sigurjónsson, Eyvind of the Hills: The Hraun Farm, trans. Henninge Krohn Schanche (New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation; London: Humphrey Milford; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916).

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the valley, which is largely devoid of higher vegetation, offers neither obstacles to the view nor hiding places. This overall situation makes the hidden hollow of Þjófalág into something special: in a landscape which otherwise is so completely open to the eye, a hidden place stands out through its very invisibility. This invisibility then became the nucleus of a story: the invisible place became a place of hiding, and the place of hiding became a waypoint in the travels of the couple who at the time was most famous for having had to live in hiding. The story arising in this way is then also memorialized in a place-name—Þjófalág, “Thieves’ Hollow”—but the relationship between story and toponym is different from the situation of the Skáruklettar rocks. In the case of the Skáruklettar rocks, the place-name was there first and was turned into a story by etymologizing word-play; the case of Þjófalág, in contrast, does not involve word-play, but a narrative interpretation of the local topography, which became the basis of a story that, in addition to its narrative formulations, was also memorialized in the place-name. At Skáru(/a)klettar, the placename was used to create a story; at Þjófalág, both the story and its place-name were created out of the local topography. This creation of story out of topography brings us back to Kastali, the “Castle”: there as well, the idea of a castle was created out of the local topography, establishing a potential nucleus for a chivalric story, even though there are no concrete attestations that such a story of chivalry was actually formulated in extenso. But seeing Kastali and Þjófalág in one vista next to each other, one cannot help but wonder whether there is a bit of a Robin Hood story lurking in the shapes of the slope where they are located so closely together. Both Þjófalág and Kastali connect the land with quasi-heroic associations that are not created out of place-names, but which still use place-names to formulate them. A few minutes’ walk further down the valley, and on the same slope, we meet a tradition which illustrates that even this secondary involvement of placenames is not necessary, but that a story can be developed out of topography without being formulated in a toponym. Just north of Þjófalág, and about halfway up the slope, it seems as if three bowls have been scooped out of the mountainside (see figure 3.5). Each of them has a name, but their names are descriptive in a very down-to-earth manner: Fremstaskál (Furthest Bowl), Miðskál (Middle Bowl), and Heimstaskál (Most Homeward Bowl). These three bowls are located at roughly the same height, have roughly the same size, and are spaced more or less evenly; while every single one of them by itself would have been rather inconspicuous, their sequence makes them a fairly notable feature of the slope. In an interview held in July 1999, Björn Guðmundsson and Guðfríður Guðjónsdóttir, who lived at Miðdalsgröf at the foot of the same slope, mentioned that this feature

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as well had a story of its own: “Þarna átti tröllaskessa að hafa stígt í skálarnar”³¹ (There, a troll woman was said to have put her foot down in the bowls). So the bowls are the footprints of a troll who walked along the valley slope. Here, a miniature story seems to have sprung directly out of the lay of the land: “A troll walked along the valley and left footprints behind.” This story is entirely based on the local topography; the features involved have names, but these names have nothing to do with the story. In the face of the actual landscape formations to which this miniature story is connected, the origin of the story is obvious; but outside of this landscape itself, the origin of the story has left no trace, not even in toponymy. If one were not able to see this landscape, one would be utterly at a loss if one tried to understand what is going on here.

Figure 3.5: Knights, thieves, and the footprints of a troll: Kastali, Þjófalág, Fremstaskál, Miðskál, Heimstaskál. Photo © M. Egeler, 2019.

Conclusion There is a continuum of possibilities in the way place-names and topography can play a role in storytelling. The examples discussed above have illustrated this on a 31 Quoted from the unpaginated field notes of Hilmar Egill Sveinbjörnsson, who in 1999 undertook a study of the place-names of the district of Kirkjubólshreppur for Ungmennafélagið Hvöt. The field notes are now held by the Environmental Institute of the Westfjords (Nátturustofa Vestfjarða) in Hólmavík and quoted by kind permission of Hafdís Sturlaugsdóttir.

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range of miniature stories taken from three places on Steingrímsfjörður in the Icelandic Westfjords, which show a spectrum ranging from a total dominance of place-names to a total dominance of topography, and everything in between. At Hjallaklettur, my first example, a miniature “narrative” about the former existence of fish-drying huts was created out of the local place-name. Here the “story” was created not only without taking recourse to local topography, but even against it, as this topography suggests a different interpretation for the name (“Cliff of Ledges/of the Ledge” rather than “Cliff of the Fish-Drying Huts”). The second example, Skáru(/a)klettar, combined toponymy and topography as the material out of which a story can be created: here, the tale of robbers butchering stolen sheep was constructed out of a re-interpretation of the place-name Skáraklettar “Sea Gull Rocks” as Skáruklettar “They-slaughtered-Rocks,” and this was combined with elements of the local topography, which suggested the idea of the rock formation serving as a landing quay for the boats of the robbers. The examples from Miðdalur then moved the balance even further towards topography. Kastali “Castle” and Þjófalág “Thieves’ Hollow” create a Robin Hood-style story landscape out of the local landforms, which is then formulated in both story and place-names. And three footsteps of a troll woman are created out of the lay of the land without toponymy ever entering into it: the bowls that are interpreted as troll footprints have names, but these names have no connection to the story. While at Hjallaklettur the origin of the “story” had been in toponymy to such an extent that topography had to be ignored, Miðdalur illustrates the possibility of a complete prevalence of topography in the emergence of story. The reason why this is of interest for medievalists is that, while we know that toponymy played a role in storytelling in medieval Icelandic literature, we often do not have access to the topography in which this literature was set and thus rarely are able to “place” it exactly. This means that, of the spectrum of possibilities described here, we sometimes are able to pinpoint storytelling techniques of the “Hjallaklettur type,”³² but storytelling of the “bowls/footprints type” eludes us. Nevertheless, it seems fair to assume that this type of storytelling existed as well. We can clearly see storytelling of the “Hjallaklettur type” in narratives like the tale of the death of Geirr on Geirstangi in Harðar saga: in such examples much the same narrative mechanics are at work as in nineteenth- and twentieth-century folk storytelling. It would be surprising if the same wasn’t true also about storytelling techniques of the “bowls/footprints type,” but, at several hundred years’ remove from the landscape in which the sagas were set, this is much harder to pinpoint.

32 See the introduction above and the many examples noted by Þórhallur Vilmundarson, “Formáli.”

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It is something, however, that we should look out for when reading medieval texts —if only as a layer of meaning which was there for the original audience but is, more often than not, irrecoverable for us. Narratives of the “bowls/footprints type,” I argue, are a systematic lacuna in our understanding of medieval literature that, even though we cannot close this lacuna, we should be conscious of. As an often irrecoverable layer of meaning, the “bowls/footprints type” narrative technique is just one of many landscape-related roots of storytelling that, when we approach medieval literature, tend to elude our grasp. One other such factor is the workflow of agricultural life. I wonder whether it was by chance that, when I last visited Miðdalur, the “bowls” had attracted many of the sheep of the valley: were these bowls a place that people thought about because the sheep gravitated to the grazing there, making it necessary to chase them down whenever the livestock needed to be taken down from the mountain? Another factor alluded to in the material presented here is the importance of roads and paths.³³ Hjallaklettur is located directly above the coastal road; Skáruklettar has been located immediately below the coastal road for as long as records of this road exist;³⁴ and Gísli Jónatansson in the passage quoted above explicitly connects Þjófalág with the path over Leiðaröxl. Importantly, if Gísli had not mentioned this connection—and he only mentioned it very much in passing—we would have had no idea that the story of the thieves in the “Hollow of the Thieves” is a roadside tale. Similarly, the road that directly passes by Skáruklettar is not actually mentioned in the stories about it. Roads attract stories; but the story often does not say that it is set by the roadside, since that would have been obvious for the original audience, and so roads as a feature that gives rise to stories actually are very easy to miss. Furthermore, “historical reality” of course also has its place in the emergence of stories. The explanation of Hjallaklettur as named from fish-drying huts would not be plausible if fish-drying huts were not, in principle, a very common feature of the coast of the fjord. The case of Skáruklettar may even be particularly—and inextricably—complex. Archaeological excavations on the nearby peninsula of Strákatangi have uncovered the remains of a seventeenth-century whaling station that, according to the structure of its buildings and the recovered finds, was not

33 Cf. Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016; paperback ed. 2017), especially 161–202; Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford/Providence, RI: Berg, 1994), especially 29–31. 34 Generalstabens topografiske Afdeling, Generalstabens topografiske kort.

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run by Icelanders.³⁵ While the archaeological material does not allow an identification of the origins of the whalers who used Strákatangi as their base,³⁶ the existence of such a foreign whaling station only about 1 kilometer from Skáruklettar poses interesting questions about the relationship between “genuine” history, (“folk-”)memory, place-names, and place-storytelling. Skáruklettar, the linguistically impossible “They-slaughtered-Rocks,” has such an unusual name that one wonders whether the morphological antics of its place-name story somehow are related to a possible “genuine” historical background. Such questions of agriculture, the role of roads and paths in cultural life, and the historical “truth” of some traditions go far beyond the scope of the present essay, however. If this essay has succeeded in showing that not only, as already widely acknowledged, toponymy, but also topography plays an important if often irrecoverable role for the emergence of stories in Icelandic storytelling culture, then it has fulfilled its objective.

35 Ragnar Edvardsson and Magnús Rafnsson, Basque Whaling around Iceland: Archeological Investigation in Strákatangi, Steingrímsfjörður (Bolungarvík: Náttúrustofa Vestfjarða; Hólmavík: Strandagaldur ses, 2006). 36 Ragnar Edvardsson and Magnús Rafnsson, Basque Whaling, 15.

Sarah Baccianti

Chapter 4 Healing Hands, Holy Water, and Hellish Diseases: Some Accounts of Medical Performance in Medieval Iceland Jóns saga ins helga tells of a girl called Arnríðr who became seriously ill: Þat var með því móti at hon kenndi fyrir brjósti sér ok at síðunni út ǫðrum megum sárligra verkja ok mikilla óhœgenda. […] Þat fylgði ok at ódaunan gekk svá mikit af henni at menn þóttusk varla mega nýta at sitja yfir henni. Eigi mátti hon sofa né matask. Faðir hennar var sorgmóðr af hennar vanheilsu, ok er honum þótti hon vera mjǫk framkomin, þá tekr hann hana upp í faðm sér hógliga ok vildi vita ef hann mætti nǫkkut kenna undir hǫndunum hvernug meininu væri farit, því at hann var læknir góðr. Ok er hann þreifar um hana, kennir hann fyrir ofan nafla við rifin ǫðrum megum at þar var sullr mikill ok ógurligr. Ok þá tekr hann til orða: “Ef fénaðr nǫkkurr hefði slíka sótt þá munda ek skera til, en nú þori ek þat eigi fyrir Guði.” Eptir þat hét hann á inn helga Jón byskup til árnaðarorðs við almáttkan Guð […]. Hann hét ok bœnahaldi, ok kona hans, at syngja fim tigum sinna Pater noster ok Máríuvers með. […] Eptir þat tóku þeir er yfir henni sátu ok dreyptu vatni því í mjólk er bein ins helga Jóns byskups hofðu verit þvegin í ok létu meyna drekka allt saman. Ok jafnskjótt sem hon hafði bergt, þá gaus upp ór henni spýja mikil með mikilli fýlu. […] Þá tekr faðir hennar ok þreifar um hana oðru sinni, ok kennir hann at þá var sullrinn sprunginn ok þrotinn hlaupinn í sundr í þrjár hellur. En er þrjár nætr váru liðnar frá því er heitit hafði verit, þá var mærin svá alheil sem hon hefði aldregi sjúk orðit.¹ (It was so that she felt bad pains and great discomfort in her chest and to one side. […]. Moreover, her body emanated such a foul odor that people could hardly sit next to her. She could not sleep or eat. Her father was saddened by her ill health, and when he thought she was near death, he took her gently in his arms and tried to see if he could feel under his hands the type of disease, because he was a good doctor. And when he touches her, he feels, above the navel by the ribs on one side, a large and terrible swelling there. And then he spoke: “If any cattle had contracted such a sickness, I would have cut it, but now I do not dare to do so before God.” After that, he called on the holy bishop Jón for intercession with the Almighty God […]. He and his wife also vowed prayers, to sing the Pater Noster fifty times along with the Ave Maria. […] After that, those who sat with her dripped into milk some water in which the bones of the holy bishop Jón had been washed, and had the girl drink it all. And as soon as she had tasted it, a huge vomit surged from her with a great stench. […] Then her father picked her up and felt her for the second time, and he felt that then the ab-

1 Jóns saga ins helga, in Biskupa sögur I, ed. Peter Foote, Íslenzk fornrit 15 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 2003), 173–316, at 256–58. Unless otherwise noted, translations from Old Norse are my own. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-009

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scess had burst, and the swelling had separated into three lumps. And when three nights had passed after the vow had been made, the girl was perfectly healthy as if she had never been ill.)

The story of Arnríðr’s miraculous recovery encapsulates the role of medicine within the biskupa sögur, but most importantly it offers a glimpse into medical knowledge and medical practices in medieval Iceland. One key issue is the question of how representative these miracle narratives might be in portraying the level of medical knowledge in medieval Iceland, especially if we consider how extreme some cases are, and how the miracles are used for literary and didactic purposes. This overlap between medicine and religion is present in the materia medica circulating in Iceland in the Middle Ages, where rituals (such as charms, prayers, signs of the Cross, incantations, etc.) were often combined with medical remedies and surgical procedures. Even though this short study focuses only on a handful of miraculous cures, I explore how they reflect, along with charms, the history of medicine in medieval Iceland. Indeed, Paxton observes that the history of healing “should look not only to the writings of doctors and diagnosticians, or even chroniclers and hagiographers, but also to those of the mostly anonymous men and women who contributed to the liturgy and ritual of the church.”² However, unlike previous studies of illnesses and remedies in Old Norse sagas, I do not try to identify any of the diseases, unless explicitly stated in the sagas, as retrospective diagnosis purely based on texts and using modern diagnostic categories leads to an erroneous, simplistic, and incomplete portrayal of those events.³ As Schmidt, Wilhelmy, and Gross argue in their discussion of retrospective diagnosis of mental illness:

2 Frederick S. Paxton, “Anointing the Sick and the Dying in Christian Antiquity and the Early Medieval West,” in Health, Disease and Healing in Medieval Culture, ed. Sheila Campbell, Bert Hall, and David Klausner (London: Macmillan, 1992), 93–102, at 99. For a summary of the debate on the nature of charms, see Ciaran Arthur, Charms, Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), 8–17; Charlotte Kaiser, Krankheit und Krankheitsbewältigung in den Isländersagas: Medizinhistorischer Aspekt und erzähltechnische Funktion (Cologne: Seltman & Hein Verlag, 1998). 3 See Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar, ed. and trans. Guðrún P. Helgadóttir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Ian McDougall, “The Third Instrument of Medicine: Some Accounts of Surgery in Medieval Iceland,” in Health, Disease and Healing in Medieval Culture, ed. Campbell et al., 57–83; D. C. Whaley and D. Elliot, “Dupuytren’s Disease: A Legacy of the North?,” Journal of Hand Surgery 18B, no. 3 (British and European vol., 1992): 363–67; D. C. Whaley and D. Elliot, “A Medieval Casebook: Hand Cures Documented in the Icelandic Sagas of Bishops,” Journal of Hand Surgery 19B, no. 5 (British and European vol., 1993): 667–71; Diana Whaley, “Miracles in the biskupa sögur: Icelandic Variations on an International Theme,” in Preprints of the 9th International Saga Conference (Akureyri, 1994), 847–62.

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Undoubtedly, it is the task of historians to analyze and interpret past events and processes as well as the constitution of individual historical protagonists. But this means that historical research is not a matter of attributing retrospective diagnosis to a person, but of clarifying how contemporaries thought about the person’s condition, how they came to their assessment, and how they dealt with the situation.⁴

The combination of medicine and miraculous healing is of course not uncommon, as it follows the tradition of the Christus Medicus (Christ the Physician)—a tradition born in the second century and consolidated in the fifth century by Augustine —which underlines the importance of curing the soul as well as the body.⁵ Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, charms, galdrar in Old Norse, provide a link between medicine and ritual, through prayers, symbols of the cross, and runes.⁶ As Olsan suggests, this is “because both charms and prayers operate under the assumption that words have the power to heal and that this power ultimately derives from God, just as the ‘virtues’ of plants do. Generally, the content of charms is religious, consisting of powerful words […] or traditional Christian names […], liturgical phrases […] or biblical characters and saints.”⁷ In the Old Norse corpus, we find examples of healing charms and prayers in both medical and literary texts, as well as in runic inscriptions. The only extant complete medical manuscript in Old West Norse, Royal Irish Academy MS 23 D 43 (late fifteenth century),⁸ begins with a

4 Matthias Schmidt, Saskia Wilhelmy, and Dominik Gross, “Retrospective Diagnosis of Mental Illness: Past and Present,” The Lancet 7, no. 1 (2019): 1–2, at 1. 5 See R. Arbesmann, “The Concept of Christus medicus in St. Augustine,” Traditio 10 (1954): 1–28. Mǫrtu saga ok Maríu Magðalenu, drawing on Gregory the Great’s Homilia XXXIII, mentions “várr herra sannr læknir” (our lord the true physician): The Saga of the Sister Saints: The Legend of Martha and Mary Magdalen in Old Norse-Icelandic Translation, ed. and trans. Natalie M. Van Deusen (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2019), 122. See also Natalie M. Van Deusen, “The Old Norse-Icelandic Legend of Saints Mary Magdalen and Martha,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2012. 6 For a discussion on the Old English galdor (spell, charm) used for healing purposes within Christian contexts, see Arthur, Charms, Liturgies, and Secret Rites, 65–97. Lea Olsan provides groundbreaking research on medical charms in early and late medieval England, which can also be applied to medical charms in medieval Scandinavia, in Lea Olsan, “Latin Charms of Medieval England: Verbal Healing in a Christian Oral Tradition,” Oral Tradition 7, no. 1 (1992): 116–42; Lea Olsan, “The Inscription of Charms in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts,” Oral Tradition 14 (1999): 401–19; Lea Olsan, “Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice,” Social History of Medicine 16, no. 3 (2003): 343–66; Lea Olsan, “Writing on the Hand in Ink: A Late Medieval Innovation in Fever Charms in England,” Incantatio 7 (2018): 9–45. 7 Olsan, “Charms and Prayers,” 357. 8 Dublin, Royal Irish Academy (RIA), MS 23 D 43. RIA MS 23 D 43 contains medical charms and remedies, translations of the Liber lapidum, the Antidotarium Nicolai, and the Liber herbarum by Henrik Harpestræng (Danish doctor and scholar, d. 1244), and a cookbook.

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series of charms to stop bleeding and fever, which, just like the ones in the medieval English medical tradition, “blur distinctions between the oral and the literate, the Christian and the Germanic, the metrical and the non-metrical, the poetic and the practical, even the sensical and non-sensical.”⁹ Elements in the manuscript resemble features of the miracle in Jóns saga ins helga quoted at the beginning of this essay: Þetta er gott vid ridu. ath rista a epli eda lauki hasis eos trema neos salvator emanuel. has himas agios fremaos salvator vao fao fao. Wid ridu. Alpha ode pallda cucio boga laba. Sa er ridu hefir komi til prestz ok til þess kross er borin um er j kirkiu ok tak patenam med vigdu vatni. ok þvo med krossinum. ok hell vatninu a hofud ok alla limu þess er siukur er. sidan hirde kross ok lesi yfir .iij. godspioll firir þeim er siukur er. In principio erat verbum. Si quis diligit me. Cum venerit paraclitus. ok gef honum þa af drecka. Þvi vatni ok mun honum batna || Wid ridu ok kauldu sott. tak konu miolk er sveinbarn hefir a briosti. Þria dropa ok lat j blautt egg. ok lat þann mann gefva honum at eta er alldri sa hann adur.¹⁰ (For a fever it is good to cut this on an apple or onion: hasis eos trema neos salvator emanuel. has himas agios fremaos salvator vao fao fao. For fever: Alpha ode pallda cucio boga laba. Have the one who has a fever come to the priest and to that cross which is carried in church and take a paten with holy water and in it wash the cross and pour the water on the head and all the limbs of the one who is sick. then hide the cross and read over three gospels for him who is sick: In principio erat verbum. Si quis diligit me. Cum venerit paraclitus. And give him then to drink that water and he will recover. For fever and a fever with cold fits take the milk of a woman who has a boy child at the breast. Put three drops in a soft egg and let that man feed him that he never saw before.)

These charms against fever combine apotropaic and religious elements, such as the cross, holy water, cosmological symbols, nomina sacra (in this case Alpha and Emanuel), and some remedies with ingredients, such as breast milk and eggs, that are also found in the Antidotarium and Leechbook. ¹¹ The obscure

9 Lori Ann Garner, “Anglo-Saxon Charms in Performance,” Oral Tradition 19, no. 1 (2004): 20–42, at 20. 10 RIA MS 23 D 43, fol. 1r. Manuscript abbreviations are expanded and underlined, word division and punctuation follow modern convention, and in the translations the untranslated forms are in italics. Parts of this charm are also found in the remedies against fever in the Leechbook, RIA MS 23 D 43, fols. S24v–S25r. I have discussed the use of breast milk and the symbolism of the Maria lactans in Old Norse medical charms in Sarah Baccianti, “Guaritori, acqua santa e latte materno: Alcuni resoconti di pratiche e incantesimi medici nell’Islanda medievale,” Supplemento Filologia Germanica/Germanic Philology, Supplement 3 (2022): 33–52 (the current study is an abridged version of the article in Italian). 11 RIA MS 23 D 43, fols. 41r–53r, fols. ix r–xii v and fols. xiv r–xxvii v.

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words, often classified as “gibberish,”¹² are very common in charms, especially those against fever, as Olsan convincingly argues that “since antiquity, fevers had been relieved by diminishing formulas such as abracadabra […]. Thus, in the medieval period, names (known and unknown) call for and bespeak power, functioning variously as invocations, declarations of divine presence, word magic, or as signs of authority like seals attached to documents.”¹³ The fact that the Old Norse charm is carved/written on an apple or onion is not unusual. For instance, in the Old English charm against dweorh (dwarf, fever) in the eleventh-century Lacnunga medical collection, the healer sings and writes the names of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus on seven sacramental wafers, which are then hung around the sick person’s neck.¹⁴ Writing on medicinal leaves, such as sage, on apples, or on ritual sticks is a well attested practice in medieval England, especially when one did not have access to a priest,¹⁵ as in the case of a remedy against fever in the RIA MS 23 D 43 Leechbook: “Blod. IX. af balsamita. med pater noster. ok svo in instu (?) læknis blads ok stappa vid salltt. ok lat vid vatn. ok gef siukum drecka”¹⁶ (Nine leaves of balsam with a pater noster and the inmost (?) leaves of the doctor’s leaf [greater plantain] and crush with salt and add water and give to the sick to drink). The performance of a healing charm and wearing or carrying one are present also in the Old Norse medical and literary tradition. For example, the Colic Leaf (Lbs fragm. 14, ca. 1600), a vellum strip written on both sides in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Old Norse in the same style as the charms in RIA MS 23 D 43, offered protection against colic and gout, and was most probably wrapped around the body or neck of the

12 Ciaran Arthur suggests, in relation to early medieval English charms, that “these ‘gibberish’ texts should be read within the wider intellectual context of medieval language and alphabet studies” (Ciaran Arthur, “The Gift of the Gab in Post-Conquest Canterbury: Mystical ‘Gibberish’ in London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A. xv,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 118, no. 2 (2019): 177–210, at 210). 13 Olsan, “Writing on the Hand,” 15. See also Garner, “Anglo-Saxon Charms in Performance”; Olsan, “Charms and Prayers”; Arthur, “Writing on the Hand”; Arthur, “The Gift of the Gab.” 14 Lacnunga lxxxvi (A43.3). For an in-depth discussion of the fever charms in the Lacnunga and the use of dweorh in disease terminology, see Conan Doyle, “Dweorg in Old English: Aspects of Disease Terminology,” Quaestio Insularis 9 (2009): 99–117, and B. R. Hutcheson, “Wið Dweorh: An Anglo-Saxon Remedy for Fever in Its Cultural and Manuscript Setting,” in Secular Learning in Anglo-Saxon England: Exploring the Vernacular, ed. L. S. Chardonnens and B. Carella (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 175–202. 15 Olsan, “Writing on the Hand.” 16 RIA MS 23 D 43, fol. S24v.

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sick person.¹⁷ Several other earlier examples of healing charms predating medical manuscripts and the Colic Leaf, are found in runic amulets, where bótrúnar (healing runes) and lyfrúnar (remedy runes) are mentioned. For instance, the Bergen rune stick (N B257; ca. 1380) and the Ribe healing stick (DR EM85;493, ca. 1300) both provide protective/healing charms: the first against elves, trolls, and giants as cause of illnesses,¹⁸ and the latter, against the trembler (possibly a fever with shivers) invoking the powers of the earth and universe, as well as Mary and God, to grant the healer læknishǫnd ok lyf-tungu at lyfja (leech/medicinal hands and a healing tongue to heal), thus highlighting the performative aspect of healing charms and the role of the healers.¹⁹ This characteristic is also mentioned in stanzas 4 and 11 of the Eddic poem Sigrdrífumál: ²⁰ Heilir æsir, heilar ásynjur, heil sjá in fjölnýta fold, mál ok mannvit gefið okkr mærum tveim ok læknishendr, meðan lifum. Limrúnar skaltu kunna, ef þú vilt læknir vera ok kunna sár at sja; á berki skal þær rísta

17 See Magnús Már Lárusson, “Eitt gamalt kveisublað,” Árbók Hins íslenzka fornleifafélags 51 (1951–1952): 81–90. See also Don C. Skemer, Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); Skemer suggests that “textual amulets promised safe passage through a precarious world by means of an ever-changing potpourri of scriptural quotations, divine names, common prayers, liturgical formulas, Christian legends and apocrypha, narrative charms, magical seals and symbols, and other textual elements that were assembled materially and used physically to exploit and enhance the magical efficacy of words” (1). 18 Monsters and elves were often thought to be the cause of many ailments. See M. L. Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 130–58; Alaric Hall, “‘Þur sarriþu þursa trutin’: Monster-fighting and Medicine in Early Medieval Scandinavia,” Asclepio: Revista de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia 61 (2009): 195–218. 19 Runes transcribed in “Skaldic Project,” https://skaldic.abdn.ac.uk/db.php?table=mss&id= 15226&if=runic, and in Mindy McLeod and Bernard Mees, Runic Amulets and Magic Objects (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2006). 20 Sigrdrífumál, in Eddukvæði II. Hetjukvæði, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson et al. (Reykjavík: Hið islenzka fornritafélag, 2014), 313–21. Translation from Carolyne Larrington, trans., The Poetic Edda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 163 and 164. Stanza 9 of Sigrdrífumál mentions bjargrúnar (helping runes) for childbirth. Charms for childbirth follow Margrétar saga in AM 431 12mo (21r–25v), a saga about Margaret of Antioch, patron saint of women in labor.

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ok á baðmí viðar, þeim er lúta ausr limar. (Hail to the Æsir! Hail to the goddesses! Hail to the mighty, fecund earth! May you give eloquence and native wit to this glorious pair And healing hands while we live! Limb-runes you must know if you want to be a healer and know how to see to wounds; on bark they must be cut and of the tree of the wood, on those whose branches bend east.)

Along with the healing of Arnríðr and the charms mentioned above, these stanzas illustrate one other essential feature needed in order to be a healer: healing hands. Isidore of Seville, in his Etymologiae, defines hands and fingers as follows: Manus dicta, quod sit totius corporis munus. Ipsa enim cibum ori ministrat; ipsa operatur omnia atque dispensat; per eam accipimus et damus. Abusive autem manus etiam ars vel artifex, unde et manupretium dicimus. Digiti nuncupati, vel quia decem sunt, vel quia decenter iuncti existunt. Nam habent in se et numerum perfectum et ordinem decentissimum […] Quartus anularis, eo quod in ipso anulus geritur. Idem et medicinalis, quod eo trita collyria a medicis colliguntur.²¹ (The hand [manus] is so called because it is in the service [munus] of the whole body, for it serves food to the mouth and it operates everything and manages it; with its help we receive and we give. With strained usage, manus also means either a craft or a craftsman—whence we also derive the word for wages [manupretium, lit. ”hand-price”]; The fingers [digitus] are so called, either because there are ten [decem] of them, or because they are connected handsomely [decenter], for they combine in themselves both the perfect number and the most appropriate order […] The fourth is the ring [anularis] finger, because it is the one on which the ring [anulus] is worn. It is also called medical [medicinalis], because physicians [medicus] use it to scoop up ground eye-salves.)²²

Hands are thus vital for the healers, since touch is tangible, multilayered, and immediate, as asserted also by Aristotle in the De anima where the hand is the organ of all organs and, just like the soul, is being-in-potency.²³ In the sagas, healing hands—along with the practical knowledge of treating wounds, of native pharma-

21 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, XI.i.66–i.71; https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/isidore/11.shtml. 22 The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 235. 23 Aristotle, De anima, in Aristotle, On the Soul, Parva naturalia, On Breath, ed. and trans. W. S. Hett, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 431b 20–432a 14.

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copeia, and of healing charms—are often a trait of kings, but also of some priests as well as a handful of lay men and women.²⁴ However, it is necessary to point out that these healers were not trained doctors.²⁵ In her discussion of the role of healers in the Íslendinga sǫgur, Charlotte Kaiser notes that they tend to be framed within the tradition of the Christus medicus. ²⁶ Similarly, in Heimskringla it is stated that King Óláfr the Saint performed several healing miracles after his death, whilst the healings he performed in his lifetime are validated as miracles by his posthumous sanctity.²⁷ Specifically, when King Óláfr cures the boil on a boy’s throat he is described by Queen Ingigerðr as læknir beztr (the best healer), and the authorial intervention that follows the miracle observes: “Var þá fyrst á þannug virt sem Óláfr konungr hefði svá miklar læknishendr sem mælt er um þá menn, sem mjǫk er sú íþrótt lǫgð, at þeir hafi hendr góðar, en siðan er jartegnagørð hans varð alkunning, þá var þat tekit fyrir sanna jartegn”²⁸ (At first it was thought that King Óláfr had good healing hands, as they say of those men who have great skill, that they have good hands, but later when his miracles became known, it was reckoned to be a true miracle.) Especially interesting in this regard is the mythical account of the beginning of the medical profession, which is linked to King Óláfr’s miraculous intercession, as

24 In Grípisspá (st. 17), Grípir foretells that Sigrdrífa will teach Sigurðr runes and medicine with healing knowledge (lyf meþ læcning; lifþv heill) (Grípisspá, in Eddukvæði II. Hetjukvæði, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson et al., 286–95). There are numerous references to women offering medical advice and engaging in healing practices, which I do not explore in this essay. 25 There were no universities in Scandinavia until the late fifteenth century. Scandinavian scholars were trained at universities abroad from the thirteenth century onwards. The Dane Henrik Harpestræng (d. 1244) was the royal physician to the Danish King Erik IV, and was most probably trained in Salerno (see Jakob Povl Holck, “Middeladerens danske lægebog et kontaktfænomen,” PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2001). Three treatises are associated with Harpestræng: the Latin De simplicibus medicinis laxativis and Liber herbarum, and the Old Danish Den danske urtebog. 26 Kaiser, Krankheit und Krankheitsbewältigung, 78–86. 27 Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 3 vols, Íslenzk fornrit 26–28 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1941–1951), 2:387, 395–96, 405–9 (Óláfs saga ins helga), 3:138 (Haralds saga Sigurðarsonar), 3:232–33 (Magnús saga berfœtts), 3:271–72 (Magnússona saga), 3:334 (Haraldssona saga). 28 Heimskringla 2:342. See also King Haraldr harðráði Sigurðarson’s medical advice and healing miracles in Morkinskinna, ed. Ármann Jakobsson and Þórður Ingi Guðjónsson, 2 vols., Íslenzk fornrit 23–24 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 2012), 1:147–48 and 232–35. On kings as healers and spiritual intercessors, see Ármann Jakobsson, Í leit að konungi: Konungsmynd íslenskra konungasagna (Reykjavík: Hásólaútgáfan, 1997), 112–14; Stephen Brogan, The Royal Touch in Early Modern England: Politics, Medicine and Sin (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2015); Audrey Spensley, “Interpreting the King’s Touch: Authority and Accessibility in the Reign of Charles II,” James Blair Historical Review 9, no. 1 (2019): article 2.

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well as the need of battlefield physicians. In Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar, Hrafn —an Icelandic chieftain, pilgrim, and renowned doctor who died in 1213—is said to be a descendant of a lineage of doctors which started in 1043, when during a battle against the Wends in Hlyrskógsheiðr, Saint Óláfr appears in a dream to King Magnús Óláfsson góði and advises him to pick twelve men from his army, “þá er væri af inum beztum ættum, til þess at þeir bindi sár manna. En hann kveðsk þat þiggja mundu af guði, at í hvers þeira kyni skyldi síðan lækning haldask, er þar væri til valðir sár manna at binda […] Svá kom lækning af guðs miskunn”²⁹ (who are of the best lineage to bind up the wounds of men. And he said that he would receive from God that in the family of each one who was chosen there to bind the wounds of men, healing should continue from then on […] Thus came the power of healing from God’s mercy). In Heimskringla, it is further narrated that King Magnús inspected the hands of some of his men and chose “þá er honum sýndisk sem mjúkhenztir mundu vera […] allir þessir urðu inir mestu læknar. Þar váru tveir íslenzkir menn, var annar Þorkell Geirason af Lyngum, annarr Atli [Hrafn’s greatgrandfather], faðir Bárðar svarta í Selárdal, ok kómu frá þeim margir læknar siðar”³⁰ (those who seemed to him to have the softest hands […] all of them became great physicians/healers. There were two Icelandic men, one was Þorkell Geirason of Lyngar, the other Atli, the father of Bárðr the Black in Selárdalur, and many doctors later descended from them). The link between healing hands, spiritual intercession (in this case of Saint Óláfr), and medical knowledge is further explored in Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar. Hrafn’s cures and medical skills, which show his continental, medical knowledge,³¹ are depicted throughout the saga as a gift from God, as the saga author stresses the pious, humble, and almost saint-like character of Hrafn, since he is said to never ask for a physician’s fee (læknisfé), and to often seek the advice of priests before proceeding with any type of medical intervention.³² Despite Hrafn’s established reputation as a physician, the reader is

29 Hrafns saga, 1. 30 Heimskringla 3:3–67, at 45. 31 He most probably acquired this medical knowledge during his pilgrimages to England (Canterbury), France (St-Gilles), and Italy (Rome). In the saga, Hrafn successfully heals some “patients” using surgical procedures, such as cauterization, phlebotomy, and lithotomy, typical of the Salerno medical school (Hrafns saga, 5–6). These procedures are also found in the RIA MS 23 D 43 and in the medical writings of Harpestræng (cf. footnote 25). 32 For additional discussions on Hrafn, the structure of the saga, and surgery in medieval Scandinavia, see the introduction to the saga by Guðrún P. Helgadóttir (Hrafns saga, xci–cviii); Úlfar Bragason, “The Structure and Meaning of Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar,” Scandinavian Studies 60, no. 2 (1988): 267–92; McDougall, “The Third Instrument”; Ásdis Egílsdóttir, “Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson, Pilgrim and Martyr,” in Sagas, Saints and Settlements, ed. Gareth Williams and Paul Bibire (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 29–39.

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reminded that: “Torvelt er at tína ǫll ágæti íþróttligrar lækningar hans, þeirar er guð gaf honum. En fyrir því má slíkt eigi undarligt sýnask, at guði eru engir hlutir ómáttugir, ok af guði er ǫll sǫnn lækning, svá sem Páll postuli segir: Alii gratia sanitatum in eodem spiritu. Þat er svá at skilja: sumum mǫnnum er gefin lækning af miskunn heilags anda”³³ (It is difficult to recount all of the excellence of his skilful cures, which God granted him. But for this reason, such a thing should not seem strange, as to God nothing is impossible, and from God comes all true healing, as the Apostle Paul says: Alii gratia sanitatum in eodem spiritu. This is to say: to some men is given healing by the grace of the Holy Spirit). Divine interventions in healing practices, as shown above in the case of charms and prayers combined with remedies and surgical interventions, become central in the miracle-cure narratives of the biskupa sögur, which offer stories of faith and healing. Within this framework some of these accounts fit within a medieval pan-European vogue of miracle-cure narratives which seek to portray a sort of dialogue between physical and spiritual transformations. In some instances, these episodes revolve around specific illnesses and injuries, which are first assessed and treated by a doctor or a priest, but with no success.³⁴ These “expertise” failures become then a frame for the miracle-cure narratives, where doctors express their powerlessness when confronted with the diseased or crippled body. Indeed, many of the bishops’ posthumous miracles occur when healers seem to fail. For example, a miracle in Þorláks saga shows how healing is procured through the saint’s intercession and his healing hands: “Maðr einn hafði fótarmein svá at holin með beininu váru full af blóði ok vág, en læknar fengu eigi grœtt. Hann hét á Þorlák byskup sér til helsu, en í svefni sýndisk honum hann koma at sér ok strjúka fótinn, en hann vaknaði alheill”³⁵ (One man had a leg injury so that the bone cav-

33 Hrafns saga, 6. 34 For example, see the story of the unsuccessful eye cauterization of a prior called Byrhtferth, and the healing intercession of Saint Swithun, in Lantfred of Winchester’s Translatio et Miracula S. Swithuni, in Michael Lapidge, The Cult of St. Swithun, Winchester Studies Series 4.2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 217–33, at 316–17. 35 Þorla´ks saga, in Biskupa sö gur II, ed. A´sdi´s Egilsdo´ttir, Íslenzk fornrit 16 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 2002), 101–40, at 94. Many of the healing miracles in the saga follow this same pattern: a person or animal is ill, a specific health issue is identified, and the sick or a member of their family calls upon a saint for healing: “Kona ein braut fót sinn ok sló í verk ok þrota miklum, ok lá hon lengi í rekkju, ok máttu læknar henni eigi bót vinna. Hon hét á inn heilaga Þorlák byskup, ok á sǫmu nátt kom hann at henni í svefni ok fór hǫndum um fótinn, ok vaknaði hon alheil” (Þorláks saga A, 93) (A woman broke her leg and was struck by great pain and profuse swelling, and she lay in bed for a long time, and the doctors could not cure her. She invoked the holy Bishop Þorlákr, and on the same night he came to her in her sleep and put his hands on the leg and she awoke completely healed).

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ities were full of blood and pus, but the doctors could not heal it. He called upon Bishop Þorla´kr for his healing, and it seemed to him that in a dream he came to him and stroked his leg, and he awoke fully healed). The opening chapter of the saga already signals the nature of the miracles in the saga, giving emphasis to the power of faith in healing the sick: “af því at nú berr opt þá raun á at nú verðr optliga þat skjótt grœtt af ákalli hans nafns er hvárki hefir áðr mátt heilt verða af smyrslum né af lækningum þeim er menn hafa áðr með farit ok til leitat”³⁶ (because it now often happens that by invoking his name a cure is soon brought up for what has never been healed before by ointments or by healing that men have used and tried in vain). Archaeological excavations in Norway, Denmark, and, more recently, in east Iceland, at Skriðuklaustur monastery, have unearthed surgical instruments required for the medical interventions described in the sagas, in the law codes, and in the medical treatises at that time. Along with studies of skeletal remains, they provide a glimpse into the treatment of disease, and of the diseased body, as well as into the medical knowledge that was circulating in medieval Iceland, which, to this day, has been largely neglected by historians of medicine. The miracle-cure narratives, runic charms, and the materia medica circulating in Iceland show—just as in medieval England, Ireland, and on the Continent—that the intersections between religion, literature, and medicine played a fundamental role in the reception and transmission of medical knowledge at the periphery of medieval Europe.

36 Þorláks saga A, 47.

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Chapter 5 A Question of Balance: Excess and Lack in Njáls saga Hverir eigu hér leik svá ójafnan? ¹ Who are the players in this uneven game?

Many have read Njáls saga as a text which is informed by a play of opposites. As Richard F. Allen writes in his book Fire and Iron: Critical Approaches to Njáls saga: More than most sagas, it presents its action through the collisions of opposing ethical forces: greed against generosity, small-mindedness against magnanimity, malice against good will, foolishness against wisdom—in short, evil against good.²

In her lecture on The Role of Sexual Themes in Njáls saga, Ursula Dronke too describes the author as having an “impish and satirical eye for opposites.”³ Also, Einar Ól. Sveinsson in Njáls saga: A Literary Masterpiece describes the text using the words of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, terming it a coincidentia oppositorum (or the coincidence or harmonization of opposites), and goes on to say that the saga author “cannot portray human existence except by means of opposites which are brought into harmony, just like the individual instruments of an orchestra.”⁴ The above statements all agree that in Njáls saga opposing and equal forces are pitted against each other in a Manichean clash of good versus evil. However, like Einar Ól. Sveinsson, I prefer not to conceptualize the saga in terms of straightforward opposition and the triumph of one force over the other, but to see it rather as an uneven game, the unevenness of which causes troublesome instability in the saga. It is a text fraught with imbalance and charged with the anxiety of superfluity and scarcity. The author of Njáls saga seems particularly interested in social economy and the difficulties of assessing equivalence and maintaining balance. 1 Brennu-Njáls saga, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 12 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1954), 203. All quotations from Njáls saga in this essay are from this edition. 2 Richard F. Allen, Fire and Iron: Critical Approaches to Njáls saga (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 77. 3 Ursula Dronke, The Role of Sexual Themes in Njáls saga (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1981), 10. 4 Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Njáls saga: A Literary Masterpiece, trans. Paul Schach (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 49–50. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-010

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Peace and harmony are only achieved when a perfect balance between opposites is attained. This essay will analyze certain significant scenes and character depictions to demonstrate how excess and lack trouble the text. I shall treat Njáls saga as a fictional construct in which the desirability of moderation and balance is key. My first examples concern household management. Extravagant spending in this sphere causes a particularly dangerous form of imbalance—lack taking the form of a shortage of money and provisions. Two troublesome women in Njáls saga cannot balance their books: Unnr and Hallgerðr. Unnr’s problem is that, divorced from Hrútr Herjólfsson, she is left alone with the entirety of her father’s inheritance: Mǫrðr gígja tók sótt ok andaðisk […] Unnr, dóttir hans, tók fé allt eptir hann; hon var þá ógefin í annat sinn. Hon var ǫrlynd mjǫk ok óforsjál um fjárhagi, ok tók at eyðask fyrir henni lausaféit, svá at hon átti ekki nema lǫnd ok gripi.⁵ (Mǫrðr Fiddle took ill and died […] Unnr, his daughter, inherited everything after his death; she was unmarried at that point. She was open-handed and imprudent when it came to money, and she squandered all her moveable property, so that she had nothing left except the land and her personal possessions.)

An entire inheritance is wasted by the young divorcee. As Richard F. Allen comments: “This event is part of the thematic pattern of wastage and imprudence, of excess, which occasions so much mortal woe in Njáls saga.”⁶ It is not just Unnr and her household who suffer because of her extravagance. The ramifications of her wastefulness extend to her former in-laws and her kinsman Gunnarr Hámundarson. After her first marriage to Hrútr Herjólfsson, her family fails to recover her dowry on the occasion of her divorce. But since she becomes so short of ready money, she is compelled to ask Gunnarr to resurrect the case for the dowry given over in her marriage to Hrútr. Unnr’s lack of prudence and wanton spending lead ultimately to feuding and enmity. Hallgerðr’s spendthrift tendencies also lead to dire consequences, though the saga author’s portrayal of this character’s excesses is less clear-cut. Her spending hovers in the gray area where generosity ends and extravagance begins, largely because the words the saga author uses to describe Hallgerðr’s management of provisions are rather ambiguous; they could have either negative or positive connotations. In the first marriage to Þorvaldr she is fengsǫm (making large provision) and stórlynd (“magnanimous,” or “high-spirited”) and in the second she is de-

5 Njáls saga, 52. 6 Allen, Fire and Iron, 61.

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scribed as fengsǫm again, as well as ǫrlynd (bountiful, charitable, open-handed).⁷ It is very difficult indeed to catch the subtle nuances of these words; modern readers must strain their ears to hear the differences. It could be that the saga author is hinting at the possibility of differences of opinion regarding Hallgerðr’s spending patterns; one person’s extravagance is another’s generosity. These words might also have carried with them some ambiguity for the contemporary audience. The choice of words used could portray Hallgerðr either as a lady of largesse or as a destructive waster of provisions. What helps us to translate these words is the accompanying commentary on her behavior. As was just noted, in her first marriage to Þorvaldr Ósvífrsson, she is described as fengsǫm ok stórlynd (making large provision and magnanimous). However, the saga author goes on to portray what is an inauspicious start to her marriage when she is described as wasting the household provisions. She claims everything in the house as her own and squanders it all.⁸ In demanding yet more, she shows herself to be entirely ignorant of the value of things. Lacking a sense of proportion and any idea of restraint, she accuses her husband and fatherin-law of starving themselves before her arrival to manage the household. What other explanation could there be for the fact that the usual amounts placed in store have run out? Her comprehension of things financial is thus revealed to be severely skewed; having spent to excess she explains her actions in terms of her husband’s previous stinginess. Another possibility is that her wasteful approach and subsequent insult is meant as a retaliation to her husband who did not consult her in the marriage offer (she was wed without her consent). As a result of this humiliating suggestion, Þorvaldr slaps his new bride across the face. This act leads to his death at the hands of Þjóstólfr, Hallgerðr’s over-protective and malicious foster-father. After the murder of her husband, Hallgerðr prepares to leave and return to her father’s house. The saga author adds a curious detail to Hallgerðr’s departure from the farm. Despite her overbearing nature and her part in Þorvaldr’s death, she gives the whole household a gift from her chest: “Hon gekk til kistna sinna ok lauk upp ok lét kalla til sín alla heimamenn sína ok gaf þeim nǫkkura gjóf ǫllum, en þeir hǫrmuðu hana allir” (She goes to her chests and opens them up

7 See Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2nd ed. with a supplement by Sir William Craigie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), s.v. fengsamr, adj.; stórlyndr, adj.; örlyndr, adj, for the definitions of these words. Geir T. Zoëga’s A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic offers slightly different definitions. For stórlynd he offers also “high-minded,” and for ǫrlynd, “impetuous, headstrong.” See Geir T. Zoëga, A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), s.v. stórlyndr a. and s.v. ørlyndr a. (2). 8 Njáls saga, 33.

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and has all the members of the household called in and gives all of them some sort of gift, and they are all sorry to see her go).⁹ It seems as if the saga author is straining to present Hallgerðr in a more favorable light at this point in the text. Presumably these were members of Þorvaldr’s household and as such, Hallgerðr as the departing widow (with a hand in her husband’s death) does not have an obligation or duty of care towards them. It is hard to explain her action as being motivated by anything other than affectionate generosity; there is no hint of an underhand agenda. The saga author is careful to mention that the gifts come out of her own chests in particular; these are not her dead husband’s provisions which she squandered when he was alive. As ever in saga narrative, the straightforward recounting of events leaves space for the reader to explore the implications of different characters’ actions. Do these departing gifts uphold Hallgerðr as the wife generous to the last? Or do we detect a hint of remorse or suggestion of reparation in her actions? Are the servants sad to see the open-handed and generous mistress of the house go, or are they mourning the close of the extravagant lifestyle to which they had grown accustomed? The saga author leaves us guessing. Hallgerðr conducts herself rather better in her second marriage; at the ceremony it is said that she behaved properly (samði sér vel).¹⁰ She is asked by her new husband Glúmr whether she wants to take control of the household, but she declines the offer. It is also noted that she showed great restraint and was not disliked. We are told that “um sumarit fœddi hon meybarn” (in the summer she gave birth to a little girl).¹¹ Married life definitely seems to suit Hallgerðr rather better the second time around. Following the death of her second husband, also killed by Þjóstólfr (though not, on this occasion, with her approval), Hallgerðr makes a third marriage, this time to Gunnarr. At her new home Hlíðarendi, she resorts to her former behavior. She is described as taking over the running of the farm and as being “fengsǫm ok atkvæðamikil.”¹² Once more, the ambiguous adjective fengsǫm is used, and the word atkvæðamikil also could have both positive and negative connotations (meaning “resolute, effective, authoritative”).¹³ Contextualization aids translation: “Hallgerðr tók við búráðum ok var fengsǫm ok atkvæðamikil. Þorgerðr tók við búráðum at Grjótá ok var góð húsfreyja”¹⁴ (Hallgerðr took charge of the household and made

9 Njáls saga, 36. 10 Njáls saga, 45. 11 Njáls saga, 45. 12 Njáls saga, 90. 13 Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, s.v. atkvæðamikill adj. 14 Njáls saga, 90.

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large provision and was always making her presence felt. Þorgerðr took charge of the household at Grjótá and was a good housewife). This parallel construction invites us to see Þorgerðr’s taking charge of affairs at her new home as being in contradistinction to her mother’s management of her third farm. The term góð húsfreyja (good housewife) makes clear that the comparison is not a flattering one for Hallgerðr. Hallgerðr seeks to assuage her scarcity of provisions by arranging for a slave to steal from the household at Kirkjubœr. She does this at a time of great famine in the country when all farms are short of food.¹⁵ If Iceland is suffering from a national disaster, is every housewife not desperate to secure more food for her household? What has motivated Hallgerðr’s crime: is it scarcity, or malice and extravagance? The saga author does not leave us guessing for long. When Gunnarr realizes where the butter and cheese have come from, the tables are cleared of the stolen produce, and meat is brought in: “ok ætluðu allir, at þat myndi til hafa borit, at þat myndi þykkja fengit betr” (and everyone suspected that this was done because it was thought to be from a better source).¹⁶ It is not a matter of scarcity and need which has prompted Hallgerðr to perform this deed. The excess of cheese implicates her further in the theft; in an attempt to rid herself of the abundance of stolen produce, Hallgerðr gives away a whole cheese to some women peddling wares round the district: “Þær sǫgðu, at þeim hefði at Hlíðarenda mest gefit verit ok Hallgerðr yrði þeim mestr drengr” (They said that they had been given the most at Hlíðarendi, and that Hallgerðr had acted most honorably towards them).¹⁷ Again, her generosity has an ambiguous motive. What also counts against the deceitful mistress of the house is that previously Njáll had intervened when provisions were short at Hlíðarendi, and on that occasion their benefactor had urged Gunnarr to ask for help only from him in future.¹⁸ Hallgerðr ignores the opportunity to restore the balance of her household’s shortages honestly. The consequences of her actions unfold inevitably: the act initiates a dispute which leads to her husband’s outlawry and eventually to his death. Unnr and Hallgerðr subvert the ideal role of the housewife; in their excess, they provide too much for their households until they have nothing left, and in their greed, they reach out for more. The saga author alerts us to Hallgerðr’s love of excess from the outset by virtue of the description of her abundant hair. In the very first chapter her long, silky

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locks which hang down to her waist are depicted: “ok hárit svá fagrt sem silki ok svá mikit, at þat tók ofan á belti” (and her hair was as fine as silk and there was so much of it, that it reached down to her belt).¹⁹ Her hair is mentioned a further three times; each time it is described as being able to veil her whole body, hanging on either side of her bosom or over it, and she can tuck it into her belt. As A. C. Bouman points out in Patterns in Old English and Old Icelandic Literature, the mention of her hair is part of a threefold repetition: first there is a description of Hallgerðr and her coiffure, followed by a marriage, followed by a slap from her husband.²⁰ Her abundant, free-flowing tresses would seem to symbolize her excessive lifestyle and her unbridled nature. Interestingly, the only other similarly hirsute person in the saga who can tuck his hair under his belt is the dubious character Bróðir, the Christian consecrated as a deacon, turned heathen versed in magic, who meets a nasty end at the Battle of Clontarf.²¹ The association is hardly a flattering one for Hallgerðr, and affirms the reading that her outward physical characteristics are a manifestation of the inner life. Furthermore, the frequent mention of her hair prepares, as Einar Ól. Sveinsson suggests, for the refusal to give her husband a few strands from her locks when his enemies come to Hlíðarendi to kill him. When his home is besieged, Gunnarr asks Hallgerðr for a couple of strands of her hair which she and his mother can wind into a makeshift bowstring, his having just been cut through by an attacker. Hallgerðr, remembering the slap that Gunnarr once gave her, makes a calculated reply: “Þá skal ek nú,” segir hon, “muna þér kinnhestinn, ok hirði ek aldri, hvárt þú verr þik lengr eða skemr.”²² (“Now I shall,” she says, “remind you of the slap, and I don’t care in the least whether you hold out for a long or a short time.”)

Since enemies cannot make an effective attack as long as Gunnarr has his bow and arrow, his life depends on it. A husband’s life for a slap is a grossly extravagant repayment to claim, especially since, as Einar Ól. Sveinsson also points out, she has such excessive amounts of hair that she could have easily spared a few strands.²³ It might be pointed out here that the employment of hair to make a bow-

19 Njáls saga, 6. 20 A. C. Bouman, Patterns in Old English and Old Icelandic Literature (Leiden: Universitaire pers Leiden, 1962), 7. 21 Njáls saga, 446, 453. 22 Njáls saga, 122. 23 Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Literary Masterpiece, 58.

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string is a romance motif, and not a realistic possibility, and that Einar Ól. Sveinsson’s remark is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Nevertheless, the frequent mention of her abundant locks ensures that the reader realizes how unreasonable she is being in her refusal. In fact, Hallgerðr claims the same grossly extravagant repayment from all her husbands. No-one arbitrates in a dispute between man and wife so Hallgerðr, as the “wronged party,” assesses her own compensation. Bearing in mind that she is a woman with a propensity towards excess, it is unsurprising that when she chooses to repay herself, she does so with outrageous imbalance. Her decisions indicate that she lacks a sense of proportion and an understanding of the value of things. On three occasions, she is given a slap across the face from her husband (inflicted for her misdemeanors). Each slap results in the death of her then husband. Hallgerðr may have too much hair, but her rival’s husband, Njáll, has a distinct lack. Several jibes are made about his curious lack of beard, and form one example of “the play of gender” as Heather O’Donoghue terms it in her article “Women in Njáls saga.”²⁴ In this play of gender we see that effeminacy constitutes a lack of manliness, and that women who take on masculine characteristics and gestures are more than women. Hallgerðr insults Njáll’s lack of facial hair when she has her first spat with Bergþóra, Njáll’s wife. She implies that Njáll is less than a man for it: she says that there is not much to choose between the pair of them, since Bergþóra has turtleback nails on every finger and Njáll is beardless (“Ekki er þó kosta munr með ykkr Njáli: hefir katrnaggl á hverjum fingri, en hann er skegglauss”).²⁵ This “old beardless” insult becomes a familiar taunt towards Njáll which is repeated throughout the saga. The outward appearance of a character (what they have too much of, and what they lack) is clearly interpreted within the saga by other characters as an outward manifestation of an inner imbalance. It is strange that Hallgerðr draws attention to the swapping of gender stereotypes within the relationship of Bergþóra and Njáll, because Hallgerðr herself is given the nickname Hallgerðr langbrók, or long breeches. Breeches are more the sort of clothing that men might wear, and it is important to remember, as A. C. Bouman does, that if one’s spouse took to dressing in garments which the opposite sex would generally wear then this was grounds for a divorce.²⁶ This is precisely what happens in Laxdæla saga. Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir, not especially happy in her marriage to Þorvaldr Halldórsson, is advised by Þórðr Ingunnarson to sew a wide24 Heather O’Donoghue, “Women in Njáls saga,” in Introductory Essays on Egils saga and Njáls saga, ed. John Hines and Desmond Slay (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1992), 83–92, at 92. 25 Njáls saga, 91. 26 See Bouman, Patterns, 6.

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necked shirt so that when he wears it, she has grounds for divorcing him.²⁷ The neck of the shirt is more appropriate as a piece of female attire; there is a suggestion that the neck is so wide that his nipples have been exposed. Guðrún returns the favor when she starts a rumor that Þórðr’s wife Auðr wears breeches with gores in the crotch as well as cross-gartering right down to her shoes, and hence has the nickname Bróka-Auðr, Breeches-Auðr.²⁸ Following the second divorce and Guðrún’s marriage to Þórðr, Auðr plans her revenge, and one night mounts her horse and rides to their farm. The saga author wryly comments: “ok var hon þá at vísu í brókum” (and she was certainly wearing breeches then) as she stabs her ex-husband in the chest, an act of violence more usual of a man.²⁹ Hallgerðr’s masculine nickname certainly gives a heavy hint as to who will be wearing the trousers in her future relationships with men. Also, she is the only woman outside of the fornaldarsǫgur, as Ursula Dronke points out, to be fostered by a man, the unscrupulous Þjóstólfr.³⁰ Hallgerðr’s third husband Gunnarr has occasion to question his own manliness after he has killed Otkell Skarfsson: “Hvat ek veit,” segir Gunnarr, “hvárt ek mun því óvaskari maðr en aðrir menn sem mér þykkir meira fyrir en ǫðrum mǫnnum at vega menn.”³¹ (“I do not know,” says Gunnarr, “whether I am less manly than other men because I dislike killing people more than others do.”)

Gunnarr expresses his own reluctance to kill in terms of lack; other men are more keen to kill, so he perceives that his lack renders him less of a man. Whether he be less of a man or not, it no longer makes any difference to Gunnarr since he has now commenced the business of killing, as Njáll points out to his friend.³² Once more, lack makes one less of a man, whereas Hallgerðr gains a nickname related to male clothing and has the addition of a foster-father to a normal female upbringing. Hrútr Herjólfsson also has a problem with his manliness—he has too much of it. Because he is not honest with the Norwegian queen Gunnhildr about having a betrothed back in Iceland, she places a curse on him which will stop him having

27 Laxdæla saga, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 5 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1934), 94. 28 Laxdæla saga, 95. 29 Laxdæla saga, 97. 30 Dronke, “Sexual Themes,” 17. 31 Njáls saga, 138–39. 32 Njáls saga, 139.

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sexual congress with the woman he loves.³³ One might expect that this curse would manifest itself as a lack, or impotence, but in fact the opposite is the case. When he returns and marries his betrothed, Unnr, it soon becomes apparent that all is not well between the newly-weds. Having made an embarrassing first attempt to tell her father what the problem is (with her husband in front of all the men of the household and Hrútr himself, it should be mentioned), Unnr tries again the following summer to explain to her father Mǫrðr gígja in confidence: Þegar hann kemr við mik, þa er hǫrund hans svá mikit, at hann má ekki eptirlæti hafa við mik, en þó hǫfum vit bæði breytni til þess á alla vega, at vit mættim njótask, en þat verðr ekki. En þó áðr vit skilim, sýnir hann þat af sér, at hann er í œði sínu rétt sem aðrir menn.³⁴ (As soon as he touches me, his manhood then is so large, that he cannot have his pleasure of me, even though we both are inclined toward this in every way, that we should enjoy each other, but it never happens. But when we draw apart, he demonstrates himself to be by nature as normal as other men.)

Excessive size prevents successful love-making. Clearly one can have too much of a good thing, and once more when things become out of proportion, no matter how desirable an abundance might seem, balance and harmony cannot be achieved. Whereas others would be glad of an increase, over-abundant manliness might as well be male impotence; both produce the same result, or lack of it.³⁵ And when, rather embarrassingly, some children re-enact the quarrel as some fun, as Heather O’Donoghue says, “it’s not clear from the wording in the saga that they are not just sniggering at what they suppose to be impotence—a simple lack of virility rather than Hrútr’s bizarre excess of it.”³⁶ Effeminacy and its associations with cowardice would have been a disastrous tarnish on the otherwise exemplary character of Hrútr, but because Unnr, and the saga author, make the reader aware of the couple’s peculiar problem, he does not lose face in the eyes of the audience, even if he is for a time the object of ridicule in the saga. Having too much of a good thing is also the problem with the settlement for the killing of Hǫskuldr Hvítaness-Priest. When all the chieftains have contributed an enormous sum of money to compensate for Hǫskuldr’s death at the hands of 33 Njáls saga, 21. 34 Njáls saga, 24. 35 Carl Phelpstead discusses this incident and through a psychoanalytic reading posits the possibility that Hrútr might, in fact, have been suffering from impotence, with the explanation of a toolarge penis being a face-saving, positive spin on the particular problem that the couple faces. See Carl Phelpstead, “Size Matters: Penile Problems in Sagas of Icelanders,” Exemplaria 19, no. 3 (2007): 420–37. 36 O’Donoghue, “Women in Njáls saga,” 86.

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Njáll’s sons, Njáll himself adds, as Dronke has it, “an ambiguous garment,” the silken cloak, along with some boots.³⁷ The cloak has been read in a variety of ways, just as Vésteinn Ólason explains in his book Dialogues with the Viking Age: The pile of silver is a sign signifying reconciliation, an unambiguous sign in the eyes of those present—it represented money on the one hand, honour or worth on the other. The additional gifts which Njáll places on the pile add to and destabilise the visible sign, creating redundant meanings and inviting differing interpretations.³⁸

And different interpretations have arisen. For example, Einar Ól. Sveinsson sees the garment as a reminder to Flosi of the blood-stained cloak which Hǫskuldr was wearing when he was killed, and Richard F. Allen wonders if there is a suggestion that Flosi is being overpaid and essentially bribed into accepting the settlement and avoiding conflict. At any rate, Flosi is highly suspicious of this piece of clothing, and asks who added it to the pile of money. When no-one answers the second time, he becomes involved in an altercation with Skarp-Heðinn, Njáll’s eldest son. Flosi implies that the cloak must belong to Njáll “því at margir vitu eigi, er hann sjá, hvárt er karlmaðr eða kona” (because not many can tell just by looking at him whether he is a man or a woman). The implication is that the garment seems to be more the sort of thing a woman might wear. The addition of it to the pile upsets the balance of the settlement, and Flosi’s anxiety sparks off conflict which takes the form of jibes of effeminacy. It is not the case, I think, that it is the dubious nature of the garment itself which ruins the settlement, but rather that its uncomfortable place on top of the pile provokes Flosi, who expresses his unease in the form of gender insults. What was given unwittingly in the spirit of friendship and reconciliation tips the balance and unsettles the compensation process.³⁹ What convinces that it is the imbalance which causes the disruption is that the pile of money is carefully described by the saga author—so many people contribute “at engan penning skorti á” (that there was not a penny short). Strange, perhaps, that so many have contributed and that there is not too much money; not a penny less, not a penny more. The total being reached just by having a whipround seems to suggest the aptness of the sum as a reconciliation payment. It is implied that if Hǫskuldr had been compensated for by just the right amount

37 Dronke, “Sexual Themes,” 13. 38 Vésteinn Ólason, Dialogues with the Viking Age: Narration and Representation in the Sagas of the Icelanders, trans. Andrew Wawn (Reykjavík: Heimskringla, 1998), 203. 39 However, it can be argued that this is a deliberate move on the part of Njáll, a man who never makes a mistake in judgment. It seems here that Njáll is seen to trigger the course of events which he knows to lie ahead.

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and without the additional items of clothing, the chances of the settlement holding may have been stronger. One can also have too much of a good thing when the social order is upset by someone paying another too much attention. Queen Gunnhildr goes out of her way to honor Hrútr.⁴⁰ Although he is clearly a worthy and noble Icelandic man, it is hardly fitting that he is given the seat of honor when the queen herself is present, not to mention sharing her bed for the entirety of his stay. The attention lavished on him is inappropriate, a fact indicated by the queen herself informing her servants that if they breathe a word to anyone outside of her circle about her domestic arrangements, then it will be their last. Certainly, Hrútr ends up rather worse off when the strange curse already mentioned is inflicted upon him. Hallgerðr pays a lot of inappropriate attention to her third husband’s kinsman Sigmundr Lambason: Hallgerðr var vel til Sigmundar, ok þar kom, at þar gerðisk svá mikill ákafi, at hon bar fé á hann ok þjónaði honum eigi minnr en bónda sínum; ok lǫgðu margir þat til orðs ok þóttusk eigi vita, hvat undir myndi búa.⁴¹ (Hallgerðr treated Sigmundr very well, and it came to the point where she was plying him with money and waiting on him no less than she did her own husband; and many people started to talk about that but didn’t know what lay behind it.)

Hallgerðr calls him gersimi, a “treasure” for doing all that she asks of him, including composing insulting verses about Njáll and his sons, but Sigmundr’s compliance with her wishes eventually costs him his life.⁴² He is treasured only for the malice which he is capable of inflicting on her enemies. The excess attention lavished upon him ultimately destroys him. Flosi becomes suspicious by the amount and nature of the attention paid to him by Hildigunnr when he visits her after the death of her husband Hǫskuldr.⁴³ All of the men of the household meet him outside as he approaches the buildings, the house is cleaned, the wall-hangings brought out, and she places him in the seat of honor, which makes the visitor feel uncomfortable; he says that he is neither king nor earl, there is no need for a high seat and no need to mock him. Not only does the star treatment make Flosi feel too honored, it is also a painful reminder to him of who would normally have been revered and loved in the household, the dead Hǫskuldr; as Carol Clover says in her article “Hildigunnr’s Lament,”

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“the empty high seat is a graphic representation of someone missing, a gaping hole in the family unit.”⁴⁴ Excessive attention is lavished upon Flosi in an attempt to win the means of vengeance for the lack of the dear husband and good man Hǫskuldr. But Hildigunnr does not stop there. She pulls her hair back from her face and weeps. This emotional outburst prompts a reaction from Flosi which opens the dialogue and allows Hildigunnr to make her wishes felt. Her final coup de théâtre (and here I am influenced by Carol Clover’s comments on the ceremony and gruesome theatricality with which the housewife carries out her lament) is the bringing out of the cloak which her husband was wearing when he was killed, and in it the congealed and dried blood which she has carefully preserved.⁴⁵ She places it on his shoulders, and the blood rains down upon him. The excessiveness of the blood and her goading repels Flosi, who calls her an aberration. With regard to characterization and especially the difference between good and bad people, Einar Ól. Sveinsson thinks also in terms of lack. There is a difference “between men and women who possess will power and who discipline themselves in accordance with their ethical views, and those who lack moral scruples and self-restraint. All of the evil-doers belong to the latter group.”⁴⁶ Throughout Njáls saga there is a suspicion attached to excessive behavior in general, and over-demonstrative outbursts and extreme reactions. Given the anger she feels initially at being betrothed without her consent, it is rather worrying, for example, that Hallgerðr is brúðrin allkát, the very jolly bride at her wedding to Þorvaldr Ósvífrsson.⁴⁷ Even more worrying is her behavior toward her first husband after the event. A friend asks him about how they are getting on together, and the reply shows the puffed-up arrogance of a groom who has misinterpreted the situation: “‘Vel,’ segir hann, ‘alla blíðu lét hon uppi við mik; ok máttú sjá mót á, er hon hlær við hvert orð’”⁴⁸ (“Very well indeed,” he says, “she is exceptionally friendly towards me; and you can see that by the way she laughs at every word”). This excessive hilarity does not bode well, as Þorvaldr’s companion fears. On a second occasion Hallgerðr’s laughter shows that this form of emotional outburst 44 Carol J. Clover, “Hildigunnr’s Lament,” in Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature: New Approaches to Textual Analysis and Literary Criticism, ed. John Lindow, Lars Lönnroth, and Gerd Wolfgang Weber (Odense: Odense University Press, 1986), 141–83, at 175. 45 William Ian Miller explores this scene in detail in his reading of the saga, noting how Hildigunnr’s actions—e. g., blood-token ritual, the concept of blood-brotherhood, and gift culture—ensure that the “layers of meaning pile up” in her persuasion of Flosi. See William Ian Miller, “Why Is Your Axe Bloody?”: A Reading of Njáls saga (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 200–206. 46 Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Literary Masterpiece, 96. 47 Njáls saga, 32. 48 Njáls saga, 33.

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serves to conceal true emotion, or, at least, that her laughter is not an indication of happiness and mirth. When Þjóstólfr comes to inform her that he has killed her second husband Glúmr, whom the saga author tells us she loved very much, she bursts out laughing, and then sends her foster-father to his death by advising him to go to her uncle Hrútr.⁴⁹ If we are thinking in terms of over-reaction then we might also wonder about her tears following the quarrel and slap given by her husband. The saga author says that “hon unni honum mikit ok mátti eigi stilla sik ok grét hástǫfum” (she loved him so much and she couldn’t control herself and sobbed loudly).⁵⁰ When her foster-father sees her so upset, he reads the sign of her tears wrongly, and immediately goes out to avenge the hurt which she has received. Her excessive emotion and inability to restrain herself play their part in the death of the man she loves. Someone else who over-reacts in his grief is Þórhallr Ásgrímsson. On hearing the news that Njáll his foster-father has been burned alive in his house, his entire body swells up, jets of blood gush out of his ears which cannot be staunched, and he collapses senseless to the floor and the bleeding then stops.⁵¹ He gets up after this and says that he has behaved in a very unmanly fashion. The implication is that the horror of that excessive crime, the burning of Njáll and his family, provokes strange reactions and phenomena (such as the witch ride and other premonitions). Burning as a means of revenge is not common in the sagas; most blood feud is settled by the play of steel. Also, the reader of Njáls saga in particular is made to understand from an earlier event that burning is an excessive means of vengeance. When Gunnarr is besieged at Hlíðarendi, Mǫrðr Valgarðsson suggests twice that they burn him to death in his house. Twice Gizurr hvíti is adamant in his response: “Eigi veit ek, hví þú vill þat mæla, er engi vill annarra, ok skal þat aldri verða” (I’ve no idea why you want to speak about something which no-one else wants; that shall never happen).⁵² Why Gizurr says it will never happen is not mentioned, even though at this point in the narrative the attackers are sorely pressed by Gunnarr’s defense with his bow and arrow. It would certainly be an effective way of achieving their ends without sustaining any more losses on their side. Is there shame attached to the deed? Is the wastefulness of it too abhorrent to decent men? Certainly the burning of Bergþórshváll wastes the lives of more than is strictly appropriate for the demands of vengeance. Flosi’s quarrel is with the sons of Njáll, not with an old man, his wife, and their devoted little

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grandson. The loss of one of the most revered and respected men in the country engenders the feeling that Flosi has definitely gone too far, as he himself admits to Geirmundr.⁵³ Geirmundr rides to Bergþórshváll in the aftermath and, witnessing the scene, says to Flosi that he has performed an especially great deed (mikit stórvirki—note the excess even in this short description, a “massive big-deed”). Flosi replies “Bæði munu menn þetta kalla stórvirki ok illverki. Ok þó má nú ekki at hafa” (Men will call it both a great and an evil deed, but nothing can be done about that now). Here excess, or more literally, over-kill, is specifically linked to evil doings by their perpetrator who realizes that there is no turning back in the chain of events which will lead to the deaths of all the burners except Flosi himself. This act of goading and the horror of the burning itself can be contrasted with situations where private settlement between reasonable men can be sought, and unlike the episode with Flosi and the cloak, the right amount and no more is given. Before concluding, I shall give one final example of a positive depiction of balance running counter to the excesses and lacks of Njáls saga. Following their initial spat over the seating plan at a feast at Bergþórshváll, Hallgerðr and Bergþóra indulge in a grim game of tit-for-tat killings in which the wives arrange the deaths of persons in the other’s household. These killings all take place when the men are at the Alþingi, the national assembly, where peaceful, legal solutions to different problems are sought. Hallgerðr is the first to strike, and Gunnarr is made to give Njáll money to compensate for the death of his slave at the hands of Hallgerðr’s slave. However, when Bergþóra retaliates, Njáll has to make a payment to Gunnarr: “Gunnarr kenndi féit, at þat var it sama sem hann hafði honum greitt” (Gunnarr recognized the money as being the same as which he himself had paid to Njáll). After the next pair of killings, the same sum of money changes hands, and so on and so forth. No matter how much their families goad them or what others think about the correlation between the sums of money given and the value of the men fallen, Gunnarr and Njáll manage to retain their friendship and concord by making sure that their financial settlements always match and honor the previous exchange. Nowhere is this more apparent than when Njáll offers to look after the money which Gunnarr receives in compensation following a thwarted conspiracy to kill him. In Njáll’s safekeeping the money gathers interest, and when Gunnarr himself has to pay compensation for some killings, he goes to him to fetch the money which he entrusted to him—“ok stózk þat á endum ok þat, er Gunnarr átti at gjalda fyrir sik” (and it turned out to be exactly the amount which Gunnarr was required to pay).⁵⁴ This happy coincidence with

53 Njáls saga, 334. 54 Njáls saga, 334.

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the interest accrued symbolizes the strength of the bond between the two men. Njáll’s having exactly the right amount stands for the balance in their relationship; free from excess and lack, they enjoy perfect accord. It can be seen that the saga author’s preoccupation with excess and lack is a means of upholding the desirability of moderation (incidentally, a Christian concept which was gaining popularity across Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a result of the re-emergence from antiquity of Aristotle’s works, and the importance of Stoic and neo-Platonic thought at this time) and enjoying the stability that balance brings. As with most of the family sagas, the focus is everyday life: how to get on with one’s neighbor, one’s friends, one’s family. The author of Njáls saga shows that restraint and balance offer the opportunity for a life without conflict and misery.

Christian Carlsen

Chapter 6 Queenship, Learning, and Good Counsel in Flores och Blanzeflor

Introduction and Context This essay takes a closer look at some distinguishing features of the verse romance Flores och Blanzeflor (FoB), one of three Swedish poems dedicated to Queen Eufemia of Norway (ca. 1275–1312) commonly referred to as the Eufemiavisor. According to the earliest full versions of Flores och Blanzeflor from the fifteenth century, the poem was composed for Eufemia “litith før æn hon do” (shortly before she died) (l. 2185),¹ indicating that this was the last of the three poems commissioned by the queen, possibly on the occasion of her daughter Ingibjörg’s marriage to Duke Erik of Sweden in 1312.² This union, arranged already in 1302 when Ingibjörg was barely one year old, seems to lie behind the commissioning of all three poems. Although composed in Swedish, the visor are likely to have been composed at the royal court in Oslo.³ The love story recounted in Flores och Blanzeflor was exceptionally popular in medieval Europe.⁴ Likely based on an Oriental legend, the European tradition begins with a French poem in the middle of the twelfth century. By the end of the thirteenth century the romance had been translated into prose in Norway as Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr (FsB), and subsequently made its way to Iceland.⁵ It 1 All quotations are from Flores och Blanzeflor, ed. Emil Olson (Lund: Svenska Fornskriftsällskapet, 1956). Olson uses the oldest complete witness of the poem, Cod. Holm. D4 (ca. 1430–1450) as his base text. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. 2 Helle Degnbol, “‘Fair Words’: The French Poem Floire et Blancheflor, the Old Norse Prose Narrative Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr, and the Swedish Poem Flores och Blanzaflor,” in Rittersagas: Übersetzung, Überlieferung, Transmission, ed. Jürg Glauser and Susanne Kramarz-Bein (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2014), 71–95. 3 All three poems are written in the loose German verse form Knittelvers, consisting of paired rhyming lines, each of which contain four stressed syllables and a varying number of unstressed syllables. 4 Patricia E. Grieve, Floire et Blancheflor and the European Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5 Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr, ed. Eugen Kölbing (Halle: Altnordische Saga-Bibliothek, 1896). While earlier commentators assigned the translation to the reign of Hákon Hákonarson, Helle Degnbol tends towards a later dating than previous commentators, possibly close in time to the oldest surhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-011

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may well be that Queen Eufemia knew the narrative before she moved to Norway from Rügen in Germany in 1299. Though little is known about Eufemia, she stems from a family associated with significant literary activity. Her ancestors on her mother’s side, the House of Welffen, initiated translations of epics such as the Chanson de Roland from French to German as well as a chronicle of the family’s history.⁶ The narrative contains several intriguing features that distinguish it from other translated romances from this time-period. In his analysis of the prose translation, Ármann Jakobsson draws attention to the “youthful mindset” of the narrative, chiefly embodied by the happy-go-lucky protagonist Flores who succeeds in his quest to regain Blanzeflor chiefly through his natural charm and naivety.⁷ In contrast to, for example, the Tristan-legend, the love story here is notably lighthearted. In fact, the depiction of the lovers’ flirtation and mutual physical desire seems to conflict with the courtly emphasis on self-restraint typical of the genre. Throughout, the narrative in the prose and poetic versions contains a curious interplay of comedy and tragedy. Seemingly parodic passages detailing Flores’s enthusiasm for his knightly armor and his slips of the tongue play with audiences’ expectations, undermining the sense of drama and urgency behind Flores’s quest to save his Blanzeflor. Ármann Jakobsson argues that Flores, compared with the somber heroes of contemporary fornaldarsögur and Íslendingasögur, represents a “new kind of man” for whom love is not a sign of weakness, and whose feminine physical features and emotional reactions blur traditional gender dichotomies in the North.⁸ To a large extent, these features are present already in the French original and the Anglo-Norman and English texts considered to be the parent tradition of the Scandinavian version. In other respects, however, the Scandinavian versions show evidence of significant reworking. In the Scandinavian branch, Flores must fight a duel in order to gain freedom for himself and Blanzeflor, while other insular versions see them released simply because of their beauty and the jurors’ compassion. After returning to Flores’s native realm, moreover, the Scandi-

viving Norwegian MS (NRA 65) from the reign of Hákon Magnússon (1299–1319) and linguistically linked to Oslo or Tønsberg. The Icelandic MS AM 489 4⁰ (ca. 1450) is the first to contain the entire saga, though in a radically condensed form. See Degnbol, “Fair words,” 83–86. 6 Bjørn Bandlien and Henriette Mikkelsen Hoel, “Dronninger som strateger og kulturbærere i middelalderen,” in Dronningen i vikingtid og middelalder, ed. Karoline Kjesrud and Nanna Løkka (Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press, 2017), 297–330. 7 Ármann Jakobsson. “Young Love in Sagaland: Narrative Games and Gender Images in the Icelandic Tale of Floris and Blancheflour,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 10 (2014): 1–26, at 10. 8 Ármann Jakobsson. “Young Love in Sagaland,” 20.

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navian Blanzeflor asks her husband to travel to France with her and, once there, convinces him to convert to Christianity. This epilogue is not found in the insular tradition, where Flores is simply said to have converted after his return. Finally, the Scandinavian versions see the two lovers retreat into monastic orders towards the end of their lives, a resolution unique to the Scandinavian branch. These shared features in the Scandinavian versions suggest that the saga was the main source of the Swedish poem. As Degnbol notes, there is no evidence to suggest that the poet of Flores och Blanzeflor used texts outside the Scandinavian branch as sources.⁹ However, any attempt to identify alterations made by the poet is necessarily complicated by the fragmentary condition of the saga versions that have survived. Whenever comparisons are made with Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr in this essay, I have focused on features that seem characteristic and distinctive for the poem as a whole. In the following analysis I will draw attention to the special emphasis given in the poem to the themes of education, good counsel, and the role of the two queens of the narrative. I will argue that the poet has augmented the role of the female protagonists as representatives of courtly rhetoric and reason, an adjustment which seems significant in view of the poem’s patroness and intended audience.

Lessons from Ovid At the age of five, Flores is due to be sent til skola (to school) under the supervision of a famed mestare named Gredes (FoB, ll. 123 ff.). When the boy throws a tearful tantrum, imploring his father to let Blanzeflor join him, the King gives his permission, reassuring his son that he would not want to cause any grief. His promise, “iak vil idher ey at skilia” (I do not wish to separate the two of you) (l. 142), intones the central controversy of the narrative to follow; it is the King’s later obsession to separate the two which in fact triggers the tragedy at the heart of the romance. But first, the poem offers a charming sketch of Flores and Blanzeflor’s school days, tracing their maturing love for each other amid their study of Ovid’s poetry. As Sofia Lodén points out, the reference to Ovid is not found in the French or English versions of the poem.¹⁰ According to the saga, reading Ovid’s De arte amandi leads them to discover their love for each other (FsB, p. 9). The poem instead focuses on the lesson of enduring sorrow for the sake of love that the youths find in

9 Degnbol, “Fair Words,” 88. 10 Sofia Lodén, French Romance, Medieval Sweden and the Europeanisation of Culture (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021), 114.

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Ovid’s poetry, a lesson of course which the two youths will soon come to exemplify (ll. 150 ff.). Both the saga and the poem highlight the lovers’ extraordinary academic talents. Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr says that they learned Latin well enough to spar with any learned counterpart: “þau tǫluðu latínu djarfliga fyrir hverjum meistara” (they spoke Latin boldly with any scholar) (p. 10). The poem refers to their education in slightly more general terms, emphasizing the learning they gained from books and their resulting rhetorical proficiency. After four years, the poem states, “haffde the bokene nomit swa, / at the for klærka ok (swa for) vala / kunno mæstirlika bookmaal tala” (they had drawn so much learning from books, / that they— with scholars and foreigners alike— / could speak Latin masterfully) (FoB, ll. 156– 158). Though the noun bookmaal is in some cases synonymous with Latin as the language of learning, its use in the poem invites a broader understanding of the word, extending to “book language” or “written language” more generally.¹¹ The explicit emphasis on Flores and Blanzeflor’s reading in any case accentuates the mirroring effect this episode represents for the audience of the poem. Situated just before the tragedy begins to unfold in the main portion of the romance, the portrait of the youthful students invites readers and listeners to liken themselves to the protagonists—to be as sensitive to the potential lessons conveyed in this tale as Flores and Blanzeflor are in their reading of Ovid. The episode signals to audiences that the poem aspires to offer more than merely lighthearted entertainment and to recognize its potential purpose as a “Mirror of Princes.”¹² It is worth noting that the Nordic versions highlight the children’s oral proficiency over their written education, which is the primary emphasis in the source texts. Lodén suggests that this may be indicative of the educational ideal in the courtly context in which the saga and poem were translated.¹³ The emphasis on fair speech in this episode supports other stylistic adjustments made by the Swedish poet, such as the increased use of direct speech throughout. Courtly language 11 Cf. Helle Degnbol, Bent Chr. Jacobsen, Eva Rode, Christopher Sanders, and Þorbjörg Helgadóttir, Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog / A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (Copenhagen: Arnamagnæanske Kommission, 1989–), https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php, s.v. bókmál. Variant readings include “bookmaal radhe” (Cod. Holm. D4) and “boken radhe” (Cod. Arnam. nr 191 fol.) (FoB, p. 10). The latter phrasing, from the version connected to the monastery at Askaby, suggests more specifically the skill of interpreting scripture. 12 Cf. Kim Bergquist, “Courtliness, Nobility, and Emotional Restraint in the First Old Swedish Translated Romances: On Herr Ivan and Flores och Blanzeflor,” in Beyond the Piraeus Lion: East Norse Studies from Venice, ed. Jonathan Adams and Massimiliano Bampi (Copenhagen: Selskab for østnordisk filologi, 2017), 189–214. 13 Lodén, French Romance, 111–12.

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and behavior are given greater emphasis in the poem compared to the saga. Certain passages added in the saga, such as the catalogue of tortures awaiting Flores in the trial scene, were evidently judged inappropriate by the poet and abridged or left out completely. The Swedish poem on the whole makes a much more polite and polished impression, strengthening its didactic potential.¹⁴ The most notable instance of the poet censoring the saga version occurs in the climactic scene in which the King of Babylonia discovers Blanzeflor in bed with the intruder Flores. In line with the French Conte, the King in the saga slanders her as “vánda púta” (evil whore) and threatens to kill her (FsB, p. 68, l. 13).¹⁵ In the poem, this phrase is softened to “onda quinna” (evil woman) and followed up with an appeal by Flores that the King should mind his words in order to preserve his “konungxlik æra” (royal honor) (FoB, l. 1669–70). Fair speech, Flores reminds the King, is very much a marker of honor, a point that echoes advice on the importance of controlling one’s tongue to avoid “skǫmm” (shame) in Konungs skuggsjá. ¹⁶ The poet’s attention to courtly language is especially apparent in places in which the poem turns narrative passages from the saga into direct speech. A good example of this is the scene in which the King of Apolis presents his wife with a gift from his ravaging in the north of Spain—a French woman abducted while honoring her husband’s deathbed wish that she should undertake a pilgrimage to Santiago. The poem expands the gift-giving sequence through a dialogue between the King and Queen which highlights the courtly register of their conversation and which lends the episode a much more ceremonial effect than in the saga narrative: Han sagdhe til drøtninga sinna tha: “Ij skulin ok mina gafuo vntfa; thenne quinno gifuir iak thik til thærna.” “Iak thigger henne aff idher gærna, hælder æn stena æller gull. Hon skal mig følghia ok vara hull ok halda tho sina kristelika tro, om henne siælfue thykkir swo.” (FoB, ll. 71–78) (He then said to the queen: “You will also receive my gift; I give this woman to you as a servant.”

14 Cf. Massimiliano Bampi, “Translating Courtly Literature and Ideology in Medieval Sweden: Flores och Blanzeflor,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 4 (2008): 1–14. 15 Le Conte de Floire et Blancheflor, ed. Jean-Luc Leclanche (Paris: Les Classiques français du moyen âge, 1980), l. 2677. 16 Konungs skuggsiá, ed. Ludvig Holm-Olsen (Oslo: Dybwad, 1945), 44.

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“I am delighted to receive her from you more so than gems or gold. She will serve me and be faithful and she may keep her Christian belief, If she herself chooses to do so.”)

The saga renders this episode in a matter-of-fact way, stating only that the King “gaf […] konuna at sínum hlut” (gave […] the woman to her), and that the queen “varð því fegnari en engri gjǫf fyrri” (was more grateful for this than for any gift before) (FsB, p. 5, ll. 1–4). In both versions the Queen allows the pilgrim and future mother of Blanzeflor to keep her faith. Her expressions of gratitude and broad-mindedness in this scene prefigure her later initiatives in aid of Blanzeflor. This particular episode is significant because it introduces the Queen and brings together the mothers of Flores and Blanzeflor for the first time. Its amplification in the poem is one of numerous examples throughout the verse rendition in which the poet attracts the audience’s attention by dramatizing and amplifying important moments. In addition to the dramatic effect of the added sequences in direct speech, they also fulfill a pedagogical function by providing examples of courtly rhetoric, for instance through the use of polite expressions and speech acts expressing gratitude or generosity. This pedagogical use of direct speech recalls passages employed in the Hirð-section of Konungs skuggsjá, where the father shifts into direct speech to model appropriate forms of addressing a king.¹⁷ In view of this attention to appropriate rhetoric in the poem, it is interesting to note that the linguistic register used by different characters to some degree also reflects their rank. As seen above, Flores reprimands the King of Babylon not because his insult blemishes Blanzeflor, but because it is inappropriate for a king. Some characters of lower social standing in the poem are noticeably cruder in their speech than the standards Flores sets for himself and his peers. A pair of servants at the court in Babylonia, for instance, are heard cursing (banna) their master behind his back for making them carry the heavy flower-pot in which Flores is concealed (FoB, l. 1393). Their master, the gatekeeper, is famed for his fiery temperament and language as shown in a description given to Flores in Babylon: Then portanær, iak sagdhe thik, han ær halla ilder ij sik;

17 E. g. Konungs skuggsjá, p. 46.

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swa vredhelika han thik spyria ma: “Hua æst thu? Hui gør thu swa?” (FoB, ll. 1231–34) (The gatekeeper that I told you about he has a lot of wickedness in him; he will ask you furiously “Who are you? Why do you do that?”)

When Flores finally meets this portanær, he certainly lives up to his reputation, immediately confronting Flores and accusing him of foul play: “han ropadhe høght ok saghdhe swa […] / Æst thu komin her fore swik, / kompan, thet skal thu sighia mik!” (he gave a loud shout and said […] / Have you come here to deceive me, / companion, tell me what you are up to!) (ll. 1317–20). The label kompánn, whose primary meaning is “friend; companion,” itself potentially carries the connotation of an insult, as the term is often employed to refer to questionable characters as well as outright villains in contemporary sources.¹⁸ Though the poet shortens the account of Flores’s encounter with the gatekeeper compared to the saga, including a chess match through which Flores manages to trick him, he gives added space to the gatekeeper’s voice. Notable is his self-pitying complaint after realizing Flores’s deception, introduced by the oath “Gudh gafue, iak hafdhe alder seet thik!” (By God, I wish that I had never met you (ll. 1348–60).¹⁹ In contrast to the gatekeeper, whose verbosity contributes to mark his inferior social class, Flores’s noble lineage shines through as much in his moments of silence as in his speech. When he disguises himself as a merchant on the outset of his quest to find Blanzeflor, his high-born manners give him away. Two innkeepers notice his sorrowful sigh—“Flores sukkadhe æ swa sara” (Flores sighed so sorrowfully) (l. 610)—and quickly realize that he must be of nobler lineage than he makes out to be: “han ær komin aff godhe æt, / ok han ær aldre køpman” (he is a man of good lineage, / and certainly not a merchant) (ll. 612–13). Flores’s sorrowful sigh at the inn illustrates a paradoxical side to Flores and his role in the narrative: even though he is the hero of the quest, he stands out neither for his abilities nor for his intelligence. Only later, in the duel scenes

18 In the Old Swedish Sjælinna thrøst, Lucifer refers to one of his under-devils as a “fromber kompan” (p. 226), and elsewhere in the poem the word applies both to looters (p. 55) and devils in disguise (p. 114): Siælinna thrøst. Første delin aff the bokinne / som kallas Siælinna thrøst. Efter Cod. Holm. A 108 (f. d. Ängsö), ed. Sam. Henning (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1954). 19 The figure of the gatekeeper foreshadows that of the guard Osmin in Mozart’s opera Entführung aus dem Serail (1781), which shares a range of central motifs, such as the female protagonist’s abduction to an oriental harem, with the French romance. See Willem J. Aerts, “The ‘Entführung Aus Dem Serail’-Motif in the Byzantine (Vernacular) Romances,” in The Ancient Novel and Beyond, ed. Stelios Panayotakis, Maaike Zimmerman, and Wytse Keulen (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 371–92.

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added in the Scandinavian branch, does Flores demonstrate knightly qualities, although it is a magic ring gifted to him by his mother more than his own martial talents that ensures his victory there. Intelligence and good counsel are instead personified by the female characters in the poem—in the first part by Flores’s mother, and by Blanzeflor in the second.

The Book of Blanzeflor The poem’s transmission history demonstrates its close connection to female audiences. In addition to its connection to Eufemia and Ingibjörg, two of the fifteenthcentury codices are associated with aristocratic noblewomen (Cod. Holm. D 4a; Cod. Holm. D 3). A third codex from that century (AM 191 fol.) was written at the nunnery at Askaby, indicating its use for theological instruction. In this version, the romance is given the unusual title Liber Blanzaflor. ²⁰ The omission of Flores’s name perhaps signals to audiences that Blanzeflor is to be considered the primary point of interest in the romance, rather than Flores and his quest, even though Blanzeflor is in fact absent in the larger portion of the narrative. The title does, however, reflect the fact that Blanzeflor plays a much more active part in the Scandinavian branch of the romance compared to the French Conte, where she essentially remains a passive object of Flores’s quest. As Blanzeflor represents the Christian side of the pair, the quest undertaken by the pagan Flores to find her contains an allegorical dimension. In addition to the Marian resonances of her name, her initiation of Flores’s conversion and the subsequent Christianization of his kingdom accentuate her symbolic function as an embodiment of Christian faith in the Scandinavian branch of the romance. She gains added significance as a symbol and ambassador of Christianity, associating her with saints such as St. Agnes who suffered a comparable fate of abduction at the hands of pagans. As Virgile Reiter observes, this alteration in the Scandinavian branch invites audiences to consider her as a saint-like example of Christian virtues of patience and devotion.²¹ These added qualities could help to explain why

20 On this codex, see Massimiliano Bampi, “Translating and Rewriting: The Septem Sapiente in Medieval Sweden,” in Rittersagas, ed. Glauser and Kramarz-Bein, 239–62. See also Lodén, French Romance, 20. 21 Virgile Reiter, “De Blanchefleur á Blanzeflor: De la jeune fille á la seinte reine,” in The Eufemiavisor and Courtly Culture: Time, Texts and Cultural Transfer, ed. O. Ferm et al. (Stockholm: Kungl. vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien, 2015), 221–34.

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the poem came to be copied in the nunnery at Askaby, and why it commonly appears together with devotional and didactic material in fifteenth-century codices.²² In addition to the added focus on Blanzeflor’s saint-like features, both she and the Queen play more significant parts as representatives of reason and good counsel in the Swedish poem. Kim Bergquist notes that the Swedish version on the whole tends to represent the characters as more rational than the saga or the French parent tradition.²³ In several instances, for example, the poet tempers the King of Apolis’s choleric outbursts compared to the saga. Even though the saga and poem largely describe the same sequence of events, the poem sharpens the focus on Blanzeflor’s accomplishments. Particularly her added contributions in direct speech draw attention to her voice and her influential position as newly crowned queen. Blanzeflor’s role as Flores’s chief counselor first emerges when, after three years of marriage and the birth of three sons, she convinces Flores to travel to France with her: Min herra, om iak idher bidhia ma ok vilin ij lydha mino radhæ til Franz wiliom vi fara badhæ Min modher sagdhe mik ther fra at iak ther godha frænder a. (ll. 2096–200) (My lord, if I may ask you and if you will listen to my advice, let us both travel to France. My mother told me of that place that I have good friends there.)

Blanzeflor’s words highlight her transformation into the principal giver and voice of radh (advice; counsel) in the final part of the poem. The parallel passage in the saga version simply reports: “Bað Blankiflúr þau þá þangat fara, er var ætt hennar” (Blankiflúr then asked them to travel to where her kinsmen were) (FsB, p. 72). In her appeal to Flores above she displays her rhetorical skill, pointing back to her educational accomplishments emphasized earlier in the poem. Her speech signals the decisive part she will play in her husband’s and his people’s salvation. For it is in France that Blanzeflor brings about Flores’s conversion, first

22 Massimiliano Bampi, “Übersetzung als Manipulation: Der Altschwedische Flores och Blanzeflor und dessen Überlieferung im 15. Jahrhundert,” Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek 36 (2019): 8–21. 23 Bergquist, “Courtliness, Nobility, and Emotional Restraint,” 200–201.

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prodding him to visit a new church every day to become familiar with Christian teachings, and then presenting him with a fundamental choice: Nu skulin ij vælia aff thæsse twa, hwath ij vilin hæller gøra swa, iak skal her æpter idher væra æller villin ij kristnas hære – swa ok them, ther hema æra, skulin ij lata kristnas, herra, ok alt thet folk medh idjer ær –; thet vilkor nu til idher stær. (ll. 2137–44) (Now you must choose between these two things what you prefer to do, either I will stay here or you will convert here – so too those at home they should also be converted, and all the people that are together with you –; those are the terms presented to you.)

The vilkor Blanzeflor presents to Flores is remarkably self-assured, and must have seemed extraordinarily bold to contemporary audiences. The motif recalls portraits of high-born and independent-minded women in Snorri’s kings’ sagas, such as Ástríðr, sister of Óláfr Tryggvason, who defiantly objects to marrying a suitor below her social standing.²⁴ It also brings to mind the famous condition that according to Snorri inspired the unification of Norway—the bold message from Gyða, daughter of a chieftain, to Haraldr hárfagri that she would not accept his offer before he had achieved this feat.²⁵ Jenny Jochens suggests that such episodes were placed anachronistically by medieval authors into historical settings where this idea of female decision-making would not have been realistic. Although the notion of female choice in marriage became enshrined in law codes of the late twelfth century, Jochens notes, the idea did not take effect in the lives of women of higher social standing during the Middle Ages. Blanzeflor’s threat to break up the union and retire to a monastery reflects the traditional alternative available to women who disapproved of a marriage arrangement in medieval Christian Scandinavia.²⁶ 24 Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 3 vols, Íslenzk fornrit 26–28 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1941–1951), 1:306. 25 Heimskringla, 1:96. 26 Jenny M. Jochens, “Consent in Marriage: Old Norse Law, Life, and Literature,” Scandinavian Studies 58 (1986): 142–76, at 144.

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Ármann Jakobsson highlights the romantic subtext of the above scene in the saga—where the choice is more explicitly between Blankiflúr’s retirement “til hreinlífs” (to a pure life / monastery) or their continued physical relationship.²⁷ Here, it seems to be his physical desire that prompts his immediate conversion: “Nú á þessum degi,” he tells her, “vil ek við kristni taka” (On this same day […] will I become a Christian) (FsB, p. 76). In the poem, Blanzeflor more firmly takes on the role of missionary as she includes Flores’s people in her ultimatum. While Blanzeflor is the voice of reason in the epilogue of the romance, the Queen of Apolis is the chief representative both of rationality and good counsel in the main narrative. As noted earlier, the King’s outbursts are presented in a less caricature-like fashion in the poem than in the saga, contributing to the theme of restraint that Bergquist has highlighted in the poem.²⁸ Even so, there is no doubt that the King is responsible for the unfolding tragedy. Were it not for the Queen, neither Flores nor Blanzeflor would have survived the controversy at the court of Apolis. As in the saga, the Queen twice dissuades the King from taking Blanzeflor’s life. Her giving of radh is a recurring motif, highlighted in the poem both through the rationality of her arguments and through her humane reactions. When the King first proposes to have Blanzeflor murdered, she makes the King aware of the dishonor such a course of action would bring both to Flores and to themselves, urging him instead to send the girl away: Thet bør os væl at akta, vart rike swa gøma ok vakta, at vaar son fore Blanzaflur tappe ey sin hedher, fore henna amur; thy thykker mik vara radhelikt swa, at vi skilia honum hænne fra, at henna liiff ey skadha ma ok wi ey vanfræghdh ther aff fa. (FoB, ll. 181–88) (We should be careful to preserve and protect our kingdom so that our son does not on account of Blanzeflor lose his honor due to her love; it therefore seems advisable to me that we separate her from him, that her life is not harmed and that we avoid dishonor because of that.)

27 Ármann Jakobsson, “Young Love in Sagaland,” 13. 28 Bergquist, “Courtliness, Nobility, and Emotional Restraint.”

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The Queen warns the King of three weighty consequences, seemingly in order of their importance: concern for the kingdom, Flores’s honor, and lastly their own reputation. In the corresponding scene in Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr the Queen instead warns that they would lose their only son, Flores (FsB, p. 12), perhaps alluding to the potential political consequences of such a turn of events. Elsewhere, too, the Queen of the poem shows a concern with honor that is lacking in the saga. When she implores the King to prevent their son from taking his own life, she stresses the grave effect on their standing in the country if it became known that they had the opportunity to save him but failed to do so: “vardher thet thunkt om land at høra, / vi mattom thæt hiælpa ok vilde ey gøra” (it would be grave news around the country, / that we could have helped but did not desire to) (FoB, ll. 445– 46). Like Blanzeflor, the diplomatic skill displayed by the Queen in the poem makes her emerge more convincingly in the role of counselor here compared to the saga. Phrases such as “Thet bør os væl at akta” (we should consider this carefully) (l. 181), “iak idher thet radha vil” (I would give you this advice) (l. 448), or “mik thykker radhelikt vara” (it seems advisable to me) (l. 185) reflect the rhetorical armory of a seasoned adviser. In other moments, especially when talking to her son, the Queen comes across as more humane and realistic in her reactions in the poem than in the saga version. Rushing to tell Flores that Blanzeflor is still alive, she calls his name gently (“liofuelik”), asking him to sit by her side and addressing him lovingly as “min son kære” (my beloved son) (ll. 455–57). Her motherly affection shines through even when she sees the need to censure him for his immaturity: overhearing Flores talking about taking his own life, she calls him “een dara” (a fool) (l. 419), but then patiently goes on to explain the illusion of his romanticized image of death: “Min son, han ær ængin viis man, / there ey for dødhin rædhas kan” (my son, he is not a wise man/ who does not fear death) (ll. 423–24). Whereas the saga foregrounds the Queen’s heathen background in a consistent way, the poet tones down this facet of her character with the effect that her positive qualities emerge more forcefully and unambiguously. For instance, in her conversation with Flores about the futility of expecting a reunion with Blanzeflor in the hereafter, the Queen of the poem uses the Christian term Paradiis (l. 428); in the saga, she refers to a heathen equivalent named Blómstarvǫll (Flower-field) (FsB, p. 12). In muting this aspect of the Queen’s otherness, the poet allows audiences to interpret her as a noble heathen and as an emblem of good queenship.²⁹

29 For a thorough discussion of the religious themes in the poem, see Virgile Reiter, “Flores och

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With one exception, the Queen’s actions in the poem correspond to the saga. Although the exception is minor, it strengthens the impression that the poet has sought to place her in a more favorable light than in the source texts. According to Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr and the Conte, the Queen—after advising the King against killing Blanzeflor—goes on to design a scheme to lure Flores away from his beloved. This scheme involves a series of deceptions: Flores is to be sent away from school to a sister of the Queen, named as “Sibilia” of “Mintorie,” with the false promise that Blanzeflor will follow; Blanzeflor’s mother is to feign a mortal illness to make her daughter return to Apolis; the relatives are further to be enlisted in the attempt to distract Flores from his feelings for Blanzeflor by surrounding him with a band of “fegrstar meyjar” (the most beautiful maidens) (FsB, p. 13). Although the same elements of this deception reappear in the poem, the poet makes the King rather than the Queen responsible for the entire scheme, framing Sibilia as the King’s sister rather than that of the Queen (ll. 189–222). This shifts not only the agency of the deception away from the Queen, but also the affiliation of his kin who contribute to it. Considered in the context of the positive emphases on queenship elsewhere in the poem, the alteration in this episode seems consistent, ensuring that the Queen’s exemplary qualities are not tainted by her involvement in devising the plot. Compared to the saga, then, the Queen emerges as more thoughtful, wellmeaning, and life-like in the poem. Though the saga, too, casts her as the King’s better half and superior to him in judgment—in one place described as vitr (“wise,” FsB, p. 17)—the Queen’s contributions in the poem to a far greater extent display her intellectual abilities and humaneness. It seems clear that, drawing on the figures of the Queen and Blanzeflor in the source narrative, the poet has sharpened these contours of the female protagonists. In doing so, the poem evinces a strategy of idealization noticeable in romance adaptations throughout medieval Europe, by which protagonists are modified to more clearly represent certain ideals, sometimes reducing their psychological complexity in the process.³⁰ The distinctive features of Flores och Blanzeflor touched upon in this essay strengthen the impression that the poem must be considered an adaptation or reworking rather than merely a translation of the saga as it has survived.³¹ The

Blanzeflor and the Orient: Depicting the Other in Medieval Sweden,” Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek 36 (2017): 21–37. 30 See Keith Busby, “‘Or volsko’, ‘Na den walschen boucken’, ‘Out of Frenssche’: Towards a Model of Adaptation,” in Riddarasǫgur: The Translation of European Court Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, ed. Karl G. Johansson and Else Mundal (Oslo: Novus forlag, 2014), 17–32. 31 Reiter, “Flores och Blanzeflor and the Orient,” 22–23.

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added attention in the poem to the role of the two queens is especially noteworthy, but the tendency is not unique in Scandinavian romance adaptations. In her study of Parcevals saga, for example, F. Regina Psaki demonstrates how the translator of that saga foregrounds the positive qualities of the female characters much more than in the French original.³² Interest in powerful women, it may be added, is developed further in the indigenous riddarasögur, to the point where the genre itself can be seen as an “imaginary space” for exploring the limits of female political influence.³³ As Jóhanna Friðriksdóttir has shown, this is especially noticeable in the subgenre of maiden-king sagas such as Cláris saga and Nitida saga, where the authors appear to experiment with ideas about female self-determination and power.³⁴ But where these narratives typically end up by reaffirming traditional limits of female influence and behavior, the female protagonists of Flores och Blanzeflor seem to transcend these boundaries. Even more so than in the saga, the Swedish poet has made the two queens of the poem the chief representatives of rationality, morality, political understanding, and courtly rhetoric. It is tempting to connect these features with the immediate historical context of the royal patron who commissioned the poem, Queen Eufemia, and her daughter. Considering this particular poem, it is not difficult to imagine Eufemia’s motives to be at least in part educational: to present her twelve-year-old daughter, her son-in-law, and further potential audiences in her environment with a narrative that showcases positive role models, exemplary behavior and speech, and healthy Christian ideals wrapped into a humorous and entertaining tale. Additionally, the adaptation gave audiences at the court access to one of the most popular pieces of courtly literature in Europe at the time, a form of cultural capital that Eufemia herself seems to have valued highly. As Bjørn Bandlien and Henriette Hoel have argued, literary patronage and production constitute one “cultural strategy” by which medieval European queens could increase their position and influence at the courts they became part of—often, as in the case of Eufemia and In-

32 F. Regina Psaki, “Women’s Counsel in the Riddarasögur: The Case of Parcevals saga,” in Cold Counsel: The Women in Old Norse Literature and Myth, ed. Sarah M. Anderson and Karen Swenson (London: Taylor & Francis, 2001), 201–24, at 203. 33 Jóhanna K. Friðriksdóttir, Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words, and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 133. 34 Jóhanna K. Friðriksdóttir, Women in Old Norse Literature, ch. 5. The author of one such maidenking saga, Sigurðar saga þǫgla, explicitly presents the saga as a sequel to this particular tale, portraying the female protagonist, Sedentiana, as the daughter of Flores and Blanzeflor who inherited the kingdom after the parents’ retirement.

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gibjörg, through international marriage alliances.³⁵ Literary enterprises such as the Eufemiavisor could help to establish the patroness’s identity, strengthen cultural alliances, and shape the cultural milieu they presided over. The attention given in the poem to the prominent motifs of queenship, learning, and counsel discussed in this essay indicate a high degree of sensitivity towards these motifs on the part of the poet. They contribute to making Flores och Blanzeflor stand out as a distinctive and subtle adaptation of this widely translated medieval romance—one that seems carefully customized to the identity of its royal patroness.

35 Bandlien and Hoel, “Dronninger som strateger og kulturbærere,” 326.

Philip Lavender

Chapter 7 When Grímr and Gunnar Met Hálfdan and Harold: Women Dressed as Men in Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar and Walter Scott’s Harold the Dauntless “Gender-fluid,” referring to people whose gender is variable over time, is a fairly recent term, so one might argue that it is anachronistic to apply it to cultural production from centuries past. Nevertheless, in this essay, I want to look back at the ways in which gender is presented as fluid and/or gender transitivity (the process of one’s gender shifting) is presented as a possibility in two non-contemporary works, one from medieval Iceland and the other from nineteenth-century Scotland, albeit influenced by older Icelandic literature.¹ A great deal of scholarly writing on Old Norse Icelandic literature discusses the non-stable gender categories presented therein and the possibility for movement between categories. Taking this secondary literature as a starting point, I will subsequently look in more detail at scenes from the two chosen texts in which women appear to change gender and consider how the realization of such a shift is managed. Is the change merely superficial? How can we be sure? One of the standard features of Carol Clover’s groundbreaking account of the Old Norse-Icelandic gender system in “Regardless of Sex” is the gender mobility that is integral to it. Clover talks of how “the category of ‘woman’ is a moveable one” and that biological women (implicit in the theory even if explicitly rejected by the one-sex model proposed) were “under the right conditions capable of ascension into the ranks of those who master.”²

1 Terminology in such matters has shifted considerably in recent years, so that which I use here may become obsolete or inaccurate with time. “Gender-fluid” is not synonymous with “trans,” since trans people may have a fixed subconscious sex (the sex that one feels that one is), even if their assigned sex, socialized gender, and bodies change in the course of a transition. See Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), on potential problems associated with equating transgender with queer and subversive gender identities. 2 Carol Clover, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Representations 44 (1993): 1–28, at 7, 14. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-012

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Likewise, some men “for whatever reason became a social woman” and were “always in peril of slipping into the servile or the feminine” in a process of “downward gender traffic.”³ Later scholars, many of whom have critiqued Clover’s model, also recognize the potential for flux in the gender system revealed in Old Norse-Icelandic texts. Gareth Evans, for example, in his recent book, Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of the Icelanders, after rejecting Clover’s model in favor of one which relies on Raewyn Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, describes a “hierarchization of different modalities of masculinity” which means that “male characters […] seek to be in a superior position to other male characters.”⁴ He carefully points out that “deviation from the masculine ideal does not invariably imply feminization,”⁵ but the phrasing here suggests that the possibility for a biological male to adopt a feminine gender is one of an array of possibilities. The focus of Evans’s study means that femininities are not dealt with at any length, but as stated, he draws heavily on Raewyn Connell’s work and the field of masculinity studies which has sprung from it. Connell sees no possibility for women to embody hegemonic femininities, rather they could only hope to attain “emphasized femininities” which are complementary to hegemonic masculinities. However, more recent studies which draw on the intersectional work of Patricia Hill Collins argue that, within the so-called intersectional “matrix of domination,” hegemonic femininities can arise. This is worth mentioning here not only because it articulates the pitfalls of monocategorical thinking (that is, thinking which neglects to see subject positions as shaped by intersectional factors), but also because it allows for an awareness of how there is movement up and down within hierarchies of femininities. As Laura T. Hamilton and colleagues have pointed out, while discussing the ways in which white, heterosexual, affluent women are more able to perform hegemonic femininities in the contemporary United States, “this does not mean, however, that the ability to perform hegemonic femininities is reducible to category membership. People may cross into the other side of dualisms by ‘passing’” and, moreover, “not all affluent white women successfully perform this style of femininity.”⁶ The game is rigged in such a way that movement is not easy and, indeed, positions of influence are very hard for certain groups of individuals to attain. But such transitions are not impossible and some leeway exists. Moreover, since the matrix of domination is context-based, more freedom of move-

3 Clover, “Regardless of Sex,” 14. 4 Gareth Lloyd Evans, Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 17. 5 Evans, Men and Masculinities, 17. 6 Laura T. Hamilton et al., “Hegemonic Femininities and Intersectional Domination,” Sociological Theory 37 (2019): 315–41, at 328.

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ment can be experienced in certain situations, for example in subcultures as opposed to the dominant culture, and, in theory, in other historical moments. I am not aware of anybody applying Hill Collins’s adumbration of hegemonic femininities in an Old Norse context but, given Evans’s work on hegemonic masculinities, it would seem to be a fruitful avenue for future research. The picture which I have just sketched may seem to be surprisingly dynamic: not only is there the possibility for individuals to move away from their socialized gender (that is, the gender which society trains an individual to adopt), but there is also the constant potential for movement between hegemonic and subordinated gender positions within the broad realms of masculinity and femininity.⁷ Nevertheless, many of the examples of gender diversity in Old Norse texts seem to exist only fleetingly before the thrust of the narrative reasserts a normative status quo. Jack Halberstam, discussing the limits of dominant genders, has expressed a desire to “hasten the proliferation of alternate gender regimes” but with a caveat: “I do not wish to suggest that we can magically wish into being a new set of properly descriptive genders that would bear down on the outmoded categories ‘male’ and ‘female.’”⁸ When looking at past configurations of gender too we must avoid “the trap of simply projecting contemporary understandings back in time,” a warning which applies equally well to conservative and progressive positions.⁹ That said, various forms of potential gender non-conformity appear in Old Norse-Icelandic literature. Mythological texts show the gods in activities which have often been described as “gender-bending,” with Loki being a key example (he becomes a mare) and Þórr famously cross-dressing in Þrymskviða. ¹⁰ Odin too, due to his engagement in seiðr practices, has at times been said to be queer.¹¹ For those not fortunate enough to be gods, the stigma of gender non-conformity is much more emphatic. In the Íslendingasögur there are many cases of verbal níð, or ritual slander, in which the insults include descriptions of their

7 It is worth mentioning that a potential pitfall of these models is their emphasis on gender transition as motivated by power, as if the only reason to negotiate one’s gender is to gain benefits. For many contemporary trans people the avoidance of gender dissonance by aligning “subconscious sex” (the gender that one feels one is) with a fitting body may be much more relevant. See Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2016), ch. 5, and Lee Colwill, “The King’s Two Bodies: Snjáskvæði and the Performance of Gender,” MA thesis, Háskoli Íslands, 2018, 49. 8 Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 41. 9 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 52. 10 See, for example, James Frankki, “Cross-Dressing in the Poetic Edda: Mic muno Æsir argan kalla,” Scandinavian Studies 84, no. 4 (2012): 425–37. 11 See Amy Jefford Franks, “Valfǫðr, vǫlur and Valkyrjur: Óðinn as a Queer Deity Mediating the Warrior Halls of Viking Age Scandinavia,” Scania: Journal of Medieval Studies 2 (2019): 28–65.

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male targets in “feminized” positions, either giving birth or being sexually penetrated.¹² Such accounts are common but usually contested, whereas uncontested examples of biological males dressing or disguising themselves as women are rare. Helgi Njálsson’s donning of a female disguise in Njáls saga in order to escape from the burning Bergþórshvoll is a well-known exception, although onlookers see through it almost immediately. Outside of the Íslendingasögur the hero of Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr is mistaken for a woman.¹³ For biological females there has been much discussion of warrior maidens and maiden kings.¹⁴ Besides valkyries, classic examples where gender presentation undergoes a change are Þor(n)björg/ Þórbergr from Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar and Hervör/Hervarðr from Hervarar saga. ¹⁵ Carol Clover suggested that they were literary reflections of a legal practice of promoting daughters to surrogate or functional sons in the absence of male relatives,¹⁶ while William Layher has argued that their gender transitions exist principally to allow for their repatrification—that is, reinsertion into a non-transgressive gender identity through the assertion of patriarchal authority.¹⁷ Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, on the other hand, has argued that Þórbergr, rather than merely playing a part, can be understood as trans since his “motive for adopting a male role seems to be attributed to the character’s identifying as male despite

12 The standard description of níð and its gendered implications is Preben Meulengracht-Sørensen, The Unmanly Man: Concepts of Sexual Defamation in Early Northern Society, The Viking Collection 1, trans. Joan Turville-Petre (Odense: Odense University Press, 1988). 13 Ármann Jakobsson, “Young Love in Sagaland: Narrative Games and Gender Images in the Icelandic Tale of Floris and Blancheflour,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 10 (2014): 1–26, at 17–21. 14 Maiden kings were first looked at in detail, albeit not from a particularly gender-theoretical perspective, in Marianne E. Kalinke, Bridal Quest Romance in Medieval Iceland, Islandica 46 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 34–39 on Þor(n)björg in Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar and ch. 3 “The Misogamous Maiden Kings” on other examples. In a later article, Marianne E. Kalinke, “Textual Instability, Generic Hybridity, and the Development of Some Fornaldarsögur,” in The Legendary Sagas: Origins and Development, ed. Annette Lassen, Agneta Ney, and Ármann Jakobsson (Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2012) , 201–27, at 204–9, Kalinke discusses how different redactions of Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar present the gender dynamics in distinct ways. 15 In addition to the works discussed, see Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 112–16. 16 Carol Clover, “Maiden Warriors and Other Sons,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 85, no. 1 (1986): 35–49. 17 William Layher, “Caught Between Worlds: Gendering the Maiden Warrior in Old Norse,” in Women and the Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre and the Limits of Epic Masculinity, ed. Sara S. Poor and Jana K. Schulman (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 183–203.

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his female biology.”¹⁸ Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir’s statement about Þórbergr is presented as a contrast to the character of Queen Ermenga in Mágus saga jarls, a riddarasaga. Ermenga appears as a man named Hirtingr in order to complete challenges set by her objectionable husband, but “retains a (cis) female identity to which she reverts immediately once she has completed the tasks, so the theoretical term most apt for her behavior during her time as a man is what Jack Halberstam calls female masculinity, that is, masculinity divorced from maleness and performed by a person biologically female.”¹⁹ Halberstam’s concept of female masculinity has also been invoked recently by Gareth Lloyd Evans as a lens through which to better understand several manly female characters from Íslendingasögur. ²⁰ These various examples involve a range of behaviors and gender identities, with the terminology used to describe them shifting over time and being disputed. Disguise and concealment can take many forms, one of these involving the use of non-gender-typical garments. In such cases, the use of the term “disguise” often divorces the activities of the individuals involved from questions of gender identity, focusing merely on practicalities, such as avoiding danger. A man using women’s clothes as a disguise could be seen as a type of transvestism, if one follows Kirsten Wolf’s pragmatic definition of transvestism: “to clothe in other garments, especially in the garments of the opposite sex.”²¹ She juxtaposes this with cross-dressing, said to be more of a lifestyle choice, which in today’s terminology might overlap in part with processes of self-identification, and mentions a distinction between imitating maleness and simulating maleness. Simulating would be a disguise, similar to what Johann Katrín Friðriksdóttir identified as “female masculinity” in the case of Ermenga dressed up as Hirtingr in Mágus saga. Imitating, on the other hand, refers to the type of presentation displayed by characters such as Bróka-Auðr in Laxdœla saga, who wear men’s clothes but whose status as women is never doubted. Evans has recently described Bróka-Auðr also in terms of Halberstam’s female masculinity, but said that “we cannot know whether Auðr is seen as sexually de18 Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, “‘With mirthful merriment’: Masquerade and Masculinity in Mágus saga jarls,” in Masculinities in Old Norse Literature, ed. Gareth Lloyd Evans and Jessica Clare Hancock (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), 77–93, at 91. 19 Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, “‘With mirthful merriment,’” 91. 20 Gareth Lloyd Evans, “Female Masculinity and the Sagas of Icelanders,” in Masculinities in Old Norse Literature, ed. Evans and Hancock, 59–75. 21 Kirsten Wolf, “Transvestism in the Sagas of Icelanders,” in Sagas and the Norwegian Experience / Sagaene og Noreg: 10th International Saga Conference, Trondheim, 3–9 August 1997: Preprints / Fortrykk, ed. Jan Ragnar Hagland (Trondheim: Senter for Middelalderstudier, 1997), 675– 84, at 675. Critical discourse has moved away from pathologizing accounts of transvestism and thus the connotations which Wolf alludes to.

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viant, as simply cross-dressing, or as having an identity akin to that of a transgender person today.”²² Such cases highlight the difficulty of working with contemporary terminology and trying to see to what extent it is applicable. But Ermenga and Bróka-Auðr can both exemplify female masculinity, despite their thoroughly different situations, because, as Halberstam explains, “there are multiple forms of female masculinity within our present culture […] might it not also be the case that historically, female masculinity takes on a huge variety of forms?”²³ One of the contemporary forms that Halberstam identifies is transgender butch (that is, approximately masculine-presenting lesbian women who experience some kind of gender dysphoria), but FTM transsexual men would be another pertinent category.²⁴ In medieval Iceland transitioning to live as a man would not have been possible, in any way similar to today, for somebody assigned female at birth, but some forms of trans-contiguous experiences may well have existed. As mentioned, scholars have suggested that Þor(n)björg can be read as a trans man and Hervör’s comment in Hervarar saga that “maðr þóttumst ek / mennskr” (a human being [that is, just a human being, not one defined by gender] I was considered)²⁵ may be a statement (albeit in past tense) of trans experience from the mouth of a character just reminded of their gendered role in child-bearing. Hervör too has been the subject of a recent non-binary interpretation by Miriam Mayburd, who argues that the character’s depiction is seen as “an invitation to depart from the modern theoretical construct of gender binary,” and that their journey is traced along a “polyphonic inter-gender continuum.”²⁶ In what follows I focus on two examples which can be added to this wealth of research. I start by looking at a fornaldarsaga, and then move on to look at a narrative poem produced in the nineteenth century but influenced by works from the Nordic Middle Ages and perhaps even specifically indebted to the fornaldarsaga under discussion. The analyses of these two seemingly disparate texts extend the findings of preexisting scholarship, demonstrating the ways in which medieval

22 Evans, “Female Masculinity,” 63. He notes, too, that trans identities are neither unitary nor transhistorical, hence “akin.” 23 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 54. Note that female masculinity can be associated with heterosexual women and with lesbians, and in the latter case there is diversity too as “lesbian masculinity has always encompassed a multiplicity of forms” (120). 24 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 144. 25 Fornaldar sögur Nordrlanda eptir gömlum handritum, ed. Carl Christian Rafn, 3 vols. (Copenhagen: Popp, 1829–1830), at 1:439, hereafter FSN. 26 Miriam Mayburd, “‘Helzt þóttumk nú heima í millim…’: A Reassessment of Hervör in Light of Seiðr’s Supernatural Gender Dynamics,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 129 (2014): 121–64, at 124, 129. Mayburd argues against the imposition of a static gender binary upon earlier Nordic conceptions of gender.

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Nordic women could be represented as becoming men and how such processes are reproduced and reimagined in the context of later medievalism.

Ingigerðr and Grímr in Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar is a fornaldarsaga, which, according to the common definition, tells of the ancient history of Scandinavia prior to the settlement of Iceland. It was probably composed in Iceland in the fourteenth century.²⁷ Much of the action takes place in the eastern Baltic, and the story begins by telling how a king named Eysteinn conquers Aldeigjuborg (Starya Ladoga) along with his son Hálfdan and his retainer Úlfkell. In the process, the ruler of Aldeigjuborg, Hergeirr, is killed, after which Eysteinn marries Hergeirr’s widow, Ísgerðr. This sets into motion a chain of events, whereby Eysteinn, who fears reprisals from Earl Skúli, who lives nearby in Álaborg and has fostered Hergeirr’s daughter, Ingigerðr, sends Hálfdan and Úlfkell to neutralize the threat. The expedition is seemingly successful, but unbeknownst to the victors, Earl Skúli and Ingigerðr have escaped, after arranging for a slave and his daughter, also named Ingigerðr, to take their places. The slave posing as Skúli is killed during the conflict while the slave Ingigerðr (believed by all to be the princess Ingigerðr) is offered to Hálfdan in marriage. He, however, refuses, and so Úlfkell marries the non-aristocratic Ingigerðr instead and becomes earl of Álaborg. The rest of the saga deals with the fallout from these events. Firstly, Eysteinn’s court receives a visit from two strangers both named Grímr. Everything seems to go well until one night these men assassinate Eysteinn and immediately afterwards make their escape. Hálfdan is deeply troubled after this, not only because his father has been killed and he must take revenge but also because he has glimpsed the hand of the younger of the two men and is obsessed with it and its owner. To make matters worse, Úlfkell, who previously supported Eysteinn, now sees himself as the rightful next-in-line to rule Aldeigjuborg (since he believes that he is married to Hergeirr’s daughter) and becomes the saga’s primary antagonist. Úlfkell gets into a sea battle with Hálfdan and nearly kills him, but Hálfdan is saved by the intervention of a mysterious stranger. After the battle, the stranger

27 Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar, ed. Franz Rolf Schröder, Altnordische Saga-Bibliothek 15 (Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer, 1917), 42. All quotations from the saga are from this edition, but the saga can also be found in FSN, at 3:519–88 (viewable at https://baekur.is/bok/000121901/3/For naldarsogur).

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takes the injured Hálfdan to a secluded cottage and leaves him there to convalesce. Once recovered, Hálfdan learns from the owner of the cottage that the stranger who helped him is the older Grímr, his father’s killer, who is also Earl Skúli. The two events—killing his father but saving him—have the potential to cancel each other out, so Hálfdan makes a perilous journey through dense tracts of forest to Skúli’s castle. Skúli is now under attack from Úlfkell, but Hálfdan intervenes on Skúli’s behalf and Úlfkell is defeated. They have now saved each other so all grudges are forgotten, and Hálfdan marries Ingigerðr, having learnt that she is the true princess and that Úlfkell’s bride is a mere usurper. The focus of analysis here is the way in which Ingigerðr disguises herself as a man, adopting the name Grímr, so as to infiltrate Eysteinn’s castle and help her foster-father Skúli kill Eysteinn in order to avenge her father. While other examples from fornaldarsögur have been repeatedly discussed, Ingigerðr has inspired little critical interest, perhaps understandably since her character is not as fleshed out.²⁸ She is not a maiden king like Þor(n)björg/Þórbergr, never seeking to rule in her own right. Her time as Grímr is short-lived and seemingly pragmatic, a means to an end, hence my provisional description of it as “disguise.” In fact, Ingigerðr’s adoption of a masculine persona seems to be of little interest to the saga-author(s) in and of itself. Rather, it is the possibilities that arise from it for Hálfdan to experience non-normative sexual urges that are played with in the text. The groundwork for this is laid early on when Hálfdan is offered the imposter Ingigerðr in marriage and “hann kvez eigi mjök kvennskygn” (he said that he was not really looking for a woman).²⁹ While the reader, who knows that this particular Ingigerðr is not a suitable match for Hálfdan, may understand his words as merely a polite way of phrasing a rejection, the statement nevertheless allows other possibilities to be entertained. This becomes more the case when the two men named Grímr arrive at Eysteinn’s court. Hálfdan takes a special interest in the younger Grímr and we are told that he “lagði opt leik sinn við hann, bæði um tafl ok skotfimi” (frequently participated in games with him, both chess and archery) and, every night when they are sleeping, Hálfdan is said to wake and look in on them.³⁰ As with the previous statement, multiple interpretations can be applied here: either Hálfdan is simply cautious and keeping these mysterious strangers

28 See the references in footnotes 13–17. 29 Hálfdanar saga, ed. Schröder, 100 (FSN, 3:527). It seems likely that this scene is influenced by Göngu-Hrólfs saga, which is probably the inspiration for a number of details and plot elements in Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar (see Hálfdanar saga, ed. Schröder, 13–14, 24). For the sake of comparison, Göngu-Hrólfr tells his father at the start of his saga “eigi [mun ek] kvænast, því konur skulu mèr ekki” (FSN, 3:249; “I will not marry, since I have no business with women”). 30 Hálfdanar saga, ed. Schröder, 103 (FSN, 3:529).

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on a short leash or Hálfdan is actually interested in the younger Grímr for other reasons, perhaps sexual attraction being one of them. Chess, in the sagas, is often a game played between lovers or those interested in becoming lovers, and the intimacy of watching someone sleeping adds to this reading. If Hálfdan is sexually attracted to the younger Grímr, this can also be read in more than one way. Either he is attracted to Grímr as a (perceived) man, and his desire is thus homosexual,³¹ or he in some way sees through the disguise to the woman beneath and is thus consumed with a normative heterosexual desire—whether he knows it or not. In any case, it is important to note that at this point we have not been informed as to the true identity of the two men named Grímr. An astute reader may have guessed who they are, but the dramatic irony is not quite the same here as in the earlier case when Hálfdan chooses not to marry the slave Ingigerðr and the audience has been explicitly told that she is not really a princess. This situation comes to a head on the night when the two men named Grímr murder Eysteinn. Hálfdan goes into the hall to check on the guests as usual and notices that the younger Grímr’s glove has slipped off and his hand is exposed. We are told that “enga mannshönd þóttiz hann slíka sét hafa fyrir fegrðar sakir” (he did not think that he had ever seen a hand equal to that one in beauty).³² There is also a beautiful and mysterious gold ring on one of the fingers, which Hálfdan gently slides off and places inside the glove. He then sits down beside the two sleeping men and subsequently falls asleep. He wakes later with a start to find that the torches in the hall have been extinguished, but the younger Grímr is waving a light in his eyes, blinding him so that the pilfered glove can be retrieved before he makes his escape. Just before, however, he addresses Hálfdan: “Eptir þessari hendi, gulli ok glófa skaltu leita ok þreyja ok aldri náðir fá, fyrr en sá leggr jafnviljugr aptr í þinn lófa, sem nú tók á burtu” (You shall search and pine for this hand, ring and glove and never find rest until what was just now taken from you is once more laid

31 Since the identitarian category of “homosexual” did not exist at the time, it may be best to avoid it as a qualifying adjective and refer instead to same-sex desire. Since much previous literature on this topic refers to active and passive homosexuality, however, I retain the term so as not to occlude the connection. 32 Hálfdanar saga, ed. Schröder, 104 (FSN, 3:531). Note that mannshönd is used, which could be translated either as “person’s hand” or “man’s hand,” since maðr (manns in genitive), the first part of the compound, can refer to people of both genders or in a restricted sense to people of masculine gender. A specifically feminine form is attested on one occasion, kvennmannshanda (gen. pl. of kvennmannshönd, “woman’s hand”), and so could conceivably have been used. See the relevant entries in Helle Degnbol, Bent Chr. Jacobsen, Eva Rode, Christopher Sanders, and Þorbjörg Helgadóttir, Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog / A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (Copenhagen: Arnamagnæanske Kommission, 1989–), https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php.

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willingly in your palm).³³ When Hálfdan has collected himself, he pursues, but arrives too late: his father is dead and the two men named Grímr have escaped. The younger Grímr’s prophecy subsequently comes true, as we are told repeatedly of Hálfdan’s yearning for the beautiful hand which he saw.³⁴ Again, the various elements lead to the potential for multiple interpretations. The longing that Hálfdan feels may be the result of some kind of magic, with Ingigerðr/Grímr’s words having a formulaic similarity to certain curses which confer unbearable sexual desire and the ring perhaps being connected to other rings from sagas which have the potential to make individuals fall in love.³⁵ Both of these elements may be drawn on as excuses for Hálfdan’s superficially inappropriate desire, but neither is fully exploited in the narrative: we see no clear sign that Grímr/Ingigerðr uses the ring as a device to ensnare Hálfdan and her words are never explicitly said to be a curse. The unconventional desire is, moreover, focused on a body part and attendant items, rather than a whole body or person. This may mitigate the desire, making it a fetish rather than a fully expressed (superficially) homosexual longing, but the focus on the hand, glove, and ring could also easily be interpreted as metonymy for the body/person as a whole, much as the focus on Cinderella’s shoe in the fairy tale expresses desire for the heroine and not merely a foot fetish.³⁶ Later on, during his convalescence, Hálfdan learns that the man who killed his father was Earl Skúli, but that Earl Skúli was also the mysterious stranger who saved him from Úlfkell’s attack at sea. Nothing is revealed, however, about the identity of the younger Grímr until Hálfdan arrives at Skúli’s castle. Skúli is out fighting, but Ingigerðr stands up on the walls and calls down to Hálfdan. He does not know who she is, but thinks that she is extremely beautiful. She, however, recognizes him and says that it is time for him to see the glove and gold ring which he let slip through his fingers. Hálfdan asks if she can help with that, either still not having cottoned on or simply engaging in coquettish banter. She casts the

33 Hálfdanar saga, ed. Schröder, 104 (FSN, 3:531). 34 Hálfdanar saga, ed. Schröder, 106, 114 (FSN, 3:533, 539). 35 For a curse which involves making men feel irresistible desire see Illuga saga Gríðarfóstra: The Saga of Illugi, Gríður’s Foster-Son, ed. and trans. Philip Lavender (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2015), 12–13 (“each man who looks upon her will fall madly in love with her”). For a ring which has a similar effect see Philip Lavender et al., trans., “Jarlmanns saga og Hermanns: A Translation,” Scandinavian-Canadian Studies 27 (2020): 50–104, at 56 (“I want to give you a certain gold ring […] if you put it on a woman’s hand and hold onto it, so that it grows warm, then she will love whomsoever you choose”). 36 For a discussion of Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar’s connection to the Cinderella story and the potential psychoanalytic interpretations of the glove see Vilmundar saga viðutan: The Saga of Vilmundur the Outsider, ed. and trans. Jonathan Y. H. Hui (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2021), xxxix–xlii.

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glove down to him and says that he will get the ring once he has helped Earl Skúli defeat Úlfkell. She proves true to her word and, after the battle has been won, she sits down on Hálfdan’s lap, giving him the ring and handing over all her possessions into his ownership. At this point there is no longer any doubt that he has identified her as the younger Grímr as well as the daughter of Hergeirr and Ísgerðr, since he asks her about some whispered words which she shared with her mother back at Eysteinn’s court. His non-normative longing for the presumed male hand has been drawn back into the realm of normative heterosexual desire. Worth noting here is the muted response which Hálfdan has to Ingigerðr’s revelation. Either at some point during the conversation at the walls prior to the battle or between it and the conversation at the gathering after the battle the penny presumably drops that Grímr, whose hand he has been longing for, is actually this woman. There is no mention of shock, surprise, confusion, or relief. Hálfdan does not ask why she donned men’s clothes, but perhaps we are to understand that it was, from his perspective, an obvious part of the ruse to gain access to the castle and to his father for the purpose of killing him. The lack of an emotional response fits well with Hálfdan’s character in particular and the laconic style of many fornaldarsögur in general.³⁷ Apart from his excessive longing for the hand/glove/ring, Hálfdan does not seem particularly in touch with his emotions at all. The saga contains plenty of potential for conflicted feelings, both in Hálfdan’s desire for Grímr’s hand and in the debt of gratitude he owes to his father’s killer, but never really exploits it. Any analysis of such conundrums is left up to the reader/audience, with plenty of ambiguity allowing for multiple perspectives. One can easily imagine heated debates taking place amongst an audience left to fill in the emotional gaps during a reading. Ingigerðr’s time as Grímr, while straightforward at first glance, also has the potential for being read against the grain. In terms of Ingigerðr’s status, there is little evidence that her transition is anything other than pragmatic. Her gender identity does not seem to be called into question, and the saga as a whole does not radically destabilize gender structures. Nevertheless, Ingigerðr is, at least physically, in some ways more like a man than a woman. When she is first introduced we are told that “hon var allra meyja fríðust ok svá stór vexti sem karlmaðr” (she was an extremely beautiful maiden and as big as a man).³⁸ Her masculine stature

37 On the representation of emotions in sagas see Sif Rikharðsdóttir, Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017). Although fornaldarsögur are not a focus of the study, Sif Rikharðsdóttir comments that “the Icelandic sagas are notorious for their lack of emotional display. The same can be said to apply to many medieval Icelandic genres, such as konungasögur (sagas of kings) and fornaldarsögur (legendary sagas)” (57). 38 Hálfdanar saga, ed. Schröder, 93 (FSN, 3:521).

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seems most readily interpretable as a mere plot device which allows her to be perceived as a man when she arrives at Eysteinn’s court hiding her other feminine features beneath a low-hanging cowl.³⁹ It is made clear to the reader that her build does not grant her greater strength, as she is said to be “mjúkr í öllum leikum” (gentle in all sports) and “prófaði litt aflraunir” (rarely put her strength to the test).⁴⁰ Thus while she seems far from any definition of transgender, she is presented as someone who dabbles in disguise and costume. She takes on three different disguises in the saga, first by swapping her clothes with the slave Ingigerðr, secondly by dressing up as an old lady to pass unchallenged away from the battlefield, and finally by disguising herself as Grímr. The fact that she disguises herself as a man for this final role bears interrogating, since female disguises have sufficed on the two previous occasions. Nobody should be on the lookout for her, as the slave Ingigerðr has been fully accepted as the princess, so it seems she could just as easily have appeared as a woman. Could there have been an element of gender propriety in her choice of masculine disguise, vengeance being the due responsibility of a son or “surrogate son,” as Clover would have it?⁴¹ Could she have dressed as a man specifically to pique Hálfdan’s interest? It seems, after all, that Skúli’s job was to deliver the killing blow and hers was to distract Hálfdan, blinding him literally with the torch and metaphorically with his/her charms. One might imagine that this was more easily done if she presented as female, but perhaps a masculine presentation was more expedient in this case. Or could personal choice have been involved? In the absence of explicit statements, we can only ever ascribe underlying motives to a character (and one so summarily sketched out) on the basis of their actions. The limited evidence, however, allows space for audiences to fill in the blanks. Moreover, for audience members with what Halberstam calls “transexual aspiration”⁴² or other types of gender non-conformity prior to social freedom or medical technology which might enable such transitions, cases such as that of In-

39 We are told that “ekki sáu menn görla í andlitit þeim, þvíat þeir höfðu síða höttu” (Hálfdanar saga, ed, Schröder, 101 [FSN, 3:528]; “people could not see their [that is, the two men named Grímr] faces clearly, because their cowls hung down low”). It is Ingigerðr’s face which might give her away, it seems. 40 Hálfdanar saga, ed. Schröder, 102 (FSN, 3:529). The closest Ingigerðr comes to challenging a normative gender role is when, standing on the walls of Skúli’s castle, she says that “aldri verðr kastalinn af mönnum unninn, þó at ekki sé til varnar í honum nema konur” (126 [FSN, 3:548]; “the castle will never be taken by men, even though there are only women defending it”). In this statement she seems to imply that women, not just women posing as men, are capable of feats which are typically deemed beyond their capabilities due to gender stereotypes. 41 Clover, “Maiden Warriors.” 42 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 96.

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gigerðr could be looked upon as sites of identification, even if the character was not explicitly motivated by similar desires.

Eivir and Gunnar in Harold the Dauntless The second example to be considered is Walter Scott’s Harold the Dauntless, a narrative poem on Nordic themes first published in 1817.⁴³ Scott’s fascination with the old North is well known, and while The Pirate (1822) is his most notable foray into such territory, Andrew Wawn has pointed out that “several features of Harold anticipate important elements in The Pirate: the inset songs; the supernatural scenes […]; the variety of character and type-scenes with wild-eyed sybils, repressive father figures, loyal retainers, quests and feasts.”⁴⁴ Heather O’Donoghue has also called Harold the Dauntless “the most thorough-going historicist treatment of Viking themes” of its time, alluding to Scott’s vast knowledge of Old Norse material.⁴⁵ The poem’s protagonist is Harold, a recalcitrant pagan who is shocked when his father, Witikind, converts to Christianity and settles down in Northumberland, acquiring lands granted by the Church. Harold takes leave of his father accompanied by his young and faithful page, Gunnar, and they live a life of Viking raids and derring-do for many years. Eventually they return to the northeast of England where Harold has decided to marry a simple maid named Metelill, but must first reclaim the lands of his father (now dead) from the Church. The venal bishop does not wish to return anything, and comes up with a plan. He will send Harold to spend the night at the haunted Castle of the Seven Shields, hoping to buy time if not put an end to Harold by poisoning. Harold heads off to the castle accompanied by Gunnar, but both Gunnar and the ghost of his dead father seem desperate to ensure Harold’s redemption: he is doomed, they believe, if he cannot learn to control his berserker rage and repent of his violent ways. In the final canto of six, Harold and Gunnar have gone to spend the night at the haunted castle. The death and destruction wrought there is all a result of “woman’s perfidy” according to Harold, who challenges Gunnar to “show example

43 The poem can be read online at https://archive.org/details/bridaltriermain00scotgoog/page/n8/ mode/2up. 44 Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 66. 45 Heather O’Donoghue, English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 125.

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where a woman’s breath/ Hath made a true-love vow.”⁴⁶ With a knowing smirk Gunnar, the “minstrel-boy,” says that a woman named Eivir is such an example, although he explains that this is in part because “she was a Danish maid,”⁴⁷ Scandinavian women apparently being particularly steadfast and faithful. After a troubled night’s sleep, Harold wakes having realized that demons of hell are waiting to receive him post-mortem and thus resolves to adopt Christianity at once. In his dream, his father also talked of Gunnar’s mother and, as Harold puts it, “hinted of disguise/ She framed to cheat too curious eyes,/ That not a moment might divide/ Thy [that is, Gunnar’s] fated footsteps from my side.”⁴⁸ Harold says that in the dream he understood what this meant, but now, awake, the import of these words eludes him. At this point, after so much foreshadowing, the climax is reached. As the pair are leaving the castle, Harold realizes that he has left his glove behind. Gunnar goes back to fetch it, and almost immediately Harold hears a scream. Rushing in he sees Odin, terrifying to behold, with his hand pressed down on Gunnar’s head. Harold demands that Odin release “that youth,” at which point Odin responds that “Eivir […] is mine” and that no “borrow’d sex and name/ can abrogate a Godhead’s claim.”⁴⁹ Thus the cat is finally out of the bag, and we realize, if we had not already, that Gunnar is in reality female and is the same Eivir about whom Gunnar has recounted tales and whom he has praised. Harold’s reaction is immediate: “Thrill’d this strange speech through Harold’s brain/ He clench’d his teeth in high disdain.”⁵⁰ The disdain is not due to the revelation but, rather, firmly directed at Odin, whom Harold proceeds to vanquish, before bearing Eivir, now firmly gendered as a woman, out of the castle. He berates himself for having been blind to Eivir’s true nature and starts to feel ashamed of his rough appearance. This vanity shows that “he fear’s now who never fear’d/ And loves who never loved.”⁵¹ Eivir is uncertain where all this is going, but Harold makes the matter clear: he intends to stay with her for the rest of his life and marry her the following day. With that the poem ends. The most surprising thing is perhaps the way in which, just moments after having learnt that his lifelong friend is a woman and not a man, Harold realizes that he is in love and asserts that he will marry this new object of his affections.

46 Walter Scott, The Bridal of Triermain, Harold the Dauntless, Field of Waterloo, and Other Poems (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1836), 186–87. 47 Scott, The Bridal of Triermain, Harold the Dauntless, 190. 48 Scott, The Bridal of Triermain, Harold the Dauntless, 190–91. 49 Scott, The Bridal of Triermain, Harold the Dauntless, 193. 50 Scott, The Bridal of Triermain, Harold the Dauntless, 193. 51 Scott, The Bridal of Triermain, Harold the Dauntless, 195.

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Tales of “love at first sight” notwithstanding, the response seems psychologically dubious, unless Harold has perhaps all along had feelings for Gunnar and is now free to express them since his homosexual fantasy has become a heteronormative possibility. These are fictional characters of course, not part of a real psychological case study, but Harold has claimed on two occasions to love Gunnar: “I love thee, youth” and “Thou hast a nook of my rude heart.”⁵² O’Donoghue says that “Harold has an inkling that he [Gunnar] is not what he seems, since he doubts the ‘boy’s’ capacity to ‘wade ankle-deep through foeman’s blood,’”⁵³ but the misgivings do not seem to extend to the “boy’s” gender identity. Looking at the matter from Eivir/Gunnar’s perspective, there is no obvious attempt made to represent Eivir’s time spent as Gunnar as anything other than pragmatic subterfuge. We are explicitly told that Eivir’s mother, Ermengarde, is responsible for the “disguise/ [which] She framed to cheat too curious eyes,”⁵⁴ thus Eivir did not herself make the decision to change her gender presentation.⁵⁵ Moreover, she was almost certainly too young to have had any say in the matter at the outset: we have been told that “Harold in childhood had Ermengarde nursed,” and Gunnar, younger than Harold, says that in his youth “[h]e [that is, Harold] endured me because I was Ermengarde’s child.”⁵⁶ Harold has thus known Gunnar since the latter’s earliest childhood and always as Gunnar. Eivir’s masculine presentation is justified insofar as it enabled Eivir/Gunnar to accompany Harold on all his adventures as a foster-brother of sorts. Had she presented as a woman, she would not have had the same freedom of movement. Eivir’s mother, drawing on some kind of supernatural foresight, seems to have believed that it was vital for her daughter not to be separated from Harold, albeit principally for the latter’s benefit as part of his redemption arc. Thus she converts her daughter into a mere supporting character in Harold’s destiny and, as is fitting for such a functional role, Scott makes little effort to develop any psychological depth for Eivir or her experiences. Given certain similarities, it may be interesting to note that it is not impossible that Scott took inspiration directly from Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar. A text of the saga and a Latin translation appeared in print for the first time in Erik Julius

52 Scott, The Bridal of Triermain, Harold the Dauntless, 152, 171. 53 Scott, The Bridal of Triermain, Harold the Dauntless, 126. 54 Scott, The Bridal of Triermain, Harold the Dauntless, 190. 55 For a real-life example of a boy raised as a girl (the inverse of Eivir’s case, although Eivir seems not to have been kept in the dark as to her biological sex) who eventually rejected that gender, see the case of David Reimer as presented in John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (New York: Perennial, 2000). Such experiments can have profound impacts on an individual, though Scott shows no interest in or consideration of such matters. 56 Scott, The Bridal of Triermain, Harold the Dauntless, 126.

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Biörner’s Nordiska kämpa dater, a copy of which was found in Scott’s personal library at his home, Abbotsford.⁵⁷ Beyond the principal similarity of a woman disguised as a man, whom the hero eventually marries, there are also circumstantial likenesses. One is the importance of a glove in both stories: as we have already seen, Hálfdan longs for the beautiful hand he saw when the glove came off (as well as the glove itself ) and Harold, reflecting upon his dream while leaving the haunted castle, realizes that he has left his glove behind and sends Gunnar to fetch it. The influence, however, must remain pure speculation: while Scott makes allusions to anecdotes culled from “Bartholine, or Perinskiold, or Snorro” he also, with tongue firmly in cheek, begs of the reader, “pardon thou thy minstrel, who hath wrote/ A Tale six cantos long, yet scorn’d to add a note.”⁵⁸ There are of course numerous other literary examples of cross-dressing closer to home which might also have inspired Scott. Diane Dugaw, for example, has discussed the “Anglo-American Female Warrior Ballads” which were extremely popular during the long eighteenth century.⁵⁹ Catherine Craft-Fairchild has described these as focusing on “the heroine’s disguised pursuit of a sweetheart in the military […] and her eventual reunion with and marriage to her lover.”⁶⁰ Eivir/Gunnar is never separated from Harold, and Harold is not exactly in the military, but the conceit of the adoption of a male disguise to permit one to stay close to a loved one during martial expeditions in Harold the Dauntless brings us fairly close to such ballad-fare, as well as to the chapbooks and newspapers which claimed to present true accounts of similar cases. In the eighteenth-century ballads, chapbooks, newspapers and in the theater, where “breeches roles” were exceedingly common, transvestism and cross-dressing were generally accepted and at times praised. Interestingly, however, CraftFairchild has discussed the way in which, as the eighteenth century wore on and the novel gained in popularity, cross-dressing came to be ever more frowned

57 Nordiska kämpa dater, ed. Erik Julius Biörner (Stockholm: Joh. L. Horrn, 1737). The title there is Sagann af Halfdane Eysteinssyne / Sagan om Halfdan Östensson, and the saga is paginated 1–59 (but there is non-consecutive pagination in the volume as a whole). See Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, 71, and John George Cochrane, Catalogue of the Library at Abbotsford (Edinburgh: T. Constable, 1836), 100. 58 Scott, The Bridal of Triermain, Harold the Dauntless, 197. See also O’Donoghue, English Poetry and Old Norse Myth, 128. “Bartholine” is the Dane Thomas Bartholin the Younger (1659–1690) who wrote a book about ancient Danish fearlessness. “Perinskiold” is probably the Swedish saga-editor Johan Fredrik Peringskiöld (1689–1725). 59 Diane Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 60 Catherine Craft-Fairchild, “Cross-Dressing and the Novel: Women Warriors and Domestic Femininity,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10, no. 2 (1998): 171–202, at 172.

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upon. She states that “in books published between 1790 and 1835, any character who dares, even fleetingly, to don a male disguise is condemned. Socially ostracized or killed, these fictional characters met with a harsher fate than the living women they partially resembled.”⁶¹ Harold the Dauntless is not a novel, which might in part explain the lack of condemnation for Eivir/Gunnar, since perhaps the poetic format was generically more forgiving of such behavior. Nevertheless, it does come from the pen of one of the great novelists of the time, and within Scott’s oeuvre we find a number of other women who cross-dress and are still granted a happy ending, such as Edith in the poem The Lord of the Isles (1815), Margaret Ramsey in the novel The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Brenhilda in the novel Count Robert of Paris (1831),⁶² and Lady Augusta in the novel Castle Dangerous (1831). Apart from Brenhilda who wears men’s clothes but does not disguise her sex, all the others use men’s clothes as a disguise, much as Eivir/Gunnar does. C. M. Jackson-Houlston has suggested that Scott’s lack of condemnation for such women, as compared to many of his contemporaries, may be a result of the way he “uses romance as enabling fantasy” and his “sympathy for a tradition of warrior women who fitted a one-sex [à la Thomas Laqueur] framework.”⁶³ That is to say, inspired by chivalric literature produced at a time when a one-sex model was prevalent and which allowed for unproblematic movement between gender identities, the stories Scott told (often set in the past) did not treat cross-dressing by women as dangerously transgressive. Scott had a fairly essentialist “two-sex” view of gender, considering women in general unable to perform on the level of men (see Harold’s concerns for Gunnar’s gentleness), but his appreciation for cross-dressing models which did not share this view meant that he felt happy to continue to include such individuals in his poems and novels and let them thrive. While scholarship on romantic literature seems happy to invoke Laqueur’s one-sex model as having explanatory value for Scott’s pre-eighteenth-century influences, most medievalists know that it insufficiently describes the sexual understanding of medieval and early modern writers.⁶⁴ Nevertheless, that does not invalidate 61 Craft-Fairchild, “Cross-Dressing and the Novel,” 178. 62 The name “Brenhilda” will, to those familiar with Old Norse and Germanic myth and legend, quite transparently bring to mind Brünhilt/Brynhildr from Nibelungenlied, Völsunga saga, and Eddic poetry. 63 C. M. Jackson-Houlston, Gendering Walter Scott: Sex, Violence and Romantic Period Writing (London: Routledge, 2017), 221, 225. Note that not all women who cross-dress in Scott’s works are “warrior women,” some using male disguise for reasons other than to engage in combat. On the one-sex model see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 64 See Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Katherine Park, “Cadden, Laqueur and the

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the theory that Scott was influenced by medieval and early modern examples of cross-dressing without repercussions, and not just chivalric ones. Thus characters such as Ingigerðr from Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar, who successfully don male clothes, may account for the fortunate outcomes of cross-dressing characters such as Eivir.⁶⁵

Conclusion The two examples looked at come from very different contexts, but are united by the common theme of a woman who appears as a man in the presence of another man, with whom a romantic relationship subsequently develops. They both take place in a broad medieval Nordic context, even if only Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar is a medieval Nordic composition. Moreover, it is not impossible that Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar might have directly influenced Harold the Dauntless. There are, naturally, significant differences between these two works, not least in terms of genre, form, time and place of composition, and sociocultural context of said composition. They are not immediately obvious bedfellows for a comparative analysis, but the juxtaposition can, nevertheless, be illuminating. This is the case as regards the status of the woman/man involved in the transition. Ingigerðr is a woman who, on the surface, merely presents as a man to get into Eysteinn’s court, though I have suggested that there is some ambiguity in her specific motivations. Eivir is also a woman who uses cross-dressing as disguise, although at the instigation of her mother and for reasons connected with Harold’s wellbeing. Both provoke questions which the narratives fail to answer. Why did Ingigerðr need to disguise herself specifically as a man? Did her masculine stature mean that others perceived her as a masculine woman already and did this contribute to her choice to adopt the disguise? How did Eivir manage to maintain her disguise for so many years in close quarters with Gunnar? Could she have maintained it for so many years if she did not, in some way, feel that it was fitting for her? It is not certain that past audiences would have asked the same questions as I elicit from these texts, but both of these narratives leave space for interrogatives of this type and thus may have served as foci of identification for gender-nonconforming individuals reading or listening to them in past times. ‘One-Sex Body,’” Medieval Feminist Forum 46, no. 1 (2010): 96–100, for a refutation of its primacy in medieval culture. 65 Jackson-Houlston, Gendering Walter Scott, 216, suggests that masculine warrior women such as Bradamante and Marfisa from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso would have also greatly influenced Scott, who was a big fan of the work ever since first reading John Hoole’s translation in 1783.

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Another point of similarity is the tendency of both texts towards the subordination of Ingigerðr and Eivir’s experiences to those of the male protagonists, Hálfdan and Harold. This is most notable in the case of Eivir, where her reason for existing seems to be merely as a tool in Harold’s redemption, almost no attempt being made to portray her experience. In Hálfdanar saga, on the other hand, Ingigerðr’s time as Grímr allows for an exploration of same-sex desire in Hálfdan. Thus the use of women’s gender transitions as a medium for interrogating men’s sexuality is yet another example of masculine bias which reveals itself in these works. Halberstam has noted that in twentieth-century representation there is a tendency towards “collapsing gender and sexuality because for gender outlaws, their gender bending is often read as the outward sign of an aberrant sexuality.”⁶⁶ In these texts “gender bending” and “aberrant sexuality” are entangled, but spread over two individuals instead of being superimposed on one: when women engage in gender-bending activities, focus is often shifted to men’s nonnormative sexuality. A final point of similarity is the fact that, in both cases, we see examples of reticence and withholding of information, which posit the women’s time as men as a mystery which needs to be solved. Following on from varying amounts of foreshadowing, Hálfdan and Gunnar become aware that the man whom they have beheld so often is a woman. The texts in this regard also share notably (from a modern perspective) muted responses to this revelation. Kirsten Wolf was already aware of similar understated reactions in 1997, when discussing “transvestism in the sagas of Icelanders.” She says that, in most cross-dressing cases, “the disguise is only temporary, and virtually all of the men and women who dress across gender lines have a rational reason for doing so; as a consequence, scenes of anagnorisis either do not appear or are undramatic.”⁶⁷ In the two texts discussed in this essay, which extend beyond medieval Íslendingasögur, it seems to me reductive to account for the lack of anagnorisis at the discovery of gender transitivity on the basis of the presence of “rational reasons.” Yet both Hálfdan and Harold undeniably take the transformations which they are witness to very much in their stride. Why might this be? Several factors may have played a role. Principal among these is a different cultural conception of transformations. I have argued elsewhere that transformations as staged in Old Norse-Icelandic literature are not nec66 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 119. 67 Wolf, “Transvestism,” 675. Wolf is relying on Vern L. Bullough’s ideas that men were relatively free to cross-dress if it served “a function that society wanted or desired.” See Vern L. Bullough, “Cross-Dressing and Gender Role Change in the Middle Ages,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), 223–42, at 234.

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essarily presented in ways which are intuitive to many contemporary audiences. For example, modern audiences may be familiar with descriptions of transformations caused by enchantments and expect that texts should “represent the moment at which a curse is broken with visible accompaniments such as a flash of light or a poof of smoke.”⁶⁸ What we actually find is that “there are several cases of curses being broken, but in none of them is there a description of a transformation taking place before the eyes of an observer.”⁶⁹ Gender/sex transitions and magical transformations are not, of course, exactly the same, but there are similarities. Another connected reason for lack of surprise may be due to the texts relying on different “emotive scripts” from those familiar to contemporary readers. According to Sif Rikharðsdóttir “emotive scripts dictate the rules for emotional behaviour within any given text.”⁷⁰ Surprise can be understood as an emotion,⁷¹ and the way it is represented in a text will be a discursive construct to be interpreted in relation to sociocultural codes of emotionality (which vary with regard to the time and place of composition) and generic codes concerning how emotionality is represented in any specific text type. The texts looked at here avoid incorporating surprise at moments where today’s readers might expect it to be part of an emotive script. This may be representative of wider cultural tendencies of showing characters (male ones in particular) having muted responses: a quip after being impaled or a stony silence after an insult are familiar examples from medieval sagas.⁷² Whatever the reason, the lack of surprise should perhaps be interpreted in a positive light. Danielle M. Seid has commented upon the fact that “in popular narrative fiction and film representations of transgender people, the moment in which a trans character’s status is discovered by the audience, or by another character, typically functions as a reveal.”⁷³ While the “reveals” which I have focused on here do not involve characters whom we can easily identify as trans, they involve non-normative gendered behavior but avoid the “sensationalized, dramatized, or eroticized” depiction which Seid alludes to.

68 Philip Lavender, Long Lives of Short Sagas: The Irrepressibility of Narrative and the Case of Illuga saga Gríðarfóstra, The Viking Collection 25 (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2020), 206. 69 Lavender, Long Lives of Short Sagas, 206. 70 Sif Rikharðsdóttir, Emotion in Old Norse Literature, 28. 71 See the various contributions to Surprise: An Emotion?, ed. Natalie Depraz and Anthony J. Steinbock, Contributions to Phenomenology 97 (Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2018). To my knowledge nobody has studied “surprise” as a concept in an Old Norse social or literary context. 72 Whether more emotionality might have appeared in oral performances of the non-novelistic texts, through the use of tone, facial expressions, or gesture, is a question also worth considering. 73 Danielle M. Seid, “Reveal,” in “Keywords,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1–2 (2014): 176– 77, at 176.

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Looking at such fictional characters is no replacement for studying the reallife experiences of gender nonconforming people in the past. Characters do not have the psychological complexity of real people (although some may appear to approximate it more than others) and fictional worlds have no obligation to straightforwardly mirror social realities. But in the absence of easy access to such firsthand evidence, these narratives can provide a window onto social imaginaries surrounding the possibility of gender transitivity. While there may be a conservative element at play in the fact that all cross-dressing has been set aside by the end of both narratives, perhaps it should also be taken as a positive sign that both Ingigerðr and Eivir are granted, at least nominally, happy endings.

Part II: Related Languages and Literatures of the Medieval North

Amy C. Mulligan

Chapter 8 Seaworthy: Irish Immrama, Old Norse Voyage Tales, and the Women of the North Atlantic In a medieval bestseller, originally Hiberno-Latin but translated into virtually every European vernacular including Icelandic, saintly Brendan the Navigator confesses that he burns with desire to set sail once he hears of another monk’s voyage to glimpse a North Atlantic Promised Land of the Saints.¹ Like Brendan, those reading or listening to a version of the Navigatio cannot help but be taken with the spirit of exploration, excitement about what lies beyond one’s own shores, about new possibilities and futures. The sea exercises a powerful appeal on the psyche, and several recent studies remind us of how people are attracted to water and seascapes. Some even argue that humans have a “blue mind,” and simply being on, in, or near water reduces stress levels and improves cognitive functions.² Just as we are drawn to water, we are drawn to stories about navigation and movement through water—foundational epics and narratives in multiple cultures focus on the adventures of model seafarers who undertake challenging yet typically rich and rewarding voyages. Island nations like Ireland and Iceland, where the sea has played important historical, economic, and environmental roles, preserve medieval literary sources rich in stories about seafaring, boat-based exploration, and transformative movement throughout the watery environments of the North Atlantic. While Old Norse-Icelandic literature may contain more numerous references to voyaging and sea travel, medieval Ireland early on developed a full literary genre focused on voyaging. This is the genre of immrama (pl., sg. immram), voyage tales whose typically eponymous texts are devoted to the experiences and transformative acts of immram, “rowing about.”

1 Navigatio sancti Brendani Abbatis from Early Latin Manuscripts, ed. Carl Selmer (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1952), ch. 2, ll. 4–7. 2 For instance, see Wallace J. Nichols, Blue Mind: The Surprising Science that Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected and Better at What You Do (New York: Little, Brown, 2014); Mathew White, Lewis Elliott, Mireia Gascon, Bethany Roberts, and Lora Fleming, “Blue Space, Health and Well-Being: A Narrative Overview and Synthesis of Potential Benefits,” Environmental Research 191 (2020): 110169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres. 2020.110169. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-013

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Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic narratives about North Atlantic voyages share a great deal on thematic, stylistic, and formal levels (they are typically in prose or prosimetric form), with their protagonists even sailing parts of the same geographies. Moreover, Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic seafaring narratives celebrate characters for their voyaging successes, the gains achieved through wise navigation, and the ability to read seascapes and the threats or opportunities they pose. In Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic voyage tales, the successful sea voyage serves to transform these individuals into heroic figures, wisdom-bearers, and highly admired travelers whose bravery and sea-savvy allow them, and often their followers and descendants, to prosper. But just who is deemed seaworthy? Who is permitted to undertake a voyage, and who makes the voyage successfully? On the other hand, who is denied movement, and the transformations and boons that generally accrue to successful voyages? When comparing Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic voyage tales to determine how medieval North Atlantic seafaring discourses were written, striking differences across the two traditions emerge. One of these differences lies in the realm of gender: Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic narratives provide entirely divergent roles for women in their respective stories. Specifically, they present radically different images and models of who might be deemed seaworthy—successful not only on the waves, but also worthy of valorization in the fictionalized voyage accounts which circulate and attract attention even today. In this essay, I consider the significance of associating seaworthiness, the ability to undergo transformation and reap rewards from journeying, with men but not with women in the medieval North Atlantic cultural sphere. The differences between Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic voyage narratives in their treatment of men and women may reveal something important about gender attitudes in these two medieval cultures, but in this essay I am also concerned with their implications for us as modern readers, teachers, and thinkers. While my analysis of these texts raises more questions than can be answered in the space available here, I show that a comparison of an Old Norse-Icelandic voyage narrative with one of its Irish counterparts helps to illuminate the sometimes problematic gendering of movement through space in these traditions, and suggests ways in which these issues impact their twenty-first-century reception. I am driven by my experiences teaching medieval Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic voyage texts to several classrooms of students, and I am motivated by the questions they ask. I am moved and increasingly concerned about their exhausted disappointment in the roles allocated to women in medieval Irish voyage texts, an alienation that stands in heavy contrast to their engaged and excited reactions to seafaring women depicted in Old Norse-Icelandic texts. This essay is thus rooted

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in pedagogical experience, and adds to conversations about how we can use North Atlantic voyage literature in ethical and inclusive ways in the academy. Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic voyage narratives allocate extremely different roles to women. Old Norse-Icelandic voyage accounts feature numerous women, among whom are several central, engrossing figures whose characters undergo significant development and transformation as they work through varied experiences and challenges during their journeys. The relative abundance of women in these stories has something to do with the historical realities of many of the Norse characters depicted in the literary sources. Women are recorded as founding figures in Icelandic history, primary settlers and revered ancestors attested in other sources that record the migrations around the North Atlantic that have come to be called the “Viking Diaspora.”³ The depiction of Norse voyaging women is by no means uniform, and it would be problematic to label those depictions as feminist, from contemporary or medieval perspectives. Nonetheless, the copious Old Norse-Icelandic literary space that is devoted to developing these voyaging women’s stories is remarkable, and stands in marked contrast to the very few women represented in the Irish accounts and the nature of their representation. Indeed, not a single woman appears in the Navigatio sancti Brendani, and none of the Irish vernacular voyage tales depict a woman who undertakes a voyage or is deemed seaworthy.⁴ There are certainly no women who feature in more than a single scene in the Irish voyage narratives—where women do appear in the Irish immrama they do so fleetingly, with the male protagonists sailing away from them in a matter of lines. This may in part pertain to the earlier medieval monastic context, a masculine milieu of religious brotherhood, from which the immrama texts, “tales about the saving of souls which use a voyage on the sea as the means of redemption,” issue: many of these Irish voyagers are themselves monks, clerics, or descendants of religious figures.⁵ The fantastic islands and inhabitants of the immrama’s seascapes demonstrate their Irish authors’ invention and creative skill in envisaging new and exotic lands and peoples. Nonetheless, these same composers show a 3 See Judith Jesch, The Viking Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2015), especially 87–118. 4 The core voyage tales are Immram Curaig Maíle Dúin (The Voyage of the Currach of Máel Dúin), Immram Snedgusa 7 Meic Riagla (Voyage of Snédgus and Mac Riagla), Immram Curaig Ua Corra (Voyage of the Coracle of the Uí Chorra), and one outlier, Immram Brain (Voyage of Bran). 5 Thomas Clancy, “Subversion at Sea: Structure, Style and Intent in the Immrama,” in The Otherworld Voyage in Irish Literature, ed. Jonathan Wooding (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 194–225, at 197. Though little is known about contemporary medieval audiences for the vernacular immrama, we should expect both secular and religious audiences for Immram Curaig Maíle Dúin, as argued in Elva Johnston, “A Sailor on the Seas of Faith: The Individual and the Church in the Voyage of Mael Dúin,” in European Encounters: Essays in Memory of Albert Lovett, ed. Judith Devlin, Howard B. Clarke, and A. W. Lovett (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2003), 239–52, at 247–49.

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spectacular failure of imagination in depicting women as seaworthy beings in the Irish voyage narratives. So, why are Irish voyage stories, vernacular Irish and Hiberno-Latin, troped so heavily towards masculinity as a precondition to voyaging and movement through the sea, a movement which is typically empowering and transformative, while Old Norse-Icelandic texts, which feature extremely important voyaging women, are not? To consider these questions, discussion will turn first to the longest and richest Irish example of the genre, Immram Curaig Maíle Dúin (The Voyage of the Coracle of Máel Dúin), and then shift to an Old Norse-Icelandic account, namely the North Atlantic voyage described in the Vínland sagas. Immram Curaig Maíle Dúin is an Irish prose-text composed in the eighth or ninth century, but preserved in twelfth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts.⁶ This story begins very darkly with the eponymous hero’s violent conception—a marauder, who is slain soon after, rapes a nun and she bears a child, named Máel Dúin, who is raised by an (unnamed) queen alongside her other sons. In a quest to discover his paternity, and, once Máel Dúin learns of his death, to avenge his father, the narrative’s main business concerns Máel Dúin’s three-year long voyage with a boatload of male companions—members of his brigand father’s clan— beyond Ireland’s coast and around North Atlantic waters. They voyage to a series of islands offering both deprivation and bounty—approximately thirty-two in total, the islands alternately terrify and indulgently restore the sailors. As emphasized in a holy island hermit’s advice to Máel Dúin towards the end of the tale, the overarching theme the story builds to is that this challenging voyage is edifying and transformative. Though he was initially intent on avenging his father’s death and pursuing a life of violence, by the end the reformed Máel Dúin pursues forgiveness and ultimately chooses the godly path and way of life back in Ireland.⁷ The women of Immram Curaig Maíle Dúin do not get the opportunity to seek personal transformation through voyaging. At the start of the story, we meet a young nun who encounters a virile warrior, Ailill Ochir Ága. He is described in admiring, though formulaic, terms. She is not even given a name: Bai fer amra di Eoganacht Ninussa (.I. Éoganacht na n-Árand) .I. Ailill Ochair Ága a ainm. Trén mílid sede, 7 láech-thigerna a thuáthi 7 a cenéoil fein. Mac-caillech banairchinnech cilli caillech rochomraic-seom fria. Baí mac sáinemail etorro díblínaib .I. Mael duin mac Ailella esside.

6 Immrama, ed. A. G. Van Hamel (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 1941), 20–24. 7 For full analysis see Amy Mulligan, A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 48–58.

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(There was a famous man of the Eoganacht of Ninuss (that is, the Eoganacht of the Arans): his name was Ailill of the Edge of Battle. A mighty soldier was he, and a hero-lord of his own tribe and kindred. And there was a young nun, the prioress of a church of nuns, with whom he met. Between them both there was noble boy, Mael duin, son of Ailill, was he.)⁸

The succeeding lines dispel any ideas that this is a happy union. Indeed, the text goes on to describe sexual assault. We learn that Ailill was on a raid, camping out not far from a church of nuns, when he raped the prioress: Medon-aidchi iarom, o roan cách do imthecht is dúnud, luid Ailill don chill. Is é tráth són dodeochaid in chaillech 7 do béim chluic do iarmergi. Gabais Ailill a laim, 7 dos-tascar, 7 dogéni a coiblige. (At midnight, then, when everyone had ceased from moving in the camp, Ailill went to the church. It was the hour that the (aforesaid) nun went to strike the bell for nocturn. Ailill caught her hand, and threw her down, and lay with her.)⁹

Nine months later, the child Máel Dúin is born. Brought secretly to the queen (a friend of the prioress) to be raised, Máel Dúin’s subsequent quest to learn his parentage begins when jealous peers taunt the talented youth. Their insults reveal to him that the king and queen who have acted as loving mother and father to him are not his biological parents. His adoptive mother generously enables the protagonist’s placement in a high social position—she raises him as her own. Yet when Máel Dúin finds out he is not the son of that king and queen, she operates in the plot as a woman who initially seeks to block our male protagonist’s path towards discovery of his patrilineage. When Máel Dúin interrogates the queen, she tries to dissuade him from pursuing his violent past, reiterating the esteem and love which she and the king share for him. She proclaims that “Messe do máthair […] Ni fulliu serc am-mac la doine in tire andas do serc-so limsa” (I am thy mother […] The love of the people of the earth for their sons is no greater than the love I bear to thee).¹⁰ Yet when he fasts in protest (an attested Irish legal custom), the queen ultimately delivers Máel Dúin into his birth mother’s hands.¹¹ The prioress tells Máel Dúin that seeking his father, now long dead, and his father’s people, is baeth (reckless, foolish, stupid) and will bring no value, profit, or benefit (bá).¹² Máel Dúin disre-

8 Whitley Stokes, ed. and trans., “The Voyage of Mael Duin,” Revue Celtique 9 (1888): 447–95 and 10 (1889): 50–95, at 452–53. 9 Stokes, “Voyage of Mael Duin,” 452–55. 10 Stokes, “Voyage of Mael Duin,” 456–57. 11 See Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1988), 182–83. 12 Stokes, “Voyage of Mael Duin,” 456.

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gards the wise nun’s words. After she reveals the name and people of Máel Dúin’s violent, raider father, now long dead, Máel Dúin’s biological mother disappears from the story, much like the equally nameless queen who raised him. He goes to his deceased father’s people, and ultimately sets sail in a boat a druid advises him to build so he can avenge his father who was killed by díbergaig (marauders, plunderers) from Leix. Ascertaining one’s paternity and avenging a dead father are common narrative tropes, and the voyage tale makes the argument that it is unfitting for a Christian to engage in retaliatory violence, expected as it may be of the heroic male. I want to point out, however, that in this masculinist quest narrative, women and crimes against them are immediately downplayed and ignored. As my students have protested when reading the passage in which Máel Dúin vows revenge for his father—What about your mother?!? What about (1) seeking out her people, or even (2) avenging her rape? Raping a nun or holy woman was a heinous criminal act in medieval Ireland, subject to significant penalty according to the legal sources.¹³ In other words, from a medieval Irish perspective, as well as our contemporary viewpoint, this was a serious crime and act of violence, which makes the text’s (and Máel Dúin’s) lack of response to it all the more remarkable and, to be honest, depressing. We do not hear anything of Máel Dúin’s mother or her people again. Her role is limited to providing a dramatic beginning to the story and foreshadowing the choices Máel Dúin must make later in life: she represents the path of Christian virtue in contrast to the sinful wanderings of his brigand father. As Thomas Clancy puts it, “born in him, then, are two potential futures, a holy one and a violent one.”¹⁴ While the suggestion might be that, in his murder soon after, Ailill Ochir Ága is cosmically punished for his crime, the text is silent about the ethical dimension of this fate. We are faced with a complex scenario, no doubt. While we might not expect textual commentary, it is nonetheless important to witness the stark gender divide here in terms of who matters in the story: violence against and rape of a woman are described neutrally and then disregarded, while the death of a plunderer and rapist necessitates filial vengeance and a quest that makes up the bulk of the narrative. Máel Dúin and his crew set sail on their journey in search of his father’s killers. However, a strong wind blows their coracle out to open sea, thus thwarting revenge and blood-feud. In their boat they wander around the “great, endless

13 Lisi Oliver, “Forced and Unforced Rape in Early Irish Law,” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 13 (1993): 93–106, at 97. 14 Clancy, “Subversion at Sea,” 204.

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ocean”¹⁵ for three years, and sail to several islands, which include islands of monstrous beasts, Edenic oases of plenty, and the more modest dwellings of hermits following the Desert Fathers’ example. A major point in these voyage tales is to highlight the heroes as thoughtful navigators of challenging landscapes who become better leaders and humans through their voyaging. Many of these islands operate as testing grounds, where Máel Dúin learns to read the landscape and its inhabitants closely. In one of the tale’s climactic scenes, the voyagers come to an island with a fort containing a finely ornamented house, also filled with good couches, welcoming baths, fine food and liquor, where the voyagers are invited to live free from labor and aging. It is inhabited by a group of women. Here, one woman—once again, she has no name—rules as queen after the death of her spouse, the king, with whom she had had seventeen daughters. The voyagers spend three blissful months, Máel Dúin partnered with the queen, and each of his seventeen voyaging companions partnered with one of the seventeen women. This remains no happy Isle of Amazons, however. Although Máel Dúin is content—his voyaging companions remark that he has a mor seirc (great love) for the queen—some members of his crew feel the passing of time and desire to be on their way, and Máel Duin decides he would rather depart with his men than stay with the queen on the island.¹⁶ In the following scenes, the depiction of Immram Curaig Maíle Dúin’s Island of Women ruled by a queen is calculated to emphasize enclosure, stasis (physical and moral), and entrapment (the women’s own, but also that of Máel Dúin and his crew). Every time the voyagers attempt to leave, the queen pitches her magic ball of thread (ceirtle) onto their ship to tow them back for another three months. They only escape by cutting off a crewmember’s limb as he holds the ceirtle. This sacrifice allows them to untether their boat, regain their freedom of movement and realize their transformative voyaging quest. The women, on the other hand, are left behind, stuck on their island. Although the text sails away from them without a second thought, their queen’s parting reaction speaks loudly to the women’s own frustrated desires for growth, change, agency, and movement. As she watches the sailors amputate their comrade’s hand that holds the ball of thread she has thrown to literally bind them to her,

15 Stokes, “Voyage of Mael Duin,” 462–63. 16 Stokes, “Voyage of Mael Duin,” 68–69.

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gabais gol 7 eigem, cor’bo aengair gol 7 egem a tír uile. Conidh amlaidh-sin doerlaiset uaidhe asand indsi. (she at once began to wail and shriek, so that all the land was one cry, wail and shrieking. So in that wise they escaped from her out of the island.)¹⁷

The queen’s powerful cries and shrieks of lamentation are echoed by the land, which might be an intriguing variation of the Irish trope that associates the land with woman (or personifies the land as a female tutelary deity).¹⁸ Regardless, the syntax and phrasing used here suggest that the very landscape, the island itself, mourns Máel Dúin’s departure and the women’s desertion. The narrative function of this queen of a feminized land is to try to trap the sailors on their island and deny them the power of movement. In the actions of the Calypso-esque queen to keep Máel Dúin with her, we also hear echoes of the early scene in which Máel Dúin’s foster-mother, also a queen filled with love—maternal in her case—for Máel Dúin, attempts to keep him from departing and pursuing his voyage of discovery. In this narrative, as in the Irish voyage texts generally, movement is only useful for the growth and development of the male protagonists. Furthermore, women are in multiple cases depicted as the forces that block or impede masculine travel and movement, the figures who weep and emote when faced with abandonment by the male protagonist. Following visits to other islands, including that of a male hermit and Christian ascetic, the voyage comes full circle. Máel Dúin’s boat sails back to Ireland, but he has undergone transformation on his voyage, and returns to Ireland a committed Christian and a leader interested in peace. Immram Curaig Maíle Dúin provides a strictly limited range of roles for women in its negotiations of the North Atlantic’s mysterious watercourses. Women are nuns and mothers; they are victims of rape and violence; they can also be queens. Máel Dúin’s adoptive mother enables his placement in a high social position. However, she functions in the story as an impediment on Máel Dúin’s journey, both actual and metaphorical, to discover his identity and absorption into his male kin group. Later, women materialize to provide food, beds, and sex to the sailors; on one otherworldly island a sinless woman simply disappears—as does the enchanted island—after being too persistently goaded by the sailors into sleeping with their leader Máel Dúin.¹⁹ Finally, we have the island dis-

17 Stokes, “Voyage of Mael Duin,” 70–71. 18 General discussions can be found in Proinsias Mac Cana, “Aspects of the Theme of King and Goddess in Irish Literature,” Études celtiques 7 (1955): 76–144, 356–413, and 8 (1958–1959): 59–65 and Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, Gods and Heroes of the Celts, trans. M. Dillon (London: Methuen, 1949), 24–37. 19 Stokes, “Voyage of Mael Duin,” 491–93.

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cussed in detail above that could have been written as an Amazonian utopia but becomes a scene of grief when a queen and her daughters are unhappily deserted by the male voyagers. The amputation of a sailor’s hand adds a grisly dimension to the tale and memorable testimony to the desperation and physical sacrifices that men will take to keep their movement unrestricted. In her brilliant article “Gender and the Nature of Exile in Old English Elegies,” Stacy Klein shows how male elegy-speakers are characterized by movement, and female speakers by stasis. Klein’s comments map onto the Irish materials nicely: For the male exile, place is unstable, yet productively so: the world’s instability impels him toward spiritual change as it simultaneously figures the ephemerality of earthly life and his own spiritual progress. For the female exile, place is all too permanent, a space from which she can never escape and that does not prompt spiritual change but simply embodies her spiritual inertia and psychological torment.²⁰

Klein goes on to point out the ways in which “Far from encouraging motion for the female exile, the natural world appears to collude in her entrapment, imprisoning her within a landscape whose topographical features seem designed to hinder movement and restrict travel.”²¹ The queen and her daughters desperately tossing a magical ball of thread to drag the fleeing men back, but never using any shipbuilding or nautical technologies to themselves flee the island or pursue what they desire, serves to topographically emphasize women’s stasis and entrapment within the confines of the Irish voyage tale. Vernacular Old Norse-Icelandic texts do not necessarily provide a fully contrasting view—these literary sources are largely consistent in their portrayal of women as having restricted mobility and remaining fixed within a domestic space. Old Norse-Icelandic culture largely genders mobility, travel, and freedom of movement as male prerogatives off limits to women, with “their perceived natural role in the domestic sphere” readily apparent.²² As Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir discusses, a small boy in Laxdæla saga who seeks to travel the world himself complains with frustration that “leiðisk mér at sitja heima sem konum” (I am bored of sitting at home like women [do]).²³ We do not question his assessment

20 Stacy Klein, “Gender and the Nature of Exile in Old English Elegies,” in A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes, ed. Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 113–31, at 115–16. 21 Klein, “Gender and the Nature of Exile,” 121. 22 Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words, and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 131. 23 Laxdœla saga in Laxdœla saga. Halldórs þættir Snorrasonar. Stúfs þáttr, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 5 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1934), 204.

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for a moment, and indeed, anticipate that his own journey will soon commence, so accustomed are we to the ways the narratives present contrasting modes of male and female movement. Earlier in the same saga, when Guðrún declares her desire to voyage abroad with Kjartan, he deems her unseaworthy and tells her to stay home and look after things for her father and brothers, which further reinforces this gendered view of who can travel.²⁴ It is therefore all the more remarkable when we do encounter female figures who manage to break this mold, with these exceptional women featured mainly in settlement and voyage accounts. Particularly important are the Vínland sagas, comprising Grœnlendinga saga, “Saga of the Greenlanders” (written at the beginning of the thirteenth century) and the slightly later but closely linked Eiríks saga rauða, or “Eiríkr the Red’s Saga” (thought to have been written between ca. 1260 and 1300). The stories describe a series of voyages undertaken first by Eiríkr rauði, Erik the Red, from Iceland to Greenland, and then by his son Leifr (and daughter Freydís), out into the North Atlantic, and over to Vínland, recognized now as North America. The sagas are set in about the year 1000, also the time of Iceland’s conversion to Christianity. Scenes from these sagas show Norse women acting as shipbuilders, navigators, settlers, important figures in establishing Christianity in new lands, bearers of wisdom, and role models. Presumably a great deal of the power wielded by the remarkable voyager-settler women of the Settlement Period pertains to the ways that the “socially turbulent times of the Viking Age”²⁵ and the newness of Iceland, whose social modes and hierarchies were still being developed and institutionalized, increased the scope of activities available to certain exceptional women. As Judith Jesch writes, In the more settled societies like the Norway they came from and Iceland as it became, women probably had fewer opportunities to play any role other than those of wife, mother and housekeeper. But in the brief interval between leaving Norway and arriving in Iceland, some women clearly had to be more. There is no doubt that Auðr took advantage of the greater opportunities and fewer social constraints in the Norse colonies of the British Isles and that the later stories and legends about her, however romanticized, preserve a true picture of the possibilities opened up for women in the upheaval of the viking movements.²⁶

We begin to glimpse in the Old Norse-Icelandic accounts the possibility that, for some women, movement is possible and productive. Echoing Klein, “the world’s instability” does not always entrap them, as it does in the Irish examples (and

24 Laxdæla saga, 115. 25 Judith Jesch, Women in the Viking Age (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1991), 83. 26 Jesch, Women in the Viking Age, 83.

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in Klein’s Old English examples). Rather, it “impels” them to boldly undertake voyages, through which they become renowned agents of change, progress and power, spiritual and otherwise. The Vínland sagas illustrate this. Eiríks saga starts out with a Gaelic past, and a dangerous voyage north from Ireland, Scotland, and the Orkneys to Iceland, an opening that puts us into the environment of attested Hiberno-Norse contact and voyaging from the Irish Sea region, though the narrative possibilities for women could not be more different. Significantly, Eiríks saga begins with a powerful sailing woman—Auðr in djúpúðga (the Deep-Minded), who is celebrated in numerous sagas and historical texts as a foundational Icelandic figure. Eiríks saga records that when Auðr, widow of the Viking king of Dublin, learned that her son Þorsteinn the Red, a warriorking who has conquered much of Scotland, had been killed, “hon lét þá gera knǫrr í skógi á laun, ok er hon var búin, helt hon út í Orkneyjar” (she had a knorr built secretly in the forest and, when it was finished, set out for the Orkneys).²⁷ On her travels from Scotland Auðr makes a brief stop in the Orkneys to arrange a marriage for her granddaughter Gróa, daughter of her son Þorsteinn, and then sets out for Iceland: Hon hafði á skipi tuttugu karla frjálsa. Auðr kom til Íslands […] Síðan nam Auðr ǫll Dalalǫnd milli Dǫgurðarár ok Skraumuhlaupsár. Hon bjó í Hvammi. Hon hafði bœnahald í Krosshólum; þar lét hon reisa krossa, því at hon var skírð ok vel trúuð. (On her ship she had a crew of twenty free-born men. Auðr reached Iceland [… After a winter there] Auðr claimed all the land in the Dales between the Dǫgurðará and Skraumuhlaupsá rivers and settled at Hvammr. She used to pray on the Krosshólar hill, where she had crosses erected, for she was baptized and a devout Christian.)²⁸

In short, Auðr builds and sails a ship to Iceland, settles there, makes significant land claims, establishes Christian practice on her lands, and later makes land grants as well. This is a voyage account in which a valorized woman models movement, navigation, and power. The character I want to focus on, however, is Guðríðr, whose personal narrative and travels permeate both of the Vínland sagas. Introduced in chapter 3 of Eiríks saga rauða following the settlement of Iceland and Greenland, she is one of the

27 Eiríks saga Rauða, in Eyrbyggja saga: Brands þáttr Qrva, Eiríks saga Rauða Grœnlendinga saga, Grœnlendinga þáttr, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarson, Íslenzk fornrit 4 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1935), 193–237, at 196; Eirik the Red’s Saga, trans. Keneva Kunz in The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection (New York: Viking, 2000), 653–74, at 653. 28 Eiríks saga Rauða, 196; Eirik the Red’s Saga, 653.

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saga’s heroes, and hers is one of the stories that ends the saga. Early in the story— we are in Greenland at this point—a powerful seeress prophesies of Guðríðr that: Þú munt gjaforð fá hér á Grœnlandi, þat er sœmiligast er, þó at þér verði þat eigi til langæðar, því at vegar þínir liggja út til Íslands, ok man þar koma frá þér bæði mikil ætt ok góð, ok yfir þínum kynkvíslum skína bjartari geislar en ek hafa megin til at geta slíkt vandliga sét; enda far þú nú heil ok vel, dóttir. (You will make the most honorable of matches here in Greenland, though you won’t be putting down roots here, as your path leads to Iceland and from you will be descended a long and worthy line. Over all the branches of that family a bright ray will shine. May you fare well now, my child.)²⁹

I mention these lines because of the way that movement—travel, paths, increase and benefit from a woman’s movement and migration—are highlighted in this Old Norse-Icelandic saga, something which is radically different from the depiction of options available to the women in the Irish voyage tales, and Immram Curaig Maíle Dúin specifically. Rather than being rooted in a circumscribed space and story, Guðríðr traverses new (to the Norse) and extensive geographies. Various things happen in Vínland, including Guðríðr giving birth to a son, Snorri, the first European born there. One of the most uncanny Vínland moments, reported only in Grœnlendinga saga, features a verbal exchange between an Indigenous woman and Guðríðr. A small, pale woman with brown hair and very large eyes enters the doorway of the house where Guðríðr sits with the infant Snorri. Approaching Guðríðr the woman speaks: “Hvat heitir þú?” segir hon. “Ek heiti Guðríðr; eða hvert er þitt heiti?” “Ek heiti Guðríðr,” segir hon. Þá rétti Guðríðr husfreyja hǫnd sína til hennar, at hon sæti hjá henni, en þat bar allt saman, at þá heyrði Guðríðr brest mikinn, ok var þá konan horfin, ok í því var ok veginn einn Skrælingr af einum húskarli Karlsefnis, því at hann hafði viljat taka vápn þeira. Ok fóru nú brott sem tíðast, en klæði þeira lágu þar eptir ok varningr. Engi maðr hafði konu þessa sét, útan Guðríðr ein. (“What is your name?” she said. “My name is Guðríðr, and what is yours?” “My name is Guðríðr,” the other woman said. Guðríðr, Karlsefni’s wife, then motioned to her with her hand to sit down beside her, but just as she did so a great crash was heard and the woman disappeared. At that moment one of the natives had been killed by one of Karlsefni’s servants for trying to take weapons from them, and they quickly ran off, leaving their clothes and trade goods lying behind. No one but Guðríðr had seen the woman.)³⁰

29 Eiríks saga Rauða, 208; Eirik the Red’s Saga, 659. 30 Grœnlendinga saga, in Eyrbyggja saga. ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarson, 239–69, at 262–63; Saga of the Greenlanders, trans. Keneva Kunz in The Sagas of Icelanders, 636–52, at 647.

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It is a strange scene—allusive and elusive—that nonetheless piques our interest and asks us to imagine how Norse women and Indigenous women interacted, what they observed and wondered about each other. It is also remarkable in terms of being one of the first recorded accounts or representations of linguistic exchange between Europeans and the Indigenous people of North America. The outbreak of violence, however, brings any potential diplomatic exchanges between these women to a quick halt, with the Norse settlers retreating back across the Atlantic. The Norse Vínland accounts, even when they depict uncanny scenes and thwarted dialogues, nonetheless provide these women’s stories and tantalizing glimpses into the transformative encounters Norse and Indigenous women might have experienced as their paths intersected. Finally, after the Vínland settlements have been abandoned, Eiríks saga closes with a statement about how Guðríðr continues to impress. As in the earlier scene with the seeress, the saga frames assessment of Guðríðr in terms of how women— the family matriarch here—value other women: “en er hon reyndi, at Guðríðr var kvenskǫrungr mikill, fór hon heim; ok váru samfarar þeira góðar” (when she [Guðríðr’s mother-in-law] learned what an outstanding woman Guðríðr was, Guðríðr moved to the farm and the two women got along well).³¹ Eiríks saga rauða closes by enumerating three of Guðríðr’s descendants who become bishops. Grœnlendinga saga gives more detail: Ok er Karlsefni var andaðr, tók Guðríðr við búsvarðveizlu ok Snorri, sonr hennar, er fœddr var á Vínlandi. Ok er Snorri var kvángaðr, þá fór Guðríðr útan ok gekk suðr ok kom út aptr til bús Snorra, sonar síns, ok hafði hann þá látit gera kirkju í Glaumbœ. Siðan varð Guðríðr nunna ok einsetukona ok var þar, meðan hon lifði. (After Karlsefni’s death Guðríðr took over the running of the household, together with her son Snorri who had been born in Vínland. When Snorri married, Guðríðr travelled abroad, made a pilgrimage south and returned to her son Snorri’s farm. By then he had had a church built at Glaumbær. Later Guðríðr became a nun and anchoress, staying there for the remainder of her life.)³²

Then follows the list of three Icelandic bishops descended from Guðríðr. What’s most interesting here, though, is mention of her continued travel abroad and pilgrimage south. We are left with the celebratory image of a woman who sailed the North Atlantic and traveled to far-flung lands—Vínland but also, it seems, the Holy Land. We are left with the portrait, and the paradigm, of a woman whose movements and actions have transformed her North Atlantic world.

31 Eiríks saga Rauða, 236; Eirik the Red’s Saga, 674. 32 Grœnlendinga saga, 269; Saga of the Greenlanders, 651.

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It is really no surprise that Guðríðr is picked out as a model for other women, centuries later, as women’s movement and migration continue. Though it is Leifr Eiríksson who has received the majority of attention, it has been popularly asserted that Guðríðr, whose travels range from North America to Jerusalem, may well have been the most widely traveled person in the Middle Ages. Such claims aside, it is true that, along with other traveling Norse women, Guðríðr has attracted much attention and admiration for surpassing the usual limits placed on medieval women and their movement. In an intriguing North American context, Rasmus Bjørn Anderson, founder of the Scandinavian Studies Department at University of Wisconsin, and the driving force behind the United States’ establishment of Leif Erikson Day, attests to this sentiment in an autographed copy of his popular book about the Vínland Voyages, entitled America Not Discovered by Columbus. ³³ In an inscription to a Mrs. Alice E. Hoffman of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, (and perhaps every woman who bought the book and asked for his signature), Anderson encourages Hoffman to see herself as a new Guðríðr, and America a new Nordic homeland. On March 26, 1897, he writes: “Let us remember dear Gudrid the first fair faced woman whose eyes ever beheld this glorious country of ours” (Figure 8.1). I’m pretty sure, however, that no one has ever written an inscription encouraging a girl or woman to identify with the women in the Voyage of Máel Dúin. Rebecca Solnit quotes and discusses a line from Sarah Schulman’s novel Girls, Visions and Everything, about reading Jack Kerouac, that covers it nicely: “‘The trick,’ thinks [Lila] Futuransky, ‘was to identify with Jack Kerouac instead of with the women he fucks along the way,’ for like Odysseus, Kerouac was a traveling man in a landscape of immobile women.”³⁴ Even this, however, isn’t sustainable. As Solnit explains in her powerful (and gutting) essay entitled “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” “You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.”³⁵ On this rather depressing note, I posit a series of questions: what does the lack of valorized women in the Irish voyage narratives say about the “world,” the milieu in which these tales were produced and circulated? Conversely, what do the Old Norse-Icelandic voyage accounts say about their world? How can we under-

33 Rasmus B. Anderson, America Not Discovered by Columbus: An Historical Sketch of the Discovery of America by the Norsemen in the Tenth Century [1874], 4th ed. (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1891). 34 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2000), 245, with quoted passage from Sarah Schulman, Girls, Visions and Everything (Seattle: Seal Press, 1986), 17. 35 Rebecca Solnit, “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” Literary Hub, December 15, 2017, https://lithub.com/ men-explain-lolita-to-me/.

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Figure 8.1: Signed copy of fourth edition (1891) of America Not Discovered by Columbus, with dedication by Rasmus B. Anderson to Alice E. Hoffman. (Author’s own copy).

stand (and maybe celebrate) some of those differences—in our scholarship, but also in our classrooms? This, I think, is where working comparatively, where bringing in related traditions to supply new views and models where one tradition may be impoverished, can help us have these conversations in more open, intellectually, and also ethically productive ways. Rebecca Solnit warns that it is also crucial for

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women’s survival to find valorized models in art, in the texts and stories we consume. We must remember that, following Stacy Klein, Sarah Schulman, and Rebecca Solnit, calling out and drawing critical attention to these representations is also transformative and empowering. By noting textual silences and minimizations of women denied agency and movement, by interrogating the historical conditions and narrative paradigms that led to such defeating portrayals of the Irish canon’s literary women, by showing with our own scholarship and teaching that today, to us, these women do indeed matter, we have the chance to intervene as humans, scholars, and teachers. I want to close this essay with heartfelt appreciation for one of the finest teachers, scholars, and mentors in the field of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, Professor Heather O’Donoghue. Relentlessly inclusive and welcoming, subtle yet completely unapologetic in her move to find a place at the table for all of those who were interested, Heather O’Donoghue has always modeled how we might pursue readings against the grain, both in terms of the sources as well as prevailing and often overly traditional scholarship. As so many of her students and colleagues will know, it has been a great gift to be part of her crew and to travel intellectually to new places with her.

Emily Kesling

Chapter 9 Christ’s Letter to Abgar in England and Ireland In the late eighth or early ninth century, three scribes writing in western England copied a book of devotional texts now known as the Royal Prayerbook. The first scribe began by copying extracts from each of the gospels; when this was finished, they copied the text of the Lord’s Prayer and the creed. Following these pieces, the second scribe entered another text, a letter claiming to have been written by Jesus himself, before continuing on to copy other prayers and devotional pieces. This essay considers this letter attributed to Christ, how it came to be included in this early medieval collection, and what it might have meant to readers in that period. The earliest known version of this text, sometimes known as the Letter to Abgar or the Epistola salvatoris, is found in Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, which was finished in the beginning of the fourth century. Eusebius relates the story of Abgar Ukkama (“the black”), who was the king of Edessa, modern day Urfa in eastern Turkey, during the life of Christ. According to Eusebius, Abgar was suffering from a terrible disease “beyond human power to heal,” although Eusebius does not identify the ailment by name. When news of Jesus’s healing miracles reached him, Abgar himself decided to write to the Galilean, inviting him to come to Edessa. The text of this letter is recorded by Eusebius: A copy of the letter written by Abgar the Toparch to Jesus and sent to him to Jerusalem by the courier Ananias. Abgar Ukkama, the Toparch, to Jesus the good Saviour who has appeared in the district of Jerusalem, greeting. I have heard concerning you and your cures, how they are accomplished by you without drugs and herbs. For, as the story goes, you make the blind recover their sight, the lame walk, and you cleanse lepers, and cast out unclean spirits and demons, and you cure those who are tortured by long disease and you raise dead men. And when I heard all these things concerning you I decided that it is one of the two, either that you are God, and came down from heaven to do these things, or are a Son of God for doing these things. For this reason I write to beg you to hasten to me and to heal the suffering which I have. Moreover I heard that the Jews are mocking you, and wish to ill-treat you. Now I have a city very small and venerable which is enough for both.¹

1 For the Greek text of both letters, see Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, trans. Kirsopp Lake https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-014

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Reputedly, Jesus received this letter and sent his own reply, which is also included in Eusebius’s account: The reply from Jesus to Abgar, the Toparch, by the courier Ananias. Blessed are you who believed in me not having seen me, for it is written concerning me that those who have seen me will not believe in me, and that those who have not seen me will believe and live. Now concerning what you wrote to me, to come to you, I must first complete here all for which I was sent, and after thus completing it be taken up to him who sent me, and when I have been taken up, I will send to you one of my disciples to heal your suffering, and give life to you and those with you.

Eusebius claims to have seen these letters himself in Edessa and that the text of the letters, which he provides in Greek, is a “word by word” (αὐτοῖς ῥήμασιν) translation made himself from the Syriac originals.² Following this account of the letters, he provides a narrative of Abgar’s healing by Thaddaeus, whom Eusebius considered to be one of the seventy disciples mentioned in Luke’s gospel, and of his preaching to the citizens of Edessa.³ Eusebius claims that this account as well has been translated from a Syriac text that he found alongside the letters. This pair of letters was officially declared apocryphal by the Gelasian decree at the end of the fifth century.⁴ Even earlier, both Augustine and Jerome denied the existence of any letter by Christ, on the grounds that if such an epistle were genuine it would have been known widely in the Church from the earliest times.⁵ The authenticity of the letters provided by Eusebius is also compromised by their direct allusion to passages in John’s Gospel, a text dating from after the life of Christ. These judgments on their authenticity, however, did not stop these works from

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), I.13. Translations from this text are Lake’s, slightly modernized. 2 Eusebius relates that he found the texts of these letters in the city archives: “There is also documentary evidence of these things taken from the archives at Edessa which was at that time a capital city. At least, in the public documents there, which contain the things done in antiquity and at the time of Abgar, these things too are found preserved from that time to this.” 3 For a discussion of the identity of “Thaddeus,” see J. B. Segal, Edessa “The Blessed City” (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2005), 64–66. 4 Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis, ed. Ernst von Dobschütz (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1912), 13. 5 Augustine, Contra Faustum 28.4: “For, if some writing were produced that was said to be the personal writing of Christ, with no other narrator, how could it have happened that, if it were really his, it is not read, not accepted, and not held in the highest authority in his Church […]?” (trans. Roland S. J. Teske, Answer to Faustus, A Manichean, Works of Saint Augustine 20 [New York: New York City Press, 2007], 396); see also Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, ed. Francisci Glorie, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 75 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1964), 44: 29–30.

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being extremely popular, especially in the East but also in the West during the Middle Ages. It seems very likely that Eusebius did rely on a Syriac source for his text of the letters, as a copy of these letters occurs in the Syriac text known as the Doctrina Addai or Teaching of Addai. This text in its present form is thought to date from the fifth century. However, it appears to have relied on an earlier Syriac source independent from Eusebius’s History, which may well have been the original text also used by Eusebius.⁶ A second and independent account of these letters from the fourth century exists in the Itinerarium Egeriae. Egeria, generally thought to be a woman of Gaulish or Spanish origin, traveled to the eastern Mediterranean between 381 and 384.⁷ As part of this trip she visited the city of Edessa. According to Egeria’s account, when she arrived there she was given a tour of the city by the bishop, who also related to her the story of the correspondence between Christ and Abgar. The bishop’s account included details of the protective power bestowed by the letter for the city of Edessa and its proven efficacy during an attempted attack by the Persians. “This letter,” he says, “has been brought out and read at the gate, and immediately by the will of God all enemies have been driven back.”⁸ Most interestingly, when the bishop gifts Egeria copies of these letters to take back with her as a souvenir, Egeria adds the comment that she already had copies of these letters at home but that this new version was “fuller.”⁹ This statement strongly suggests that by the end of the fourth century, versions of these letters had already begun to circulate in the West in some form. In the early fifth century, however, Rufinus’s translation of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History provided the standard Latin translation of the letters.

6 Sebastian P. Brock, “Eusebius and Syriac Christianity,” in Eusebius, Christianity, and Judaism, ed. H. W. Attridge and Gohei Hata (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 212–34, at 213. 7 For an edition of the Latin text and translation into English, see Egeria, Journey to the Holy Land, ed. and trans. P. F. Bradshaw (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021). Egeria is described in the seventh century as a “native of Ocean’s western shore,” so it is thought that she must have lived on the Atlantic coast, but a more precise location is still a matter of debate: see John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, rev. ed. (Jerusalem: Ariel Publishing House, 1981), 177. 8 Egeria, ch.19:13 (trans. Bradshaw): “haec epistola prolata est et lecta est in porta, et statim nutu Dei expulsi sunt omnes hostes.” The idea that the letters would provide protection for the city is not mentioned in Eusebius’s account, but does have a parallel in the final sentence of Christ’s Letter to Abgar as recorded in the Doctrina Addai. 9 “Et licet in patria exemplaria ipsarum haberem, tamen gratius mihi uisum est, ut et ibi eas de ipso acciperem, ne quid forsitan minus ad nos in patria peruenisset; nam uere amplius est, quod hic accepi” (And although I had copies of them at home, yet it seemed more gratifying to me that I should also receive them there from him, lest perhaps something less had reached us at home; for what I received here is indeed fuller). Egeria, ch.19:19 (trans. Bradshaw).

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The Letter in the Royal Prayerbook The earliest record of any version of these letters from the British Isles is found in British Library MS Royal 2.A.xx. This manuscript, generally referred to as the Royal Prayerbook, is one of four interrelated collections known together as the early Insular Prayerbooks; this group also includes the Book of Cerne, the Book of Nunnaminster, and the (fragmentary) Harleian Prayerbook. All four of these collections date from the late eighth to the early ninth century; it is generally thought that these texts were created primarily for the purpose of private devotion. The three complete collections all begin with extracts from the gospels which are then followed by prayers and other material.¹⁰ Although some content is shared between one or more collections in this group, the Royal Prayerbook is the only one to contain any part of the Abgar correspondence. The text found in the prayerbook begins with an incipit on folio 12 recto, followed by the main text on the verso. These read: Incipit epistola salvatoris Domini nostri iehsu xpisti ad abgarum regem quam dominus manu scripsit et dixit. Beatus es qui me non uidisti et credisti in me; scriptum est enim de me quia hi qui uident me non credent in me et qui me non uident ipsi in me credent et uiuent. De eo autem quod scripsisti mihi ut uenirem ad te oportet me omnia propter quae misus sum hic explere; et postea quam conpleuero recipe me ad eum a quo misus sum. Cum ergo fuero adsumtus mittam tibi aliquem ex discipulis meis ut curet egritudinem tuam et uitam tibi at his qui tecum sunt praestet et saluus eris. Sicut scriptum qui credit in me saluus erit.¹¹ (Here begins the letter of the Savior, our Lord, Jesus Christ to King Abgar, which the Lord wrote with [his] hand and said. Blessed are you who did not see me and believed in me. Truly it is written concerning me that those who see me do not believe me and they who do not see, the very ones, will believe in me and will live. Concerning that, however, which you wrote to me, that I come to you, it is necessary for me to fulfill everything for which I was sent here, and afterwards, when I will

10 For a general background on these collections, see Michelle P. Brown, The Book of Cerne: Prayer, Patronage and Power in Ninth-Century England (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Patrick Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature in Western England: 600–800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Michelle P. Brown, “Mercian Manuscripts? The ‘Tiberius’ Group and Its Historical Context,” in Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, ed. Michelle P. Brown and Carol Farr (London: Continuum, 2001), 281–91; Barbara Raw, “Anglo-Saxon Prayerbooks,” in The Cambridge History of the Book, vol. 1, ca. 400–1100, ed. Richard Gameson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 460–67. 11 The incipit is written in a separate hand from the main text of the Letter, with no decoration marking its first letter. The text of the Letter and its rubric occurs on folia 12v–13r. Expansions have been rendered silently and punctuation has been normalized throughout this chapter.

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have completed it to be taken to him by whom I was sent. When therefore I have been taken, I will send to you someone from my disciples in order that he may cure your illness and give life to you and those who are with you, and you will be saved. Thus it is written: who believes in me, will be saved.)

The text of the letter is followed by a rubric on the letter’s use. This is marked as separate from the letter proper by three medial commas and a colored initial. This reads: Siue in domu tua siue in ciuitate tua siue in omni loco nemo inimicorum tuorum dominabitur et insidias diabuli ne timeas et carmina inimicorum tuorum distruuntur; et omnes inimici tui expellentur a te siue a grandine siue a tonitrua non noceberis et ab omni periculo liberaueris, siue in mare siue in terra siue in die siue in nocte siue in locis obscuris. Si quis hanc epistolam secum habuerit ecures ambulet in pace. Amen. (Be it in your house, be it in your city, be it in any place, none of your enemies will have dominion, and the plots of the devil you will not fear, and the charms of your enemies will be broken, and all of your enemies will be driven away from you; you will not be harmed be it by hail, be it by thunder and you will be free from all danger, be it on the sea, be it on the earth, be it in the day, be it in the night, be it in dark places, if you have this letter with you, you will walk safely in peace. Amen.)

What is initially striking about the appearance of the letter within the Royal Prayerbook is that the reply from Christ occurs alone, without the text of Abgar’s letter or any reference to details of the legend. This suggests that this text was expected to be familiar to the users of this prayerbook. The location of this “letter of our Savior” within the collection suggests a belief in its legitimacy and prominence as the words of Jesus. As mentioned above, the letter comes very close to the beginning of the prayer portion of the collection, where it occurs as the third text, following only the Pater noster and the creed.¹² The majority of the text in this letter follows extremely closely the Latin version of the letter found in Rufinus’s translation of the Ecclesiastical History. Only two sections of the text differ notably from this version, the first and final lines. The first line of Rufinus’s text reads: “Beatus es, qui credidisti in me, cum me ipse non videris” (you are blessed who believed in me, since you have not seen me).¹³ As seen above, the Royal letter reads instead: “Beatus es qui me non uidisti

12 The first line of the Letter has been glossed in Old English. 13 The full text of the Letter in Rufinus’s translation can be found in Eusebius Werke, vol. 2, ed. Theodor Mommsen (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1902), I 13, p. 89. The differences between the Royal text and Rufinus have been remarked upon by Christopher M. Cain, “Sacred Words, Anglo-Saxon Piety, and the Origins of the Epistola salvatoris in Royal 2.A.xx,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 108 (2009): 168–89, at 177; discussion of Cain’s conclusions will follow below.

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et credisti in me” (blessed are you who did not see and believed in me). While the source for Royal’s letter seems to be ultimately Rufinus’s translation, I would suggest that this particular sentence has been reshaped to further emphasize its relationship with John 20:29: “Dicit ei Iesus ‘Quia vidisti me, Thoma, credidisti; beati qui non viderunt et crediderunt’” (Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen me, Thomas, you have believed; blessed are they that have not seen and have believed”).¹⁴ While both Eusebius’s Greek text and Rufinus’s Latin echo this verse, the Royal version makes the relationship with the gospel text more explicit, as it maintains the order of the verbs found in both clauses of the biblical text, and keeps them both in the perfect tense, the same tense used in the first half of the gospel verse. The second departure from the standard text as preserved by Rufinus is that two additional clauses have been added to the end of the letter, reading “et saluus erit. Sicut scriptum qui credit in me saluus erit” (and you will be saved. Thus it is written: who believes in me, will be saved); this addition also seems to be inspired by the gospels, perhaps particularly Mark 16:16a, “Qui crediderit et baptizatus fuerit salvus erit” (he who believes and is baptized shall be saved).¹⁵ I would suggest that these variations show a subtle adaptation of the text of the Letter to further emphasize its connection to the words of Christ in the gospels and thus perhaps underline its authenticity as Christ’s speech. The final additional clause of the letter found in the Royal Prayerbook also serves to accentuate a healing dimension of the text. While salvus in the Vulgate is normally rendered “saved,” this word can also be used to refer to physical health. In the context of King Abgar’s request for physical healing, it would be easy to understand this line as “thus it is written, whoever believes in me will be healed.” The idea of the healing of physical maladies is not emphasized in particular in the rubric following Royal’s letter, which covers a variety of events but seems focused especially on dangers associated with travel; one can perhaps see in this a tradition of devotional books or pamphlets serving as portable travel aids to piety—Royal itself is quite a small manuscript, although there is no known evidence of it functioning as a vademecum. More generally, however, the Royal Prayerbook has frequently been perceived as being preoccupied with health and protec-

14 The Vulgate Bible, ed. Edgar Swift with Angela M. Kinney, 6 vols., vol. 6 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), John 20:29 [translation modernized]. The Vulgate reading is given above but these same verbs in the same tense are almost always used in Vetus Latina versions of this verse; see “Vetus Latina Iohannes Electronic Edition 2.0,” Vetus Latina Iohannes: The Verbum Project, ed. Philip H. Burton et al. (2015), https://itsmleeweb.cal.bham.ac.uk/iohannes/vetusla tina/index.ht. 15 The Vulgate Bible, ed. Swift and Kinney, Mark 16:16a [translation modernized].

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tion against illness.¹⁶ Many of the gospel extracts included at the beginning of the collection focus on Christ’s healing miracles, and the collection also contains a variety of short texts aimed at staunching a flow of blood.¹⁷ This understanding of the letter as a healing text may also be indicated by the texts immediately following in the collection, a series of three petitions under the title Oratio. Sims-Williams has suggested that at least two of these petitions have been adapted from liturgical prayers from the visitation of the sick.¹⁸ This personalized reading of the Letter differs notably from Eastern traditions which more frequently emphasize the Letter’s protection of the city of Edessa.¹⁹

Christ’s Letter in England and Ireland In a recent article, Christopher Cain suggests that the Letter of Christ to Abgar found in Royal 2.A.xx came originally from the milieu of Theodore of Tarsus in Canterbury. This argument was inspired in part by the differences between the text of the letter in the Royal manuscript and the text in Rufinus’s translation of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History. Cain sees these differences as signifying some distance between Royal’s letter and Rufinus’s translation; he suggests that the Royal text could be considered a distinct textual tradition of the letter, independent of any direct knowledge of Rufinus’s text. He sees Theodore, sixth-century Archbishop of Canterbury, who spoke Greek and possibly also Syriac, and who had traveled in the East and may have visited Edessa itself, as a potential conduit for the version of the letter found in the Royal manuscript. In keeping with this, he suggests that

16 This stress has led to the suggestion that this collection may have been originally compiled for the use of a physician; I am not yet persuaded that there is evidence to support this view but a more general concern with spiritual and physical health is widely accepted: Brown, The Book of Cerne, 152; Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 285. For the specific suggestion that this book belonged to a female physician, see Michelle Brown, “Female Book-Ownership and Production in Anglo-Saxon England: The Evidence of the Ninth-Century Prayerbooks,” in Lexis and Texts in Early English: Papers in Honour of Jane Roberts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 45–68, at 57. 17 For a discussion of these texts, see Emily Kesling, “The Royal Prayerbook’s Blood-Staunching Charms and Early Insular Scribal Communities,” Early Medieval Europe 29 (2021): 181–200; Emily Kesling, “A Blood-Staunching Charm of Royal 2.A.xx and Its Greek Text,” Peritia 32 (2021): 149–62. 18 Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 296. 19 Han J. W. Drijvers, “The Abgar Legend,” in New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1, Gospels and Related Writings, ed. W. Schneemelcher, rev. ed. (London: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 493; Segal, Edessa “The Blessed City,” 74–75.

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the rubric following the text can be understood as part of an “Eastern tradition of the Letter’s protective powers.”²⁰ There are good reasons for assuming that some of the material found in the early Insular Prayerbooks derived from the intellectual milieu fostered by Theodore and Hadrian in Canterbury. Two other texts in Royal, a litany occurring on folio 26r–v and the Old Roman creed on folio 12r, likely derive from this milieu.²¹ It has also been suggested that three hymns found in the Book of Cerne were written by Theodore himself, or by someone else familiar with Greek verse.²² Nevertheless, these prayer collections bring together material from diverse origins, including texts originating in Northumbria, Wales, Ireland, and other locations. In the case of the Abgar correspondence, I do not believe that there is adequate evidence to support the view that these texts were transmitted via Canterbury. In my view, the differences (noted above) from the standard text of the Letter found in Rufinus are not significant enough to require any Eastern source, whether in Greek or Syriac, but instead suggest a monastic readership familiar with the Latin Vulgate. While I have been unable to identify any Greek copy of the Letter to Abgar that provides any meaningful correspondence to the text found in Royal 2.A.xx, there are three extant Latin versions that offer significant parallels, all of which are found in manuscripts from the British Isles.²³ These are the copy found in British

20 Cain, “Sacred Words, Anglo-Saxon Piety,” 189. 21 Anglo-Saxon Litanies of the Saints, ed. Michael Lapidge (London: Henry Bradshaw, 1991), 13–25. 22 For discussion of these pieces, as well as an English translation, see Michael Lapidge, “Theodore and Anglo-Latin Octosyllabic Verse,” reprinted in his Anglo-Latin Literature 600–899 (London: Hambledon, 1996), 225–46. 23 Warner and Gilson suggest that the Royal text “can be connected to the Greek text printed by Lipsius and Bonnet, Acta Apostolorium Apocrypha, 1891.” George F. Warner and Julius P. Gilson, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Old Royal and King’s Collections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), I, 33–34. However, the text found in Lipsius and Bonnet bears no notable relationship with Royal; it is instead the Epistula Abgari, the title given to a lengthened version of the correspondence found in Vienna MS Vindobonensis bybl. Caesar theol. gr. 315 (s. xii) and New York, Pierpont Morgan MS 499 (s. xiv). For a translation of the Pierpont Morgan version of this text and a discussion of this textual tradition, see Mark Goscin, The Tradition of the Image of Edessa (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016), 79–106. Interestingly, the Syriac version of the Letter by Christ found in the Doctrina Addai also inverts the order of the verbs found in the first line of the Greek text, reading “blessed are you who, not having seen me, have believed in me.” However, this is likely to be a coincidence, perhaps independently influenced by the gospel text. For an English translation of portions of this text, including the correspondence between Christ and Abgar, alongside Eusebius’s text, see Brock, “Eusebius and Syriac Christianity,” 215–21, at 216. The most recent edition of the Syriac text is found in Alain Desreumaux, Histoire du roi Abgar et de Jésus: Présentation et trad. du texte syriaque intégral de “La doctrine d’Addaï” (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993).

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Library MS Cotton Galba A.xiv, sometimes known as the Galba Prayerbook, and the versions found in the two extant copies of the Irish Liber Hymnorum. The texts found in these manuscripts share close textual similarities to the version of the letter found in the Royal Prayerbook and in each case the letter from Christ appears alone, rather than as a pair with Abgar’s letter. None of these manuscripts provides direct parallels to the rubric that follows Christ’s letter in Royal, however. The closest correspondence to the Royal letter is the version found in Galba A.xiv, a manuscript copied in the first half of the eleventh century. The prayerbook was severely damaged during the Cotton fire of 1731, rendering some of its text illegible. Several different centers have been suggested by scholars for the prayerbook. It has been most commonly associated with Nunnaminster abbey in Winchester, but other centers have also been suggested. Most recently, Julia Crick has argued that we might look instead to western England and the area of Worcester for its origin.²⁴ Beyond the Letter to Abgar, the Galba Prayerbook shares several texts with members of the early Insular Prayerbooks.²⁵ These early prayer collections seem to have had a direct influence on Galba, as the later prayerbook also shares paleographic features with these earlier works; it has been noted in particular that several distinctive letter forms are shared between Galba and Royal.²⁶ The copy of the Letter to Abgar found in Galba begins, like Royal, “Beatus es qui non uidisti et credidisti in me” rather than the standard first line found in Rufinus.²⁷ This text also contains the final additional clause present at the end of the letter in the Royal manuscript and is introduced by an incipit closely mirroring that found in Royal.²⁸ I would suggest that the version of Christ’s Letter found in Galba A.xiv was either copied from Royal itself or from another closely related but no longer extant Insular prayer compilation. Much of the discussion related to the Galba Prayerbook has focused on its possible origin in a female monastic house. Four prayers in the collection contain feminine endings, with another having feminine endings added interlinearly above

24 Julia Crick, “An Eleventh-Century Prayer-Book for Women? The Origins and History of the Galba Prayer-Book,” in Writing, Kingship and Power in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Rory Naismith and David Woodman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 281–302, at 296. 25 Muir lists nine texts that are shared between these collections (including the Letter to Abgar): Bernard Muir, A Pre-Conquest English Prayer Book (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1988), xxvii–xxx. 26 For a discussion of these features, see Crick, “An Eleventh-Century Prayer-Book for Women?,” 287. 27 British Library, Galba MS A.xiv, fol. 27v. A printed edition of this text is available in Muir, A PreConquest English Prayer Book. 28 The incipit in Galba differs only with the insertion of the reflexive adjective sua: “Incipit epistola salvatoris domini nostri iehsu xpisti ad abgarum regem quam dominus manu sua scripsit et dixit.”

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masculine endings. The meaning of this evidence has been the subject of debate, with Neil Ker proposing that the book was written first for men and only later adapted for a female audience.²⁹ However, Crick has recently argued that there was no time lapse in the production of the collection and that the original parts of the compilation were produced at “a single centre within a single biological generation.”³⁰ If these conclusions are correct, it seems extremely likely that the manuscript was created either in a monastic community of women or one closely associated with a female community or congregation. Such an environment provides another parallel with the earlier Insular Prayerbooks, three of which have been associated with a female audience or readership, including the Royal Prayerbook. ³¹ The appearance of closely related versions of the Letter of Abgar within these two prayer collections may then indicate that this text was important devotionally in female monastic communities. While the text of the Letter found in Cotton Galba A.xiv appears to be a textual descendent of the version found in the Royal Prayerbook, the relationship between Royal’s text and the other related versions, those found in the Irish Liber Hymnorum, is less clear. The compilation of prayers known as the Irish Liber Hymnorum exists in two manuscripts, Trinity College Dublin MS 1441 and University College Dublin Franciscan MS A2. While the two manuscripts are closely related, they differ slightly in their contents and include variant readings sometimes within individual texts. TCD 1441 is generally thought to be the earlier of the two manuscripts, with both dating probably to the eleventh century and the Franciscan manuscript to the late eleventh.³² This collection shares a variety of content with the early Insular Prayerbooks, and among these is the Letter to Abgar.³³ As in the case of Cot-

29 N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957), 201. A detailed overview of this question is available in Crick, “An Eleventh-Century Prayer-Book for Women?.” 30 Crick, “An Eleventh-Century Prayer-Book for Women?,” 289. 31 See Brown, “Female Book-Ownership”; Raw, “Anglo-Saxon Prayerbooks.” In the case of the Royal Prayerbook, this idea is due to the presence of five short texts aimed at staunching a flow of blood, three of which reference Veronica, the name given in apocryphal texts to the bleeding woman of the gospels. It is generally thought that these texts all relate to uterine bleeding and thus indicate that the collection was used by women, as there are no entries related to other physical conditions in the collection. For a discussion of these texts, see Kesling, “The Royal Prayerbook’s Blood-Staunching Charms.” 32 Ludwig Bieler, “The Irish Book of Hymns: A Palaeographical Study,” Scriptorium 2 (1948): 177–94, at 177. The Franciscan manuscript is the shorter of the two collections. 33 The Liber Hymnorum shares three texts with the Book of Cerne, two with the Book of Nunnaminster, one with the (fragmentary) Harleian Prayerbook. Additionally, a number of other essential liturgical prayers are shared between Royal Prayerbook and Liber Hymnorum. While these prayers are widespread throughout the broader Christian tradition, it would be worth examining whether

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ton Galba A.xiv, the letters found in the Hymnorum manuscripts are close variants of the Royal letter. Both manuscripts contain the same reading of the first line found in Royal: “Beatus es qui me non uidisti et credidisti in me.” The Franciscan manuscript furthermore contains the final clause: “Sicut scriptum qui credit in me saluus erit.”³⁴ There are other Irish versions of the Letter to Abgar, but no other shares these distinctive readings.³⁵ In his argument for looking towards Canterbury, Cain suggested that the Irish tradition of the Letter to Abgar—including the versions within the Liber Hymnorum—was fundamentally liturgical, as opposed to the private devotional context of the Letter within Royal.³⁶ However, I would suggest that the distinction made by Cain risks oversimplifying the nature of the prayer collections at hand. The Letter to Abgar does seem to have served as a lection in some forms of the monastic office in Irish circles.³⁷ However, while it is clear that many of the texts found within the Liber Hymnorum had some sort of liturgical use in the early Middle Ages, the Liber Hymnorum itself does not have any clear liturgical function.³⁸ Similarly, while it is generally thought that the early Insular Prayerbooks were compiled for private devotional use, they contain prayers also used in liturgical rites. This liturgical aspect is particularly pronounced in the Royal Prayerbook, which contains the Pater noster, the Apostle’s Creed, several canticles, and the Gloria, as well as

there is any more specific relationship between the text of these prayers found within the two collections. 34 The Trinity College Dublin manuscript also spells missus, which occurs twice in the letter, with a single s; this is the spelling used in the main text of Royal, although a different hand has later corrected this. 35 Considine lists the known Irish versions of the Letter and provides editions of several texts including that found in the Leabhar Breac: Patrick Considine, “Irish Versions of the Abgar Legend,” Celtica 10 (1973): 237–57. 36 Cain does not provide the text of the Liber Hymnorum’s Letters. 37 The Letter to Abgar is listed in what seems to be an order of service for a special office written in an Irish hand in the ninth-century Basel Psalter (Basel MS A. vii. 3). The prayer to St. John, which occurs immediately preceding the Letter in the Liber Hymnorum, is also included in this list. See Bernard’s discussion, The Irish Liber Hymnorum, xxi–xxxi. 38 Máire Herbert has suggested that the prayers collected in the Hymnorum required informative prefaces because they were long out of use when the collection was created: “Crossing Historical and Literary Boundaries: Irish Written Culture around the Year 1000,” in Crossing Boundaries: Croesi Ffiniau, ed. Patrick Sims-Williams and Gruffydd Aled Williams, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 53/54 (2007): 87–101, at 90. Similarly, Michael Clarke remarks that “the scholarly apparatus of our Liber Hymnorum manuscripts makes it hard to see them as service-books: in plan and in presentation, the compilation was clearly designed for the study of a literary canon, not for saving one’s soul”. Michael Clarke, “The Irish Liber Hymnorum: A Bilingual Anthology of Sacred Verse” (forthcoming).

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gospel readings sometimes used as lections.³⁹ It thus would not be out of keeping with the contents of Royal if the text of the Letter to Abgar included therein originated in a liturgical context; such an origin may perhaps even be signaled by its position immediately following the Pater noster and the creed. In both copies of the Liber Hymnorum, the Letter to Abgar is followed by a series of three petitions. These read: Domine domine defende nos a malis et custodi nos in bonis ut simus filii tui hic et in futuro, amen./ Saluator omnium Christe respice in nos Iesu, et miserere nobis. /Euangelium domini nostri Iesu Christi liberet nos protegat nos custodiat nos defendat nos ab omni malo ab omni periculo ab omni langore ab omni dolore ab omni plaga ab omni inuidia ab omnibus insidiis diabuli et malorum hominum hic et in futuro, amen (O Lord, Lord, defend us from evils and protect us in goodness that we will be your sons here and in the future, amen. O Christ, savior of all, keep watch over us, O Jesus, and have mercy on us. May the gospel [euangelium] of our Lord Jesus Christ free us, protect us, watch over us, defend us from every evil, from every danger, from every weakness, from every pain, from every misfortune, from all ill will, from all plots of the devil and evil men here and in the future, amen.)⁴⁰

These prayers could perhaps be compared to the series of three short petitionary prayers that follows the Letter and rubric in the Royal manuscript.⁴¹ Unlike the Liber Hymnorum’s texts, which are in the plural, these three texts are all in the singular, perhaps indicating a more private or personal use.⁴² As is noted by Cain, the third of the petitions in the Hymnorum also shares some points of similarity to the rubric for the letter found in Royal. There is no direct overlap between these pieces but both share an enumerative quality—attempting to protect their user against a wide array of potential dangers, both physical and spiritual. In the Royal rubric, this protection comes as a result of carrying the letter with you, while in the Hymnorum text this protection is conferred by the evangelium, a word that can convey both the spiritual truth of Christ’s victory as well as the physical book containing the four gospels. While not being exclusive to a single tradition, extended enumeration is a feature often seen in Hiberno-Latin compositions. This trait can be seen for instance in the lorica prayers, which have frequent enumerative passages and often list in detail parts of the body and dangers against 39 For discussion of this, see Brown, The Book of Cerne, 152. 40 TCD 1441, fol. 15r (text from The Irish Liber Hymnorum, 94; translation mine). 41 fol. 13r–v. These are titled simply oratio within the manuscript. A text and translation of these texts can be found in Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 296. 42 Sims-Williams has observed that the second and third of these petitions are drawn from the liturgical rites for the visitation of the sick, and notes that the second seems to have been purposefully altered to use first person pronouns. Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 296.

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which the user needs to be protected.⁴³ Examples of this Irish style of prayer can be seen in the Liber Hymnorum but also in the early Insular Prayerbooks, clearly demonstrating that this style of prayer was familiar both to the compilers of these collections and to the early medieval authors responsible for many of the hymns included.⁴⁴ It seems likely that both the rubric accompanying Royal’s text and the third petition following the Letter in the Liber Hymnorum may have arisen in an intellectual milieu influenced by this style of prayer.

Conclusions The incipit found in the Royal 2.A.xx introduces its copy of the Letter to Abgar as a text which “dominus manu scripsit et dixit” (the Lord wrote with his hand and said). This heading emphasizes the Letter as the result of a physical act: it was made with the Lord’s hand—the Galba manuscript’s text even adds the reflexive pronoun, sua manu (his own hand). Yet while this Letter is the work of the Lord’s hand, it is also his speech. This fact would have been underscored for its readers by its clear relationship to Jesus’s words in the gospels. The version of the text found within the Royal Prayerbook subtly alters the first phrases of the Letter to make its relationship to John 20:29 even more explicit and adds as a conclusion the promise made by Christ in Mark 16:16 “he who believes in me will be saved.” These subtle changes work to transform the text of Rufinus’s letter into an echo of Christ’s own words in the gospel texts. Exactly what type of milieu produced the text first recorded in Royal is unknown. The pronounced focus on the gospel text may suggest it originated within a monastic community, perhaps as a lection used in the divine office. The occurrence of the Letter in Royal and Galba, alone, without reference to Eusebius or the text of Abgar’s letter, suggests an audience already familiar with the tradition associated with the text; this presentation also suggests that within these collec43 Lorica is the Latin term for breastplate used in Ephesians 6:17. Godel defines a lorica thus: “litany form of prayer, usually fairly long, in a Latin or Celtic language, in which earnest expressions are used to invoke the protection of the three Divine Persons, the angels and the saints, in times of material or spiritual danger. The dangers are minutely detailed, mentioning various organs of the body for which protection is specifically asked. The petitioner asks God or the saints to shield him as a defensive wall against all hostile attack: hence the name lorica (‘breastplate’).” W. Godel, “Irish Prayer in the Early Middle Ages,” Milltown Studies 4 (1979): 60–99, at vol. 5, p. 85. 44 Both the Book of Cerne and the Book of Nunnaminster contain the Lorica of Laidcenn. In the Book of Cerne the text has been glossed in Old English. The Trinity College Dublin manuscript of the Liber Hymnorum contains another famous Irish-language lorica known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate.

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tions it was valued primarily as a prayer, or meditation, rather than for any historical purpose.⁴⁵ All direct parallels to this text originate within Britain and Ireland, so I would suggest that it is to these islands, rather than to the East, to which we should turn for its origin. While this text could surely have arisen in an early English monastic community, evidence for the use of this Letter as a lection in the early Irish church may suggest that it is more likely to be ultimately of Irish origin, as is a variety of other content included within the early Insular Prayerbooks. Ireland may also be the origin for the rubric found following the text in Royal, even if no Irish versions are extant. Wherever this version of the text may have originated, it is clear that in the eighth to eleventh centuries the Letter of Christ to Abgar was used as a private devotional prayer in England. It is possible that it was particularly popular among women’s communities, as both extant copies exist in manuscripts showing signs of being designed for female use. For these readers, a Late Antique composition from Edessa that was translated from Syriac into Greek by Eusebius and from Greek into Latin by Rufinus had become the words of Christ.

45 The presentation within these manuscripts differs from the Liber Hymnorum, where the text is prefaced by introductory material in Irish and Latin, which provides a historical background to the text; a practice also used in presenting the other prayers in that collection. This perhaps demonstrates a shift in the understanding or usage of this text between the ninth and eleventh centuries.

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Chapter 10 Norse, Irish, and English Songs: Communal Entertainment and Cultural Exchange in the Gesta Herwardi

The Gesta Herwardi stands at a significant turning-point in the literature of medieval England.¹ Composed in the first half of the twelfth century, it celebrates the life of Hereward, an English rebel against Norman rule, and is overtly and proudly the tale of an English hero. However, it is also one of the earliest examples of postconquest literature to show the influence of Anglo-Norman romance, as well as one of very few texts from medieval England to make direct reference to a Scandinavian storytelling tradition of oral saga. A product of the twelfth-century Fenland, a multicultural society combining English, Norman, and Scandinavian influences, the Gesta Herwardi draws on a variety of sources to construct a life-story for its hero: Anglo-Norman and Norse material is united with oral accounts of Hereward’s life, hagiographical motifs, and outlaw legend to create a text notable for its cultural and literary hybridity.² The Gesta’s blending of these disparate influences reflects the process of transition which is at the heart of its narrative, the reshaping of English culture and identity in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. Hereward, who is presented by the Gesta as the greatest of English heroes, was an unlikely candidate for that role. He was a minor Lincolnshire landowner who is named in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as one of those who participated in the siege of Ely in 1070–1071, when a group of English rebels, assisted by a fleet sent from Denmark, held the Isle of Ely against a Norman army.³ Though he played only a

1 Quotations from the Gesta Herwardi are from Lestorie des Engles solum la translacion Maistre Geffrei Gaimar, ed. T. D. Hardy and C. T. Martin (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1888–1889), 1:339– 404; translations are my own. 2 Joanna Huntington, “‘The Quality of His Virtus Proved Him a Perfect Man’: Hereward ‘the Wake’ and the Representation of Lay Masculinity,” in Religious Men and Masculine Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), 77–93; Douglas Gray, Simple Forms: Essays on Medieval English Popular Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 55–57; Paul Gerhard Schmidt, “Biblisches und hagiographisches Kolorit in den Gesta Herwardi,” in The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Memory of Beryl Smalley, ed. Katherine Walsh and Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 85–95. 3 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, MS. E, ed. Susan Irvine (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 86–90. For the historical evidence for Hereward’s life, see J. Hayward, “Hereward the Outlaw,” Journal of Mehttps://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-015

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small role in the events of 1070–1071, Hereward had a long afterlife in medieval legend, particularly in the east of England. Stories about him feature in a number of sources from the twelfth century and later, telling how he led a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Normans in the Fens before and after the siege of Ely.⁴ The Gesta Herwardi, the earliest and most extensive of these sources, is a Latin prose narrative which survives in one thirteenth-century manuscript from Peterborough Abbey.⁵ The most likely time and place of its first composition is, however, at Ely between 1109 and 1131.⁶ This narrative provides Hereward with a youthful career in the years immediately preceding the conquest, beginning with his exile from England as a teenager, then recounting his adventures traveling around Britain, Ireland, and Flanders in the 1060s. He returns to Lincolnshire just after the conquest to find his homeland under Norman rule, and the rest of the narrative concerns his struggles against the new rulers in the area. He triumphs over Norman soldiers through physical prowess and clever schemes of trickery and disguise, before eventually reaching a peaceful accommodation with the Norman regime. The Gesta Herwardi seems to be an attempt to use the story of Hereward to explore what Englishness meant within the context of the early twelfth century, and it lays heavy emphasis on Hereward’s English identity. In its first sentence, we are told that the subject of the narrative is “the deeds of the great Hereward of the English,”⁷ while the text proper begins with the claim that “From among the English people many very mighty men are remembered, and Hereward the outlaw is held to be the most famous of the famous, a distinguished warrior among the distinguished.”⁸ The Gesta’s focus on Englishness has attracted considdieval History 14 (1988): 293–304; Cyril Hart, The Danelaw (London: The Hambledon Press, 1992), 625–48; David Roffe, “Hereward ‘the Wake’ and the Barony of Bourne: A Reassessment of a Fenland Legend,” Lincolnshire History & Archaeology 29 (1994): 7–10. 4 The most significant narratives about Hereward apart from the Gesta Herwardi are found in Geffrei Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, ed. Ian Short (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 296– 309, and Liber Eliensis, ed. E. O. Blake (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1962), 173–95; for a survey of the range of narrative material about Hereward, see Eleanor Parker, Conquered: The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 15–57. 5 The Cartularies and Registers of Peterborough Abbey, ed. Janet D. Martin (Peterborough: Northamptonshire Record Society, 1978), 7–12. 6 Liber Eliensis, ed. Blake, xxxiv–xxxvi; a slightly later date is suggested by Paul Dalton, “The Outlaw Hereward ‘the Wake’: His Companions and Enemies,” in Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England: Crime, Government and Society, c.1066 –c.1600, ed. John C. Appleby and Paul Dalton (London: Routledge, 2016), 7–36. 7 “opera magnifici Anglorum gentis Heruuardi,” Lestorie, ed. Hardy and Martin, 339. 8 “Ex Anglorum gente multi robustissimi memorantur viri, et Herwardus Exul præclarissimus inter præclaros et insignis miles cum insignioribus habetur,” Lestorie, ed. Hardy and Martin, 341.

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erable attention, in part because, as a celebration of an anti-Norman rebel, its subject-matter results in a particularly direct examination of identity in post-conquest England. Hugh Thomas has argued, for instance, that the Gesta’s purpose is to put forward a positive view of the English, in the hope of encouraging a Norman audience to respect them as brave and honorable warriors. The author’s aim, he suggests, is not to inspire imitation of Hereward’s rebellion but “to depict the English as a people worthy of living in peace and on terms of cultural equality with the invaders under the new regime”—promoting not resistance but co-existence.⁹ Rolf H. Bremmer agrees that the Gesta invokes Hereward’s English identity in order to encourage mediation between Normans and English: Hereward’s final peaceful acceptance of the new regime, he argues, “invites his audience to accept the new order: Anglo-Saxon England is dead, long live the new England!”¹⁰ In this text, however, questions of culture and identity are explored not only in the context of the struggle between English and Normans, but also in Hereward’s encounters with different cultures in northern Britain, Ireland, Cornwall, and Flanders. At several points in the text, the Gesta displays an interest in linking such national and regional identities to certain forms of storytelling, song, and performance. As Hereward moves between these different cultural worlds, the author comments on the differences between Irish, Scandinavian, Norman, and English cultures as they are expressed through such customs and practices, publicly performed in the context of communal entertainment and feasting—as a political statement, as a form of social ritual, or as friendly cultural exchange. The author’s overt commentary on such practices suggests that he was interested in the relationship between identity and literary performance, and in how different cultures preserve and perpetuate their own social and literary customs. This essay will explore how the author’s perspective on these issues sheds light on the question of what kind of “English” story the Gesta aspires to tell. The first half of the Gesta, which is probably almost entirely fictional, has often been treated dismissively by critics wanting to use the text as a source for Hereward’s life or for Norman-English relations in post-conquest England; the author is usually seen as merely inventing a backstory which conforms to standard generic expectations regarding the early career of a hero.¹¹ However, that view is overly simplistic. In the first half of the twelfth century, with literature in England changing rapidly, such

9 Hugh M. Thomas, “The Gesta Herwardi, the English, and Their Conquerors,” Anglo-Norman Studies 21 (1999): 213–32, at 214. 10 Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr., “The Gesta Herwardi: Transforming an Anglo-Saxon into an Englishman,” in People and Texts: Relationships in Medieval Literature, ed. Thea Summerfield and Keith Busby (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 19–42, at 42. 11 See for instance Roffe, “Hereward ‘the Wake’ and the Barony of Bourne,” 7.

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generic expectations were by no means yet firmly established. In drawing on multiple narrative traditions to invent a story of Hereward’s early life, the Gesta is working to create—not simply to imitate—the figure of an English romance hero. Its choice to borrow from other narrative traditions is a deliberate and self-conscious act of literary appropriation, at a time when English identity and English literature were both undergoing significant change.¹²

The Heroes of Saga and Romance The author’s borrowing from narrative traditions which he identifies with particular cultures is especially marked in Hereward’s first two adventures, which draw respectively from Scandinavian and Anglo-Norman literary modes. Both mark stages in the maturation of the young protagonist as he grows from a rebellious teenager into a tested warrior. The first story tells how, after leaving his home at Bourne, Hereward heads for somewhere in the north “beyond Northumbria,” where he stays with his godfather. It is not clear where this is supposed to be, but it is apparently imagined as a part of northern Britain within the Scandinavian cultural world. His godfather keeps wild animals against which to test the strength of his knights, and among them is a caged bear said to be the offspring of a famous Norwegian bear, which had the head and feet of a man and human intelligence. According to “the stories of the Danes” (fabula Danorum), this bear had fathered Beorn, king of Norway, with a human woman.¹³ When the bear breaks loose, Hereward fights and kills it, saving the lives of his host’s wife and daughters. As the Gesta itself points out, this is a borrowing from Scandinavian legend. The story of a human warrior descended from a bear appears in various forms in Old Norse literature, but the version the author had in mind may have been specifically an ancestry legend associated with the dynasty of Thorgils Sprakalegg, grandfather of both Harold Godwineson and Svein Estrithson, king of Denmark.¹⁴

12 On English identity in the twelfth century and the emergence of Anglo-Norman literature, see John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity, and Political Values (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000); Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity 1066 –c.1220 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Ian Short, “Patrons and Polyglots: French Literature in Twelfth-Century England,” Anglo-Norman Studies 14 (1992): 229–49. 13 Lestorie, ed. Hardy and Martin, 343. 14 For further discussion of knowledge of this legend in England, see Eleanor Parker, Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018), 126–38.

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Members of the family to which this legend was attached, Svein’s brother and sons, led the Danish army with whom Hereward collaborated around the time of the siege of Ely, and this may be how the story became known to the author of the Gesta. Hereward’s collaboration with the Danes is an aspect of his life which the Gesta Herwardi entirely ignores; it never mentions either his cooperation with the Danish forces at Ely, or an incident recorded in other twelfth-century sources in which Hereward plundered the abbey church at Peterborough and gave its treasures to the Danes.¹⁵ The Gesta’s desire to present Hereward as an English hero seems to necessitate suppressing the uncomfortable fact of his cooperation with the Danes. If the author knew of the association between this ancestry legend and Hereward’s allies, there may be a political point being made here which is decidedly unfavorable to the Danes: the savage bear Hereward kills is not exactly an admirable family connection, and Hereward’s own heroism is magnified by the contrast. Nonetheless, it is clear that the author is explicitly borrowing from what he identifies as Danish storytelling in order to create an exploit for his young hero. The story emphasizes Hereward’s youth: it is his first adventure, and at eighteen years old he is thought too young to fight the bear until he proves himself by his courage in the moment of danger. As well as recognizing the bear-human ancestry legend as a Scandinavian story, this use of the exploit seems to display a more general awareness of how such stories tend to be employed in Norse literature: it is a common trope in Old Norse sagas for a young man to fight a bear, a berserkr, or a man named Björn (that is, Bear) as his first trial, as a kind of initiation into manhood.¹⁶ The Norse affiliations of this part of the narrative are deliberate and self-aware, and the author draws the reader’s attention to them in order to show Hereward succeeding in the Scandinavian world. This is the most markedly Scandinavian episode in Hereward’s story, but the author’s familiarity with these literary traditions is also suggested by similarities between some of Hereward’s later adventures and Old Norse sagas, which both seem to draw on closely related models of outlaw narrative.¹⁷ In medieval Lincolnshire and the Fenland, there is good evidence for traditions of Anglo-Scandinavian storytelling continuing to circulate and develop throughout the medieval period.¹⁸ The author of the Gesta

15 Irvine, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle E, 87–90. 16 Mary Danielli, “Initiation Ceremonial from Old Norse Literature,” Folklore 56, no. 2 (1945): 229– 45. 17 Andy Orchard, “Hereward and Grettir: Brothers from Another Mother?,” in New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia, ed. Jeffrey Turco (New York: Cornell University Press, 2015), 7–59. 18 Parker, Dragon Lords, 61–138.

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clearly had such traditions readily available to him, and he recognized them as distinctly Scandinavian in character: fabula Danorum. A similar impulse can be seen in the next episode in Hereward’s story, which has also been directly borrowed from another narrative known to the author. It is a longer episode about Hereward’s adventures in Ireland and Cornwall, culminating in his rescue of a princess who is being forced to marry against her will. In this case the debt is to Anglo-Norman romance, specifically the story of Horn.¹⁹ The Horn story features a very similar rescue of a bride at a wedding: in each case the hero disguises himself to appear at the feast unnoticed, there is a tense moment of secret recognition as drink is served to the guests, and a ring passes between the hero and the bride as a token of his identity. There are other parallels which suggest that these similarities are more than coincidence. Each story is linked to Ireland: the Horn episode is set there, while Hereward journeys from Ireland to Cornwall to rescue the princess, acting on behalf of the Irish prince she really wishes to marry. In the Gesta the bride’s father is named Aalof, which is the name of Horn’s father in the other romance. The Horn story survives in the Anglo-Norman Roman de Horn, which dates from some decades later than the likely composition of the Gesta Herwardi, but it seems probable that the author of the Gesta borrowed this episode from an earlier, now-lost version of the Horn story. The wedding episode is central to the story of Horn (it turns on a pun on the hero’s name, and he goes on to marry the bride), but for Hereward it is only one of many adventures on his journey to manhood, inserted into the narrative to give the hero another opportunity to prove himself. Though only a minor episode in Hereward’s story, however, the setting at the feast gives the author an opportunity to explore further the idea that different cultures have differing customs of oral literature and social performance. At the wedding feast, Hereward draws attention to himself by declining to follow the custom of the region, which is to offer a drink to anyone who will play the harp, “a particular and distinctive kind of entertainment in those parts.”²⁰ Hereward at first refuses to participate, and the other guests mock him for his ignorance of their customs and his inability to play the harp. Stung, Hereward promptly takes the instrument and plays and sings so skillfully that they are all struck with amazement. He and his friends perform in a way identified as characteristic of their own cultural background, “in a trio with his companions in the style of the Fenland people.”²¹ 19 Judith Weiss, “Thomas and the Earl: Literary and Historical Contexts for the Romance of Horn,” in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 1–13. 20 “præcipuus illis in locis jocus erat et novus,” Lestorie, ed. Hardy and Martin, 351. 21 “tripliciter cum suis sociis more Girviorum,” Lestorie, ed. Hardy and Martin, 352.

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This Fenland singing meets with an enthusiastic response, and those who mocked him are made to seem foolish. Hereward demonstrates that he is able to participate successfully in the custom of the country, but in a way typical of his own (and the Fenland author’s) culture. In this case the young hero’s prowess is shown not by his physical strength, as in the bear episode, but by his skill at harping and at negotiating an awkward social situation—the skills of a hero of romance. Just as the first episode is set in the Scandinavian world and displays Hereward’s ability to succeed in that cultural sphere, so this episode seems designed to place him in a different environment where he can again triumph—in this case, a loosely evoked Irish or Celtic world, as filtered through Anglo-Norman romance.²² In each case the author not only borrows a (rather vague) geographical setting, but also draws attention to literary modes which he seems to associate with these different cultures.

A New Englishman For the Gesta, there is a competitive edge to these cross-cultural interactions, as the English Hereward proves himself to be equal to or better than the heroes of foreign literary traditions. The text’s approach to proving the value of its hero in these different contexts is born not of a confident sense of English identity, but of insecurity and a profound fear of loss. Hereward, who wins such admiration in the Norse and Celtic worlds, is the product of an English culture which the author sees as unfairly derided and scorned by its Norman conquerors. This theme pervades the second half of the narrative, which deals with events after Hereward’s return to England. As presented by the Gesta, the Normans are hostile to many aspects of the country they have conquered: they show nothing but disdain for its people, its landscape, and its customs, and Hereward’s triumph over this attitude—as much as over the Normans’ military strength—drives the remainder of the narrative. This section begins with another scene set at a feast, which again contains overt comment on a particular culture’s mode of entertainment. When Hereward returns to his Lincolnshire home, he finds his father’s house occupied by the conquerors and his friends full of grief and fear. His younger brother has been murdered by the Normans and decapitated, his head displayed above the gate of the house. Hereward’s first action is to disguise himself and enter the house, rescuing his brother’s head and ambushing the Normans while they are feasting. As the

22 On the Irish context for the Roman de Horn, see Weiss, “Thomas and the Earl.”

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Normans are drinking Hereward’s inheritance, they are also disparaging the conquered English by mocking their customs: a Norman minstrel is entertaining the feasters by parodying the “English” style of dancing.²³ Hereward, provoked to rage, bursts out in the middle of the feast and avenges his brother’s murder— and also, apparently, the insult to English culture. Like the episode taken from the Horn legend, this is a fraught scene of disguise at a feast followed by a dramatic revelation of identity, and it involves a competitive cross-cultural interaction with characters commenting openly on each other’s performance customs. Unlike that episode, however, this scene of the hero’s return to his home seems likely to be firmly rooted in the Hereward legend, perhaps originating in eleventh-century oral tradition rather than being invented for the Gesta. The author names this as the one episode in the text which came directly from his source, and so it may be significant that—as a revenge attack staged within a hall —it is perhaps the only episode in the narrative which would be entirely at home in Old English heroic poetry. As he plans the attack Hereward employs a grimly ironic metaphor, comparing the fight within the hall to serving his enemies a bitter drink, which has resonances, for instance, in Beowulf. ²⁴ The author seems to have been aware of at least one oral tradition of pre-conquest English legend, though he alludes to it only in passing;²⁵ if the text has inherited anything substantial from Anglo-Saxon literary tradition, it might have been this scene at the feast. The fear underlying this story seems to be not only that the Normans have seized the inheritance of men like Hereward, but that their contempt for English culture will present a still more dangerous threat: nothing of pre-conquest England will be allowed to survive the imposition of Norman customs. So, at least, it appears at the beginning of the post-conquest section of the Gesta. But though the Normans are repeatedly shown as scornful of England and the English, the second half of the Gesta stages multiple encounters between Norman characters and Hereward in which the Normans begin to change their minds. Though Hereward frequently triumphs over his enemies through his physical strength, his cunning and facility for disguise are also important elements of his success: he is able to elude pursuit, and even get inside the Norman camp, by disguising himself as a fisherman or a seller of pots. As in his adventures abroad, he is shown to be a figure who can move easily between different worlds, taking on a variety of social

23 Lestorie, ed. Hardy and Martin, 366. 24 For Anglo-Saxon versions of the theme, see Hugh Magennis, “The Cup as Symbol and Metaphor in Old English Literature,” Speculum 60, no. 3 (1985): 517–36. 25 The “Godwine, son of Guthlac, who was greatly celebrated in the tales of the ancients” (Lestorie, ed. Hardy and Martin, 372); see R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England (London: Methuen, 1952), 32.

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roles and fully inhabiting the characters he plays. This includes linguistic adaptability and the facility to speak in different languages and registers, as appropriate for these roles: the Gesta quotes the cry he adopts while playing a potter, and he foils a Norman plan because, contrary to his enemies’ expectations, he is able to understand French.²⁶ This deft adaptability seems to be central to how the Gesta sees Hereward, and it is this which finally allows him to reach an accommodation with the Normans. As Hereward repeatedly outsmarts the Norman leaders, their respect for him— and through him, for the skill and valor of the English soldiers they had despised—increases, until the king comes to admire him so much that he restores to Hereward his father’s lands. The Gesta ends with Hereward living on peacefully, reconciled to the king and to his neighbors, for many years. His final act of adaptation is to accommodate himself to Norman-ruled England—but only on his own terms and once he is in possession of his rightful inheritance. The young man who begins by rebelling against his home and father ends his story reintegrated into his homeland, restoring the paternal inheritance to the direct pre-conquest line. It is a kind of victory, but one of mutual accommodation and adaptation rather than military triumph. Hereward’s achievement is not driving the Normans out of England, nor dying heroically in battle resisting them, but teaching them to respect the English and value the culture of the people they rule. It seems likely that the author of the Gesta hoped his narrative of Hereward would have a similar effect: by telling the story of a great Englishman, he attempts to persuade Norman audiences that it is possible for an Englishman to be great.

An English Literary Inheritance The author of the Gesta identifies Danish storytelling, English dancing, Fenland singing, and Irish (or Cornish) harping, and repeatedly seems interested in drawing attention to the link between cultural identity and customs of story or song. We may ask, then, how this association between storytelling and identity applies to the Gesta itself: in what ways does this Latin narrative define or present itself as an “English” text? The prologue to the Gesta, which frames Hereward as an English hero, engages directly with the question of the text’s own Englishness. It presents a complicated account of the writing of the Gesta, outlining a difficult and multi-stage process of composition. The author (anonymous in this text, though named in the Liber Elien-

26 Lestorie, ed. Hardy and Martin, 385–86.

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sis as Richard of Ely) describes his fellow monks deciding to seek out information about Hereward, and managing to locate a short account of his life in English. This text, he says, had been written by Hereward’s chaplain Leofric, a priest at Bourne, and it survived in a very fragmentary state, so that he was able to extract information from it only with great difficulty: it consisted merely of “a few loose pages, partly rotted by water-damage and decayed and partly injured by tearing.”²⁷ He gleaned from it, supposedly, nothing more than a few details about Hereward’s parentage and the story of his return to his father’s house. He and his assistants then attempted to track down a large book about Hereward’s exploits which they had heard of, but they were unable to find it; instead, they augmented the information provided by Leofric’s text with some oral accounts from people who had known Hereward.²⁸ What is notable about this prologue is how it foregrounds the text’s composite nature and tortuous relationship to its English origins. The English author is named (as the Latin author is not) and Leofric’s narrative, like the Gesta itself, is presented as a work of compilation and synthesis: the prologue says “it was the work of this well-remembered priest to gather together all deeds of giants and warriors from ancient stories as well as from true narratives, for the edification of his audience, and to commit them to writing in English so that they might be remembered.”²⁹ The praise of this English author and his wide-ranging knowledge of different forms of literature seems designed to claim for the text a distinguished literary ancestry. It fits with the comment on the many mighty English heroes to whom Hereward is compared; the text situates itself within a vast and estimable literary tradition which is specifically English. Yet Leofric’s work is fragmentary, damaged, and almost unrecoverable, and the reference to these other heroes is notably vague. If this English literary tradition was once of great worth, it is now seen as almost out of reach—under threat, in danger of being lost, and in need of rescue. To follow in Leofric’s footsteps, as this text claims to do, seems thus to mean not just translating his text but also following his example, in an act of deliberate remembering and reconstruction. In a text which is primarily concerned with the loss and recovery of a paternal inheritance, and in which father and fatherland,

27 “pauca et dispersa folia, partim stillicidio putrefactis et abolitis et partim abscissione divisis,” Lestorie, ed. Hardy and Martin, 339; see Joseph Grossi, “Fiction from Putrefaction: Hereward in the Wake of Old English,” Early Middle English 1 (2019): 89–97. 28 Lestorie, ed. Hardy and Martin, 339. 29 “Hujus enim memorati presbyteri erat studium, omnes actus gigantum et bellatorum ex fabulis antiquorum, aut ex fideli relatione, ad edificationem audientium congregare, et ob memoriam Angliæ literis commendare,” Lestorie, ed. Hardy and Martin, 339.

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pater et patria, repeatedly go together,³⁰ it seems significant that the author Leofric shares his name with Hereward’s own father. Neither Leofric the Deacon nor Hereward’s father, Leofric of Bourne, is attested in any source independent of the Gesta, so the coincidence of names may be the author’s choice. Both father and author belong to a pre-conquest England whose wealth has passed into other hands, and can only be restored to its proper heirs through considerable struggle and labor. As the Gesta presents it, Leofric’s stories seem to be a kind of literary equivalent of the lands Hereward fights to regain: an English inheritance which needs to be reclaimed and saved from destruction. In the Gesta that act of literary reclamation is, however, much more like an act of new creation. The author seems to feel that, unlike the lively Scandinavian and Anglo-Norman storytelling traditions of which he was aware, the ancestral inheritance of English literature has passed almost out of reach and has to be made anew. The narrative which characterizes itself as an inheritance from pre-conquest English literature thus owes much more to the present-day circumstances of the twelfth-century Fenland, an environment in which a variety of literary models were available from which the author could select and borrow to construct a narrative of Hereward’s life. The Gesta’s aim is to produce an English hero worthy to compete with the greatest men of any other culture. The result is different in significant ways from any product of pre-conquest English writing, but it marks an important stage in the development of a new kind of English literature for the post-conquest world.

30 Lestorie, ed. Hardy and Martin, 341, 343.

Erin Michelle Goeres

Chapter 11 “No Good Song Is Ever Sung of a Traitor”: The Death of Earl Waltheof in Verse and Prose Tell your King, Sir, my answer is – Defiance! Tell him, that not his hatred of my race, which in its blind haste could not grope out plea Less his dishonor than this charge of treason; That not this gluttonous grasping at my life, Nor the foul ravening of his fierce Jackals, Called Norman Peers, to share the spoils of murder, Nor all the prowling wolves in this world’s desert, – Weigh aught against the charge my spirit has heard Speak from the graves where my forefathers sleep; That I uphold the Charter of their honor.¹

Francis Worsley’s Waltheof (1843) is a melodramatic imagining of what Worsley calls “The Great Conspiracy” of 1075. Led by the rebel Norman lords Roger, Earl of Hereford and Ralph, Earl of Norfolk, the aim of the plot was to depose William the Conqueror from the throne of England. Disaffected with their share of the spoils gained in the Conquest, the conspirators mustered support from members of the Norman and English nobility alike. Chief among the latter was Waltheof, Earl of Northumbria, one of the few pre-Conquest noblemen to re-establish himself successfully under Norman rule. Worsley’s play presents Waltheof as the epitome of honor and nobility: drawn into the conspiracy only by his love of England, Waltheof quickly regrets his disloyalty to the king and rushes to France to warn William of the plot. “The last Saxon thane” is, however, no match for the duplicity and greed of England’s new rulers. Betrayed by his Norman wife and attacked by his former allies, Waltheof dies defending his castle against the king, cursing William for the destruction he has brought to the country. In this nineteenth-century version of events, Waltheof is the personification of the Anglo-Saxon age: as Worsley writes in his preface to the play: “The fall of the Last Saxon Thane is a historical landmark; it is the boundary line between two conditions in the progressive civi-

1 Francis Worsley, Waltheof, The Last Saxon Thane. A Tragedy, in Five Acts (London: J. Parkins, 1843), 84 (act IV, scene ii). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-016

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lization of England.”² Worsley’s Waltheof is honorable but ultimately doomed by the onward march of history. Medieval authors, however, were far more ambivalent about the figure of Waltheof.³ His moral character, ethnic identity, and role in the rebellion of 1075 are all contested in the medieval sources on which Worsley’s tale is ultimately based.⁴ There, the “boundary line” marked by his death is blurred at best; indeed, the nebulous status of both his life and death testifies to just how uncertain the process of Conquest was. Although descended from English nobility on his mother’s side, Waltheof was of mixed Anglo-Scandinavian heritage. His father, Earl Siward of Northumbria, was likely of Danish origin and had risen to prominence in England during the reign of King Cnut.⁵ At the time of the Conquest Waltheof held the southern part of his father’s earldom, but there is no record of his having fought at Hastings. He appears to have submitted to William peacefully, although he later participated in the northern rebellion of 1069–1070. Following a second reconciliation with William, Waltheof married the king’s niece and regained his English holdings; their eldest daughter later married the Anglo-Norman earl Simon of Senlis, and then King David of Scotland. Despite this apparently successful integration into the new regime, Waltheof became involved, as noted above, in the rebellion of 1075, for which he was executed near Winchester on 31 May, 1076. Shortly afterwards his body was moved to Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire, where a local cult, promoted by the monks, grew up around his tomb.⁶ Even as a saint, however, Waltheof remained a controversial figure, and the shifting allegiances of his life emerge all the more strongly in texts focused on his death. Waltheof’s affiliation with a variety of competing groups—English, Anglo-Scandinavian, and Norman—do not simply blur the boundaries between them. Rather, his story re-

2 Worsley, Waltheof, ii. 3 The term “author” (as well as names such as “Orderic Vitalis” and “Snorri Sturluson”) is used in this chapter for the sake of simplicity. It should be read as a blanket term encompassing the many and varied figures—poets, prose writers, scribes, compilers, and more—whose work contributed to the texts and manuscripts we read today. 4 Worsley did not consult medieval texts directly but drew instead on later histories such as David Hume’s History of England (1762) and Augustin Thierry’s History of the Conquest of England by the Normans (1825); see Worsley’s Preface to Waltheof, i–ii. 5 Waltheof’s mother was Ælfflæd, a noblewoman descended from the house of Bamburgh, who had held Northumbria before Cnut’s invasion. An overview is given in Forrest Scott, “Valþjófr jarl: An English Earl in Icelandic Sources,” Saga-Book 14 (1953–1957): 78–94, at 78–80. On the legends surrounding the family’s origins, see Eleanor Parker, Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England (London: I. B. Taurus, 2018), 102–38. 6 Carl Watkins, “The Cult of Earl Waltheof at Crowland,” Hagiographica 3 (1996): 95–111.

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minds us that such boundaries were in fact blurred from the earliest days of the Conquest and in many cases long before. Waltheof’s multifaceted nature is perhaps best captured in the prosimetric forms that were used to tell his story. Heather O’Donoghue has done much to enhance our understanding of how medieval authors used the combination of verse and prose to emphasize the literary quality of their texts.⁷ Her studies reveal the littérarité—the self-conscious, fictional quality—of prosimetric works. The author of an Old Norse-Icelandic saga, she observes, weaves skaldic verse into the prose text “to pace and structure his narrative, to realize the potential of verse to ‘heighten the mood’ as well as to authenticate important factual detail, and to explore the interplay of both.”⁸ As will be discussed below, this is true not only in the account of Waltheof’s death in the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas, but also in Old English and Anglo-Norman sources. It is striking that Waltheof’s story is told through a combination of verse and prose in such a variety of literary traditions. Is this the product of chance, or of the popularity of prosimetric forms during the medieval period? Was there something particularly marked about the story of Waltheof’s death that made prosimetra so appropriate for its telling? This essay will consider how the combination of verse and prose was used to tell Waltheof’s tale and suggest that it was the overt littérarité of medieval prosimetra that made it so suited to that event.

Rebellion in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle The earliest account of Waltheof’s death is found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Both the D and E manuscripts give an account of Waltheof’s involvement in the conspiracy of 1075, and of his execution the following year. In both, the episode is punctuated by short, verse-like fragments, the first of which predicts the deaths of the conspirators.⁹ Describing the bridal feast at which the plot was hatched, the

7 See especially Heather O’Donoghue, The Genesis of a Saga Narrative: Verse and Prose in Kormáks Saga (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 8 O’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative, 14. 9 The presence of poetry in the Chronicle has long been acknowledged, but the status of specific verses or verse-like passages has also been the subject of debate. Thomas Bredehoft makes a compelling case for acknowledging the poetic qualities of a much broader range of passages in the Chronicle than has often been the case, including the verse-like fragments describing the rebellion of 1075. See Bredehoft’s useful summary of this debate in Textual Histories: Readings in the AngloSaxon Chronicle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 73–78. Bredehoft draws in turn on

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D text proclaims: “þær wæs þæt brydealo, þær wæs manegra manna bealo” (there was that bride-ale, there was harm to many men).¹⁰ While not quite in keeping with classical Old English meter, the poetic quality of the phrase is clear, both in the alliteration of brydealo/bealo and manegra/manna, and in the repetition of þær wæs at the start of each half-line. Diction too marks a change to the poetic register: bealu (evil, harm, destruction) occurs predominantly in poetry while the compound brydeala (“bride-ale”—that is, marriage feast) is a late addition to Old English, occurring only in these two Chronicle entries.¹¹ If not quite a kenning, it is a strikingly memorable description of an event that would, in later sources, come to be known as the “Bridal Conspiracy.” Set near the beginning of the Chronicle entry, the verses have a prophetic quality. Verse interrupts the prose narrative, signaling both the significance and inevitability of the tragedy to come. Perhaps surprisingly, given the prominence he would assume in later accounts of the conspiracy, Waltheof himself is a minor character in this narrative. His death and burial are described succinctly: as D has it, “7 her wæs Walþeof eorl beheafdod on Wincestre on sancte Petronella mæssedæg, 7 his lic wearð gelæd to Crulande, 7 he þær is bebyrged” (and here was Earl Waltheof beheaded in Winchester on the feast-day of St. Petronella, and his body taken to Crowland, and he is buried there).¹² A second verse placed near the conclusion of the episode focuses instead on the punishments suffered by Earl Ralph’s Breton supporters:

Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe’s work in Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 10 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 6, MS D, ed. G. P. Cubbin (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), 87 [1076]. The E version reads: “þær wes þet brydeala mannum to beala” (There was that bride-ale harm to men); see The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 7, MS E, ed. Susan Irvine (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 91 [1075]. Further discussion of the differences between these verses, as well as those that conclude the episode, may be found in Bredehoft’s Textual Histories, 84–85. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 11 Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, compiled by Antonette diPaolo Healey with John Price Wilkin and Xin Xiang (Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, 2009), https://doe.artsci.utor onto.ca/. The compound (which gives us the modern English “bridal”), became common only in the later medieval period: see the Middle English Dictionary, ed. Robert E. Lewis and Frances McSparran et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952–2001, online ed. 2000–2018). DOI: http:// quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/, s.v. “brīd-āle.” 12 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS D, 88. E reads simply, “7 Walþeof eorl \wes/ beheafdod on Winceastre, 7 his lic wearð gelead to Cruland” (and Earl Waltheof was beheaded in Winchester, and his body taken to Crowland), Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS E, 91.

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sume hi wurdon geblende. 7 sume wrecen of lande. 7 sume getawod to scande. þus wurdon þæs kyninges swican genyðerade.¹³ (Some of them were blinded. And some banished from the land. And some brought into disgrace. Thus were traitors to the king laid low.)

There is a marked littérarité to the Chronicle’s account of these events, due in large part to this prosimetric structure. The rhyme across geblende/lande/scande emphasizes the three-part structure of the lines, as does the triple repetition of the subject sume. This triad of half-lines about punishment and suffering builds to a climax with þus: thus is the king’s power manifested against those who sought to betray him. The tale of the conspiracy is in this way set apart from the surrounding prose narrative, its inception marked by a poetic foreshadowing of defeat, the bloody conclusion by a versified moral about the consequences of rebellion. Verse interrupts the prose history of the Conquest, and the episode reads like a literary parable, an exemplum on the dangers of attempted regicide. Although the Chronicle does not focus on Waltheof in the way later writers would, the episode gestures towards the broader questions of loyalty, personal agency, and the dangers of contesting royal power that would become so important in later retellings of his tale. Even in this early version, however, there is a suggestive universality in the language of both verse and prose that transcends the division between English and Norman, conquered and conqueror. The verses themselves never identify the ethnic or linguistic affiliations of their subjects; phrases like manegra manna and the thrice-repeated sume emphasize the number, not the identity of those involved. The prose narrative likewise emphasizes the heterogeneous make-up of the conspiracy.¹⁴ The Conqueror himself is identified by his political role rather than his territory of origin: in D he is the conspirators’ “kynehlaford”

13 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS D, 87–88. This is the layout and punctuation proposed by Bredehoft in Textual Histories, 84. The lines are printed as prose in the collaborative edition. The E version, however, shows considerable variation: “sume hy wurdon ablænde 7 sume of lande adrifene,/ swa wurdon Willelmes swican geniðrade” (some of them were blinded and some driven from the land./ Thus were traitors to William laid low), Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS E, 91. This edition prints the lines as verse. As Bredehoft observes, it is impossible to know which, if either, of the versions is original. 14 In addition to Waltheof, the Chronicle reminds us that Earl Ralph had a Breton mother and an English father, while Earl Roger was William’s kinsman, and therefore a representative of the Norman inhabitants of England. On the status of the Bretons in post-Conquest England, see K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, “The Bretons and the Normans of England 1066–1154: The Family, the Fief and the Feudal Monarchy,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 36 (1992): 42–78.

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(their liege-lord), in E their “cyng” (king).¹⁵ Such language emphasizes the wider implications of the conspiracy: it is a revolt against the conspirators’ rightful lord, and must be punished as such. The ominous little verses that bookend the episode call attention to the broader issues that underpin the king’s relationship with the diverse population that makes up his new realm. In this way, the entry for 1075 transcends the historical moment. Although written in Old English, the episode is notably supra-English in its outlook.

Memories in the Historia ecclesiastica of Orderic Vitalis In contrast to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Anglo-Norman chroniclers unpack fully the significance of Waltheof’s life and death.¹⁶ Principal among these is the Historia ecclesiastica of Orderic Vitalis, a monk of the Norman monastery of St. Evroul who had visited Waltheof’s tomb at Crowland.¹⁷ While there, Orderic was commissioned to write a verse epitaph for the tomb, along with a prose narrative of the earl’s life. He later integrated these two texts into Book IV of his multi-volume Historia ecclesiastica, written between ca. 1114 and 1141. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Orderic’s account focuses squarely on the life and death of the rebel earl. In this text, Waltheof’s honor, piety, and loyalty stand in marked contrast to the squabbling Normans. The combination of prose narrative and verse epitaph serves to emphasize the exceptionality of Waltheof in contrast to those around him, and to demonstrate the ongoing power of his story for those who come to worship at his tomb.

15 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS D, 87 and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS E, 91. 16 Notably William of Malmesbury in both the Gesta Regum Anglorum and in the Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, as well as John of Worcester in his Chronicle, Henry of Huntingdon in the Historia Anglorum, and the Hyde Chronicle. Geffrei Gaimar also gives a brief account in Anglo-Norman verse in the Estoire des Engleis. A thirteenth-century manuscript thought to originate from Crowland Abbey, now known as Douai, Bibliothèque municipale MS 852, includes a dedicated Vita et Passio Venerabilis Viri Gualdevi that incorporates part of Orderic’s text, along with related works on the earl’s martyrdom, family, and posthumous miracles. Among these are two further poetic epitaphs that, for reasons of space, cannot be considered here. Timothy Bolton gives a detailed discussion of this manuscript in “Was the Family of Earl Siward and Earl Waltheof a Lost Line of the Ancestors of the Danish Royal Family?,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 51 (2007): 41–71. 17 On Orderic’s visit and his contribution to the promotion of Waltheof’s cult, see Watkins, “The Cult of Earl Waltheof.”

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Orderic presents the rebellion of 1075 as an opportunistic power grab on the part of earls Ralph and Roger. With King William abroad in Normandy, the earls leap at the chance to unseat him. Addressing their fellow Norman lords, they offer a dizzying array of reasons for revolt: William’s illegitimacy, his erratic rule, his failure to reward sufficiently those who helped him conquer England.¹⁸ Speaking to Waltheof, however, they appeal to what they assume must be his English sensibilities, promising vengeance on William for his enslavement of the English people and a return to the laws and customs of the pre-Conquest era.¹⁹ Their rhetoric is as slippery as their loyalty, but Waltheof remains unmoved by their arguments; even the offer to share rulership over the kingdom does not entice him. In marked contrast to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Orderic’s Waltheof protests: “integra fides in omnibus gentibus ab omni homine domino suo seruanda est” (every man in every country owes absolute loyalty to his liege lord).²⁰ Citing the biblical traitors Achitophel, Judas, and Satan, Waltheof appeals to an ideal of loyalty that transcends ethnic affiliation.²¹ Loyalty is part of Waltheof’s identity as a Christian, not an Englishman; as such, it permits him to acknowledge a Norman lord as King of England. Orderic’s Waltheof is moreover keenly aware of the effect disloyalty has on one’s posthumous reputation, proclaiming, “Nusquam de traditore bona cantio cantata est” (no good song was ever sung of a traitor).²² Loyalty is public; disloyalty is remembered for generations. Although doomed from the start, Waltheof claims the right to participate in the crafting of his own narrative. Waltheof is, nevertheless, implicated in the conspiracy and later imprisoned. He begins to transform into a saint even before his execution, repeatedly confessing and repenting of his sins, and chanting daily all 150 psalms. Orderic praises him both as “uir corpore magnus et elegans” (a handsome man of splendid physique) but also “[d]euotus Dei cultor, sacerdotum et omnium religiosorum supplex auditor; æcclesiæ pauperumque benignus amator” (a devoted Christian who showed humble obedience to all priests and monks and truly loved the Church and the poor).²³ Waltheof has become the ideal lay saint, challenging neither the political nor the spiritual hierarchy: just as he acknowledges William as his

18 The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 313. 19 Ecclesiastical History, 315. 20 Ecclesiastical History, 315. Translations throughout this section are Chibnall’s. 21 Ecclesiastical History, 315. 22 Ecclesiastical History, 315. 23 Ecclesiastical History, 320–21.

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rightful lord, he humbly acknowledges the supremacy of the church.²⁴ Venerated for this humility by English and Norman alike, Waltheof is nevertheless executed by a group of Normans seeking to take control of his lands.²⁵ Although his killers act in secret because they fear the local population will attempt to rescue their compatriot,²⁶ Waltheof himself continues to emphasize his Christian, rather than English, identity. He distributes his clothing and goods to those watching and asks for time to say the Lord’s Prayer, “pro me et pro uobis” (on your behalf and mine).²⁷ Dying, like many a decapitated saint, with the prayer on his lips,²⁸ Waltheof’s final concern is not the conflict between English (or Anglo-Danish) and Norman, but the unifying power of Christian ritual. According to Orderic, then, Waltheof transcends ethnic divisions, and the epitaph with which Orderic concludes this episode dwells on the promise that such transcendence is likewise available to those who might worship at the earl’s tomb. As Carl Watkins observes, all of Waltheof’s posthumous miracles are reported to have occurred at Crowland, with most taking place on the site of the tomb itself.²⁹ Far more so than in the prose, Orderic’s verse epitaph dwells on the centrality of this monument in the ongoing commemoration of Waltheof the saint. The tomb is the quintessential lieu de mémoire, encapsulating both the Christian identity embodied by the earl and offering to those who worship at it a means of participating in that identity:³⁰ En tegit iste lapis hominem magnæ probitatis, Danigenæ comitis Siwardi filius audax Walleuus comes eximius iacet hic tumulatus. Vixit honorandus, armis animisque timendus. (Beneath this stone a man of highest virtue – The valiant son of Siward, earl and Dane –

24 Joanna Huntingdon links Orderic’s representation of Waltheof as “a layman who knew his place in the Christian infrastructure” to the struggles between lay and clerical leaders that dominated the first half of the twelfth century in “The Taming of the Laity: Writing Waltheof and Rebellion in the Twelfth Century,” Anglo-Norman Studies XXXII: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2009, ed. C. P Lewis (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), 79–95, at 93. 25 Ecclesiastical History, 321. 26 Orderic here calls him their “nobilis compatriotus” (noble fellow countryman), Ecclesiastical History, 322–23. 27 Ecclesiastical History, 322–23. 28 In the first miracle associated with Waltheof, his head is struck off before he is able to complete the prayer, and the severed head speaks the final line. Ecclesiastical History, 322–23. 29 Watkins, “The Cult of Earl Waltheof,” 105–6. 30 Cf. Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1982–1994).

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Waltheof, most glorious earl, lies nobly buried. Honoured in war, revered by all, he flourished.)³¹

In these, the opening lines of the verse, Orderic dwells on the materiality of the tomb (iste lapis) and the location of Waltheof’s body (hic). This is interspersed with superlative descriptions of the earl himself: he was audax and eximius, a man magnæ probitatis. The physical monument is in this way metaphorically adorned with literary descriptions of Waltheof’s virtue. Following a brief account of Waltheof’s downfall, the closing lines of the epitaph likewise reveal the full significance of the monument: although the “gleba Crulandia aquosa” (marshy soil of Crowland) holds the earl’s body, his spirit resides “in ætheris arce” (in the citadel of heaven).³² Orderic reminds his reader that the tomb is a mediator between the body interred below and the soul risen above; it symbolizes the earl’s journey between earth and heaven and invites the viewer to marvel at Waltheof’s transformation from pious mortal to immortal saint. In this way, Orderic’s epitaph takes the mute symbolism of the tomb and endows it with a very specific voice that urges his readers to look beyond the division between England and Norman, and to privilege instead their membership in the wider Christian community. Although no good song is sung of a traitor, it seems that verse is essential to the commemoration of a hero like Waltheof. Orderic’s epitaph crystallizes themes already established in the prose, corroborating not only the historical accuracy of the events there described, but also their political and theological significance. Orderic’s use of verse in this account is strikingly similar to the way saga authors would later use skaldic verse to corroborate the prose narrative. As Vincent Debiais and Estelle Ingrand-Varenne observe, “The main role played by [such] inscriptions is to attest the veracity of the events recounted by Orderic.”³³ The citation of verse epitaphs “show[s] the historian at work,” just as the citation of skaldic verse is often used in Norse texts to corroborate the prose narrative.³⁴ Indeed, O’Donoghue has argued that texts such as Orderic’s could have provided a

31 Ecclesiastical History, 350–51 (ll. 1–4). 32 Ecclesiastical History, 350–51 (ll. 11–13). 33 Vincent Debiais and Estelle Ingrand-Varenne, “Inscriptions in Orderic’s Historia ecclesiastica: A Writing Technique between History and Poetry,” in Orderic Vitalis: Life, Works and Interpretations, ed. Charles C. Rozier et al. (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 127–44, at 130. It should be noted that Waltheof is far from the only figure so honored in Orderic’s text: as Debiais and Ingrand-Varenne note, the Historia ecclesiastica incorporates direct citations from over 100 other documents, spanning theological, literary, legislative, and diplomatic texts. Of these, Orderic includes thirty-eight funerary epitaphs, nine of which he likely composed himself. 34 Debiais and Ingrand-Varenne, “Inscriptions,” 130.

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model for Scandinavia’s early vernacular historians in developing the prosimetric sagas.³⁵ It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that the self-conscious fictionality of Waltheof’s tale finds its fullest expression in those very texts.

Betrayal in the konungasögur In contrast to other medieval accounts, Old Norse authors set Waltheof’s death during the events of 1066 rather than 1075.³⁶ This is part of the overall abridgment in Old Norse-Icelandic historiography of the events of the Norman Conquest: the konungasögur dwell at length on the Norwegian invasion led by King Haraldr Sigurðarson but note almost in passing the defeat of the English army at the Battle of Hastings.³⁷ Norse authors are also unusual in identifying Earl Waltheof as a son of Earl Godwin, and thus a brother of the English king Harold.³⁸ It is unknown whether this is due to misinformation or a misinterpretation of English or Norman sources, or whether it is a deliberate change on the part of saga authors; however,

35 O’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative, 22–23. 36 In the Old Norse-Icelandic tradition, Waltheof, known as Valþjófr, appears in all the major konungasögur, including Heimskringla, Fagrskinna, and Morkinskinna, as well as later texts such as Hemings þáttr Áslákssonar and Játvarðar saga. Scott gives a useful overview of the main texts and the differences between them in “Valþjófr jarl,” 83–89. In addition to the stanzas discussed in this chapter, Waltheof is also mentioned in the one extant stanza of Haraldsstikki, an anonymous verse commemorating the Norwegian victory at the Battle of Fulford. Judith Jesch also notes a number of similarities between descriptions of the death of Waltheof and that of St. Magnús of Orkney: see her “England and Orkneyinga saga,” in The Viking Age in Caithness, Orkney and the North Atlantic: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Eleventh Viking Congress, Thurso and Kirkwall, 22 August–1 September 1989, ed. Colleen E. Batey, Judith Jesch, and Christopher D. Morris (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 222–39, at 227–28. 37 See, e. g., Fagrskinna, which notes merely that the battle occurred nineteen nights after the fall of Haraldr Sigurðarson; that King Harold Godwinson, his brother Gyrðr, and most of his troops were killed; and that Harold had been king only nine months at the time of his death: A´grip af No´regskonunga sögum. Fagrskinna – No´regs konunga tal, ed. Bjarni Einarsson, I´slenzk fornrit 29 (Reykjavik: Hið íslenzka fornritafe´lag, 1985), 293–95. Some sources of a more legendary character note that Harold was said by some to have survived the battle, and that he lived afterwards as a hermit. See, e. g., Hemings þáttr Áslakssonar, ed. Gillian Fellows Jensen, Editiones Arnamagnæanæ series B, vol. 3 (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1962), 57–59. 38 This is noted in all the major konungasögur, including Fagrskinna, 279; Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, I´slenzk fornrit 26–28, 3 vols. (Reykjavik: Hið íslenzka fornritafe´lag, 1941–1951), 3:194; and Morkinskinna, ed. Ármann Jakobsson and Þórður Ingi Guðjónsson, I´slenzk fornrit 24, 2 vols. (Reykjavik: Hið íslenzka fornritafe´lag, 2011), 1:306. Waltheof is also named in these texts as one of the leaders of the English army that was defeated by the Norwegians at the Battle of Fulford.

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Waltheof’s elevation to the highest ranks of the English nobility fundamentally alters the role his death plays in these texts. In the sagas, as in Worsley’s play so many centuries later, it is Waltheof rather than Harold who emerges as “the last Saxon thane,” offering a doomed but heroic resistance to the Norman incursion. Two texts in particular, Fagrskinna and Heimskringla, are notable for the pre-eminence they grant Waltheof over Harold, with each employing a prosimetric structure to emphasize different aspects of Waltheof’s role in the conflict. Following the death of Harold at Hastings, Waltheof and his men retreat. Encountering a group of Normans on the way, Waltheof burns them alive in the woods. As the text of Fagrskinna relates, “hann gætti, at engi kœmisk á brott ór skóginum” (he made certain that none might escape from the wood).³⁹ Nevertheless, when William becomes King of England he grants Waltheof not only a truce but also the earldom of Northumbria. Welcoming Waltheof warmly to his court, William gives him a “bréf ok innsigli” (letter and seal), signifying their new relationship as lord and vassal.⁴⁰ The agreement is concluded publicly and in person; the betrayal, when it comes, is all the more shocking. As Waltheof rides home, he is set upon by a group of knights, and the saga-author is clear as to who has organized the ambush: “Þessa riddara hafði Vilhjálmr konungr sent eptir hónum at láta drepa hann” (King William had sent these knights after him to have him killed).⁴¹ The Norse text makes no mention of the bridal conspiracy, nor of any trial or imprisonment: unlike the Latin chronicles, Fagrskinna depicts the attack as an extrajudicial act of revenge. Outnumbered and lacking armor, Waltheof is decapitated as he lies on the ground, his arms outstretched in the shape of a cross.⁴² The text briefly acknowledges his later sanctification,⁴³ but the focus of the narrative is firmly on the political conflict between king and earl. The episode closes with the citation of half a stanza from the now-fragmentary sequence known as Valþjófsflokkr, neatly encapsulating the fatal relationship between the two men:

39 Fagrskinna, 293–94. As Scott observes, it is more likely that this event (or something like it) took place during the rebellion of 1069–1070, during which York was burned: “Valþjófr jarl,” 90. 40 Fagrskinna, 294. 41 Fagrskinna, 294. 42 This motif dates back to the early Christian martyrs and is associated with a number of martyrlike deaths in the Old Norse-Icelandic tradition. See further Haki Antonsson, St. Magnús of Orkney: A Scandinavian Martyr-Cult in Context, The Northern World 29 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 177–81. 43 “Af hans blóði fengu margir menn bót, ok er Valþjófr jarl sannheilagr maðr” (from his blood many men receive healing, and Earl Waltheof is a truly holy man). Fagrskinna, 294.

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Víst hefr Valþjóf hraustan Viljalmr, sás rauð malma, hinn, es haf skar sunnan hélt, í tryggð of véltan.⁴⁴ (William, who reddened weapons, who cut the frosted sea from the south, has certainly betrayed brave Waltheof while in a truce.)

As O’Donoghue observes, the citation of a skaldic stanza is often employed by saga authors to structure the narrative and “to create striking interludes or neat climaxes.”⁴⁵ The use of Valþjófsflokkr here provides such a climax, drawing on both the stylistic and thematic qualities of the skaldic form. The names Waltheof and William are bound together by the v-alliteration of the first two lines, along with the idea of certainty (víst). They are likewise joined by the uncomfortable final word of the stanza, véltan. Coming as it does at the very end of the verse, the concept of betrayal presents a sudden and jolting reversal of the positive imagery that precedes it. William, the subject of the stanza, is there described in positive, albeit conventional, phrases that emphasize his agency and daring: like so many Scandinavian princes, he has reddened weapons in blood and traveled the frosty sea. The poet’s praise of Waltheof is more muted, focusing on the intrinsic quality of bravery (he is hraustr). The two descriptions are, nevertheless, linked stylistically, with hraustan—describing Waltheof—alliterating with words associated with William: hinn, haf, hélt. Indeed, hraustan, located at the end of the first line and alliterating with the primary stressed syllables of the third and fourth lines, is a mirror to the word véltan, located at the end of the fourth line and alliterating with the stressed syllables in the first and second lines: Víst Valþjóf Viljalmr hinn haf hélt

hraustan

véltan

44 Valþjófsflokkr is attributed to the otherwise unknown poet Þorkell Skallason. It is edited by Kari Ellen Gade in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2: From ca. 1035 to ca. 1300, ed. Kari Ellen Gade, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 382–84. These lines form the first helmingr of the second stanza, as reconstructed there. See also Heimskringla, 3:295. Judith Jesch makes a compelling case for the English provenance of the flokkr, which she dates to the late 1070s in Judith Jesch, “Skaldic Verse in Scandinavian England,” in Vikings and the Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and York, 21– 30 August 1997, ed. James Graham-Campbell et al. (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2001), 313–25, at 321–23. 45 O’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative, 61.

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This alliterative interlace pattern is not required of the dróttkvætt meter in which the stanza is composed; rather, it forms an extra, ornamental emphasis, binding the four lines closely together and emphasizing the apparent closeness between king and earl. The juxtaposition of hraustan and véltan, however, clearly articulates the differences between the two men: just as the noble quality of courage is intrinsic to Waltheof, so, the poet implies, is the ignoble urge to betrayal intrinsic to William. While the verse appears at first glance to be no more than a simple reiteration of the events related in the prose, it offers in fact a subtle meditation on the characters of the two men, and of the relationship between them. Fagrskinna concludes the episode by reiterating the consequences of William’s invasion for all the children of Godwin, including Waltheof: “Þetta sama haust lét Haraldr konungr líf sitt Goðinasonr ok fjórir brœðr hans” (this same autumn King Harold Godwinson lost his life along with his four brothers).⁴⁶ There follows a chapter detailing the descendants of the only remaining members of their family, Harold’s daughter Gyða and Tosti’s son Skúli.⁴⁷ Although Godwin’s sons are dead, their offspring marry into the royal families of Scandinavia, Russia, and Poland, and their descendants include many figures who would come to influence the history of the northern world. Reminding the audience of the illustrious family of which Waltheof was said to be a part, the author of Fagrskinna does not portray the earl’s death as the end of a dynasty but merely the remarkable conclusion to one man’s life. The international consequences of Waltheof’s death are only implicit in this text. Rather, it is Snorri Sturluson who fully exploits the possibilities of the prosimetric form to make clear the consequences of Waltheof’s death for the wider Anglo-Scandinavian community. Although Snorri’s prose account of the death of Waltheof is terser than that in Fagrskinna, his citation of two full stanzas from Valþjófsflokkr—indeed, the only two now extant—substantially alters the tenor of the narrative. Fully one third of the text relating to the death of Waltheof in Heimskringla is in verse, contrasted to just over one-twentieth in Fagrskinna. ⁴⁸ Poetry dominates Snorri’s telling of Waltheof’s tale, where it serves not only to summarize the conflict between the two men but to explore the implications of that conflict in the years to come. Snorri cites the first stanza of Valþjófsflokkr as he recounts the episode of Waltheof

46 Fagrskinna, 295. 47 Fagrskinna, 295–96. 48 This section in Fagrskinna comprises approximately 324 words, eighteen of which are contained in the stanza (thus 5.6 percent of the total passage). The same section is only 200 words long in Heimskringla, but sixty-seven of those words are found in the two verses from Valþjófsflokkr (thus 33.5 percent of the passage).

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burning Normans in the woods. This verse casts the conflict between Waltheof and the Normans as one of heroic, almost mythical, proportions: Hundrað lét í heitum hirðmenn jǫfurs brenna sóknar Yggr, en seggjum sviðukveld vas þat, eldi. Frétts, at fyrðar knǫ́ ttu flagðviggs und kló liggja; ímleitum fekksk áta óls blakk við hræ Frakka. (The Óðinn of battle [Waltheof ] made one hundred and twenty of the lord’s retainers burn in hot fire, and that was a roasting evening for men. It is heard that the men did lie under the claw of the troll-woman’s steed [wolf ]; from the corpses of Frenchmen nourishment was given to the dark-colored horse of the [?]troll-woman [wolf ].)⁴⁹

“The Last Saxon Thane” he may have been to the Victorians, but Waltheof emerges in this stanza the quintessential Nordic hero. The kenning sóknar Yggr is a classic poetic circumlocution for “warrior,” referencing no less a figure than the god of war, Óðinn, himself. The singular construction lét brenna attributes responsibility for the burning to Waltheof alone: the earl’s men are never explicitly referenced by the poet, an omission that implicitly positions Waltheof as the sole vanquisher of the Norman troop. Were this not dishonor enough for the doomed invaders, the hapax legomenon sviðukveld (roasting evening) plays on the more prosaic compound sviðueldr (roasting fire, cooking fire), implying that Waltheof’s enemies are not only being burned alive but ignominiously roasted like meat for dinner. For whom is Waltheof preparing this dish of crispy Frenchmen? The second helmingr provides the answer in the form of two wolf-kennings: flagðvigg (trollwoman’s steed) and ímleitr blakkr óls (dark-colored horse of the troll-woman). The wolf was a well-known scavenger of battlefields, appearing in both Old Norse and Old English poetry. These two kennings emphasize the scale of the carnage Waltheof has caused, while the combination of poetic language for Óðinn and wolves, set against the backdrop of fiery death, hints at the ultimate conflict at the end of the world, Ragnarǫk. Referencing both wolves and troll-women, the kennings likewise nod to the very beginning of Snorri’s account of 1066. Sixteen chapters earlier in the saga of Haraldr Sigurðarson, as the Norwegian army sets off to invade England, the soldiers witness a series of nightmarish visions prefiguring

49 The translation of this final kenning follows Gade’s in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2, 382–83. As Gade notes, ól does not usually denote “troll-woman,” but that seems to be the only possible meaning here.

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their defeat. One of the king’s men dreams that the English army is led by a great troll-woman riding on a wolf, “ok hafði vargrinn manns hræ í munni, ok fell blóð um kjaptana” (and it had a man’s corpse in its mouth, and blood fell from its jaws).⁵⁰ Tossing corpses to the wolf as she rides, the troll-woman acts as a grotesque landvættr (guardian spirit, spirit of the land) challenging the oncoming Norwegian army.⁵¹ The kennings of Valþjófsflokkr echo this moment many chapters later as England faces a second wave of invaders under William of Normandy. As the last surviving Godwinson, Waltheof himself steps into the role of the land-guardian, using the natural environment—the burning wood—in a lastditch attempt to protect the realm. In this way, the horrific imagery of ravening wolves and murderous troll-women bookends Snorri’s account of 1066. Neither Waltheof nor the troll-woman can ultimately prevent the Conquest of England, but the inclusion of poetry in Snorri’s account makes their attempts to do so as memorable as they are macabre. The verses also function as a sober reminder of the human cost of the invasions of 1066: the struggle for England was not simply a political dispute but a series of bloody battles resulting in widespread carnage for English, Norwegian, and Norman troops alike. In contrast to Fagrskinna, Waltheof and William do not meet in person in Heimskringla. The lord-vassal relationship is never solemnized in Snorri’s text; it is, rather, the bait that lures Waltheof to his death. Snorri relates that William “sendi boð Valþjófi jarli, at þeir skyldi sættask, ok selr honum grið til fundar” (sent word to Earl Waltheof that they should be reconciled, and grants him safe passage for a meeting).⁵² As the reciprocal verb sættask implies, the offer is of a meeting between noblemen, if not equals; and yet Waltheof’s death is described as that of a common criminal. Traveling to meet the king, the earl is arrested by two ármenn (king’s officers, stewards) who place him in chains and execute him. There is no mention of Waltheof fighting, of forgiving his killers or the king, or of lying on the ground in the shape of a cross. The presence of the ármenn and the manacling of Waltheof’s body expose the duplicity of the king’s offer to come to an agreement: Waltheof has been condemned without ever knowing he was on trial. The episode nods to the judicial process described in the Anglo-Norman sources, but in this saga the king’s justice is sudden and arbitrary; it is not a formal process but the means through which to dispose of a dangerous rival to the throne. 50 Heimskringla, 3:177. 51 On the landvættir, see Einar Ól. Sveinsson, “Landvættasagan,” in Minjar og Menntir: Afmælisrit helgað Kristjáni Eldjárn 6. Desember 1976, ed. Guðni Kolbeinsson (Reykjavik: Bókaútgáfa Menningarsjóðs, 1976), 117–29. 52 Heimskringla, 3:196.

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Outrage at the king’s treachery is evident in the verse that follows, with Snorri citing the full stanza from Þorkell’s Valþjófsflokkr from which the helmingr in Fagrskinna was taken. As O’Donoghue observes, Snorri is particularly skilled in the deployment of skaldic verse, and the use of this stanza in Heimskringla signals a dramatic shift in tone quite unlike that in Fagrskinna. ⁵³ As discussed above, the first helmingr condemns William for his betrayal of Waltheof and implies that treachery is as much a part of William’s nature as bravery is of Waltheof’s. In the context of Heimskringla, the verse also serves to make explicit William’s role in the killing, which is only implied in the prose. In the second helmingr, the poet explores Waltheof’s betrayal in the broader context of the Norman Conquest. He explains far more forcefully than either of the prose accounts the long-term consequences of Waltheof’s death: Satts, at síð mun létta, snarr en minn vas harri, — deyrat mildingr mærri — manndráp á Englandi.⁵⁴ (It is true that—my lord was brave; a more famous, generous prince will not die—slaughter will be slow to cease in England.)

Together, the two half-stanzas form a delicately balanced verse. The second helmingr follows an almost identical structure to the first. Both start with an expression of certainty in the first line (sátts and víst); both close with the ominous concepts of betrayal (véltan) and slaughter (manndráp). In this way, the opening and closing lines of both emphasize the certainty of the terrible things that are happening; and in both, this idea encloses the intercalary clauses that describe the two men involved, William and Waltheof. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of the verse relies not only on the similarities, but also on the differences between the two men. Praise of William in the first helmingr gives way to praise of Waltheof in the second, and notably in a far more superlative vein: no more famous lord will live. Such an assertion is just as conventional as the images of William reddening weapons and cutting the sea with his ship, but the poet leaves his audience in no doubt

53 O’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative, 63. O’Donoghue makes this point while discussing Snorri’s use of verse to provide an authoritative conclusion to a conversation or debate but, as his use of Valþjófsflokkr demonstrates, this skill extended to non-dialogic contexts as well. 54 This follows the text in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2, 383–84 rather than Heimskringla, 3:196, which emends en on the second line to an. That emendation gives a slightly different sense to the second and third lines: “a more famous, generous prince than my lord was will not die.”

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as to who is superior. The scale of William’s crime likewise intensifies from one half-stanza to the next, as the betrayal of Waltheof in the first helmingr becomes a symbol—perhaps even the catalyst?—of widespread slaughter in the second. The ominous final line suggests that, while Waltheof’s death may have brought to an end the conflict between the Godwinsons and the Duke of Normandy, his killing is only the beginning of a coming wave of violence. Noting the compression of time implicit in this stanza, Laura Ashe argues that the verse “holds the audience in a traumatic ‘present’” lasting from 1066 to the death of Waltheof in 1076.⁵⁵ The stanza encapsulates, in the laconic and allusive manner of the skalds, a decade marked by multiple invasions and the violent suppression of English resistance to Norman rule. In the prose context of Heimskringla, this traumatic present extends even longer, with Snorri briskly concluding his account with the observation that “Viljálmr var síðan konungr á Englandi einn vetr ok tuttugu ok hans afkvæmi jafnan síðan” (William was then king in England for twenty-one years and his descendants ever after).⁵⁶ The traumatic present of Waltheof’s death thus extends in the prosimetric saga not only from 1066 to 1076, but to the end of William’s reign and into that of his descendants. In this way, Valþjófsflokkr casts a long shadow of betrayal over the decades that follow the death of the earl. Whereas in Fagrskinna the genealogy of the Godwins pointed to the continuation of Waltheof’s family and its political influence outside England, Heimskringla presents the death of Waltheof in a highly stylized, almost mythic manner: it is the end of a dynasty and the beginning of widespread slaughter. Traitor, saint, warrior, dupe: who was Waltheof? The medieval texts discussed above offer no resolution. They resist the straightforward identification of Waltheof with any one of the ethnic or linguistic groups jostling for power in the late eleventh century. Rather, these texts reveal the many competing affiliations that, although ultimately responsible for the earl’s downfall, also ensured that authors from across the medieval north would seek to tell his tale. In Old English, AngloNorman, and Old Norse-Icelandic texts alike, prosimetric forms allowed medieval authors to explore the complexities both of Waltheof’s life and of the historical moment in which he died. Waltheof’s struggle was used to invoke broader concerns about loyalty, sanctity, memory, and the construction of historical narrative itself. The heteroglossic play between verse and prose reminds the reader that, just as there was no one story of the earl’s life, there was likewise no one story of conquest.

55 Laura Ashe, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 1, 1000–1350: Conquest and Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 12. 56 Heimskringla, 3:197.

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Chapter 12 Norse Names and Narratives in Havelok the Dane In her article “What Has Baldr to Do with Lamech?” Heather O’Donoghue showed us that the differences between two parallel scenes in Beowulf and Snorri’s Edda (the deaths of Herebeald and Baldr) tell us less about the Beowulf poet’s knowledge, or lack thereof, of pre-Christian Scandinavian mythology than about the influence of literate Jewish and Christian traditions on Snorri.¹ Though those Christian traditions left a documentary trail, Heather suggests that it is the oral life they had as a topic of conversation among scholars that may have brought them to Snorri’s awareness. Beyond revealing something of Snorri’s sources and influences the article is a reminder of the artificiality of modern boundaries between orality and literacy and between the literatures of different languages and nations. It is also an important reminder that medieval writers whose business is telling stories are not dispassionately recording traditions or replicating sources; both the Beowulf poet and Snorri make choices that are influenced by the emotional logic of the stories as they understand them and the narrative conventions of their respective cultural contexts. In this chapter I make a case for reading the Middle English romance Havelok the Dane in a similar spirit of openness to a diversity of influences—beyond strict “sources”—which demonstrate that its cultural context is broader and more international than is often assumed. Many modern readings of the text have unfortunately tended to bracket it off as a “Matter of England” romance, and one of the most popular editions even expresses surprise about its having a Danish protagonist—for what has England to do with Denmark? The text, however, speaks to the long history of English stories about Scandinavia. The structure of the episode in which Havelok defends Bernard Brun’s hall suggests the influence of a much transformed and translated memory of one of the key adventures of Beowulf in Denmark, the ambiguous characterization of Ubbe points to a relationship between this Ubbe and the malevolent Viking of the same name in the developing legends of St. Edmund, and the renaming of Havelok’s father Birkabeyn indicates an awareness of relatively recent Norwegian politics of succession, perhaps even of

1 Heather O’Donoghue, “What Has Baldr to Do with Lamech? The Lethal Shot of a Blind Man in Old Norse Myth and Jewish Exegetical Traditions,” Medium Ævum 72, no. 1 (2003): 82–107. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-017

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skaldic poetry on the subject. It is not necessarily a question of direct knowledge of any given text, but of the narratives that were broadly in circulation, in song, story, or conversation, when the romance was composed exerting an influence on how the story was told and retold. There are a number of versions of the story of Havelok the Dane in various languages and genres—Eleanor Parker counts fourteen extant.² The names and setting vary; some put the story in an Alfredian context, others in an Arthurian one. Most locate the story in Lincolnshire, but John Hines has convincingly argued that many of the story’s key figures have their origins in the same Hiberno-Norse Irish Sea context that produced the legend of King Horn.³ There are a number of names that appear first (or only) in the Middle English romance Havelok the Dane, including the distinctively Norse names given to two of the Danish characters: Birkabeyn (Havelok’s father, whose name derives from the Birkibeinar, a faction which supported King Sverrir during the Norwegian civil wars of 1130–1240) and Ubbe (Havelok’s host on his return to Denmark, who shares his name with a leader of the Great Army of the 860s who is associated in hagiography with the martyrdom of King Edmund).⁴ It is unfortunate that the most widely accessible edition of Havelok, the online TEAMS volume Four Romances of England, frames the text within the retrospectively constructed category of “Matter of England” romances to the exclusion of the text’s complex multilingual origins and distinctive North Sea cultural context.⁵ The cultural connections between eastern England and Scandinavia were not limited to Viking Age migrations, as Eleanor Parker makes clear in the picture she paints of the enduring commercial links between Lincolnshire and the Scandinavian world,⁶ yet the TEAMS introduction acknowledges the poem’s Scandinavian orientation only insofar as it posits a nebulous folk memory of myth and legend held over from the Viking Age. It heads its—very brief—discussion of the romance’s Anglo-Norman precursors and Danish cultural connections with the statement: “If the question of defining boundaries between history and myth remains 2 Eleanor Parker, Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 178. 3 John Hines, “From *AnleifR to Havelok: The English and the Irish Sea,” in Celtic-Norse Relationships in the Irish Sea in the Middle Ages 800–1200, ed. Jón Viðar Sigurðsson and Timothy Bolton (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 187–214. 4 See the table showing the names used in different texts in Smithers’s edition. G. V. Smithers, Havelok (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), xxxi. Quotations of Havelok are taken from this edition. 5 Graham Drake, Eve Salisbury, and Ronald B. Herzman, eds., Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/salisbury-four-romances-of-england. 6 Parker, Dragon Lords, 166.

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unanswered so too does the question of what a Danish prince is doing in a very English romance.” This is a strange position to take—the multilingual Havelok tradition belongs to a literary culture with persistent links to Scandinavia, and the Middle English romance in particular engages with narratives about Scandinavian royal succession as old as those recounted in Beowulf and as recent as the actions of the Birkebeiner faction. We can see this engagement particularly in the episodes which are set in Denmark, especially in Havelok’s return, which will be my focus here. This portion of the poem has attracted critical attention due to what Maldwyn Mills terms its “diminished logical coherence” relative to the rest of the romance.⁷ The inconsistencies of plot and characterization in this section do in fact show the romance to be a “very English” text, though not in the way the TEAMS introduction seems to imply; they reveal the gravitational pull of various emotional resonances and conventions of narrative patterning that are triggered by the Danish setting. Havelok indiscriminately gathers up names and motifs from history, from hagiography, from romance; the text’s emphasis on the emotional logic of discrete episodes over coherence of characterization and plot allow the magpie nature of the narrative to remain visible in a way it might not in a more “rationalized” version of the story.

Ubbe The peculiarities of the portion of the romance in which Havelok returns to Denmark have been explained as the result of the blending of different versions of this story, and the blending of this story with others brought to mind by it.⁸ Nancy Mason Bradbury has argued that these are primarily narratives the author would have encountered via oral rather than literary tradition; she contextualizes Havelok’s inconsistencies of plot and characterization in terms of its indebtedness to oral style, arguing that it is above all the emotional logic of individual scenes that matters to the author.⁹ We might compare Bradbury’s point to James Fentress and Chris Wickham’s observation that characters in fairy tales often act without motivation because they are “simply the embodied causal agents of the themes used in the story.”¹⁰

7 Maldwyn Mills, “Havelok’s Return,” Medium Ævum 45, no. 1 (1976): 20–35, at 20. 8 See, e. g., Mills, “Havelok’s Return” and Smithers, Havelock, xxxii–liii. 9 Nancy Mason Bradbury, “The Traditional Origins of Havelok the Dane,” Studies in Philology 90, no. 2 (1993): 115–42, at 133–39. 10 James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 162.

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These considerations go some way to explain the inconsistencies in Ubbe’s characterization. Ubbe is, as Bradbury puts it, “extravagantly affectionate” towards Havelok, yet Havelok (and, often, the narrator) regards him as threatening.¹¹ Bradbury sees this as evidence of incomplete rationalization with a version of the narrative in which Ubbe engineered the attack on Havelok to test the hero, while Mills suggests that it is a function of the depiction of Denmark as a dangerous place that a sense of threat adheres to Ubbe when there is not a more immediate danger.¹² The use of the name Ubbe is also a factor in his ambiguous characterization in the romance. Ubbe (Ubba, Hubba) is one of the baddies in stories of the martyrdom of St. Edmund, which became increasingly complex in post-Conquest sources, acquiring a number of motifs in common with versions of the Havelok legend, including a king’s birth outside England (Saxony, in Edmund’s case), his journey over the North Sea to eastern England as a child or adolescent, the showing of a ring in a scene of recognition, and the fortuitous washing up of people set adrift in boats.¹³ St. Edmund was a key figure in the self-conception of England, particularly the East of England, at this time. Even as that story gathered to it more and more romance tropes, showing the interaction and integration of English and French literary cultures, it maintained in its essential plot an idea of England that is defined in relation to Scandinavia. Thus the name Ubbe carried particular ethical resonances and narrative expectations for the milieu that produced and consumed Havelok the Dane. The names Birkabeyn and Ubbe are a part of what Parker describes as the romance’s “allusive sense of historicity,”¹⁴ but I would argue that the introduction of these names is also prompted by the romance’s focus on “emotional logic.” A name can reinforce expectations of a character’s narrative function, just as convention may link certain discrete narrative motifs into expected sequences.¹⁵ Some teller of the tale of Havelok (perhaps the romance writer, but perhaps one of their sour-

11 Bradbury, “Traditional Origins,” 137. Havelok is also loved by his father, the people of Lincoln, the sons of Grim, Bernard Brun (ll. 349, 1348, 1761), and—eventually—Goldborw (ll. 2967–77), but Ubbe’s love for Havelok is particularly—perhaps suspiciously—quick and intense (ll. 1703–11, 1937–41). 12 Bradbury, “Traditional Origins,” 138; Mills, “Havelok’s Return,” 32. 13 See Eleanor Parker, “Havelok and the Danes in England: History, Legend, and Romance,” The Review of English Studies 67 (2016): 428–47, at 432–33; also, Dragon Lords, 183. Francis Hervey collected and published some three dozen literary texts on St. Edmund written in England in the Middle Ages, roughly half of which date from the twelfth or thirteenth century. Francis Hervey, Corolla Sancti Eadmundi: The Garland of Saint Edmund, King and Martyr (London: John Murray, 1907). 14 Parker, Dragon Lords, 179–80. 15 See Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, especially “Ordering and Transmission of Social Memory,” 41–86.

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ces) must have been prompted by the resemblances between the developing mythology of the youth of St. Edmund and the story of Havelok to pick up Ubbe as a suitable name for the character (he is called Sigar in the Anglo-Norman texts), and then the name once in use exerted its own ethical gravity. Parker argues that the Havelok-poet rejects the negative associations of the name;¹⁶ I would suggest that while the Ubbe who appears in Havelok narratives is ultimately “good” and the Ubba who appears in Edmund narratives is ultimately “bad,” the two traditions pull against each other, resulting in a certain unsettling moral ambiguity attached to the name and the suspicion with which Ubbe’s sudden, extravagant love for Havelok is often viewed.¹⁷

Hákon Hákonarson Parker argues that for the milieu in which Havelok was produced, “ideas about north-east England’s Danish heritage had become bound up with experience of other kinds of contact with Scandinavia, particularly trade,” eloquently demonstrating how “the legend of Havelok and Grim is not only an origin-myth for the town, but also an expression of its contemporary commercial identity.”¹⁸ That Scandinavian politics and culture was a current concern and not the dusty oral memory of the Viking Age suggested by the TEAMS edition is also apparent in the romance’s use of the name Birkabeyn for Havelok’s father. Critics who comment on the use of the name Birkabeyn in Havelok generally allude to Sverrir Birkabeinn—that is, Sverrir Sigurðarson, the protagonist of Sverris saga, who became King of Norway in 1184.¹⁹ But the Birkebeiner were a faction who existed before and continued to exist after the reign of Sverrir, and the figure associated with the Birkebeiner whose childhood bears the strongest narrative resemblance to Ha-

16 Parker, Dragon Lords, 169–70. 17 Ubbe becomes an ambiguous character in some Edmund narratives as well: in the early thirteenth-century Flowers of History by Roger of Wendover, Hubba and his brother are deceived into launching their attack on Edmund by a false claim that Edmund had murdered their father—so even in a story where Ubbe was responsible for the death of a saint, he was not depicted as wholly villainous. Roger of Wendover’s Flowers of History: Comprising the History of England from the Descent of the Saxons to A.D. 1235; formerly ascribed to Matthew Paris, trans. John Allen Giles (London: H. G. Bohn, 1849), 193–95. 18 Parker, Dragon Lords, 166. 19 Sverris saga, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Þórður Ingi Guðjónsson, Íslenzk fornrit 30 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 2007). For the identification of Birkabeyn with Sverrir Sigurðarson, see The Lay of Havelok the Dane, ed. W.W. Skeat and K. Sisam, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915), xxvi; Smithers, Havelok, 101; Hines, “From *AnleifR to Havelok,” 207–8.

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velok’s is Sverrir’s grandson Hákon Hákonarson.²⁰ According to the opening chapters of Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar, Hákon is born after the death of his father, King Hákon Sverrisson; his life is in danger when members of the opposing Bagler faction discover his existence, but the Birkebeiner carry him to safety, fleeing on skis or snow-shoes through the wilderness in the dead of winter. Hákon’s rescuers initially struggle to provide enough food for him just as Grim struggles to keep Havelok fed (though in the saga this is down to the inhospitable circumstances, not an uncommonly prodigious appetite), and like Havelok, the young Hákon inspires strong affection in most of the people he encounters.²¹ These events took place beginning in 1204 and are recounted as the foundational episodes at the start of Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar, which was composed in 1264–1265, shortly after Hákon’s death. They are also the subject of the opening verses of Hákonarkviða, which are embedded in the saga and may of course have circulated separately as well.²² The resemblances between the stories are not sufficient to suggest direct textual borrowing from the saga (the story of Hákon’s early life could well have spread to England orally at any point during his decades-long reign), but the aptness of the association between Havelok and Hákon invoked by the use of the name Birkabeyn does suggest an awareness—albeit perhaps an imprecise one—of comparatively recent events in Norwegian royal politics by people in thirteenth-century Lincolnshire. It may even suggest a sympathetic attitude towards those events driven by an understanding of Hákon’s origin story in terms of folklore motifs. It is the emotional consonance between the early life of Havelok and the early life of Hákon Hákonarson that most likely prompted the use of the name Birkabeyn in the romance. The term Birkibeinar literally refers to leggings or footwear of birch-bark, alluding to the poverty of the Birkebeiner faction; the name itself is thus strongly associated

20 Michael Knudson also comments on the resemblance between Havelok and Hákon in, “Where Fact Meets Fiction: The Scandinavian Historical Roots of the Middle English Romance Havelok the Dane,” in Memory and Identity in the Medieval and Early Modern World, Court Cultures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance 8 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022), 85–102. 21 Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar, ed. Þorleifur Hauksson and Sverrir Jakobsson, 2 vols., Íslenzk fornrit 31–32 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 2013). For an English translation, see The Saga of Hacon and a Fragment of The Saga of Magnus, trans. G. W. Dasent (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1894). It is curious to compare the saga’s claim (in chapter 22) that Hákon inherited no more wealth from his father than a brooch and a ring to Havelok’s inexplicably possessing a ring to bribe Ubbe with, but rings as signifiers of identity and inheritance are a very common folklore motif. 22 Sturla Þórðarson, Hákonarkviða, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2: From ca. 1035 to ca. 1300, ed. Kari Ellen Gade, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 715–16.

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with the rags-to-riches motif that characterizes the childhoods of both Hákon and Havelok. There is also a semantic connection between Birkibeinar and the byname or alias “Cuaran” which is given to Havelok in many versions of the narrative (but which is dropped in the Middle English romance): this is an Irish term referring to a shoe or sandal. It has long been recognized that Havelok ultimately derives his name from the tenth-century Hiberno-Norse king Óláfr Sigtryggsson, who was also known as Olaf Cuaran or Amlaíb Cuarán (“Havelok” is the end result of an early form of the Norse name “Olaf” being first Gaelicized then Cambricized then Anglo-Normanized then finally Anglicized).²³ Although cuarán is Irish in origin, the word had been borrowed into Welsh by the thirteenth century,²⁴ and as Smithers notes in his comments on potential Breton or Welsh influence in the romance’s use of the peculiar name “Griffin Galle” and its unusual invocation of St. David, there is evidence for people of Breton and Welsh origin living in Lincoln in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.²⁵ It is possible then that the name Birkabeyn was first introduced into tellings of the Havelok narrative in a milieu where there were people who could at the very least have a sense of the characters Birkabeyn and Cuaran being both somehow related to footwear, if not the linguistic competence to consciously make the pun—shoe (Cuaran) descends from legging (Birkabeyn).²⁶

Havelok the Bear’s Son Scott Kleinman has a different theory about the name Birkabeyn, which arises in the context of his examination of the bear-baiting imagery in Havelok’s first fight in Denmark and his argument that the romance draws on the “Bear’s Son” folklore motif.²⁷ He suggests that the author of Havelok may have been familiar with the

23 Gustav Storm, “Havelok the Dane and the Norse King Olaf Kuaran,” Englische Studien 3 (1880): 533–35. See also Skeat and Sisam, Lay of Havelok, xxv–xxvi, and Hines, “From *AnleifR to Havelok,” 195–97, 203–4. 24 “Curan, cuaran, cwaran,” in Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru online (Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, 2020), http://welsh-dictionary.ac.uk/gpc/gpc.html. See also Timothy Lewis, A Glossary of Mediaeval Welsh Law based upon the Black Book of Chirk (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913), 82. 25 Smithers, Havelok, 136, 153–55. 26 My thanks to David Callander for his assistance and comments on the intelligibility of “cuaran” to a thirteenth-century speaker of Middle Welsh. 27 Scott Kleinman, “Animal Imagery and Oral Discourse in Havelok’s First Fight,” Viator 35 (2004): 311–28.

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character Bǫðvarr Bjarki from Hrólfs saga kraka, and conjectures that the introduction of the name Birkabeyn into the Havelok narrative could have come about as a result of the “journey of the Norwegian magnate Bjarni Erlingsson of Bjarkey to Scotland in 1286 in order to look after the interests of the Maid of Norway.”²⁸ Margaret was the daughter of the King of Norway but heir to the Scottish throne through her late mother, and was intended (had she not died aged seven from an illness contracted en route to Scotland) to marry Edward II of England, which would have brought about an alliance between England and Scotland. Kleinman sees an analogy with the alliance between England and Denmark in the romance, and suggests that the phonetic similarity could have prompted an association between Bjarni Erlingsson of Bjarkey and Bǫðvarr Bjarki. The fact that the name Birkebein is also used for Havelok’s father in the Anglo-Norman Brut which seems to have been composed not long after 1272 causes some difficulty for this theory, though Kleinman argues that this can be resolved with reference to the later date (ca. 1300) of extant Brut manuscripts using the name Birkebein.²⁹ Leaving the question of dating to one side, I’m not convinced by the strength of the narrative links between Margaret’s situation and the Havelok legend. The parallels are simply that a royal child (1) is raised in a country other than the one she is the heir to and (2) is pledged in a marriage which could unite England with another kingdom. This situation isn’t particularly anomalous in the context of thirteenthcentury royal marriage politics; it is memorable primarily because of the tragic circumstances of Margaret’s death. The connection between Havelok and Margaret relies on a fair amount of abstraction and substitution due to the swapping of genders and nations, and “child-queen with a living father and powerful friends is pledged to a foreign prince but is meanwhile well-looked after in the place of her birth” has a very different emotional force to “daring protectors flee a threatening authority figure, making a dangerous journey with a fatherless child-king who will endure poverty before he reclaims his birthright.” In terms of emotional consonance and analogous narrative motifs, Havelok has far more in common with Hákon Hákonarson than with the Maid of Norway; the frequent description of Havelok as a “male Cinderella” in criticism of the romance could just as well apply to Hákon’s depiction in the opening chapters of his saga. While I’m not convinced by Kleinman’s suggestion of a link between Havelok and the Maid of Norway, I don’t dispute his larger point that there is a resemblance between elements of Havelok and the Bear’s Son’s Tale. I would suggest, however,

28 Kleinman, “Animal Imagery,” 19. 29 See Smithers, Havelok, lxv–lxxi on the dating issues surrounding the Anglo-Norman Brut and its relationship to the Middle English text.

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that there’s a closer analogue than Bǫðvarr Bjarki—in terms of narrative patterning, Havelok has more in common with Beowulf. ³⁰ In fact particular scenes in Havelok and Beowulf have a firmer resemblance to one another than either does to the Bear’s Son’s Tale.³¹ This isn’t to say that Havelok is drawing directly on Beowulf; it is more likely that the romance is influenced by a storytelling tradition (perhaps largely oral) that preserves as a unit a narrative sequence closely related—but not identical to—the version of Beowulf’s fight with Grendel that appears in Beowulf itself. The scenes in question are Beowulf’s encounter with Grendel at Heorot and Havelok’s first fight in Denmark (Beowulf, ll. 194–1250, esp. ll. 611–862; Havelok, ll. 1626–2008, esp. 1767–974). Both heroes are young and impressive but untested, returning for the first time since childhood to Denmark, where they are offered hospitality by a man who was an ally of their father, and prove their worth by defending a hall from attack without the use of a sword. The ambiguous Ubbe performs the functions of both Hrothgar and Unferth in that he both welcomes and challenges Havelok. Like Hrothgar, Ubbe expects danger and absents himself from the place where his guest is sleeping. Ubbe’s knighting of Havelok after the fight parallels Hrothgar’s (curtailed) attempt to adopt Beowulf as a potential heir. These scenes in Beowulf and Havelok feature parallel sequences of narrative motifs: 1) After their arrival in Denmark, both Beowulf and Havelok state their purpose to a man who was once their father’s ally (this relationship is remarked upon openly in Beowulf but concealed for the time being in Havelok), and are accepted as guests. They are then entertained at a feast at which the host’s wife is present. (Beowulf, ll. 320–641; Havelok, ll. 1626–68, 1715–36). 2) After the feast, the hall is attacked, while the hero’s primary host is absent.³² The attack is not unexpected: Hrothgar foresees Grendel’s attack and retreats

30 On the connection between Beowulf and Bǫðvarr Bjarki, see Francis Leneghan, The Dynastic Drama of Beowulf (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), 114–18, 249, 252–55. Mills also alludes to a resemblance between Beowulf and Havelok: “Havelok, nobly defending Bernard’s life at the risk of his own, becomes a latter-day Beowulf, who rids Denmark of a monster of a post-Grendelian, many-headed kind” (Mills, “Havelok’s Return,” 33). 31 For a skeptical view of the relationship of Beowulf to the Bear’s Son’s Tale, see “The Question of the Origin of the Grendel Story,” in Martin Puhvel, Beowulf and Celtic Tradition (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1979), 86–138. 32 There are a number of minor resonances between the characterization of the men who attack Brun’s hall and Grendel which may or may not be of significance. Both are referred to as Cain’s kin (“Kaym[es] kin,” Havelok, l. 2046; “Caines cynne,” Beowulf, l. 107a). Bernard Brun’s certainty that the thieves intended to bind him “hond and fet” (l. 1962) resonates with Grendel’s devouring his first victim right to his “fet ond folma” (“feet and hands,” l. 745a), and their intention to bind

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from the hall, leaving it to Beowulf to defend (ll. 642–65) while Ubbe is anxious that Havelok might be attacked and so sends him to stay in the home of a man called Bernard Brun (ll. 1737–66). (This is ostensibly for Havelok’s own protection, though Bernard Brun proves to be little better than Hrothgar at defending his own home.) The attack occurs by night, and the hero defends the hall without the use of a sword. Beowulf had boasted that he would take on Grendel without weapons (and Grendel appears to be impervious to blades in any case) and so takes on the monster with his bare hands, while Havelok lacks a sword because he is not yet a knight, and so takes up the door-bar (l. 1807) and defends the hall with only that as his weapon. The sound of the fighting ascends. Beowulf refers to the sound of the fighting first in an envelope pattern at lines 767a–770b: “dryhtsele dynede […] reced hlynsode” (the lordly hall dinned […] the building resounded) and then recapitulates the motif at line 782b: “sweg up astag” (the sound rose up).³³ In Havelok the phrase is: “þo bigan gret dine to rise” (l. 1861). This rising sound is heard by bystanders—the Danes in Beowulf, and Hugh Raven in Havelok. At this point, helpers from the hero’s own party rush in. In Beowulf, this is his band of Geatish men who attempt (without success) to strike Grendel with their swords (ll. 794b–805a); in Havelok this is Bernard Brun and the sons of Grim, who run after the attackers with an odd assortment of weapons, none of them swords (they include an oar, a knife, a staff, some sort of plank or wooden bar, and an axe). The fight ends and a new phase of the narrative is signaled by a reference to the arrival of morning—in Beowulf “ða wæs on morgen mine gefræge” (“then it was in the morning, I have heard tell,” l. 837); in Havelok “on þe morwen, hwan it was day” (l. 1921). There follows a reckoning of the carnage of the previous night and repetition of the story of what the hero accomplished. The hero is declared to be the strongest man in the world. The narrator says of Beowulf:

Brun and stuff his possessions into sacks (ll. 2017–20) reflects Grendel’s intention to stuff his victims into a glof (“sack,” l. 2085b). The robbers are led by one Griffin Galle, whose name has attracted scholarly attention for its oddity and possible Breton origin (see Smithers, Havelok, 135–36); whether its phonological echoes of “Grendel” are anything more than coincidence may be impossible to determine. 33 Quotations (with diacritics omitted) are from Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th ed., ed. R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

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Monig oft gecwæð þætte suð ne norð be sæm tweonum ofer eormengrund oþer nænig under swegles begong selra nære rondhæbbendra, rices wyrðra (ll. 857b–61) (Many often said that neither south nor north between the two seas, over the whole earth, was there any other under the course of heaven who was a better warrior, more worthy of a kingdom.)

Bernard Brun has similarly superlative praise for Havelok: He is þe beste man at need Þat euermar shal ride stede— Als helpe God, bi mine wone A þhousend of men his he worth one! (ll. 1971–74)

The same idea is reiterated by Ubbe sometime later, after he has had his impression of Havelok confirmed by the glowing light that emanates from Havelok’s body while he sleeps: Jn al þis werd ne haues he per— Non so fayre, ne non so long, Ne non so mikel, ne non so strong. Jn þis middelerd nis no knith Half so strong ne half so with. (ll. 2242–46)

More important than any one of these details individually is the overall narrative patterning; the way in which these elements fit together into a set sequence. It is unlikely that the romance is drawing directly on Beowulf, but the parallel sequences suggest that the romance was drawing on narratives circulating in England that descended from Beowulf’s fight with Grendel or something like it, rather than looking directly to more recent Scandinavian iterations of Bear’s Son tales. Another narrative technique that Beowulf and Havelok have in common is the use of “renarration,” in which key events are rehearsed and retold by characters within the story—sometimes not long after they have been narrated initially.³⁴ Bradbury argues that in the case of the triple telling of Havelok’s first fight, the purpose of the renarration is emphasis, signaling the importance of this battle to Havelok’s being recognized as the heir to the Danish throne. This is in a

34 See Nancy Mason Bradbury, Writing Aloud: Storytelling in Late Medieval England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 90–93.

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sense also what “should” have happened as a consequence of Beowulf’s fight with Grendel, were the poet not resisting the natural pull of narrative logic; the poet cultivates the expectation that Beowulf will be made Hrothgar’s heir in order to undermine it.³⁵ Whereas Havelok seems almost inexorably swept along by narrative expectation even at the expense of consistent characterization, allowing commonplace narrative structures to serve as evidence in themselves of Havelok’s legitimacy, Beowulf achieves its effects by subverting expectation. Renarrations such as those in Beowulf and Havelok can contain new (sometimes contradictory) information that was not offered in the first telling. In Bernard Brun’s renarration of Havelok’s fight, his phrasing suggests that Havelok was sleeping when the attack on the hall began. Bradbury comments: “Very likely there were versions of the Havelok-tale in which the surprise attack occurred while the hero and his host were sitting down to supper and versions in which it came when the hero and his men were asleep.”³⁶ In Beowulf as well, the men in the hall bed down for the night despite fully expecting Grendel’s attack; Paul Battles has explained this paradox as the powerful pull of the “sleeping after the feast” motif: Closer examination of the theme reveals its core and optional elements. The core elements are feasting, sleeping, and danger; the optional elements are the victims’ ignorance of their fate, and the aggressor approaching the hall, entering, and staring at the enemy. Arranged sequentially, the motifs take on a six-part scenic structure: the victim (a) feasts, (b) sleeps, and (c) is unaware of his impending doom; the aggressor (d) approaches the hall, (e) enters and looks at the victims, and (f ) attacks or threatens them. However, the elements are rarely presented in order.³⁷

Battles identifies variations of this motif or type-scene exclusively in Old English poems (Beowulf, Genesis A, Daniel, Andreas, and Judith). In fact it can also be found in Middle English alliterative verse, suggesting a longer afterlife for the type-scene than has previously been appreciated. Apart from the optional element of the aggressor “staring at the enemy,” the downfall of Belshazzar at the end of Cleanness (ll. 1757–81) precisely follows the “six-part scenic structure” of the sleeping after the feast type-scene—and it does it in order.³⁸ Despite Daniel’s dire warn-

35 On the Beowulf poet’s larger thematic purposes here, see chapter 1 of Leneghan, Dynastic Drama, 32–103, esp. 50–68, 72–76. 36 Bradbury, Writing Aloud, 91–92. 37 Paul Battles, “Dying for a Drink: ‘Sleeping after the Feast’ Scenes in Beowulf, Andreas, and the Old English Poetic Tradition,” Modern Philology 112, no. 3 (2015): 435–57. 38 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, ed. J. J. Anderson (London: Everyman, 1996), 47–137.

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ing, (a) Belshazzar feasts in his hall with much joy and festivity; (b) Belshazzar is carried to his bed and sleeps, never to rise again; (c) the people in the city are unaware that their foes are massing nearby; (d) the narrative perspective moves outside to take in the enemies’ stealthy approach and (e) entrance into the city; (f ) they attack the palace and kill Belshazzar in his bed. Unlike Cleanness, Havelok has only the core elements of feasting, danger, and (in Bernard Brun’s renarration) sleeping. It is missing the victim’s unawareness of danger, and it wholly lacks the omniscient narratorial perspective that views the approach and entrance of the aggressors. The fact that Havelok has only the bare minimum features of the “sleeping after the feast” motif in general and yet shares a curiously large conglomeration of vehicles of metaphor, sequentially linked narrative motifs, and details of characterization with Beowulf’s fight with Grendel, suggests a link, however remote, to that episode of Beowulf in particular rather than just the “sleeping after the feast” motif in general.

Conclusions Havelok the Dane is cluttered with narrative elements and techniques circulating in its dynamic multilingual, multicultural milieu, and this “type-scene” with roots in Old English verse is only one of several narrative models that exert a powerful pull on the shape of Havelok’s first fight. Mills argues that one of the origins of the narrative discontinuities of Havelok’s return to Denmark is the attempt to include the (fundamentally irreconcilable) features of two different “hall attack” narratives, both exemplified in francophone texts: one resembling the version found in the Lai d’Haveloc, in which Havelok is attacked after a feast by men who are attempting to kidnap his wife Argentille, and one resembling the treacherous attack by a host intent on robbery during a meal in the French romance of Richard li Biaus. ³⁹ The Passion narrative is another influence: Kleinman has observed a curious density of Christological imagery in the scene.⁴⁰ Havelok’s suffering becomes a pseudo-martyrdom, one of the elements of this romance that render it almost hagiographical (it comes down to us solely in a manuscript which is dominated by the South English Legendary).⁴¹ The role Ubbe plays in the episode seems to show the influence of the Ubbe of St. Edmund narratives—a hagiographical tradition which was becoming more and more like a romance through the accumula-

39 Mills, “Havelok’s Return.” 40 Kleinman, “Animal Imagery,” 314–15. 41 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Laud Misc 108.

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tion of new narrative elements. And the broader purpose of the fight episode within the romance is that it hastens recognition of the fact that Havelok is Birkabeyn’s heir, an identity that associates Havelok’s youth with that of Hákon Hákonarson, and thus constructs a consonance between the legendary origins of Grimsby and recent matters of Norwegian royal succession. No one of these sources and influences exerts consistent dominance over the others; the poet is moving with the currents of emotional consonance and narrative convention, not constructing a coherent political allegory or deliberate analogies between Hákon and Havelok, or Havelok and Beowulf. As John Blair comments on the appearance in the Life of St. Kenelm of the “Juniper Tree” motif (one of the case studies in Social Memory), “the main point, as Fentriss and Wickham observe, is that the linked motifs are transmitted, divorced from their original context, simply because they are narrative motifs: that is how story-telling works.”⁴² There is inevitable uncertainty in my suggestion that the use of the name Birkabeyn demonstrates awareness of the life of Hákon Hákonarson, perhaps spread through Old Norse verse, and in the suggestion that the characterization of Ubbe shows the influence of one or more of the expanding and proliferating St. Edmund narratives, and perhaps most of all in my suggestion of an indirect influence of Beowulf on Havelok. While each of these individual elements must remain speculative as they depend on aspects of the world that created this text that we can never precisely recover, together they are revealing of a fantastically mixed and connected culture. Havelok is the Bear’s son, and also Birkabeyn’s son, and a “favorite son” of Grimsby. Havelok is, as the TEAMS edition claims, a “very English romance,” though not for the reasons implied there. It is very English because it could only be in this unique cultural context that the distant memory of a Hiberno-Norse king preserved in a Welsh tradition and revived in an Anglo-Norman generic framework could prompt new associations linking that story to both a contemporary Norwegian dynasty and the long-ago hero of a barely remembered Old English poem, all to the glory of Grimsby.

42 John Blair, “A Saint for Every Minster? Local Cults in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, ed. Alan Thacker and Richard Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 455–94.

Richard Dance

Chapter 13 Strong Language: An Old Norse Word and Northern English Introduction

The study of regional varieties of language can produce powerful effects, and this is strikingly true where the identification of originally “Viking” elements is concerned. In particular, modern regional dialects provide some fascinating and often unique evidence for the Old Norse influence on English. As Townend shows so compellingly, the rise of philology and dialect study in the Victorian period played a crucial role in establishing the impact that speakers of the early Scandinavian languages had in medieval Britain.¹ In some cases, word-forms and meanings which must have entered varieties of English during the Viking Age were recorded in writing for the first time by the pioneering makers of regional glossaries in the nineteenth century, before being codified in Joseph Wright’s great English Dialect Dictionary (EDD), published between 1898 and 1905.² Some of the more romantic impressions voiced then about these words can seem picturesque and exaggerated to us, it is true; notice Morris’s rather excitable conclusion that “the backbone of the Yorkshire dialect is Danish pure and simple,” for instance.³ But this “Viking legacy” loses none of its significance in the context of more nuanced twenty-first-century constructions of identity and heritage, especial-

1 Matthew Townend, “The Vikings and the Victorians and Dialect,” in The Legacy of Medieval Scandinavian Encounters with England and the Insular World, ed. Richard Dance, Sara PonsSanz, and Brittany Schorn (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). 2 Joseph Wright, The English Dialect Dictionary, being the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the last two hundred years, 6 vols. (London: Frowde, 1898–1905). For dialect study in this period, and the history and methods of EDD, see also Martyn F. Wakelin, English Dialects: An Introduction, rev. ed. (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone, 1977), 45–48; Rob Penhallurick, “Dialect Dictionaries,” in The Oxford History of English Lexicography, vol. 2, Specialized Dictionaries, ed. A. P. Cowie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 290–313, at 299–306, and Robert Penhallurick, Studying Dialect, Perspectives on the English Language (London: Red Globe Press, 2018), 16–24, with further references. 3 M. C. F. Morris, Yorkshire Folk-Talk, with Characteristics of Those Who Speak It in the North and East Ridings (London and York: Henry Frowde; John Sampson, 1892), 126. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-018

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ly in the North of England.⁴ Connecting everyday English words to forms and meanings in Old Norse may serve as a potent reminder of the diversity of the multilingual and multicultural European world of which early Britain was a part; and invoking the time-depth and literary pedigree of dialect vocabulary can, moreover, prove remarkably empowering for the modern speakers of non-standard varieties, whose features are still too often denigrated or marginalized next to popular ideas of “proper English.” Yet for all the resonance of these words then and now, many of the Scandinavian borrowings found in modern northern dialects remain very little examined since the original nineteenth-century heyday of dialect lexicography. As Townend puts it, “this is a rich and curiously neglected body of evidence,” which to some degree we need to learn once more how to approach.⁵ I offer below one small contribution to this endeavor, via a new study of an interesting set of English words which themselves have to do with intense reactions, and which have often been taken to show Norse input: they are ram “rancid, strong-flavoured, offensive in smell or taste” and the (probably) historically connected rammy and rammish. I have hoped for an opportunity to look further into the histories of these words ever since an inspiring conversation with Heather O’Donoghue when I was a student, when I discovered that she and I share the element ram- in our respective native dialects from Teesside (ram) and the Don valley (rammy). As I hope will become clear from the scramble through the (sometimes wild and wooly) evidence that follows, these words turn out to be remarkable for a number of reasons. Amongst other things, the ram- group offers a rare example of completely divergent approaches in EDD and the earliest incarnation of its cousin the Oxford English Dictionary (OED);⁶ and hence shows how looking again at neglected items of regional vocabulary can shine a new light on the history of word-forms attested in Standard English, as well as vice versa.

4 For some recent remarks see, e. g., Nik Gunn, “The Dialect Heritage of Viking Age Cleveland,” in The Vikings in Cleveland, ed. Heather O’Donoghue and Pragya Vohra, Languages, Myths and Finds 4 (Nottingham: Centre for the Study of the Viking Age, University of Nottingham, 2014), 26–30; Richard Dance and Brittany Schorn, “Tykes and Vikings: Looking for the Old Norse Influence on Northern English Vocabulary,” Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society 23 (2018): 46–78. 5 Townend, “The Vikings and the Victorians and Dialect.” 6 The Oxford English Dictionary (first published as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles), ed. James A. H. Murray, Henry Bradley, W. A. Craigie, and C. T. Onions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1888–1928); 2nd ed. prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 1989; 3rd ed. in progress, http://www.oed.com.

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An Acquired Taste So far as I can see, the simplex adjective ram has not attracted much recent comment. It appears in only one isolated response to a question in the Survey of English Dialects, when it was volunteered by an informant from Washington, County Durham as a way of describing rancid bacon.⁷ But ram is a common entry in nineteenth-century glossaries of English dialects, culminating in and collected by EDD volume five (1905), s.v. ram adj.⁸ As figure 13.1 shows, the sources drawn upon by Wright mostly refer to ram itself, but several also include rammy, treated by EDD as a straightforward derivative on the same stem.⁹ The bulk of these sources— which include influential collections such as those by Carr (1828) and Atkinson (1868), plus numerous English Dialect Society volumes and other local glossaries —record one or the other form in the North and the northernmost Midlands of England (Cheshire and Lincolnshire); but ram also appears in Barnes’s Dorset glossary (1863).¹⁰ Other words treated by Wright as derivations on the same stem have

7 A response more appropriate to the precise lexical field that the fieldworkers were evidently hoping to access through this question (to judge from most other answers in the North and North Midlands recorded in Harold Orton, Wilfrid J. Halliday, Michael V. Barry, Philip. M. Tilling, and Martyn F. Wakelin, Survey of English Dialects: Introduction and Basic Material, 13 vols. [Leeds: Arnold, 1962–1971], 1:531, 3:653–54) would have been a formation on the reast- stem. But compare East Midland and East Anglian responses like bad, rotten, and stinky, called at 3:653 note 1 “general terms not synonymous with RANCID”; and for other dialect adjectives in this broad sense area see Clive Upton, David Parry, and J. D. A. Widdowson, Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and Grammar (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), s.v. rancid. 8 Ram and rammish are also recorded (in both cases as “North”) by James Orchard Halliwell, A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs, and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century, 2 vols. (London: John Russell Smith, 1847) (s.vv. ram (1), rammish (1)) and Thomas Wright, Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English, 2 vols. (London: Bohn, 1857) (s.vv. ram (1), rammish (2)). 9 There is a key to Wright’s abbreviated printed sources in the Select Bibliographical List at the beginning of each volume of EDD, and a full Bibliography and List of Correspondents (by initials) in EDD, vol. 6; for expanded sets of references see also Manfred Markus, EDD Online, Version 4.0 (Innsbruck: English Department, University of Innsbruck; https://eddonline4-proj.uibk.ac.at/edd/). Note that the correspondent “J. W.” from w.Yks. seems to have been Wright himself. 10 William Carr, The Dialect of Craven in the West-Riding of the County of York, with a Copious Glossary, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Crofts, 1828); J. C. Atkinson, A Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect: Explanatory, Derivative, and Critical (London: John Russell Smith, 1868); William Barnes, A Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect, with the History, Outspreading, and Bearings of South-Western English (Berlin: Asher, 1863). It may be noted, however, that EDD records a surprisingly large number of words of likely Scandinavian origin from Dorset. Thorson’s total of “provable” and “probable” Norse loans for Dorset is 117, higher than for any other county south of Cheshire or Lin-

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separate EDD entries: thus rammish adj.2 (northern England, but also Herefordshire [as roamish] and Somerset, plus Dorset again), ramsh adj. (especially Scotland, including Shetland and Orkney, plus Northumberland),¹¹ and ramp adj.2 (Scotland and Ireland only).¹² The only etymon offered by EDD for all these ram- words is the Old Norse adjective represented by Old Icelandic (OIcel) ramr, rammr. This does indeed seem a very plausible source.¹³ It is attested frequently in Old Icelandic, and its reflexes are in widespread use in the modern Scandinavian languages. Its basic meaning in Old Icelandic is “strong,” but this can be applied to a broad range of referents

colnshire; see Per Thorson, Anglo-Norse Studies: An Inquiry into the Scandinavian Elements in the Modern English Dialects, Part I (Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger, 1936), 5. 11 See also William Grant and David Murison, The Scottish National Dictionary, designed partly on regional lines and partly on historical principles, and containing all the Scottish words known to be in use or to have been in use since ca. 1700, 10 vols. (Edinburgh: The Scottish National Dictionary Association, 1931–1976; online [with access to further supplementary vol.], http://www.dsl.ac.uk/) (SND), s.v. Ramsh adj., which equates ramsh with English dialect rammisch, and explains both as derivations on ram adj. (from Old Norse). For another Scots word derived on the same stem see SND s.v. Ram n.2. 12 SND s.v. Ramp adj. explains this word as “prob. an altered form” of rank, but suggests a possible connection also to ramsh. Despite some early commentators (e. g., Robert Backhouse Peacock, A Glossary of the Dialect of the Hundred of Lonsdale, North and South of the Sands, in the County of Lancaster; Together with an Essay on Some Leading Characteristics of the Dialects Spoken in the Six Northern Counties of England (Ancient Northumbria), ed. J. C. Atkinson, Publications of the Philological Society [London and Berlin: Asher, 1869], 67), rammish “frantic, headstrong” etc. (see also George Tobias Flom, Scandinavian Influence on Southern Lowland Scotch: A Contribution to the Study of the Linguistic Relations of English and Scandinavian, Columbia University Germanic Studies 1.1 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1900], 56 for Scots rammys, rammous) is no longer generally derived from ON ram(m)r, but explained instead as a development of ramage adj. (i. e., early French ramage “untrained, wild”), albeit perhaps with some cross-influence from rammish, ramsh “rank” (etc.); so OED s.v. rammish adj. 2, SND s.v. Rammish adj., adv., v. Other word-forms not now usually connected to ON ram(m)r include: northern English ramming, rammen “huge,” Scots ram- as an intensifying prefix (Atkinson, Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect, 399–400; OED s.v. ramming adj., SND s.v. Ram- pref.); northern English and Scots ram-stam “impetuous” (John Jamieson, An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, 2 vols. [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1808], s.v. ramstam, Flom, Scandinavian Influence, 56; Erik Björkman, Scandinavian Loan-Words in Middle English, 2 vols., Studien zur englischen Philologie 7, 11 [Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1900–1902], 284n1, OED s.v. ram-stam adj., adv. and n., SND s.v. Ram-stam adj., adv., n., v.). 13 Notice also the Shetland word ramsk (variants rams, ramps, ramsket, ramset) “sharp; rancid; sour, of taste,” apparently the direct reflex of a Scandinavian-derived form, cf. Jutland dialect ramsk “quick at work, sharp in speech”; see Jakob Jakobsen, An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland, 2 vols. (London: Nutt, 1928–1932), s.v. ramsk (and Thorson, AngloNorse Studies, 72).

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Figure 13.1: The EDD entry for ram adj.

and situations: Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog (ONP) s.v. rammr adj. (draft entry) defines it as, “(om fysisk styrke/kraft) stærk; kraftfuld, hård, slem; (om smag) ram, besk, skarp, bitter” (that is, (physical strength/force) strong; powerful, harsh, bad; (taste) ram, acrid, sharp, bitter), and also records it in several nicknames;¹⁴ its figurative usages include a reference to powerful love (ramma ást) in a verse in Kormáks saga. ¹⁵ It is moreover found as a constituent in numerous

14 Helle Degnbol, Bent Chr. Jacobsen, Eva Rode, Christopher Sanders, and Þorbjörg Helgadóttir, Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog / A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (Copenhagen: Arnamagnæanske Kommission, 1989–); access to slips and draft entries at https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php. See also Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2nd ed. with a supplement by Sir William A. Craigie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), s.v. ramr adj.; Geir T. Zoëga, A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), s.v. rammr a.; Johan Fritzner, Ordbog over det gamle norske sprog, 3 vols. (Oslo: Feilberg and Landmark, 1867), s.v. rammr adj.; Sveinbjörn Egilsson, Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis (Ordbog over det norsk-islandske Skjaldesprog), 2nd ed. rev. Finnur Jónsson (Copenhagen: Møller, 1913–1916), s.v. rammr. Translations in this essay are my own unless otherwise indicated. 15 Kormákr, Lausavísur 1, ed. Finnur Jónsson in Den norsk-islandske Skjaldedigtning, 4 vols. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1912–1915), A1 80, B1 70.

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derivatives and compounds (for example, rammaukinn “very powerful,” rammgǫrr “strong-built, very strong,” andramr “with evil-smelling breath”). It has a similar range of meanings in the later Scandinavian languages, including a noteworthy overlap with English dialect ram in its reference to unpleasant tastes or smells.¹⁶ This shared metaphorical extension may, of course, simply be the result of semantic convergence, since it is easy enough to parallel elsewhere (cf. English strong in “a strong smell,” “a strong taste”);¹⁷ but it is not impossible that it continues a subsense already present in some varieties of Viking Age Norse. In the context of this essay, it is also interesting to notice the use of ram in parts of Sweden and Denmark to describe the “strength” of a regional dialect, as in phrases like Swedish tala ram Vestmanländsku, Danish tale ram Jysk; as already remarked by Atkinson, this equates to English broad as in “broad Yorkshire.”¹⁸ The ulterior etymology of this Scandinavian adjective is worth pursuing too, especially in light of the discussion in my next section. It is usually now connected with the West Germanic words for a male sheep, as in Present-Day English (PDE) ram, Old English (OE) ram(m), and compare Middle Low German (MLG) ram, Middle Dutch (MDu) ram, Old High German (OHG) ram. Interestingly, it is often suggested that a ram was originally so called precisely because of its powerful odor (especially in the summer months), rather than because of its perceived “strength” more generally. This explanation is repeated in the majority of modern etymological authorities, with reference to the English and other West Germanic nouns as well as to the Scandinavian adjective,¹⁹ and it is also found in some Germanic

16 Notice especially Swedish dialect “sträv (om smak), ohygglig” (harsh (in taste), horrible) (Elof Hellquist, Svensk Etymologisk Ordbok, 3rd ed. [new impression], 2 vols. [Lund: Gleerup, 1970], s.v. ram (3)); Norwegian dialect “stram av smak” (harsh of taste) (Alf Torp, Nynorsk Etymologisk Ordbok [Oslo: Aschehoug, 1919], s.v. ram); Danish “skarp, bitter, stram (i smag el. lugt)” (sharp, bitter, harsh (in taste or smell)) (Niels Åge Nielsen, Dansk etymologisk ordbog [Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1966], s.v. ram (II)). Modern Icelandic usage separates ramur “strong” and rammur “bitter” (and hence remi “strength, power,” remma “bitter taste”); by-forms in both and are found in medieval texts, but do not show a regular semantic distinction. 17 See the Mapping Metaphor project (Wendy Anderson, Marc Alexander, Carole Hough, and Christian Kay, Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus [Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2012–2015; https://mappingmetaphor.arts.gla.ac.uk], metaphor 8149 [1 J08 Strength mapping onto 1I11 Smell]). OED s.v. strong adj. sense (10) records this meaning from the OE period; and for another example involving smell see OED s.v. stith adj. sense (5d). 18 Atkinson, Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect, 400. 19 Thus Ferdinand Holthausen, Altenglisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2nd ed. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1934), s.v. ramm; OED s.v. ram n. 1 (revised June 2008); Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 25th ed., ed. Elmar Seebold (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), s.v. Ramme; Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon, Íslensk Orðsifjabók (Reykjavik: Orðabo´k Ha´sko´lans, 1989), s.v. rammur; Torp, Nynorsk Etymologisk Ordbok, s.v. ram; Hjalmar Falk and Alf Torp, Norwegisch-dänisches etymolo-

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handbooks.²⁰ If we accept this ovine connection, then dialect ram (adj.) is one amongst many English words in that category of probable Old Norse loans whose Germanic roots are known in (pre-contact) Old English, but whose particular morphology (in this case, its adjectival function) and meaning are distinctive of the Scandinavian languages; and it is these factors that constitute the essential evidence for Old Norse input.²¹ It should be added, nonetheless, that the further Germanic affiliations of this supposed ram- word-group are obscure,²² and its broader Indo-European context is also opaque;²³ hence not quite all etymological commentators have chosen to describe the Scandinavian adjective and the West Germanic noun as sharing a source.²⁴ English regional ram is not always derived from Old Norse (ON) ram(m)r in the nineteenth-century dialect literature. Carr’s glossary of the Craven area gisches Wörterbuch, Germanische Bibliothek 1, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1960), s.vv. ram and ramme II (partly); Hellquist, Svensk Etymologisk Ordbok, s.v. ram (3); Nielsen, Dansk etymologisk ordbog, s.v. ram (II). 20 See especially Frank Heidermanns, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der germanischen Primäradjektive, Studia Linguistica Germanica 33 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993), s.v. ramma-, who includes “scharf riechend” (i. e., pungent-smelling) as an early sense of the Germanic adjective; and Vladimir Orel, A Handbook of Germanic Etymology (Leiden: Brill, 2003), s.v. *rammaz (with further references). Other Germanic word-forms sometimes cited as cognate are the first element of Low German ramdäsig “unusually stupid” and a supposed Burgundian *rams “strong; ram.” 21 Following the typology employed in Richard Dance, Words Derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Etymological Survey, 2 vols., Publications of the Philological Society 50 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019), I would therefore classify ram as a type C1c (C3c). 22 Heidermanns (Etymologisches Wörterbuch, s.v. ramma‐) connects it with Proto-Germanic (PGmc) *remmōn- (as in OIcel rimma “tumult, fray”), stemming from a sense “heftig” (i. e., violent). But Orel (Handbook of Germanic Etymology, s.v. *rammaz) prefers a relationship with PGmc *remiz (as in OIcel rim “rail,” East Frisian rim “rafter”), and hence with PGmc *ramō (as in MLG rame “stand, frame,” OHG rama, hrama “pillar”). 23 The favorite recent comparanda are Old Church Slavonic raměnь “violent, impetuous,” and Old Russian ramjan″, raměn″ “strong” (thus OED); but several other suggestions have been made, including Irish remor “thick, fat” (and see Alois Walde, Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der Indogermanischen Sprachen, ed. Julius Pokorny, 3 vols. [Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1927–1932], 2:371). 24 The two words are separated by Alf Torp, Wortschatz der germanischen Spracheinheit, unter Mitwirkung von Hjalmar Falk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1909), 339, 340 (see also Falk and Torp, Norwegisch-dänisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, s.v. ramme II), and notice also Hensleigh Wedgwood, A Dictionary of English Etymology, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1872), s.v. ram. Guus Kroonen, Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 11 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), s.v. *ramma- “ram” makes no mention of the Scandinavian adjective, but argues that the original meaning of the root may have been “to batter” (cf. (M)Du, MHG rammen “to batter; be in heat,” English ram verb). Jan de Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1962), s.v. rammr, rammr also omits any relationship to the West Germanic noun.

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(1828), which contains unusually full speculations about word origins, prefers a connection with the superficially similar—and, apparently to its author, the similarly offensively smelling and tasting—rams “wild garlic”; although Carr also mentions the Scandinavian adjective, which he seems to think has a garlicky startingpoint, too.²⁵ Not all words that end up sounding alike (or, for that matter, words for things that smell or taste alike) are etymologically related, of course, and we would not now associate ON ram(m)r and terms for wild garlic (OE hramsa).²⁶ Easy though it is to dismiss Carr’s origin for ram as fanciful, and an understandable artifact of the period just before the rapidly evolving discipline of comparative philology began to make its mark on etymological scholarship, it is remarkable that the same explanation crops up in a pre-EDD publication from no less a philological luminary than Joseph Wright (in his account of his native dialect of Windhill), hinting at the persistent attractiveness of the notion.²⁷ However, the great majority of the other nineteenth-century glossaries and dialect studies that offer an etymology for ram (and/or for rammy and rammish) do cite the Old Norse adjective as its etymon. Of the sources given in EDD s.v. ram, these are (for ram only, unless otherwise stated): Atkinson (1868),²⁸ Peacock (1869, ram and rammish),²⁹ Morris (1869),³⁰ Nodal and Milner (1875–1882, ram and rammy),³¹ Clough Robinson (1876),³² Ross,

25 Carr, Dialect of Craven, s.v. ram. In referring to ON rammr he is drawing partly on Jamieson, Etymological Dictionary, who suggests some input from this source for ramsh adj. (Jamieson’s is the earliest derivation of ram- from the ON adjective that I have found in the scholarly literature), alongside ram n. as another possible etymon (see below). 26 See OED s.v. rams n. (revised June 2008). 27 Joseph Wright, A Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, English Dialect Society 67 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner, 1892), 27. Atkinson (Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect, 399) also connects ON rammr to rams “wild garlic,” apparently thinking that the latter derives from this same adjectival base, “from its strong, disagreeable odour”; and this idea reappears in Peacock, Hundred of Lonsdale, 66. 28 Atkinson, Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect. 29 Peacock, Hundred of Lonsdale. 30 J. P. Morris, A Glossary of the Words and Phrases of Furness (North Lancashire), with Illustrative Quotations, Principally from the Old Northern Writers (London and Carlisle: J. Russell Smith; Geo. Coward, 1869). 31 John H. Nodal and George Milner, A Glossary of the Lancashire Dialect, Publications of the Manchester Literary Club (Manchester and London: Alexander Ireland; Trübner, 1875–1882). 32 C. Clough Robinson, A Glossary of Words Pertaining to the Dialect of Mid-Yorkshire; with Others Peculiar to Lower Nidderdale, English Dialect Society C.5 (London: Trübner, 1876). The etymological note is in square brackets with the initials “W. W. S.,” and was therefore apparently inserted by Skeat (the general editor of the English Dialect Society series in which this volume appears).

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Stead, and Holderness (1877),³³ Morris (1892),³⁴ Ellwood (1895).³⁵ To these, one should add Wall’s important 1898 study of the Scandinavian borrowings in English dialects.³⁶ The same etymology is given by most of those (fewer) studies of northern English dialects which have appeared subsequently, and which comment upon this word family; some examples are Cowling (1915), Brilioth (1913, ram and ramiš), and Haigh (1928, ræmmi only), next to Thorson’s survey of the Old Norse loans in EDD. ³⁷ But not quite all make this identification: Heslop (1892–1894) derives ram adjective (and ramsh) direct from OE ramm noun, and the same claim is made for rammy by Holland (1886), and for rammish by Elworthy (1886, for West Somerset).³⁸ These three works therefore look like curious outliers in the dialect glossary tradition that informed EDD. As we shall see, however, they seem much less

33 Frederick Ross, Richard Stead, and Thomas Holderness, A Glossary of Words Used in Holderness in the East-Riding of Yorkshire, English Dialect Society C.7 (London: Trübner, 1877). 34 Morris, Yorkshire Folk-Talk. 35 T. Ellwood, Lakeland and Iceland, English Dialect Society (London: Henry Frowde, 1895). John Trotter Brockett, A Glossary of North Country Words, with their Etymology, and Affinity to Other Languages; and Occasional Notices of Local Customs and Popular Superstitions, 3rd ed., corrected and enlarged by W. E. Brockett, 2 vols. (Newcastle upon Tyne and London: Emerson Charnley; Simpkin, Marshall and co., 1846), 80 (ram and rammish) also derives from the Scandinavian adjective, but his definition is “fœtid, rank, like a ram,” implying a (recent?) link to ram n., too? Note that most dialect glossaries, including the other sources cited by EDD which I have seen, do not offer an etymology. 36 Arnold Wall, “A Contribution towards the Study of the Scandinavian Element in the English Dialects,” Anglia 20 (1898): 45–135 at 115; albeit he suggests that rammish (which he notices from Somerset only) could be “from the animal?”. The connection with “North. E. ram” is also made at Cleasby and Vigfusson, Icelandic-English Dictionary, s.v. ramr adj. (originally published 1874). 37 G. H. Cowling, The Dialect of Hackness (North-East Yorkshire), with Original Specimens and a Word-List, Cambridge Archaeological and Ethnological Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 56; Börje Brilioth, A Grammar of the Dialect of Lorton (Cumberland), Historical and Descriptive, with an Appendix on the Scandinavian Element, Dialect Specimens and a Glossary, Publications of the Philological Society 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 155; Walter E. Haigh, A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 90; Thorson, Anglo-Norse Studies, 72. 38 Oliver Heslop, Northumberland Words: A Glossary of Words Used in the County of Northumberland and on the Tyneside, English Dialect Society, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner; Oxford University Press, 1892–1894); Robert Holland, A Glossary of Words Used in the County of Chester, English Dialect Society 16 (London: Trübner, 1886); Frederic Thomas Elworthy, The West Somerset Word-Book: A Glossary of Dialectal and Archaic Words and Phrases used in the West of Somerset and East Devon, English Dialect Society (London: Trübner, 1886). And notice Brockett, North Country Words, 80 (note 35 above) and Jamieson, Etymological Dictionary (note 25 above). Later, Orton also sits on the fence, referring to NED s.v. rammish but comparing also ON rammr (Harold Orton, The Phonology of a South Durham Dialect: Descriptive, Historical and Comparative [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and co., 1933], 155).

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strange when read next to the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the quite different lexicographical hinterland of non-regional English that preceded its take on rammy and, especially, rammish.

Sheep and Goats Since its first incarnation as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (published between 1884 and 1928; hereafter NED), OED has expressly set out not to record words that are only found in regional dialects and only attested in the modern period. In this connection, we should recall that what became NED and EDD started life as closely related products of the Philological Society’s plan to catalogue the vocabularies of varieties of English, and the two dictionary projects began with deliberately distinct remits and criteria for inclusion. For NED in particular to be a manageable enterprise, limits had to be set on its coverage, and it was decided early on, as Trench put it (rather bluntly) in an 1857 paper to the Society, that provincial or local words “have no right to a place in a Dictionary of the English tongue.”³⁹ The practical result of this is encapsulated in the well-known principle set down by NED’s first editor Murray, viz. that dialect words and forms occurring since 1500 are not included, “except when they continue the history of a word or sense once in general use, illustrate the history of a literary word, or have themselves a certain literary currency.”⁴⁰ In fact, then, a great deal of modern dialect evidence is cited in NED, but only when it relates to words already recorded in writing in Middle English, and/or that at some point found their way into modern texts classed (broadly) as “literary.” Looked at from the perspective of the story of English regional vocabulary, there is arguably some inequity in this, of course. Many NED headwords, that is, seem to have been more or less confined to a particular region throughout their histories, both during the Middle Ages

39 Richard Chenevix Trench, On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries: Being the substance of two papers read before the Philological Society, Nov. 5, and Nov. 19, 1857, 2nd ed. (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1860), 15, cited by Penhallurick, “Dialect Dictionaries,” 302. On the development of NED, see Lynda Mugglestone, “The Oxford English Dictionary,” in The Oxford History of English Lexicography, vol. 1, General-Purpose Dictionaries, ed. A. P. Cowie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 230–59, and on its relationship with EDD see further Philip Durkin, “The English Dialect Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary: A Continuing Relationship between Two Dictionaries,” in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary and Beyond, ed. Manfred Markus, Clive Upton, and Reinhard Heuberger (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010), 201–18. 40 James A. H. Murray, “General Explanations,” at NED, 1:xviii; discussed by Martyn F. Wakelin, “The Treatment of Dialect in English Dictionaries,” in Studies in Lexicography, ed. Robert Burchfield (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 156–77, at 170–72.

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and afterwards, and are included in the Dictionary chiefly by dint of their attestation in Middle English sources from that region.⁴¹ But there are no entries in NED for “dialect words” that happened to escape being recorded in medieval texts; these words remain the exclusive province of EDD. In practice this division of labor is rarely problematic, and it is hard to disagree that NED had to draw a line somewhere; but on very rare occasions it is the source of missed opportunities. That is to say, some dialect word-forms not attested in medieval texts, and hence not precisely matched by NED headwords, seem to have flown under the radar of NED contributors; and this may have led to the missing of the evidence that these forms could have provided for interpreting the histories of (probably, arguably) related items that were included in NED. ⁴² The ram- family is a very pertinent case in point, since NED has entries for rammish a.1 (and also rammishness) (figure 13.2) and rammy a. (figure 13.3), but not for ram (simplex adjective) itself. At the time of writing, both entries are present in similar but expanded forms in the ongoing third edition of OED (hereafter OED3; these entries were last revised in June 2008). OED3 s.v. rammish adj. 1 retains the basic structure as in NED, but adds several new quotations, and moves Lydgate from sense (1b) to sense (2).⁴³ The revised entry for rammy adj. is improved with more specific definitions, with sense (1) now referring to smell or taste, and a new sense (2) (“Wild, frisky; aggressive; lecherous,” marked “colloquial (chiefly U.S.)”) under which five twentieth-century instances are added to NED’s 1884 Bourke quotation.⁴⁴ As will be evident, NED derives both words in all senses from the word for the male sheep— that is, ram n. (OE ram(m)); MED follows suit for rammish, with citations from Chaucer and Lydgate. This derivation is surely uncontroversial for rammish 41 For a few examples of probable ON borrowings of this kind, see the OED entries for some of the typically “northern” items discussed by Eduard Kolb, “Skandinavisches in den nordenglischen dialekten,” Anglia 83 (1965): 127–53, and Wakelin, English Dialects, 135, i. e., steg n. “gander,” lea n.3 “scythe,” ket n.1 “rubbish,” sty n.2 “ladder.” 42 The team behind OED3 is, of course, well aware of and very much sensitive to this issue as revisions to the Dictionary progress. See the lucid discussion in Durkin, “The English Dialect Dictionary,” in particular his category of “Cases where the EDD’s documentation for words not included in the OED can be adduced in the OED to help explain the etymologies of other words which it does include” (203; 212–16); and continuing attention to such cases is adding considerably to the twentyfirst-century OED’s use of dialect evidence missed by the original NED. For an enthusiastic early attempt to use EDD evidence to elucidate some difficult Middle English words, in this case in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, see Elizabeth Mary Wright, “Notes on ‘Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight,’” Englische Studien 36 (1906): 209–27. 43 Following Hans Kurath, Sherman M. Kuhn, and Robert E. Lewis, Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1956–2001), https://quod.lib. umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary (MED), s.v. rammish adj. 44 In both original and revised entries, senses are not distinguished s.v. rammishness n.

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Figure 13.2: The NED entry for rammish a.1.

sense (2), “?Lascivious, lustful,” the evidence for which is greatly increased in OED3 with quotations up to 1990 (and compare OED3’s new sense (2) for rammy). In any event, rammish and rammy with this meaning probably represent (perhaps a series of ) acts of derivation on ram n. distinct from those which (if we accept OED’s etymology) produced the same word-forms in sense (1); and “polygenesis” of this sort would not in itself be surprising, given that the suffixes -ish and -y have, of course, remained productive and transparent throughout the history of English. It is, more importantly, entirely credible that many of the occurrences of rammish and rammy referring to nasty smells or tastes do indeed show direct derivation on

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Figure 13.3: The NED entry for rammy a.

ram n., too—especially when they are linked immediately by their users to the smell of sheep, or to the strong scents of odoriferous animals more generally, of which there is a real menagerie in these entries. Such uses go right back to Chaucer, who likens the rammish pongs of his brimstone-covered alchemists to the stink of a gote; and NED’s quotations include several where sheep are directly invoked (see especially 1607 Topsell and 1621 Burton under rammy). There are, furthermore, no indications of dialect marking for most of NED’s instances, especially the early ones, and so we are missing here the circumstantial evidence of mainly northern distribution so evident for ram adj. in EDD, and which might encourage the search for an Old Norse etymon. NED notices that rammish and rammy are now mainly dialectal;⁴⁵ but it implicitly explains this as a modern retreat into regional usage by words that were once more widely current. To add to all this, further examination of the English dictionary record reveals a long lexicographical tradition of adducing rammish, at least, as a “general” English word, which is always explained purely as a derivation on ram n. Rammish appears in some early dictionaries that are known to include regional vocabulary, such as Skinner’s Etymologicon Linguæ Anglicanæ (1671), the Gazophylacium Anglicanum of 1689, and Kersey’s 1706 revision of Philips’s New World of Words, from where it made it into Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721);⁴⁶ but I have

45 In OED3 s.v. rammish adj. 1 this label has been moved to refer to sense (1b) only, where Carr, Dialect of Craven, and a 1997 Cumbrian glossary are added to the 1863 Yorkshire dialect source cited by NED. 46 Stephen Skinner, Etymologicon Linguæ Anglicanæ (London: H. Brome, R. Clavel, B. Tooke, T. Sawbridge, 1671); anon., Gazophylacium Anglicanum: Containing the Derivation of English Words, Proper and Common (London: Randall Taylor, 1689); Edward Phillips, The New World of Words, or Universal English Dictionary, 6th ed., rev. John Kersey (London: J. Phillips, N. Rhodes, J. Taylor, 1706);

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found it in several other dictionaries for which this is very unlikely to be the explanation, notably those of Minsheu (1617), Cockeram (1623) (rammishly, as cited by NED), and Johnson (1755).⁴⁷ From this perspective, then, it is hardly surprising that NED might have looked no further for its etymology for rammish (and rammy), since—without the simplex adjective ram on the horizon as a comparandum— this group of words can in principle be explained happily enough as straightforward derivations on the “male sheep” noun.⁴⁸ On the other hand, there is surely a case to be made for introducing ram (adjective), and ON ram(m)r, into the etymological discussion for both rammish and rammy—just as, with the boot on the other foot, EDD ought probably to have compared literary English uses of rammish (and rammy), and drawn attention to the alternative derivation from ram n. To my mind, the argument for some Scandinavian input into the history of the adjective ram remains very persuasive: the zeroderivation of a denominal adjective ram upon ram n. (in medieval or modern English) is improbable, and must be set against its exact correspondence to an Old Norse adjective, boosted by the circumstantial evidence of its mainly northern distribution. In this light, the preponderance of recent attestations of rammish and (especially) rammy (when denoting off-putting smells or tastes) in these same dialect areas makes it very plausible that, whatever their ultimate origin, we owe at least the survival of these forms to association with ram adj., with whose senses and local usage theirs would seem to have converged. It is hard to rule out some independent, regional derivations of rammy, at least, on ram adj. (English -y can be deadjectival as well as denominal), to which rammish could then have been added as an obvious analogue;⁴⁹ this seems especially likely if—as would Nathaniel Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (London: printed for E. Bell, J. Darby, A. Bettesworth, F. Fayram, J. Pemberton, 1721). Bailey’s entry is included as dialectal by William E. A. Axon, English Dialect Words of the Eighteenth Century as shown in the “Universal Etymological Dictionary” of Nathaniel Bailey, English Dialect Society (London: Trübner, 1883), 142. On the treatment of regional words in these and other dictionaries of this period see further Wakelin, “Treatment of Dialect,” 157–67. 47 John Minsheu, Ductor in linguas, the Guide into Tongues, 2nd ed. (London: J. Brown, 1617); Henry Cockeram, English Dictionarie: or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words (London: Nathaniel Butter, 1623); Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London: J. and P. Knapton, T. and T. Longman, C. Hitch and L. Hawes, A. Millar, and R. and J. Dodsley, 1755). 48 For a precisely analogous animal-word derivative likewise referring to an unpleasant odor, compare EDD s.v. foxy adj., sb. Sense (5) “Decayed, tainted, rank, rancid, having an offensive smell like a fox.” It is worth adding that this portion of NED (volume VIII, part 1, for Q and R) was published with a cover date of 1910, but the entries for rammish and rammy are dated online by OED (under “Entry history”) as 1903, i. e., before EDD’s entry for ram adj. appeared in 1905. 49 Assuming it is not originally an Anglicization of an ON derivation in -sk, as lies behind Shetland ramsk (see note 13 above). On the suffixes see OED s.vv. -ish suffix 1, -y suffix 1.

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be entirely natural—this whole group of words came, by folk etymology, to be associated by some speakers with the homophonous word-stem for a notoriously smelly animal, reactivating the connection of offensive stink with male sheep that may ultimately have been the route for the derivation of both of them from the same Germanic root in the first place.⁵⁰ The rams themselves had presumably not got less smelly in the meantime. While we’re about it, it is difficult to avoid the whiff of some origin more complex than a straight derivation from ram n. even when it comes to the earliest literary occurrences of rammish. One notices in particular the persistent association of rammish with goats, as well as or instead of sheep. Beside their appearance in Chaucer (see above), goats butt into the definitions of this word given by the Gazophylacium Anglicanum (“stinking as a Goat, or casting a strong smell, like that of a Ram in Riding-time”), and Phillips (rev. Kersey) (“that smells rank like a Ram or Goat,” repeated by Bailey), as well as into Maplet’s entry for rammishly (“smel rammishly, in maner like the Goate”).⁵¹ Rammish- is moreover given as an equivalent to Latin hīrcus and its derivatives by Huloet (“Rammishness, hircus”), Cockeram (“smelling Rammishly. Hircosically”) and Skinner (“Hircum olens, […] notum enim est hircos ingratum odorem emittere, nec multo minus Arietem”).⁵² It is hard to tell how much this is because learned writers would naturally have thought of Latin hīrcus (originally “male goat,” but also by extension “offensive smell”),⁵³ and hence of goats, when they were reaching for a word associated with strong odors, and how much because of some independent, and apparently counter-intuitive (why not goatish?), connection between rammish and the smell of goats. But, reading between the lines, this disjunction may have at least piqued the interest of users of rammish down the centuries, with Skinner at any rate feeling the need implicitly to apologize for English having (capriciously?) chosen a seemingly less appropriate animal than Latin had as the source of its equivalent to hīrcus. In any event, classically educated English speakers aware of hīrcus and its connotations may very well have been tempted to gloss it with an English word that they perceived to have similar etymological links to a foul-smelling male

50 For some other examples of animals being introduced into English words and phrases by folk etymology, see Wakelin, English Dialects, 73. 51 Gazophylacium Anglicanum; Phillips, New World of Words; John Maplet, A Greene Forest, or a Naturall Historie (London: H. Denham, 1567). 52 Richard Huloet, Abcedarium anglico-latinum pro tyrunculis (London: William Riddel, 1552); Cockeram, English Dictionarie; Skinner, Etymologicon (“Indeed it is well known that he-goats emit an unwelcome smell, and the ram not much less”). 53 Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), s.v. hīrcus.

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animal, even if an animal of a different species. We perhaps see this happening in the 1709 translation of Virgil’s Eclogues by Richard, Earl of Lauderdale,⁵⁴ cited now by OED3 s.v. rammy adj., where “Who can do that as easily may stroke/ The Rammy Goat, or subtle Foxes Yoke” renders Virgil’s “atque idem iungat vulpes et mulgeat hircos.”⁵⁵ A bit more speculatively, the very existence of hīrcus (with its dual sense) might itself have helped encourage such speakers to connect rammish and rammy (pseudo‐)etymologically with male sheep in the first place, even if ram n. were not in fact the (only) immediate origin of these words. In sum, it seems overwhelmingly likely that we have to reckon with input from reflexes of both proximate etymological sources, ON ram(m)r and OE ram(m), at one or more points in the histories of the English ram- words considered in this essay. The formally identical stems of these two items, which quite possibly share an ulterior etymology too, would naturally have attracted one another, and the senses of their adjectival descendants would have converged, at any rate in those varieties of English which had acquired reflexes of both, not least in the North of England. While it is tempting to hypothesize that particular senses and usages continue the lineage more of the Scandinavian adjective, while others have more to do with the native animal term (for example, “strong or bitter taste” < Old Norse, “foul smell” < Old English?),⁵⁶ it is in many cases surely impossible to tease apart the respective inputs with any confidence: it is after all a very short physical and perceptual as well as semantic distance from bad smell to bad taste; and the northern dialect use of simplex ram is, one notes, often glossed as referring to both sensations, just as the modern Scandinavian adjectives can.

Conclusions The ram- group of words hence stands, all in all, as a peculiarly potent example of the etymological problems that can arise in the study of contact between two very 54 Richard, Earl of Lauderdale, The Works of Virgil, Translated into English Verse (London: Bernard Lintott, 1709), 3.91. 55 “and let him also yoke foxes and milk he-goats!” Virgil, Eclogues; Georgics; Aeneid I–VI, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough and G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 63 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 3.91. 56 Thorson (Anglo-Norse Studies, 72) tries something of this kind for rammish and ramsh, and is thus one of the very few commentators in the EDD tradition to incorporate a double etymology for these words; but his reasoning (“Rammish and ramsh (see EDD) are derivatives, with native suffix, of the borrowed adjective when coincident in meaning (‘acrid, pungent’ etc.), but when denoting ‘rank’ (of animals) are formations from Eng. ram ‘male sheep’”) seems to me to require a more fastidious semantic discrimination than the attested definitions of the words will bear.

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closely related languages exchanging formally similar (and themselves probably related) sets of lexical items. Amongst other things, ram, rammy, and rammish illustrate how the consequences of this similarity may continue to be felt post-borrowing, resulting in the ongoing association of native and imported word-forms in the recipient language to the extent that it can be practically impossible to sniff out their source—especially when some of the words and usages in question are first recorded hundreds of years later, and when we have to reckon with the possible (and inter-related?) effects of folk etymology and learned discourse into the bargain. The ram- family is moreover a fascinating object lesson in the gaps that can be created in scholarly study by the differing priorities of the lexicographical traditions of “literary” versus “dialect” words, leading in this case to an unusually polarized response by two great nineteenth-century English dictionary projects, and meaning that the nature of the relationships between the words in this group was fully explored by neither. But these are just a few aspects of the linguistic evidence and the history of its exploration that are very much worth coming to grips with as we continue to improve our understanding—right across varieties of English, both regional and standard—of the legacy of the Vikings, in all its complexity and all its subtlety.

Part III: Afterlives

Jessica Clare Hancock

Chapter 14 Mighty Men at Home: Domestic Environments and Heroic Masculinity in William Morris’s The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs The art of house-building begins it all. […] These common things not only shelter us from wind and weather, but also express the thoughts and aspirations that stir in us.¹ The question is not whether architecture constructs identities and stabilizes meanings, but how and in whose interests.²

Atlakviða, one of the Old Norse-Icelandic retellings of the Scandinavian Völsung legend, unusually provides details about Atli’s palace. As Ursula Dronke observes, “the description of a building is unique in Old Norse poetry.”³ His home is impressive in size, with imposing watchtowers, shields, and spears; its details connect Atli to a heroic masculinity, as well as indicating his wealth and power. When William Morris rewrote this legend as The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, first published in 1876, he offered an even greater insight into the characters’ relationships with physical structures, often connecting buildings explicitly to masculinity.⁴ Existing studies of Sigurd the Volsung have not examined this crucial way in which gender identity is linked to domestic environments.⁵ This essay

1 William Morris, “The Beauty of Life,” in Hopes and Fears for Art: Five Lectures Delivered in Birmingham, London and Nottingham, 1878–1881 (London: Longmans Green, 1882), 71–113, at 104. 2 Kim Dovey, Becoming Places: Urbanism/Architecture/Identity/Power (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 45. 3 “Atlakviða Commentary,” in The Poetic Edda, vol. 1, Heroic Poems, ed. Ursula Dronke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 46–74, at 54. 4 William Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris, vol. 12, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, ed. May Morris (London: Longmans Green, 1911). All subsequent references to this poem will be given parenthetically in the text by page number. Simon Dentith acknowledges the added representation of landscape in the text, but does not comment on this focus on buildings; see his Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 81–82. 5 Indeed, not much work has been done on masculinity in Sigurd the Volsung regardless of its focus. A recent notable exception is Ingrid Hanson, “William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung and the Parameters of Manliness,” in Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature, ed. Amelia Yeates and Serena Trowbridge (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 35–53. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-019

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will rectify this through an exploration of how houses construct and reflect masculinities in Morris’s poem: particularly, the ways in which interactions between domestic and natural environments affect masculinity. As Carl Phelpstead has argued, Old Norse-Icelandic literature “attracted an unprecedented level of interest in Victorian Britain” and this has accordingly received significant critical attention.⁶ Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung is a reworking of narratives found in the Poetic Edda and Vǫlsunga saga. ⁷ In 1868, after meeting Eiríkr Magnússon, who taught him Old Norse, Morris embarked on a series of joint translations with him, which included Vǫlsunga saga in 1870.⁸ Theirs was the first English translation of Vǫlsunga saga, to which was added several poems from the Poetic Edda. ⁹ Morris takes a different path from many of his contemporaries who were interested in Norse gods, as he is almost solely concerned with the heroic poems (and did not publish his renditions of the mythological poems).¹⁰ Yet Morris was clearly dissatisfied with merely translating the Poetic Edda and Vǫlsunga saga and so he published Sigurd the Volsung, a reworking of the narrative into an epic

6 Carl Phelpstead, “Eddas, Sagas, and Victorians,” in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, ed. Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 271–88, at 271. For further discussions of Victorian interest in Old Norse-Icelandic literature see, for example, Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2000); Heather O’Donoghue, English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Ian Felce, William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018); Heather O’Donoghue, “Representing Icelandic Saga Narrative for Victorian Readers,” in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, ed. Parker and Wagner, 616–31. 7 The sole manuscript witness for the Poetic Edda, the Codex Regius (GKS 2365 4to), is dated to around 1270; see Joseph Harris, “Eddic Poetry,” in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide, ed. Carol Clover (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 68–156. Vǫlsunga saga also only has one manuscript witness, NKS 1824 b 4to, which is dated to around 1400; see R. G. Finch, “Introduction,” in The Saga of the Volsungs, ed. and trans. R. G. Finch (London: Nelson, 1965), ix. 8 See J. N. Swannell, “William Morris as an Interpreter of Old Norse,” Saga-Book 15 (1957–1961): 365–82, at 368–70. 9 The first of these translations appears within the text, while the rest appear in an appendix. Morris also uses material from Reginsmál and Sigrdrífumál (two poems from the heroic section of the Poetic Edda) in the text. 10 See O’Donoghue, Old Norse Myth, 148 and David Ashurst, “Eddic Myth, Victorian Values: The Popularisation of Old Norse Mythology in Britain, 1837 to 1876,” in Sang an Ægir: Nordische Mythen um 1900, ed. Florian Hesch and Katja Schulz (Heidelberg: Universitä tsverlag Winter, 2009), 45–71, at 65; O’Donoghue comments on “themes perhaps especially congenial to Victorian authors, for example, the conflict and continuity between Old Norse paganism and Christianity” (O’Donoghue, “Representing Saga Narrative,” 618).

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poem.¹¹ Morris also provides an alternative approach to vocabulary choice from that of other Victorians, in both his translations and Sigurd the Volsung. As John Kennedy has explained, in relation to Morris’s translations of the sagas, Morris does not so much offer an archaic version of English as one that is Icelandicized.¹² This linguistic mixing is typical of Morris’s refusal to locate the poem in a single time or geography, instead including elements from several. Such hybridity increases the ability for this text to offer different conceptions of identities to those of Victorian Britain in the 1870s, and to explore different ways in which humans might relate to their environments. Nevertheless, the alterations that Morris makes to the legend relate to the semiotics of his contemporary society, particularly in his focus on architecture.

Homes and Identity Sigurd the Volsung begins with an account of a building, and indeed this first section is entitled “Of the dwelling of King Volsung, and the wedding of Signy his daughter” (1). The chapter titles more commonly refer to the events that will occur in each section, so it is revealing that the emphasis at the outset (and also in chapters 1.3, 1.9, 3.3, 4.5) is placed on a house. This accentuation establishes the need for the implied audience to pay attention to characters’ dwellings; as David Ashurst comments, this opening is “particularly impressive among the many evocative descriptions” in the text.¹³ This focus reflects contemporary concerns; in her exploration of the connections between houses and identity, Andrea Tange argues that “through careful attention to the interplay between the physical space and the identities contained within, […] British middle-class identity from the 1830s through the 1870s was clearly architectural.”¹⁴ Indeed, John Tosh has argued against notions of the home as a purely feminine space, clearly demonstrat-

11 David Ashurst, “William Morris and the Volsungs,” in Old Norse Made New: Essays on the Postmedieval Reception of Old Norse Literature and Culture, ed. David Clark and Carl Phelpstead (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2007), 43–61, at 43. 12 John Kennedy, Translating the Sagas: Two Hundred Years of Challenge and Response (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). 13 Ashurst, “Morris and the Volsungs,” 54. 14 Andrea Tange, Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature and the Victorian Middle Classes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 5–6. Wendy Parkins similarly addresses the ways in which Morris’s Red House constructs the identities of its inhabitants; see her “Feeling at Home: Gender and Creative Agency at Red House,” Journal of Victorian Culture 15, no. 1 (2010): 61–81.

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ing the ways in which Victorian houses produce conceptions of masculinity.¹⁵ As this essay will establish, these ideals of a man’s responsibility for his home and occupants, and the links between home and masculinity, are expressed in Sigurd the Volsung. The opening lines of Sigurd the Volsung demonstrate that both architecture and gender identities are central aspects of this rewriting: There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old; Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold; Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors; Earls’ wives were the weaving-women, queens’ daughters strewed its floors. (1)

References to nobility and precious metals raise the status of the building but entirely erase the role of lower-class workers. It is also notable that the house is described solely as a “dwelling of Kings”—the expected female presence in a domestic environment is also effaced. From the outset, the focus is on aristocratic men. When female characters are acknowledged, they are depicted in a very different role to male characters—connected to decorating the interiors rather than creation and protection. The built environment prioritizes certain identities. Ayona Datta has observed the relationship between construction and masculinity in the twenty-first century; describing how “a deeply masculine act of building” can validate the identity of men in opposition to those who merely buy a home.¹⁶ Similarly, in Sigurd the Volsung, appropriate male involvement in a house is connected to assembly, even for aristocrats. Further details of Volsung’s house emphasize its fine décor and exceptionality. Volsung himself is not described at all at this point, so is knowable only through his home.¹⁷ He is the sole named occupant, and thus positioned as the single inhabitant of significance (once again reducing the association of women with domestic environments as he lives there with his wife Hljóð), and thus as remarkable as the house. I have written elsewhere about the establishment of a hegemonic heroic masculinity in the Old Norse-Icelandic versions of the Völsung legend (in other words, heroic masculinity is depicted as the ideal identity for male characters, at the same time as other kinds of masculinities are marginalized); the opening

15 John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 16 Ayona Datta, “Building Differences: Material Geographies of Home(s) among Polish Builders in London,” Transactions – Institute of British Geographers 33, no. 4 (2008): 518–31, at 529. 17 Indeed, the only direct description of Volsung in the first few pages of the text is spoken by Siggeir, and so is likely to be unreliable because of the portrayal of his character as deceitful.

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of Sigurd the Volsung also endorses this, such as through mention of “wall-hung shields” (1).¹⁸ In Vǫlsunga saga, heroic masculinity is countered with chivalry. Throughout Sigurd the Volsung heroic masculinity is interrogated as well as legitimized—and offset against what Ingrid Hanson calls a focus on “a recognition of the inadequacies of life and the willingness to both endure them and take action to change them.”¹⁹ Nevertheless, heroic masculinity retains much of its hegemonic power in Sigurd the Volsung. Homes do not always confer individual identities. Later in the text, Elf accepts Hiordis, Sigmund’s widow, into his home and she gives birth to Sigurd. On hearing the news, Elf remarks that “great hath our dwelling become” (64) and this sentiment is echoed by the female announcers. The prowess of a male character confers a collective identity onto the house and its male and female inhabitants. Ironically, although it is a connection with heroic masculinity which produces approbation for the home, the actual praiseworthy event here is childbirth. Domestic environments, however, are repeatedly portrayed as important for male characters. When Sigmund defeats Siggeir, he and his retinue’s “hearts are fulfilled of joyance” (42) to return to the Volsung family home. They feel a sense of belonging to the house, which again establishes a collective identity—indeed, they are depicted as sharing a single emotion, thought, and verbal expression. Nonetheless, Sigmund’s son, Sinfiotli, seems dissatisfied with a life of family domesticity and travels “wide in the world” (48) to gain fame in battle. This illustrates the complex relationship between home and masculinity, as the demands of heroic masculinity dictate that a man must prove himself outside of the domestic sphere. Tange argues that men could “inhabit potentially conflicting roles without being hypocritical, since different aspects of [their] identity would be clearly associated with different spaces.”²⁰ In Sigurd the Volsung, battles that take place in homes lead to the defeat of the occupier who does not exhibit heroic behavior (such as those involving Siggeir and Atli) indicating the tension between domesticity and combat. Indeed, a home ideally provides a retreat from war. Although Lymdale is initially described as belonging to Brynhild, rather than her father Heimir, the house is adorned with “hangings” (134) of masculine feats and heroic endeavors. These wall decorations depict both the past and “deeds yet to be” (134)—indicating the enduring nature of heroic masculinity, but also

18 See Jessica Clare Hancock, “‘That Which a Hand Gives a Hand or a Foot Gives a Foot’: Male Kinship Obligations in the Heroic Poetic Edda and Völsunga saga,” in Masculinities in Old Norse Literature, ed. Gareth Lloyd Evans and Jessica Clare Hancock (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020), 217–36. 19 Hanson, “The Parameters of Manliness,” 39. 20 Tange, Architectural Identities, 137.

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that it is constructed rather than a reflection of reality. Moreover, weaving is a woman’s occupation in the text. Female characters will have constructed these images of heroic masculinity and thus have some control over its depiction and endorsement, disrupting overt power relationships. This is despite the text diminishing female characters’ presence from the Old Norse-Icelandic versions of the narrative.²¹ If we accept Ian Felce’s argument that the key motivation throughout the text is that “characters are inspired to subordinate their private desires to the glory of the popular narrative in which their lives play a small but integral part,” then perhaps these kinds of constructions of masculinity, such as through weaving, are more crucial than they might initially seem.²² Hanson argues that, in Sigurd the Volsung, “manliness is neither solely a matter of essential individual identity nor the orderly, ordering characteristic of the naturally ruling race or class, but rather a shifting, performative identity.”²³ This indicates that an association with heroic masculinity is insufficient; it must be continually produced through acts of heroism, undermining its production through representations in a building. To explore this potential opposition, I will now address the ways in which the built environment relates to abject or marginalized masculinities—those masculine identities which are portrayed as undesirable.

Abject Masculinities Siggeir’s house is portrayed in a single descriptor, “high-built” (16). His lack of heroic masculinity (he is explicitly described as avoiding battle) is reflected by the near absence of his house, which becomes almost invisible, with no protection or support for his “high-seat” (16)—and indeed, later it is destroyed completely. The extent to which heroic masculinity can be constructed by a character’s abode may be questionable, yet a home without this function is unworthy of attention. In contrast, Regin, another character not portrayed as having a heroic masculinity, is depicted as having a prominent role in the assembly of his family abode. Unlike in Sigurd the Volsung’s opening lines, however, where construction work was depicted in a positive way, Regin’s blacksmithing is described as “the craft that createth a semblance, and fails of the heart’s desire” (76). Here the nature of manufactured

21 I have previously explored the idea of a female control of narrative in relation to the Old NorseIcelandic versions of the legend; see Jessica Clare Hancock, “Beyond Sorrow and Swords: Gender in British Rewritings of the Volsung Legend” (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2015), 37–38. 22 Felce, Morris and the Icelandic Sagas, 140. 23 Hanson, “The Parameters of Manliness,” 46.

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objects as simulacra is exposed, troubling the connections between identity and the built environment. Indeed, when the narrative is focalized on Regin, the consequences of physical labor are also revealed: I toiled and I toiled; and fair grew my father’s house; But writhen and foul were the hands that had made it glorious; And the love of women left me, and the fame of sword and shield. (76)

Sigurd the Volsung’s opening describes production that is detached from material reality. In contrast, corporeality is clearly expressed here; Regin’s body becomes damaged in direct opposition to the glory of the house he constructs. What is more, his labor leads to the loss of battle proficiency and thus heroic masculinity, as well as the affirmation of his masculinity through heterosexuality. This creates a division between men in terms of status and occupation; figures of authority who can choose to create their own house have their heroic masculinity affirmed by their dwelling, but the men who construct buildings for others are subject to an abject masculinity—the kind of masculinity that is condemned within the text. The grandeur of higher-status men’s abodes comes at the cost of men of lower standing and who are associated with different identities (given both Regin’s supernatural status and abject masculinity). Yet any sympathy generated for Regin is short-lived given the negative portrayal of his character, particularly in his intended betrayal of Sigurd. The actuality of house building is either erased from the text or obscured through a connection to less illustrious characters. Fafnir is possibly the most problematic male character in Sigurd the Volsung. His sparsely-described house traverses boundaries between earth and “the heavens” (117) and between overground and underground—corresponding to the positioning of Fafnir’s identity between dragon and human. Sigurd the Volsung develops the description from Vǫlsunga saga to portray an entire house “of unwrought iron fashioned” (117). This contrasts with the precious metals used in other houses, despite Fafnir’s possession of a hoard of fine objects. Whereas ornate surroundings encourage admiration, iron conceals and protects. The Niblungs’ house, which accommodates inhabitants who murder their brother-in-law, is also characterized by its fortifications. Such a defensive structure emphasizes a house’s potential vulnerability, constructing its inhabitants as fearful rather than confident and hospitable. Atli, a similarly duplicitous character, has a house with a “long white wall” (274) and “high-built guarded gateways” (274). The building is designed to both intimidate strangers and protect its inhabitants.²⁴ Its fortifications are accom24 The portrayal of the defensive nature of Atli’s hall is present in Atlakviða (st. 14).

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panied by “glittering spear-heads” (274), producing a more aggressive exterior than the Niblungs’ abode, which appears solely concerned with defense. These houses are occupied by characters who act unethically and against an honorable code of warfare; dwellings which focus on defense indicate the absence of heroic masculinity. The further description of Atli’s house emphasizes its uninviting nature. It is a “huge, dim” (276) hall and “but little daylight toucheth the walls” (276) in a further exclusion—this time of the natural world. The next section will examine more closely the relationships between the built and ecological environment expressed in this text, and the implications for masculinities.

Nature and Domestic Environments Not all homes in Sigurd the Volsung fortify themselves against nature. The distinguishing feature of Volsung’s dwelling is the Branstock tree: So therein withal was a marvel and a glorious thing to see, For amidst of its midmost hall-floor sprang up a mighty tree, […] And when men tell of Volsung, they call that war-duke’s tree, That crownèd stem, the Branstock; and so was it told unto me. (1–2)

The tree is described much more briefly in Vǫlsunga saga. ²⁵ The presence of a living tree in the house could signify a harmonious mingling of the ecological and built environments, revealing the falsity of an opposition between nature and culture; no home can ever exclude all living creatures. Although Ashurst reads the text as representing the desire for unequivocal boundaries, here a tree appears to coexist harmoniously within a domestic dwelling.²⁶ This image connotes a possibility for a posthuman identity without clear limits, corresponding to late-Victorian concerns over animal rights, and perhaps providing an answer to Deborah Amerson and Elena Past who ask “where does the posthuman dwell? At what address? And in what type of house?”²⁷ The Branstock is also the site of an apparent

25 Finch, Saga of the Volsungs, 4. Finch notes that, as an apple tree, it is a fertility symbol (connected to the apple which is ingested to make Volsung’s mother pregnant—a story which occurs in Vǫlsunga saga but not Sigurd the Volsung); see Saga of the Volsungs, 4–5. The name change in Sigurd the Volsung deemphasizes further the link to fertility with “bran” replacing “barn” (child). 26 Ashurst, “Morris and the Volsungs,” 57. 27 Deborah Amerson and Elena Past, “Gadda’s ‘Pasticciaccio’ and the Knotted Posthuman Household,” Relations beyond Anthropocentrism 4, no. 1 (2016): 65–79, at 65. Martin Weiner comments on

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test of strength, in a “sword-in-the-tree” scene which is much extended from Vǫlsunga saga. The sword, however, comes out easily for Sigmund—he is selected rather than successful. It is not clear that Odin has enchanted the sword to produce this outcome; it could be read as the tree making the decision. This possible autonomy calls further attention to the alleged divide between the human and other biological organisms, which material ecocritics would describe as political rather than actual.²⁸ Indeed, Sigurd the Volsung, like the Poetic Edda and Vǫlsunga saga, often uses tree imagery to describe male characters. Nonetheless, part-way through the Branstock’s description, the narrator reproduces a phrase from Vǫlsunga saga, “svá er sagt” (“so it is said,” 4). This comment challenges the veracity of this account, which is further weakened by the change of the tree’s name in this text (it is Barnstokkr in Vǫlsunga saga) demonstrating an alteration to the story; a symbiotic relationship between a tree and a house is undermined through association with fictionality. The tree can also be interpreted as a phallic symbol, penetrating the house, unsettling the built environment. Indeed, the wailing wild hawks indicate disruption. If the tree is a symbol of masculine power, and the house is closely connected to Volsung’s identity, the tree’s presence may detract from Volsung’s own heroic masculinity. Rosie Cox has argued that “unhomeyness is the feeling produced when such a sense of belonging is absent or disrupted, perhaps through the threat of displacement.”²⁹ This vision of nature intruding into the built environment in an uncontrolled manner suggests the potential for unhomeyness. Later in the text, after escaping from the wolf which kills his brothers, Sigmund takes up residence in a cave, a dwelling even more closely associated with the natural environment. Nevertheless, it is filled with gold and “wargear he gat him enough from the slaying of earls of men” (24), expressing his heroic masculinity through the evidence of successful violent attacks. Indeed, the suggestion that Sigmund has been fighting to gain materials to decorate the interior of his home contradicts Felce’s assertion that “the deeds of these characters [Sigmund and Sinfiotli] are coloured with a more abstract idealised benevolence than the

the growing concern over violence towards animals in the Victorian era, indicated by the establishment of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824; see his Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 13. 28 See, for example, Joni Adamson, “Source of Life: Avatar, Amazonia, and an Ecology of Selves,” in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 253–68. 29 Rosie Cox, “What Are Homes Made Of? Building Materials, DIY and the Homeyness of Homes,” Home Cultures, 13, no. 1 (2016): 63–82, at 64.

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frequently materialistic endeavours of the saga’s protagonists (who are adept at plundering).”³⁰ Sigmund is also depicted as forging metal to embellish his home. Yet this trade links him more clearly to the supernatural “smithying folk” (24) such as the abject Regin. Sigmund is temporarily cast out from society, after his family is defeated by Siggeir, and this status is reflected in his dwelling—moreover, the insistence on the display of his martial success is ironic given he is hiding in a cave from his brother-in-law, further weakening this link between interior home décor and heroic masculinity. Despite this, there are repeated attempts to express this gender identity through domestic environments. Even Sigmund’s final residence, his grave mound, juxtaposes natural elements with man-made battle apparel. After his death, his family home and the Branstock tree are both described as “forlorn” (58) and mourning for their former occupant—in this expression of sentience, the boundaries of the human are more obviously transgressed. But although the tree was once able to construct identities, it is cut down and made into a boat. This new form is seen as positive, giving it “a dear name” (58), and bestowing “a fame that groweth not old” (58) upon the tree. Mastery of the natural world is represented as beneficial and the tree’s posthuman identity is obliterated. Gripir’s house, “on a crag from the mountain reft” (79), continues the interrogation of distinct boundaries between humans and nature. “The winds from the heart of the mountains searched every chamber through” (79), proving an inescapable presence which penetrates the most intimate areas of the domestic environment. His visitors are “wild ernes” and “vultures” (79) rather than people. Florence Boos has argued that depictions of the love of nature in Morris’s work have “deeply ‘feminine’ qualities.”³¹ Just as with Sigmund, however, other aspects of Gripir’s masculinity are expressed to counteract this, such as his “sweeping beard nigh met / The floor” (79) and his position as a wealthy ruler. Gripir lives amongst animals, even “some that are men-folk’s terror” (79). This could demonstrate his bravery but also alludes to the benefits of a symbiotic relationship with nature rather than one of mastery; or in Rosie Braidotti’s term, “mutual codependence.”³² This is demonstrated fleetingly, however, and only for a minor character—for the male protagonists, a reliance on heroic masculinity is retained.

30 Felce, Morris and the Icelandic Sagas, 137. 31 Florence Boos, “Gender Division and Political Allegory in The Sundering Flood,” Journal of PreRaphaelite Studies 1 (1992): 12–23, at 22. 32 Rosie Braidotti, “The Politics of Life Itself and New Ways of Dying,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 201–20, at 214.

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Reidmar, like Gripir, sits in a whale-tooth chair but his is “wrought smooth with never a flaw” (78); nature is tamed and controlled. His house is a simulacrum of nature with its “forest of its pillars” (78) which reflect the “mirrored boughs of the garden” (78) rather than including them. Indeed, Reidmar boasts of taking what he wants from the environment, exploiting it just as he misuses his son. Reidmar is clearly distanced from heroic masculinity—the narrator declares that “never a sword was before him” (78). Nonetheless, he offers a clear challenge to the gods, questioning the transferability of their status of “mighty men at home” (79) to a new context. Here the tension previously observed in the domestic construction of heroic masculinity is openly articulated—it is necessarily always posterior, celebrating past deeds which have now been renounced in favor of a focus on home and family. Yet this explicit interrogation of the links between domestic environments and heroic masculinity comes from a character who is greedy, deceitful, and who betrays his family—all traits that are severely condemned throughout the text. Sara Ahmed argues that “homes do not stay the same as the space which is simply the familiar. There is movement and dislocation within the very forming of homes as complex and contingent spaces of inhabitance.”³³ Whilst repeated attempts are made throughout Sigurd the Volsung to use domestic environments to construct heroic masculinity, this ever-present threat of intrusion into a home calls into question the stability of any identity it confers.

Conclusion A male character’s home reveals aspects of his identity and status in Sigurd the Volsung. The close connection between male figures and their houses reflects the importance of domesticity to middle-class masculinity in the mid to late-Victorian period.³⁴ At certain points in the text, glimpses of the cost of these productions of a heroic masculinity are visible—in the erasure of figures who do not conform to this identity, whether through class, gender, or status as non-human, posthuman, or supernatural figures. The problematic nature of the construction of a heroic masculinity through simulacra found within a domestic environment is also exposed. Yet alternative identities that acknowledge a mutual codependence between humans and the built or natural environment are rarely endorsed and

33 Sara Ahmed, “Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (1999): 329–47, at 340. 34 See Tosh, A Man’s Place, 30–43.

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interrogations of the production of heroic masculinity through the home are undermined. The most “natural” house in the text belongs to a female character; it is Brynhild’s mound, where she is imprisoned after interfering in a battle against Odin. The mound is both a site of proven heroic masculinity (Sigurd’s, in being able to penetrate the protective surroundings to “find” her), and undecidable gender identity (Sigurd the Volsung retains the scene from Vǫlsunga saga where Brynhild is initially mistaken for a man). Both the natural environment and a woman are portrayed as claimable by a male colonizer for his own purpose, perhaps fittingly for a text that was published during the age of the British Empire and shortly after the first Arctic expedition; indeed many ecofeminists have argued that the domination of women and nature are not separable.³⁵ In the scene on Brynhild’s mound, Felce argues that Brynhild is portrayed as determined and demanding rather than vulnerable, in contrast to her depiction in Vǫlsunga saga, and Hanson describes her as “beautiful and active, warrior and woman,” accentuating her potential connection to a heroic masculinity.³⁶ Yet it is not the characteristics of Brynhild, but rather the adherence to many of the subsequent events from the Old Norse-Icelandic versions of this legend, that reveal the deficiencies in the attitude to women, and the nature of discovery and exploitation expressed within Sigurd the Volsung. The attempted appropriation of the male explorer fails; the mound does not become Sigurd’s home, and Brynhild does not become his wife. Moreover, Sigurd’s disturbance of Brynhild sets in motion many of the tragic events of the text, just as the abuse of Signy, in forcing her to marry against her will, instigates earlier misfortune: to dominate and forcefully possess is to invite tragedy. Perhaps behind this tale is an alternative utopia, where nature and woman are left alone (which would not, of course, involve Brynhild waiting endlessly to be discovered, but rather her not being trapped there in the first place). In Sigurd the Volsung, the continued accentuation of heroic masculinity, particularly in the context of domestic environments, detracts from a potential harmony with nature, and female equality; only if masculinity is fully reimagined might the urge for mastery be evaded.

35 See, for example, Karen Warren, “The Power and the Promise of Ecofeminism,” Environmental Ethics 12 (1990): 125–46; Chaia Heller, Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1999). 36 Felce, Morris and the Icelandic Sagas, 144; Hanson, “The Parameters of Manliness,” 48.

Matthew Townend

Chapter 15 Tolkien and Mirkwood “Well, here is Mirkwood!” said Gandalf. “The greatest of the forests of the Northern world. I hope you like the look of it.”¹

This essay will explore J. R. R. Tolkien’s Mirkwood, described by Gandalf as “the greatest of the forests of the Northern world” and by Tolkien himself as “the famous forest of Mirkwood” in the advertising text which he prepared for The Hobbit. ² These two phrases seem to indicate that we are being invited to identify the Mirkwood of The Hobbit with a real or pre-existing place. To be precise, we are being invited to regard the Mirkwood of The Hobbit as being the same forest as the Mirkwood (Myrkviðr) of Old Norse myth and legend (and it is worth noting that the name “Middle-earth” is not used in The Hobbit, with the lands of the story being called instead “the Northern world” or simply “the North”).³ In this essay, I want to examine the relationship between Tolkien’s Mirkwood and the Myrkviðr of Old Norse texts, and to reveal some of the medievalist subtleties of the forest that Bilbo ventures into—a suitable subject, I hope, to offer to the honorand of this volume, who has made such important contributions to the study of both Old Norse literature and its modern afterlife. What follows is by no means an exhaustive examination of the many influences that went into the making (and meaning) of Tolkien’s Mirkwood. I will focus only on the Old Norse element in its creation, and so will have to leave out, by necessity, the contributions made by various other forest traditions—most importantly, the forests of medieval romance (Arthurian knights on wandering quests), the forests of fairy tales (Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and so on), the forests of modern fantasy (in the works of George MacDonald and especially William Morris), and the forests of children’s literature (above all, the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows, a major influence on Tolkien’s book). These are all present, in one way or another, in the Mirkwood of The Hobbit. And I am by no means the first person to examine even the more narrow topic of Tolkien and Myrkviðr;

1 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit; or There and Back Again (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), 119. 2 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Annotated Hobbit, ed. Douglas Anderson, rev. ed. (London: HarperCollins, 2003), 13. 3 See, for example, Tolkien, The Hobbit, 51, 241, 246. See also Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 162–64. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-020

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but there are things still to say on the subject, especially when one places The Hobbit in the context of Tolkien’s other writings from the same period, and also in the modern tradition of Mirkwood which Tolkien inherited from William Morris.⁴ The compound place-name Myrkviðr occurs six times, in four different poems, in the Poetic Edda, as follows:⁵ (1) Lokasenna 42/5 (“when the sons of Muspell ride over Mirkwood [Myrkvið yfir]”) (2) Vǫlundarkviða 1/1 (“the maidens flew from the south across Mirkwood [Myrkvið í gǫgnum]”) (3) Helgakviða Hundingsbana I 51/6 (“let the bridled horses gallop to the battle, […] to Mirkwood [til Myrkviðar]”) (4) Atlakviða 3/4 (“Atli has sent me here, through Mirkwood the unknown [Myrkvið inn ókunna]”), 5/8 (“that famous forest which men call Mirkwood [Myrkvið]”), and 13/4 (“the brave men spurred the bit-gnashing horses […] through unknown Mirkwood [Myrkvið inn ókunna]”). The noun phrase myrkr viðr (“mirky wood”) also occurs three times in the Poetic Edda, in three different poems, as follows:⁶ (1) Vǫlundarkviða 3/8 (“the maidens hastened through Mirkwood/the mirky wood [á myrkvan við]”) (2) Oddrúnargráta 25/3 (“Atli sent his messengers through Mirkwood/the mirky wood [um myrkvan við] to test me out”) (3) Rígsþula 35/2 (“He rode from there through Mirkwood/the mirky wood [myrkvan við]”) Thus a total of six different Eddic poems reference either Myrkviðr or myrkr viðr, and the examples in Vǫlundarkviða and (above all) Oddrúnargráta imply that we

4 See Gilliver, Marshall, and Weiner, Ring of Words, 165; Jonathan Evans, “Mirkwood,” in J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, ed. Michael D. C. Drout (London: Routledge, 2006), 429–30; Marco R. S. Post, “Perilous Wanderings through the Enchanted Forest: The Influence of the Fairy-Tale Tradition on Mirkwood in Tolkien’s The Hobbit,” Mythlore 33, no. 1 (2014): 67–84; and John Garth, The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien: The Places that Inspired Middle-earth (London: Frances Lincoln, 2020), 122–26. For Tolkien’s own comments, see J. R. R. Tolkien, “Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings,” in A Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared Lobdell (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), 168–216, at 203–4, and Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 369–70 (no. 289). 5 Eddukvæði, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, 2 vols., Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 2014), 1:416, 428 (capitalization added), 2:257, 372, 373, 375. 6 Eddukvæði, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, 1:429, 455, 2:369.

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should normally treat the noun phrase myrkr viðr as a variant form of the placename Myrkviðr rather than as a different expression altogether. Elsewhere in Old Norse poetry, Myrkviðr occurs a number of times in verses preserved in the fornaldarsögur, either as a place-name or a descriptive compound. It features, for example, as part of a snake-kenning in a verse in Ragnars saga loðbrókar (hringr myrkviðar, “the ring of the dusky forest”) and also as a disputed reading in a verse in Ketils saga hœngs (“I often roamed alone […] through many dark forests [myrkviðu]”).⁷ But most important are the two verse-citations of the place-name in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, one of which refers to “that excellent forest which is called Myrkviðr” and the other (in an emended reading) to an occasion on which “all Myrkviðr’s heath is scorched.”⁸ The prose of Hervarar saga narrates (among much else) the story of the conflict between the Goths and the Huns, and it is Myrkviðr which divides the two peoples: “When this [Hunnish] army came together, they rode through the forest which is called Mirkwood [Myrkviðr], which separates the land of the Huns and the land of the Goths.”⁹ Hervarar saga is not the only Old Norse prose text to refer to a forest called Myrkviðr, but it is by far the most significant; and we should note here that one of the standard modern editions of the saga was produced by Tolkien’s son, Christopher.¹⁰ We can therefore summarize what Old Norse texts have to say about Myrkviðr as follows. First, it is the name of a great forest, sometimes located in the south, and it separates the Goths from the Huns. Second, it is a forest that needs to be crossed or negotiated: a significant proportion of citations involve a preposition of direction (á, í gǫgnum, um, yfir). Third, its possession may be disputed: in Hervarar saga it clearly belongs to the Goths, but in Atlakviða it is potentially within Atli’s power to offer it as a gift (if the statement to this effect in stanza 5 can be taken at face value). And fourth, in some texts, the name is either re-applied to other forests, or is generalized as a forest separating the familiar from the unknown, a perilous barrier that stands in the way (and in Eddic poetry, we may

7 “Ragnars saga loðbrókar,” ed. Rory McTurk, in Poetry in Fornaldarsögur, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross, 2 vols., Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 2:617– 706, at 644–47, and “Ketils saga hœngs,” ed. Beatrice La Farge, in Poetry in Fornaldarsögur, ed. Clunies Ross, 2:549–96, at 572–73. 8 “Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks,” ed. Hannah Burrows, in Poetry in Fornaldarsögur, ed. Clunies Ross, 1:367–487, at 463, 475 (italics added). 9 Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, ed. G. Turville-Petre (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1956), 60. 10 The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, ed. and trans. Christopher Tolkien (London: Nelson, 1960). See also Christopher Tolkien, “The Battle of the Goths and the Huns,” Saga-Book of the Viking Society 14 (1953–1957): 141–63, and “Introduction,” in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, ed. Turville-Petre, xi– xx.

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also observe, the barrier of Myrkviðr is sometimes paired up as an obstacle with [úrig] fjǫll—“[misty] mountains”). Modern scholarship has proposed a number of historical forests or possible locations to be identified with the Myrkviðr of Norse tradition, such as the sylva Hercynia or “Hercynian Forest” mentioned by classical authors, which (according to Caesar) took at least sixty days to cross from west to east.¹¹ The rendering of Old Norse Myrkviðr as Modern English “Mirkwood” is an uncontroversial, element-for-element translation. The Modern English form “Mirkwood” does not originate with Tolkien: his usage is pre-dated not only by translators of the Poetic Edda (of course), but also by at least three creative writers, all of whom, like Tolkien, were in their different ways both students of Old Norse and also pioneers of romance or fantasy: Walter Scott, William Morris, and E. R. Eddison. The brief occurrences of the name in Scott (in Waverley, 1814) and in Eddison (in Styrbiorn the Strong, 1926) need only to be noted in passing; but the precedent of William Morris is much more important.¹² In The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, Morris’s long poem of 1876, Myrkviðr is mentioned frequently, but here it is Englished as a compound noun, “the mirk-wood,” rather than as a capitalized place-name, “Mirkwood” (so, for example: “I have ridden the scorching highways, I have ridden the mirk-wood blind”; or “Three days the Niblung warriors the ways of the mirk-wood ride”).¹³ There are other aspects to Morris’s response to Myrkviðr in Sigurd the Volsung which should be noted. One is that (influenced by Völsunga saga, which he had earlier translated) he places “the mirk-wood” next to a sea, and another is that he locates it on the Hunnish side of the sea, not the Gothic, and so presents the forest as being, at least at that time, in Atli’s possession.¹⁴ We should also observe that, in Sigurd the Volsung, Morris tends to use the term “Goths” not so much as a designation for the Gothic tribes of recorded history, but rather as a

11 De Bello Gallico, VI. 25. See further Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 83; Garth, The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien, 123. 12 See Walter Scott, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 19, and E. R. Eddison, Styrbiorn the Strong, ed. Paul Edmund Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 213. On the name “Mirkwood” in Waverley, see John V. Orth, “Mirkwood,” Mythlore 38, no. 1 (2019): 51–53. On Scott and Old Norse, see Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 60–83, and on Eddison and Old Norse, see Matthew Townend, “E. R. Eddison’s Egil’s Saga: Translation and Scholarship in Inter-War Old Northernism,” Saga-Book 42 (2018): 87–124. 13 William Morris, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, 5th ed. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896), 290, 309. 14 See, for example, Morris, Sigurd the Volsung, 277, 286, 292, 307–9.

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general term for all Scandinavians or followers of Odin. This usage derives from the notion that the Goths (as Jordanes claimed) originally issued from Scandinavia; but it also connects, very importantly, with the whole notion of “Gothic liberty”— that is, the idea that the Germanic peoples of northern Europe were particular champions of freedom (often in antagonism to Roman hierarchy and empire-building).¹⁵ Hence for Morris—not only as a revolutionary socialist, but also as a disciple of John Ruskin—Iceland was “a Holy Land,” as he believed that “the rugged volcanic mass [of Iceland] has become the casket which has preserved the records of the traditions and religion of the Gothic tribe,” those beliefs and virtues which he associated with “Gothic” art and liberty.¹⁶ This is an idea of profound significance for the afterlife of Mirkwood. As Ian Felce has observed, although Sigurd the Volsung was published more than ten years before the appearance of the first of Morris’s late “prose romances,” it also stands as the point of beginning for those romances, in its creation of an immersive “secondary world” (since for Morris much of the intervening period was taken up with political campaigning rather than poetry and fiction).¹⁷ In the first of these romances, Morris returns to Goths, and to Mirkwood, in a more historical and less legendary manner than in Sigurd the Volsung, with a strong preference this time for Hervarar saga’s perspective. The House of the Wolfings (1889) begins as follows: The tale tells that in times long past there was a dwelling of men beside a great wood. Before it lay a plain, not very great, but which was, as it were, an isle in the sea of woodland, since even when you stood on the flat ground, you could see trees everywhere in the offing. […] That Folk had made an island amidst of the Mirkwood, and established a home there, and upheld it with manifold toil too long to tell of. And from the beginning this clearing in the wood they called the Mid-mark.¹⁸

15 See, for example, Chris Brooks, “Ruskin and the Politics of Gothic,” in Ruskin and Architecture, ed. Rebecca Daniels and Geoff Brandwood (Reading: Spire Books, 2003), 165–87. 16 The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris, ed. Eugene D. LeMire (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969), 181 (“The Early Literature of the North – Iceland”). 17 Ian Felce, William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), 149–50, 168– 70. 18 William Morris, A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark, Written in Prose and in Verse (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1889), 1–2. On “Mirkwood” in The House of the Wolfings, see T. A. Shippey, “Goths and Huns: The Rediscovery of the Northern Cultures in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Medieval Legacy: A Symposium, ed. Andreas Haarder (Odense: Odense University Press, 1982), 51–69, at 58–62; reprinted in Tom Shippey, Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien, Cormarë 11 (Zurich: Walking Tree Press, 2007), 115–36.

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The House of the Wolfings tells of the resistance of the Goths who dwell in Mirkwood to the encroachment of the Roman Empire; and Morris’s imagined Goths have Old Norse personal names—Thiodolf, Arinbiorn, Gisli, Geirmund—to accentuate the connection (in Morris’s political imagination) between Gothic Mirkwood and the Iceland of the sagas. Tolkien’s deep familiarity with (at least some of ) Morris’s writings is wellknown, and Sigurd the Volsung and The House of the Wolfings stand near the top of the list.¹⁹ Sigurd the Volsung is one of the few works of modern literature that we know Tolkien taught as an academic: he gave a whole term of lectures on Morris’s poem in 1941.²⁰ As for The House of the Wolfings, Tolkien acquired a copy of this while still an undergraduate, and he later read it aloud to his children (probably around the time when he was also telling or reading them the story of The Hobbit). The clearings and buildings of “Woodmen” on the Wilderland map of The Hobbit seem a nod to Morris’s “clearing in the wood they called the Mid-mark.” So let us return now to The Hobbit itself. Tolkien’s children’s classic represents the high-point of his creative engagement with Old Norse, and it was composed after a decade of teaching the language and literature, first at the University of Leeds, then at the University of Oxford. (Although it was published in 1937, Tolkien seems to have written The Hobbit in the period 1930–1932, though its date of composition cannot be established definitively.²¹) We have a good knowledge of the syllabuses that Tolkien taught, and a good understanding of the ways in which Old Norse left its mark on Tolkien’s creative writing.²² The Hobbit is full of Norse influences and elements, from the obvious (such as the dwarf-names from Vǫluspá, or the shape-shifting from Hrólfs saga kraka) to the more recondite (such as the association between dwarves and stone doors which Vǫluspá also supplied). But what is startling is how, around the time of the composition and then publication

19 See, for example, Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology and Reader’s Guide, rev. ed., 3 vols. (London: HarperCollins, 2017), 2:796–803; Oronzo Cilli, Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist (Edinburgh: Luna Press, 2019), 206–10; Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages (Park Ridge, IL: Word on Fire Academic, 2021), 163–83. 20 Scull and Hammond, J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, 1:266. 21 See John D. Rateliff, The History of The Hobbit, 2 vols. (London: HarperCollins, 2007), 1:xi–xx; Scull and Hammond, J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, 2:511–22. 22 See, for example, Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth, rev. ed. (London: HarperCollins, 2005); Marjorie Burns, Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); J. S. Ryan, Tolkien’s View: Windows into His World, Cormarë 19 (Zurich: Walking Tree Press, 2009), 89–96; Tom Birkett, “Old Norse,” in A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien ed. Stuart Lee (Chichester: Wiley, 2014), 244–58; and many entries in Scull and Hammond, J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide.

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of The Hobbit, Tolkien incorporated Mirkwood—taken above all from the Poetic Edda—into not only his famous children’s book, but also into a sequence of other writings as well. These remained unpublished during his lifetime, but are now available to us, thanks to Christopher Tolkien’s editing of his father’s works. So we can now appreciate the extraordinary manner in which Mirkwood seized Tolkien’s imagination around this time: besides The Hobbit, Mirkwood also features in “The New Lay of Gudrún,” The Fall of Arthur, “King Sheave,” and the Quenta Silmarillion, as well as The Lord of the Rings. “The New Lay of Gudrún” combines with “The New Lay of the Volsungs” to form Tolkien’s attempt at re-telling the story of the second half of the Poetic Edda in modern alliterative verse—sometimes shadowing the original poems closely, sometimes diverging boldly, and sometimes endeavoring both to fill in the gaps and reconcile contradictory accounts.²³ These two “new lays” also, it seems reasonable to suggest, represent Tolkien’s attempt to respond to, or compete with, Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung; Tolkien’s version is in dialogue with both his medieval and Victorian predecessors. “The New Lay of Gudrún,” inevitably, supplies Tolkien’s least innovative treatment of the name and idea of Mirkwood, as he stays close to his Norse sources (“From mighty Mirkwood / came message darkly: / ‘Atli ariseth / armies mustering,’” which is an echo of Atlakviða; or “Goths were there many: / griefs were remembered, / wars in Mirkwood / and wars of old,” which is an echo of Hervarar saga).²⁴ It is not possible to establish precise composition dates for Tolkien’s alliterative poems in this period; but we may take The Fall of Arthur next. Its composition almost certainly dates from after the writing of the main body of The Hobbit, and thus it represents a next step in Tolkien’s ongoing preoccupation with Mirkwood. In the poem we find Arthur’s army campaigning “in Saxon lands” and coming at last “to Mirkwood’s margin under mountain-shadows.”²⁵ This (incomplete) poem attempts an ambitious fusion between Middle English Arthurian poems such as the Alliterative Morte Arthure and the new, inter-war quest for the historical Arthur, in which Tolkien’s Oxford colleague R. G. Collingwood was one of the leading

23 See Tom Shippey, “Tolkien’s Reconstruction of the Legends of Sigurd and Gudrún,” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 291–324; abbreviated version reprinted in Revisiting the Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend, ed. Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington (London: Routledge, 2013), 238–57. 24 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2010), 255, 280. 25 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fall of Arthur, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2013), 17, 19; see also 209, 212.

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figures.²⁶ In most medieval literary treatments of Arthur’s end, the king crosses to continental Europe to fight either against the Emperor of Rome (as in Geoffrey of Monmouth) or against Lancelot (as in Malory); and while he is away, Mordred seizes the throne. But in Tolkien’s historicized version, Arthur is on the continent in order to fight against the Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) tribes who are threatening to invade Britain; and the invocation of the forest of Mirkwood—“the greatest of the forests of the Northern world,” as Gandalf calls it—is an important marker of the location and purpose of Arthur’s struggles. So in The Fall of Arthur, Tolkien inserts Mirkwood into Arthurian legend; in “King Sheave,” he inserts it into Beowulf as well, in his re-imagining of the Scyld “exordium” (as Tolkien called it) which records “the Langobards who long ago / beyond Myrcwudu a mighty realm / and wealth won them in the Welsh countries.”²⁷ The usual uncertainties of dating apply: the poem is associated with Tolkien’s soon abandoned novel The Lost Road (from 1936 or 1937), but the lines above seem to have been additions to the text made in the mid-1940s, when he was working on the related fiction of The Notion Club Papers. ²⁸ The use of “Welsh” to mean “foreign,” and specifically “Roman,” is a straight borrowing from Morris’s practice in The House of the Wolfings (though Tolkien will have known independently the philological grounds for this rendering). What Tolkien is doing with Mirkwood in this passage, though, is notable for three reasons. First, Mirkwood is again being invoked as a barrier or geographical divider, here separating northern Europe from southern Europe. Second, as with The Fall of Arthur, Tolkien is directly inserting a reference to Mirkwood into medieval source-material in which no such reference can be found—namely Beowulf, which never mentions such a forest. And third, most audacious of all, Tolkien is presenting the name of Mirkwood in an Old English form, not Modern English or Old Norse. But in fact, no such form occurs anywhere in Old English texts, so Tolkien is not only inserting Mirkwood into Beowulf; through his linguistic form, he is inserting Mirkwood into the Old English language, and thus implicitly into Anglo-Saxon culture and legend—or indeed, more broadly, he is claiming the memory of Mirkwood for England as well as Scandinavia. Myrcwudu (or Mircwudu in a variant version) is an imagined or reconstructed

26 See R. G. Collingwood and J. N. L. Myres, Roman Britain and the English Settlements, Oxford History of England 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 320–24 (a work in which Collingwood acknowledges Tolkien’s help). 27 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other Writings: Language and Legend before “The Lord of the Rings,” ed. Christopher Tolkien, The History of Middle-earth 5 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), 91. 28 See Tolkien, The Lost Road, 90; J. R. R. Tolkien, Sauron Defeated: The End of the Third Age (The History of the Lord of the Rings Part Four). The Notion Club Papers and The Drowning of Anadûnê, ed. Christopher Tolkien, The History of Middle-earth 9 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1992), 294–95.

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form, existing on the plane of “asterisk-reality” (as Tom Shippey has influentially termed it) and not in attested records.²⁹ In addition to introducing Mirkwood into both Beowulf and Arthurian legend, and having made the journey through Mirkwood such a central feature of The Hobbit, it was perhaps inevitable that Tolkien should also introduce the forest (or at least the name of the forest) into his own “Silmarillion” mythology, where the forest of Dorthonion is conquered by Morgoth and becomes known as “Taur-na-Fuin, which is Mirkwood, and Deldúwath, Deadly Nightshade.”³⁰ This is in the 1930s Quenta Silmarillion, that decade’s main iteration of Tolkien’s Elvish mythology. As usual, the text is hard to date precisely, but its composition followed the previous prose version of the mythology, the Quenta Noldorinwa (which was probably written in 1930), and it seems to have been abandoned when Tolkien turned to the composition of The Lord of the Rings in late 1937. The important point here is not so much the significance of Taur-na-Fuin in Tolkien’s frequently-revised mythology; it is simply that in the 1930s, the name “Mirkwood” gets drawn into Tolkien’s most precious and intimate story-cycle. At some later point, though, this reference to “Mirkwood” was removed from the evolving text of the Quenta Silmarillion, either by Tolkien himself or by his son Christopher as executor and editor, prior to the posthumous publication of a unified text as The Silmarillion in 1977.³¹ The complex relationship between Myrkviðr, Taur-na-Fuin, and the Mirkwood of The Hobbit does, however, require a little more exploration before we can move on. Taur-na-Fuin was originally called Taurfuin (and later became Taur-nu-Fuin), and this dangerous forest existed in Tolkien’s mythology as early as his prototypical Book of Lost Tales, where it is described as a “dark and perilous region,” marked by “glooms.”³² The Book of Lost Tales itself bears conspicuous influence from Old Norse, which Tolkien had studied as an undergraduate only a few years previously, and so it is possible that Myrkviðr may have been one point of origin for the forest Taurfuin, as its Elvish etymology “dark forest” hints.³³ Moreover, it is also possible that in the very earliest stages of composition of The Hobbit,

29 Tolkien, Sauron Defeated, 276; Shippey, Road to Middle-earth, 22–26. 30 Tolkien, The Lost Road, 282. 31 See J. R. R. Tolkien, The War of the Jewels: The Later Silmarillion Part II. The Legends of Beleriand, ed. Christopher Tolkien, The History of Middle-earth 11 (London: HarperCollins, 1994), 239; and J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Allen and Unwin, 1977), 155. 32 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Book of Lost Tales: Part II, ed. Christopher Tolkien, The History of Middleearth 2 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), 34, 78. 33 See J. R. R. Tolkien, The Book of Lost Tales: Part I, ed. Christopher Tolkien, The History of Middleearth 1 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 253, 267.

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Tolkien imagined the forest of Taur-na-Fuin and the forest of Mirkwood (in The Hobbit) as being one and the same.³⁴ However, this idea dropped away as it became clear to Tolkien in the course of writing that The Hobbit was not, after all, to be set in the same lands as the “Silmarillion” (and indeed, the abandonment of this idea seems to pre-date the transference of the name “Mirkwood” from The Hobbit to the Quenta Silmarillion); so, for example, when Tolkien translated names from his “Silmarillion” mythology into Old English, at some point in the 1930s, he rendered Taur-na-Fuin as Nihtsceadwesweald (forest of night shadow), and not as Myrcwudu. ³⁵ In terms of visual representation, though, there was influence from the “Silmarillion” tradition to The Hobbit: when Tolkien was called upon to illustrate the latter book for his publishers, he based his picture of Mirkwood on an earlier one of Taur-na-Fuin.³⁶ Finally, many years later in a short text written in the last few years of his life (“The Disaster of the Gladden Fields”), Tolkien proposed, in a further act of mutual influence, that Taur-nu-Fuin should be the Elvish name for the Mirkwood of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, even though in The Lord of the Rings itself the Elvish name of Mirkwood is given as Taur e-Ndaedelos “forest of the great fear” (no Elvish name occurs in The Hobbit, of course).³⁷ So there is a lot going on here in the entangled—and perhaps unentanglable—relationship between Mirkwood and Taur-na-Fuin. We will come back in a moment to The Lord of the Rings (written 1937–1948, published 1954–1955), but first we should pause to summarize Tolkien’s engagement with the name and idea of Mirkwood in his pre-Lord of the Rings writings. As we have seen, Tolkien’s use of the name in modern fiction is preceded by Morris and (less importantly) Scott and Eddison. With some caveats about dating, we can see that, with the possible exception of “The New Lay of Gudrún,” Tolkien first used the name “Mirkwood” in The Hobbit; and in The Hobbit, Mirkwood seems to be intended as the same forest as in Old Norse texts (“the greatest of the forests of the Northern world”). Similarly, the Mirkwood that appears in The Fall of Arthur and “King Sheave” is clearly the same as the Mirkwood of Old Norse legend, but this is not the case with the deployment of the name in the Quenta Silmarillion, where (in spite of the shared name) we are not invited to identify the Mirkwood

34 See Rateliff, The History of The Hobbit, 1:19–21; Garth, Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien, 122–23. 35 See J. R. R. Tolkien, The Shaping of Middle-earth: The Quenta, the Ambarkanta and the Annals, ed. Christopher Tolkien, The History of Middle-earth 4 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 211. 36 See Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, The Art of The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2011), 74–76. 37 See J. R. R. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980), 281; J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, rev. ed. (London: HarperCollins, 2004), 1134; and Tolkien, The Lost Road, 289 (note by Christopher Tolkien).

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of Tolkien’s mythology (Taur-na-Fuin) with that of Old Norse; rather, the use of the name “Mirkwood” in the Quenta Silmarillion is evidence for the hold that Mirkwood (Norse-derived) had come to exert on Tolkien’s imagination. We should complete this investigation, therefore, by looking at the treatment of Mirkwood in The Lord of the Rings (and also, briefly, in “The Northmen and the Wainriders,” a late, expansionary text published posthumously in Unfinished Tales). As we have seen, in some Old Norse texts (such as Hervarar saga), Mirkwood is a home, and in others (including most Eddic poetry) it is a barrier. William Morris, as we have also seen, prefers the former idea (a home) in The House of the Wolfings, and mostly the latter (a barrier) in Sigurd the Volsung. What Tolkien offers in The Lord of the Rings is an imagined history of how these two very different ideas might have arisen: Tolkien’s proposition, in short, is that the forest was once a home, Greenwood the Great, until Sauron turned it into a perilous barrier, Mirkwood (though for the Elves of Thranduil, rebooted from the fairy people of The Hobbit into more serious representatives of Tolkien’s elvendom, part of Greenwood remains a home even as the forest as a whole darkens into Mirkwood). This is a simple and effective means of reconciling the two Old Norse traditions—home and barrier—into a single history, and as such it is sufficient for the main narrative of The Lord of the Rings. But there are also remarkable subtleties being worked by Tolkien in the background and appendices, which are well worth attending to. These subtleties are constructed around the Rohirrim, the horse-riding warrior-people of Rohan. Although the Rohirrim, within the narrative of The Lord of the Rings, are now located in a southerly land near Gondor, the lore and appendices of the story tell us repeatedly that they originated much further north, beside the great forest of Greenwood the Great: so, for example, Faramir, in his disquisition on Gondorian anthropology in Book IV, explains to Frodo and Sam that the Rohirrim are descended from “the proud peoples of the North,” while Appendix A relates that the realm of their earliest named king “lay between Greenwood and the River Celduin [that is, the River Running],” and the text “The Northmen and the Wainriders” tells us that originally “their settled homes were in the eaves of the Forest.”³⁸ There are other references to the same effect. The scholarly tendency, led by questions of language and the strong impress of Beowulf, has been to see the Rohirrim as Tolkien’s transposition of the Anglo-Saxons into Middle-earth—though often with an acknowledgment that their associa-

38 Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 678, 1046; Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, 288.

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tion with horses doesn’t quite fit their Anglo-Saxon origin.³⁹ But there are also many features of Rohan that are derived from Viking or Old Norse culture rather than Anglo-Saxon, such as their “weapontake,” their use of temporary “booths,” Éowyn’s status as a “shieldmaiden,” their practices of vow-making and carrying the war-arrow, perhaps even their illiteracy.⁴⁰ So the Rohirrim are not simply “Anglo-Saxon” in their provenance. In fact, the relationship more broadly between Rohan and Gondor, contrastive yet reciprocal, is Tolkien’s reflex of the common Victorian comparison or theorization between northern Europe and southern Europe, the Germanic and the Latinate (as found, for example, in the works of John Ruskin and Charles Kingsley). And as Christopher Tolkien first observed, the names of the earliest rulers of the Rohirrim are not Old English at all, but are Gothic (Vidugavia, Vidumavi, Marhwini).⁴¹ Goths and Gothic, meant a great deal to Tolkien, just as they did to Morris, and in some of the same ways.⁴² All of this helps us to understand one of Tolkien’s alternative designations for the Rohirrim: “the Northmen.” Literally, within the geography and imagined history of Middle-earth, the Rohirrim have moved south to inhabit (what becomes) Rohan; their origins are in the north. But such a created geography enables Tolkien, through a sort of double-meaning or scholarly pun, to label his Rohirrim with a name that also has a clear real-world referent: “Northmen,” in nineteenthand twentieth-century English, primarily means, of course, Vikings or Scandinavians. This is the clever back-story, rich in historical allusion and intertextual play, that Tolkien has constructed for his Rohirrim: these “Northmen,” whose distinctive cultural, military, and political contribution is of such value to Gondor in the south, have their origins near or in the great forest later known as Mirkwood, ruled over by kings with Gothic names; and their culture and practices are recognizably transposed into Middle-earth from Viking or Scandinavian sources as well as Anglo-Saxon. In other words, we are very deliberately back in the world of both Hervarar saga and The House of the Wolfings, with a distinctly Morrisian notion

39 See, for example, Shippey, Road to Middle-earth, 139–49; see also, however, Thomas Honegger, “The Rohirrim: ‘Anglo-Saxons on Horseback’? An Inquiry into Tolkien’s Use of Sources,” in Tolkien and the Study of His Sources: Critical Essays, ed. Jason Fisher (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 116– 32. 40 See Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 778, 799, 803 (weapontake), 784 (shieldmaiden), 783, 794–95, 802 (booths), 797 (vow-making), 798–99 (war-arrow), and 430 (illiteracy). 41 See Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, 311 (note by Christopher Tolkien). 42 See Tom Shippey, “Goths and Roman in Tolkien’s Imagination,” in Tolkien: The Forest and the City, ed. Helen Conrad-O’Briain and Gerard Hynes (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), 19–32.

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of Gothic liberty and heritage in play, allied with (and expressed through) Tolkien’s own philological artistry. There may even have been a specific, topical context for all this, when Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings in the early 1940s (he seems to have drafted Book III, in which the Rohirrim first appear, in 1942).⁴³ In a well-known letter to his son Michael, written in June 1941, Tolkien gives full vent to his “burning private grudge […] against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler,” for “ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making 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.”⁴⁴ So the “Northmen” of The Lord of the Rings, with their origins around Mirkwood, may be both a throwback to the old idea of Gothic liberty (and beyond that, to Hervarar saga’s association between Goths and Myrkviðr) and also a contemporary re-imagining or rescue mission in the face of misappropriation and abuse—a presentation of “that noble northern spirit […] in its true light,” as Tolkien saw it. It is time to conclude this short essay, gratefully and affectionately offered in honor of Heather O’Donoghue, who has done so much to present both Old Norse literature and culture, and also their post-medieval influence, in as true a light as possible. In terms of method, we can view the connection between the Old Norse Myrkviðr and Tolkien’s Mirkwood from two different perspectives. From the point of view of source study (that is, from the modern period looking backwards), we can observe how the Poetic Edda and Hervarar saga—partly filtered through William Morris—are especially productive for the making of Tolkien’s Mirkwood, and help to explain some of its features. But from the alternative perspective, the point of view of medievalism or the study of reception and afterlife (that is, from the medieval period looking forwards), we can observe how the Old Norse Myrkviðr is re-discovered and re-deployed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. In The Hobbit and other works, Tolkien presents Mirkwood as a dark and dangerous forest, a perilous barrier that must be overcome; but in The Lord of the Rings, the idea of the forest as a home is rehabilitated, and linked in Morrisian ways with cultural and ethical values which Tolkien views positively. Finally, there is a further, important point to be made about Tolkien’s Mirkwood (and about The Hobbit more broadly), which is this. In his creative re-deployment of Myrkviðr—and also of the dwarves of Vǫluspá, the shape-shifting of Hrólfs 43 See Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (London: HarperCollins, 2005), xxiv. 44 Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Carpenter and Tolkien, 55–56 (no. 45). See also Tom Shippey, “Tolkien and ‘that Noble Northern Spirit,’” in Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, ed. Catherine McIlwaine (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2018), 58–69.

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saga, and so on—Tolkien stands at the head of a whole tradition of (especially British) writers drawing on Old Norse language and literature as a creative resource for the composition of children’s fantasy fiction. This whole practice, now very familiar to us and still far from exhausted, is arguably initiated by Tolkien in The Hobbit: the impact of Old Norse on children’s fantasy effectively begins here— from Alan Garner to Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman to Joanne Harris, and many more besides.

Carl Phelpstead

Chapter 16 Past and Present Identities in Margaret Elphinstone’s Islanders Post-medieval responses to the Viking and medieval Norse world have been inextricably tied to issues of identity. Beliefs about the relationship between historical and contemporary identities have impelled creative writers whose work has in turn enabled new views of both past and present. This process can be seen clearly in writing from the Scottish Northern Isles, the only part of the British and Irish archipelago to be the subject of a whole Icelandic saga, Orkneyinga saga. ¹ As Julian Meldon D’Arcy, Andrew Wawn, and Simon Hall, for example, have shown, the Viking past is central to the ways in which creative writers from Sir Walter Scott onwards have understood and constructed Orcadian and Shetlandic identity.² This essay examines Margaret Elphinstone’s Islanders, a novel written and set in Shetland, as a revealing example of the relationship between historical scholarship and creative writing.³ Whereas many modern writers have used or been inspired by Old Norse texts in their creative writing (as other essays in this section of this book demonstrate), I argue here that Elphinstone is unusual in drawing also on archaeological interests and experience which give her a rare sensitivity to the material and environmental dimensions of daily life in the past. I argue, too, that Elphinstone goes beyond recreating the Viking past (which she does with unusual success) to undertake a narrative exploration of identity in characteristically contemporary terms, not limited to questions of local or national identity, but extending also to interrelated issues of gender, sexual orientation, and dis/ability. Whereas the relatively small amount of previous criticism devoted to Elphinstone’s

1 Orkneyinga Saga, ed. Finnbogi Guðmundsson, Íslenzk fornrit 34 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag), 1–300. 2 Julian Meldon D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds and Sagamen: Old Norse Influence on Modern Scottish Literature (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996); Andrew Wawn, “Foreword,” in Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate (Lerwick: Shetland Times [1822] 1996), i–xxiv; Simon W. Hall, The History of Orkney Literature (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2011). My research on Orkneyinga saga, and on its modern reception, began while I was a graduate student under Heather O’Donoghue’s generously supportive supervision. I am grateful for my own students’ regularly enthusiastic engagement with Elphinstone’s Islanders on my “Island Stories: Literatures of the North Atlantic” module at Cardiff University. 3 Margaret Elphinstone, Islanders [1994] (Edinburgh: Kennedy & Boyd, 2008). References to this edition of the novel will be given parenthetically in the body of the essay by page number. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-021

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Islanders has explored gender issues, the focus has mainly been on female experience, with less attention paid to masculinities and the male same-sex relationship in the novel. In what follows, I not only examine masculine identities and sexualities, but also relate the representation of gender and sexuality in the novel to the hitherto neglected theme of disability. I will argue that Elphinstone’s attention to identities marginalized in medieval texts and in many modern recreations of the period exemplifies how historically informed reimagining of the Vikings can challenge and reshape understandings of both past and present identities. Margaret Elphinstone was born in Kent in 1948; she grew up and was educated in England, including at Durham University. Apart from periods of academic work in the USA, she has spent all her working life in Scotland.⁴ Islanders, which is set in late twelfth-century Fair Isle and Shetland, was drafted in 1979, while she was living in Shetland, but rewritten in the early 1990s after the appearance of Elphinstone’s first two published novels; it was published in 1994 and reprinted in 2008.⁵ It is the first of two Norse-inspired novels by Elphinstone and was followed in 2000 by The Sea Road, another historical novel exploring women’s experiences in the Viking period through its central character, the extraordinarily well-traveled Gudrun Thorbjarnardóttir.⁶ As someone who grew up in England but moved to Shetland, Elphinstone offers readers of Islanders the perspective of an outsider who has herself come to live among islanders, just as her central character, Astrid, is shipwrecked on Fair Isle (called Fridarey in the novel) and has to adapt to a lifestyle very different from that of the cosmopolitan Dublin in which she grew up. The island setting is important: at the time the novel is set, Fair Isle/Fridarey, a small island midway between the archipelagos of Orkney and Shetland, is cut off for much of the year when the seas are too dangerous for sailing, and most of its inhabitants are consequently more or less closely related to one another. The novel captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of life on the island very effectively: in chapter 3 Astrid learns that Fridarey is three days’ sailing from Norway, a day’s sailing from either Orkney or Shetland (16); when Thorvald and Astrid travel

4 “Author Profile” at https://www.margaretelphinstone.co.uk/phdi/p1.nsf/supppages/0994?open document&part=9. After eight years in Shetland, she has since lived in Galloway, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. 5 See Elphinstone’s account of the writing of the novel at https://www.margaretelphinstone.co.uk/ phdi/p1.nsf/supppages/0994?opendocument&part=7. 6 Elphinstone’s anglicized spellings of Norse names are used throughout this essay. See Margaret Elphinstone, The Sea Road (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000) and her account of writing the novel at https://www.margaretelphinstone.co.uk/phdi/p1.nsf/supppages/0994?opendocument&part=6. Elphinstone’s later novels have often continued to explore island and frontier life and identities, but in other temporal and geographical settings.

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to Shetland proper, the reader shares their sense of vast new vistas opening up: Amundi Palsson’s hall on Papey Stora is said to be the largest building Thorvald had ever seen (253). Proud though the islanders are of their island and its community, they are aware of—and frequently refer to—their peripheral relationship to centers of civilization and power: the earl and bishop in Kirkwall, the kings of Norway or England, the wealthy merchants of Bjorgvin (Bergen), and, towards the novel’s end, the papal court in Romaborg (Rome). Outsiders who come to Fridarey— not only Astrid, but also Ingebjorg (who grew up in Orkney before marrying Eirik Thorvaldsson), and a priest who visits the island towards the end of the novel—are all aware of how truly insular the islanders’ life is. The islanders are themselves aware of their peripheral location: when the priest visits, it is stated that “They were aware of their own backwardness” (362). But the island is, for them, central rather than marginal. Even the outsider Astrid comes to realize, as she returns to Fridarey from Papey Stora, that the island is now “home” for her (350). This perception of the peripheral as central challenges the reader to see things differently, and defamiliarization is a central narrative strategy of the novel. In an essay on nineteenth- and twentieth-century “fictions of Scandinavian Scotland,” Elphinstone observes that Scottish novels set in the Norse past insist that we review Scotland on the map: no longer positioned in the extreme north, as maps of Britain would suggest, Scotland becomes one of a network of far-flung lands linked together by seaways, so that they become a cohesive cultural, if no longer a political, hegemony.⁷

A similar point is made in strikingly visual form on the map printed at the beginning of Islanders (xx): the map is centered on Fair Isle and oriented with south, rather than north, at the top. As Douglas Gifford writes in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing: from the opening pages with their map of the islands which turns north and south upside down to reflect the orientation of the island worldview, the reader’s conventional perspectives on peripheral cultures is [sic] destabilised, and resettled in a view from a rock perched far in the Atlantic, looking at Europe, Britain, and even Orkney and Shetland from a very different value-centre.⁸

7 Margaret Elphinstone, “Some Fictions of Scandinavian Scotland,” in Scotland in Europe, ed. Tom Hubbard and R. D. S. Jack (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 105–18, at 110. 8 Douglas Gifford, “Contemporary Fiction II: Seven Writers in Scotland,” in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 604–29, at 606.

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The reader is also disorientated by the defamiliarizing use of slightly anglicized Norse place names, rather than their familiar modern forms, both on the map and throughout the text of Islanders: thus Dublin appears as Dyflin, Fair Isle as Fridarey, Shetland as Hjaltland, Bergen as Bjorgvin, and so on. As Simon Hall notes in his useful Introduction to the 2008 reprint of Islanders, “altered perspective” is a preoccupation of the novel.⁹ This is, but at the same time is not quite, the world we know. The impressively realized historical setting of Elphinstone’s novel is informed both by the author’s reading of Icelandic sagas and by her participation in archaeological fieldwork in Shetland. In an essay on the relationship between archaeology and historical fiction, Elphinstone writes that “People tell each other stories. The ability and the need to construct narratives is one of our defining characteristics.”¹⁰ Asked in an interview in 2021 about what drew her to Norse history for her novel The Sea Road, she explains that when she moved to Shetland in 1972 she worked part-time in the island library and nurtured her interest in the history of the islands there: “They had a ‘Shetland Collection’ including the Viking Sagas, and I worked my way through them. […] So, I read all the Sagas and I just got so interested.”¹¹ Story-telling is presented as an important part of community gatherings in Islanders (for example, 193–96). Many of the stories that characters tell in the novel are familiar to readers of the medieval Icelandic sagas: Elphinstone recreates the oral story-telling tradition thought to lie behind the sagas by having her characters tell stories that she has herself taken from the surviving written literature. An informed reader playing “spot the saga” will notice, as one would expect, frequent use of material from Orkneyinga saga, but there are also allusions to the story of Audun and the Bear (Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka, 75), Laxdœla saga (138), and Njáls saga (for example, 123, 153), and at one point Thorvald recites a passage from the Norse mythic poem Hávamál (138); there is even an echo of Beowulf (97). The Norse heritage of the Northern Isles is underlined by the familiarity which the characters show with the history and stories of the wider Norse-speaking world and its explorers as far afield as Vinland, Greenland, and the Mediterranean, including Byzantium and Jerusalem. In showing how profoundly Norse the islanders’ culture is, Elphinstone reinforces her readers’ contemporary sense of Orkney and Shetland as culturally, because historically, distinct from mainland Scotland.

9 Simon Hall, “Introduction,” in Elphinstone, Islanders, ix–xviii, at ix. 10 Margaret Elphinstone, “Voices from the Silence,” in Researching the Archaeological Past through Imagined Narratives: A Necessary Fiction, ed. Robert Witcher and Daniël van Helden (London: Routledge, 2019), 54–69, at 55. 11 Beth Whitelaw, “An Interview with Margaret Elphinstone,” March 28, 2021, https://www.ring woodpublishing.com/an-interview-with-margaret-elphinstone/#.

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The ways in which stories and story-telling create or confirm identity are explicitly acknowledged in comments made by characters in Islanders. Towards the end of the novel, for example, the women of the island realize that they must keep Gunnhild’s midwifery charms secret from the visiting priest and one of them sounds rather as if she has been reading postmodern theory: Each of us has many stories, they’re all true, but we have to tell the right one to the right person. There’s no use pretending there’s only one tale which takes account of everything. (402)

The text itself thus acknowledges the link between narrative and identity. At the time she first drafted the novel, Elphinstone lived on the island of Papa Stour, which appears as Papey Stora, the island to which Thorvald and Astrid travel in Part 6 of the novel. While living on the island, Elphinstone took part during several summers in archaeological excavations of a Norse farm at The Biggings, excavations that were led (and later written up) by the eminent historian of the Northern Isles, Barbara Crawford, who is among the people thanked in the acknowledgments to Islanders (vii).¹² Elphinstone has recently recalled that during her time at the Papa Stour excavations I found that the experience of spending many days on the same site, scraping away with a trowel, gave me scope to imagine what it had actually been like to dwell in this place. Each time my scrapings revealed yet another spindle whorl, I found myself speculating about who had strung it, who had used it and who had lost it.¹³

This archaeological experience and interest in Norse material culture and daily life inform Elphinstone’s descriptions of daily activities on Fridarey: cooking, spinning, weaving, sowing, harvesting, animal slaughter, smithing, are all described in historically informed detail that creates an unusually vivid—and decidedly unromanticized—impression of what life might actually have been like. This informed interest in the details of Norse life also extends to Elphinstone’s description of legal

12 For the report of the excavations, see Barbara E. Crawford and Beverley Ballin Smith, The Biggings, Papa Stour, Shetland: The History and Excavation of a Royal Norwegian Farm (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1999). 13 Elphinstone, “Voices from the Silence,” 65. Elphinstone has also reflected on the relationship between archaeology and historical fiction in Margaret Elphinstone and Caroline WickhamJones, “Archaeology and Fiction,” Antiquity 86 (2012): 532–37. Both these essays are primarily concerned with the Mesolithic period in which she set her novel The Gathering Night (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2009); see also Elphinstone’s account of writing that novel at https://www.margaretelphin stone.co.uk/phdi/p1.nsf/supppages/0994?opendocument&part=2.

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disputes and the work of the island’s Thing.¹⁴ Drawing as it does on deep knowledge of both literary and archaeological sources, Islanders exemplifies what Elphinstone and the prehistoric archaeologist Caroline Wickham-Jones call the “informed novel,” a form of writing which they argue “can contribute to exploring our deep past in a different way, while also involving a wider readership.”¹⁵ A powerful “altered perspective” on the period is offered by Elphinstone’s avoidance of the term “Viking” in the novel: she consistently uses the term “pirate” instead, “presumably,” as Hall notes, “to disarm our preconceptions of what a viking is.”¹⁶ Gifford writes that In addition to recreating the men and women of Fridarey in rare depth and individuation, Elphinstone successfully recreates that tension of cultures surrounding Fridarey which saw both raiding and trading as legitimate foraying for food and goods, with honour in valour valued alongside profit. These movements in history are encapsulated in the story of Astrid, caught between old and new worlds.¹⁷

The historical development from raiding to trading is a thread that runs through the novel, brought into clearest focus when Dagfinn tells the islanders of the killing of Sveinn Asleifarson in Dublin; as Thorvald then comments, “There are no pirates left in the islands now” (411). The outsider’s perspective of an English-born woman in modern Shetland, or a Dublin-born girl on medieval Fridarey, is mirrored in Elphinstone’s focus on the historically marginalized experience of women. It is possible to read the novel’s island setting as conducive to this exploration of female experience; in an essay on Byron’s poem The Island, Catherine Addison writes that Islands in literature, mythology, and dream are already feminized spaces, perhaps reminding their regressive questers of the fluid-surrounded child in the womb. […] As an object of male desire, the island resembles the secluded garden, but unlike the garden its enclosure is no mere wall or hedge but the most suggestive of all material things, the sea. Thus, it usually has as its concomitant the narrative of the voyage, whose direction, always away from

14 The Thing endorses Ingebjorg’s plan to bring up her sons as a widow; confirms Astrid’s legal status after her shipwreck; meets to try to resolve the inheritance dispute between Thorvald and Bjarni; and determines the appropriate fine after Leif kills a man near the end of the novel. 15 Elphinstone and Wickham-Jones, “Archaeology and Fiction,” 536–37. 16 Hall, “Introduction,” xiii. Whether deliberately or not, the choice of “pirate” also echoes the title of Scott’s Norse-influenced historical novel set in seventeenth-century Shetland, The Pirate, one of the texts about which Elphinstone writes in “Fictions of Scandinavian Scotland.” 17 Gifford, “Contemporary Fiction,” 606–7.

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home (and then back), posits the island on the extreme verge of the imaginative vision, points to it from “here” as “over there” and invests it with the elusive attraction of Otherness.¹⁸

Simon Hall argues that in drawing “attention to our preconceptions about Norsemen and their heterosexual masculine ethos” Elphinstone redresses an imbalance in both Orkneyinga saga and later scholarly and creative writing and offers instead what Hall calls “a proto-feminism imagined from a background of saga literature and other historical and archaeological evidence.”¹⁹ Writing primarily about her later Norse novel, Elphinstone herself explains that she chose to write about Vikings “because of my own mixed reactions to the heroes of the Icelandic sagas. […] In The Sea Road I wanted to explore what it was like to be a woman in a Viking world.”²⁰ Her earlier Viking-period novel also undertakes such an exploration.²¹ In chapter 1 of Islanders Astrid is said to be “tough as a boy” (4) and to think that she ought to have been a boy so that she could have been apprenticed to her ship-builder father; later in the novel her running ability leads to the comment that “She should have been a boy anyway” (121). When she first has sex with Thorvald, though, this changes: “Tough as a boy, she’d been,” but now something “had died” (337). Thorvald also perceives a change; from his perspective, he has become fully masculine by acquiring new property: “He was a man with a woman of his own” (340). The novel leaves no doubt as to women’s subordinate status. Married women in the novel have to keep their hair covered (30, 62). Ingebjorg, another incomer to the island from elsewhere, maintains her independence after the drowning of her husband Eirik and brings up her sons on her own, despite the attempts of her brothers-in-law to intervene, and her position is regarded as anomalous. Many of the women on the island have suffered from Einar’s position as powerful patriarch: he has had sex with most of them and fathered children on several. His attempted drunken pass at Astrid leads her to tell him to go fishing (198); when he is later discovered to have gone to sea drunk in his fishing boat in a terrible storm, she goes hysterical, leading Thorhalla to blame her for his death (207).

18 Catherine Addison, “‘Elysian and Effeminate’: Byron’s The Island as a Revisionary Text,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 35 (1995): 687–706, at 687–88. 19 Hall “Introduction,” xvii, xv. 20 Elphinstone, “Fictions of Scandinavian Scotland,” 116–17. 21 For a reading of Islanders as feminist historical fiction in the context of other Scottish women writers, especially Naomi Mitchison and Sian Hayton, see Amanda J. McLeod “The Treatment of Gender in Twentieth-Century Scottish Women’s Historical Fiction” (MLitt thesis, University of Glasgow, 2001), especially ch. 5.

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The power of men over women in the novel is clearest, perhaps, in the arrangements that men make for marriages. Rolf intends using the gift of his sister Ragna as a wife to cement a new trading alliance with the Biorgvin merchant Jens of Lubeck (365). Most centrally, Astrid’s marriage to Thorvald is suggested by Helgi Arnesson and decided between three men: Helgi, Thorvald himself, and Astrid’s new guardian Amundi Palsson, though to Thorvald’s credit he says he will not marry her if she is unwilling (at that point Amundi has not even thought it worth asking her view: he treats her simply as property that he can bestow). Though it becomes a loving and happy relationship, it is a marriage made in order to solve an inheritance dispute between Thorvald and his uncle Bjarni by endowing Thorvald with Astrid’s dowry of 15 ounces of gold (271). Historically realistic, the episode also acknowledges—by Thorvald’s deferring to Astrid’s view— those Icelandic saga narratives in which women are granted more of a say in their marriages than would have been likely elsewhere in medieval Europe. When Astrid learns of the proposal, she is said to realize for the first time the powerlessness of her position (274). The novel does not shy away from the most physical aspects of women’s experience. The use of moss as a primitive sanitary towel is alluded to at one point (156) and the importance of midwives and the experience of giving birth are also prominent in the novel. Astrid and Thorvald stay at a midwife’s house in Shetland while she is called out to attend a birth (ch. 47); the visiting priest’s view of charms as the work of the devil is a dangerous threat to Gunnhild, the island’s midwife, though she puts up a spirited defense of her calling (364) and is comforted by Bjarni’s pointing out that the island had managed without a priest but there “was never an island since time began that managed without a midwife” (370); the women of the island agree that the priest is to be kept ignorant of the charms. Historically, patriarchal societies have almost always been profoundly heteronormative, often because of perceptions that taking what is seen as a “woman’s role” sexually is incompatible with masculine gender roles and so threatens the ideological underpinning of patriarchy. The society described in Islanders is, unsurprisingly, both patriarchal and heteronormative. But just as Elphinstone explores the historical position of women with sympathy, so she imagines with delicacy and sensitivity what it might be like for two men to be lovers in such a society. That the two men in question, Dagfinn and Leif, are Vikings challenges preconceptions about masculinity, another example of the novel’s concern with altering perceptions: Dagfinn’s bravery is made clear in his confrontation with Sveinn Asleifarson when the latter boards his ship (165–66) and by service in battle as one of Sveinn’s men. The nature of the relationship between Dagfinn and Leif is hinted at in remarks whose implications become clear in retrospect, but its unambiguous reve-

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lation must come as a surprise to many first-time readers.²² At the annual washing in chapter 13 Astrid tells other women that she fancies Leif, who is “very handsome” (77): “There was something they were not telling”—only on rereading does it become obvious that the women knew of Leif’s relationship with Dagfinn. There is a hint in banter among the ship’s crew that Dagfinn goes ashore for “boys” rather than women (88). But only a very perceptive reader would, on first reading the novel, connect this with the story of Leif’s joining the crew at Bjorgvin after second thoughts about whether to do so (90). Perhaps Leif’s unhappiness after Dagfinn has left the ship and his keeping lookout, alone of all the crew, for Dagfinn’s return (181) is a broader hint of the nature of their relationship, especially when collocated with his reference to (unspecified) “guilt” (182). Later, an insulting comment directed by one crew member to another about not needing a girl and there now being no competition for what he does need alludes to Leif’s situation now that Dagfinn is absent (196). When Leif goes to the visiting priest in chapter 56 he talks about a sin that can be connected with love (“sin isn’t all black, is it? Not if there’s love too. It can be more confusing than that” [366]). He says that a prayer that temptation would go away has been answered, though without desire departing, and possibly by causing the death of “the only person I loved” (366); much is left unsaid and the priest, if not the reader, is left confused. It is clear, at least on a rereading in the light of later chapters, that Leif sees Dagfinn’s leaving his ship as a kind of answer to his prayer to be spared temptation. Any remaining doubt in the reader’s mind is removed in the moving scene when Leif is reunited with the badly wounded Dagfinn after the latter’s return to Fridarey (396–97). There is then another moment of intimate contact when Leif supplies Dagfinn with ale to tell the story of Sveinn Asleifarson’s death in chapter 63, but Dagfinn is struck by the fact that he cannot tell the islanders about the love that he and Leif have for one another: “What was the point of a tale, when that which lay at the heart of his life must remain forever silent, not part of any story?” (407–8). As the novel nears its end it becomes clear that many people in fact know the story of Dagfinn and Leif, despite its remaining untold: “Rolf had become adept over the years at turning a blind eye to what he didn’t wish to see, but he had the measure of that situation within five minutes of Leif’s coming aboard the Sula” (417); Leif kills a crewman who threatens to make the relationship public

22 Hall remarks that “The most startling reversal of perspectives and examination of marginalisation is reserved for the end of the story. It transpires that Dagfinn is gay” (History of Orkney Literature, 173).

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(431–32) and Thorvald understands the situation immediately when told of the killing, telling Leif that the dead Dane “deserved it”: “Thorvald had realized why Leif was here the first winter he came, but he had never admitted it, even to himself, until now” (433). Despite this tolerant attitude on the part of many who realized what was going on, the reason for silence and secrecy is clear: the relationship is said to be “a capital offence […] if anyone should choose to prove it” (418) and when Astrid asks Thorvald why it carries the death penalty he replies simply (and despite his tolerant attitude towards Dagfinn and Leif ) that “It’s against nature” (438). Carol Clover has argued in a highly influential study of the gender system in medieval Iceland that, rather than a binary division between men and women, a distinction was made between able-bodied men who take on the active role in sexual intercourse plus a few exceptionally strong women on one hand and everyone else on the other: women, children of both sexes, men who allow themselves to be penetrated, and old and disabled men.²³ In Islanders, Elphinstone brings into focus a third group of people disadvantaged by the twelfth-century Northern Isles’ hegemonic ideology besides women and men who love men, namely disabled people. Whereas critical discussions of the novel have examined gender and, to a much lesser extent, sexuality, the disabled characters and their similarly marginalized status have not hitherto attracted comparable critical interest. Towards the end of the novel, Dagfinn returns to Fridarey badly injured, having lost an eye “and not much wisdom exchanged for it” (395, alluding to the myth of Óðinn’s exchanging one of his eyes for knowledge at Mímir’s well); he had thought he would be “Better dead than crippled” (395). The two main disabled characters in the novel are, however, presented in ways that make clear that their lives are very much worth living. When Astrid first sees the smith Snorri move, “she realised he was crippled” (41). The image of a lame or disabled smith has deep roots in myth and legend (Vulcan/Hephaestos in Greco-Roman, Volundr/Wayland in Germanic myth) and Snorri became a smith only after being disabled fighting under the Viking leader Sveinn Asleifarson. Despite his heroic past and present skillful usefulness, Snorri suffers from society’s prejudices: he is kept away when the island turns out to help launch their ship, the Sula, because “A crippled man was unlucky at a launching” (85). His disability appears also to compromise his masculinity: his wife is in a long-term adulterous relationship with his friend Bjarni Thorvaldsson (first alluded to on 102–3) and although they think Snorri is not aware of it, it is clear in comments

23 Carol J. Clover, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Speculum 68 (1993): 363–87.

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he makes near the end of the novel that he simply pretends not to know: when he advises Olaf to leave the island so as to escape an impossible situation he cannot deal with (his brother Thorvald’s marriage to the woman he himself loves, Astrid), it is clear to the reader he has his own situation with his wife and Bjarni in mind. Olaf Eiriksson is himself the other main disabled character in the novel and is also associated with craftsmanship, aspiring to become a smith himself: he says in chapter 27 that “I like making things […] I’d rather make things than break things” (178). The reader learns, slowly, that Olaf has very poor eyesight: so short-sighted that he would be no use as a sailor (74, 83). Late in the text we are told that when a disease ravaged the island when he was a child, people thought for a while that he had lost his sight (377). When the priest visits Fridarey, Olaf pointedly asks him about the stories of St. Magnus of Orkney miraculously healing the blind (362). A bond forms between the visually impaired boy and the lame man, who gives Olaf his first lessons in smithing and recommends him to train with a smith in Kirkwall who had come from Durham with the masons to work on St. Magnus Cathedral. Olaf will go there, hoping also for a cure at the saint’s shrine. As with gender and sexuality, Elphinstone’s portrayal of disabled people is sensitive to historical reality, while also obviously reflecting the concerns and values of a late twentieth-century writer. By attending in this way to realms of experience that are rarely central in the surviving medieval sources, Elphinstone prompts readers both to re-evaluate their image of the past and to consider their present condition. At a feast about halfway through Islanders, Snorri the smith remarks that “We should think about the old stories […] They tell us what kind of people we once were.” “Or might have been,” said Rolf. “Of course they do,” said Einar. “That’s why we’re waiting to hear another.” (195)

In Islanders Margaret Elphinstone draws on “old stories” from medieval Icelandic sagas and the stories told by archaeological remains to explore issues of both past and contemporary identity in a defamiliarized setting. By attending especially to groups of people who are marginalized in, or absent from, the surviving medieval texts (women, men who love men, disabled people) she tells “another story” that invites readers to rethink their preconceptions of the Viking Age. Simon Hall notes that Elphinstone also hints “at inequalities persisting in modern day society, mirroring and magnifying these in her recreation of twelfth century Fridarey.”²⁴ If the

24 Hall, “Introduction,” xvii.

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novel is, as Hall calls it, a “daringly subversive historical epic,”²⁵ this is because it shows how reimagining the Vikings in the light of their literary and archaeological remains can involve rethinking not only Viking identities but also our own. Elphinstone has written elsewhere that “There comes a point in life when one realises that history is also about one’s self.”²⁶ In offering a different story of who we were or might have been, the novel suggests the possibility of a different account of who we are.

25 Hall, “Introduction,” ix. 26 Elphinstone, “Voices from the Silence,” 54.

David Clark

Chapter 17 It’s not the End of the World: The Neo-Norse Cosmology of Joanne Harris Joanne Harris is perhaps best known for her novel Chocolat or the Hollywood film adaptation of the same name.¹ However, her bestselling work encompasses several genres and a wide range of subject matter, including, in her Runemarks series, novels inspired by Norse mythology. This essay focuses on Runemark and Runelight, originally marketed as a Young Adult duology, and explores Harris’s use and transformation of Norse mythological elements in creating her own fantasy world.² Through close engagement with the various ways in which Harris reworks and adapts Old Norse myth, it shows how Harris brings Norse-inspired elements into productive tension with contemporary ideological concerns, ultimately suggesting that our reality is shaped by the stories we choose to privilege. Although Harris builds on, and sometimes rationalizes, the accounts of Norse myth in the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, this essay demonstrates that her adaptation differs from the Eddas in prioritizing proliferation and pluralism over the attempt to create the illusion of a coherent whole. As such Harris’s reception of Norse myth aligns with recent political readings of Snorri’s work that emphasize some of the more sinister aspects of its ideological underpinnings.³

Acknowledgment: For various kinds of support during the research that underpins this chapter, I would like to thank Kate McClune, Holly Furneaux, Erin Goeres, Carolyne Larrington, Kate Loveman, Carl Phelpstead, Cathleen Waters, and, of course, Heather O’Donoghue herself for her generosity of time and spirit over many years. 1 Joanne Harris, Chocolat (London: Doubleday, 1999); Chocolat, dir. Lasse Hallström, Miramax, 2000. 2 Joanne Harris, Runemarks (London: Doubleday, 2007); Runelight (London: Corgi, 2012). Harris has since written two adult prequels, set in the same universe but adopting the perspective of Loki: The Gospel of Loki (London: Saga Press, 2015), and The Testament of Loki (London: Saga Press, 2018). Note that in this essay I adopt Harris’s Anglicized spellings for Norse characters. Harris’s work is explored in greater depth in my monograph: Children’s Literature and Old Norse Medievalism (London: Arc Humanities Press, 2023). 3 See, for example, Richard Cole, “In Pursuit of an Æsirist ideology,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 15 (2019): 65–101. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-022

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“A Lifetime of Unofficial Research” “Seven o’clock on a Monday morning, five hundred years after the End of the World, and goblins had been at the cellar again.”⁴ This first sentence of Joanne Harris’s Young Adult novel, Runemarks, both introduces the premise of the book and its sequel Runelight and thrusts the reader in medias res. Economically, Harris prepares the reader to accept that they are entering a secondary world with some similarities to their own (the time reference), which is related in some way to Norse mythology (the “End of the World” is implicitly located as the Norse Ragnarok by the runes which circle the chapter number and section heading and epigraph from “Lokabrenna,” an invented title recalling the Eddic poem Lokasenna), but which contains some important modifications: the action is placed centuries after Ragnarok and goblins are involved.⁵ Maddy, the initial focal character, is estranged from her local community because she is “a dreamer, a teller of tales” and imagination is stigmatized in her village of Malbry (3). However, she also has magical abilities characterized as “cantrips and runecharms [and] true glamours” (5), anathematized by “the Order” which controls the Middle Worlds from their base at World’s End. These spells are activated by runes, which Harris has based on the Norse futhark (here termed the “Elder Script,” 39) and its use by modern pagans.⁶ Only one person knows of Maddy’s magical abilities, a friend known as “One-Eye,” a name which immediately flags his identity as Odin to readers with any prior acquaintance with Norse mythology.⁷ There is thus more than one level on which Harris’s novel can be enjoyed—as a children’s fantasy full of incident and intrigue, and as a reworking of and response to Norse myth. Harris’s novel also, however, calls upon its young adult target audience to negotiate issues of identity and self-determination, religious ideology and gender, within a complex imagined world that owes as much to late twentieth-century concerns with pluralism and anti-totalitarianism as to Norse cosmology. The link between the novel’s worldview and its source subject matter is made clear right from the start, when Maddy uses a goblin’s “true name” to compel him 4 Harris, Runemarks, 3. Subsequent page references are incorporated within the text. 5 For the text of Lokasenna, see The Poetic Edda, trans. Carolyne Larrington, rev. edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 84–96. 6 Harris later introduces “New Runes” based on the Old English futhark; she discusses runes extensively on her website. See her “Runemarks: Using Runes,” at http://www.joanne-harris.co.uk/ books/runemarks/runemarks-using-runes/. She also refers approvingly to Jan Fries, Helrunar: A Manual of Rune Magick (Oxford: Mandrake, 2006). 7 See Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes (London: Dent, 1987), 17; The Poetic Edda, 7.

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to obey her. Harris contextualizes this scene with a brief retelling of the myth of Baldr which Maddy calls to mind: Mother Frigg knew the true names, and used them to make all of Creation weep for the return of her dead son. But Loki, who had many names, would not be bound to such a promise, and so Balder the Fair, god of springtime, was forced to remain in Underworld, Hel’s kingdom, until the end of all things. (10)

This is evidently a modified version of the Norse myth, since the power of names does not feature in this way in the Eddas. ⁸ Rather it is a common component of folklore, as likewise with elements like Harris’s use of the descriptions “Mother Frigg” and “Balder the Fair, god of springtime.” However, later in the novel Maddy actually goes to Hel’s kingdom and hears the “real” version of the narrative, and this emphasizes the fact that the initial version is not Harris’s authorial retelling but her character Odin’s (“an old story, told by One-Eye years ago,” 10) and that Odin’s version of events is not necessarily to be trusted. Again and again in the novel, narratives are told of cosmological and world history, by the Aesir (or “Seer-folk”), the Vanir, and the leaders of the Order, but Maddy (and the reader) must choose which to believe and which worldview (if any) to accept. Much as Norse scholars might wish it, it is not always possible to pinpoint the precise source of a contemporary writer’s version of elements from Norse mythology. Authors are often drawing on not only multiple layers of Norse material itself (in the original and/or in multiple translations), but also the reworkings of this material by previous adapters, novelists, and poets, with some of whom they have been (and may remain) in direct contact.⁹ Furthermore, authors’ own accounts of their influences and writing processes are not always consistent, and they often continue to read and research and develop their ideas as novels or series progress. Harris makes it clear in the materials on her website and interviews that her engagement with Old Norse myth has been sustained over many years. At the age of seven, she borrowed a library book containing “a simple retelling of some of the more popular Norse myths,” and at nine she was given a copy of H. A. Guerber’s Myths of the Norsemen, which so inspired her she then read “all the source books

8 See Snorri Sturluson, Edda, 48–51; The Poetic Edda, 8. 9 For a fuller discussion, see David Clark, “Norse Medievalism in Children’s Literature in English,” in Pre-Christian Religions of the North: Research and Reception, vol. 2, From ca. 1830 to the Present, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 367–400, at 390–91, and the introduction to my Children’s Literature and Old Norse Medievalism.

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listed by the author” and began “a lifetime of unofficial research” into Norse culture and the process of writing “myths and legends of my own.”¹⁰ It is impossible to pin down exactly which text(s), translation(s), retelling(s), secondary critical, or popular work(s) have influenced any one detail in Harris’s books. It is clear, nonetheless, that she is steeped in Norse material of various kinds. As she comments on her website: I started with retellings by H. A. Guerber and Robert Graves. I read Snorri Sturluson and Saxo Grammaticus; I snapped up every translation of the […] Eddas and longed to read them in the original. Finally, I taught myself Old Icelandic and did just that.¹¹

At the same time, however, Harris is engaged with producing her own version of these disparate sources, transformed for her contemporary audience, and aware of herself as one in a long line of storytellers and rewriters.¹²

“Thor the Thunderer … Loki, the Trickster” Harris has One-Eye tell Maddy a variety of tales from Norse mythology, including “Half-Born Hel” and “Jormungand, the World Serpent,” but the stories concentrate on the gods: Thor the Thunderer with his magic hammer; Idun the Healer and her apples of youth; Odin, the Allfather; Balder the Fair; Tyr, the Warrior; falcon-cloaked Freyja; Heimdall Hawk-Eye; Skadi, the Huntress; Njörd, the Man of the Sea; and Loki, the Trickster. (40)

Harris chooses a single prominent feature of the myths that surround these gods as a means of distinguishing them as characters when they appear and interact with Maddy later in the novel. The most-notorious mythic feature of Odin, his single eye, is of course not mentioned here, since both Harris and One-Eye need Maddy to remain unaware of One-Eye’s true identity until later in the plot. One-

10 Joanne Harris, “Gospel of Loki,” at http://www.joanne-harris.co.uk/books/the-gospel-of-loki/; H. A. Guerber, Myths of the Norsemen: From the Eddas and Sagas (London: Harrap, 1908). 11 Harris, “Gospel of Loki.” 12 As well as the other sources mentioned above, she also singles out Kevin Crossley-Holland’s “very good retelling” (Harris, “Gospel of Loki”). See his The Norse Myths: Tales of Odin, Thor and Loki (London: Walker Studio, 2017).

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Eye is, however, clearly imbued with Odinic traits such as an association with gnomic wisdom when he tells Maddy “Fire burns, that’s its nature” (57).¹³ Loki first appears as a “slim red-haired person” who “looked no more than seventeen” (81). The detail about his “red hair” is repeated, emphasizing it for the careful reader who is thus given a chance to deduce that this may be Loki— if the name he gives himself, Lucky, is not enough—since he (along with Thor) is popularly associated with this feature in medievalist novels (though not medieval myth, which does not specify his hair color). The characterization of Loki seems to conflate elements of Loki with those of Logi (“Fire”), though they appear separately (and in competition) in the Gylfaginning section of Snorri’s Prose Edda. ¹⁴ This same conflation appears in Wagner’s Ring cycle and in Diana Wynne Jones’s earlier reworking of Norse myth for children, Eight Days of Luke. ¹⁵ Loki reveals mythological details that One-Eye has kept from Maddy, including the fact that they are “Brothers in blood, sworn to each other” (97), a detail found in Lokasenna, where Loki asks Odin to recall the time “we mixed our blood together.”¹⁶ Maddy struggles to work out why Lucky seems so familiar, and one reason given is the “silvery crisscross of scars over his lips” (97). She eventually realizes that these scars are a result of Loki’s deception of the dwarf sons of Ivaldi. In revenge, the dwarves “had sewn up Loki’s mouth, and from that day forth his smile had been as crooked as his thoughts” (98). This story derives from the Skáldskaparmál section of the Prose Edda. ¹⁷ In this way, Harris proceeds throughout the novel to interweave and oppose different narratives about the gods from both the Poetic and Prose Eddas, subsequent reworkings of or responses to these texts, and her own folkloric versions of these tales. One result of the number of gods and the complexity of the narrative is that some of them are starkly characterized: denoted just by the characteristic or symbol with which they are most closely associated, for instance Frey’s “broken sword” (207).¹⁸ Both Loki and One-Eye/Odin, however, are fully developed, and especially

13 For Odin’s association with gnomic wisdom, see Sayings of the High One, in The Poetic Edda, 14– 38. 14 Snorri Sturluson, Edda, 41–42. 15 Diana Wynne Jones, Eight Days of Luke (London: Macmillan, 1975). See my “Old Norse Made New: Past and Present in Modern Children’s Literature,” in Old Norse Made New: Essays on the Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse Literature and Culture, ed. David Clark and Carl Phelpstead (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2007), 133–51, at 144–48; “Norse Medievalism,” 367– 400; and “Diana Wynne Jones’s Contemporary Medievalism,” in Diana Wynne Jones 2019, ed. Catherine Butler and Farah Mendlesohn ([n.p.]: Manifold Press, 2019), 107–11. 16 Lokasenna (as Loki’s Quarrel), strophe 9, line 2, in The Poetic Edda, 86. 17 Snorri Sturluson, Edda, 97. 18 Snorri Sturluson, Edda, 31–32; The Poetic Edda, 62.

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the former, whom Harris imbues with a mixture of self-interest and insouciant charm calculated to appeal to a contemporary audience’s fondness for an antihero.¹⁹ In relation to other characters, too, there are moments where Harris demonstrates her detailed knowledge of the Norse source texts. For instance, when Maddy first encounters Thor it is in a prison-cell in Netherworld, where he appears as an old man in a near coma, tended by his wife, identified by Loki as “Ellie… Otherwise known as Old Age” (404). Here, Thor’s adventures in the realm of Utgarda-Loki in Snorri’s Gylfaginning, where he unsuccessfully battles a personification of Old Age, have come back to haunt him in a very literal way.²⁰ To add to this, when Ellie grapples with Jormungand, the “World Serpent,” Harris points out that “Old Age conquers everything in the end, of course” (407), in another clear allusion to the Gylfaginning narrative. One of the techniques Harris shares with other reworkers of Norse myth is that of undercutting, as for instance when she characterizes the novel’s antagonist, “the Whisperer” (a version of Mimir) as having the personality of “a bad-tempered old man” (127).²¹ In Runelight, this technique is seen in the transformation of Thor’s hammer, Mjöllnir, into “Jolly” the dwarf with a comically nasty and greedy personality; and Odin’s ravens, Hugin and Munin, who take on human form as the Glaswegian teenagers with a penchant for the “shiny,” Hughie and Mandy.²² These characters thus become more accessible and lighten the texture of these apocalyptic narratives. In Runemarks, this undercutting technique is used most obviously when Loki fills in the back-story of “Hel and Balder” for Maddy, calling it a “roller-coaster love story through space, death and time,” casting it in a colloquial register as a “boy meets girl” narrative with hackneyed plot elements such as the idea that Hel “lives in a bad part of town” (357). The invented narrative fits Loki’s sarcastic and irreverent character, but it also matches Harris’s approach to Norse mythology: finding ingenious explanations behind key mythic events like the death of Baldr, coloring them with contemporary motivations, and couching them in terms which will be familiar to her target audience. For instance, the nightmares attributed to Baldr in the Prose Edda and in the Eddic poem Baldr’s Dreams are explained here as fantasies created by Hel, sent by her into his dreams in an attempt to seduce him and have him “all to herself” (358).²³

19 Harris herself comments on this appeal on her website and more fully explores Loki’s point of view in The Gospel of Loki and The Testament of Loki. 20 Snorri Sturluson, Edda, 44–45. 21 On undercutting, see further Clark, “Norse Medievalism,” 384–85. 22 Runelight, 92 and 106 respectively. 23 The Poetic Edda, 243–45.

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Hel’s plan is said to be motivated by her having heard the classical legend of Pluto and Persephone—she had “heard stories […] of a previous Guardian of the Underworld who’d gained [a spouse] by means of guile and a handful of pomegranate seeds” (358)—and this last classical allusion points to another key element of Harris’s novels: their pluralistic worldview characterized by concepts of postmodernism, here the perceived compatibility of two entirely separate myth-systems.

“What Is Good Today May Be Evil Again Tomorrow” The fantasy world created in Runemarks and Runelight is a complex one, and it hinges on a central opposition between forces of Order and Chaos. The front matter of both novels includes a “Map of the Nine Worlds,” in which the cosmos appears as a series of worlds linked by the World Tree, Yggdrasil. It demonstrates how Harris’s created world brings order to Norse cosmology by rationalizing elements within both Prose and Poetic Eddas that are sometimes contradictory and were certainly not conceived of as a unity. As many scholars have shown, Old Norse myth (and indeed Old Norse paganism) in the singular is an academic creation.²⁴ In fact, the fragmentary character of Norse mythological sources may be one of the elements that inspired Harris to rework them: on her website, she calls the myths “especially fertile soil for the imagination” and speculates that one of the reasons for this may be that they are “so frustratingly incomplete, pieced together from fragments.”²⁵ In Harris’s cosmology, the Nine Worlds comprise Order, otherwise known as “The Firmament” or Asgard (the Sky Citadel); Inland, the Outlands, and the One Sea (grouped as the World Above, or the Middle Worlds); the Fundament, Dream, Death (or Hel, or the Underworld), and Damnation (or the Netherworld), grouped together as the World Below; and finally Chaos (or Pan-daemonium), the World Beyond. As well as being linked by Yggdrasil, the worlds can be accessed through both the bridge, Bif-rost, and the river of Dream, a factor which is crucial to the denouement of the plot but also to Harris’s worldview.

24 For an introduction to this complex subject, see Heather O’Donoghue, From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). 25 See Harris, “Gospel of Loki.”

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The universe of the novels is therefore both plural and binary, since the inhabitants and the worlds all partake in varying degrees both of Order and of Chaos. As One-Eye explains to Maddy in Runemarks: Since the world began—and it has begun many times, and many times ended, and been remade—the laws of Order and Chaos have opposed each other, advancing and retreating in turn across the Nine Worlds, to contain or disrupt according to their nature. (34)

One-Eye claims that “Good and Evil have nothing to do with it” (34), and that, although “glam” (Harris’s term for magic) “works from Chaos,” it is not necessarily evil, for “a tool is only as good or bad as the one working it. And what is good today may be evil again tomorrow” (33). Harris’s universe, then, combines the dualistic struggle of Manichaeism (one of medieval Christianity’s main rivals) with the dismissal of absolute good or evil characteristic of postmodernism.²⁶ This complex ideology is delineated from the perspective of Maddy, and thus made accessible to young adult readers, who will connect it to their own negotiation of the different faiths and ideologies encountered in the contemporary world. The post-apocalyptic world Maddy inhabits is governed by the Order, which at first appears as a Pullman-esque reworking of institutional Christianity along the lines of the Inquisition and modern bureaucracy, combining “parsons” and a “Good Book” with “examiners” and “magisters.” The creed of the Order is delineated in chapter 4 at the point at which Maddy discovers that her worldview is not as stable as she had thought, that her home village is not in fact the center of the worlds but that in fact she inhabits “a world of many parts and contradictions” (32), where “one man’s religion might be another’s heresy, magic and science might overlap […] even the Laws of the Order at World’s End, which she had always assumed were universal, might warp and bend to suit the customs of this new, expanded world” (33). Although One-Eye dismisses questions of good and evil as irrelevant, Harris’s novels are not in fact amoral. They make it clear that a “balance” must be kept between Order and Chaos. Odin’s obsessive search for wisdom in the Eddas becomes here a concern “to study and to understand the Order” (317). He and the other gods value equilibrium, but the Order wants only order:

26 The conversations between One-Eye and the Whisperer in fact bear a strong resemblance to those between the Manichean entities behind the Belgariad and Mallorean High Fantasy series of David and Leigh Eddings. Their conflict is represented alternately as a game and a war that has no end: “You’ve lost […] There’s nothing new about this, my friend” (Runemarks, 467).

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Throughout the history of the world there have been gods and their enemies, Order and Chaos existing in balance. The world needs both. It needs to change, as the World Tree drops its leaves in order to grow. When we were gods, we understood that. We valued the balance of Order and Chaos, and took care to preserve it. But this Order sees things differently. It seeks not to maintain, but to destroy the balance of things, to wipe out anything that is not of itself.

Perfect Order is as bad as the annihilation of total Chaos, but it is also the case that perfect balance is not desirable, for we are later told that “Death [that is, Hel] is a place in permanent balance, a place of no movement, no progress, no change” (337). Therefore, the reader must infer that life itself involves upsetting the balance, continually changing the status quo just as the world ends and begins again. Harris does not explicitly tackle the question of how one is to judge between competing choices, or outline an ethical or moral framework, but it is clear that the choices made by the Order are wrong ones, and this seems to be because they involve limiting the choices and the experience of others. We learn that the aim of the Order is to destroy “the Fiery [anyone tainted by magic] […] every one, until the Order rules supreme, and the world is Cleansed of them for ever” (155). Here Harris draws on the language of ethnic “cleansing” and totalitarianism, and she devotes a lot of space to describing the rise of the Order. The reader discovers that the Order ultimately stemmed from officials of “the University,” the influence of which grew gradually, resulting in the control of the sources of knowledge and thus power: “Histories were written; conclusions drawn; dangerous books were hidden away” (159). Power inheres in “the Department of Records, and the little clique of historians, academics and theologians” who write the “Good Book”: “a catalogue of world knowledge, science, wisdom and medicine; and a list of commandments.” Academia thus becomes a religion and restricts knowledge in the pursuit of power and control: “They controlled education, and ensured that literacy was restricted to the priesthood, its prentices and those of the Order. The word ‘University’ was expanded to make ‘Universal City’, so that as years passed, folk forgot that once there had been free access to books and to learning, and came to believe that things had always been as they were” (159–60).²⁷ It is evident that Harris has a keen interest in the Foucauldian critique of the control of knowledge and particularly in the Nietzschean concepts of the will to 27 The antagonism towards scholars here can also be seen in Harris’s comment on her website that “For too long, academics have claimed the Norse myths as their own” (“The Gospel of Loki”). For further discussion of the sometimes uneasy relationship between academics and practitioners (as well as the frequent overlap between the two), see Clark, “Norse Medievalism,” 390– 91, and “Old Norse Made New,” 137–38.

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power, master-slave morality (the idea that “the slave dreams of becoming the master” is repeated throughout), perspectivism, and eternal recurrence. We may also infer that universal literacy and self-determinism are unequivocally good things, but again there is no explicit explanation of the basis on which one can make ethical or moral judgments. What is clear, however, is that Harris expects her readers to think for themselves and resists giving them definitive answers. A comment Loki makes to Maddy in Runemarks encapsulates her implicit position nicely: Anyone can be a god if they have enough worshippers. You don’t even have to have powers any more. In my time I’ve seen theatre gods, gladiator gods, even storyteller gods, Maddy— you people see gods everywhere. Gives you an excuse for not thinking for yourselves… God’s just a word, Maddy. Like Fury. Like demon. Just words people use for things they don’t understand. Reverse it, and you get dog. It’s just as appropriate. (98–99)

The initial concept is a contemporary twist on the principle, seen in other contemporary medievalist works, that when gods are no longer worshiped they diminish and are supplanted (compare Runelight, 316: “The gods of Asgard are almost extinct; our names forgotten; our territories lost”).²⁸ Harris here satirizes the modern tendency to idolize others, particularly in the media, but she neatly undercuts her own position as bestselling novelist: a storyteller god. Simultaneously, she implicitly emphasizes the need for people to think for themselves and warns them not to be fooled by the fact that they can name something into thinking that they therefore understand it or that it has a concrete reality. It fits in with the iconoclasm and anti-authoritarianism in Harris’s other works like Chocolat, but it also betrays a certain anxiety about the role of the novelist as wielder of words, and the power that those words might have over others.

“For a Teller of Tales Will Never Die” Comments on words, language, and books appear throughout the Runemarks dyad. These relate mostly to English, although the names of the runes are given in Icelandic and Harris summarizes the runes of the “Elder Script” (the Norse futhark) as hug-rúnar, “mindrunes,” and rísta-rúnar, “carven runes,” and sig-rúnar, “runes of victory” (39).²⁹ The “new runes” that become so important to the plot in Runelight come from the Old English futhark (both sets are listed in the front matter of Runelight), but Harris does not discuss the compatibility of the two systems, or the

28 See further Clark, “Norse Medievalism,” 387. 29 For the names of these runes, see The Lay of Sigrdrifa, in The Poetic Edda, 167–69.

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fact that the invented spells she attaches to the runes are named in Icelandic: “Her trick was called sjón-henni, or truesight, and it was one of the fingerings of the rune Bjarkán” (23). This approach might seem willfully eclectic, but it fits in with Harris’s broader view of language in the novels, as we can see early in Runemarks when magical creatures like goblins are labeled first as “Faërie” (3) and soon after as “the Fiery” (27). One-Eye dismisses the difference and tells Maddy: “Faërie, Fiery, it’s all the same” (27). That this is not just part of Odin’s characterization is seen by the fact that Loki later uses the term “Fury” (82), and it seems to reflect Harris’s principle that things in the world are radically interrelated, whether words, myths, or people. Folk etymologies of the sort found in Isidore of Seville, and structural or thematic similarities across world myths, combine with the unexpected relation of characters such as Maggie Rede, who turns out to be Maddy’s sister and the other child of Thor (Modi and Magni, Maddy and Maggie), and Peth, who turns out to be an avatar of Odin. This radical refusal of absolute boundaries between physical and cultural entities is particularly evident in its application to the real-world texts that Harris adapts and fuses with other texts and her own inventions. For instance, the epigraph at the start of book six is an invented quotation from “Lokabrenna, 6:6:6,” which reads: In the beginning there was the Word. And the Word begat Man And Man begat Dream And Dream begat the gods After which you may find things getting just a tiny little bit more complicated. (247)

The name of the text is modeled on the Eddic poem Lokasenna, but the location “666” alludes to the number of the Beast in the biblical book of Revelation (chapter 13, verse 18). The poem begins with a fusion of the start of John’s Gospel with the style of the genealogies found in the Old Testament book of Genesis and the New Testament Gospel of Matthew in the King James Version of the Bible. This in itself subtly draws attention to the scholarly practice of “harmonization” between the different gospel accounts within Christian theology. However, Harris goes further, by undercutting the solemnity of her poem’s beginning: she shifts from a regular stressed line and archaic syntax and vocabulary to modern colloquial English, and she makes use of italics, which signals a shift between oral poetry and written text (since italics can only be used in printed material). Authority is always open to question, whether it is secular or religious, literary or etymological.

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Harris clearly expects her readers to pay close attention to language, as, for instance, when Maggie reflects on the changes to the city of World’s End: “the world she knew had turned to Pan-daemonium” (Runelight, 8). Here, the hyphenation defamiliarizes this already uncommon word and invites the reader to think about the etymological meaning of the components of the word, and possibly its use as a literal place (the capital of Hell) in Milton’s Paradise Lost, since it likewise appears in Runemarks as an alternative name for the world of Chaos (32). Words are important sources of knowledge, then, but they are also potentially dangerous. As we have already seen, the Examiners of the Order write edited versions of history, hide “dangerous” books, and restrict literacy (Runemarks, 158–59), and, as One-Eye tells Maddy: “Not kings, but historians rule the world” (158), an allusion to the famous maxim about history being written by the victors (anonymous but often misattributed to Winston Churchill). The Order wields influence or authority over the king, the “Parleyment,” the army, the police, and possesses great wealth and power (160). The Order’s recruits or “Prentices” give up their names and their families in order to enter the priesthood, an abnegation of self which epitomizes Harris’s creation of a dangerous totalitarian religious bureaucracy, and the power that they may gain in return via the use of “the Word” is characterized ominously as bringing “ecstasy” and as being “an addiction, a pleasure beyond any other” (183). The implication is that language can be misused in an unwholesome and damaging way; that religious fervor can constitute obsessive fanaticism. The phrase “the Word” is used in John’s Gospel to refer to Christ as part of the Trinity (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” John 1:1). Here, however, it is a power that is used to torture others and enforce compliance. Similarly, the head of the Order is known as “the Nameless,” an allusion to the Christian and Jewish “Jahweh,” the God whose name must not be taken in vain, who here becomes a despotic tyrant bent on absolute domination: “everything will worship Me, and love Me, and fear Me, and be judged” (Runemarks, 478). The Nameless has already destroyed the world(s) once, in “a great cleansing” derived from the biblical story of Noah’s Flood: “Only Noar’s line survived, or so the Good Book tells us” (103). The Examiners of the Order are based at “the Universal City” (144), a corruption of “University” but also a nod to Rome, “the Eternal City” of Catholicism, and they represent the Inquisition at its worst: “there were other darker tales of demons caught and bound by the power of the Word; demons who were dragged, screaming, to the scaffold and the pyre; demons who looked like men and women but were in fact the servants of the enemy, and therefore had no soul to save” (138). Harris relies on the reader’s knowledge of the Inquisition to read between the lines and realize that the executed victims are not in fact demons and therefore

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they are encouraged to side against the Order. This is followed up by an attribution to the Order of practices associated with institutional religion: “In World’s End Prayer was compulsory; Sundays were fallow; Mass was twice daily and anyone refusing to attend—or indeed exhibiting unnatural behaviour of any sort—was likely to face Examination and Cleansing if they failed to renounce their ways” (138). In this way, the Order is carefully constructed as a dangerously ruthless and over-zealously fundamentalist institutionalized religion with not just conservative but fascistic values. In Runelight, Harris expands the frame to include conservative Islam in her references to the practice at World’s End of devout women wearing the “bergha” (Runelight, 3, 70). However, here, the main religion in Harris’s sights is conservative Protestantism, with its emphasis on the Bible, the singular Word, the monolithic Good Book. Books and words in the plural, however, are potential sources of great good in Harris’s universe. In Runelight, the main reason that Maggie is able to raise herself beyond the limitations of her upbringing is that she has taught herself to read and has thus “collected more knowledge than anyone could have suspected” (9). After the abrupt disappearance of the Order, she collects the books they left behind, “knowing that it was dangerous, but filled with a mounting nostalgia for the half-forgotten worlds inside” (10). Books, then, are dangerous, but offer the promise of worlds within, and this is because of the ambivalent power of words. As Loki reflects: “Words were far from harmless. A well-placed word can bring down a foe; a speech can take down an empire” (505). However, they are also “misleading. They liked to hide, to reverse themselves, to warp and turn into something else.” Harris has Loki consider the example of the word “Apocalypse”: Passed down through generations of Folk; a word of power and mystery, the sense of it lost over the years until only the children knew what it meant, in skipping songs and playground games: See the Cradle rocking High above the town… Pucker-lips, a-pucker-lips, All fall down. (505)

The verse here is clearly a reworking of the nursery rhyme Ring-a-ring o’ roses and the popular belief that it originally referred to the Black Death (now usually rejected by folklorists). It encapsulates the principle that ancient wisdom is contained in under-regarded material like nursery rhymes. The corruption of the word “apocalypse” into the apparently nonsensical phrase “a-pucker-lips” foregrounds the idea

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that words, and the knowledge they contain, develop and shift and enlightenment can be discovered in the most unpromising places if one is willing to hunt and take all kinds of literature seriously. However, a few pages before this passage, Harris inserts an invented quotation from Lokabrenna: “The End of the World always starts with a kiss” (Runelight, 499). This perhaps alludes to Judas’s betrayal of Jesus before the Crucifixion with a kiss, but blends it with the fairytale prophecy of the Apocalypse concealed in the words “pucker lips,” which then is realized in Maggie and Adam’s wedding, where they ceremonially kiss the Kissing Stone— which itself, it transpires, conceals in plain sight the rune “Gabe,” which means a “gift” but also in fact involves a “sacrifice” (502–4, 512). Again, words become other words, things turn out to be other things, and language has the power to make and unmake the world. Words and books have great potential, then, but even greater potential is found in what lies beyond them and what creates them, and that is “Dream,” Harris’s term for imagination. At the end of Runemarks we find the startling assertion that “Anything that can be dreamed is true. The river Dream, like the World Tree, has many branches, many routes” (504). By the end of the sequel Runelight, when the worlds are on the brink of annihilation, the only way to save them is quite literally for Maddy to dream. Odin commands her to “Dream, Maddy! Dream for your life!” (528) and, although she initially feels inadequate, she reflects: “But dream? That she could do. She had dreamed for most of her young life.” It is dreaming, longing, imagining, then, that promises salvation, and the shape of the world is limited only by one’s own imagination. In Runelight the villagers of Malbry dream back to life lost dogs and toys and children (388–90). The gods and their allies use Dream to build Asgard as they most want it to be: “Bragi had a concert hall, Idun a series of gardens and groves. Heimdall had a lighthouse, Skadi a labyrinth of caves. Njörd had an underwater hall, Frey a banqueting hall, Freyja a hall of mirrors” (563). This might seem like a rather limited wish-fulfillment scenario, but Harris goes beyond it. For instance, Loki is given the opportunity to live within his devoted wife Sigyn’s homely and modest dream-creation and to be reunited with their two little boys whom Sigyn has dreamed back from death, but he decides “that perfection was really not his style” (565). Similarly, Maggie rejects the option of living with her newfound sister and family to carry out her own project of rebuilding World’s End and reopening the Library (570). This seems to represent Harris’s recognition within her own imaginative creation that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the messy reality of life and human desires. The resurrection of dead children is not seen as in any way a problematic, or emotionally complex undertaking, and as such it might be seen as an underdeveloped plot element. However, it seems to fit into Harris’s worldview better if taken in a metaphorical sense, captured at

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the end of Runemarks, where Maddy realizes that “a teller of tales will never die, but will live on in stories—for as long as there are folk to listen” (504). In real-world terms, then, what the concept of Dream opens up is the possibility for Harris’s young adult readers that their own worlds are not fixed and immutable, that the loss experienced in the transition from childhood to adulthood is not irrevocable. And if there is a singular message from Runemarks and Runelight at all, it is that, fueled by books and stories, children and adults alike must dream, imagine the world differently, and that, if we do, then—for better or worse—the world will change. In some ways, Harris’s approach to Norse mythology is not dissimilar to that of Snorri Sturluson in his Prose Edda: like him, she brings together disparate source materials and adapts them to create a more coherent narrative. However, where Snorri attempts to rationalize and harmonize incompatible stories, betraying a perhaps more sinister ideological bent, Harris is concerned to proliferate meaning within an overarching cosmological structure. She embraces a pluralistic worldview, where myths and religions represent alternative perspectives on an infinitely complex reality. For Harris, conflicting narratives represent different points of view, and every ending represents the chance for a new beginning. How reality shifts and develops depends entirely on which stories (and aspects of those stories) we choose to listen to, believe, and retell.

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Chapter 18 “Here Are the Words of the Æsir Themselves”: Retelling the Master Builder Myth between Translation and Adaptation Scholarship on the reception of Old Norse literature has focused on the activities of translation on the one hand—including what Chapman calls the meeting “of poesy with poesy”—and adaptation on the other, a loosely defined complex of responses that covers everything from Wagner’s Ring Cycle to graphic novels, and extends to what O’Donoghue refers to as writers working “under the influence” of Norse mythology.¹ Within, and perhaps between, these two categories falls the act of retelling, a sphere of activity that includes many responses to the Poetic and Prose Eddas. When Snorri Sturluson first gathered together the overlapping sequence of narratives about the Norse gods into a coherent framework in his Edda, he instigated a tradition of retelling Norse mythological narratives in literary prose that has long served as the primary means of carrying these stories across to new audiences and that continues to the present day. However, this venerable tradition of literary retelling has so far escaped the scrutiny given to both translations of particular Old Norse-Icelandic sources, and also to high-profile adaptations. The fact that retelling seems to occupy a gray area between translation and adaptation is supported by the lack of critical reflection on the activity itself: retellings are often marketed as being “true” or “faithful” to the stories and the label “retelling” suggests participation in an ongoing process, yet sources are rarely acknowledged and problematic aspects of the myth are often elided without comment. This raises important questions: just what exactly is the re-teller being faithful to, and do the same ethical considerations bound up in cultural translation also apply to retelling? By taking as a case study several recent retellings of the Master Builder narAcknowledgment: I would like to thank Heather for introducing me to the reception of Old Norse through her mentorship and unparalleled scholarship, as well as for encouragement with the particular project that is the focus of this essay. 1 Heather O’Donoghue, “From Heroic Lay to Victorian Novel: Old Norse Poetry about Brynhildr and Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native,” in Translating Early Medieval Poetry: Transformation, Reception, Interpretation, ed. Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), 183–98, at 185. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501516597-023

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rative, including that in my own Norse Myths, this essay argues that giving proper consideration to this activity on the margins of two disciplines can illuminate wider debates surrounding the reception and reuse of Old Norse literature. Ursula Le Guin, reviewing Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology, opens with the insight that “any retelling of a tale from times long past must be an interpretation, a translation into language and concepts that the present audience understands.”² Retelling is here situated as an interpretation—contingent, because of the distance from our sources—and also necessarily as a translation, broadly conceived. It is curious, then, that in the discipline of translation studies, the process of “retelling” has received little attention. When the concept is referred to, it is usually either subsumed into an inclusive definition of translation or used to characterize translation practice as a whole as a form of retelling. For instance Lefevere, a critic most closely associated with the cultural turn in translation studies, argues that every translation is also a rewriting, even if moving a text from one language to another constitutes the most radical transformation within the bundle of processes—editing, anthologizing, compilation, and reference works aimed at “non-professional readers”—that he groups together and seeks to rescue from their “ancillary” position.³ Tymoczko addresses retelling in slightly more targeted terms, suggesting that “the discourse of retelling and rewriting is a particularly potent framework for the discussion of a noncanonical or marginalized literature” and arguing that in the case of some little-known early Irish literature, translation is in effect “telling a new story.”⁴ This is certainly not the case for the central narratives of Old Norse mythology, which since the “rediscovery” and translation of Norse sources in the seventeenth century have always been implicated in a chain of retranslation and retelling: from Old Norse to Latin; via Mallet’s French to English in the case of Thomas Percy’s 1770 Northern Antiquities—re-edited with reference to Old Norse by I. A. Blackwell in 1847—and later within the gravitational pull of both these early translations and the many retellings and adaptations that used them as guides.⁵ Whilst Norse myth has not played quite as important a role as classical 2 Ursula Le Guin, “Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman Review: Nice Dramatic Narratives, but Where’s the Nihilism?,” The Guardian, March 29, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/ mar/29/norse-myths-by-neil-gaiman-review. 3 André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London: Routledge, 1992), 3. 4 Maria Tymoczko, “The Metonymics of Translating Marginalized Texts,” Comparative Literature 47 (1995): 111–24, at 12–13. 5 On these early milestones in the reception of Norse myth, see Heather O’Donoghue, From Asgard to Valhalla (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), especially ch. 6. For a discussion of the influence of Northern Antiquities in particular, see Thomas Spray, “Northern Antiquities and Nationalism,” eSharp 23 (Spring 2015): 1–17, https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_404386_smxx.pdf.

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mythology in underpinning the English literary canon, it has still had, as O’Donoghue argues, “a major impact on Western culture.”⁶ Indeed, the process of retelling the central narratives of Norse myth has continued for long enough that every new version both relies on and responds to an established tradition—to use Tymoczko’s terminology, “the retelling is metonymic” of what has come before.⁷ In fact, the central stories of Norse myth are so firmly embedded in popular consciousness that retellings are able to play with metonymic effects and weave in elements of the medieval sources that would constitute “information overload” on first telling.⁸ These include original spellings of proper names and placenames, the accretion of various—sometimes contradictory—details, or attempts to carry across literary features such as the economy of saga prose: even in one case “deconstructing and decontextualizing the Old Norse material” in a “dialogic relationship with earlier versions of the myth.”⁹ As productive a starting point as Tymoczko’s essay represents for understanding the terms within which the transmission of texts to new audiences takes place, it is clear that she understands translation as a form of retelling, and translators as a “special group of rewriters”: neither she nor Lefevere reflect on retelling as a category in its own right.¹⁰ Other critics have acknowledged the “fluid boundaries between the activities of translation, adaptation, rewriting and retelling” whilst similarly locating all these activities on a translation continuum,¹¹ or have approached retelling simply as a subset of translation. Öztürk Baydere, for example, considers the challenges to existing paradigms posed by a translation of a modernized retelling of The Canterbury Tales into Turkish, characterizing such a process as “retranslation through indirect translation.”¹² But under what terms do we critique a work such as Ackroyd’s The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling in the first place? Intralingual translation here seems an inadequate label for a process so radical that it renders the famous opening lines “Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth/ Inspired hath in every holt and heeth” with the almost absurdly prosaic “the west wind blows away the stench of the city.”¹³ Whilst labeled as a retelling 6 O’Donoghue, From Asgard to Valhalla, 85. 7 Tymoczko, quoting John Foley, “Metonymics of Translating,” 14. 8 Tymoczko, “Metonymics of Translating,” 18. 9 Kristel Zilmer, “‘Nobody Owns the Myths:’ Adaptations of Old Norse Myth in Tor Åge Bringsværd’s Vår gamle gudelære,” Scandinavian Studies 90, no. 2 (2018): 161–94, at 190 and 191. 10 Tymoczko, “Metonymics of Translating,” 16. 11 Judith Inggs, “Fairy Tales and Folk Tales,” in The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation, ed. Kelly Washbourne and Ben Van Wyke (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 146–58, at 146. 12 Hilal Öztürk Baydere, “What Could the Translation of a ‘Retelling’ Imply for Translation Studies?,” transLogos 2, no. 2 (2019): 102–33, at 116. 13 Peter Ackroyd, The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 3.

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in its cover title, the title page tells us that Chaucer’s tales are “translated and adapted” by Ackroyd, suggesting that in this author’s understanding, retelling either relies on both processes, or falls somewhere between the two.¹⁴ It is not unusual for translation to be viewed as the primary act of reception, and adaptation and retelling as secondary derivations. Long seen as the poor relative of translation studies, the study of adaptation has often been subsumed into the wider field or relegated to the position of a “subaltern discipline”—though there have been several concerted attempts in recent years to problematize the hierarchy of translation and adaptation and to view “both disciplines as fundamentally different yet interrelated processes.”¹⁵ One difference, at least in the context of medieval literature, is that translation almost always makes reference to a particular source or group of witnesses; so it is clear that Larrington’s The Poetic Edda is a translation, even if the sources are themselves dispersed or when there are several versions of a poem such as Vǫluspá that may have to be editorially reconciled before translation takes place.¹⁶ Perhaps more fundamentally, there is an expectation that however creative or unorthodox a translation might be, and however much other translations (or indeed, retranslation) might influence the process, the aim is one of discernible correspondence between the language of the medieval source and the modern translation. Adaptation, on the other hand, takes aspects of the original sources (often mediated via other translations or adaptations) to create a new work which references or in some way maps onto the adapted text —sometimes “laterally”¹⁷—but that does not rely on this identification for it to function as an autonomous cultural product.¹⁸ In addition, O’Donoghue has also made us aware of the many ways in which authors bring the plots, tropes, and imagery of Old Norse literature into their writing, “adapting” these features to a new context even when this debt is not explicitly, or even consciously, acknowledged.¹⁹

14 Ackroyd, Canterbury Tales, 3. 15 Laurence Raw, “Introduction: Identifying Common Ground,” in Translation, Adaptation and Transformation, ed. Laurence Raw (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 1–20, at 2–3. 16 The Poetic Edda, trans. Carolyne Larrington, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). In fact, this revised edition includes separate translations of the Codex Regius version of Vǫluspá and of that in Hauksbók. 17 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2006), xiii–xiv. 18 Many adaptation scholars give remediation an important place in the definition of adaptation as a process, whilst also acknowledging that the transposition can instead (or also) take place “from one cultural field into another”: Johannes Fehrle and Mark Schmitt, “Adaptation as Translation: Transferring Cultural Narratives,” Komparatistik Online (2018): 1–7, at 2. 19 O’Donoghue, “From Heroic Lay to Victorian Novel,” 185. See also Heather O’Donoghue, “The One that Got Away in Old Norse Myth, Moby-Dick, and the Work of Hugh McDiarmid,” in The Vikings Reimagined: Reception, Recovery, Engagement, ed. Tom Birkett and Roderick Dale (Berlin: De Gruyt-

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When it comes to Norse myth, whilst every post-medieval retelling has relied to a greater or lesser extent on Snorri, the terms are further blurred as Snorri’s version is of course also itself a retelling: perhaps the most radically interventionist of all. Indeed, Helgason has recently argued that “Snorri and his contemporaries should be regarded as compilers or rewriters”²⁰ with “no significant difference” between Snorri’s rewriting and that of the Marvel comics’ reframing of Thor in the twentieth century.²¹ Helgason perhaps gives too little credit to Snorri’s proximity to the oral tradition and motivation as a conservator of living narratives, but he is absolutely right to draw attention to the fact that the “pre-texts” we think of as sources “are themselves adaptations of one kind or another.”²² Hutcheon’s request that we talk of the “adapted text” rather than source, seems sensible in this context;²³ yet even this term needs refinement when referring to retelling myth, as this particular kind of rewriting hardly ever limits itself to adapting the Prose Edda alone, working with what Leitch calls multiple “precursor texts” in the form of Eddic and skaldic poems, saga prose, art and material culture, as well as the many editions, translations, handbooks, guides, and critical essays presenting and interpreting these varied sources.²⁴ It may be, as Zilmer has recently argued, that “mythological adaptation is a special form of adaptation, as it creates a dialogic relationship with the legendary, untraceable past”: in adapting a tradition it is perhaps not tied so closely to the questions of remediation and fidelity that have dominated discussion of other forms of adaptation.²⁵ Though literary retelling of myth is undoubtedly a form of adaptation with a “dialogic relationship” to a body of stories that are themselves adaptations, and though translation and adaptation are both “phenomena of constructing culture through acts of rewriting,”²⁶ it seems to me that the act of retelling differs from both translation and other forms of adaptation in two key respects. Firstly, unlike translation, retelling does not imply a one-to-one correspondence between a par-

er, 2019), 129–44 and the many case studies in her English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 20 Jón Karl Helgason, Echoes of Valhalla: The Afterlife of the Eddas and Sagas, trans. Jane Victoria Appleton (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), 74–75. 21 Helgason, Echoes of Valhalla, 50. 22 Helgason, Echoes of Valhalla, 12. 23 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, xiii. 24 Thomas Leitch, “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory,” Criticism 45, no. 2 (2003): 149–71, at 165. 25 Zilmer, “Adaptations of Old Norse Myth,” 167. 26 Katja Krebs, “Translation and Adaptation – Two Sides of an Ideological Coin?,” in Translation, Adaptation and Transformation, ed. Raw, 42–53 at 42. Quoted in Fehrle and Schmitt, Adaptation as Translation, 4.

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ticular source text and the retold narrative—in fact, this also differentiates retelling from most forms of adaptation, in that there may be no clearly discernible “adapted text.” However, unlike the license given to adaptation as its “own palimpsestic thing,”²⁷ a retelling of Norse myth does still imply that it is part of a tradition, and that the version presented to the reader can be readily located within this tradition. There may be a much greater degree of license afforded to a retelling of Norse myth than a translation of the Prose Edda, but we would also expect adherence to the central narratives of the myth cycle. In other words, labeling a work as a re-telling situates it in a metonymic relationship to previous tellings, and within the narrative of cultural transmission through which myths are preserved and passed on to new audiences: this in turn exerts a degree of control over the parameters of the retold narrative. The second key respect by which literary retelling differs from translation is in the foregrounding of the teller. Some translations are of course carried out by translators with a high profile—Heaney’s Beowulf, Armitage’s Sir Gawain, and Auden’s translation of the Poetic Edda come immediately to mind.²⁸ However, with retelling, as questions of fidelity to—or relationship with—a particular source fade into the background, the focus is redirected to the literary or narrative merits of the particular instance of telling, and consequently to the teller as author. Many readers, for example, will be drawn to Gaiman’s version of the myths because they are fans of his fiction rather than having an interest in the Norse gods. Again, this situates retelling somewhere between translation and adaptation of mythical narratives, the latter of course usually classed as original and proprietary works: whether Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Marvel’s Thor, or Byatt’s Ragnarok. ²⁹ Helgason notes that this is in keeping with a medieval tradition where at times “the main emphasis is placed on the individual who is reciting” a particular story, rather than the “creators(s)” of this same work.³⁰ Indeed, in discussion of the retelling of fairy tales, Joosen suggests that this may be a defining feature of retelling: a highlighting of “performativity and flexibility” and the retold text’s status as a “ver27 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 9. 28 Seamus Heaney, Beowulf (London: Faber & Faber, 1999); Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London: Faber & Faber, 2009); W. H. Auden and Paul B. Taylor, The Elder Edda: A Selection (London: Random House, 1970). 29 It could be argued that all of these borrowings of Norse myth are themselves retellings, including the novel Ragnarok—which involves the protagonist encountering a book of Norse myths and relating it to her own experiences. But it seems to me that what this character encounters in the novel, a prose retelling of Norse myths and legends, is something of a missing link between the worlds of translation and adaptation, worth considering in its own right, A. S. Byatt, Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2011). 30 Helgason, Echoes of Valhalla, 51.

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sion” in a gesture towards the oral tradition.³¹ As we will see, the terms through which literary retellings are presented to their audience also tend to highlight their “intermediary” status as well as carefully positioning the retelling between the activities of translation and adaptation.

Framing the Retelling Kevin Crossley-Holland’s version of the Norse myths, first published in 1980 by André Deutsch, and two years later reissued as The Penguin Book of Norse Myths, has introduced several generations of readers to Norse mythology.³² It has not been out of print in the forty years since its first publication, which is itself testament to the author’s skill at capturing the richness of the mythology and presenting it in such an approachable and unmannered way.³³ The cover page refers to the Norse myths “introduced and retold by Kevin Crossley-Holland,” and the author is one of the few qualified to write a scholarly introduction to his own popular retelling, an introduction in which he discusses individual poems, sources, and the literary structure of the myths. In addition to this, notes to the chapters dealing with individual myths run to some fifty-five pages, and are as comprehensive as many of those accompanying translations. Crossley-Holland’s identification of individual sources in his acknowledgments is also unusual. These include translations of the Poetic Edda by Bellows and of the Prose Edda by Jean I. Young, alongside reference works such as Ellis Davidson’s Gods and Myths of Northern Europe and Turville-Petre’s Myth and Religion of the North: the author goes as far as to acknowledge that he “may have unconsciously lifted a phrase from [the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda] here and there” (xii), which indicates a refreshing awareness of retelling as an intertextual dialogue in which prior versions, translations, and scholarly guides are always present, even if engaged with obliquely. Crossley-Holland is also refreshingly open about his rationale for retelling, which stems from a desire to make known “a part of our tradition” less familiar than Greek and Roman mythology (xli), and which distinguishes itself from translation through an appeal to legibility: “no collection of straight translations, however good, and whether in verse or prose, could hope to present the Norse myths in

31 Vanessa Joosen, “Back to Ölenberg: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Retellings and the Sociohistorical Study of the Grimm Tales,” Marvels & Tales 24, no. 1 (2010): 99–115, at 110. 32 The edition referred to throughout is Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Penguin Book of Norse Myths: Gods of the Vikings (London: Penguin, 1993). 33 For further discussion of Crossley-Holland’s status as reteller, see Tom Birkett, “Introduction: Vikings in the Public Eye,” in The Vikings Reimagined, ed. Birkett and Dale, 1–18, at 14.

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a form that would appeal to the wide audience that they so deserve” (xl). We might say that this dual desire to honor the tradition and to reach new audiences is the unspoken rationale behind almost every retelling, and it has certainly been expressed in this way from an early stage in the history of retelling Norse myth.³⁴ What perhaps makes this version a little different is that Crossley-Holland aims not to dumb down the stories to their essentials, but to work in all the detail found across disparate sources. He claims to have “omitted nothing of any consequence that appears in an Eddaic poem or Snorri Sturluson” but also stresses that he has “not hesitated to develop hints, to flesh out dramatic situations, and add snatches of dialogue” (xl). He mentions in particular adding to the geographical setting of the myths “that their original audience would have taken for granted” (xl), and this includes frequent references to the weather—no doubt drawn from the personal “observation of Iceland” mentioned in the introduction (xl). Perhaps one reason his retelling has stood the test of time better than any other is because it is so comprehensive—to use the metaphor of textile that is often associated with traditional stories, Crossley-Holland takes all the surviving fragments of the tapestry, no matter how degraded or seemingly out of place, and stitches them to a back-cloth that is of his making—very little is lost in the process, but it is still very much his own composition. Crossley-Holland’s Penguin Norse Myths may be the most enduring of contemporary retellings, but Neil Gaiman’s recently published Norse Mythology is without doubt the most high profile.³⁵ A Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, Gaiman’s playful version of the myths rides on the back of his huge success as a writer of darkly humored fantasy, and as such has introduced many readers to the myth cycle for the first time. Gaiman clearly has a keen awareness of the particularities of retelling as a creative practice, and (as is typical of retelling) locates himself within a history of reception and reproduction, telling us how he first encountered the Norse gods through the Mighty Thor comics and went on to read Roger Lancelyn Green’s rather dated (but recently reissued) Myths of the Norsemen: Retold from the Old Norse Poems and Tales. ³⁶ He also tells us that when it came to his

34 Even Rasmus Björn Anderson, who claims to be writing “the first complete and systematic presentation of the Norse mythology in the English language” [his italics] still “fully appreciate[s] the value of” and cites, “the many excellent treatises and translations” as well as retellings in Scandinavian languages that precede it, Norse Mythology or The Religion of Our Forefathers (Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co., 1884), 8–9. He also appeals to the lack of attention to “Gothic inheritance” over classical mythology and asks “whether you will not give the Norse the preference,” 7. 35 Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 36 Lancelyn Green, in his Myths of the Norsemen (London: Puffin Books, 1960/2017), himself looks back to “that classic version The Heroes of Asgard by Annie and Eliza Keary” published in 1857 as

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own retelling, he “did not dare go back to the tellers of Norse myth whose work [he] had loved” (xvii), including Lancelyn Green and Kevin Crossley-Holland, presumably fearing that his own retelling would be unduly influenced. Instead, he turns to “many different translations of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda” as well as the Poetic Edda (translation unspecified) and Simek’s Dictionary of Northern Mythology (xvii). This betrays an anxiety common to retellings locating themselves within the intertextual chain of telling—how to acknowledge influence and establish credibility without becoming enmeshed in those same influences, and how to avoid having to cite a particular translation as a source when not making reference to the original Old Norse. Such considerations are not limited to retelling— Larrington addresses the issue of how to avoid the influence of existing translations when translating the Poetic Edda, for example³⁷—and “retranslation” has become an important discourse within translation studies. However, the tightrope is a particularly difficult one to walk when it comes to retelling, precisely because the process is balanced so finely between investment in the tradition of retelling and the avowed separation from this same tradition necessary to create the space for something new. Gaiman goes further than most in his author’s preface in gesturing towards the performativity of the oral tradition, and opening out this space to his audience. “The fun,” he says, “comes in telling [the myths] yourself” (xviii). “[R]ead the stories in this book,” he urges the reader, “then make them your own” (xviii). It seems to me that this statement is doing a lot of work. Firstly, it reinforces the idea that mythology is a collective inheritance, and that authorless, iterative, and oral in origin, it belongs to no-one and to everyone—similar to Bringsværd’s statement in relation to his series Vår gamle gudelære, that “nobody owns the myths.”³⁸ However, Gaiman’s statement also acts as something of a defense against any accusation of derivation—if anyone can make the myths their own, then any teller can presumably put their name to (and exercise proprietary rights over) a particular retelling of Norse myth, as Gaiman does. Finally, in conjuring up an image of tales retold in the wake of reading his Norse Mythology, he situates his book as the jumping off

an example of those versions “which have tended to exceed the license of invention which a teller should be allowed” using this prior work to position his own as one which “tried […] to keep to the spirit of the original,” xiv. The Keary sisters themselves open with reference to Simrok’s “drawing together” of narratives in his Handbuch der Deutschen Mythologie, as a necessary step towards their “little tales […] drawn from the most striking and picturesque of the Northern myths,” The Heroes of Asgard (London: Macmillan, 1857/rev. ed. 1906), 10. 37 Carolyne Larrington, “Translating and Retranslating the Poetic Edda,” in Translating Early Medieval Poetry, ed. Birkett and March-Lyons, 165–82, at 170–71. 38 Tor Åge Bringsværd, quoted by Zilmer, “Adaptations of Old Norse Myth,” 187.

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point for the next generation of retellings. In short, this statement is once again poised very delicately between characterizing the tradition of retelling as ongoing and necessarily contingent on what came before, and reinforcing his particular retelling as distinctive, important, and new. Whilst Gaiman does not address the question of fidelity directly, he twice mentions his hope that the retelling is an “honest” one, saying “I’ve tried my best to retell these myths and stories as accurately as I can”³⁹ and later adding “I hope I’ve retold these stories honestly.”⁴⁰ Discussing his retelling in interview, he tells us that “I really didn’t depart—I was very, very good in always taking what happened in the tales that we have and just amplifying it, giving it color, giving it dialogue.”⁴¹ This rather begs the question. What does accuracy imply in a retelling? What does honesty mean in this context? And what license does the rather euphemistic “amplifying” and “giving color” encompass? Gaiman is not alone in this prevarication; indeed, it seems a studied vagueness—about sources, about influences, and what is acceptable and what dishonest—may in fact be necessary for the contingent act of retelling to take place.⁴² Revealingly, some of the details of Norse myth that Gaiman uses as examples of their richness in interviews about his book—such as Thor dropping salmon bones on his plate from under his veil and dead fish rising to the top of the seas at Ragnarǫk—are actually his own embellishments, details accreted in his interpretative realization of the narratives.⁴³ Like most retellings, Gaiman’s version of the myths progresses one narrative per chapter in a roughly chronological sequence from creation to Ragnarǫk, but the colloquial style of his version is fairly unique. Rather than the “withers” and “thereafters” of the Lancelyn Green retelling that Gaiman grew up with, his tone is conversational, using direct speech wherever possible, and this informal, “curiously childlike” tone takes the gods down from their pedestals and makes them feel very human in scale, as several reviewers have pointed out.⁴⁴ These techniques also help to make the retelling feel intimate and accessible, and also in flux,

39 Gaiman, Norse Mythology, xvi. 40 Gaiman, Norse Mythology, xviii. 41 “Neil Gaiman Interview, 2017: Norse Gods, Donald Trump and Learning from Mythology,” Channel 4 News (2017), https://youtu.be/7zHCpEnCy8I, at 3:19–32. 42 Indeed, many retellings, including Anderson’s, achieve the same studied ambiguity in a different way: by including a roll-call of all conceivable translations and scholarship. 43 Gaiman, “Neil Gaiman Interview.” 44 Katy Waldman, “Neil Gaiman Reanimates the Norse Myths,” The New Yorker, March 19, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/neil-gaiman-reanimates-the-norse-mythsand-lokionce-again-is-the-most-alluring-character. See also Le Guin, “Norse Mythology Review,” who notes the “familiar tone and friendly approach” which sometimes “trivialises” through its “pleasant, ingratiating” telling.

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as if you are overhearing a well-rehearsed teller confident enough to alter the details to bring his audience along with him. You can sense the glee with which Gaiman recounts the gory details of the “bad poets’” share of the mead, and the theatricality of asking “the delicate” among his readers to “stop [their] ears, or read no further.”⁴⁵ Gaiman can get away with this kind of authorial intervention because the readers are here for the teller as much as they are here for the myths themselves. To use the terminology of translation studies, his version is thoroughly and unapologetically domesticated—to a modern English idiom, but also very much to the author’s own idiom. Indeed, because Gaiman’s voice is so prominent in this retelling, it makes it hard to avoid the impression that the gods with their “funny, snappy” dialogue have become characters performing in his own fantasy world, influenced by the Marvel figures he cites as an early influence.⁴⁶ My Norse Myths—with its rather overblown subtitle Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes Vividly Retold—is one of the most recent additions to the rather crowded market of retellings.⁴⁷ This version for Quercus is based on the successful model of their Greek Myths, published a few years prior, and thus follows a template that determined much of the structure and content.⁴⁸ It includes profiles on individual gods and supernatural beings—gathering together what information we know— interspersed with narrative retellings of individual myths. The book also ranges more widely than the others surveyed here, covering heroic legend and accounts of saga heroes and Norse kings. By necessity, individual myths are thus told in a fairly condensed form, and whilst I am unsure if this adds to or detracts from the “vivid” retelling advertised, there is markedly less elaboration than in Crossley-Holland’s or Gaiman’s versions, and certainly less artistry. In its core sections on the myth, the book is perhaps closer to Snorri’s account, but as stated in its introduction, the material included “is not a direct translation of any one source” (xiv). I resort to the same tropes as so many retellings: distinguishing this format from both translation and adaptation, honoring Snorri’s key role in the transmission of the myths, acknowledging intertextuality by referencing several different sources for our knowledge, but not particular editions (xv), as well as using accessibility as a primary justification for transmission of these tales through retelling (xiv). In a slight departure from the two other retellings surveyed here, my aim was to “bring together, rather than embellish, what we know” (xiv), though

45 Gaiman, Norse Mythology, 135. 46 Gaiman, “Neil Gaiman Interview,” 5:05. 47 The version referenced is Tom Birkett, The Norse Myths: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes Vividly Retold, paperback ed. (London: Quercus, 2019). 48 Robin Waterfield and Kathryn Waterfield, The Greek Myths: Stories of the Greek Gods and Heroes Vividly Retold (London: Quercus, 2016).

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using cohesion rather than elaboration as a guiding principle of retelling also has many precedents.⁴⁹ Like Gaiman, I also use the idea of the chain of retelling as justification for any liberties taken, though here with reference to the fact that “no source that comes down to us marks the beginning of the retelling” and with the admittedly vague statement that “myths are meant to be retold” (xv).

The Big, Beautiful Wall The reason for choosing the story of the building of the walls of Asgard—commonly referred to as the Master Builder narrative—as a case study of the ways in which these retellings approach myth—is that a single “full” version of this narrative exists, recorded in Snorri’s Gylfaginning, itself quoting two strophes from Vǫluspá which Snorri took to be a reference to the same story. It thus highlights how even a retelling based on a single “adapted text”—and as a “paraphrase” appearing to have much in common with translation—in fact has the potential to intervene much more profoundly in the reception of the myth, and even to critique the authority of Snorri’s interpretation. Crossley-Holland’s version of the Master Builder myth—titled “The Building of Asgard’s Wall”—is fairly typical of his retelling both in the manner and extent to which he elaborates on Snorri’s narrative. The “fleshing out” takes the form of plausible details added to the bones of the Prose Edda retelling, particularly via dialogue, cross reference to other myths (of Hræsvelgr, for example), and in references to the setting and environment. Perhaps the longest elaboration concerns the appearance of the builder, spun from the statement “þá kom þar smiðr nokkvorr” into an arrival over “the trembling rainbow” (9), encounter with Heimdall, and two-page negotiation over the terms of the contract in which Loki plays a far more prominent role than he does in the source. In linking the rebuilding of the wall to the mistreatment of Gullveig and destruction caused by the ÆsirVanir War, the author is clearly also taking the chronology of Vǫluspá into account and making an implied connection concrete: the first of several acts of critical interpretation. When he criticizes the gods as oath-breakers, Crossley-Holland also seems to take up a cue from the strophes Snorri quotes from Vǫluspá at the end of his narrative, which stress “the seriousness of the gods’ violation of their oaths” in contrast to Snorri’s rather non-judgmental treatment of the episode

49 For example, Zilmer notes that Bringsværd uses the image of a broken mirror to describe Norse mythology, and his process as one of piecing this mirror together, “Nobody Owns the Myths,” 187.

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which frames the story as an etiological narrative about the origin of Odin’s horse.⁵⁰ However, Crossley-Holland may also have been influenced here by an intermediary: Ursula Dronke’s essay ‘“Völuspá’ and Satiric Tradition,” published the year before the release of his Norse Myths, which argues that the stanzas stressing oath-breaking and Snorri’s more jocular narrative could be derived from the same source, and also links this episode to the narrative of Gullveig and the breaking of the original palisade during the war between the Æsir and the Vanir.⁵¹ Here we can begin to see the re-teller’s intervention as more than a simple “fleshing out,” but as a particular reading of the myth which takes its cue from recent scholarship and interprets the episode within a wider structural and moral framework. In his notes to this chapter, Crossley-Holland elaborates that “the antagonism of the gods and giants can only be seen as the conflict of good and evil,” with the gods “embody[ing] aspects of natural and social order” (185) which fits with his presentation of the wall as a necessary protection from the giants that at least partly justifies their machinations. In keeping with this interpretation, deceit is placed very much on the shoulders of the “towering brute of a rock giant” who “burst out of his disguise” (13) upon realizing that he would lose the wager, though Crossley-Holland remarks that the gods are also “far from unblemished” (185). The giant gets the final words denied to him by Snorri, “Tricked by a gang of gods! A brothel of goddesses!” (14), but just as in Snorri’s narrative, Thor arrives to rid the gods of both their troubling contractor and their moral equivocation and allows the myth to close with reference to the benefit the gods gained from their machinations: the foal Sleipnir. Perhaps slightly implausibly, a chastened Loki gifts the horse to Odin, and there’s a characteristic open-endedness to Crossley-Holland’s version of the myth: Odin simply “looked at the Sly One very thoughtfully” (14). Whilst Crossley-Holland certainly adds complexity to this retelling, and makes some sense of Snorri’s strange blend of etiology and eucatastrophe, he stops short of intervening to establish the wider significance of the myth beyond it being “the first of the myths devoted to the enmity of gods and giants” (185): instigating a pattern of threat and resolution that almost always falls in the gods’ favor. In his recent reworking of the Norse myths for children, beautifully illustrated by Jeffrey Alan Love,⁵² Crossley-Holland both re-tells under the influence of his earlier version for adults, and offers a slightly different interpretation of the myth. Here Loki still plays a very decisive role as the cajoler, and the narrative 50 Ursula Dronke, “‘Völuspá’ and Satiric Tradition,” Annali—Studi Nordici 22 (1979): 57–86, at 59. 51 Dronke’s “‘Völuspá’ and Satiric Tradition,” 62 and 58. This essay, first published in 1979, is also included in her collected essays, Myth and Fiction in Early Norse Lands (Aldershot: Routledge, 1996). 52 Crossley-Holland, Tales of Odin, Thor and Loki.

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is still clearly linked with the destruction of the walls of Asgard in the Æsir-Vanir war. However, in this version more emphasis is placed on the gods’ own deception: indeed the chapter is subtitled with the statement “Fair words often conceal weaselly thinking” (30), which reads like a rather loose paraphrase of Vǫluspá st. 27, quoted by Snorri: “Á gengoz eiðar, / orð ok særi / mál öll meginlig, / er á meðal fóro” (“the oaths were violated, / the vows and pledges, / all the powerful words / that passed between them”).⁵³ Notably, Thor does not return home to find a raging jötun and react angrily to this provocation, but arrives home from his “massacre” of giants (36) in time to threaten Loki on behalf of the gods—his killing of the builder and breaking of the oaths of the gods is thus premeditated. For a version aimed at young adults, the moral tenor is far more troubling than the contest between good and evil set up in his Penguin Norse Myths, and markedly more critical of Snorri’s framing of the story. As well as developing the presentation of the Master Builder narrative from his earlier work—what we would call “retranslation” in another context—Crossley-Holland also adds in deliberate nods to his Penguin version. The giant’s exclamation “Tricked by a gang of gods! A brothel of goddesses!” (39) is taken directly from his earlier retelling, and Loki’s gifting of the horse is also very similar. These auto-referential gestures indicate an awareness that each performance by the same teller is unique, but also very much contingent on what came before. The giant’s exclamation is an innovation of the teller that, like Gaiman’s secondhand reporting of “authentic” details that he added in himself, has the potential to be carried across into the next recounting of the mythical narrative. CrossleyHolland’s technique is one that suggests a particularly nuanced understanding of the medium and of the flexible and performative nature of oral storytelling: it also illustrates how interpretative elements of retelling can quickly fossilize into plausible, replicable details. In Gaiman’s retelling of the Master Builder narrative the parameters of Snorri’s narrative are again followed fairly closely. The main difference here is that the gods are not rebuilding a wall, but, anxious of their future security, feel the need for protection from trolls and giants who do not yet seem to have threatened the gods: these are clearly “more than reactive defences,” as Cole has recently argued.⁵⁴ Odin’s pronouncement “We need a wall” (55) is distinctly Trumpian: indeed, in an interview for Channel 4, Gaiman wryly suggests that this myth may 53 The Poetic Edda, vol. 2, Mythological Poems, ed. and trans. Ursula Dronke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 54 Richard Cole, “Æsirism: The Impossibility of Ideological Neutrality in Snorra Edda,” in Old Norse Myths as Political Ideologies: Critical Studies in the Appropriation of Medieval Narratives, ed. Nicolas Meylan and Lukas Rosli (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 27–46, at 40.

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be where a certain US president got his idea for making others pay for his wall,⁵⁵ and his recognition of this point of connection may have influenced the author’s reworking of the myth to make the threat that the wall is built against appear illusory. Shortly after Odin identifies this need for protection, the builder appears as if by magic, “cold calling” with an offer of a deal, to borrow O’Donoghue’s characterization of his arrival.⁵⁶ In this retelling, Loki again takes a more prominent role as a cajoler than in Snorri’s account, but we are also offered a rationale for the gods’ deception—according to their thinking, they will get the foundations of a wall that they can finish up later on. It is telling that this explanation is offered to the gods “as if [Loki] were explaining to a small child” (58–59). Gaiman himself often sees a need to set things straight for the reader and to offer the kinds of explanations that Crossley-Holland mostly leaves unspoken, and at least one reviewer has been left puzzled by such “guileless prose.”⁵⁷ This same desire for clarity leads the author to elaborate on the oaths the gods swear, explaining that “an oath sworn on Gungnir was unbreakable” (60). This places more emphasis on the gods’ breach of trust, perhaps inspired by the quoted stanzas from Vǫluspá in Snorri’s prose account, or perhaps influenced by Crossley-Holland’s earlier retelling of this episode. The giant also gets his say, stating that “you gods are nothing but cheats and vile oath-breakers” (71). However, when the builder becomes angry and metamorphosizes into a mountain giant, the gods level their own accusations: “we have not cheated […] No more than you have cheated” is Odin’s childish repost to the giant, which he follows by stating categorically that “no oath was broken” (71), as if believing his own words absolve the gods: another distinctly Trumpian move. Finally, Thor, the secret weapon, is revealed standing concealed behind the throng of gods: a bit of Marvel-inspired drama, perhaps. In truth, Gaiman casts aspersions on both gods and giants in his retelling of the Master Builder narrative, and the morality is perhaps less clear-cut than Crossley-Holland’s version of the myth for Penguin, though similar to that author’s recent version for children. Where the two retellings converge most notably, however, is in the aftermath of the master builder’s visit. In his young adult retelling, Crossley-Holland makes a bold critical intervention: after the giant’s death he has the gods take up the work and finish off the wall—filling in the gap left by the giant, and perhaps closing off a detail on which the broader mythical applicability of this narrative may hang. Gaiman also states that “the gods finished build-

55 Gaiman, “Neil Gaiman Interview,” 7:28–32. 56 O’Donoghue, From Asgard to Valhalla, 48. 57 Waldman, “Neil Gaiman Reanimates the Norse Myths.”

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ing the wall themselves” (71), emphasizing the labor it takes them to lay the final blocks the giant left unlaid—specifically twenty of them. This also means that the moral complexity of the original is quite literally closed off: the gods succeed in establishing a boundary between their civilization and the threatening world of the giants. Both of these retellings of the Master Builder narrative broadly accord with prevailing scholarly interpretations of the narrative. Making explicit the fact that the gods do not need the giant to complete the wall, but exploit him anyway, is at least partly in keeping with Cole’s recent engagement with the myth, which reads the Æsir’s defenses as “symbols and means of an enduring marginalization of the giants,” the narrative betraying “a strain of something like what we would recognize as colonialism.”⁵⁸ However, the fact that Gaiman frames this as a lighthearted narrative of crisis averted, and Crossley-Holland portrays the episode as a necessary protection from evil, suggests that neither really construes it as an example of control and exploitation exercised simply because it can be. In his notes to the Penguin Norse Myths, Crossley-Holland also references the debate about whether the two strophes Snorri quotes from Vǫluspá are misapplied, and there is justification for discounting the additional emphasis put on oath-breaking that this quotation provides. Partly because of this mismatch between the quoted strophes and Snorri’s account, some critics argue that the Master Builder narrative as a whole is not an “authentic” myth—Harris, in perhaps the most concerted attempt at de-coupling the story from the core myth cycle, argues that it is a popular folktale raised to the status of a myth, and a rather clumsy elaboration at that.⁵⁹ In an extraordinary intervention involving the composition of a new lay named Svaðilfarakviða or “Loki’s Horseplay”—a retelling which blurs the boundaries between scholarship and creative practice—Dronke counters Harris by arguing forcibly for the broad mythical applicability of Snorri’s account, systematically working through the narrative and demonstrating parallels elsewhere in the surviving myth for everything Snorri includes.⁶⁰ I would further argue that the fact that Snorri does not massage his own narrative to fit with the poem he quotes rather counts against the idea that he invented the Master Builder myth. Snorri certainly has no anxiety about these accounts not matching up, and the strophes he quotes may simply be gesturing to a different interpretation of the episode that he chooses not to follow in his more sanguine retelling. 58 Cole, “Æsirism,” 40–41. 59 Joseph Harris, “The Masterbuilder Story in Snorri’s Edda and Two Sagas,” in “Speak Useful Words or Say Nothing”: Old Norse Studies by Joseph Harris, ed. Susan E. Deskis and Thomas D. Hill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library, 2008), 51–95. 60 Dronke, “‘Völuspá’ and Satiric Tradition,” 57–86.

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The challenge to Snorri’s framing of this myth that the strophes provide is the basis for the interpretation that I give through my own retelling, which follows the Prose Edda in most of its details, but also attempts to reinvest a meaning from Vǫluspá that Snorri either resists or ignores: namely, that this is an episode which sees the gods break faith in a spectacular way when faced with the threatened loss of “Od’s girl,” and which “involve[s] them inextricably in compromise and error.”⁶¹ As Dronke points out, the quoted strophes from Vǫluspá introduce “the pressure of disaster and ill-omen” which is “not lifted until after […] Ragnarök”: a change in tone not replicated in the structure of Gylfaginning. ⁶² Indeed, in Snorri’s account, the gods seem to benefit from the episode rather than receive sanction. However, one thing that is certainly unresolved in Snorri’s account, and perhaps tellingly so, is the fate of the wall which both Crossley-Holland (in his young adult version) and Gaiman have the gods complete themselves as a way of tying up the narrative. In fact, Lindow’s fairly blunt observation that “the wall was never completed”⁶³ has more merit, not only because of a lack of evidence to the contrary, but also because completion implies resolution: something that contradicts both the general tendency of the myths towards imperfection and exception, and the course of mythical history in which the gods are, in the end, unable to protect themselves from the inexorable “rebalancing” momentum of the giants. Instead, it seems to me that Dronke is right in her interpretation of this myth’s role in Vǫluspá as a foreshadowing of Ragnarǫk, a crisis not averted, but only delayed: it is also a myth centered on the paradox that the gods can only acquire complete security from the giants by relinquishing those same “productive” forces of the sun, moon, and Freyja that they are reliant on. To answer the question put to Gaiman about a myth that undoubtedly has “a disconcerting ring of relevance to our time”⁶⁴—the wall could never be completed, because of the impossible compromise that this would involve. In light of this interpretation, my retelling departs from Snorri’s narrative in its essentials only to make reference to the gods escaping “a bargain that would have seen the whole world ruined for the price of an impregnable wall” (100) and to stress the fact that “the wall was never finished, and never will be finished” (100). In this way, the context Snorri provides with his quotation from the “pretext” Vǫluspá is replaced with a few framing statements in prose that I hope have the same effect of troubling the idea of this episode as nothing more than 61 Dronke, “‘Völuspá’ and Satiric Tradition,” 59. 62 Dronke, “‘Völuspá’ and Satiric Tradition,” 59. 63 John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals and Beliefs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 62. 64 O’Donoghue, From Asgard to Valhalla, 48.

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a lucky escape and highlighting the narrative’s resistance to straightforward resolution in the wake of the builder’s killing. In the more condensed illustrated version of the myths for children that I have written for Quarto’s “Wide Eyed Editions,” I could not resist borrowing from my earlier retelling and echoing the same statements that the wall was not completed, and that the bargain did not work out well for anyone.⁶⁵ The next retelling will undoubtedly interpret the myth in a different way, taking its cue from Snorri, from the alternative reading he gives us in his quote from Vǫluspá, from scholarship assessing the relationship of these sources, and from the long tradition of retelling that inexorably exerts its influence on each individual retold narrative. The case of the Master Builder narrative presented here illustrates the intermediary position of each retold narrative as a version of the myth which is both conditioned by (and continually gestures towards) the tradition of retelling, and which is positioned quite deliberately between the related processes of translation and adaptation. Whilst considerations of “truthfulness” to the tradition of telling within which the new version is retold undoubtedly exert more of an influence here than is the case with other forms of adaptation, retelling should not be mistaken for translation except in the broadest sense of a transfer between language, culture, and medium. Indeed, because of their indeterminate status—and the critical blind spot surrounding retelling as a process—retellings have the potential to intervene quite radically in the interpretation of a myth even when following a source quite closely, and by doing so to productively call into question the authority of the pre-text and the notion of originality in the context of oral tales. Focus on the retelling of an individual narrative highlights the extent to which the intertextual status of retellings can play a role in engaging with and even, perhaps, progressing the critical discourse surrounding individual myths from their current position on the margins of scholarship.

65 Tom Birkett (text) and Isabella Mazzanti (artwork), Legends of Norse Mythology (London: Quarto, 2023).

Notes on Contributors Sarah Baccianti is the Research Manager at National Museums Northern Ireland. She has published widely on Old Norse historiography, especially on Breta sögur, the Old Norse translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae. Her current research focuses on the reception and transmission of scientific and medical knowledge in Denmark and Iceland from 1200 to 1550. Hannah M. Bailey is a Lecturer in English at Wadham College, University of Oxford. She is the author of “Memory, Sight, and Love in Cynewulf’s Elene” (2017) and “St. Rumwold in the Borderland” (2022) and co-editor of Architectural Representation in Medieval Textual and Material Culture (2023). Tom Birkett is Lecturer in Old English at University College Cork, and has a particular interest in the reception and translation of early medieval literature. He is the author of Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poetry (2017) and Norse Myths (2019), and co-editor of the collections Translating Early Medieval Poetry (2017) and The Vikings Reimagined (2020). Christian Carlsen is Associate Professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway, where he teaches courses in Old Norse literature, English language, and language teaching. He is the author of Visions of the Afterlife in Old Norse Literature (2015) as well as a number of publications within educational research. David Clark is the author of three monographs, four edited collections, and a crime novel, and for many years taught and researched medieval literatures, gender and sexuality studies, creative writing, and contemporary medievalism. He currently works as a pianist, singer, and vocal repertoire coach in Manchester. Richard Dance is Professor of Early English in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St. Catharine’s College. His recent publications include Words Derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Etymological Survey (2019), and he was Principal Investigator of “The Gersum Project: The Scandinavian Influence on English Vocabulary” (2016–2020). Matthias Egeler is Supernumerary Professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. His publications include Atlantic Outlooks on Being at Home: Gaelic Place-Lore and the Construction of a Sense of Place in Medieval Iceland (2018), Islands in the West: Classical Myth and the Medieval Norse and Irish Geographical Imagination (2017), and Walküren, Bodbs, Sirenen (2011). Gareth Lloyd Evans is Rebecca Marsland Lecturer in Medieval Literatures at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. He is the author of Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders (2019) and a co-editor of Masculinities in Old Norse Literature (2020). Annemari Ferreira is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Liberal Arts at SolBridge International School of Business, Woosong University. She is a co-editor of Old Norse Poetry in Performance (2022) and holds a research fellowship at Africa Open: Institute for Music, Research, and Innovation, Stellenbosch University.

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Erin Michelle Goeres is Associate Professor of Old Norse Language and Literature at University College London (UCL). She is the author of The Poetics of Commemoration: Skaldic Verse and Social Memory, c. 890–1070 (2015), as well as articles on Old Norse-Icelandic poetry, the kings’ sagas, and the relationship between Old Norse, Anglo-Norman, and early English literature. Laura Gormley completed a doctorate on the representation of land and landownership in medieval Icelandic texts at Oxford University. She was recently awarded a Postgraduate Diploma in Library and Information Studies from Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, and currently works as a librarian for the National Health Service. Siân Grønlie is Associate Professor and Kate Elmore Fellow in English at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. She is the author of Islendingabók, Kristni saga: The Book of the Icelanders, The Story of the Conversion (2006), and The Saint and the Saga Hero: Hagiography and Early Icelandic Literature (2017). Jessica Clare Hancock is Head of Learning and Teaching at the University of Winchester. She coedited Masculinities in Old Norse Literature (2020) and is a reviews editor for Saga-Book. She has also published on gender and the representation of Vikings in picture-books, as well as on the construction of identity in teaching in higher education. Emily Kesling is a Lecturer in English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. She is the author of Medical Texts in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture (2020), winner of the ISSEME award for Best First Monograph, as well as other work related to intellectual culture and monasticism in the early Middle Ages. Carolyne Larrington is an Emeritus Research Fellow at St. John’s College and former Professor of Medieval European Literature, University of Oxford. She has recently co-edited A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre (2020) and her book on the reception of Old Norse myth in the modern period, The Norse Myths that Shape the Way We Think, appeared in 2023. Philip Lavender is a researcher and academic officer at the University of Gothenburg. He is the author of Long Lives of Short Sagas: The Irrepressibility of Narrative and the Case of Illuga saga Gríðarfóstra (2020) and recently co-edited Faking It!: The Performance of Forgery in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture (2023). Amy C. Mulligan is Associate Professor of Irish Language and Literature and Fellow of the Medieval Institute and Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. In addition to several articles on national identity formation, gender, and corporeality, she has written A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250 (2019) and edited, with Else Mundal, Moving Words in the Nordic Middle Ages: Tracing Literacies, Texts, and Verbal Communities (2019). Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford. She is the author of Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England (2018), Conquered: The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England (2022), and Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year (2022). Carl Phelpstead is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University and a former president of the Viking Society for Northern Research. He is the author of Holy Vikings: Saints’ Lives in the Old

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Icelandic Kings’ Sagas (2007), Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), and An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders (2020). Matthew Townend is Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature, and the Centre for Medieval Studies, at the University of York. His publications include Language and History in Viking Age England (2002), The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland: The Norse Medievalism of W. G. Collingwood and His Contemporaries (2009), and Viking Age Yorkshire (2014).

Index Ælfric of Eynsham 24 Anglo-Norman Brut 202 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 165, 179–83 Arnórr jarlaskáld 35 Atlakviða 229, 242–43, 247 Augustine, St. 69, 152 Beowulf 7, 9, 172, 195, 197, 203–08, 248–49, 258, 288 Birkett, Tom, Norse Myths 284, 293 Chanson de Roland 96 Cláris saga 108 Crossley-Holland, Kevin, The Penguin Book of Norse Myths 289–90, 295–96, 298 Doctrina Addai 153 Egill Skalla-Grímsson 14–17, 19–20, 24–26, 37–38 – Berudrápa 37–38, 41 – Sonatorrek 14, 16–17, 19, 24 Egils saga 41 Einarr skálaglamm, Vellekla 42–44 Eiríks saga rauða 144–47 Elphinstone, Margaret 255–66 – Islanders 255–66 – Sea Road, The 256, 258, 261 English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) 209–12, 216–19, 221–22 Eufemiavisor 95, 109 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 151–53, 163–64 Eustace (Plácidus), St. 18–26

Green, Roger Lancelyn, Myths of the Norsemen 290–92 Greenland 144–46 Grœnlendinga saga 144–47 Hákonarkviða 200 Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar 111–31 Hamðismál 17 Harðar saga 47–49, 52, 58, 63 Harris, Joanne – Chocolat 267, 276 – Runelight 267–68, 272–73, 276, 278–81 – Runemarks 267–69, 273, 276–78, 280 Hávamál 17, 43, 258 Havelok the Dane 195–208 Heaney, Seamus 7, 288 Helgakviða Hundingsbana 242 Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks 114, 116, 243, 245, 247, 251, 253 Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða 48 Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar 75 Hrólfs saga kraka 202, 246, 253–54 Iceland 2, 5–7, 16, 25, 57, 67–68, 77, 83, 86, 95, 111, 116, 117, 135, 144–46, 245–46, 264, 290 Immram Curaig Maíle Dúin 137, 138, 141, 142, 146 Ireland 1, 2, 77, 135, 138, 140, 142, 145, 151, 157, 158, 164, 166, 167, 170, 212 Irish Liber Hymnorum 159–63 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 73, 277 Isle of Man 5 Itinerarium Egeriae 153

Fagrskinna 187, 189, 191–93 Flateyjarbók 28 Flores och Blanzeflor 95–109 Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr 95, 97–98, 106–07 France 97, 103, 177

Konungs skuggsjá 99, 100 Kormaks saga 61, 213

Gaiman, Neil 254 – Norse Mythology 284, 290, 291–94, 297–99 Galba Prayerbook 159–61, 163 Gesta Herwardi 165–75

Lai d’Haveloc 207 Laxdœla saga 85–86, 143 Letter to Abgar (Epistola salvatoris) 151–64 Lokasenna 242, 268, 271, 277

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Jerome, St. 152 Jóns saga helga 67, 70

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Index

Mágus saga jarls 115 Morris, William 2, 7, 229–45, 250–53 – House of the Wolfings, The 245–46, 248, 251 – Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, The 229–40 Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis 135, 137 Nitida saga 108 Njáls saga 3, 7, 79–93, 114, 258 O’Donoghue, Heather 2–8, 9–10, 27, 85, 87, 123, 125, 150, 179, 185, 188, 192, 195, 210, 255, 267, 283, 285, 286 Oddrúnargráta 242 Óláfr hvítaskáld Þórðarson, Third Grammatical Treatise 36 Óláfs saga helga 28 Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica 182–85 Orkney 5, 212, 255–58, 265 Orkneyinga saga 255, 258, 261 Ovid – De arte amandi 97, 98 – Metamorphoses 210, 218–19 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 210, 218–19 Parcevals saga 108 Plácidus saga 22 Plácitusdrápa 22 Poetic Edda 230, 237, 242, 244, 247, 253, 267, 286, 288, 289, 291 Prose Edda: see Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda Prosimetrum 6–7 Richard li Biaus 207 Rígsþula 242 Rǫgnvaldr jarl Kali Kolsson 35 Roman de Horn 170 Royal Prayerbook 151, 154–57, 159–61, 163 Runes 9, 69, 72–73, 268, 276–77

Scott, Walter 123, 126, 244, 250, 255 – Harold the Dauntless 123–31 – Pirate, The 123, 255 Shetland 3, 212, 255–60, 262 Sigrdrífumál 72 Sigvatr Þórðarson 28 Snorri Sturluson 17, 104, 189, 270, 287, 290, 300 – Gylfaginning 294 – Háttatal 27 – Heimskringla 191–93 – Prose Edda 195, 267, 271–72, 281, 283, 288–89, 291, 294, 299 – Skáldskaparmál 44 Steins þáttr Skaptasonar 28 Sturla Þórðarson 351 Sweden 95, 214 Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury 157–58 Tolkien, J. R. R. 241–54 – Book of Lost Tales, The 249 – Fall of Arthur, The 247–48, 250 – Hobbit, The 241–42, 246–47, 249–51, 253–54 – Lord of the Rings, The 247, 249–53 – Quenta Noldorinwa 249 – Quenta Silmarillion 247, 249–51 – Silmarillion, The 249 Valþjófsflokkr 187–89, 191–93 Vínland 138, 144–48 Virgil, Aeneid 13 Vǫlsunga saga 230, 233, 235–37, 240, 244 Vǫlundarkviða 242 Waltheof, Earl 177–94 Þorláks saga 76–77 Þrymskviða 113