Translating Early Medieval Poetry
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Translating Hervararkviða for the Twenty-First Century
There are more possibilities for the academic study of Old Norse literature in the
English-speaking world now than ever before, thanks to resources such as digitised
manuscripts, more university courses teaching the language, literature and history
of early Scandinavia, electronic dictionaries, and more reliable editions and transla-
tions. There is, of course, always pressure on specialist fields like Early Scandinavian Studies, owing to demands for universities to concentrate on matters of narrowly-defined contemporary and ‘real world’ relevance. But the contemporary ‘real world’
speaks for itself. Interest in the North and its cultural heritage is evidenced in,
for example, the Thor franchise of films (2011–), and the Marvel comic series that inspired it; the Irish-Canadian TV show Vikings (2013–; now developing its fifth season);57 or the 2014 ‘Vikings: Life and Legend’ exhibition at the British Museum.
Academic research informs many of the productions of popular culture; while those
intrigued by what they have seen or read boost numbers in lecture theatres and
demand for further information.
In the twenty-first century Hervararkviða, its dramatis personae and the saga from which it comes have inspired fan-fiction, band names, T-shirts, avatars on
gaming and chat sites, a brass band score, a short film ( Tyrfing, 2015), and even a knitting pattern (‘Hervor’s mittens’). Hervǫr has been named among the readers’
choice of ‘10 best Vikings’ on The Guardian’s website,58 and as ‘badass of the week’
on the website of the same name.59 I will here discuss briefly two translation projects, one academic and one ‘public engagement’, that I have been involved with.
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages Project
The Skaldic Project is an international col aborative project to edit the corpus of Old Norse-Icelandic poetry composed before c.1400, excluding only the poetry from the
Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda and related manuscripts. Poetry from the fornal-
darsögur (and hence Hervarar saga), despite being predominantly in eddic metres, is thus included,60 and will comprise volume 8 of the series.61 As well as presenting
the edited Old Norse text, the editions include for each stanza a rearrangement of
the text into prose word order, an English translation, a list of manuscripts in which it is found, variant readings, references to previous editions, and scholarly notes.
57 On the use of poetry in this series, see Evans’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 12.
58 http://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2014/feb/27/readers-suggest-the-10-
best-vikings Accessed 14 September 2015.
59 http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hervor.html Accessed 14 September 2015.
60 On the terms ‘eddic’ and ‘skaldic’ and the problems of demarcation they imply, see Margaret Clunies Ross, A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 21–8.
61 Margaret Clunies Ross, ed., Poetry in Fornaldarsögur, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8 (Turnhout, forthcoming).
Reawakening Angantýr
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Fittingly for the twenty-first century, the hardcopy volumes are accompanied by
an electronic edition containing additional interactive features including links to
transcriptions and manuscript images where available.62
The translations act as companions to the Old Norse texts, rather than stand-
alone works, meaning translators can sidestep many decisions regarding content
versus style. The introduction to the series explains that ‘the English translation is
… pragmatic in purpose, seeking to remain as close to the original as is compat-
ible with English usage’.63 Some effects which arguably have more to do with the
translation’s ‘literalness’ than its poetics are retained: ‘There has been no attempt
to replicate the metre of the original poetry, but where possible the translation is
true to stylistic effects such as repetition, metaphor or litotes.’64 This policy has
the advantage of conveying some sense of the diction employed by poets, but such
representation can only ever be partial and cannot always replicate the conditions
behind the original poet’s word-choice. For instance, take the following half-stanza
from Hervararkviða:
Brennið eigi svá bál á nóttum,
at ek við elda yðra fælumz.65
I have translated this: ‘You will not burn blazes at night in such a way that I will be frightened of your fires’. There are two ‘fire’ words here, bál and eldr. Bál can have the sense ‘(funeral) pyre’, which, given the setting of the poem and the implied threat
to Hervǫr, may be appropriate. But the word also implies ‘fire, flame’ in a general
sense, and in the original bál alliterates with brennið (‘you burn’). A choice must therefore be made between making a semantic al usion to funeral pyres – which in
English may be too strongly stated – and a felicitous poetic effect (‘burn blazes’).
Eldr, the most common ‘fire’ word in Old Norse, also influences the decision. Across the skaldic project’s corpus eldr is translated ‘fire’ in the overwhelming majority of instances. It also occurs on five other occasions in Hervararkviða, where I have always used ‘fire’. The aim, then, of avoiding introduced repetition in the translation, confirms that another word must be sought to translate bál. The advantage of translating eldr as ‘fire’ is mitigated by the loss of the alliteration with ek (‘I’) and yðra (‘your’) in the original, although this effect would be lost to some extent anyway given the forms of the English pronouns and that English speakers are less
attuned to the Old Norse alliteration of vowels, where any vowel can alliterate with
any other. The compromise solution therefore seemed the best choice since it allows
for some poetic effect and some indication of the relative register of the words eldr (common in both poetry and prose) and bál (less common, significantly less so in prose). Ultimately, the project can help readers appreciate the full poetic effects of 62 http://www.abdn.ac.uk/skaldic/db.php
63 Diana Whaley, ‘Principles of Translation’, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1: From Mythological Times to c. 1035, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 1 (Turnhout, 2012), p. xxxv.
64 Ibid.
65 Hervǫr, Lausavísa, 13/1–4 ( Heiðr 33).
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the original by presenting the original text and including scholarly notes discussing
such translation decisions where appropriate.
Modern Poets on Viking Poetry
‘Modern Poets on Viking Poetry’ was a 2013 Arts and Humanities Research
Council-funded cultural engagement project curated by Dr Debbie Potts.66 Though
the descriptor ‘Viking’ is not strictly accurate, it is recognisable to non-specialists in the way that ‘Runic’ or ‘Celtic’ perhaps was in earlier centuries. A group of contemporary poets were given a crash-course in the diction of Norse poetry, and each
provided with the original text and close translation of a Norse poem. I supplied my
edition and translation of Hervararkviða, with an abbreviated form of its introduction and notes. This provoked three very different, very contemporary responses.
Adam Kirton draws on the modern dilemma of ‘having it al ’, rejecting the Old
Norse Hervǫr’s claim that she ‘ræki[r] þat lítt, / … hvé synir mínir deila síðan’
(‘care[s] little … how my sons contend afterwards’),67 and portraying instead an
introspective potential mother facing decisions about how to find future happi-
> ness. Sarah Hesketh utilises a contemporary medium, rewriting the dialogue as a
screenplay for something resembling a very classy version of a cheesy horror film.
Hesketh’s ‘script’ is not versified, but is full of striking sound patterns: ‘writhing in the roots’, ‘keep the killer covered’. Despite finding ‘the places where you have a list of things all basical y saying the same thing’ initial y problematic,68 Hesketh cleverly captures this tendency of the original while resisting archaism: ‘I want the slayer
of Hjálmarr! I want that brilliant edge! I want that famous butcherer of shields!’,
cf. ‘Sel mér… hlífum hættan, / Hjálmars bana’ (‘give me … the slayer of Hjálmarr,
dangerous to shields’).69 She also retains traces of the original language: ‘Hell grinds open’ plays on the Old Norse Helgrindr (‘hell gates’).70
Rebecca Perry translates the poem to a present-day setting and contemporary,
idiomatic Modern English. Her ‘how the earth increases’ explores the disjointed
thoughts of a young female protagonist (‘she’) lying awake: her thoughts of school,
friends and memories capture the spontaneous philosophy of a twenty-first-century
teenage girl sleepily pondering her life and the world. Into this contemporary poem,
and situation seemingly far removed from Hervǫr’s, Perry skilful y and effectively
interweaves linguistic and thematic references to the original Hervararkviða. In the following extract, for example, there are both linguistic echoes of the Old Norse – cf.
‘Skelfrat meyju / muntún hugar’ (‘The mind-enclosure of the heart [BREAST] of the
girl will not tremble’)71 – and an encapsulation of Hervararkviða’s exploration of inheritance and the obstacles (and frustrations) daughters face relative to sons: the
66 http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/resources/mpvp/ Accessed 14 September 2015.
67 Hervǫr, Lausavísa, 18/5–8 ( Heiðr 44).
68 Sarah Hesketh, pers. comm.
69 Hervǫr, Lausavísa, 14/6–8 ( Heiðr 36).
70 Angantýr, Lausavísa, 3 ( Heiðr 32).
71 Hervǫr, Lausavísa, 13/5–6 ( Heiðr 33) (translation as given to the poet).
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163
‘Someone & / Son’ perhaps also draws on the patronymic naming system common
in the Middle Ages and still used in Iceland:
She
thinks of the heart
as a mind enclosure,
visualises a silver cage
around it. She feels
anger that the signs of
small businesses are
always Someone &
Son.
‘She’ lives in a thoroughly modern world, of gardens in Soho, streetlights, auber-
gines, videos in Biology class at school. Perry’s poem resonates deeply for a modern
reader and resists archaism while playing with kenning patterns, motifs and
concepts inspired by the Old Norse poem. The result highlights, perhaps, what is
not bound by time or language. ‘Maðr þóttumz ek / mennskr til þessa’ (‘I thought
myself a human being until this’),72 muses Hervǫr, of her identity-forming dalliance
on the borders of the gendered and supernatural worlds. Perry’s poetic explora-
tion of the identity-forming influences on the worldview of a twenty-first-century
young Western woman ends: ‘You think / of yourself as just a / human being until /
something happens’.
Conclusions
The twenty-first-century English-speaking world looks to Scandinavia for its social
conscience and politics, popularised by television programmes such as Borgen
(2012–13) and The Bridge (2013–);73 for its cultural productions that excite the senses (Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy of novels, the tense television crime drama The Killing (2011–12)); for its dramatic landscapes and (sometimes disruptive) strange geographical features; for its contribution to British (and North
American) history and the English language; for its same-but-differentness. In short,
for all the broad reasons it has been a source of fascination since at least the seventeenth century. The multifaceted ways in which different groups of people engage
with the Scandinavian past can also be seen to be remarkably constant: through
academic endeavour, through translations of varying levels of reliability, through
cultural production, through popular channels of dissemination that change only in
format (then periodicals, now the internet).
Old Norse itself has no unique word for the process of translation as we know it:
snúa ‘to translate’ also (and primarily) means ‘to turn, twist’ and ‘to change, alter’.
Norse translators felt free to adapt non-native texts in ways which were more appro-
priate to their audiences.74 In some contemporary contexts, that means a literal,
scholarly translation; in others, it means something different. Contemporary trans-
lations like Rebecca Perry’s offer not only a space for twenty-first-century poets and 72 Ibid., 15/1–2 ( Heiðr 38).
73 Dates refer to UK airing.
74 Keneva Kunz, ‘Icelandic Tradition’, in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker (London, 1998), pp. 456–63.
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audiences to think about our own social worlds, but another way of thinking about
the motivations and functions of the original.
Hervararkviða deals with issues that have continued to be topical and interesting for at least eight hundred years. Its inclusion in the second edition of Carolyne
Larrington’s translation of the Poetic Edda, almost canonical on student reading
lists as well as accessible to wider audiences, will doubtless inspire further engage-
ment on all levels. Angantýr is unlikely to get much rest any time soon.
10
Translating and Retranslating the Poetic Edda
Carolyne Larrington
Bringing out a second revised and expanded edition of my translation
of the Poetic Edda, which appeared in September 2014, gave me a chance
to reappraise what I did nineteen years earlier when I first undertook the
translation: to think about translation and what happens when you can revisit a
translation, to adjust my perceptions of publishing cultures and audiences, and
also to take on board how thinking about eddic poetry has changed since the mid
1990s.1 In this essay I offer some reflections on my attitude as a translator then, and talk about what I know now, and did not know in 1994 when I first approached the
project. My observations may – or may not – be valid both for other translators and
other kinds of translation.
The Poetic Edda is a collection of mythological and heroic poetry, largely written
down in one manuscript in Iceland in 1270, now GKS 2365 4to in the Stofnun Árna
Magnússonar in Reykjavík. Many of the poems are likely to be much earlier, some
at least dating from before Iceland’s conversion to Christianity.2 It was my idea to
embark on the translation of the Poetic Edda, for I had been living at close quarters
with it when writing my doctoral thesis on Old Norse and Old English wisdom
poetry.3 I was quite easily able to persuade Judith Luna, the Commissioning Editor
at Oxford World’s Classics, of its usefulness.4 Further proposed translations of Old
Norse poetry in popular translation series have not found favour: translation projects for the so-called Eddica minora (poems mostly preserved in a prose context in the
‘legendary sagas’ or fornaldarsög
ur) have not tended to be commissioned.5 Back in 1 The Poetic Edda: A New Translation, trans. Carolyne Larrington (Oxford, 1996); second revised and expanded edition, The Poetic Edda, published in 2014.
2 The question of the dating of eddic poetry is extremely problematic. See, for an up-to-date discussion, B. Ø. Thorvaldsen, ‘The Dating of Eddic Poetry’, in A Handbook to Eddic Poetry: Myths and Legends of Early Scandinavia, ed. C. Larrington, J. Quinn and B. Schorn (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 72–91.
3 Published as Carolyne Larrington, A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Themes and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry (Oxford, 1993).
4 Judith retired in the summer of 2015 and will be much missed by World’s Classics
translators.
5 These poems were published by W. Ranisch and A. Heusler as Eddica minora:
Dichtungen eddischer Art aus den Fornaldarsögur und anderen Prosewerken (Dortmund,
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the early 1990s there were a few Edda translations around, such as Bellows (1923)
and Hol ander (1928) (American versions from early part of the last century with a
great number of archaic usages such as I ween and thou and thee).6 Patricia Terry’s version (1969), and closer to home, Auden and Taylor with Salus (1969) and the
expanded Auden and Taylor (1981) were then the most recent translations.7 Terry’s
translation was published in the USA and not easy to get hold of while Auden and
Taylor and Salus had not been reprinted since 1973. My translation then was timely.
At that point, it was not easy to tell who was working on what topics in the UK, and
as it turned out my contemporary Andy Orchard was working at the same time on
a translation of the Poetic Edda for Penguin. In the event he put his work on hold
for some fifteen years and the translation was final y published in 2011 with an oddly outdated and misleading title ( The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking Lore), probably forced upon him in order to distinguish it from my version. The Elder Edda is no
longer used for the Poetic Edda, since the Codex Regius manuscript was written
around 1270, making it rather younger than the so-called Younger or Prose Edda
of Snorri Sturluson. Nor is there any good case for claiming that the majority of