Carolyne Larrington

Eddic poetry and heroic legend

Introduction In his preface to a recent collection of essays on eddic heroic poetry and heroic legend, Tom Shippey remarks on the nineteenth-century realisation that ‘there was something recognisable in the heroic poems of what came to be called “the Elder Edda”’ (Shippey 2013: xiv). The compendiums heroes – Sigurðr, Atli, Jǫrmunrekkr, Þjoðrekr, even Brynhildr – were identifiable from historical sources such as Ammianus Marcellinus, Jordanes, and Gregory of Tours, and, in some cases, from their appearances in Old English or Old High German poetry – poems which predated the manuscripts in which the Old Norse verse was preserved by hundreds of years (see Shippey 2013, 1982; C. Tolkien 1953–57). The names – also sometimes the place names – remained the same, but the details of their stories, from dragon-slaying to unwitting cannibalism, from being rendered limbless to falling foul of Oðinn, were very different. A good number of eddic heroic poems, primarily the verse preserved in the Codex Regius, relate to a pan-Germanic legendary; they recall the Migration Age heroes whose names and deeds survived almost a millennium in the oral tales of the Anglo-Saxons, the Germans, and the Scandinavians. Tales of Vǫlundr the smith, of Hildibrandr, and the probably ancient sequence of verses sometimes known as Hlǫðskviða ( Poem of Hlǫðr ) or The Battle of the Goths and Huns also belong in this category. The poems associated with these legends span a remarkable range of genres, for, as Shippey notes, though eddic ‘heroes may choose not to speak … heroines have different speech privileges’ (2013: xviii). Thus, heroic narrative expands to encompass both male and female perspectives and heroic behaviour is both celebrated and critiqued in the poems preserved in the second half of the Codex Regius (see Clark 2012: 17–45; 67–88). These ancient Germanic figures were not, of course, the only heroes commemorated in eddic poetry; by heroes, I mean humans who take up arms against human or supernatural foes, who are brave and fearless, but not necessarily morally admirable. The fornaldarsǫgur preserve poems about certain exclusively Scandinavian figures: Starkaðr, Angantýr, Hjalmarr, and Ǫrvar-Oddr (see Clunies Ross 2013).

Eddic performance and eddic audiences

What exactly was an eddic poem? The first thing that can be stated with any certainty is that it was not what it has become – in other words, a poem written in ink on parchment or paper, gathered together in a book with other poems in a format designed essentially for silent, private reading, in which all the stanzas can be quickly viewed side by side and reread at will. Prior to the early thirteenth century (when Grimnismal, Vafþruðnismal , and Vǫluspa were transcribed in the small collection probably used by Snorri Sturluson for the Prose Edda ), there is little doubt that most of the eddic poems lived in the oral tradition. Indeed, this would seem to be underlined by Snorris statements with regard to eddic quotations that words were said ( sagt ) and figures named ( nefndar ) in Vǫluspa and Grimnismal ; and that stanzas could be heard ( mattu heyra ) in Grimnismal , or were uttered by Vafþruðnir ( her segir Vafþruðnir jǫtunn ). That the poems lived in this form for some time before they came to be recorded would also appear to be stressed by the fact that, unlike with many of the skaldic poems, Snorri does not appear to know the identities of the authors of these works, referring to Vǫluspa simply as – or alongside – what he calls forn visindi (‘ancient wisdom’) ( Gylfaginning : 12). The poems’ potentially ‘ancient’ nature and origin are supported still further by the use of the expression fornyrðislag (literally ‘old story metre’) for one of the main eddic metres, and the regular mention in the poems of trees, animals, objects, societies, attitudes, and beliefs that seem to have been unknown in Iceland (where the poems were transcribed). All this suggests that many of the poems must have originated in one form or another in a different environment (see below with regard to Grimnismal , for example; see also Einar Olafur Sveinsson 1962: 202–66). This chapter will not be concerned with suggesting any precise ‘original’ date for any of the eddic poems. The environmental features of the poems and the suggestions of ‘age’ are mentioned above first and foremost to remind us of the fact that (not least in Snorris mind) these were works that originated, travelled, and had lived for some time in the medium of sound rather than in writing.

The transmission and preservation of eddic poetry

The period of oral composition, performance, and transmission Prolegomenon In the period before c .1000–1100, when the Scandinavian peoples began to adopt the technology of writing using the Roman alphabet, there is evidence from early runic inscriptions that they, along with other groups speaking Germanic languages, participated in the composition and recitation of alliterative poetry in what has been called the common Germanic verse-form (Lehmann 1956). In Old Norse scholarship, poetry in that common Germanic verse-form is usually referred to as eddic. We only know eddic poetry today from texts that were committed to writing, for the most part, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, so access to Old Norse alliterative poetry from the pre-literate period can never be direct and many questions about its composition, performance, and transmission can never be definitively answered. However, written texts may give us important clues about the nature and significance of eddic poetry in the pre-literate period. I begin this discussion by considering two passages from West Germanic alliterative poems that have come down to us in writing, but which may reasonably be considered to reflect attitudes to poetry in the common Germanic verse-form. The first of these is from the Old English poem Beowulf , whose precise date of original composition is not known, though it must antedate the unique manuscript, BL Cotton Vitellius A XV ( c .1000), in which it has been recorded, perhaps by some two centuries (Fulk et al. 2008: clxiii–clxxiv). In lines 866b–75a of the poem, the Beowulf poet tells how there is great rejoicing after Beowulf has killed the monster Grendel, and one of the kings retainers ( cyninges þegn ) recites a poem about how the legendary hero Sigemund killed a dragon, as an indirect compliment to Beowulf for his killing of Grendel.

Eddic poetry and mythology

Introduction When the Germanic peoples – the ancestors of the English, Germans, and Scandinavians – met the Romans during the first centuries CE, they translated the Roman weekday names bearing the names of Roman deities. Thus, we know that Týr (Tuesday), Oðinn (Wednesday), Þorr (Thursday), and Frigg (Friday), to use the names in their Old Norse forms, must have been worshipped or at least known in pre-Christian times across the Germanic speech area, and many other sources support this conclusion. Also, in the Interpretatio romana (ch. 43) of the Roman historian Tacitus’ Germania (Benario 1999), we can easily recognise traits of Oðinn, Þorr, and Týr in descriptions of Mercury, Hercules, and Mars among the Germani, and in doing so we postulate the existence of narratives (myths) about these deities. Such narratives were almost certainly in verse. Since we can reconstruct the existence of alliterative poetry in early Germanic times on the basis of the verse that has survived in Old English, Old High German, Old Saxon, and Old Norse (and on runic inscriptions, many of which technically precede what we call Old Norse), we may infer that mythological alliterative poetry existed among the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons, Germans, and Scandinavians. For the most part, however, such poetry has survived only in Old Norse. The exception is some charm poetry in Old English and Old High German, where names of mythological beings seem to figure. These include the Old English Charm Against a Sudden Stitch (Elves) and Charm Against Unfruitful Land (Erce, mother of earth) and, especially, the Old English Nine Herbs Charm , which shows Woden (~ Oðinn) in a healing role. Wyrm com snican, toslat he man; ða genam Woden VIIII wuldortanas, sloh ða þa naeddran, þaet heo on VIIII tofleah. þaer geaendade aeppel and attor, þaet heo naefre ne wolde on hus bugan.