Hlǫðskviða and the Rise of the Old Norse Legendary Sagas

Abstract Hlǫðskviða or “The Battle of the Goths and the Huns” is the most famous of the poems contained in the Old Norse legendary sagas, being generally held to belong to the earliest Old Norse poems. By contrast, the present article argues that linguistic features and the characteristics of verbal and metrical correspondences with other poems are most easily explained by a twelfth-century date. Comparable examples are explored, and the study indicates that the poetry in the legendary sagas should probably not be divided into old and young poems, but rather be viewed generally as the product of a twelfth-century antiquarian flowering drawing on older elements. It is suggested that older poems treating the topics of the legendary sagas may once have existed, since stray stanzas in the sagas appear to be old, but that they did not belong to the canon of poetry transmitted by court poets. They would therefore not have enjoyed the stable transmission typical of eddic and skaldic poetry, ensuring the survival of entire poems. For this reason, would-be authors of the twelfth century needed to expand the corpus, leading to a greater ratio of late poetry in the legendary sagas than in any other genre of Old Norse historical literature. This process was crucial to the emergence of the genre of legendary sagas as we know it.