‘This Chain of Griefs’
Another, later poem reveals that Brynhildr had a sister, Oddrún, who loved Gunnarr ‘as Brynhildr should have’. Once Brynhildr was dead, the tyrannical Atli refused to let Oddrún marry their sister’s widower. Oddrún and Gunnarr became secret lovers until they were betrayed. Thus Atli had a double motive for the murder of his brother-in-law: family honour as well as withheld treasure. Both Guðrún and Oddrún share and give ready expression to the sorrow that is women’s lot in this patriarchal and vengeance-oriented culture: ‘to all ladies – may your sorrows grow less, / now this chain of griefs has been recounted’, Guðrún concludes in her final utterance in eddic poetry.
GUÐRÚN’S VENGEANCE FOR HER DAUGHTER
The final movement of Guðrún’s life sees her married to King Jónakr and mother to two more sons. Then tragedy strikes once again. For Guðrún and Sigurðr also had a daughter, it’s now revealed, Svanhildr, ‘the one of my children whom I loved best in my heart; / so was Svanhildr in my hall / like a splendidly glowing sun-ray’. Svanhildr is sent to wed Jörmunrekkr, King of the Goths. Jörmunrekkr’s son by a previous marriage, Randvér, came to fetch his new stepmother, so close to him in age, and on the journey home they seem to have become friendly. Whether they fell in love, like Tristan and Isolde, whose story had begun to circulate in Scandinavia by the beginning of the thirteenth century, or whether the allegations against them were mere slander, is unclear. But Jörmunrekkr was persuaded that his honour had been impugned; he hanged his son and had his wife trampled to death by horses. From the scaffold Randvér sent him his own hawk with its feathers plucked out, and Jörmunrekkr quickly grasped the symbolism: he had crippled himself by execu-ting his only heir. But this insight came too late; the hanging was already under way.
For Guðrún, the news that her last link with her dear Sigurðr, their daughter, has been killed in such a horrific way demands that Svanhildr be avenged on Jörmunrekkr. She summons her sons Hamðir and Sörli to her and, weeping, asks them to go on a mission of vengeance for their sister. The young men are reluctant – an attack on Jörmunrekkr in the Goths’ stronghold is tantamount to suicide – and they remind their mother, when she compares their courage unfavourably with her brothers’, how they triggered the cycle of vengeance-killing that she now seeks to perpetuate. Must a sister be avenged as a brother certainly would be? The question hangs in the air; killing women is rare in Norse legend and the ethics of the situation are uncertain. The story plays out across two poems. In one, the sons ride away on their mission, leaving their mother behind to mourn for them along with her other lost kindred, and to call for the building of a great oak-wood funeral pyre. For now she is ready to depart this world and be reunited with her beloved Sigurðr: ‘Bridle, Sigurðr, the dark-coloured, shining horse, / the swift-footed charger – let it gallop here,’ she commands.
King Jörmunrekkr
Jörmunrekkr, a historical ruler over the Goths, seems to have been infamous for his tyrannical behaviour, for he appears in the Old English poem Deor (which, as mentioned in Chapter 2, also tells the story of Weland the Smith). Ermanric, as he’s called in Old English, has a ‘wolfish mind’. ‘Þæt wæs grim cyning!’ (that was a grim king!), the poet tells us, and many a warrior fervently wished that the kingdom might be overthrown and Ermanric deposed. And indeed, in Old Norse at least, he meets a well-deserved and horrible end.
In the other poem, Hamðir and Sörli set out in fury, goaded by their mother into seeking vengeance for Svanhildr. On their way from their father’s court they meet their half-brother who riddlingly offers them assistance, ‘as one foot does another’. Erpr, the half-brother, is metaphorically suggesting that kinsmen are all parts of the same body, but the other two wilfully refuse to decode his meaning and strike him down where he stands. Against all expectation, they enter the Goths’ hall and capture Jörmunrekkr, cutting off his hands and feet and casting them into the fire. But the king has the wit to cry out to his men (for he realizes that the brothers are magically invulnerable), ‘Stone them!’ and his warriors obey. In the Saga of the Völsungs, the command to stone the brothers comes, inevitably, from a mysterious one-eyed old man who suddenly enters the hall. At last realizing their folly in killing Erpr (‘Off his head would be now if Erpr were alive’) the brothers die, congratulating themselves for having fought well, and comparing themselves to eagles, beasts of battle who perch on piles of the slain. At last the cycle of killings and vengeance is played out. There are no more Gjúkungs or Völsungs left.
The long Völsung / Gjúkung cycle is the best-known and most influential sequence of heroic legends from the north, thanks to Richard Wagner’s operas and William Morris’s epic poem, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, which was published in 1876, the same year that Wagner’s Ring-Cycle made its debut in Bayreuth. But there are a good number of other heroes whose stories are preserved in Norse legend, heroes whose ethics often made them challenging to write about. We’ll meet them in the next chapter.
SCANDINAVIAN HEROES
The last chapter showed how the catastrophic dynastic history of the Völsungs and the Gjúkungs was retold in a sequence of poems, which explored the ethics of heroic behaviour and all that it entails: the over-valuing of masculine kinship and friendship networks against women’s sense of their own selfhood, the problematic nature of vengeance, and the extraordinary allure of treasure. All these define the kind of Norse heroism that was inherited from Germanic tradition. There’s little sense of altruism, of saving the community by fighting monsters, battling against invading armies or giving women freedom to make their own choices. The downfall of the Völsungs and the Gjúkungs is a salutary reminder that there is more to the heroic life than a prickly sense of your own honour. In this chapter we’ll learn about a number of less well-known Norse champions and their different understandings of what makes a hero.
STARKAÐR THE STRONG
Starkaðr had a difficult heritage; his grandfather was a giant who abducted a princess, and his father Stórvirkr was born bigger and stronger than most men. Stórvirkr ran off with Unnr, the daughter of the Jarl of Hálogaland in northern Norway, against her family’s wishes. Unnr’s brothers pursued them to the island where they were living and burned the household alive. Somehow little Starkaðr escaped and was taken in by King Haraldr of Agde in southern Norway. Haraldr was later murdered by the king of Hordaland (where Bergen now is), and the three-year-old Starkaðr was fostered by a man with the odd name of Hrosshárs-Grani (Horse-hair-Grani, echoing the name of Sigurðr’s remarkable horse). Nine years later, Haraldr’s son Víkarr came looking for vengeance for his father, and found Starkaðr at Hrosshárs-Grani’s. The young Starkaðr was a seemingly worthless ‘coal-biter’. But he was also extremely large, dark-complexioned – and already had a beard at the age of twelve!
Coal-Biters
Coal-biters are unpromising, lazy boys who get their name from lying around in front of the fire and refusing to do anything useful. Often they are silent and sullen. They tend to annoy their fathers very much indeed, while their mothers often defend them, arguing that the idle lout will come good in the end. A good many Old Norse heroes start life in this way; a classic example is Offa of Angeln (northern Germany), in Saxo’s account of him. He was silent as a youth and his father Wermund had him down as a simpleton. Then Wermund went blind, and the neighbouring Saxons threatened to invade. Wermund offered to fight their king in a duel, but they claimed that fighting a blind man was dishonourable. This spurred Offa into action. He fought against two Saxon champions at once, but his swords kept breaking because of his great strength. Wermund quickly had his old sword dug up – he’d abandoned it when he lost his sight – and given to his son, and with this weapon (with the unlikely-sounding name of Skræp), Offa won victory and honour among the Angles. J. R. R. Tolkien founded a ‘Coal-biter’ society in Oxford in 1926 – in fact an Old Norse reading group – and the name persisted long after his day.
Víkarr gave Starkaðr weapons and took him off on his ship to seek out his father’s killer. The king of Hordaland and his warriors put up a strong fight, but the foster-brothers prevailed. Starkaðr was horribly injured:
He [Starkaðr’s opponent] hacked me painfully
with his sharp-edged sword against my shield,
sliced the helmet from my head, slashed into my skull;
my jawbone was cloven to the back-teeth,
and my left collar-bone ruined.
VÍKARR’S FRAGMENT, V. 14
Nevertheless he survived and for fifteen years he was Víkarr’s dearest friend and right-hand man, in peace and war. Nothing lasts for ever, though, and one raiding season, Víkarr decided to head back to Hordaland to do some fighting. The fleet got only contrary winds and when they cast wooden slips to divine why, it became apparent that Óðinn wanted a sacrifice: someone must be hanged. And, shockingly, the lot fell on King Víkarr. Everyone went very quiet and they decided to have a meeting the next day to discuss this.
In the middle of the night, who should show up in the camp but Hrosshárs-Grani? He quietly awakened his fosterling Starkaðr and rowed him over the water to a little wooded island. Twelve chairs were set up in a circle in a clearing; eleven were occupied and Hrosshárs-Grani himself took the twelfth. The others greeted him as Óðinn and he announced that they had assembled to judge Starkaðr’s fate. Þórr, one of those present, had it in for Starkaðr, for the girl who had run off with his grandfather had earlier turned down Þórr as a suitor, preferring a giant – and we know how Þórr feels about giants. The god proclaimed that Starkaðr should have no offspring. Óðinn played the part of the good fairy-godmother, decreeing that Starkaðr should live for three human lifetimes. ‘And he’ll do a dastardly deed in each of them,’ announced Þórr. The competition between the gods continued. While Óðinn declared that his fosterling would have the best clothing and weapons, lots of treasure, victory in battle, the gift of poetic skill and would be honoured by all, Þórr countered with curses: Starkaðr would have neither house nor land, he’d be a miser, never thinking his treasure enough; he would be injured in every battle, unable to remember the poems that he composed, and though he might be highly honoured by nobles, he would be horrible to, and hated by, the common folk. The divine collective agreed to this fate for Starkaðr and he was rowed back to the camp. Hrosshárs-Grani asked for a reward for the night’s work and Starkaðr agreed. ‘Give me the king,’ said the old man, and he handed Starkaðr a spear disguised to look like a reed.
Next day, at the council, Starkaðr came up with a plan. They should carry out a mock-sacrifice of the king. He identified a tree with a low-hanging branch, and a tree stump was placed beneath it. A calf was killed and its guts twisted into a noose. Víkarr agreed that there could be no possible danger in standing on the stump with the noose, dangling from the low branch, just loosely laid around his neck. And so he stood there and Starkaðr jabbed at him with the reed in his hand, saying ‘Now I give you to Óðinn!’ But as he stabbed at Víkarr, the noose tightened around the king’s neck, the tree branch sprang upwards, the stump on which the king stood rolled away – and the harmless reed became a spear. Pierced through and hanged, Víkarr died as an Odinic sacrifice. One more hero for Valhöll, but Starkaðr was driven away into exile.
That deed counted as one lifetime’s worth of villainy for Starkaðr. Elsewhere we learn that, doubtless because of his giant ancestry, he was born with four extra arms. These Þórr obligingly tore off him, so that he looked a bit more human. After Víkarr’s death, Starkaðr went raiding in various lands, where he achieved remarkable victories. He developed a striking hatred for actors and other entertainers; he left Uppsala, where he was present during one of the great sacrifices, because he couldn’t abide the ‘womanish body movements’ of the participants and in Ireland he had a band of actors and singers thoroughly flogged. Although he had been in the service of the Danish crown, after the murder of King Frodi of Denmark Starkaðr left his son’s court, disgusted by young King Ingeld’s self-indulgence, and journeyed far and wide.
He returned to Denmark in the nick of time; Ingeld’s younger sister was promised to a Norwegian, Helgi, but a band of savage warrior brothers, led by Angantýr (about whom more below), challenged Helgi for the hand of the bride. Starkaðr agreed to meet them in single combat and killed all of them, though he was left severely wounded, his bowels hanging out of a huge gash. Starkaðr propped himself up on a rock. A man driving a cart stopped and offered to help him for a reward, but Starkaðr decided that this man was too low-born and simply insulted him – showing the contempt for ordinary folk that Þórr had visited upon him. Another saviour appeared, but when the injured hero questioned him, this man admitted he had married a maidservant. This too disqualified him. A slave-woman was also rebuffed; finally a free-born farmer was permitted to bind up Starkaðr’s stomach and stuff his guts back inside him.
Starkaðr returned to Ingeld’s court, but was appalled to find that Ingeld’s German wife had introduced interesting European cuisine (meat with sauces!), cushions, musicians (a particular bête noire as we know), witty conversation and decorated wine-goblets. Worst of all, Ingeld had forgiven and promoted the men who had murdered his father. Starkaðr lashed out in a long poem at all the decadent practices he saw around him; one which Saxo Grammaticus quotes at length and in Latin. This had the desired effect; Ingeld leapt to his feet, drew his sword and slew his father’s murderers on the spot. The queen, with her fancy ways, was swiftly divorced.
After many more battles, Starkaðr was so worn out that he didn’t want to live any longer, and he thought it would be unheroic to die of old age. He wandered the country trying to find someone who would kill him, with a bag of gold slung round his neck to reward his slayer. After (in line with his class views) rejecting a peasant’s offer to kill him, he met Hather, the son of one of the many men he’d killed. Hather was ready to act, both in vengeance for his father and in hopes of the fee. The old man urged his opponent to strike off his head, and to run between head and body as the head flew off, for this would make Hather magically proof against any weapon. Hather indeed sliced off the head, but didn’t risk running between head and body. Starkaðr’s head flew through the air, gnashing its teeth and lodging itself deep in a tussock. The advice was nothing but a trick: had Hather come anywhere near the body, its toppling weight would have killed him outright. Starkaðr was buried with due honour in a barrow at that very spot. Þórr is blamed for Starkaðr’s behaviour, but his decision to betray his friend Víkarr inaugurates a career of uncompromising violence, divorced from any understanding of ethics or helping others. His style of heroism alienates him from everyone around him: a warning about the effects of exaggerated masculine violence and the obsession with honour.
The ageing Starkaðr offers a bag of gold to Hather, in order to persuade the younger man to kill him. Olaus Magnus (1555).
RAGNARR SHAGGY-BREECHES – THE OTHER DRAGON-SLAYER
The earl of Gautland in southern Sweden loved his daughter Þóra so much he decided to give her a little shining snake that he’d found. Þóra asked what would make it grow, and it turned out that placing a new golden coin underneath it every day was the answer – for, as we know, Germanic dragons are extremely fond of treasure. Before too long, the serpent was enormous, sitting on a huge pile of gold and eating a whole ox every day. He had entwined himself around Þóra’s quarters and was friendly to her, but hostile to everyone else. This monster needed to be dealt with, and so the king advertised that whoever could kill it would have his daughter’s hand – and the hoard as a dowry. No one dared face the creature, until young Ragnarr, son of the king of Denmark, heard tell of the serpent and the prize. He got ready a cloak and a pair of trousers made of shaggy fleece, and had them dipped in pitch. Then he sailed over to Gautland.
Ragnarr’s weapon was a spear and he removed one of the nails securing the head. Then, after rolling in sand which glued itself nice
ly to the pitch, he boldly attacked the monster. He stabbed it with the spear; as the beast writhed in its death throes the loosened spear-head became stuck in its body. Ragnarr quickly turned away in retreat as a huge wave of poisonous blood erupted from the monster; thanks to his shaggy and sandy suit, he was unharmed. When he went to the earl’s court to claim his reward, he was able to prove he was the dragon-slayer by showing how his spear-shaft fitted the head embedded in the monster’s corpse, and he won Þóra’s hand. A splendid feast was held and they were married. The couple had two brave and heroic sons, but then Þóra took ill and died. Ragnarr was so devastated by her death that he left his kingdom and sailed the seas, raiding and ravaging.
A NEW WIFE – AND A NEW SET OF SONS
Before their disastrous marriages to other people (see Chapter 4), Brynhildr and Sigurðr managed to have a daughter, little Áslaug, or so Ragnarr’s Saga tells us. When Brynhildr went off to marry Gunnarr, she left her toddler with her foster-father Heimir. After the news of the terrible events at the Gjúkung court came to Heimir, he set off with Áslaug and a good supply of gold, both concealed in the case of his harp. He ended up being murdered by greedy Norwegian peasants, who stole the gold and raised Áslaug as their own, dirtying her face to hide her beauty and to stop her giving herself airs.
The Norse Myths Page 11