9 - Reawakening Angantýr: English Translations of an Old Norse Poem from the Eighteenth Century to the Twenty-first

Summary

THE OLD NORSE fornaldarsaga ‘saga of ancient time’ Hervarar saga ok Heidreks includes a number of stanzas of dialogue between a warrior-maiden, Hervǫr, and the ghost of her dead father, Angantýr. Now often known as Hervararkvida or, in the English-speaking world The Waking of Angantyr, these stanzas gained acclaim as a separate poem, the first to be translated from Old Norse into English, in 1705. Although Hervǫr's parting words to her father entreat him to rest peacefully in his mound, poor Angantýr has since then been revived almost relentlessly as part of an ongoing interest in the North and its cultural heritage. The poem's strong female protagonist and supernatural setting have made it particularly attractive, first within the eighteenth-century burgeoning of interest in northern antiquity, the sublime and the gothic, and more recently in the context of social and academic concern with feminism and gender issues, and a cultural fascination with ‘Nordic Noir’.

I have translated the stanzas that make up this poem myself, for the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages project, and have worked on them with contemporary poets for the project Modern Poets on Viking Poetry. In the former initiative, transparency and fidelity to the original are explicit aims; in the latter, literal translations were given to modern poets as inspiration for new cultural productions, ‘translated’ into their own style and voice. In the past four centuries, Hervararkvida has appeared in forms that fall at just about every point along this spectrum of possibility. This paper examines the full history of the poem's life in English, exploring its versatility through changing literary fashions and the kinds of ‘authenticity’ that matter in these various contexts.

Most of the ‘translations’ considered here are not translations at all, strictly speaking. Many of the poets and others who worked with the material had little or no knowledge of Old Norse, working from extant English translations or via another language such as Swedish or Latin. As such, it is difficult to find adequate terminology to describe the types of works produced.