I have lived in the Southwest all my life, yet most of my dreams are laid in cold, giant lands of icy wastes and gloomy skies, and of wild, wind-swept fens and wilderness over which sweep great sea-winds, and which are inhabited by shock-headed savages with light fierce eyes. With the exception of one dream, I am never, in these dreams of ancient times, a civilized man. Always I am the barbarian, the skin-clad, tousle-haired, light-eyed wild man, armed with a rude axe or sword, fighting the elements and wild beasts, or grappling with armored hosts marching with the tread of civilized discipline, from fallow fruitful lands and walled cities. This is reflected in my writings, too, for when I begin a tale of old times, I always find myself instinctively arrayed on the side of the barbarian, against the powers of organized civilization.

--Robert E. Howard

Old Norse Saga and myth were readily available to writers working in the early 20th century due to the mass proliferation of Saga translations. The first English language Saga translations began to appear in the late 18th and early 19th century. Sir Walter Scott was studying the Sagas as early as 1790, possessed a huge library of Saga material, and performed one of the earliest English translations of a Saga, An Abstract of the Eyrbiggja Saga (1814). But their popularity exploded during the Victorian Age. The likes of Samuel Laing, author of the first English translation of Heimskringla (1844), Sir George Dasent, and in particular the tag-team of William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson stirred a fire in the blood of a populace searching for meaning, and a restoration of hardihood and manliness. The Victorian Age is noted for its return to romanticism and the Sagas provided ready fuel.

Today Morris is perhaps best-known as an early pioneer of the fantasy novel, with the likes of The Wood Beyond the World (1894) and The Well at the World’s End (1896). He was also an influential artist who sought to revive Medieval craftmanship, and an ardent socialist. But he had the love of Norse Saga and myth in his veins, enough to prompt a well-documented trip to Iceland in 1871 to seek out the historical locations of the old heroic stories he so loved. Morris teamed up with the Icelandic native Magnusson and published a joint translation of The Saga of Grettir the Strong in 1869. From 1869-75 Morris and Magnusson published three books of translations and minor pieces, and from 1891 brought out another six volumes in “The Saga Library.” These stories became a source of pride to the English and those of northern European descent, a great uniting myth. Morris suggested that the “Great Story of the North, the Volsung Tale, should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks.”

In the early days of the 20th century the translation craze continued. The popular Everyman’s Library of 1911 included Dasent’s well-regarded translation of the Saga of Burnt-Njal, and in 1930 Everyman published a reprint of Laing’s 1844 translation of the Heimskringla. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, who later made his mark in Adventure, performed a translation of the Prose Edda in 1916 and did some well-regarded scholarly excavation of Beowulf.

These translations began to filter into the mainstream and influence popular writers of the day. One of the finest early examples was H. Rider Haggard’s The Saga of Eric Brighteyes, first published in 1890, a modern retelling and re-skinning of the old Sagas. Haggard continued to mine this rich lode with The Wanderer’s Necklace (1913). E.R. Eddison joined the fray with the likes of The Saga of Styrbiorn the Strong (1926) and The Worm Ouroboros (1922). Of the latter and the influence of Icelandic literature upon it, Eddison said, “I assure you that I have graduated in a hard school these 23 years—the school of the sagas, the most bare-rock mountain type of grand epic prose the world has ever seen.”

Robert E. Howard would possibly have been first exposed to Norse myth and Saga second-hand. In the early-mid 20s Arthur D. Howden Smith was spinning the tales of Swain the Viking for the pulp magazine Adventure, of which Howard was an avid reader. As noted here on DMR Blog, from 1923 to 1925 Smith “cranked out over fifteen stories about Swain, a grim, ruthless warrior who fell on hard times and fought his bloody way back to almost royal heights. Smith would write more tales of Swain in the '30s and '40s for Adventure.” Howden Smith was not alone, as Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur branched out from the halls of academia to write bloodthirsty tales like “Vengeance” (Adventure, 1925) and the serialized novel He Rules Who Can (1928), a tale of Harald Hardrada’s time in the Varangian Guard.

But Howard also read some of the Sagas themselves, using the likes of the Saga of Burnt Nial as fuel to add blood and thunder and realism to the likes of “Spears of Clontarf” (1931). Over on the Robert E. Howard bookshelf (www.howardhistory.com), Rusty Burke notes that Howard likely tapped the Saga of Burnt Nial in P.W. Joyce’s A Short History of Gaelic Ireland:

It is likely that Howard’s true source for material from this saga was P.W. Joyce’s A Short History of Gaelic Ireland, in which chapters on “The Danish Wars” and, in particular, “The Battle of Clontarf,” make extensive use of “The Saga or Story of Burnt Nial, translated by Sir George Webbe Dasent.” This would be The Story of Burnt Njal; from the Icelandic of the Njal’s Saga. Translated by Sir George Webb Dasent (1817-1896), originally published 1861.

But we also know that Howard read Grettir’s Saga at least five years prior, as early as March 1926. The same year he began work on “The Shadow Kingdom,” Howard wrote a letter to Weird Tales recommending that the pulp magazine consider The Saga of Grettir the Outlaw/Grettir the Strong and the broader field of Icelandic saga for a series of reprints.

Where did Howard read Grettir’s Saga? Possibly in a popular translation by George Ainslie Hight that by this time would have flooded the markets of England and North America. First published in 1914, its clear style, free of the archaisms of Morris and other earlier translations, made it popular and enduring. According to John Kennedy’s Translating the Sagas: Two Hundred Years of Challenge and Response it was reprinted several times, and no other complete or substantially complete English language translation of the saga appeared between 1914 and 1974.

Howard may have read Hight’s translation; as noted in the letter above he had read Grettir’s Saga specifically, and we know that Hight’s was by far the most popular. It was not on his bookshelf at the time of his death.

Old Norse literature undoubtedly served as a model for the eventual sword-and-sorcery tales of Kull and Conan. Saga and Norse myth inform sword-and-sorcery more than the more popular Greek and Roman myths, with their warm climates and heroes hailing from civilized lands, or even Celtic myth, though the latter also deeply influenced Howard. They are tales of outsiders, rebelling against the overreach of kings and hierarchical, top-down order, enjoying the spoils of plunder taken by the sword. There is magic in some of the Sagas, trolls or witches, but these elements are weird and dangerous and intrusive, hitting a sword-and-sorcery sweet spot.

Sword-and-sorcery authors would employ the tension of the individual striving against society to lend their stories additional resonance and relevance. The list of S&S authors who claimed their influence is impressive. Michael Moorcock states that “from a very early age I was reading Norse legends and any books I could find about Norse stories.” When Fritz Leiber and Harry Otto Fischer were dreaming up the characters of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and exchanging ideas via letters they were reading Norse myth; Leiber says both were “steeped” in it. Arguably the greatest novel-length work today that could be classified as sword-and-sorcery, Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword (1954) is utterly northern in its Ragnarok spirit and character, though written in a modern style and featuring a heavier quotient of monsters and magic than the Icelandic originals. It proved hugely influential to a handful of later authors including Moorcock and Karl Edward Wagner. Anderson later penned a second Viking novel Hrolf Kraki’s Saga based off the fragments of an authentic saga, transforming a fragmentary tale of the historical Danish king Hrolf Kraki into a full-blown Norse saga for the modern age. Anderson’s “The Tale of Hauk” (first appearance in Swords Against Darkness #1) is another Icelandic saga-inspired sword-and-sorcery story.

Subsequent sword-and-sorcery authors continued to dip into Northern saga and myth for inspiration. David Drake employed an effective northern setting and the historical “berserk” in his dark, moody, horror-infused S&S tale “The Barrow Troll” (1975), inspired by his youthful readings of Norse myth in Bulfinch, translations of the Eddas, and later, the Icelandic sagas themselves. Writing under the pseudonym Chris Carlsen, Robert Holdstock of Mythago Wood fame wrote the Berserker series, the first volume of which, Shadow of the Wolf, appeared in 1977. A non-exhaustive list includes works like Neil Langholm’s Blood Sacrifice (Pinnacle Books, 1975) Gerald Earl Bailey’s Sword of the Nurlingas (Berkley, 1979), Poul Anderson’s The Last Viking trilogy (Book #1, The Golden Horn, was published by Zebra in 1980), and Eric Nielson’s Haakon series, of which vol. 1, The Golden Axe, was published by Bantam Books in 1984. Their influence is felt up to the present day, in the likes of DMR’s Viking Adventures, Scott Oden’s A Gathering of Ravens (2017), and Whetstone #4, featuring the poem “The Eldest Edda” by Robert Subiaga.

As for Howard, the Sagas never left his blood. Less than a year before his death on July 25, 1935, he wrote to H.P. Lovecraft of a profound experience reading the Heimskringla, which he may have encountered in a 1930 volume of Everyman Library:

“By the way, I recently got hold of a book that ought to be read by all writers who strive after realism, and by every man with a drop of Nordic blood in his veins — the ‘Heimskringla’ of Snorre Sturlason. Reading his sagas of the Norse people, I felt more strongly than ever my instinctive kinship with them, and the kinship between them and frontier people of America. In many ways the Norsemen figuring in this history more resemble the American pioneers of the West more than any other European people I have ever read about.”

(Author’s note: The source of much of the historical research in this article is Translating the Sagas: Two Hundred Years of Challenge and Response.)

Brian Murphy is the author of Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery (Pulp Hero Press). Learn more about his life and work on his website, The Silver Key.