Tyrfing

King Svafrlami trapped the dwarves Dvalinn and Durinn away from their stone and forced a commission: a sword with a gold hilt that would never rust, cut iron like cloth, and bring victory always. He got exactly that, plus the interest: as the dwarves vanished into the rock they cursed the blade to kill a man each time it was bared, to be the death of its every owner, and to work three deeds of ultimate evil. Svafrlami, satisfied, became owner number one and casualty number one — killed by the berserker Arngrímr, with Tyrfing.

The sword's saga, Hervarar saga, is effectively its biography: twelve berserker brothers dead on Samsø; the heroine Hervör, in one of Old Norse literature's greatest scenes, standing at her father's burning grave-mound at night demanding the sword from his draugr, who warns her and hands it over; her son Heiðrekr, ruined by it on schedule. Tyrfing is the weapon system as moral: you can commission invincibility, but the terms and conditions are written by the people you enslaved to make it.

Where the gods' dwarf-made treasures — Mjölnir, Brísingamen, the silk-soft fetter Gleipnir — were bargained or wagered for, Tyrfing was extorted. It is the one great dwarf-work in the literature made wholly under duress, and its entire career is the invoice.

A sword forged at sword-point

Svafrlami (called Sigrlami in one version — the manuscripts disagree) caught the two dwarves outside their stone, hemmed them in with drawn steel, and named the price of their lives. They delivered a masterpiece — gold hilt, a blade that shone like flame, edges that never dulled or rusted, victory in every fight — then, from the door of their stone where no blade could reach, spoke the codicil: a death every time Tyrfing is drawn; three níðingsverk, unforgivable outrages, worked with it; the death of every man who owns it. Svafrlami lunged; the blade bit rock as the dwarves vanished, and the first drawing had missed its kill. It would not miss again.

The curse collected promptly: the berserker Arngrímr cut Svafrlami down and took Tyrfing over his corpse — the perfect weapon killing its owner was now simply the sword's operating principle.

Twelve barrows on Samsø

Arngrímr's twelve sons were berserkers, and the eldest, Angantýr, carried Tyrfing. A bragged betrothal brought them to a duel on the island of Sámsey (modern Samsø) against the Swedish champion Hjálmarr and his comrade Örvar-Oddr. The berserkers killed Hjálmarr — Tyrfing's wounds allow nothing else; the saga gives him a death-song for the bride he would not come home to — but all twelve brothers fell. The survivors did the one wise thing in the whole saga: they buried Tyrfing in Angantýr's barrow, its dead owner for a guard.

Hervör at the grave-mound

It stayed buried for one generation. Angantýr's daughter Hervör grew up wilder than her keepers — she took up weapons, raided under the male name Hervarðr, and when she learned what lay in her father's barrow she sailed to Sámsey and did what her crew would not: walked at nightfall into the grave-fires burning above the howes and called her father up out of death.

The poem the saga preserves here, often called "The Waking of Angantýr," is one of the great dialogues of Northern literature. The dead man tries everything — denial, delay, dread: the barrows are opening, the fires burning; the sword is doom; it will destroy her line; no woman should hold it. Hervör meets every refusal with the same demand, taunting the dead that a well-kept sword ill becomes them. At last Angantýr yields what a father cannot refuse and a cursed owner cannot keep: Tyrfing passes from the grave into her hands, the warning going with it. She sails away delighted. The saga lets the reader hold both truths — the scene is a triumph, and the triumph is the curse working.

What is the curse of Tyrfing?

Three clauses, all honoured: every drawing kills a man before the sword can be sheathed; every owner dies by it or because of it; three great evils will be worked with it. The saga traces the fulfilment through Hervör's son Heiðrekr, a king clever in everything except abstaining. With Tyrfing he killed his own brother — kin-slaying, plainest of the níðingsverk. He held a riddle-contest against a stranger called Gestumblindi, who was Odin in disguise; when the god ended the game with the unanswerable question — what did Odin whisper in dead Baldr's ear? — Heiðrekr drew Tyrfing on his guest. The blade must kill when bared: Odin escaped as a falcon, and the drawing's debt was paid by Heiðrekr himself, murdered in his bed by his own thralls, who stole the sword. Exactly which deeds count as the three evils varies between the saga's redactions, but the shape is constant: the sword's gifts are only ever spent on the owner's own house.

Heiðrekr's son, another Angantýr, hunted down the slaves and recovered Tyrfing — then, in the saga's last movement, the great battle of the Goths and the Huns, used it to kill his own half-brother Hlöðr. Standing over the body, he speaks the saga's verdict: evil is the doom of the Norns. The story ends with a victorious, undestroyed, still-cursed sword; the saga simply stops, which may be the grimmest ending available.

In the primary sources

Tyrfing belongs to a single work: Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, a thirteenth-century Icelandic legendary saga surviving in several divergent redactions — which is why the first owner is Svafrlami in one and Sigrlami in another, and details of the curse shift between manuscripts. The saga is a treasury of much older verse: "The Waking of Angantýr," the riddles of Gestumblindi, and the poem on the battle of Goths and Huns, which scholars count among the oldest heroic poetry in Old Norse. The smiths have wider roots — Dvalinn and Durinn both appear in the dwarf-catalogue of Völuspá in the Poetic Edda, so the saga hired its craftsmen from the oldest available register.

Legacy

Hervarar saga has a peculiar modern distinction: Christopher Tolkien edited and translated it, and his father mined it openly — Durinn's name went to the eldest Dwarf-father of Middle-earth, and the riddle-contest finds its echo in the riddle-game of The Hobbit. "The Waking of Angantýr" was among the first Old Norse poems ever rendered into English, in the early eighteenth century, helping ignite the antiquarian craze for the North. And Tyrfing itself became the type-specimen of the cursed blade: wherever fantasy arms a hero with a sword that must kill once drawn, the terms were drafted by two dwarves standing in the door of their stone.