Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks

The saga may be most appreciated for its memorable imagery, as seen in a quotation from one of its translators, Nora Kershaw Chadwick, on the invasion of the Huns: Hervör standing at sunrise on the summit of the tower and looking southward towards the forest; Angantyr marshalling his men for battle and remarking dryly that there used to be more of them when mead drinking was in question; great clouds of dust rolling over the plain, through which glittered white corslet and golden helmet, as the Hunnish host came riding on.The text contains several poetic sections: the Hervararkviða, on Hervor's visit to her father's grave and her retrieval of the sword Tyrfing; another, the Hlöðskviða, on the battle between Goths and Huns; and a third, containing the riddles of Gestumblindi.

[6] R is the version found in the fifteenth-century parchment manuscript Reykjavík, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, MS 2845, formerly held in the Danish Royal Library at Copenhagen.

Another early witness to parts of this version is the seventeenth-century paper manuscript Copenhagen, Den Arnamagnæanske Samling, AM 203 fol.

This parchment manuscript is today fragmentary, containing the story up to the end of Gestumblindi's second riddle, but two early copies (AM 281 4to) and (AM 597b) record parts of H now lost.

[14] All the different manuscripts of the saga tell a similar story, though with many variations of detail (in particular, the U- and H-versions open with a mythic tale of Guðmundr of Glæsisvellir).

Tyrfingr is retrieved from the barrow by Angantýr's daughter, the shieldmaiden Hervör, who summons her dead father to claim her inheritance.

This section mixes prose with extensive quotations from a poem known today as Hervarakviða, which largely comprises dialogue between Hervör and her father.

[29][21] Tolkien considers that the poem, though seemingly considerably altered over time, once formed part of a continuous poetic narrative that gave a complete description of the Goth-Hun conflict and existed as a separate work.

[31][32] Richard Heinzel (Heinzel 1887), in his analysis Über die Hervararsaga, suggested the battle described was the same as the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (451 CE), identifying Angantyr as the Roman general Aetius and Hlothr as the Frankish Chlodio, with the incorporation of parts of the general Litorius, whereas the Vandal Geiseric is the prototype for Gizurr Grytingalithi.

One, recorded by Paul the Deacon, took place between the Langobards and the Vulgares Bulgars; in that battle, Agelmundus (Agelmund) was killed, and his sister (conflated with Hervor) is taken prisoner.

Neckel placed the events after the death of Attila (d. 453 CE) during the later Gepid-Hun conflicts, whereas Schütte identified either Heithrekr or Heathoric as transformations of the name of the Gepid king Ardaric.

Schück split the legend of the strife between brothers from that of the Goth-Hun war, as well as their geographic locations, and identified both sites as being in southern Russia.

Boer associated the Dunheithr with the Daugava River but placed the battle further north in central European Russia, in the Valdai Hills.

[37] Further scholarship in the 20th century added more name and place attributions, with Otto von Friesen and Arwid Johannson returning to the western end of the Carpathians; Hermann Schneider placing the Goths in the Black Sea area (Crimean Goths); and Niels Clausen Lukman reanalyzing the tale, not in the context of Jordanes' history but in that of Ammianus Marcellinus.

Lukman shifted the date to 386 CE, when a mass migration of peoples under Odotheus (conflated with Hlothr) was destroyed by the Romans on the Danube; in his reconstruction Heithrekr is the visigothic Athanaric.

[43] The Faroese ballad, Gátu ríma ('riddle poem') was collected in the 19th century; it is thought by some scholars to derive from the riddle-contest in the saga.

[44] At the beginning of the 18th century, George Hickes published a translation of the Hervararkviða in his Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus.

[45][46] The work was reprinted in Dryden's Poetical Miscellanies (1716) and by Thomas Percy in amended form as "The Incantation of Hervor" in his Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (1763).

[47][48] Hickes's publication inspired various "Gothic" and "Runic odes" based on the poem, of varying quality and faithfulness to the original.

"[50] The Hervararkviða poem was translated fairly closely into verse by Beatrice Barmby and included in her Gísli Súrsson: a Drama (1900); and into a more "Old English" style by (Smith-Dampier 1912) in The Norse King's Bridal.

There are, for instance, warriors similar to the Rohirrim, brave shieldmaidens, Mirkwood, haunted barrows yielding enchanted swords (see Barrow-downs), an epic battle, and two dwarfs named Dwalin and Durin.