{"collection":"Northern European Mythology","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/neu/onp/onp14.htm","path":"neu/onp/onp14.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/neu/onp/onp14.htm","text":"\u201cON Good Friday it happened in Caithness1 that a man called Dorroth went out of doors. He saw twelve persons ride toward a (stone) hut. There they were lost to his sight. When he came up to the hut and looked through a chink in the wall he saw that some women were inside and had set up a web. Heads of men served as weights, men\u2019s entrails formed the woof and weft, a sword did as a weaver\u2019s reed, and arrows as the rods. They sang this song: (follows the Song of the Valkyries). Then they tore the web down and into pieces, and each one held on to what she had in her hands. Dorroth right the opening and went home; but the women mounted their horses and rode away\u2014six to the south and six to the north.\u201d\nThus the Ni\u00e1ls saga (Chapter 157), whose narrative is our sole source for one of the most striking poems of Norse antiquity. Down to Walter Scott\u2019s days it was recited in the Norn tongue by the inhabitants of North Ronaldsha (Rinansey), the northernmost of the Orkney Islands.2\nAs we have it, the lay is darkly prophetic of the outcome of the great battle of Clontarf (1014) in which some of the actors in the saga took part on the side of the Viking leaders, Sigtrygg Silkbeard, King of Dublin, and the Orkney earl, Sigurth Hlothversson, who were arrayed against the famous King Brian Borumha of Leinster; but contrary to its prophecy, history\u2014and the saga, too\u2014tells us that it was the Leinster king who won p. 73 the victory, though he paid for it with his life, and that the invaders were driven off, leaving Earl Sigurth on the field. To account for this contradiction, some scholars have surmised that the lay originally referred to some other battle. Against this it may be urged that at any rate Sigurth\u2019s fall is foretold, in stanza 7. Also, it is just possible that the Irish themselves are meant as the dwellers on the outer nesses in their own land (ibid.) and that the valkyries are chanting their magic song to safeguard only their favorite, the young King Sigtrygg, weaving for him the \u201cweb of war\u201d\u2014much as the giant maidens in the Quern Song \u201cgrind out\u201d the fate of their captor, King Fr\u00f3thi.\nAs to the supposed transmitter of the lay, Dorroth, it seems that his name was supplied, either from the kenning in stanza 4, the \u201cweb-of-darts,\u201d i.e., \u201cbattle\u201d (vefr darratha(r)) or, even more probably, from the (unauthentic and inappropriate) current title of the lay, Darratha(r)li\u00f3th or Lay of the Darts which was misunderstood as Dorroth\u2019s Lay.\nFew lays in Old Norse compare with the Song of the Valkyries in somber power and dark magnificence. Thoroughly in harmony with the great carnage presaged is the gruesome picture of the loom; and terribly splendid the vision of the red dawn with its cloud-rack incarnadined by the blood of warriors, into which the battle maidens issue forth, riding on wild horses to join the fray.\nThe lay\u2014which is in regular fornyrthislag\u2014is handed down in the four main MSS of the Ni\u00e1ls saga, dating from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, but seems incomplete, for all that, and is in poor shape.3 In this case it is not altogether unlikely that the author was an inhabitant of the Northern Isles. At any rate it is well to remember that still another poetic prophecy\u2014a genre more Celtic than Germanic in inspiration\u2014viz., the Quern Song, right memories in these localities where Norse and Celtic blended most intimately.\n| 1 | Widely is flung,\u2003warning of slaughter, the weaver\u2019s-beam\u2019s-web:4 \u2019t is wet with blood; is spread now, grey, the spear-thing5 before, the woof-of-the-warriors4 which valkyries fill with the red-warp-of- Randv\u00e9r\u2019s-banesman.6 | \n| 2 | Is this web woven\u2003and wound of entrails, and heavy weighted with heads of slain; are blood-bespattered spears the treadles, iron-bound the beams, the battens,7 arrows: let us weave with our swords this web of victory! | \n| 3 | Goes Hild to weave,\u2003and Hiorthrimul, Sangrith and Svipul,8 with swords brandished: shields will be shattered, shafts will be splintered, will the hound-of-helmets9 the hauberks bite. | \n| 4 | Wind we, wind we\u2003the-web-of-darts, and follow the atheling after to war! Will men behold shields hewn and bloody where Gunn and Gondul8 have guarded the thane. | \n| 5 | Wind we, wind we\u2003such web-of-darts as the young war-worker waged afore-time!10 Forth shall we fare where the fray is thickest, where friends and fellows \u2019gainst foemen battle! | \n| p. 75 | | \n| 6 | Wind we, wind we\u2003the web-of-darts where float the flags of unflinching men! Let not the liege\u2019s life be taken: valkyries award the weird of battle.11 | \n| 7 | Will seafaring men\u2003hold sway over lands, who erstwhile dwelled on outer nesses; is doomed to die a doughty king,12 lies slain an earl by swords e\u2019en now | \n| 8 | Will Irish men eke\u2003much ill abide: \u2019t will not ever after be out of men\u2019s minds. Now the web is woven, and weapons reddened\u2014 in all lands will be heard the heroes\u2019 fall. | \n| 9 | Now awful is it\u2003to be without, as blood-red rack races overhead; is the welkin gory with warriors\u2019 blood as we valkyries war-songs chanted. | \n| 10 | Well have we chanted\u2003charms full many about the king\u2019s son: may it bode him well! Let him learn them who listens to us, and speak these spells to spearmen after.13 | \n| 11 | Start we swiftly\u2003with steeds unsaddled\u2014 hence to battle with brandished swords! | \n1 The northeasternmost district of Scotland.\n2 The poem had struck the imagination of Thomas Gray, who in 1768 made a free version of it which he entitled The Fatal Sisters. In 1814, when Scott was on his voyage among the northern islands of Great Britain, he heard a gentleman tell that when some remnants of the Norse were yet spoken there, a clergyman had carried thither Gray\u2019s version, then newly published, and had read it to some old people as referring to the ancient history of the islands. But as soon as he had proceeded a little way they exclaimed they knew it well in the original and had often sung it. They called it \u201cThe Enchantress\u201d (Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, IV, 81. See also The Pirate, Note c).\n3 In order not to overload the footnotes I have tacitly essayed an approximation in the translation of the first and second stanzas as well as in numerous other doubtful passages.\n4 Kenning for \u201cbattle.\u201d The same conception, growing out of the interweaving of darts and arrows in the air, is found in the Anglo-Saxon w\u012bgsp\u0113da gewiofu, \u201cthe web of battle-luck\u201d (B\u0113owulf 697). The two parts of this difficult stanza are parallel: a web is set up, the \u201cweb-of-battle,\u201d which is all stained with blood.\n5 Another kenning for \u201cbattle.\u201d (Thing = \u201cmeeting.\u201d)\n6 The whole line, probably, a kenning for \u201cblood.\u201d Randv\u00e9r\u2019s banesman was Bikki, the evil counselor of Iormunrekk (cf. Guthr\u00fanarhvot, Prose, and note 8), in whom\u2014as in Gizur (Battle of the Huns)\u2014we may detect \u00d3thin, the instigator of strife between men. \u201cFill\u201d is here, probably, used in the sense of completing the web with woof and weft. But it might also mean \u201cto saturate\u201d and so, \u201cto color.\u201d\n7 The batten is the instrument used to beat home the yarn. Much also in this stanza is doubtful.\n8 The names of valkyries.\n9 Kenning for \u201cbattle-axe.\u201d\n10 Granting that \u201cthe web-of-darts\u201d is a kenning for \u201cbattle\u201d (from the cloud, or web, of missiles flying overhead), the meaning of this uncertain line is that the p. 75 valkyries are urging each other on to \u201cweave\u201d another such victorious battle as the young king (Sigtrygg) had before. Cf. Eir\u00edkr Magn\u00fasson, Old-lore Miscellany of Orkney III, 92.\n11 It is for the valkyries to decide the fate of battle and to choose the slain: they have no need of his life.\n12 I.e., King Brian, who was set upon at the very end of the battle. The earl, Sigurth Hlothversson, had fallen earlier.\n13 A hint to the listener outside.","title":"THE SONG OF THE VALKYRIES [DARRA THARLIOTH]","type":"page"}