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  • Enigma Variations: Hervarar saga’s Wave-Riddles and Supernatural Women in Old Norse Poetic Tradition
  • Hannah Burrows

What lives in concealment and dies in discovery?

This riddling description of a “riddle” itself might seem to prove true with consideration of the scholarly reception of the Old Norse riddles preserved in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks. While the Old English riddles recorded without solutions in the Exeter Book have proved dynamic subjects for study (including in some cases multiple attempts at interpretation and reinterpretation),1 the Old Norse riddles, conveniently solved in the performative context of the episode in which they are set, have been largely neglected. When they have been considered, they have usually been thought of as oddities or anomalies. Christopher Tolkien states in the introduction to his 1960 edition of Hervarar saga that “there are no others in ancient Norse,”2 and this view is accepted, although with cautionary qualifiers such as “nearly the only riddles” and “almost unique,” in a recent article by Alaric Hall.3 However, this forces the riddles into too narrow a generic categorization, and too rigid a definition of “riddle.” Rather, the features they share with each other, and with other and more canonical eddic poetry, strongly suggest a shared existence in a fluid poetic tradition. This article will demonstrate, then, that the riddles are a vital part of the Norse poetic tradition, and that considering them as such provides valuable insights into how that tradition functioned. It will do so through a case study of riddles about waves, comparing their language and imagery with that of other eddic-style poetry, particularly that used to discuss supernatural female beings, as the wave-riddles do. [End Page 194]

To begin with some contextual information, Hervarar saga is a fornaldar-saga or “saga of ancient time,” built around four major groups of poetry in eddic metres, of which the riddle collection is the third.4 The riddles are put forth during a contest between the eponymous King Heiðrekr and a man whom he believes to be his enemy Gestumblindi, called to Heiðrekr’s court to submit to judgment for his crimes on the understanding that he will be pardoned if he is able to ask a question the king is unable to answer. Gestumblindi, however, has sacrificed to Óðinn (well known from other texts as an expert in poetic wisdom contests) for help with this dilemma, and the god has switched places with him. Although Gestumblindi/Óðinn takes the opportunity to propound a variety of riddles, he eventually wins by means of his favorite get-out clause: he asks what Óðinn (i.e., he himself) said into the ear of his own son Baldr at the latter’s funeral.5

A date in the first third of the thirteenth century has been proposed for the assembling of the saga in something like the form we now have it,6 and it can confidently be dated before ca. 1306–8, the date of its oldest extant manuscript, Hauksbók.7 The poetry is often supposed to be older, although how much older is, as often, a vexed question. Hall suggests, unlike Tolkien, that the riddles were composed specifically for the saga or at least as part of a story about King Heiðrekr and his death. “A collection so rambling and encyclopedic without being obviously mnemonic would probably be literary and originate with *Heiðreks saga itself,” he claims.8 However, while the saga may have been the first time the riddles were brought together, the eclectic nature of the collection suggests that many of them, or their “ingredients” at least, were already extant and gathered together from disparate sources. They are all broadly similar, most having between six and eight lines and a two-line stef or refrain, Heiðrekr konungr, | hyggðu at gátu (King Heiðrekr, think about the riddle), which is usually heavily abbreviated or omitted altogether in the manuscripts and in all likelihood was only appended when the riddles were set into the prose framework. But while some [End Page 195] closely-related groups can be identified,9 overall the riddles are far from uniform in their structure...

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