8 - Heroic Poetry

Summary

This chapter focuses on the heroic poems of the Poetic Edda. It begins by considering the date of the manuscript and the poems it contains, and goes on to offer a definition of the term ‘heroic’ in the context of eddic verse. There is an outline of the historical and legendary contexts of this poetry, and of the material in Völsunga saga, in which heroic poems are also preserved. Comparisons are made with heroic material in Das Nibelungenlied. The history of the Völsungs as narrated in the saga is recounted, and its relation to the individual heroic poems in the Edda explained. Hlöðskviða, or ‘The Battle of the Goths and Huns’, is also discussed, and the chapter moves on to more eddic-style poems set in Viking Age Scandinavia and preserved in fornaldarsögur, some as broadly whole poems, such as ‘The Waking of Angantyr’ or ‘The Riddles of Gestumblindi’, and others as sequences of verse dialogue dramatizing a particular moment in a hero’s life, such as the verses in Ketils saga hængs. The chapter ends with a discussion of summative poems which mark a hero’s end, pre-eminently ‘Hjálmarr’s Death Song’ in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks.