Heimskringla. Vol. 1. The Beginnings to Óláfr Tryggvason

290 Pages·2011·1.6 MB·English

by  Snorri Sturluson

SNORRI STURLUSON
HEIMSKRINGLA
VOLUME I
The printing of this book is made possible by a gift to the University of
Cambridge in memory of Dorothea Coke, Skjæret, 1951
Snorri SturluSon
HEiMSKrinGlA
VoluME i
tHE BEGinninGS to ÓlÁFr
trYGGVASon
translated by
AliSon FinlAY
and
AntHonY FAulKES
ViKinG SoCiEtY For nortHErn rESEArCH
uniVErSitY CollEGE lonDon
2011
© VIKING SOCIETY 2011
ISBN: 978-0-903521-86-4
The cover illustration is of the ‘Isidorean’ mappamundi (11th century), of
unknown origin, diameter 26 cm, in Bayerische Staatsbibliotek, Munich, Clm
10058, f. 154v. It is printed here by permission of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
East is at the top, Asia fills the top half, Europe is in the bottom left hand
quadrant, Africa in the bottom right hand quadrant. The earliest realisations
of Isidore’s description of the world have the following schematic form:
E
ASIA

N TANAIS M NILUS S
E
D
EVROPA ITE AFRICA
R
R
A
N
E
U
M
W
Printed by Short Run Press Limited, Exeter
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................vii
Authorship ......................................................................................vii
Sources .............................................................................................ix
Manuscripts ....................................................................................xiii
Further Reading .............................................................................xiv
This Translation .............................................................................xiv
CHRONOLOGY ...........................................................................xvi
GENEALOGY ............................................................................xviii
MAPS .................................................................................................xix
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES ..........................................xxiii
HEIMSKRINGLA I ...............................................................................1
Prologue ............................................................................................3
Ynglinga saga ...................................................................................6
Hálfdanar saga svarta ......................................................................48
Haralds saga ins hárfagra ................................................................54
Hákonar saga góða ..........................................................................88
Haralds saga gráfeldar ..................................................................120
Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar ...............................................................137
INDEX OF NAMES ...........................................................................235

Introduction
Authorship
The title Heimskringla derives from the phrase kringla heimsins ‘the disc of
the world’ which opens this collection of sagas on the lives of the kings of
Norway attributed to the Icelandic author Snorri Sturluson. The words belong
to a geographical preamble, ‘The disc of the world which mankind inhabits
is very indented with bays’, and have little to do with the main substance
of the work; but they are fortuitously appropriate to its scope and ambition,
which make it one of the greatest literary achievements of medieval Iceland.
Heimskringla covers the history of Norway from its legendary beginnings
up to the year 1177, and is structured as a sequence of sixteen sagas, mostly
biographical in their focus on a single ruler (or two or three contemporary
rulers). These sagas vary considerably in their length and degree of detail,
presumably partly because of the varied nature of Snorri’s sources, but also
because of differences of emphasis and technique in the way he interpreted
them. The work is often described as a triptych, falling naturally into three
sections, with the saga of Óláfr Haraldsson, translated and beatified as St
Óláfr in 1031, only a year after his death at Stiklastaðir, as the centrepiece.
This part of the text is closely based on Snorri’s own earlier Separate Saga
of St Óláfr, and the incorporation of a work of this length and detail into
Heimskringla marks it out from earlier historical surveys such as Fagrskinna,
in which Óláfr’s reign is treated in no more detail than that of the rulers who
preceded and succeeded him.
The authorship of Heimskringla is not referred to within the text or in any
surviving manuscript—as is usually the case for a medieval work—and its
attribution to Snorri has been questioned.1 The first surviving works in which
he is credited as author are the sixteenth-century translations of Heimskringla
into Danish by the Norwegians Peder Claussøn Friis and Laurents Hanssøn
(see Hkr I vii), who are generally believed to have used at least one now lost
manuscript of Heimskringla that gave authority for their naming of Snorri.
Ólafur Halldórsson argues from allusions to him in Orkneyinga saga and
Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar in mesta that Snorri was widely known in medieval
Iceland as a historian, and that the history in question is likely to have been
Heimskringla (1979, 123–27 [1990, 385–89]).2 Íslendinga saga ch. 79 records
that in 1230 Snorri’s nephew Sturla Sighvatsson stayed with him for some
1 Most recently by Cormack (1999) and Boulhosa (2005, ch. 1)
2 Jørgensen (1995) has recently reviewed the evidence and found unconvincing the
theory that Snorri was named as author in a lost manuscript, and suggested that the
translators’ claims may have been based on the medieval references cited by Ólafur
Halldórsson, and possibly on learned theories circulating in Bergen in Hanssøn’s time.
viii heimskringla
time and lagði mikinn hug á að láta rita sögubækr eftir bókum þeim, er Snorri
setti saman ‘was very keen on having saga books copied from the books that
Snorri had put together’; sögubækr can plausibly be interpreted as meaning
‘books of history’ (Sturlunga saga 1946, I 342).
The identification of Snorri as author of Heimskringla is all the more
tempting, as he seems better equipped for it than any of his contemporaries
by education, background and political experience. An argument based on
his literary experience is a circular one, since there is little sure evidence
either for Snorri’s authorship of Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar or even the
work that carries his name, Snorra Edda (Wanner 2008, 26–29). There is
a considerable convergence among the three, since Snorra Edda takes the
form of a treatise explicating and preserving the complex skaldic poetry that
is skilfully used as a source material in Heimskringla and Egils saga, and
one of the three sections of Snorra Edda, Háttatal, itself takes the form of
a long skaldic eulogy of two rulers of Norway. More significant perhaps is
their shared literary skill, sharing ‘epic scope, an organising and rationalising
intelligence, narrative verve, and resourceful use of skaldic verse’ (Whaley
1991, 15). Egils saga devotes far more detail than any other of the sagas of
Icelanders to the history and politics of Norway and its rulers, and its account
of events in the history of Norway overlaps with that of Heimskringla.
Jónas Kristjánsson (1977 and 1990) accounts for its more hostile treatment
of the Norwegian crown by suggesting it was written after Heimskringla,
by a disillusioned Snorri on his return from Norway to Iceland in 1239;
the more conventional view has been that Egils saga was the earlier work.
An alternative explanation for this difference in perspective may be that
Heimskringla addressed itself to a Norwegian and Egils saga to an Icelandic
audience (Jónas Kristjánsson 1977, 471–72).3
Snorri was one of the foremost political figures of his day. He was an
important member of the Sturlungar family, whose history is recorded in
Íslendinga saga, written by his nephew Sturla Þórðarson, and in other parts
of the Sturlunga saga compilation. The family was dominant at a particularly
turbulent time in Iceland’s history, from the death of Snorri’s father Sturla
in 1183 till the submission of Iceland to the Norwegian crown in 1262–64.
Snorri, born in 1179, had connections with another powerful family, the
Oddaverjar, as he was fostered at Oddi in south-west Iceland, an important
centre of learning, by the powerful chieftain Jón Loptsson, himself descended
3 Ólafur Halldórsson (1965 [1990]) and Stefán Karlsson (1979 [2000]) have argued
that many Icelandic manuscripts with content of interest to Norwegians were exported
from Iceland to Norway soon after being written; it is also believed that texts such
as Fagrskinna may have been written in Norway by Icelanders.