The Saga of the Volsungs

by Jackson Crawford

  Seen in a wider context that takes in both their ancient roots and the widespread and long-lasting fame of their heroes, these two sagas stand out not as the sources of a mythical tradition but as the culmination of it. The Saga of the Volsungs, in particular, is the masterpiece of an author who inherited a magnificent and deep-rooted set of conflicting but related traditions, and made from them a sweeping story that has become one of the longest-enduring and most influential sagas.

  Culture and Values

  The Saga of the Volsungs and the Saga of Ragnar Loðbrók were composed in Iceland centuries after that island-republic had been converted to Christianity, an event traditionally dated to the year AD 1000. Yet Christian Iceland was isolated by its distance from the rest of Scandinavia {xxiv} and Europe, and maintained independent practices in culture and literature, many of which remained more similar to those of the Viking Age than to those of contemporary societies in late medieval Europe. The culture and values presented in the sagas are grounded in those of this older, pre-Christian layer of Icelandic society, while not being impervious to the influence of later medieval Christian thought.

  The Viking-like society presented in these sagas is warlike and tribal, with social mores and expectations based on the family, not the individual, as the unit of value. With the availability of natural resources sharply limited in Viking Age Scandinavia by its harsh climate and sparse farmland, neighboring families and small states often existed in a state of violent competition for survival. Naked aggression was not necessarily considered wrong if it advanced one’s wealth and reputation and that of one’s family. Readers will note that, in chapter 8 of the Saga of the Volsungs, when the hero Sigmund determines that the young Sinfjotli is still too inexperienced to help him avenge his father, he takes Sinfjotli into the woods to train him by killing and robbing travelers for their valuables. This in no way diminishes their moral stature in their society, as their victims are unrelated to them. It would be the responsibility of their victims’ families to take vengeance for them, but for Sigmund and Sinfjotli, supremely capable warriors of the Volsung clan, the threat of vengeance from the kinsmen of incidental victims must have seemed of little practical concern, and virtually no ethical concern.

  The promise of mutual revenge bound a family together in a feuding world, and thus there was a special horror for the notion of accidentally or knowingly doing damage to one’s own relatives. Nonetheless, the heroes of the sagas are sometimes forced to take action against their own families, usually because of the ironclad force of their sworn words and boasts. The sagas depict a world in which a person’s words are absolutely binding, no matter the consequences—which are often tragic. The greatest tragedy of the Saga of the Volsungs is the murder of Sigurð, which is brought about because Brynhild has been tricked into breaking her vow that she will marry only a man who knows no fear. Since not Brynhild but Guðrún is married to the fearless Sigurð, Brynhild insists that her husband Gunnar must kill him. But even here, Gunnar and his brother Hogni will not break their oaths of blood-brotherhood with {xxv} Sigurð, and Gunnar instead must get his brother Guttorm, who was too young to swear an oath to Sigurð, to commit the murder.

  Norse society also had rigid expectations of different social classes, which are reflected in nearly every chapter of these two sagas, beginning in chapter 1 of the Saga of the Volsungs when Sigi, progenitor of the Volsung family, is made an outlaw for killing Breði, another man’s slave, out of jealousy at his superior hunting skills. In chapter 12, Queen Hjordís exchanges clothes with her unnamed servant while they are in hiding, and orders the servant to pretend to be her. But Álf, who finds them, is suspicious that something is wrong, since the "servant" is more courtly and attractive than the woman he thinks is the queen, and his suspicions are soon confirmed.

  An even starker example of these attitudes is in chapter 9 of the Saga of Ragnar Loðbrók. The Danish Viking and ruler Ragnar has married a beautiful woman he believes to be named Kráka (Crow), who he also believes is the daughter of two poor and ugly peasants. In spite of Kráka’s fantastic beauty, however, Ragnar’s men later pressure him to take a wife from a better family, and so he arranges to marry Ingibjorg, the daughter of a Swedish king. When he comes home from making the engagement, his wife has heard the news, and she pleads with him not to abandon her, because she in fact can claim even nobler birth than Ingibjorg. Kráka now confesses to Ragnar that her true name is Áslaug, and that she is the daughter of the great hero Sigurð and the Valkyrie Brynhild. As proof, she says she will soon give birth to a son who will have a snake in his eye. When the child is born, Ragnar sees the proof in his eye and remains with the wife who, after all, was noble enough to be married to him. Such considerations may seem hardly romantic to readers today, but the anxiety of a family losing face by being tied to people of lower rank was no trivial fear in the struggle for survival and prestige between competing clans.

  While the domains of war and local government were largely the province of men in Viking times, one of the most striking characteristics of the two sagas in this volume is the prominent role played by women characters, especially Signý, Brynhild, and Guðrún in the Saga of the Volsungs, and Áslaug in the Saga of Ragnar Loðbrók. Far from the passive, one-dimensional princesses of so much medieval or fantasy literature, these are forceful, bold women who are steadfast in their purpose (in fact, Brynhild’s unwavering commitment to her oaths is at the {xxvi} core of the saga’s tragedy) and who even physically fight alongside men (as when Guðrún takes up weapons to help her brothers in battle in chapter 36 of the Saga of the Volsungs, or when Áslaug joins the army of her sons in chapter 11 of the Saga of Ragnar Loðbrók).

  It is usually women in these sagas who are capable of peering into the future and interpreting dreams and other signs. Brynhild, for instance, is shown to have this power in chapter 25 of the Saga of the Volsungs when she correctly interprets Guðrún’s dream, foretelling the conflict the two women will have over Sigurð. Similarly, in chapters 34 and 35, Hogni and Gunnar’s wives try to dissuade them from making a journey based on clear signs they have seen in dreams and written in runes (and the men’s interpretations of their dreams are wildly wrong, though this seems to be a product of their stubbornness rather than ignorance). However, the revealing of the future in prophecies or dreams is never effective in the sagas; what modern readers might regard as "spoilers" were evidently seen differently by a medieval audience. Even after a very direct and specific warning about the future, the characters in the sagas typically behave as if they had no forewarning whatsoever—or, perhaps, they consider it more important to face a bad fate well than to try to fight the inevitable.

  Despite their preeminent roles as instigators, participants, and foreseers of the sagas’ action, the women of these sagas often are forced to act as subordinates to their male relations, especially in matters of marriage—as Signý is forced by her father, Volsung, to marry Siggeir against her will, and Guðrún, while she loves Sigurð, is offered to him in marriage essentially as a prize for his military support of her father and brothers. In chapter 27 of the the Saga of the Volsungs, Gunnar rides to the home of Brynhild’s father Buðli to propose his marriage to her before she has ever heard of him. Yet the sagas also seem to acknowledge men’s wrongdoing when they ignore women’s wishes, as neither Signý’s nor Brynhild’s forced marriages are happy, and both marriages lead to terrible consequences for both families involved.

  Language and Pronunciation

  The two sagas in this volume were composed in Old Norse, the written language of medieval Iceland and Norway. This language, sometimes called Old West Norse, is the direct ancestor of today’s Icelandic, Norwegian, and {xxvii} Faroese languages, and is very closely related to Old East Norse, the ancestor of Danish and Swedish. Old Norse is also a "first cousin" to other old Germanic languages, such as Gothic, Old English, and Old High German, and thus distantly related (as an "aunt" or "uncle") to modern Germanic languages such as English, Germ
an, and Dutch.

  Old Norse was written using the Roman alphabet (the alphabet used for English and most other Western European languages today) beginning in approximately AD 1150, with the addition of some new letters for sounds that the Roman alphabet was not designed to accommodate. In the interest of readability, modern editors and translators of Norse literature must make decisions on how to render these letters, and invariably these decisions must sometimes contradict one another’s. The issue is complicated by several considerations, including the fact that many of these special Norse/Icelandic letters resemble more familiar letters that represent completely different sounds, as well as the variation in spelling in medieval manuscripts.

  In this volume, I have rendered Old Norse personal names in a less anglicized form than in my translation of the Poetic Edda.6

  The names of humans and gods are written essentially as they are in standard, "textbook" Old Norse, with the following modifications and considerations:

  · The letter þ (þorn) is rendered as th (thus Þóra becomes Thóra). The letter þ represents the sound of th in English worth or breath, but the letter is frequently mistaken for p.

  · The letter ð (eð), which in origin is a rounded medieval letter d with a crossbar, is rendered as a straight-backed, modern d with a crossbar, ð (thus Guðrún). This letter represents the sound of th in English worthy or breathe. The less common straight-backed version of this letter is used because the rounded version is frequently mistaken for o.

  · {xxviii} 3. The letter

  (o caudata) is rendered as o (thus H

  gni is rendered as Hogni). In Old Norse, the letter

  represented the sound of o in English or. This vowel has become ö in Modern Icelandic and o in Modern Norwegian. Some editors and translators use Modern Icelandic ö here, but this encourages an anachronistic pronunciation. Unfortunately there are few fonts or digital readers that successfully render

  , and the letter is easily mistaken for q, but the use of plain o to render this vowel is not unknown from Old Norse manuscripts. The most important names with this vowel are Volsung, Sinfjotli, Hjordis, Hogni, Jormunrekk, and Sorli.

  · In accordance with the usual convention of modern translators, the -r that ends many names in the subject (nominative) case is removed. Old Norse is a highly inflected language, and certain endings are added to the root of a word when it performs different functions—for example, Sigmundr is the man’s name when he is the subject of a verb ("Sigmundr hit me"), but his name is Sigmund without the -r when he is the object ("I hit Sigmund"). This grammatical ending appears as a second -r or -n on masculine names that end in in -r (such as Ragnarr, Ívarr) or -n (such as Óðinn), and this is removed by the same convention (Ragnar, Ívar, Óðin). However, the -r at the end of a name is left intact when it is part of the name’s root and not simply a grammatical ending; the only important name of this kind in this book is Jónakr. By convention, the final -r is also left intact in names that end in -ir, such as Heimir and Hamðir.

  · The vowels æ and ǿ (œ) are kept separate, as they are in the oldest Icelandic texts and in Old Norwegian (thus Hǿnir rather than Hænir).

  I have followed the same guidelines in rendering Old Norse place-names, but I have substituted modern place-names when these are available in order to facilitate comparison with good modern maps (thus Swedish Götaland and Uppsala, and Danish Fyn and Samsø, rather than Old Norse Gautland, Uppsalir, Fjón, Sámsey). In dealing with common nouns, where an English rendering of the Old Norse word is already {xxix} widespread and popular, I have used that instead of directly transliterating the Old Norse word according to the guidelines above: thus I write Valhalla and Valkyrie instead of the more authentic or consistent Valholl and Valkyrja. I have usually translated nicknames (Bjorn Ironside, Sigurð Snake-Eye), but I have left Ragnar Loðbrók (shaggy-pants) untranslated because Ragnar is well known under that name in the modern world.

  In reading aloud the Old Norse names in the translation, a few ground rules should be kept in mind. The accent is always on the first syllable of a word, thus SIG-urð,not sig-URÐ,and BRYN-hild, not bryn-HILD,and so on. The pronunciation of Old Norse in the AD 1200s (i.e., approximately during the time when these two sagas were originally composed) can be reconstructed with great confidence using the tools of historical linguistics, and this reconstructed medieval pronunciation is easier to learn and more historically authentic than the Modern Icelandic pronunciation favored by many today. The Old Norse pronunciation of most consonants is similar enough to the Modern English pronunciation to require no comment. The most important facts to note are these:

  ð is pronounced as the English th in worthy (not worth);thus Sigurð is pronounced SIG-urth, ending on the the th sound of English breathe (not breath).

  f is pronounced as v unless at the beginning of a word; thus the name Fáfnir is pronounced close to FOV-near, and Álf as OLV.

  g is pronounced as in go,never with the sound of j as in gin;thusthe second syllable of Regin is like that of begin,not like the liquor gin.

  h can occur in the combinations hj (Hjordís), hl (Hlymdalir), hr (Hreiðmar),and hv (Hvítserk). Hj is pronounced with the hy sound of the h in English Houston or hue, and hv probably with the hw sound of older American English wh in what or whale (see also j and v,below). The sounds of hl and hr are, similarly, produced by pronouncing the h in English he followed by an l or r before the vowel.

  j is pronounced as the English y in young, or the German j in ja; thus Jormunrekk is pronounced Yorm-un-wreck. The sequence hj is pronounced hy as the h in English Houston or hue.

  r is a trill (as in Spanish) or a tap (as in Scots). In a name such as Jónakr or Baldr, the -r constitutes a separate syllable, pronounced not unlike the final syllable in American English water or bitter.

  s is pronounced as in bass, never with the sound of z as in has; thus Áslaug is pronounced OSS-loug, not OZ-loug.

  {xxx} th (þ)is pronounced as the English th in worth or breath (not worthy or breathe), thus Thór is correctly pronounced as it is usually pronounced in English (his name is not pronounced like tore or tour,as it is in modern Scandinavian languages or German).

  v is pronounced as the English v in very.It is likely that a v after another consonant was pronounced as w (a pattern not unknown in modern languages, for example in the pronunciation of the letter w in Afrikaans),so Hvítabǿwould begin with the hw sound of older American English "where," and Svanhild would be pronounced as SWAN-hild.

  Vowels without the acute length mark (´) are pronounced as in Spanish, so a is the o of American English got, e is the e of pet, i is the ee of feet, o is approximately the oa in boat (pronouncing this word with a northern Wisconsin accent will be nearer the actual Scandinavian pronunciation), and u is the oo of boot. The vowel y is similar to u, but further forward in the mouth, like the German ü or the vowel in a "surfer" pronunciation of dude or tune. The letter y is not used as a consonant in Old Norse (see j, above). The vowel æis pronounced as the a in cash, and the vowel ø has a pronunciation somewhat like the i in bird (more authentically, the German ö or the Norwegian ø). A vowel with the acute length mark (´) is pronounced with the same sound as the equivalent unmarked vowel, but the syllable lasts a few fractions of a second longer (compare the words hat and had in English, where the vowel is longer in the second word than in the first). The exception is long á, which is pronounced with more rounding of the lips than the short vowel, similar to the o in a northern New Jersey pronunciation of coffee.

  The combination au is pronounced like the ou of house,while ei is the ai of rain.The combination ey is somewhat similar to the oy in boy, if pronounced with pursed lips(a more authentic parallel would be the Norwegian øy).

  A Note on This Volume’s Translations

  The translations in this volume were prepared from the standard Old Norse texts edited by Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson in Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, vol. 1 (Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfan forni, 1943). I {xxxi} have al
so used Guðni Jónsson’s chapter names and mostly followed the chapter divisions printed there, while occasionally dividing chapters a sentence earlier or later. Decisions about punctuation (including quotation marks), capitalization, and the divisions of the Old Norse text into sentences and paragraphs are my own and reflect natural breaks in the narrative as perceived by a reader accustomed to English prose. The Old Norse text vacillates between the present and the past tense in narration, but I have regularized all narration into the past tense, and I have freely translated the conjunctions between clauses and sentences to insure an unmonotonous rhythm and style in English.

  Where the Saga of the Volsungs quotes poems also preserved in the Poetic Edda, I have drawn the verses from my translation, The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes (Hackett, 2015).