Tales of Valhalla

by Martyn Whittock

  The dwarfs too have names attested in a number of traditions. That of Dvalin is found in both the poem Grímnismál in the Poetic Edda and also in the story called Gylfaginning in the Prose Edda.

  With regard to Princess Eyfura, the twelfth-century book entitled the Gesta Danorum (Deeds of the Danes), compiled by Saxo Grammaticus, identified her as a Danish princess and said that she was the daughter of a king whose name was Frodi. This may indicate that the character had a tradition apart from the sword legend and may have been incorporated into that account in order to enhance its local Scandinavian colour.

  These features of these traditions are very much in keeping with the ‘legendary’ material found in these stories, where some material that would be at home in the Norse ‘myths’ is intermingled with the doings of real (or probably real) tribes and peoples. In these legendary accounts, we also hear garbled echoes of real conflicts that occurred between the Gothic tribes (of Norse origin), living north-west of the Black Sea, and invading Hun tribes in the fourth century. These conflicts occurred in the period of ‘folk wanderings’ (the so-called Völkerwanderung) in the ‘migration period’ that accompanied the end of the Roman Empire. Because of the Scandinavian origins of the Goths, and because of later Scandinavian exploration of the eastern lands as they travelled towards the Byzantine Empire and the Caspian Sea, these ancient conflicts became woven into later Norse legends. In this way, magic swords and migration-period tribes are brought together in a curious blend of fiction and history.

  Myrkvithr (Mirkwood) was later to make an appearance in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

  * * *

  King Svafrlami and the sword that was forged by the dwarfs, Dvalin and Durin

  There was once a king whose name was Svafrlami. He was the king of the people known as the Gardariki. The name of this people means something like ‘the tribe of cities’, or ‘the tribe of towns’. Svafrlami was the son of Sigrlami, who was the son of Odin. So, this Svafrlami was the grandson of Odin. By cunning he managed to trap the two dwarfs named Dvalin and Durin.

  Dvalin’s name means ‘the sleeping one’ and some use his name for one of the four stags who feast on Yggdrasil, the world tree. It was Dvalin who led the host of dwarfs from the mountains to find a new home. They travelled from the mountains, through the marshes to the fields of sand. Some say that it was Dvalin who taught the dwarfs how to write in runes, in the same way that it was Dain who taught the elves and Odin who taught the runes to the gods. Some poets call the sun ‘one who deceives Dvalin’, for the sun turns a dwarf to stone if one is caught out in it. Other poets call mead by the name ‘Dvalin’s drink’ as the mead of poetry was originally created by the dwarfs. Some of the norns (who decide the destinies of men) are known as ‘Dvalin’s daughters’.

  Durin too is famous for he was the second dwarf created after Motsognir, the father of the dwarfs, in the distant times when the worlds were first created.

  Now Dvalin and Durin were trapped because they left the rock within which they lived and so were exposed to the trickery of Svafrlami. It happened in this fashion. One day, Svafrlami was out hunting on horseback and chanced on these two dwarfs. They were standing near a large rock; this was the home within which they lived. Svafrlami raised his sword over them so that they could not disappear back into the rock and so they were trapped. With them in his power, he forced them to forge a magical sword for him. It had a hilt made from pure gold and when wielded it never missed its intended victim. It would never rust and, when it came to sharpness, it could cut through stone and iron just as if these were mere cloth.

  Forced by Svafrlami, the two dwarfs forged the sword, and Svafrlami saw how it glowed like fire. However, in revenge for their imprisonment, the two dwarfs cursed the sword that they had made, so that it would kill a man every time it was drawn from its scabbard. In addition, it would be the cause of three great evils. As if this was not enough, they completed their vengeance by cursing it so that it would lead to the death of Svafrlami himself.

  When Svafrlami realised what the dwarfs had done, he was furious and he tried to kill Dvalin. But the dwarf disappeared into the rock from which he had originally emerged. Svafrlami drove the magic sword deep into the rock but Dvalin escaped the cutting blade and so survived Svafrlami’s anger.

  The sword becomes the property of Arngrim, the berserker

  The sword was indeed the undoing of Svafrlami. In time, he was killed by a berserker (a wild warrior) who was named Arngrim. At first, all seemed well for Svafrlami when he battled Arngrim. The sword Tyrfing sliced through Arngrim’s shield but, so great was the force of the blow, that it dug deep into the earth. Svafrlami was caught by surprise and found that his sword was caught fast in the ground. As a result, Arngrim was able to cut off Svafrlami’s hand. Then he seized Tyrfing from him and killed him.

  After his triumph, Arngrim forced Svafrlami’s daughter (whose name was Eyfura) to marry him. After she had married Arngrim, they had twelve sons. They were all berserkers. These twelve sons were later all killed by the Swedish warrior Hjalmar and his companion Orvar-Odd, as we shall shortly see. Some say, however, that the sword came into Arngrim’s possession by a different route and that Arngrim fought for King Frodi of Denmark and only gained the hand of the princess after he had defeated the Finnish tribes of the Samis and the Bjarmians. Arngrim thus became the warrior champion of King Frodi and, as a result, he was later granted both the sword, Tyrfing, and the princess, Eyfura, as rewards for his service.

  After Arngrim died, the sword passed to Angantyr, his son by Eyfura, who was one of twelve brothers. With regard to these twelve brothers, one Yule they were back home on Bolmsö, in Lake Bolmen, in Småland, in southern Sweden. It was then that the next eldest son, Hjorvard, declared that he wished to marry Princess Ingeborg, who was the daughter of Yngvi, the king of Sweden. To this end, he swore an oath declaring his intention and his determination.

  As a result of this oath, these twelve brothers set off for the Swedish royal court at Uppsala. When they reached Uppsala, Hjorvard proposed to Princess Ingeborg. But things soon turned sour. For, at that point, Hjalmar – who was one of the Swedish king’s champions – claimed that he had a better right to the princess than the berserker, Hjorvard. This placed the Swedish king in a very difficult position, for he greatly feared that if he opposed the brothers – who were infamous berserkers – then terrible violence would overwhelm his royal court. As a way out of his dilemma, he suggested that Ingeborg herself should decide the man that she wished to marry.

  She chose Hjalmar, as she knew him and preferred him to the threatening stranger. Hjorvard was furious and challenged Hjalmar to a duel on the Danish island of Samsø. He underscored the challenge when he declared that Hjalmar would lose his honour if he was too frightened to appear. But Hjalmar was unafraid and decided to accept the challenge and to sail there in the company of Orvar-Odd, his trusted friend who was his Norwegian sworn-brother.

  The first evil deed of the sword

  When the twelve brothers arrived on the island of Samsø, they worked themselves up into a frenzy of berserk-rage. As was their habit, they bit the edge of their shields, they screamed out loud and obscene curses; they fell on the crewmen of the ship of Hjalmar and Orvar-Odd and cut them to pieces. The bloodshed was terrible.

  However, when the Swedish warrior Hjalmar and Orvar-Odd the Norwegian arrived at the scene, the tide of battle turned. Angantyr’s eleven brothers were swiftly slaughtered by Orvar-Odd, who despatched them with a war-club. Orvar-Odd then went to assist Hjalmar. On reaching him, he saw that Angantyr was dead but that Hjalmar had been mortally wounded by Tyrfing. This mortal wounding of Hjalmar was the first evil deed of Tyrfing.

  Orvar-Odd realised that the sword had both dealt out death and, at the same time, had brought destruction on its owner, too. It was, indeed, a cursed weapon.

  As a result, Orvar-Odd buried the twelve brothers in earthen barrows there on the island of Samsø. With them he buried the cursed sw
ord, Tyrfing. In this way, he hoped that it would no longer cause any harm. After this, Orvar-Odd carried the body of Hjalmar, the Swedish champion, to Uppsala where he gave the body to Princess Ingeborg, daughter of King Yngvi.

  But the plan of Orvar-Odd was thwarted because Angantyr’s daughter – who was named Hervor – later travelled to Samsø and retrieved Tyrfing and took it as her own possession. This is remembered as the ‘awakening of Angantyr’.

  The second evil deed of the sword

  Hervor was raised as a slave girl and had no idea who her parents were. When at last it was revealed to her, she took arms as a female warrior (a shield-maiden), as if she was one of the valkyries. Learning of her father’s death, she travelled to the island of Samsø to search for the sword that the dwarfs had cursed and which had caused the death of her father in battle. There she found it beneath the burial mound and took it for herself.

  After this, she married the son of King Gudmund, who lived in Jotunheim in north-eastern Norway. He ruled over a land called Glaesisvellir, which was renowned for its warriors and warfare. This was the area known as the ‘Finnmark’ or ‘Finnish borderlands’, for it was on the edge of Norse and Finnish territory. Some say that Gudmund was a giant and some later called him ‘Gudrun faxi (‘horse mane’) and thought him a god who roamed the dark countryside at Yule collecting the dead.

  The man that Hervor married was named Hofund. Together, they had two sons, whose names were Heidrek and Angantyr (junior). Hervor decided that the magic sword should go to one of these sons. Without telling anyone else she gave it to her son Heidrek. But, once again, the sword Tyrfing was to be the undoing of those who owned it.

  One day Angantyr (junior) and Heidrek were out walking. As they walked, Heidrek wanted to have a look at the sword that his mother had given him. To do so he drew it from its scabbard. But once unsheathed it was doomed to kill a man. This was the curse that the dwarfs had put on the sword. And so, as a result of this curse, Heidrek killed his brother Angantyr (junior). This was the second of Tyrfing’s three evil deeds.

  The third evil deed of the sword

  After he had killed his brother, Heidrek became king over the Goths. He embarked on an adventure and while travelling he camped in the Carpathian mountains. Now Heidrek was travelling in the company of eight slaves. And while Heidrek was asleep one night, these slaves broke into his tent, stole Tyrfing, his sword, and killed him. This was the last of Tyrfing’s three evil deeds. Heidrek’s son – who was also named Angantyr (ruling as King Angantyr II) – hunted down, captured and killed the slaves who had murdered his father. In so doing, he reclaimed the magic sword; then the curse had run its course.

  The magic sword in the ownership of King Angantyr II

  After he had avenged himself on the slaves who had killed his father, Angantyr II became the next king of the Goths. However, he was challenged by his illegitimate half-brother. This brother was half-Hun and was named Hlod (or Hlothr). He was illegitimate by a Hun slave-girl, but was, nevertheless, a son of Heidrek. Hlod had grown up with his grandfather; this was Humli, the king of the Huns. It was his daughter who had been taken by the Goths as a slave and by whom Heidrek had a half-Hunnish son. Hlod was handsome and brave. Even while he was a baby he had been given weapons and horses, as was the custom of the Huns, for they were fierce warriors.

  Hlod demanded half of the kingdom from his half-brother, King Angantyr II. To enforce his claim, he rode to his court at the heart of the kingdom of the Goths.

  The Battle of the Goths and the Huns

  When Hlod reached the court of Angantyr II, he was admitted but found that Angantyr awaited him dressed in mail, carrying his shield and the magic sword. Nevertheless, Angantyr invited Hlod to drink to the honour of their dead father.

  However, Hlod rejected his offer of hospitality and demanded half of the kingdom: its treasure, herds, mills, slaves, the forests of Myrkvithr (Mirkwood) and the land as far as the carved stone that stood beside the River Dniepr.

  Angantyr refused Hlod’s demands and declared that he had no right to inherit land that had legitimately come to Angantyr. But he sought peace by offering Hlod compensation: weapons, cattle, treasure and a thousand each of slaves, horses and armed retainers. Furthermore, one third of the Gothic lands would be his.

  Whether this would have satisfied Hlod no one was to discover because the offer was soon overshadowed by an insult against Hlod. Staying with Angantyr II was Gizur Grytingalidi, the grey-haired king of the Geats. He had come to attend the funeral of Heidrek, who was his dead foster-son. Listening to the demand and offer, he thought that Angantyr had been far too generous to his Hunnish half-brother. As a consequence of this, Gizur dismissed Hlod as a bastard and the offspring of a slave-girl. As such he should not be given the riches offered him by the king of the Goths.

  Hlod was furious at being called a bastard and the son of a slave and so he rejected Angantyr’s offer and, instead, he returned to the land of the Huns and to Humli, his grandfather. He recounted to Humli how Angantyr had refused to share the kingdom with him, and that Gizur Grytingalidi had dismissed him as the mere son of a slave!

  At this, his grandfather was as offended as he was and set about gathering a vast Hun army. By the spring, it was ready and warriors were summoned from across the vast grasslands ruled by the Huns. Every male older than twelve years of age was summoned to come equipped for war.

  In spring, the assembled Hun host rode through Myrkvithr, which bordered the land of the Goths. Pouring out of the forest onto the plains beyond, they reached a fortress which was held against them by Hervor, the grandmother of Angantyr II.

  In the battle that took place before that fortress, Hervor was killed and the news of her death was taken to Angantyr. The Huns then burned and destroyed the borderlands. Angantyr pondered what to do against such a vast invading army. It was then that he was reminded of a law declared by Heidrek of the Goths that if the king was to mark out a battlefield with hazel poles then no invading army could pillage until it had settled matters by the sword on that battlefield.

  The message declaring this was carried to the Huns by Gizur Grytingalidi, the king of the Geats. And the marked-out battlefield was to be on the plains beside the River Danube. When Gizur informed the Huns of this, he added that Odin was against them and that they would fall to the weapons of the Goths.

  So it was that the two great armies met on the plains beside the Danube, at the place marked out by hazel rods. There the battle raged for eight long days of death and destruction. For the Goths, it was a war to defend their freedom; for the Huns, it was a war to prevent them being annihilated by a victorious Gothic army. And this added urgency to the way both sides wielded their weapons.

  The Huns greatly outnumbered the Goths but still the Goths triumphed, because Angantyr used Tyrfing against them and they were vanquished by its powerful death-dealing strokes. At the sight of this great blade dealing out death, the Huns lost heart. The Goths broke the lines of the Hun army and drove them back. With this sword, Angantyr killed his half-brother Hlod in battle and went on to rout the Huns. Humli too died in the middle of that great slaughter. So great was the slaughter of the fleeing Huns that the bodies of their slain warriors and their dead horses filled the rivers, causing a flood that inundated the valleys.

  After the battle, Angantyr went back and searched among the bodies on the battlefield until he eventually found the body of his half-brother. Looking at one who had fallen to the edge of Tyrfing, he declared that it was a cruel fate when the norns decreed that a brother would kill his own brother.

  This ends the story of the sword that was named Tyrfing.

  23

  The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki

  THE STORY OF King Hrolf Kraki and the characters associated with him is one of the most important and influential of the fornaldar-sagas (sagas of the ancient times) or ‘legendary sagas’. As with these others stories, it recounts legendary traditions associated with (possibly real) pre-Viking Age king
s. In this case, the king in question is the sixth-century King Hrolf of Denmark. His nickname ‘Kraki’ refers to his face being ‘long and thin like a pole-ladder’. So, when his Old Norse nickname is translated, it is something like ‘Thin-faced Hrolf’.

  The original story of King Hrolf Kraki was first written down c.1400 in Iceland but drew on much earlier traditions that are found in other Germanic literature (there are echoes of some of it or its concerns in an incomplete tenth-century poem called Bjarkamál and in the late-twelfth-century Saga of the Skjoldungs). Its structure reveals that it is really a collection of stories and subplots. There are five of these subsections and each revolves around a different set of characters but all are linked in some way to Hrolf Kraki and other members of his family and his royal court. In the first four subsections, Hrolf Kraki’s role is a relatively minor but unifying one; in the fifth story, he is centre-stage. Interestingly, it is often women characters who connect the stories as much as Hrolf Kraki, and women generally play a major part in the stories. However, the abuse suffered by Olof and by the mistress of Hjalti reminds us of the vulnerability of women to male violence in the Viking Age.

  Overall, its most striking parallel is with the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) story of Beowulf that was put into written form in England somewhere between the eighth and eleventh centuries and was itself based on even earlier traditions. Both refer to legendary ‘events’ that were thought to have occurred in the Danish kingdom of the Skjoldungs (Scyldinga in Old English). Both stories were inspired by the warriors of the past (the family name itself was derived from skjold, shield); similarly named characters appear in both accounts although their roles sometime differ; most strikingly, both stories include the actions of a bearlike warrior. In The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, the character is named Bodvar Bjarki (bjarki meaning ‘little bear’) and in Beowulf it is Beowulf himself (whose name, ‘bee-wolf’, is a poetic term for a ‘bear’ named from its love of honey). The stories of both heroes start in Götaland in southern Sweden (in Old Norse the land of the Gautar, in Old English the land of the Geatas). Until the later consolidation of Sweden, starting from the tenth century, it was a separate political unit from the kingdom of the Svear (early Sweden). In both stories, the hero crosses water to the Danish court of the Skjoldungs and kills a monster ravaging the land.