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ON Good Friday it happened in Caithness1 that a man called Dorroth went out of doors. He saw twelve persons ride toward a (stone) hut. There they were lost to his sight. When he came up to the hut and looked through a chink in the wall he saw that some women were inside and had set up a web. Heads of men served as weights, men s entrails formed the woof and weft, a sword did as a weaver s reed, and arrows as the rods. They sang this song: (follows the Song of the Valkyries). Then they tore the web down and into pieces, and each one held on to what she had in her hands. Dorroth right the opening and went home; but the women mounted their horses and rode awaysix to the south and six to the north.
Thus the Niáls saga (Chapter 157), whose narrative is our sole source for one of the most striking poems of Norse antiquity. Down to Walter Scott s days it was recited in the Norn tongue by the inhabitants of North Ronaldsha (Rinansey), the northernmost of the Orkney Islands.2
As we have it, the lay is darkly prophetic of the outcome of the great battle of Clontarf (1014) in which some of the actors in the saga took part on the side of the Viking leaders, Sigtrygg Silkbeard, King of Dublin, and the Orkney earl, Sigurth Hlothversson, who were arrayed against the famous King Brian Borumha of Leinster; but contrary to its prophecy, historyand the saga, tootells us that it was the Leinster king who won p. 73 the victory, though he paid for it with his life, and that the invaders were driven off, leaving Earl Sigurth on the field. To account for this contradiction, some scholars have surmised that the lay originally referred to some other battle. Against this it may be urged that at any rate Sigurth s fall is foretold, in stanza 7. Also, it is just possible that the Irish themselves are meant as the dwellers on the outer nesses in their own land (ibid.) and that the valkyries are chanting their magic song to safeguard only their favorite, the young King Sigtrygg, weaving for him the web of war much as the giant maidens in the Quern Song grind out the fate of their captor, King Fróthi.
As to the supposed transmitter of the lay, Dorroth, it seems that his name was supplied, either from the kenning in stanza 4, the web-of-darts, i.e., battle (vefr darratha(r)) or, even more probably, from the (unauthentic and inappropriate) current title of the lay, Darratha(r)lióth or Lay of the Darts which was misunderstood as Dorroth s Lay.
Few lays in Old Norse compare with the Song of the Valkyries in somber power and dark magnificence. Thoroughly in harmony with the great carnage presaged is the gruesome picture of the loom; and terribly splendid the vision of the red dawn with its cloud-rack incarnadined by the blood of warriors, into which the battle maidens issue forth, riding on wild horses to join the fray.
The laywhich is in regular fornyrthislagis handed down in the four main MSS of the Niáls saga, dating from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, but seems incomplete, for all that, and is in poor shape.3 In this case it is not altogether unlikely that the author was an inhabitant of the Northern Isles. At any rate it is well to remember that still another poetic prophecya genre more Celtic than Germanic in inspirationviz., the Quern Song, right memories in these localities where Norse and Celtic blended most intimately.
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Widely is flung,warning of slaughter, the weaver s-beam s-web:4 t is wet with blood; is spread now, grey,the spear-thing5 before, the woof-of-the-warriors4which valkyries fill with the red-warp-of-Randvér s-banesman.6 |
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2 |
Is this web wovenand wound of entrails, and heavy weightedwith heads of slain; are blood-bespatteredspears the treadles, iron-bound the beams,the battens,7 arrows: let us weave with our swordsthis web of victory! |
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3 |
Goes Hild to weave,and Hiorthrimul, Sangrith and Svipul,8with swords brandished: shields will be shattered,shafts will be splintered, will the hound-of-helmets9the hauberks bite. |
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4 |
Wind we, wind wethe-web-of-darts, and follow the athelingafter to war! Will men behold shieldshewn and bloody where Gunn and Gondul8have guarded the thane. |
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Wind we, wind wesuch web-of-darts as the young war-workerwaged afore-time!10 Forth shall we farewhere the fray is thickest, where friends and fellows gainst foemen battle! |
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6 |
Wind we, wind wethe web-of-darts where float the flagsof unflinching men! Let not the liege slife be taken: valkyries awardthe weird of battle.11 |
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Will seafaring menhold sway over lands, who erstwhile dwelledon outer nesses; is doomed to diea doughty king,12 lies slain an earlby swords e en now |
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Will Irish men ekemuch ill abide: t will not ever afterbe out of men s minds. Now the web is woven,and weapons reddened in all lands will be heardthe heroes fall. |
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Now awful is itto be without, as blood-red rackraces overhead; is the welkin gorywith warriors blood as we valkyrieswar-songs chanted. |
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Well have we chantedcharms full many about the king s son:may it bode him well! Let him learn themwho listens to us, and speak these spellsto spearmen after.13 |
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Start we swiftlywith steeds unsaddled hence to battlewith brandished swords! |
1 The northeasternmost district of Scotland.
2 The poem had struck the imagination of Thomas Gray, who in 1768 made a free version of it which he entitled The Fatal Sisters. In 1814, when Scott was on his voyage among the northern islands of Great Britain, he heard a gentleman tell that when some remnants of the Norse were yet spoken there, a clergyman had carried thither Gray s version, then newly published, and had read it to some old people as referring to the ancient history of the islands. But as soon as he had proceeded a little way they exclaimed they knew it well in the original and had often sung it. They called it The Enchantress (Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, IV, 81. See also The Pirate, Note c).
3 In order not to overload the footnotes I have tacitly essayed an approximation in the translation of the first and second stanzas as well as in numerous other doubtful passages.
4 Kenning for battle. The same conception, growing out of the interweaving of darts and arrows in the air, is found in the Anglo-Saxon w+gspda gewiofu, the web of battle-luck (Bowulf 697). The two parts of this difficult stanza are parallel: a web is set up, the web-of-battle, which is all stained with blood.
5 Another kenning for battle. (Thing = meeting. )
6 The whole line, probably, a kenning for blood. Randvér s banesman was Bikki, the evil counselor of Iormunrekk (cf. Guthrúnarhvot, Prose, and note 8), in whomas in Gizur (Battle of the Huns)we may detect Óthin, the instigator of strife between men. Fill is here, probably, used in the sense of completing the web with woof and weft. But it might also mean to saturate and so, to color.
7 The batten is the instrument used to beat home the yarn. Much also in this stanza is doubtful.
8 The names of valkyries.
9 Kenning for battle-axe.
10 Granting that the web-of-darts is a kenning for battle (from the cloud, or web, of missiles flying overhead), the meaning of this uncertain line is that the p. 75 valkyries are urging each other on to weave another such victorious battle as the young king (Sigtrygg) had before. Cf. Eiríkr Magnússon, Old-lore Miscellany of Orkney III, 92.
11 It is for the valkyries to decide the fate of battle and to choose the slain: they have no need of his life.
12 I.e., King Brian, who was set upon at the very end of the battle. The earl, Sigurth Hlothversson, had fallen earlier.
13 A hint to the listener outside.