Sir Walter Scott: Harold the Dauntless (1817)

A view of Durham Castle from Elvet Bridge

[Image source: The Walter Scott Digital Archive]




Scott wrote Harold the Dauntless in 1815-1817, in spare moments between dashing off some of the greatest novels in English (The Antiquary, Old Mortality, Rob Roy...).  Nevertheless the poem has tended to be neglected.  Scott didn't feel confident about it. He was aware that Byron had overtaken him in the public's eye, and winced when he realized that he had inadvertently selected the one name for his hero that would most instantly bring his competitor to mind. *


[*But for Nancy Moore Goslee, in her very welcome new book on Scott's poetry Scott the Rhymer (University Press of Kentucky, 2015), Harold the Dauntless is in conscious dialogue with Byron and also with Scott himself.]




Scott published Harold anonymously (or rather, as the "Author of The Bridal of Triermain", along with a reprint of the earlier poem), and the reviews were rather lukewarm (one of them describing it as a poor imitation of Walter Scott...).




The neglect is a pity, because Harold is worth a deep visit, if only to witness Scott's mastery of the free-tetrameter stanza form at the latter end of his startling career as a narrative poet. Furthermore, Harold is a fascinating step along the road to Ivanhoe (1820). There's a lot more to it than that, too.

Early impressions are of a highly eclectic fictional world.  It feels like there's a riot of heterogenous story-material, flung together without much significance or art. That is reminiscent of Scott's preceding poem The Bridal of Triermain, but closer acquaintance with Harold reveals a deeper co-ordination of interests.

Our hero, or anti-hero, somewhat Byronic, is a heathen Viking, a berserker.

But he is also a kind of knight errant. The impression, indeed, is  of a medieval rather than dark-age setting. Here knights (including Harold) have plate-mail, plumes and visors. Harold has fought the Muslims in Palestine, apparently. Durham Cathedral is well-established, and its payroll includes French names (Hugh Meneville, Vinsauf) as well as Saxon ones.

Scott surrounds his medieval story with glints of more modern eras, however.  For instance he names tilburies and barouches, Durham antiquaries, the novelist Maria Edgeworth and the then-inbcumbent bishop Barrington  (a friend of Scott's). At one point he refers to the well-known conversation about clouds between Prince Hamlet and Polonius. Unlike most later historical fictions, Harold keeps the future visible.

In the Dark-Age material, too, there's a heterogenous feel. We hear a lot about Norse lore (Scott was rather an expert), but the sorceress Jutta worships the deity Zernebock, an ancient heathen deity of Baltic origin, and the story of the Castle of the Seven Shields has a mainly Celtic tint.

This heterogeneity may seem to cast doubt on how we are meant to read the poem. Rapid-fire switches of mode can weaken the definiteness of scene and event.  So is it best, we wonder momentarily, to cast the narrative line aside altogether and instead make an a-chronological examination of the poem as an aesthetic construct: a kaleidoscope or a mobile?

You could do that, but I still think the narrative line is the thing to follow. Scott can be a messy narrator, but he's also a wily one. The poem is at any rate sufficiently a narrative to make me hesitate about giving spoilers, but I will.

*

Let's home in on a particular section. Canto III begins with the well-known invocation of Durham:


....

Well yet I love thy mix’d and massive piles,
Half church of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot, .....

When we get back to the story, we find that it's morning and that Harold is contemplating the battlements and towers of Durham from the "western heights of Beaurepaire" (=Bearpark, but Scott probably means Western Hill). Scott, no doubt, had seen this view himself, perhaps while on a visit to  the ruins of Beaurepaire Priory Manor House, destroyed during the civil war.  (In contrast, the engraving at the head of this post shows Durham from the north-east.)

Durham skyline from the west

[Image source: https://www.dayoutwiththekids.co.uk/durham-cathedral]


It isn't an idle contemplation: Harold, we eventually learn,  is waiting for the bell that signals the bishop's conclave. But as Canto III unfolds, it appears to be a lull in the action. Harold's stern mood softens, and he demands a song from his page Gunnar.

Such was my grandsire Erick’s sport,
When dawn gleam’d on his martial court.
Heymar the Scald, with harp’s high sound.
Summon’d the chiefs who slept around;
Couch’d on the spoils of wolf and bear,
They roused like lions from their lair,
Then rush’d in emulation forth
To enhance the glories of the north.—
Proud Erick, mightiest of thy race,
Where is thy shadowy resting-place?
In wild Valhalla hast thou quaff’d
From foeman’s skull metheglin draught,
Or wander’st where thy cairn was piled
To frown o’er oceans wide and wild?

*


[Concerning that last sentence, the mistaken belief that Vikings drank from human skulls derives from the Danish scholar Ole Worm's Latin misrendering of Stanza XXV of the twelfth-century Krákumál  (aka Ragnar's Death Song),  a ferocious poem indeed but not in this regard.  When the poem talks about drinking from the "curved wood of heads", it means drinking-horns. 

The misinterpretation made its way into Bishop Percy's English translation "The Dying Ode of Regner Lodbrog" in Five Pieces of Runic Poetry Translated from the Islandic Language (1763), which was highly influential on the English Gothic novel as well as on Romantic authors like Scott and Byron .... or Arnold:

And on the tables stood the untasted meats,
And in the horns and gold-rimm'd skulls the wine.

(Matthew Arnold, "Balder Dead", I.13-14)

Modern translation by TheGrinningViking:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Norse/comments/4mel3w/ragnars_death_song/


Thomas Percy's prose translation:
https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/norse/HTML/Percy.html



Lord Byron's gardener found a skull in the grounds of Newstead Abbey, and Byron had it converted into a drinking vessel for his own use. 


Other literary traditions of skullcuppery, such as Herodotus' claim that the Scythians drank from their enemies' skulls,  may be equally suspect for all we know. But skull-vessels have been found in Magdalenian sites across Europe, e.g. Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge (c. 12,750 BCE).


Then there's the story of the 6th-century Gepid princess Rosamund and her cruel husband, the Lombard king Alboin. Alboin has had her father decapitated and wears the skull on his belt. At a royal banquet, he forces his wife to drink from her father's skull. She subsequently has her husband assassinated. (Story reported by Paulus Diaconus in the 8th century.)  ]


*


Harold invokes his grandsire Erick.  It could as well have been his father Witikind, except that Harold quarrelled with his father before his death, scorning his conversion to Christianity.


Gunnar... Oh yes, Gunnar.  In Scott's world, pages such as Gunnar have rather a fitful existence. At the beginning of The Lay of the Last Minstrel the minstrel is attended by his own page, but the page is never mentioned again.  Likewise Gunnar, who at the end of Canto I faithfully follows the banished Harold into the storm after the break with Witikind, and thence into years of foreign service, is entirely missing from Canto II, in which Harold dogs the fair maiden Metelill and affronts her ugly parents. But now Gunnar's back in the frame again, and what's more, has a warning to convey; he's carefully watching his dangerous master's propitious mood.


Here's the song Gunnar produces in response, and its interruption.

“Hawk and osprey scream’d for joy
O’er the beetling cliffs of Hoy,
Crimson foam the beach o’erspread,
The heath was dyed with darker red,
When o’er Erick, Inguar’s son,
Dane and Northman piled the stone;
Singing wild the war-song stern,
‘Rest thee, Dweller of the Cairn!’
“Where eddying currents foam and boil
By Bersa’s burgh and Graemsay’s isle,
The seaman sees a martial form
Half-mingled with the mist and storm.
In anxious awe he bears away
To moor his bark in Stromna’s bay,
And murmurs from the bounding stern,
‘Rest thee, Dweller of the Cairn!’
“What cares disturb the mighty dead ?
Each honour’d rite was duly paid;
No daring hand thy helm unlaced,
Thy sword, thy shield, were near thee placed,
Thy flinty couch no tear profaned,
Without, with hostile blood was stain’d;
Within, ’twas lined with moss and fern,—
Then rest thee, Dweller of the Cairn!—
“He may not rest: from realms afar
Comes voice of battle and of war,
Of conquest wrought with bloody hand
On Carmel’s cliffs and Jordan’s strand,
When Odin’s warlike son could daunt
The turban’d race of Termagaunt.”

VI.

“Peace,” said the knight, “the noble scald
Our warlike father’s deeds recall’d,
But never strove to soothe the son
With tales of what himself had done.
At Odin’s board the bard sits high
Whose harp ne’er stoop’d to flattery;
But highest he whose daring lay
Hath dared unwelcome truths to say.”
With doubtful smile young Gunnar eyed
His master’s looks, and nought replied—
But well that smile his master led
To construe what he left unsaid.

Hoy, Bersa (Birsay), Graemsay, Stromna's bay (Stromness) : places in the Orkneys. Evidently Erick's grave is there, but that wasn't Harold's question, he wants to know where Erick's spirit rests now. Gunnar's reply claims a bard's vaticinative powers, supposedly inherited from his prophetess mother.

The first three stanzas tell us that Erick's ghost is unquiet. In the fourth stanza (interrupted) it becomes unmistakable that the unquietness refers to Harold, since it's he who has fought in the Holy Land against "the turban'd race of Termagaunt".

[In N. European medieval romances Termagaunt was a god or demon supposed to be worshipped by Muslims. There's no known connection with real Islamic beliefs or customs.]

Harold interrupts the song on the pretext that it's improper to hear of his own deeds.  But the words that follow show that he understands that Gunnar has something to say to him, and he invites the confidence, though not without a warning of his own.  As Canto III proceeds, Gunnar expresses misgivings about Harold's intention to wed Metelill and about her shifty mother's advice to reclaim his lands from the church.

As the sequel shows that Harold ignores these warnings, we may feel that the conversation could have been spared. But what's really happening here is that the pair are fencing, nay, courting. It's a conspicuously different thing to the absence of courtship in Harold's peremptory claim of Metelill, in the greenwood, in the preceding canto. As Harold remarks later,

What maid e'er showed such constancy
In plighted faith, like thine to me?

It would be going too far, of course, to call Harold a homosexual poem. Scott doesn't do sexuality; and anyway, the poem ends with the revelation that faithful Gunnar is actually a Danish princess (Eivir) in disguise. Harold kicks himself for not having seen the signs before, and this reader did too.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that up to that final page we are reading about a growing closeness and tenderness between two guys. Opposites attract; Harold is dauntless, but Gunnar is far from fitting the ruthless profile outlined by Harold (in Canto I) as a must-have for any follower of his. Harold begins to enjoy caring for Gunnar.  In the eerie Castle of the Seven Shields, Harold says:

But couch thee, boy; the darksome shade
Falls thickly round, nor be dismay'd
Because the dead are by.
They were as we; our little day
O'erspent, and we shall be as they.
Yet near me, Gunnar, be thou laid,
Thy couch upon my mantle made,
That thou mayest think, should fear invade,
Thy master slumbers nigh.

The thought might even cross our minds that it's the dauntless Harold who's afraid of sleeping alone. At any rate it's he who passes the more fearful night. Rising the next morning, an altered man, the accents of tenderness are clearer still:

"My page," he said, "arise; --
Leave we this place, my page." ...

But back to that dialogue in Canto III. Aside from Gunnar's gender, another bizarre fact about it emerges in retrospect; Gunnar is carrying something for his master. Two things, actually: the head of Anthony Conyers and the hand of Alberich Vere, tokens to show the conclave that Harold means business.

I'm not sure that Gunnar quite gets to state his intended warning... It surely had more to do with subduing Harold's primitive violence than with undermining a love-rival. At any rate the collision of those plot-elements on the same sunny hillside is funny, even grotesque.

Harold is a conversion narrative, and there is a grotesquerie to conversion. Just as in Canto I Witikind's conversion produced grotesque combinations of heathen and Christian at his feast, so at the end of the poem there's something grotesque about the idea of Harold's conversion redeeming his years of unhinged slaughter. Perhaps another word for it is miraculous.

*

Librivox sound recording of Harold the Dauntless, read by Nathan.


https://librivox.org/harold-the-dauntless-by-sir-walter-scott-2/




Online Text of Harold the Dauntless:


https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/norse/HTML/Scott.html


Short-lived but interesting blog on Scott's works as they relate to Co. Durham:


https://wizardofthenorth.wordpress.com/

Harold accosts Metelill in the greenwood (Canto II, St 7)

[Image source: http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/poetry/harold.html . Presumably taken from an old edition of Scott's poems, but no source or artist is named.]


Further eclecticism:  Harold's weapon is not a Viking weapon such as a Dane-axe but a medieval mace. This mace does allow him to shatter the stone monument of Osric (in Canto IV), which would have ruined an axe.  In the illustration, the spiked head of the mace is reminiscent of a Morgenstern (morning star), a weapon that came into use in Germany in the early 14th Century.




*




The engraving of Elvet Bridge stirred a long-untroubled layer of memories. I was at Uni there between 1979 and 1984. In my time the spot from which that view is taken was the regular site of a kebab van, an interesting novelty for many of us at the time. I am sure it was a kebab van, though I can't quite square that with another memory of walking through the wintry night-time streets of Durham clutching a spring roll, from which hot grease regularly splashed on the cobbles. Probably this was after visiting the Big Jug, a heavy metal pub in Claypath.




My interest in wild flowers began in 1982. I was living on the banks of the Wear, a few miles out of the city. Here the river was bordered on one side by a ribbon of ancient woodland belonging to the Dean and Chapter, and it was in this wood that I cut my teeth on flower identification. Perhaps it is a relic of the once-extensive Weardale greenwood that Scott describes in his poem. Here I found (but was too inexperienced to appreciate) an exceptionally rich ground-flora: all the usual plants of ancient woodland, along with Yellow Archangel, Woodruff, the hybrid swarm when Water Avens meets Wood Avens,  a single magnificent specimen of Wood Vetch which I could never re-discover, and northern specialities like Wood Cranesbill and Wood Stitchwort. Since I subsequently moved back down south, I've never encountered Wood Stitchwort again, and Wood Cranesbill only on visits to Sweden.



Scott's novels: A brief guide