thematic thread
Death & Dying Well
The supreme image: Högni laughs aloud as his living heart is cut from his chest. Courage so absolute it masters even the body's terror — the Norse ideal of dying well, at its starkest.
Högni laughs
At Atli's hall the welcome turns to ambush, and the Niflung brothers fight a doomed last battle. Högni is terrible in it — the lay says he slew seven with his keen sword and flung an eighth into the fire[1] — but the brothers are overwhelmed and taken. Then comes one of the most famous and most savage scenes in all Norse poetry, the test of the hearts.
Atli's men, seeking the secret of the gold, decide to cut out a man's heart. First they kill a coward, Hjalli, and bring his heart — but it trembles on the platter, and Gunnar scorns it as no hero's heart.[2] Then they cut out Högni's living heart — and Högni laughs as they do it, and his heart lies still on the platter, unmoving even in death.[3] It is the supreme image of the Norse heroic ideal: a man so utterly master of himself that he can laugh while his living heart is carved from his chest, his courage absolute and untouched by the body's terror. Whatever else one makes of this grim world, it produced in Högni's laugh one of literature's purest emblems of defiance.
The source text · 3
Hogni slew seven / with sword so keen, / And an eighth he flung / in the fire hot; / A hero should fight / with his foemen thus, / As Hogni strove / in Gunnar's behalf.— atli gudrun lays
Högni slays seven and flings an eighth in the fire (Bellows 1923).
Then Gunnar spake forth, / the lord of the folk: / "Here have I the heart / of Hjalli the craven, / Unlike to the heart / of Hogni the valiant, / For it trembles still / as it stands on the platter; / Twice more did it tremble / in the breast of the man."— atli gudrun lays
the coward Hjalli's heart trembles — no hero's heart (Bellows 1923).
Then Hogni laughed / when they cut out the heart / Of the living helm-hammerer; / tears he had not. / On a platter they bore it, / and brought it to Gunnar.— atli gudrun lays
Högni laughs as his living heart is cut out (Bellows 1923).
Ragnar in the snake-pit, singing of his battles and laughing at death, with his dying boast that 'the young pigs would grumble.' Defiance to the last breath, and a death turned into a summons for vengeance.
The snake-pit
To outdo his sons, Ragnar made a boast and kept it: he would conquer England with only two ships. Áslaug, wiser, begged him not to go so thinly manned, and warned him by her foresight that it would end in disaster.[1] He went anyway. His ships were wrecked on the English coast, his small force overwhelmed, and Ragnar himself taken alive by King Ella of Northumbria.
Ella had him thrown into a pit of serpents to die.[2] Ragnar met it with the defiance that defines him: as the snakes killed him he sang of his battles and laughed at death, and spoke the line the whole saga has been driving toward — that the young pigs would grumble if they knew how the old boar suffered.[3] It was at once a boast and a summons: he was telling Ella, with his last breath, that his sons were coming.
The source text · 3
On a certain time Randalin asked Ragnar whither he intended to go. He told her he wished to go to England with no more than the two ships, and such men as could sail on them. She said,— ragnars saga
Ragnar's rash vow to take England with two ships, against Áslaug's warning (Schlauch 1930).
“This man shall have a greater test of his hardihood put upon him if he will not tell us who he is. Let him be cast into a snake-pit and let him sit there a long time; but if he says aught by which we may know that he is Ragnar, let him be taken out as quickly as may be.”— ragnars saga
Ella orders Ragnar cast into the snake-pit (Schlauch 1930).
“The young pigs would grumble if they knew what the old one is suffering.” But although he said this, they did not certainly know that he was Ragnar rather than another king. Then he spoke a verse:— ragnars saga
Ragnar's dying words: the young pigs would grumble (Schlauch 1930).
Gísli the outlaw, cornered at last, fights to the end with a verse on his lips — the hunted man making his death a final composition, unbroken.
The outlaw's death
Twelve men rushed the crag at once. Gísli held them off with stones and blade, doing great deeds, until at last he was so wounded that his entrails came out — and he bound them up with his shirt and a cord, and fought on.[1]
With the last of his strength he leapt down among his enemies and clove the man who had wounded him to the waist, dying in the same stroke, falling on him dead. The saga gives him the outlaw's perfect end: cornered, hopelessly outnumbered, his guts bound in his shirt, still dealing death as he died. Of all the deaths in the sagas it is among the most admired — a man the law had cast out for thirteen years, dying with a courage that shames the fifteen who came to kill him.[2] Gísli Súrsson falls, and the broken oath of the saga's first pages is paid in full at last.
The source text · 2
Now they take counsel, and no one is willing to turn back for his life's sake. So they fall on him from two sides, and two men are foremost in following Eyjolf whose names are Thorir and Thord, kinsmen of Eyjolf. They were very great swordsmen, and their onslaught was both hard and hot; and now they gave him some wounds with spear-thrusts, but he still fought on with great stoutness and bravery; and they got such knocks from him, both with stones and strokes, that there was not one of them without a wound who came nigh him, for Gisli was not a man to miss his mark. Now Eyjolf and his kinsmen press on hard, for they felt that their fame and honour lay on it. Then they thrust at him with spears, so that his entrails fall out; but he swept up the entrails with his shirt and bound the rope round the wound.— gisla saga
Gísli fights on with his entrails bound (Dasent 1866).
That was Gisli's last song, and as soon as ever he had suing it he rushes down from the crag and smites Thord, Eyjolf's kinsman, on the head, and cleaves him down to the belt, but Gisli fell down on his body and breathed his last.— gisla saga
Gísli's death-leap from the crag — the outlaw's end (Dasent 1866).
Gunnarr fighting from his roofless hall to the end, after choosing this death over the shame of flight. The good death is the one you walk into with open eyes.
The roof comes off
They came for him at Hlíðarendi — forty men under Gizurr the White — and found him alone in his hall but for his wife and his mother. The first man to climb the roof saw a red kirtle pass a window-slit and took Gunnarr's bill through the middle; he toppled down dead, and when Gizurr asked if Gunnarr was home, the dying man's answer is pure saga: “Find that out for yourselves; but this I am sure of, that his bill is at home.”[1]
From the loft Gunnarr held forty men off with his bow alone, beating back onslaught after onslaught. They could do nothing — until Mörðr thought of the ropes, and they twisted the very roof off his hall to get at him. Still he shot. Then a man sprang up and cut his bowstring.[2]
The source text · 2
Thorgrim the Easterling went and began to climb up on the hall; Gunnar sees that a red kirtle passed before the windowslit, and thrusts out the bill, and smote him on the middle. Thorgrim's feet slipped from under him, and he dropped his shield, and down he toppled from the roof.— njals saga
The attack begins; 'his bill is at home.'
Some ropes lay there on the ground, and they were often used to strengthen the roof. Then Mord said - "Let us take the ropes and throw one end over the end of the carrying beams, but let us fasten the other end to these rocks and twist them tight with levers, and so pull the roof off the hall."— njals saga
Mörðr's plan: pull the roof off the hall.
Njáll and his wife lie down under the ox-hide and let the fire take them, calm and unafraid. Even passive, even burning, the manner of death is everything.
The ox-hide over the bed
Njáll and Bergþóra lay down in their bed and took Kári's little son between them — the boy had refused to leave, saying he would rather die with his grandmother than live after her. Njáll told his steward to mark where they lay, so men would know where to find their bones, and had an ox-hide spread over the three of them. They signed themselves and the child with the cross, gave their souls into God's hands, and spoke no more.[1]
Skarphéðinn watched his father lie down and said only, with that flat unflinching wit, that the old man had gone early to bed, as was to be looked for. When the bones were found afterward, unburnt beneath the fallen hide, men took it for a sign of grace.[2]
The source text · 2
"Now shalt thou see where we lay us down, and how I lay us out, for I mean not to stir an inch hence, whether reek or burning smart me, and so thou wilt be able to guess where to look for our bones."— njals saga
Njáll, Bergþóra and the boy under the ox-hide.
"Our father goes early to bed, and that is what was to be looked for, for he is an old man."— njals saga
Skarphéðinn watches his father lie down.
And the wry version: Harald Hardrada, who wanted all England, granted at his death just 'seven feet of England, or as much more as he is taller than other men.' Dying well can be done with a grim joke.
Seven feet of England
The fighting was fierce, and it ended the age. Harald Hardrada, fighting in the front in a battle-fury, was struck by an arrow in the windpipe — and that was his death-wound. Tostig took up the fallen king's banner and fought on, and he too was killed; a relief force that ran up from the ships, the men exhausted and overheated, was cut down almost to a man.[1]
So the last great Viking king got his seven feet of English ground. And the saga's reach here is the whole point of the journey: a man who began as a boy fleeing Stiklestad, made his fortune in the guard of the Greek emperor at Constantinople, ruled Norway with an iron hand, and died grasping for England — Stiklestad to Byzantium to Yorkshire, the widest single life in the corpus. Stamford Bridge is reckoned the end of the Viking Age; and the saga-reader knows the bitter coda, that the victor Harold Godwinson had only days to savour it before William's Normans landed in the south and Hastings finished what Stamford Bridge began.[2]
The source text · 2
King Harald Sigurdson was hit by an arrow in the windpipe, and that was his death-wound. He fell, and all who had advanced with him, except those who retired with the banner. There was afterwards the warmest conflict, and Earl Toste had taken charge of the king's banner. They began on both sides to form their array again, and for a long time there was a pause in fighting. Then Thiodolf sang these verses: --— heimskringla
Harald falls with an arrow through the windpipe (Laing 1844).
Eystein Orre came up at this moment from the ships with the men who followed him, and all were clad in armour. Then Eystein got King Harald's banner Land-ravager; and now was, for the third time, one of the sharpest of conflicts, in which many Englishmen fell, and they were near to taking flight. This conflict is called Orre's storm. Eystein and his men had hastened so fast from the ships that they were quite exhausted, and scarcely fit to fight before they came into the battle; but afterwards they became so furious, that they did not guard themselves with their shields as long as they could stand upright. At last they threw off their coats of ringmail, and then the Englishmen could easily lay their blows at them; and many fell from weariness, and died without a wound. Thus almost all the chief men fell among the Norway people. This happened towards evening; and then it went, as one might expect, that all had not the same fate, for many fled, and were lucky enough to escape in various ways; and darkness fell before the slaughter was altogether ended.— heimskringla
The relief force cut down; the Norse host destroyed.
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