Treasure From the Barrow

“A fiftieth anniversary reissue of Christopher Tolkien’s masterly translation of the Icelandic Heidrek’s Saga, including the dramatic Battle of the Goths and the Huns, the lyrical Waking of Angantyr, and the unique riddle-contest between King Heidrek and the god Odin.

“Heidrek’s Saga is a medieval entertainment - a ‘romance’, but a romance that derives little of its matter from the literature of France or Germany. It is an example of a kind of story-telling that was flourishing in Iceland by the beginning of the twelfth century, and which (in contrast to the more celebrated ‘Sagas of the Icelanders’) told of legendary figures whose origins lie far back in time beyond the settlement of the country. The elements of the story, diverse in age and atmosphere, are unified in the theme of a possession bearing an ancestral curse, as it passes down the generations; but the saga’s peculiar value lies in the older poems which the unknown author set into the framework of his narrative, including The Battle of the Goths and the Huns, perhaps the oldest of all the Northern heroic lays, The Waking of Angantyr, source of many eighteenth-century ‘Gothic Odes’, and the unique riddle-contest between King Heidrek and the god Odin in disguise.

“Translated from the Icelandic with Introduction, Notes and Appendices by Christopher Tolkien, then Lecturer in Old English at New College, Oxford, The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise was first published in 1960 in Nelson’s Icelandic Texts series and has since become extremely difficult to obtain. Marking its fiftieth anniversary of publication, this new hardback edition reproduces the original text. This edition is available exclusively as a print-on-demand hardback from www.tolkien.co.uk “ – Amazon

Hervor Demands the Cursed Sword Tyrfing from Her Dead Father Angatyr's Barrow

J. R. R. Tolkien once remarked in a letter to his son Christopher (himself a scholar of Old English Literature and the languages behind it) that Christopher had a remarkable talent for suddenly revealing piercing insights into the past simply by explicating the roots of a name or a word, painting a distant but clear picture of lives lost to time and history. That talent is on full display here, as Christopher untwists the threads that have gone to make up this saga in an almost archaeological analysis of the Norse Saga. His prose is precise and engaging, revealing that he was already uniquely prepared, not only by his familial position, but also by his scholarly temperament, for the great task of editing his father’s literary remains.

There are moments when I almost feel he is hovering in familiar Tolkien territory, for instance when he explicates the nature of dwarfs or the legendary forest of Mirkwood (already an ancient name in the sagas), but Christopher’s scholarly discipline and good taste keep him on point. There is a kind of added aesthetic thrill for the dedicated reader of his father’s Legendarium, though, not intended at the time, an accidental spice detectable (perhaps simply by imagination) only in retrospect.