The Viking

by Erik Gustaf Geijer
translated by Kristina Andersson Bicher

Translator’s introduction

You know the old saw, “A real Viking never drinks under a blackened roof ridge.” No? Well, neither did I. I learned it while translating the famous nineteenth-century Swedish epic, “The Viking,” by Erik Geijer. It was the sister of my Swedish professor at Harvard who recalled the adage, which refers to the idea that a true Viking can never be domesticated, that is, cannot live in rooms darkened by soot from hearth fires. This information was crucial to making sense of line 44, just one of the 118 that had me stumped. You could also say that it speaks to the heart of the poem, that a free and fearless spirit cannot be tamed, as well as its dark flip side, that the bloody warrior cannot be restrained.

Translating a poem, especially one written over two hundred years ago, is not only a linguist riddle, it is a historical whodunit. And like any pleasing puzzle, “The Viking” only became more complex the more I opened it up.

Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783–1847) is a highly regarded figure in Sweden. A professor at the prestigious Uppsala University, he was a philosopher, historian, composer, and poet. Geijer’s collected works include several volumes of Swedish history, theories of personality and national culture, poetry, chamber music, and a variety of songs, some set to the words of Schiller and Goethe.

There are a few things to know about “The Viking.” The first is that when it was published in 1811, it marked a departure from the poetry being written in Sweden at the time. Geijer was one of the first to introduce Romanticism into Swedish poetry; although he continued to adhere to traditional forms, gone were the high diction and abstractions of earlier poetic movements. In “The Viking,” he employs a comparatively loose poetic form: sixteen seven-line stanzas with a rhyme scheme of ABABCCD, including a short repeating refrain at the end of each (the last stanza, the seventeenth, has no refrain). Metrically, the poem has the feel of a ballad, falling between iambic pentameter and the dactylic hexameter often used for epics.

Geijer also wrote poetry that appealed to broader segments of society and introduced new themes. Just prior to writing “The Viking,” he had traveled to England, where he had seen at least four plays by Shakespeare. He was the first to translate Shakespeare into Swedish (into blank verse, no less!), choosing the bloody play of succession Macbeth. In his letters home, Geijer wrote that he was moved by what he had encountered in England, especially as it concerned a sense of identity and nationhood, something that was flagging in his own native land.

“The Viking” was an exercise in Swedish mythmaking and a seminal work in establishing the Viking identity. By glorifying certain character traits and reconnecting with a storied past, the poem stoked the Swedish national imagination. Until this time, the word “viking” had been used as a verb meaning “to forage” or “to pillage.” At the time of the poem’s composition, the Swedish crown had just suffered a resounding military and political defeat, losing Finland to Russia. Swedish writers and poets, with Geijer at their front, borrowed a page from the German Romantic movement, also founding a society dedicated to the celebration of Swedish antiquity called the Geatish Society or the Gothic League, whose members where known for, among other things, gathering to drink mead from horns.

“The Viking” is also a coming-of-age tale: a restless fifteen-year-old boy leaves a dull rural life, becomes king of the sea, and, though dead by twenty (spoiler alert), has acted with valor. Having fulfilled his destiny, he will be remembered among the greats and rewarded by the gods. Not surprisingly, the poem is rife with symbolism. Viking swords were rare—only for the wealthiest, most influential families—and had a personal identity; they were handed down as heirlooms and were often named. So when our hero picks up the rusted sword of his missing father, it is both an attempt to rehabilitate his own family and a larger symbolic rehabilitation of Sweden. Similarly, successful Viking leaders would often call themselves “king,” and here we have a boy who, through victory in battle, could claim status equal to that of the disgraced King Gustav IV.

Then there’s the notion of destiny in the poem. My old seam-torn dictionary translated Nornorna as “the Fates,” leading me at first to the Greek Fates, whose prognostications were irreversible. But the Norse Norns were a bit different: three sisters representing the past, present, and future (uncannily similar to the three sisters in Macbeth), while the web they weave represents a fluid concept of time and interconnectivity. Not only does the past inform the present and future, but time can somehow move backward as well. This is oddly fitting, since Geijer himself “altered” his own past with a revisionist poetic history, and with this translation we bring that altered past forward to a new present.

A translator faces many choices. My first was whether to attempt to replicate the rhyme scheme of the poem. I hauled the manuscript up to the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, where one faculty member suggested I try a rhyme scheme of ABCB. This got me all in a lather, so much so that I penned the letters on my palm in black ink, like some runic code. But, alas, this didn’t seem to want to work. Swedish has more natural, unintentional rhyme than English. Once I gave this up, the poem, already heavy with repetition in the original, filled with internal rhyme.

“The Viking” has an old-fashioned sensibility, and the modernist in me was salivating to compress and enjamb the heck out of it. At Bread Loaf I was talked out of this, and I decided that rhythm was the propulsive force moving this long ship of a tale through the waters, across miles and years, from kingdom to castle.

A few observations on word choice in the poem. In Swedish, the common word for sea or ocean is hav. Geijer occasionally used sjö, which is really a large lake, but only when he needed to rhyme with both “die” (dö) and “virgin” (mö), two key elements of the poem. But most often he used the word “wave.” There are a few choices for “wave,” one being våg (pronounced with a long o), or the lovelier word bölja (pronounced “bull-yah,” similar to the German cognate bulge), which, when made plural and definite, becomes böljorna, with the stress on the first syllable. It has the same rhythm as “billowing”: a pleasing instance of onomatopoeia, the word enacting the motion of waves. Böljor also means “swells,” again a word conjuring an image of ceaseless motion, whereas perhaps våg is a more static word.

And what of the sea? As a metaphor, it is a contradictory and generative space. The ocean is both friend and foe, calming and wild, beautiful and perilous. It is also unpredictable and beyond human control. Water, like time, moves in cycles and is never ceasing. All these meanings are present throughout the seventeen stanzas of “The Viking.” The sea is further personified in the poem insofar as it is constantly singing (though I was told by my family that, in Sweden, the hills and flowers and lakes do truly sing). In “The Viking,” the sea’s song varies from a pleasant traveling tune, to an incantation, to a siren call, and finally to a dirge.

The last experiment I performed on the poem was a word frequency test, since it felt like I kept bumping into water, water everywhere. But out of the 750 words in the poem, a variant of “I/me/mine” appeared most often, about sixty times, reinforcing that this is an epic of a very personal nature, so I largely honored the original with its use of personal pronouns.

On my own Viking quest, I have had many helpers. In addition to my former professor and her above-mentioned sister, I am grateful to my Swedish mother for schooling me on the “feeling-sense” of many Swedish words. My journey also led to the discovery of a long-lost cousin with a great deal of literary knowledge, to the rare book room at Columbia University’s library, and to the Barn at Bread Loaf, where—I am happy to report—my manuscript, printed in blue and red, sturdily withstood the deluge of a spilled gin and tonic.

Published on October 18, 2017