Revisiting the Poetic Edda

Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend

Paul Acker, Carolyne Larrington, Paul Acker, Carolyne Larrington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138936997
• eBook ISBN: 9781136227868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: Literature

Bringing alive the dramatic poems of Old Norse heroic legend, this new collection offers accessible, ground-breaking and inspiring essays which introduce and analyse the exciting legends of the two doomed Helgis and their valkyrie lovers; the dragon-slayer Sigurðr; Brynhildr the implacable shield-maiden; tragic Guðrún and her children; Attila the Hun (from a Norse perspective!); and greedy King Fróði, whose name lives on in Tolkien's Frodo. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to the poems for students, taking a number of fresh, theoretically-sophisticated and productive approaches to the poetry and its characters. Contributors bring to bear insights generated by comparative study, speech act and feminist theory, queer theory and psychoanalytic theory (among others) to raise new, probing questions about the heroic poetry and its reception.

Each essay is accompanied by up-to-date lists of further reading and a contextualisation of the poems or texts discussed in critical history. Drawing on the latest international studies of the poems in their manuscript context, and written by experts in their individual fields, engaging with the texts in their original language and context, but presented with full translations, this companion volume to The Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Mythology (Routledge, 2002) is accessible to students and illuminating for experts. Essays also examine the afterlife of the heroic poems in Norse legendary saga, late medieval Icelandic poetry, the nineteenth-century operas of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, and the recently published (posthumous) poem by Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún.

Introduction to Chapter 1

The Helgi Poems

Helgakviða Hundingsbana I and II; Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar
(Poem about Helgi Slayer of Hundingr I and II; Poem about Helgi Son of Hjörvarðr)

Critical History

The heroic poems of the Poetic Edda begin not with Sigurðr, Brynhildr, and Guðrún but rather with a far more obscure pair of heroes, both named Helgi. The first Helgi poem (HHI) does make him a son of Sigmundr and thus a half-brother of Sinfjötli and Sigurðr (sts. 6–8), but that is probably an attempt to bring this originally separate heroic cycle into the family of the Völsungs.¹ Helgi Hundingsbani and his men are otherwise called Ylfings (sts. 34, 49; HHII sts. 4, 8, 47), a tribe found in Sweden, and his world is thus separate from the continental setting of the Völsung poems.² The heroic legends of Helgi Hundingsbani and his predecessor, Helgi Hjörvarðsson, will serve as a prologue to the more unified and more internationally known legends to follow in the Codex Regius.

Like Sigurðr, both Helgis take up with valkyries with tragic consequences. The first Helgi is born, dressed in chain-mail from day one; the norns visit and predict his fate. He kills King Hundingr and then after some splendid battle poetry defeats four of Hundingr’s sons. The valkyrie Sigrún descends from the sky to Helgi (in HHII she says she loved him before she had seen him), but he will have to defeat her suitor. After a flyting between opposing champions, Helgi does so, and Sigrún says he will enjoy her as well as lands and victory; HHI ends here.³ HHII adds that they marry, but that Helgi had killed her father and one of her brothers. Years later her surviving brother Dagr kills Helgi with a spear lent him by Óðinn. Sigrún curses Dagr and then makes a bed beside Helgi in his burial mound, but he returns to Valhöll.

Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar is placed in the manuscript between HHI and HHII. After some initial difficulties, Hjörvarðr takes the beautiful Sigrlinn as his bride. She gives birth to a son. One day the son is sitting on a barrow and the valkyrie Sváva goes by, names him Helgi, and shows him where to find a fine sword. He uses it to kill Sigrlinn’s former suitor, accompanied by his father’s right-hand man, Atli. He and Helgi engage in a flyting with the giantess Hrímgerðr until the day dawns and she turns into stone. Later Helgi’s brother Heðinn makes a drunken vow that he will marry Sváva. Helgi is mortally wounded in battle, asks Sváva to marry Heðinn, but she declines. A line at the end of the poem says that Helgi and Sváva are reborn; HHII specifies that they are reborn as Helgi Hundingsbani and Sigrún.

Scholarship on the Helgi poems from 1955 to 1984 is listed and discussed in Harris (1985). Encyclopedia articles on the poems are found in Strayer and in Pulsiano. The German-language Kommentar (von See 1997 –) devotes its entire fourth volume to the Helgi poems, with discussions of textual transmission, history of criticism, and line by line annotations. Joseph Harris (1983) describes, with fine attention to manuscript detail, the way HHII condenses and supplements HHI. Theodore Andersson gives a welcome study of HHj, calling it “the most neglected of all Eddic poems” (54). He provides a full summary and then relates the poem’s motifs to those of Old Norse fornaldarsögur, especially those dealing with the Hrafnistumenn. The first half of the poem, dealing with Helgi’s father Hjörvarðr, draws on bridal-quest motifs known from German-derived material like Þiðreks saga, such as may also have influenced “secondary Eddic lays” (69) like Atlamál and Sigurðarkviða in skamma. John Stanley Martin shows how both Helgis, despite the fact that their name means “consecrated one,” are not “sacral kings,” semi-divine beings whose “powers sustain the fecundity of the natural environment.” Rather they are valued for their wisdom, munificence, and prowess as warriors. Carolyne Larrington discusses the Helgi poems in light of sibling relations, contrasting the early careers of Helgi Hundingsbani and his half-brother Sinfjötli and noting Helgi’s death at the hands of his brother-in-law Dagr, which enrages Helgi’s wife and Dagr’s sister Sigrún. Helgi’s mother Borghildr values her brother over her stepson Sinfjötli, poisoning him for killing her brother. Regarding Helgi Hjörvarðsson, Larrington discusses his brother Heðinn’s rivalry for the valkyrie bride Sváva. In the chapter that follows, David Clark examines the Helgi poems in the light of “homosocial desire”—of male bonding and competition among themselves and over heterosexual partners. Some aspects of the poem that previous commentators have found “bizarre and unnecessary” make more sense when viewed “in terms of its gender dynamic.”

—Paul Acker

Notes

1. Helgi’s narrative is integrated further with the Völsungs in that he kills Hundingr and four of his sons, but other sons of Hundingr kill Helgi’s father Sigmundr (prose “Frá dauði Sinfjötli” [Concerning the death of Sinfjötli], which occurs just after HHII), and then Sigmundr’s other son Sigurðr takes vengeance and kills these remaining sons of Hundingr (Reginsmál, prose after st. 25). See Larrington 174–175.

2. The prose introduction to HHII tries to have it both ways: “Sigmundr konungr oc hans ættmenn héto Völsungar oc Ylfingar” [King Sigmundr and his kinsmen were known as Volsungs and Ylfings]. Saxo relates this Helgi to the King Helgi of the Danish Skjöldungar (see von See Kommentar 4.104–4.105) and thus to Hrothgar’s brother Halga in Beowulf.

3. HHI, but not the other Helgi poems, is paraphrased in Völsunga saga ch. 9.

Works Cited

Andersson, Theodore M. “‘Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar’ and European Bridal-Narrative.” JEGP 84 (1985): 51–75.

Harris, Joseph. “Eddic Poetry.” Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide. Ed. Carol J. Clover and John Lindow. Islandica 45. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 68–156.

——. “Eddic Poetry as Oral Poetry: The Evidence of Parallel Passages in the Helgi Poems for Questions of Composition and Performance.” Edda: A Collection of Essays. Ed. Robert J. Glendinning and Haraldur Bessason. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 1983. 210–242.

Larrington, Carolyne. “Sibling Drama: Laterality in the Heroic Poems of the Edda.” Myths, Legends, and Heroes: Essays on Old Norse and Old English Literature. Ed. Daniel Anlezark. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. 169–187.

Martin, John Stanley. “Some Thoughts on Kingship in the Helgi Poems.” Poetry in the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Ed. Teresa Pároli. Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1990. 369–382.

Pulsiano, Phillip, et al., eds. Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1993.

Strayer, Joseph R., ed. Dictionary of the Middle Ages. New York: Scribner, 1982–1989.

von See, Klaus, et al., eds. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda. Heidelberg: Winter, 1997–.

1
Heroic Homosociality and Homophobia in the Helgi Poems¹

David Clark

This chapter evaluates the usefulness of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of “homosocial desire” in understanding the construction of heroism in the Helgi poems of the Poetic Edda. Sedgwick inaugurates the use of this concept in pursuit of her hypothesis of “the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual” (1985, 1). However, she observes that homosocial desire is often normalized by homophobic discourse—homosexuality is explicitly abjected or refused in order to validate homosocial bonds. Therefore, Sedgwick’s concept is potentially helpful in illuminating the dynamic at work in three poems that seem to replicate this dynamic: Helgakviða Hundingsbana in fyrri (The First Lay of Helgi Hundingsbani), Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar (The Second Lay of Helgi Hjörvarðsson), and Helgakviða Hundingsbana önnor (The Second Lay of Helgi Hundingsbani). These poems center on heroic adventure and martial exploits, where homo-social intimacy between warriors is predicated on the exclusion of same-sex eroticism seen most clearly in the exchange of sexual insults, or níð. Nevertheless, although Sedgwick has influenced work on premodern sexuality by several medieval and early modern scholars, her approach has not been accepted uncritically, and indeed it needs some modification in order to avoid anachronism in its application to medieval texts.

Drawing on research on cognate material by Preben Meulengracht Sørensen and my own work, this chapter begins to develop a critical approach to heroic homosociality that allows the texts to speak on their own terms and to interrogate modern categories and taxonomies of sexuality. In particular, it replaces Sedgwick’s emphasis (via Girard) on the triangulation of desire through a woman with a more nuanced approach to the erotics of interpersonal relations. Finally, the chapter demonstrates that the “incoherent” plot of Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar makes more sense if we unpack the complexities of the poem’s construction of Helgi’s relations with friend, brother, and lover.²

Sedgwick and Homosocial Desire

The heroism in the Helgi poems is readily apparent. It may be less obvious, however, why the essay title employs and opposes the terms “homosociality” and “homophobia”. In doing so, it explicitly draws on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the founders (along with Judith Butler and others) of the branch of gender/sexuality studies known as Queer Theory. Sedgwick inaugurates the use of the phrase “homosocial desire” at the start of her influential book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homo-social Desire. The term “homosocial” had already become a standard term in sociological studies, and, in a discussion of Sedgwick’s work, Stephen Jaeger describes the term with approval as one that:

sets sexuality to one side, eliminates its automatic inclusion, while holding it in readiness. The discourse of male-male love displays on its surface sexuality vanquished and banished. Sexual desire and sexual intercourse can infiltrate it secretly, but they do not govern it from their position of hiding. (15)

However, Sedgwick in fact employs the term in a collocation of her own coinage: “homosocial desire.” This, as she remarks, appears to be something of an oxymoron—“homosocial” is a neologism formed by analogy with “homosexual,” from which it is thus intended to be distinguished and is usually applied to so-called “male bonding” activities, which are frequently, in many Western societies, characterized by homophobia. Therefore, Sedgwick remarks:

To draw the “homosocial” back into the orbit of “desire, of the potentially erotic … is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted. (1985, 1–2)

In our society, she explains, where there is a site of homosocial desire that society sanctions, one often finds that this desire is normalized via homophobic discourse—homosexuality is explicitly abjected.³ Often cited in this context is the locker-room where manly men often make homophobic jokes to demonstrate that their physical and emotional intimacy with other men does not make them “gay.”⁴ Sedgwick clarifies that she does not want to suggest a “genetic” hypothesis—to claim that homosexual desire lies at the root of all forms of interaction between men. Instead, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Revisiting the Poetic Edda
• Introduction to Chapter 1
• Introduction to Chapters 2 and 3
• Introduction to Chapters 4, 5 and 6
• Introduction to Chapter 7
• Introduction to Chapter 8
• 9 The Eddica minora: A Lesser Poetic Edda?
• 10 Fornaldarsögur and Heroic Legends of the Edda
• 11 Wagner, Morris, and the Sigurd Figure: Confronting Freedom and Uncertainty
• 12 Writing into the Gap: Tolkien’s Reconstruction of the Legends of Sigurd and Gudrún
• Contributors
• Index