 A man of no knowledge assumes that he knows everything if he lives his whole life in a little corner of the world, but this he does not know. What answers he needs if people confront him with questions. Only the one who wanders the wide world and makes his way through much knows what kind of mind each man is master of. He knows what knowing is. These are quotations from the Habomal, or words of the high one, collection of proverbs from the Old Norse poetic Eta, a medieval text that collects myths, heroic legends, and aphorisms like this from the ancient Scandinavia and other areas of northern Europe. This particular part of the poetic Eta, the Habomal, is full of advice about how to live and interact in the world of the medieval Norse during the Viking era and before during the time of the Great Migrations. It distinguishes between intelligent behavior and unintelligent behavior. What counts as wisdom? How to sort of be defensive and defend yourself from attackers but at the same time be open, you know, make new alliances, exchange gifts, and feel at home in the world. Another one says, a man of no knowledge when he mingles with people, it best say little. No one knows that he has no knowledge unless he talks too much. A man who knows nothing does not even know that he's talking too much. On the other hand, reticent and reflective must a ruler's child be, and he must be brave in battle. Genial and merry must every man be until he encounters death. And of course, this advice given during a harsh time in history and also a harsh part of the world to live in is very much aware that life is short, everything that grows eventually dies, and these two proverbs address that by saying cattle die and cattle were a form of wealth. You know, obviously gold is a source of wealth but references to cattle usually mean references to personal wealth in this pastoral culture. Cattle die, kinsmen die, one dies oneself just the same, but the fame of renown never dies for anyone who earns himself that excellence. Cattles die, kinsmen die, one dies oneself just the same. I know one thing that never dies, judgment on every man dead. In other words, everything you earn in your life, you'll lose. Your wealth, your family, and your own life. But if you do something worth remembering, people will remember you, and that if you're lucky will never die. That should sound familiar. That is the concept of kleos amphithon, the Greek thing that Achilles and the other Achaeans were fighting for. Even the ones that knew they wouldn't survive the Trojan War, they wanted to be remembered and potentially remembered forever. That word kleos amphithon shows up also in ancient Indian scriptures, the Vedas, which indicates it's a very, very ancient concept in the Indo-European culture and is carried into three very different branches of Indo-European culture. It is ancient Indian culture, ancient Greek culture, and ancient Norse culture. So the aphorisms, the advice as well as potentially the narratives and the myths that are a part of the poetic edda and some of these other texts that we're going to look at, seem to have at least some elements that go back centuries but even potentially thousands of years. This work, this particular work, the havumal, the title means words of the high one and the high one in this case is Odin. It's attributed to the chief of the Norse gods, Odin, who the Anglo-Saxons remembered as Wotan, ancient Ghasts remembered as Wutanas. There are several other names because he was a god that was recognized throughout the Germanic world even before the Viking Age. And he frequently shows up in the narratives and there are works in the poetic edda and some of the other old Norse works that are about Odin going along on his quest for wisdom or quest for understanding. He also knew the prophecy that the gods of Valhalla would eventually be destroyed by the frost giants and the fire giants at Ragnarok, the doom of the gods. But he was always trying to find a way to put off that fate, to take care of his own children, the gods, and he was frequently going about the world in disguise. He's frequently described as having put on this cloud-gray cloak and wearing a broad-brimmed hat that he can pull down over his face a little bit to hide the fact that he's missing an eye, because he gave up that eye as a sacrifice to this being named Mimir in order for Mimir to allow him to drink from the well of knowledge, this well whose waters give you access to prophecy and to knowledge of the world beyond. And this character Mimir sounds a lot like Enki, remember the beliefs about the water underneath the earth that the ancient Mesopotamians had. Odin is a very unique god. He's frequently represented in modern culture, like in the Thor movies with Anthony Hopkins playing him. He looks just like another version of Zeus, except he has wings on his helmet. It looks like the Roman, Greek, Jupiter, or Zeus. Even in pictures drawn of him in the 19th century, when a lot of Norse mythology was becoming very popular, especially in Europe, he's represented in much the same way that Zeus would be represented. But he's very different. He's not the sort of all confident, all powerful, domineering figure. He's always traveling in disguise. He's always trying to learn something, and he's frequently trying to help his favorite humans achieve their goals. And in all these circumstances, he goes in disguise. He doesn't want to be recognized. He changes his name in another text from the poetic adda called Grim to Small, which is the sayings of Grimnir. He says, my name is Grim, when someone asks him, which means dark. My name is Ganglari, which means wanderer. Haeryan, which is warrior. Helmberry, which is Helmbearer. Thec, clever, because this is his characteristic. He's frequently referred to by names like Truthfinder, that's a sangatal. But also terms which refer to his role as the god of warfare, one of the gods of warfare. There are terms for the Norse gods like valetivar, which mean gods of war. So they're all sort of gods of war, but Odin is the sort of strategic one. And of course, he shows up in disguise in the work that I asked you to read for this unit, which is the Saga of Rolf Krocki. He shows up as the farmer in disguise named Hrani. In fact, he shows up three times. Each time to sort of test King Rolf and his men, and each time he exposes them to some difficulty, some pain, some test of their fortitude. And he always tells Rolf, just you and your 12 champions, you are the only ones who should go to face King Adels. If the rest of these go, then they'll be defeated and they'll drag you down with them. And so he's testing King Rolf because he wants to prepare him for this confrontation that he's going to have with this magic user, King Adels. And he offers King Rolf a sword and a coat of mail and a shield. And this is something that he does frequently with heroes in Old Norse mythology. He'll give them some special weapon, although it doesn't always look like much, which is the case in Rolf Saga. And Rolf rejects it. And that is where he loses Odin's favor. And so Odin doesn't help him in the up-canoning battle with the army of Queen Skuld. But of all the things that Odin is known for, the most interesting for our purposes here in a literature class would be that he was attributed the invention of runes. Now, of course, the medieval Norse and the Anglo-Saxons and the other Germanic tribes of Northern Europe eventually got writing from the Romans. But they had a form of writing which was best designed for carving. It could be carved on pieces of wood. It could be inscribed on rings and medallions. It could have magical properties. It could be some sort of magic spell that you carry around on a medallion around your neck that has some charm to protect you or to keep you from getting lost or something like that. This piece of wood at the bottom has a love poem on it. But it could also be used to commemorate someone who had passed on. In this case, the runestone on the left is a stone that was erected on the island of Gotland, which is this island off the coast of Sweden. And as you might have already guessed because of what I've mentioned about the geese and the goths and the gout in Hrolfsaga, Gotland is named after these people that were one branch of which would go down and eventually conquer Rome. Another branch of which would remain there and be the people of Beowulf. But this stone was erected in Gotland. And the runes say that it was erected for a man named Rom. And Rom traveled, quote, far and wide in Iofor. And Iofor is a name for a region that you pass through when you take this Dnieper River route. And I mentioned how the ancient Norse were able to find these river routes where they would sail from the Baltic Sea up a river up into the mountains and then find a lake or sometimes find a way to carry their ships over a mountain from the headwaters of one river that flowed west to the headwaters of a river that flowed south down to the Black Sea. And that's what this region was, this man named Rom traveled in. And so whatever happened to him, someone put this stone up so that people would remember potentially forever. He would have fame that lived on beyond him, even though he and everything he earned by trading on that route. All of that stuff passes away, but this runestone is there to try to make that quote from the Habomal come true, which is to be remembered forever, to have that Klayos forever. And he is remembered, if for nothing else, than the fact that he was one of those who was able to travel these river routes from the Baltic Sea down to the Black Sea. And these runes that allowed this were attributed to Odin. And we can learn a lot about the Norse from what they wrote on these runes before they had access to Roman letters and writing on parchment with ink. The problem is the runes are good for carving, but they're not so great for writing long narratives or any other long text. So most of what the more developed knowledge we have, the longer narratives, the poetry, the longer prose that we have is written down on parchment, which is calfskin or sheepskin that's been stretched out and because there's no paper at this time, they don't yet have the technology to take wood pulp and turn it into paper. So each of these pages has to be written on leather. That means it's very expensive and I'll get into that more in a later lecture. But the writing, most of what we know, is written on these pages. Now keep in mind that writing traveled with the spread of Christianity. This is how Roman technology and Roman connections spread into Northern Europe. And that means that by the time these things are being written down, they're being written down after people no longer believe in the old myths about Odin and others. But also, most of this writing that we have that tells us what the medieval and ancient Norse believed was not written in Scandinavia. It was written in Iceland, which was at that time seemed like the edge of the world. But the Icelanders wrote a lot. They recorded a lot of their ancient cultural traditions, the old stories that people had told in the oral tradition. Because they wanted to preserve these old stories and these old poems and this sort of artistic knowledge. And they wrote several different kinds of texts. So the Havimal that produced those proverbs that I read at the beginning, that's part of the eddas. There's two eddas, the younger edda, which is also called Snorri's edda or the prose edda. That's an edda written that we have an author that we know. His name is Snorri Sterlissen. And he deliberately wanted to save as much of oral tradition, a poetic tradition as he can. He even wrote as part of that younger edda. He wrote a book about how to recognize references to old mythological stories. So if you heard someone say that you were weeping the harvest on the Fierce Plain or Fierce Valor, you would know, oh, the harvest on the Fierce Valor, that's the plane where King Hroth Crocky threw down gold while he was riding away from King Adel's army. And King Adel's army stopped to reach down to pick up the gold. So it was as if they were harvesting these seeds that King Hroth had planted. Well, Snorri Sterlissen wanted to write a text that would help explain a lot of these old references before they were forgotten. That was the younger edda, the elder edda, the older edda is called the poetic edda. And that one was written a little bit before Snorri's time. And it contains the Havimal. It contains a lot of other stories about the gods and the heroes that the Icelanders had stories about hundreds of years before. Similar to that are a type of saga. And this is where we get the word saga from the Icelanders. A saga was a story not just about one person, but usually about an entire family. And if you go back and read the beginning of Hroth saga, you'll see that most of the beginning is not about Hroth at all. It's about his father and even his grandfather. And this is pretty common in most Icelandic sagas. It starts several generations before the main hero or the main protagonist. But these sagas took different forms and one type of saga was called the Fornaldursogir or the songs of the legendary times. These were sagas about mythical people. Frequently the gods show up in these ancient sagas. And they're people who lived either during the Viking Age or even before that during the time of the Great Migrations shortly before and then shortly after the fall of Rome. This is what Rolf Krakis saga is. It's one of the legendary sagas. Another one of the most famous legendary sagas is called the Volkswagen saga. It's about this dragon slayer named Sigurd, but it starts even before that with his father who's named Sigmund. And this is what Richard Wagner's operas about the ring cycle. If you've ever heard the Rite of the Valkyries, this is from that opera and it's about the story of the Volkswagen saga. Another type of saga is the King's sagas. And these are stories about the kings of Norway and sometimes of Sweden and of Denmark. And these are being written in Iceland, which is a democracy. They were still very interested in the histories of the kings that had come before them. And then there are the most famous, the ones you can find the most examples of if you go to amazon.com or go to the bookstore and wanna buy some Icelandic sagas. Mostly what you'll find are the sagas of the Icelanders themselves. And these are stories about the people who actually settled Iceland. There's also a type of saga called the Night Saga or the Ritter Saga. And that is very much like literature about King Arthur or about Charlemagne or other figures that show up in literature from the 1300s, 1400s and after that. And Iceland is a very interesting place as a very interesting history. Until 874 when the first permanent settler Ingolf or Arnersson showed up, sailed from Norway in order to settle there. There was no native population. This is one of the few places we can say that Europeans did not take away from someone else. And most of the people that settled there in the 10th century, the 900s, they didn't necessarily go there because they wanted to go there. They went there because they were trying to escape from the new king of Norway and Norway had not had a national king until that point until a guy named Harold Fairhair or Finehair decided that he needed to conquer every single small chieftain and small kingdom in Norway. And he was very brutal. Anyone who did not submit to his authority, he would send his armies to attack and wipe out. So a lot of people in order to maintain their autonomy and maintain their independence sailed from Norway to this newly discovered place, Iceland. And once they were there, they had to deal with a very difficult climate. This is a satellite photo that was actually taken during the summertime and all that white you see is snow on glaciers. The Myrdalsglacier is the largest one on the bottom right and that is, was and still is the largest glacier in the world. Of course, all of these glaciers were much larger a thousand years ago when Iceland was first settled. And that meant that if you go there in the summertime, it's a very high altitude or high latitude. So it's up around the 66 parallel, 66 degrees north. And that means in the summertime, there is a lot of sunshine. You can watch the sun go all the way around the horizon and sort of dip below it just a little bit and then come back up and never really set. But that also means that during the wintertime, there is a lot of darkness and there's really not much to do outside. It's too cold and it's too dark to go do anything. And this seems to be why the Icelanders decided that the best thing to do with their time indoors was to write down one thing to tell stories but then to write those stories down because it did take a lot of resources and a lot of time to write down what they wrote down. But this seems to be why it was Iceland, this sort of edge of the world place rather than one of the wealthier or more highly populated areas of Northern Europe. These Scandinavians who fled, Harold Fairhair, fled the sort of tyranny as they saw it. They learned from their experience and because they wanted to maintain a certain level of autonomy, they founded the oldest parliamentary democracy which is called the thing which makes it difficult to translate into English because everything in English is a thing. But thing or once it became consolidated at this one particular place, it became called the all thing. And this is the oldest continuously functioning parliamentary democracy in the world. It's been active for over a thousand years now. But while they're telling these stories, the Icelanders, as I mentioned, there are the Icelandic sagas where they're telling stories about people who lived just a generation or two before them. But they're also telling stories and writing these stories down about people who, Scandinavians who lived during the Viking Age, and they're looking even beyond that to the period of the Great Migrations which was the time when the Goths came down and settled around the Black Sea and then eventually moved west and conquered Rome and settled in modern day Spain and France. This is the time when the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes are going from the Jutland Peninsula which is the modern day nation of Denmark as well as Northern Germany and settling in the island of Britain. They have stories about people that we know from history were very much part of these Great Migrations. Attila the Hun shows up as a character in several of the legendary sagas. He's called Ottley. And he seems to be remembered relatively favorably. He seems to be one of these great kings that the Icelanders admire centuries later. They didn't see him as the scourge of God or something like that. They saw him as somebody who was good at what he did and what he did was conquering other nations. But we should also keep in mind that the Ostrogoths who had Scandinavian connections, they were just as likely to have joined with Attila as to run into trouble with him. It was the Romans mostly and the native populations of Southern Europe that really for whom Attila was the threat, the bad guy. If you were a Visigoth or Ostrogoth and you had to decide between farming or joining up with this army that could ride across Europe and capture spoils of war, then you might be more likely to be a little more favorable to Attila. So Attila's remembered relatively favorably. Several other kings from the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths who settled in Northern Italy and in Gaul are remembered in these later sagas. But then there are also the Scandinavians who did not travel around much during the Great Migration, the ones who stayed in the areas of modern day Norway, Sweden and Denmark. And even though these populations didn't move around Europe at the same time everybody else was, they did have a lot to do. There were quite a few characters or potentially historical people who made quite a name for themselves just staying in the region of Scandinavia. I want to look at this map really quick just so we know the major layout of Scandinavia. The modern nation of Norway does not exist yet but your translation makes a reference to it. This is where King Ring and his son Bjorn and his grandson Bodvar Bjarkir are from. And the way to describe these people would be as Norse but then again the word Norse refers to the language spoken in all of this area. So it may be confusing if I just said this is where the Norse were. But Norway, this is where most of the settlers of Iceland came from. But then there's also the Swedes but I'm not gonna refer to where they live as Sweden because modern day Sweden includes the area of the Gauls or the Goths or the Geets and that is the southern part of the Swedish peninsula which was not considered belonging to the Swedes at this time. The Swedes at this time were centered at the area of Uppsala which was relatively for this region highly populated area. It was also an area of great religious significance. We know that there was a large temple to the Norse gods there and people would make pilgrimages to it frequently. In the Saga, in Rolf Krakis Saga, this is where King Adels lives with Rolf Krakis mother, Irsa. And this is where Rolf has to take his men to go reclaim his inheritance that King Adels has taken from it. Below that is the area of the Goths who are gonna be remembered in Beowulf as the Geets. Now I'm anglicizing that G if in an old Norse it would be Jötts and so you can sort of see how a pronunciation of Jöt and Jöt would sort of blend into each other. It's the Anglo-Saxons that use the word Geets and it's not exactly a Y sound but it's not a G sound either it's kind of the middle between those two. But for the, to make things easier I'm just gonna refer to them as the Goths or the Geets. And this island between the Jötland Peninsula, modern day Denmark and the Swedish Peninsula, this is where most of the action of Rolf Saga takes place. This is where his great hall of Lydaar is and the area around is called Lydaargaard. This island is the island of Zeeland. It's part of the nation of Denmark today. But bear in mind that the Jötland Peninsula that's part of Denmark today isn't all inhabited by Danes. There are people called Jötts there, there are people called, well the angles are there from the central part of the Jötland Peninsula. The Danes themselves are mostly on the islands between the Jötland Peninsula and the Swedish Peninsula. Also in the far north is the area of Finmark. Now that's not to be confused with modern day Finland which is named after the same Finns but the boundaries are a little bit different. This area is mostly too cold, especially inland, it's too cold for even the Norse to really want to settle it too much. The Norse are more preoccupied with settling along the coast. But the people who do live there speak a very different language. It's not an Indo-European language. Even though almost every language spoken in Europe and in Western Asia, Russian, Hindi, Slavic languages, all of these languages are Indo-European language even though they sound very different than English or Spanish or French, they actually do have a lot in common. But Finnish, the language spoken by the Finns and the language spoken by the Sami people or the people frequently referred to as the Laps, the text you read refers to them as the Laps. These are the people of Queen Vitt or Vite, the queen who curses Bjorn and turns him into a bear. She's one of these people and their language is completely different. It actually has more in common with the people who live around the Arctic Circle in Northern Russia. And King Rolf Saga, even though the manuscript that you read of Rolf Saga wasn't actually written down until the 14th century, it has enough clear parallels to a lot of older works that this indicates that it contains a lot of very old narratives in it. It's maybe a compiled individual narratives that were once separate. But what it does is actually combine independent, what might have been independent narratives about independent heroes. For instance, Bodvar Bjarke is the subject of other works of literature, some of which we don't have anymore, like there's a poem called The Bjarkamal or the lay of Bodvar Bjarke, which is a poem that doesn't survive today, but there are references to it in works that do survive and they will give a little bit of quotations from that. So we know that there are other works about Bodvar Bjarke. There are other descriptions of this hero named Sviipdair who is, there is an entire section that I didn't ask you to read, but if you go back in just because you want to, read the entirety of King Rolf Saga, you'll see that there's an entire section about Sviipdair. And King Rolf himself is the subject of a very long legendary and literary tradition. We're gonna see when we get to Beowulf that the author of Beowulf presumes that you know who Rolf, or in Beowulf he's called Rolf. He presumes that you know who he is, so he doesn't really, he makes references to things that haven't happened yet, but he assumes that you know those things are going to happen because that's how famous King Rolf was. And by putting these different narratives together, whether or not these individual heroes Rolf thought of as being part of Rolf's court or not is, we'll never know. But what has happened here is something very similar to the Arthurian legends where all these different knights seem to have been heroes of their own stories. And but those stories during the Middle Ages are combined and instead of being individual heroes doing individual things, they're all brought together around King Arthur's round table. Well the same thing is happening here with King Rolf and his champions, Sviipdair and Badvar Bjarke, as well as some of the other people that are obliquely referred to and potentially Hjalti, the little guy that Badvar sort of turns into a champion, may have all had their independent origins and independent narratives, but they've been compiled into this singular narrative. And so this is kind of what makes it a saga. It's not just a very tight compact story. It's combining lots of different narrative threads. And it's a good example of old Norse literature for a lot of reasons. It contains a lot of common themes and common motifs that you'll see if you read a lot of old Norse literature, especially the legendary sagas, but even to some extent some of the later sagas. Remember that a motif is a conventional situation or device, literary device or an interest or an incident, especially one that serves as a recurrent or unifying element in a text. It can be an image, a symbol that we see over and over again, a particular type of character and action and idea and object or phrase. And some of these motifs are deliberate. They're literary conventions. They're put there because this is what the literature usually contains, but also there are some ideas that the old Norse would have taken for granted that we may not be familiar with. The first is the idea of a troll. Now if you see fantasy movies, if you see the Lore of the Rings movies, we play video games, you maybe have an idea of a troll as like one particular species of monster that looks a particular way. They're always large and stupid, but trolls in old Norse narratives are almost anything that is unnatural and scary. So the first troll, we meet the first character described as a troll, was Queen Vitt. Remember Vitt is the lap girl that marries a King Ring and she's the one that slaps Bjorn with a Wolfskin glove and that curses him so that it turns him into a bear during the daytime. She also knows how to do other types of magic. She's described as a maistice troll, which is the greatest of trolls or the scariest of trolls. But she's a woman, she's a human. She's a human that can perform magic, but she's still described with that word troll. Also we have this dragon or dragon-like monster. It seems pretty clearly to be a dragon that attacks the Hall of Flydar that Bodvar Bjarke has to kill, and that dragon is described as a troll as well. We also have this boar that attacks when Rolf and his men go to Upsala. This magical boar attacks them and Rolf's dog, a grom, is able to defeat him, but that boar is also described as a troll. And even Rolf's sister, Queen Skuld, is described as a troll because she's able to perform magic. So a troll is just anything that's scary and anything that's sort of supernatural. It's not just one type of monster. I mentioned the laps and the fins. These are the people that have a very different culture, and as I mentioned, they have a very different language than the Norse. The Norse could understand the Swedes and they could understand the Geats and they could understand the Danes even though their language is kind of slightly different. They could even understand the Angles and Saxons on the continent, but they couldn't understand the language of the laps. There's people that still around today, they refer to themselves as the Sami people, but that word lap sort of indicates that these are a foreign people that the Norse just don't know that much about, and because they don't know that much about them, they're a bit afraid of them. They have these shamanic religions and practices and rituals that don't fit what the Norse understand, so they see the Norse see them as being the sort of dangerous, magical people. Another element of particularly this story, but also the next story and some of the other texts that we're gonna read, the idea of a bear. We all know what a bear is when there are references to bears. It might seem sort of banal. It might seem like not that interesting. Well, it's a large and scary animal, so I guess that's why it's something that would be good to turn into, or as we see a bot of our Bjarke doing in the final fight with Queen Skald's army. But bears in the Arctic region, in particular the brown bear, which this map at the bottom is the modern day range of the Ursus Arctus. There's an R missing there, but the brown bear has this domain that extends around the world. The Indo-European word for bears wasn't originally bear or anything that sounds exactly like bear. It was something more like arcus or urx, and this is where the Latin Ursus comes from. So if you know the constellation Ursa Major, you know it's the big bear. Well, this Ursus or arcus, this is where we still have in English the word arctic, which literally meant the bear's realm, the realm of the arcus. But notice that we don't call bears arcs or urx or Ursus. That seems to be because there was this prohibition in these northern latitudes, even for Indo-European people, not to refer to the bear directly. Whether it's because you're afraid that it was gonna hear you, if you were hunting it and you wanted to sneak up on it, because as we see from the feast, where they eat bjorn, that people did eat bear meat. But also it's a predator and it's the largest and scariest predator on land. So that might also been a reason not to say its name because it would hear you and follow you and hurt you. You might be, you speak of the devil and the devil appears. But whatever this reason was, it's clear that there was an ancient taboo against saying arcus. Instead, people would say something like the brown one. And that is where we get our word bear. And so most of the Germanic and English remembers the Germanic language. Most of the Germanic references to bear start with a B. And that includes Bjorn, the character in Ralf Saga, who is the father of Badvar Bjarke. Bjorn literally means bear. His wife is bearer, which is the female bear. His son is Badvar Bjarke, and the Bjarke part means little bear. And next time we're gonna read, in the next unit we're gonna read Beowulf. And Beowulf's name literally means be wolf. And there are a lot of ways to interpret this, but the one that seems the most obvious, if you think keep this taboo in mind, is I don't wanna say the word arcus. So I'm gonna say that there's this animal that is like a wolf, but it breaks into be highs because we know bears like honey. So there's a clear possibility that Beowulf means, as Beowulf means the wolf of the bees, or the large wolf that attacks be highs, which is actually a bear. We also have these berserks, and this is where we get the word berserk to go crazies, to go berserk. We have some of these figures showing up in Ralf Saga, and they're these sort of dangerous warriors that even King Ralf is afraid of. The word berserk means literally bear shirt. So they're these warriors that wear the skin of bears as their only armor, or maybe not their only armor, but they wear these bear skins and potentially bear claws and bear teeth, maybe even a bear skull. We see in some of these ancient metal works, these images of the one on the top right of this guy carrying a spear, it's clearly a human, but there's this animal head on top of it. So either it's an animal headed person, or this is somebody wearing potentially a bear, a skull on his head, or it could be a wolf as well. There was a similar type of warrior, it's called an Ulf Hidnar, which is someone wearing a wolf skin. But the association with a bear seems to have been a source of power, not just something cool to wear on the battlefield, but a source of supernatural power in their belief system. And that, all of the bear imagery, the fact that one of the main characters in Rolf Saga, and especially if we look at Badvar Bjarke's story independently, it's a guy named Little Bear who's the son of a guy named a bear and a woman named a bear. That in itself might just seem like a story about a guy with bear characteristics, but there are other elements, structural elements of the story of Badvar Bjarke within Rolf Saga, which connect that story to a very ancient story that's actually found all the way around the world, literally, you know, around the Arctic Circle and in cultures that are connected to that. This is something I'm gonna talk more about when we get to Beowulf and then read some excerpts from Greta Saga, which is another Icelandic saga. But there is this tradition of this bear's son tale in which the son of a bear, sometimes somebody with bear characteristics himself, sometimes just the son of a bear, has to fight a monster that nobody else can fight, that has been attacking the dwelling of humans. Another motif we see in a lot of Old Norse narratives is the representation of these weapons and other artifacts that are bound to the fates of particular individuals. So Bjorn, before he dies, sets up these three weapons for his three sons. He has this sword set aside for Badvar. He has this axe set aside for Thorir and this Seax, or this large knife, sort of a dagger, but it's also useful as a knife, that he sets up for his son Frodi, or Elk Frodi. And only the ones for whom those weapons are set aside, they're the only ones who can remove them where they're wedged in this stone. This sounds obviously like the sword in the stone from Arthurian legend, which is not actually Excalibur. Excalibur is given to King Arthur by the Lady of the Lake. The sword in the stone is mostly just used to show that Arthur is the one who's supposed to be king. Not much gets made of that sword afterwards. But there are also other stories in Old Norse where sometimes the god Odin will show up and strike a sword into the middle of a tree. He does this in the Volsang Saga. He sticks the sword in a tree and he says, you know, the greatest warrior among you will be able to pull that sword out. And of course, everyone tries it, but it's the last one who's Sigmund, who's the one who's able to pull it out. This is true with weapons. It's also true with objects. We have Bjorn's ring, which he has under his arm when he's killed in bear form. Berra goes up and asks King Ring if she can have the ring, which is under his arm. And that later becomes the token by which she can identify herself and more importantly, identify Bodvar Bjarki as the son of Bjorn and therefore the grandson of King Ring. But these objects are objects of special attention. Their use is more than just their use value. They have either magical properties or something, but most importantly, they have a narrative property. They're there for a reason to, without them, the narrative cannot move forward. And frequently this is connected to identity. This proves someone's identity. This is a weapon that can only be used by this person with this identity. And sometimes they have almost sort of identities of their own, almost personalities of their own. For instance, Bodvar's sword will only be unshiefed three times and then it sort of, it decides, the sword itself seems to decide whether or not it's going to be used on a particular occasion. There are several interactions and descriptions of fighting in Rolf Saga, which are very common. They're very peculiar, they don't seem to make much sense. They seem to be guys just being jerks. But they're very common in Old Norse literature. And one of these is a situation where two people who know each other, one person will go to visit the other, but remain in disguise, refuse to show his identity. And be a sort of threat to someone who's actually his friend. And there's this sort of interaction. He's sort of testing his friend to see if his friend will show him hospitality or something like that. And frequently this ends up with a fight. Frequently what I'll call a flinch test, the host will swing a weapon at the guest in disguise. And this is sort of an opportunity for the guest to show how unafraid he is and how he's not going to flinch. We see this happen when, first when Thorir Houndsfoot goes to see his brother Elgfrothi when he's on his way out of Norway. And we see this again when Bavar Bjarke stops at Elgfrothi's dwelling and pulls his hood down over his face and won't tell his own brother who he is until they end up fighting and wrestling around. It's only then that he reveals himself. This sort of thing happens a lot. And it seems to be just a way to sort of prove that you're not locked to your identity, that you're not depending on the kindness of others. You can take care of yourself. We also have a lot of sort of poetic and literally this is responding to a challenge or to a fight or after you've won a fight, responding in poetic verse. We have King Hroth do this several times. We have Bavar do this after he fights with his brother Elgfrothi. He responds with poetry. And it's kind of hard to tell in the webpage that you read. But frequently in texts that if you buy Jesse Bayak's book, which I highly recommend, his translation of it, which is a Penguin Classics, Bayak will actually separate the lines of poetry so that you can see the difference between just normal dialogue and a response in poetry. And there are some later Viking heroes, namely like Ayo Scala-Grimson, who's a later sort of Viking-age Icelandic hero that has his own saga and he is very much a poet. He will respond to people who are threatening his life with poetry in the moment, right as he's about to draw a sword or to fight or right after he's killed somebody who will respond with a few verses. And then sometimes when people ask him who he is instead of saying his name, he'll give a line of poetry. This is something that we may not associate the idea of a warrior with the idea of a poet. But this is something, these are two elements that are combined in Odin. Odin is not just the God of the Runes, but he's also the God of poetry. He actually went, he had to steal this elixir of poetry, this, the meat of poetry from the giants in order to bring that to the gods in Asgard. And poetry was very much something that he was connected with. Now there was another God of poetry named Bragy, but he seems to be somebody who was actually a poet who lived at some point in history that was later sort of deified and made into a minor God. But Odin unites warfare and poetry and those two things seem to really be the two things that every real Norseman, every Viking was supposed to be good at. And so we'll have a warrior in the middle of a fight break into poetry and that's just considered totally normal. We also have the duty of vengeance. If someone killed someone close to you, it was your duty to get revenge on that person. We see this when Bodvar wonders why no one has killed Queen Viet when he finds out that she's the one that had his father, Bjorn, killed. He wonders why didn't Elkfrody go and kill her? It was his duty, he was the oldest. Why didn't Thorir go kill her? It was his duty. So when Bodvar goes to do that, he's saying that he's not just doing this because he's angry, he's doing this because it is his duty as Bjorn's son to kill the person who had Bjorn killed. But as you can imagine, if you have to go get revenge on somebody else and somebody's gonna have to get revenge on you for killing that person, and then somebody's gonna have to get revenge on the person that killed you, that can escalate out of control and turn into entire families, entire tribes, entire clans, fighting with each other over generations. And that is actually the subject of most of the Icelandic family sagas, quite a few of them, and most of the legendary sagas as well. Each one of the, something may start with an insult and the insult may result in a punch and the punch results in a stab kill somebody and that means that somebody has to kill that guy, but then three people will be involved with taking revenge and that means another five people will have to kill the three people and it just gets bigger and bigger. So frequently these sagas will go on until something happens where the two sides are reconciled or more likely they just, there's not really much left of the groups and people will just leave the area and travel away and that's the end of it. One way to end the blood feud potentially before it starts was to pay what the Anglo-Saxons called wear guild, which is gold for a man or man gold, where you have a set price on an individual and if you kill him, either somebody's gonna kill you or you have to pay this set price for that person and usually this amount will be set depending on how high ranking you were in society. We also see a motif that you may not think of with quote unquote viking literature, which is this sort of idea we associate with later chivalric literature, like the courtly knights who are gonna protect the weak and only fight the strong, but it's actually a much older idea. You don't wanna be seen as fighting someone who's weaker than you and Bodvar reminds a Hrolf's men of that when they're picking on hot who eventually becomes healthy. He says frequently that this is just unbecoming behavior picking on someone who's smaller than you. So he tells his brother Elkfrody this too, you shouldn't go raiding, you shouldn't go attacking people on the highways and taking what doesn't belong to you just because you're stronger than them. But that doesn't mean he's against fighting, it means he wants to punch up, always fight somebody who's as strong or stronger than you. And when the berserk come into King Rolf's court, Bodvar has no problem fighting them, but he'll wait when it's unclear whether the person who's taunting him is actually stronger than him or not, he'll try to put off the fight in those cases. And we see Bodvar really stand up for this idea by protecting this character named Hoth. Now obviously, first he knows of Hoth because he stops at Hoth's parents cottage, they're these peasants and they show hospitality to Bodvar and they tell him if you go to Lidar, which is King Rolf's mead hall, this large, this is before there are nation states and before there are really wealthy kingdoms, they don't have palaces, they don't have large cities, the sort you would find in Southern Europe at this time, even the sort you would find in Southern Europe during the Bronze Age. There's nothing like the city of Troy, the city of Mycenae in the north. The most opulent you're gonna get is a relatively large village, which might just be a few hundred, maybe a thousand or so people. And at the center of it is gonna be this long house, this really high roofed long building that is big enough to bring in the warriors that are loyal to the king and then the people who serve the king and the people who are part of the royal family and the warriors' families. But when Bodvar comes there, he sees this kid that he's been told about building this wall of bones when the warriors are eating meat off the bone and they throw the bone at hot and he's got bruises all over his body and so he can't stand up for himself. The most he can do is try to build a wall out of these bones and the fact that people are doing this is showing, it shows us that Hrolf's warriors are not yet the champions that they need to be. They're these sort of bullies and Bodvar's gonna put a stop to that and when somebody decides to throw a bone at him, he grabs the bone, throws it back and kills the guy when it hits him. And notice King Hrolf's response to that is, well you've killed one of my men and what the guy was doing was really dishonorable so I understand why you did it but now I'm missing a warrior, will you take his place? And of course that was Bodvar's goal to begin with. But I really like the story of Hoth. I really like the sort of zero to hero aspect of his story because he's not only small, he's also a complete coward and he's the one that Bodvar is clearly decides to be a mentor with. He doesn't just defend him by throwing the bone at the guy who had been throwing bones at Hoth but then he drags him out when the sort of dragon troll creature attacks Lidar. He drags him out there and of course Hoth thinks he's gonna be just instantly killed and there's just no chance. He was afraid to stand up to the warriors of course he's afraid to stand up to this monster but Bodvar kills the dragon but then he makes Hoth drink the dragon's blood and all of a sudden he turns into just this completely different sort of hero. He's now, he will later earn the name Hjalte which means the Hilt, the Hilt of the Sword. So he's the Hilt of King Hrolf's sword. He becomes known as Hjalte the Magnanimous because he's forgiven the people who've been torturing him but this act of drinking the dragon's blood is another motif that really connects this saga to much, much older beliefs apparently and we've seen this elsewhere in Hrolf's saga. So right from the beginning of Bodvar's narrative we have the story of his father Bjorn who is fit to this woman who practices this sort of shamanic magic, hits him with a Wolfskin glove and it makes him turn into a bear during the day. Well, he tells his wife, Barra, that when men kill me tomorrow they're gonna try to make you eat part of my flesh. Don't do it because it will have effects on our children because he knows that she's pregnant with their three sons. But this prohibition against eating that bear flesh seemed violating that even though Barra doesn't want to Vitt makes her do this and it seems that Vitt is doing this deliberately. She wants to force Barra to eat this bear flesh so that something's gonna happen to her children and this seems to be why Elgfrothi has the bottom half of an elk and why Thorir Houndsfoot has these dogs paws on the front part of his feet. And they've got this sort of quasi-animal nature because their mother while she was pregnant ate part of this bear's flesh. So eating the flesh of particular types of animals, especially supernatural animals will change the sort of type of person you are. There again, when Bodvar is leaving Norway he stops by Elgfrothi's hut and Elgfrothi wrestles around with him and says that you're not quite as strong as you should be. So he cuts his own, Elgfrothi cuts his own leg and takes the blood and has Bodvar drink it and as soon as Bodvar drinks it, he's much stronger. Then Elgfrothi pushes him, Bodvar doesn't move and something has changed. But then the biggest change is of course when Hoth turns into Hjalte after drinking this dragon's blood. This happens elsewhere in Norse mythology. The hero Sigurd kills a dragon and then drinks his blood and all of a sudden he's able to understand the speech of birds and other animals. So whatever happens after drinking the blood of a supernatural animal doesn't always have the same effect but it has some effect. But in this case it is a pretty clear zero to hero effect on Hjalte. Now Hjalte's situation, he goes on to join this group of champions that had been abusing him. But this whole situation tells us a lot about how the chieftain worked. This is not, King Hrolth is not a king in the sense that we think of today. He doesn't have total power. He can't just command people to do what he wants to do and they don't just automatically do it. He has to be the ringgiver. He has to be the one who deals out treasure. And that means he has to have the treasure and to get the treasure he has to have the warriors to go on these battles to go get this treasure and bring it back. But then he's the one that redistributes it. So as long as he keeps that redistribution of wealth happening, he keeps that economic system flowing, he can maintain his central power. But if he becomes too stingy, and we'll see this in Beowulf, we'll see a Hrothgar-worn Beowulf don't become stingy like this other king who became a terrible person because he didn't share things with his thanes, with his warriors. This is very important. This is really the only thing keeping the chief in power, keeping that king in power. But he's also got to manage the egos of his warriors. He's got, if he gets the best warriors together in his hall, in his Kamatatas, his group of thanes, then that means he's gonna get a lot of guys who are used to pushing other people around. And of course they're gonna end up pushing each other around. So we see this happening when all of his warriors are picking on Hroth. We see this in full effect when the berserkers who are there to serve Hroth but serve in the sense of they're gonna go with him, fight against who he wants to fight, but in return they are expecting to be well paid. And they get, when they arrive, they start by getting right in Hroth's face and saying, do you think you could take us, that you could defeat us? The passage says, now when winter passes, and it gets round to the time when Hroth's berserkers are expected back, Bavar asks Hrothi what the berserkers are like. He says that it's their custom when they come home to this retinue to go up to each man starting with the king and ask him if he considers himself as brave as them. But then the king says that's hard to say with such valiant men as you are who have so distinguished yourselves in battle and in bloodlettings among various peoples in the southern part of the world just as much as in the north. And the king answers them this way from courage rather than cowardliness because he recognizes their support and that they win great victories for the king and win much wealth. So they're even sort of a potential threat to the king. It's almost as if they're saying like, look, you better respect us or we could easily kill you right here and I don't think any of your men could do anything about it. And the king is in a really weird situation which a later high medieval king would never be in. He would always be able to command somebody to kill anyone threatening him. But Hroth has to be very delicate in how he responds. At least until Bodvar sort of, Bodvar and Shotli both beat up, severely beat up two of the Berserk's. And Bodvar is able to establish by force this sort of modesty that everyone else then adopts this respect for the king that Bodvar has from the beginning but not all the other warriors do. We also see the role of the king as the ringgiver, as the treasure giver put to the test when King Hroth goes to King Adels to get his own inheritance back. There is gold there that he's not going to steal. It's gold that he deserves. But when King Adels married Hroth's mother, Irsa, he took all his inheritance and didn't give it to him. So when Hroth and his men go up to Uppsala to get that treasure back, they get it back after passing Adels sort of magical challenges. But on their way back, Irsa sends this guy named Vogue, who's a peasant, who's somebody of very little wealth, and King Hroth gives Vogue a ring. And Vogue's response to that is to swear a type of allegiance to Rolf. Now, notice Rolf hasn't asked him to swear any kind of allegiance. He just gave him a gift, a gift of a golden ring. And Vogue's response to that is to swear to King Hroth that if anybody murders him, he, Vogue, will get revenge. So this is the same thing that one of his regular warriors would be expected to do. So just by giving him a ring, that makes Vogue instantly swear a type of fealty to this ring giver, this chief. We also see a duel of ring giving prowess between Rolf and King Adels on the escape from Upsala, on the Fierce Plains, or the Fierce Valor. When Rolf sees that someone has left a ring on the ground, he refuses to pick it up because he knows it's there to stall him. So he just throws another ring down there to show I'm not the one who receives rings, I'm the one who deals them out. And he has more treasure thrown down in the field. And it's because of that that Adels men who are supposed to get their treasure from King Adels, they're actually stopping to pick up Rolf's treasure. In other words, they're inadvertently and unconsciously switching allegiances. And so while they're stopping to pick up Rolf's treasure that's on the ground, they're no longer fighting on King Adels' behalf. And even Adels himself reaches over to pick up his favorite ring that's been taken. He sees it there on the ground. Of course, Rolf is the one that threw it on the ground, Adels reaches to pick it up. And that's when he gets cut on the backside by King Rolf because now he is sort of, in picking up that ring, he is now essentially bowed to King Rolf. So Rolf is thoroughly embarrassed him and sort of outperformed him as a ring-giving chief. And because it's this whole Kamatathis, this war band that's held together by this chief, is held together by this chief's dispensation of wealth, this is why this sort of Hall of Champions is able to be formed at Lidar around King Rolf. And this seems to be what attracts Bodvar. Now remember, Bodvar could have stayed and inherited the rule of that part of Norway from his grandfather, King Ring, but he refuses. He then goes to the land of the Gauls where his brother Thorir Hounsford has become king and Thorir says, I'll give you all this wealth and give you half the kingdom, but Bodvar doesn't want that. What Bodvar wants is to be part of this Hall of Champions, be part of King Rolf's Champions. And that's why he goes all the way to Lidar. The same thing, if you go back and read the story of Swift Dog and his brothers, this is what attracts them to this. And this is part of that drive. It's not just a drive for fortune to borrow the Indiana Jones phrase, it's fortune and glory, or it's wealth, but not just wealth, it's wealth and chaos. You've gotta get that wealth by fighting for it, by earning it, of course, we might say that that's stealing it rather than earning it by our modern mores and that's probably best. But at this time we see that wealth that's won in battle is better than wealth that's just given to you. And this Hall and this group of champions is one of the reasons that Lidar is going to be remembered. And I'm gonna go ahead and tell you when we read Beowulf, Lidar is Heirat. I mentioned already that Hroth is referred to as Hrothulf in Beowulf. And the Hrothulf we see in Beowulf is much younger than King Hroth. But Hrothulf is a Skuldung king in Old Norse when these are the shieldings in Beowulf. But Hrothgar in Beowulf is also a shielding. He's Hroth's uncle. In this saga, in Hroth's saga, Hrothgar corresponds to a guy named Hror. You just drop the the T.H. in both Hrothulf, you get Hroth and Hrothgar, you get Hror. He's actually a king in Northumberland in England, which is a Danish settlement later on. But the hall at this magnificent hall that King Rolf rules over, has all his champions in, this is the same as Heirat in Beowulf. And you'll see that it has something in common with the city of Troy. Notice that to get from the North Sea on the left of this map to the Baltic Sea on the right, you have to go past the island of Zealand. And this is where Lidar is. And this seems to be why it's such a strategically important and therefore a wealthy place. Anybody who goes past there kind of has to pay homage to whoever rules that island. And that island is being ruled from Lidar or Heirat, this central meat hall. One more theme you may have noticed is, I believe your translation actually uses the word yule. Yule is a Norse word. So when we say, yule tide in reference to Christmas, that is that time of year. It's around the solstice, shortly after it. And this celebration may not exactly be the right word. We still have references to the yule log, this giant log that should burn for days being used at this point. Keep in mind in these northern latitudes, this is the darkest time of the year and the sun, depending how far north you are, may not come out at all during the day. Regardless of whether there's clouds or not. It's far enough north that you get entirely dark days. And so this is a very cold time of the year, a very difficult time of the year, but it's also a very scary time of the year because it's dark outside all the time. And so we may love Christmas and see it's the most wonderful time of the year, but yule to the Norse, especially the pre-Christian Norse, is not the most wonderful time of the year. In fact, it's the scariest time of the year. That's when the dark side of the powers of darkness are the strongest. And you may have noticed every time something bad happens that Bodvar or somebody else has to contend with, it's at yule. So this dragon troll thing attacks at yule. The berserkers come home at yule. In other words, even these bad guys who are willing to fight anybody, they kind of want to come in and stay inside, apparently, at yule, but then that also means trouble for everybody else. So there's sort of this domino effect of the problems and the darkness outside. So yule is a very sort of touchy time, a very sort of frightening time. And this is also the time when Skold and her sort of undead army and her army of these evil magic creatures, these warriors that you can kill and they just get right back up again, they have to attack at yule because this is when her power, her evil power is the strongest. We're gonna see this again with Greta Saga. Every time something dark and supernatural happens, it's gonna be at yule. Now there's some more readings that I want you to read on the schedule before we get to Beowulf, but I want you to keep some things in mind from Hrolf Saga, especially the parts about Bodvar, that I want you to keep in mind when you read Beowulf. Remember that Bjarke means Little Bear, Beowulf means Beowulf. Remember that Helidar is the same as Helorot. And remember that Hrolf is actually present in the poem of Beowulf, his name is Hrolf. But when it comes to creatures attacking Helidar, Helorot, look and see what similarities we might have and we'll see more of these building up in this Bear Sun narrative, those sort of collect. Now clearly they're gonna be differences. Anytime we compare one narrative to another, we don't wanna just say, hey, look, these two things seem to be parallel, they seem to be similar. Once we identify those similarities, we then want to say, okay, well, what's different and why is it different? Why are those differences now sort of become more important once we've identified some of these similarities? In other words, it could have been more similar, why isn't it more similar? What are these two cultures, how do they differ? What's different ideas about how things work and what's important in a narrative do we have in one text, the text that produces the saga of Ralph Krocke versus the culture that produces the poem of Beowulf? Keep in mind both the similarities and the differences as you read Beowulf.