Marketing Scoops: The Board Game at The Heart of Viking Culture

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The Icelandic saga Hervör and Heidrek abounds with tropes instantly familiar to modern fantasy fans. Regarded as a key influence on classic early-20th century works in the genre, the 13th-century tale features dwarves, a tragic curse, a magical sword, and, perhaps most recognizable of all to fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, a fateful contest of riddles……..Continue reading….

By: Daniel Crown

Source: Atlas Obscura

Critics:

The Viking Age in Scandinavian history is taken to have been the period from the earliest recorded raids by Norsemen in 793 until the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Vikings used the Norwegian Sea and Baltic Sea for sea routes to the south. The Normans were descendants of those Vikings who had been given feudal overlordship of areas in northern France, namely the Duchy of Normandy, in the 10th century.

In that respect, descendants of the Vikings continued to have an influence in northern Europe. Likewise, King Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, had Danish ancestors. Two Vikings even ascended to the throne of England, with Sweyn Forkbeard claiming the English throne in 1013 until 1014 and his son Cnut the Great being king of England between 1016 and 1035.

Geographically, the Viking Age covered Scandinavian lands (modern Denmark, Norway and Sweden), as well as territories under North Germanic dominance, mainly the Danelaw, including Scandinavian York, the administrative centre of the remains of the Kingdom of Northumbria, parts of Mercia, and East Anglia. Viking navigators opened the road to new lands to the north, west and east, resulting in the foundation of independent settlements in the Shetland, Orkney, and Faroe Islands; Iceland; Greenland; and L’Anse aux Meadows, a short-lived settlement in Newfoundland, circa 1000.

The Greenland settlement was established around 980, during the Medieval Warm Period, and its demise by the mid-15th century may have been partly due to climate change. The semi-legendary Viking Rurik is said to have taken control of Novgorod in 862, while his kinsman Oleg captured Kiev in 882 and made it the capital of the Rus. The Rurik dynasty would rule Russia until 1598. There are three medieval recensions of the saga, each of which is an independent witness to its lost archetype, and which together are the basis for all post-medieval manuscripts of the saga.

These are known as versions R, H, and U.The saga continued to be copied in manuscript into the nineteenth century, and the relationships of the surviving manuscripts and the ways in which they vary has been studied in detail. R is the version found in the fifteenth-century parchment manuscript Reykjavík, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, MS 2845, formerly held in the Danish Royal Library at Copenhagen.

The manuscript is fragmentary, today containing the saga only into chapter 12, that is within the poem on the battle of Goths and Huns. R is in most respects closest witness to the lost archetype of Heiðreks saga. U is the version best attested in a seventeenth-century paper manuscript, Uppsala, University Library, R 715. Another early witness to parts of this version is the seventeenth-century paper manuscript Copenhagen, Den Arnamagnæanske Samling, AM 203 fol.

This contains a copy of R, but where R breaks off it then continues with text from a common ancestor with R 715. The version dramatically reworks the saga, adding a new opening chapter and including alterations sourced from other sagas, including from the Rímur reworking of the same tale, the Hervarar Rímur.

H (Hauksbók: Reykjavík, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, AM 544), dates to c. 1325. This parchment manuscript is today fragmentary, containing the story up to the end of Gestumblindi’s second riddle, but two early copies (AM 281 4to) and (AM 597b) record parts of H now lost. H is a conflation of an early version of the saga similar to that preserved in R, and the U-version of the saga. Thus although it is found in the earliest surviving manuscript, H is the third known recension of the saga.

There are many other paper manuscripts of the saga that were copied in the seventeenth century from the manuscripts mentioned above. These include AM 192, AM 193, AM 202 k, AM 354 4to, AM 355 4to, and AM 359 a 4to. The saga tells the history of the family of Hervör and Heidrek over several generations. Then, the story turns to the sons of Arngrim, a Viking Age tale also told in the Hyndluljóð. Next, the tale tells of Hervör, daughter of Angantyr; then of Heidrek son of Hervör.

At this point, the setting of the tale changes from the Kingdom of the Goths to somewhere in Eastern Europe (c. 4th–5th century); finally, the tale returns to the historically later date. Kershaw considers that the latter part of the tale involving the Huns and Goths has an origin separate from that of the earlier parts and, in chronological time, is actually taking place several centuries earlier.

In addition to attempts to understand the relationship between the events in the saga and real-world historical characters, events, and places (see § Historicity), the manuscripts and contents are also useful to research into the attitudes and cultures of the periods in which they were composed or written down. Hall thinks the text derives ultimately from oral tradition, not from the invention of an author.

Hall believes the poem Hervararkviða (or ‘The Waking of Angantýr’) was composed specifically for a narrative closely akin to the tale told in Heiðreks saga, as it is consistent in style and forms a consistent narrative link between the events in the tale.Tolkien considers it unequivocally older than the saga itself. The exact nature of the original underlying narrative for the poem is a matter of scholarly debate.

Some passages of the poetry in Heiðreks saga also appear in variant forms in Örvar-Odd’s saga (lines 97–9, 103-6), and the outline story of the duel between Arngrímr and Hjálmarr also appears in books 5 and 6 of the Gesta Danorum. There are also elemental plot similarities between the saga and Sturlaugs saga starfsama up to the point that a protagonist receives the magic sword from a female figure; Hall surmises that the two may share a narrative origin.

The section of the saga concerning Heiðrekr’s disregard for his father’s advice is common to a widely known family of tales (called by Knut Liestøl “The Good Counsels of the Father”). In general there are three counsels; in the saga, a set of three (1st, 2nd, and 6th) fit together. Tolkien proposes that after the counsels were introduced into the work, further counsels were added, further extending that theme through the saga.

The poem Hlöðskviða (or “Battle of the Goths and Huns”) has numerous analogues that overlap in topical coverage. The oldest of these is thought to be the Old English poem Widsith. Several of the characters who appear in the battle of the Goths and Huns appear are mentioned in this poem: Heiðrekr (Heaþoric), Sifka (Sifeca), Hlǫðr (Hliðe), and Angantýr (Incgenþeow). Tolkien considers that the poem, though seemingly considerably altered over time, once formed part of a continuous poetic narrative that gave a complete description of the Goth-Hun conflict and existed as a separate work.

Traditions appearing in the saga have also been preserved in several Scandinavian medieval ballads and rímur, i.e. the Danish Angelfyr og Helmer kamp, the Faroese Hjálmar og Angantýr, Arngrims synir, Gátu rima, and in the Swedish Kung Speleman. The Faroese ballad, Gátu ríma (‘riddle poem’) was collected in the 19th century; it is thought by some scholars to derive from the riddle-contest in the saga.

At the beginning of the 18th century, George Hickes published a translation of the Hervararkviða in his Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus. Working from Verelius’s 1671 translations (Verelius 1671), with the aid of a Swedish scholar, he presented the entire poem in half-line verse similar to that used in Old English poetry (see Old English metre). It was the first full Icelandic poem translated into English, and it aroused interest in England in such works. The work was reprinted in Dryden’s

Poetical Miscellanies (1716) and by Thomas Percy in amended form as “The Incantation of Hervor” in his Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (1763). Hickes’s publication inspired various “Gothic” and “Runic odes” based on the poem, of varying quality and faithfulness to the original. (Wawn 2002) states “[T]he cult of the ubiquitous eighteenth-century poem known as ‘The Waking of Angantyr’ can be traced directly to its door.”

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