Hervör

Raised as a bondservant's daughter and behaving, the saga notes disapprovingly, 'more like a boy than a girl,' Hervör learned her true parentage — daughter of the berserker Angantýr, who lay buried with the cursed sword Tyrfing on the haunted island of Samsø — and reacted by taking a ship. As 'Hervarðr,' in man's dress and man's name, she landed alone at dusk where her crew refused to follow: the mounds were burning with grave-fire, and the dead were awake.

The Waking of Angantýr, the poem at the saga's heart, is the greatest father-daughter scene in Old Norse: she calls him up with formal summons — 'Awake, Angantýr, Hervör wakes you' — and the draugr tries everything: denial (the sword isn't here), terror (the fires, the dead), and, at last, honesty: Tyrfing will destroy your line, daughter; it destroys everyone's. Her answer closes the negotiation: give it to me or lie shamed in your barrow forever. The dead man hands his death out through the mound-fire, with a father's blessing worded like a lament. She sailed on to raid, ruled, married, and passed the sword — and its arithmetic — to her sons, one of whom it duly ruined.

Later tradition kept the name in the family: her granddaughter Hervör died leading troops against the Huns. The first Hervör is the sagas' full answer to anyone who thinks shield-maidens were a screenwriter's invention: the North wrote her a thousand years ago, and gave her the best midnight scene in the corpus.

The sword before the girl

Hervör's story is a chapter in the biography of a weapon, and the weapon comes first. Tyrfing was forged, Hervarar saga tells us, by the dwarves Dvalinn and Durinn under compulsion: King Svafrlami cornered them outside their stone and forced them to make a sword with a golden hilt that would never rust, never miss a stroke, and cut iron like cloth. The dwarves complied to the letter and cursed the remainder: the sword would kill a man every time it was drawn, be the death of its own bearer in due course, and accomplish three great villainies. Svafrlami was duly killed with it by the berserker Arngrímr, whose twelve berserk sons inherited it — the eldest, Angantýr, carrying Tyrfing to the famous duel on the island of Samsø, where all twelve brothers fell against the champions Hjálmarr and Örvar-Oddr. (The curse kept its arithmetic even in defeat: Hjálmarr won, and died of his wounds.) The twelve were laid in mounds on Samsø, Tyrfing in the earth under Angantýr, and the island acquired the reputation that keeps Hervör's crew on the beach: the mounds burned at night, and the dead did not lie quietly.

Angantýr's daughter was born after Samsø, posthumous like Sigurd, and raised in her grandfather's house believing less than the truth. The saga's portrait of the girl is vivid precisely because the narrator disapproves: strong as a man, trained to bow and shield and sword, doing more harm than good, running off to the woods — until a thrall taunted her with her supposed low birth, and her mother's father told her the truth: her father was Angantýr of the twelve, and her inheritance lay in a haunted mound. The saga gives her verse at this hinge, demanding equipment "as a Gothic girl": she dressed as a man, took the name Hervarðr, joined a crew of vikings, and in time commanded it. When the ship touched at Samsø, the entire crew refused to go ashore in the dark. Their captain went alone.

The Waking of Angantýr

The poem at the saga's heart — often titled The Waking of Angantýr, and old enough that the saga is partly built as its frame — is a formal necromancy conducted as a family argument. Hervör walks up through the grave-fires at dusk, past a herdsman who flees, and calls her father by rite: Awake, Angantýr — Hervör wakes you, your only daughter — give me the sharp sword the dwarves forged. The mound opens; the draugr answers, and tries every honest and dishonest way to refuse her. He denies the sword is there — it fell among the slain. He invokes terror: the gates of the dead are open, the island burns, girl, run to your ships. He tells her she is mad to come alone into such a night. And when none of it moves her — she stands in the flame and says the fires do not frighten her, nor the dead in their doors — he tells the truth: Tyrfing lies beneath him, wrapped in fire, and it will destroy her line; the son who bears it after her will suffer by it; it destroys everyone's line, that is what it is for.

Her answer ends the negotiation on the only terms a draugr respects — honour: give me the blade, or lie in your barrow rotten and shamed, a dead man who denied his only child her inheritance. And Angantýr yields, handing his own death out through the mound-fire, with a father's blessing spoken like a lament — she is doomed by what she carries, and he gives it to her anyway because she is his, and braver, he says, than most men. The exchange runs close to thirty stanzas, and there is nothing else like it in the corpus: not a hero looting a barrow, but a daughter serving legal notice on the dead, and winning.

What Hervör did with it

The saga does not pretend the sword improved her prospects; it reports, dryly, that she went on being formidable. She raided for a time as Hervarðr, then lived as a maiden at her adoptive grandfather's court, excelling — the saga can't help noting — more in weapons than in needlework. She married Höfundr, a famously just judge-king, and bore two sons who split the inheritance between them: Angantýr the good, and Heiðrekr, who got the sword and the arithmetic that came with it. Tyrfing's clauses executed on schedule: drawn once at a feast, it had to kill, and Heiðrekr's brother died for it — the first of the three villainies the dwarves had budgeted. The rest of the saga follows the sword down the generations, through Heiðrekr's riddle-contest with a disguised Odin (the god escapes, as usual, on a technicality and a transformation) and on to the great war with the Huns — where the saga's second Hervör, Heiðrekr's daughter and the first's namesake and granddaughter, commands a border fortress and dies fighting at the head of her troops, unyielding as her grandmother. The name, like the sword, ran in the family; only the sword was cursed.

In the primary sources

Everything comes from Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks (The Saga of Hervör and Heiðrekr), a thirteenth-century Icelandic fornaldarsaga preserving much older verse: the Waking of Angantýr, the riddles of Gestumblindi (Odin's riddle-match, a catalogue of Norse riddle-lore), and the Battle of the Goths and Huns, a poem so archaic it seems to remember fourth-century steppe geography. The Samsø duel that kills Angantýr is also told in Örvar-Odds saga, from the winners' side — a useful cross-check where the two sagas share the scene. Hervör has no entry in Saxo or the Eddas; she is the legendary sagas' own creation, and their best. The Waking was among the first Old Norse poems ever translated into English (1705), and eighteenth-century Britain knew it well — Hervör was haunting English poetry a century before Wagner made valkyries fashionable.