Six Sagas of Adventure (5 page)

The supernatural parts of this saga can be read fairly literally, and were probably received that way by many listeners. Although the
apologiae
in this saga look like attempts to defuse skepticism of the more outlandish events in the saga, the simple existence of elves, dwarves, and sorcery was not in doubt in medieval Iceland (and has not faded away completely even in modern Iceland). But the supernatural can also be read as an allegory for the unpredictable nature of a person’s fate. Every person sometimes receives strokes of luck, and at other times suffers setbacks, without necessarily doing anything to deserve either one. While these strokes of good and bad luck may not be “supernatural” in the sense of being caused magically by elves and sorcerors, they certainly may seem to appear out of nowhere. The fickleness of fate—the
Rota Fortunæ
—is of course a common theme in medieval literature in general, but it is also a common theme in old Germanic texts, from Anglo-Saxon poems like
The Fortunes of Men
, to Beowulf’s reminder that
Gæð á wyrd swá hío scel.
The question is: Given that good or bad luck can strike at any time, what should a person do about it?

Hrolf provides the right answer: Persevere, and hold to your oaths. All through his forced servitude, he never forgets his mission. After his servitude is over, when it would be easy to kill Vilhjalm, he nonetheless keeps his oath, even though he swore it under duress. Of course, this in turn sets up Vilhjalm’s second betrayal, but without that, Hrolf would never get Mondul’s indispensable help.
[107]
His generosity to Hrafn and Krak, although it seems odd at the time, will eventually bring him crucial help in his hardest fight. Even after suffering the loss of his feet and the seeming collapse of his mission, he perseveres in doing the right thing as he tries to rescue Bjorn. King Eirek, on the other hand, consciously tries to exploit the supernatural forces to gain lasting wealth and power; in the end, these are insufficient and he fails. Vilhjalm is too greedy and foolish to be anything but a pawn of the forces that are using him, and this also brings about his doom. By the time that Hreggvid and Eirek and Grim Aegir and Mondul are finished with him, however, Hrolf has fully come into manhood: he has earned worldly success, and he is able to leads a victorious army in his own right, no longer because supernatural powers are manipulating him, but because of his personal loyalty to his friend. It’s a lesson that could have come from the
Hávamál
: You cannot control your fate, but it is foolish to abandon yourself to it. The best you can do is to keep your oaths and promises, to help those who have helped you, and to choose to live as long as there is any chance of living, because “many things may happen that you would think impossible.”

Sixty-nine manuscripts survive of this saga, from the fifteenth century to 1883. I have translated the text published by Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson in
Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda
, based on the 15
th
-century vellum manuscript AM 152 fol. (the same text that contains the oldest surviving example of the younger recension of
Gautreks saga
). Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson added the preface to the saga as it appears in a different manuscript, AM 589f 4to.

The Saga of Hromund Gripsson

The genealogical link between
Göngu-Hrólfs saga
and
Hrómundar saga Gripssonar
is slight.
Göngu-Hrólfs saga
claims that King Olaf (called Olaf
Liðsmannakonungr
, “King of Warriors” or “King of Sailors” in other texts) is the son of Göngu-Hrólfr.
Hrómundar saga
itself makes Olaf the son of Asmund, one of the heroes of
Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar berserkjabani
. In any case, the hero of this saga resembles Bosi in
Bósa saga
in that he is descended from warriors, but is not a king himself. Persevering through adventures and adversity, he ends up with a royal wife and splendid descendants.

The opening episodes of
Hrómundar saga Gripssonar
are among the oldest documented saga material.
Þorgils saga ok Hafliða
, part of the great compilation known as
Sturlunga saga
, includes a famous description of a wedding feast at Reykjahólar, Iceland, in the year 1119. Guests were entertained with
dansleikar, glímur ok sagnaskemmtan
—“dancing, wrestling, and saga-entertainment”:

Hrólfr frá Skálmarnesi sagði sögu frá Hröngviði víkíngi ok frá Óláfi Liðsmannakonungi ok haugbroti Þráins berserks ok Hrómundi Gripssyni—ok margar vísur með. En þessari sögu var skemmt Sverri konungi, ok kallaði hann slíkar lygisögur skemmtiligstar. Ok þó kunna menn at telja ættir sínar til Hrómundar Gripssonar. Þessa sögu hafði Hrólfr sjálfr saman setta.

Hrolf of Skalmarnes told a saga about Hrongvid the Viking and about Olaf King of Warriors, and breaking into Thrain’s burial mound, and Hromund Gripsson—and many verses along with it. King Sverrir found this saga amusing, and he called such “lying sagas” the most entertaining.
[108]
And yet men are able to reckon their ancestry from Hromund Gripsson. Hrolf himself had put this saga together.
[109]

This often-discussed passage is one of the earliest pieces of evidence for any sort of saga in Iceland. Even if the wedding account is fictionalized, a story corresponding to at least the first four chapters of the present saga must have been known when
Þorgils saga
was written in the mid-13
th
century.
[110]
Other sources confirm that Hromund Gripsson was considered an ancestor of Icelandic families; according to
Landnámabók
, he was the great-grandfather of Ingolf Arnarson, the first permanent settler in Iceland.
[111]
Thus, his identity and family history were part of the stock of common knowledge that saga-composers could draw on. In fact, Ingolf’s sworn brother Leif, also a descendant of Hromund Gripsson, was said to have entered an underground chamber while raiding in Ireland, seized a sword from a man inside it, killed the man, and won much treasure—after which he became known as Hjörleifr, “Sword-Leif.” Motifs in the legendary sagas tend to pass along genealogical lines and be repeated in the lives of successive descendants,
[112]
and the story of a
haugbrot
or “gravemound-breaking” may have become attached to more than one ancestor, as Ingolf’s descendants passed it down.

The
Hrómundar saga Grípssonar
that we have now isn’t the one described in
Þorgils saga
, which has not survived; the most obvious difference is that the wedding saga had many verses, and the existing saga has none. Instead, the story was retold in a set of
rímur
(long narrative poems) known as
Griplur
, probably in the first half of the 1400s.
Griplur
itself contains several references to characters speaking in verses; in all likelihood, its source contained verses as well, and was probably similar to whatever the
Þorgils saga
author had in mind.
[113]
The extant
Hrómundar saga
is similar enough to
Griplur
in its vocabulary, phrasing, and even alliteration to leave no doubt that it is a prose paraphrase. It even contains some probable errors caused by misreading a manuscript of the
rímur.
[114]
This is not unusual; almost all
fornaldarsögur
in the standard corpus were turned into
rímur
, as were a number of
fornaldarsaga
-like narratives that now only survive as
rímur
. In turn, several
rímur
were retold as prose sagas.
[115]

The first four chapters feature the
haugbrot
, “mound-breaking,” mentioned in
Þorgils saga.
There are ancient Greek and Chinese variants of this tale type, but it flourished in medieval Iceland: aside from several canonical
fornaldarsögur
and post-classical romances,
Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar
and three other “sagas of Icelanders” contain variations on the
haugbrot
, as does
Orkneyinga saga.
[116]
In a typical “Gravemound Battle” saga episode, the hero digs his way into a hollow burial mound, filled with darkness and a vile stench. He lets himself down into the mound on a rope and discovers fabulous treasures, but must wrestle the undead occupant. In the end, he cuts off the undead man’s head with a sword. In several sagas, although not in
Hrómundar saga
, the hero discovers that his companions above ground have heard the noise of the fight, decided that he is dead, and abandoned him; he must then escape the mound himself. Such stories have drawn attention for their similarity with the fight between Beowulf and Grendel’s mother: Beowulf also wrestles his enemy, he finds an ancient sword that he must use to deliver the coup de grâce, and his companions abandon him when they believe he’s been killed.  There may also have been Celtic influence on the “Gravemound Battle” tradition; an episode from the Irish
Voyage of Maelduin
is too close for coincidence.
[117]

The main source for the second half of
Hrómundar saga Gripssonar
was the cycle of poems about the hero Helgi, partially preserved in the
Poetic Edda.
Helgi is loved by a valkyrie who protects him, and the couple is said to be reborn in three successive incarnations. First, he is Helgi Hjorvarðsson and she is Svava, as told in
Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar
. Later they are reborn as Helgi Hundingsbani and Sigrún, whose lives are related in two poems, both known as
Helgakviða Hundingsbana
.
[118]
At the end of the poem
Helgakviða Hundingsbana II
there is this note:

Þat var trúa í forneskju, at menn væri endrbornir, en þat er nú kölluð kerlingavilla. Helgi ok Sigrún, er kallat, at væri endrborin. Hét hann þá Helgi Haddingjaskati, en hon Kára Hálfdanardóttir, svá sem kveðit er í Káruljóðum, ok var hon valkyrja.

It was a belief in the old days that people were reborn, but that is now called old wives’ tales. Helgi and Sigrun, it is said, were reborn. He was then named Helgi Haddingjaskati [“the Haddings’ mighty man”], and she was called Kara Halfdan’s daughter, as is told in the
Káruljóð
, and she was a valkyrie.

The
Káruljóð
or “Lay of Kara” has been lost—but Helgi Haddingjaskati’s and Kara’s fates are told in the second half of
Hrómundar saga.
[119]

Other aspects of the “Helgi lays” also appear in
Hrómundar saga
. Most notably, the episode in which Hagal conceals Hromund from the wicked Blind is borrowed from an episode in
Helgakviða Hundingsbana II
, in which Helgi is the one who is hidden from Blind
.
Since the connection between Hromund’s story and Helgi Haddingjaskati’s legend is made at the end of
Göngu-Hrólfs saga
, the connection must have been made before
Göngu-Hrólfs saga
was written in its present form, and after 1119 if
Þorgils saga
is accurate, or after the mid-13
th
century if it isn’t.

Hrómundar saga Gripssonar
lacks the wit and humor of the other sagas in this book. The process of transcription from the
rímur
—probably a defective manuscript of the
rímur
, at that—has added some rather perplexing errors and created a rather unevenly paced text. Nonetheless, the saga deserves better than to be dismissed as “a wretched paraphrase.”
[120]
It is important for Icelandic literary history, as its assembly can be traced in several stages from the 12
th
century through the 17
th
. The fact that the story was retold in prose, in
rímur
, and in various ballads and other poems
[121]
attests to its interest for Icelandic audiences, as does the fact that 37 manuscripts have survived from the 17
th
to the early 20
th
centuries.
[122]
Though perhaps not the finest literature, the saga still tells a rip-snorting tale of a stalwart Viking hero battling plenty of bad guys, both human and non-human. Its undeniable brio must have entertained many generations of Icelanders on long winter nights.

The text that I used is based on the 17
th
-century paper manuscript AM 587b, and was published by Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson in
Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda
. Their text  is fundamentally the same as Rafn’s edition; no critical edition of the Norse text has been published to date. Other English translations of this saga appear in Nora Kershaw’s
Stories and Ballads of the Far Past
(1921) and Bachmann and Erlingsson’s
Six Old Icelandic Sagas
(1993), with another partial translation in Stitt’s
Beowulf and the Bear’s Son
(1992). A fourth translation by Gavin Chappell is available online at
http://tinyurl.com/gripsson
.

Notes on Translation

There has been a long and famous debate over to what extent the Icelandic sagas can be considered literary creations as opposed to transcripts of an oral tradition—the “bookprose versus freeprose” controversy. The question does not have a simple answer. However the sagas originated, the forms that we have today have been transmitted through writing, by people who were steeped in literary culture. That said, medieval copying was rarely intended to reproduce a text exactly, except in the case of Biblical and other sacred texts. Copyists could and did rework the stories that they copied, even adding or abridging material, giving the written texts something of the flavor of oral transmission.

Furthermore, the sagas were almost always received orally: most people received them by listening to them being recited. The collection known as
Sturlunga saga
cites several instances of
sagnaskemmtun
, “saga entertainment,” in the 12
th
and 13
th
centuries, while 
Íslendings þáttr sögufróða
depicts an Icelander who wins a place in King Harald’s household by telling sagas. Churchmen fulminated against the reading of sagas and poems as early as the 16
th
century, joined in the 18
th
century by Enlightenment-inspired critics outraged at the common folk’s low tastes—seemingly with little effect.
[123]
From at least the 18
th
century to the turn of the 20
th
century, the
kvöldvaka
or “evening wake” was common on Icelandic farmsteads during the winter months, featuring readings of sagas,
rímur
, and poems. The reader usually had a book at hand, but might improvise details every time, and the audience was quite free to chime in with questions and comments on the characters and the plot.
[124]

The sagas in this book were copied and recopied so that they could be read aloud, and passages that seem awkward on the page could have come alive when told by a good storyteller.
[125]
This has guided my own attempts at translation. I have read these translations aloud several times, and have tried to create something that will work as an oral text. These sagas in particular, as befitting their hybrid origins, sometimes switch from straightforward “saga style” to a more ornate style derived from chivalric romance. I’ve tried to mirror this in my translation, switching between fairly plain English and a “loftier” style as needed. I’ve mostly maintained the paratactic syntax of saga prose, with parallel independent clauses instead of dependent clauses, but have sometimes modified the native syntax when the alternative seemed just too clunky in English.

I’ve usually translated names of fairly well-known places to their modern English equivalents, but transliterated more obscure names; thus
Sjóland
is Zealand and
Suðreyjar
are the Hebrides, but the lesser-known island
Þruma
is rendered
Thruma
instead of its modern name
Tromøy
. Even here I’ve made some exceptions that seemed like a good idea at the time. Personal names have usually been transliterated, but with a few exceptions: since
Ella
is a feminine name to most English speakers, I have turned King Ella into King Ælle, the Old English spelling of the name. For a similar reason, King Játgeirr seemed baffling, and I chose to render him by his Old English name Edgar.