Writing the Ice-Bear III

Photo by Brocken Inaglory

Wikimedia Commons

Just a little footnote to previous posts on this topic... Here in Britain we have suffered some unseasonal weather at a time when we might expect winter to be turning its thoughts to spring. In March there was quite a lot of snow across the country (something generally unusual in lowland England, even in the winter months) causing a period of chaos. Some places even had snow as recently as today. This weather was popularly known as the 'Beast from the East'.

I don't think the nature of this beast was specified anywhere, but I can now reveal that the answer is to be found in the Eddic poem Atlamál. This is the wordier, more prosaic, and later, version of the much-told story of how the heroes Gunnar and Högni are deceived and killed by Atli, the husband of their sister Guðrún, who then takes a particularly violent revenge. Before Gunnar and Högni depart on their fateful visit, the latter's wife Kostbera has a prophetic dream of a bear breaking into their home, smashing it up and even apparently eating a few people. Her husband, like all Old Norse heroes, cannot allow such a clear warning to put him off, so he claims the dream just has a meteorological meaning (st. 18 in Eddukvæði 2014, ed. Vésteinn Ólason and Jónas Kristjánsson):

Veðr mun þar vaxa, / verða ótt snemma, / hvítabjörn hugðir, / þar mun hregg austan.

It means that a storm will grow, it will soon be daybreak, if you think of a polar bear, it means a blizzard from the east.

Interestingly, this reference to a polar bear is what scholars have used to justify the manuscript title of the poem Atlamál in grœnlenzku 'The Greenlandic Poem about Atli'. There is however little real evidence for a Greenlandic origin for the poem, which the latest editors think is quite likely to be Icelandic and no earlier than the twelfth century. The story is ostensibly set in Denmark, but whether the author was Greenlandic or Icelandic, we don't need, I think, to take either their dream interpretations or their ideas of Danish weather too seriously. And we can enjoy the author's little joke in making Kostbera (the second element of whose name means 'she-bear'), dream of a bear.

Baby Vikings

Heimdall and his nine mothers

by W. G. Collingwood 1908

My North American correspondent has alerted me to a news item in which some 'celebrity' or other refers to her infant daughter as a 'baby Viking' because she celebrated her first birthday by 'feasting on steak'. As it happens, I am not aware that the eating or not eating of steak is one of the aspects of how we define Vikings. Nevertheless, I thought it might be of interest to see what some Old Norse texts see as the defining features of baby Vikings.

Starting with the youngest, there is the legendary hero Helgi Hundingsbani, who is celebrated in two poems of the Poetic Edda. The first of these describes his birth, and quotes this conversation between two ravens who are rejoicing at it:

Stendr í brynju / burr Sigmundar, / dœgrs eins gamall, / nú er dagr kominn; /hvessir augu / sem hildingar, / sá er varga vinr, / vit skulum teitir. (Eddukvæði II, ed. Kristjánsson & Ólason, 2014, p. 248)

'He stands in his mail-coat, the son of Sigmundr, one day old, now the day has come! He sharpens his glance as leaders do; that one is a friend of wolves, we two will be cheerful.'

The ravens are of course, anticipating the carrion that the warrior will provide for them and the wolves during his martial career. He does indeed have a varied and interesting career and eventually grows up enough to fall in love with a valkyrie. But that is another story...

Next up is Magni, son of Thor. In one of his many giant-fighting episodes, Thor manages to fell Hrungnir, but in such a way that the giant's leg lay across his neck, pinning him down. Young Magni saves the day by being the only one strong enough to remove the giant's leg, after all the other Æsir have tried and failed. Magni was three years old at the time (and his name means 'strength'). He clearly felt he could have done more:

Sé þar ljótan harm, faðir, er ek kom svá síð. Ek hygg at jötun þenna mundak hafa lostit í Hel með hnefa ef ek hefða fundit hann. (Skáldskaparmál, ed. Faulkes, 1998, p. 22)

'It is a awful shame, father, that I came so late. I think I would have struck this giant into Hel with my fist if I had encountered him.'

His father is impressed and predicts a glowing future for his son, and gives him Hrungnir's horse Gullfaxi as a reward. This irks  Odin, who thinks he, as Thor's father, should have had this gift, rather than Magni the 'son of a giantess'. Presumably it was Magni's maternal giant heritage that made him strong enough for the deed. Magni's fate is to survive Ragnarök, but that is another story...

Another precocious three-year-old is the hero of Egils saga. We meet him first in ch. 31, ugly, black-haired and clever with words, but a bit obstreperous in playing with other children. When the family sets out for a party at the grandparental home, Egil's father refuses to take him, saying that he can't be trusted to behave when there is drink being taken, indeed he is hard enough to deal with when he's sober. The toddler won't have this, grabbing a horse to follow the party. At the party, grandfather Yngvar welcomes Egil and gives him three sea-snail shells and a duck's egg as a reward for a verse he composed in a drinking game which involved competitive poetic composition:

Kominn emk enn til arna / Yngvars, þess's beð lyngva, / hann vask fúss at finna, / fránþvengjar gefr drengjum; / mun eigi þú, þægir, / þrevetran mér betra, / ljósundinna landa / linns, óðar smið finna. (Egils saga, ed. Nordal, 1933, pp. 82-3)

'Still I have come to the hearth of Yngvar, he who gives to warriors gold (the bed of the gleaming thong of the heather). I was anxious to find him. You will not, giver of the twisted, shining gold (land of the snake) find a better three-year-old craftsman of poetry than I am. [Thong of the heather is a snake, and the snake's bed, according to tradition, is gold]. (Egils saga, tr. Christine Fell, 1975, p. 182).

It's quite a sophisticated poem for a three-year-old. Egil doesn't however, kill his first man until he is in his seventh year, the victim being a boy of ten or eleven who had bested and humiliated him at a ball game. This killing led his mother to declare that Egil was a víkingsefni 'the makings of a Viking'. Indeed Egil goes on to fulfil his destiny, but that is another story...

Anyway, six is a bit beyond babyhood and nearing the age of reason. This little tour of baby Vikings does not suggest that steak played any part in their achieving that status, but then it is not recorded what they ate and only hinted at what they drank. From the legendary poetry of the Edda to Snorri's prose mythology and the historical fiction of the saga, we do find an admiration for exceptional individuals, expressed in their baby Vikinghood. But I do not expect any time soon to read articles claiming that the Vikings started training their warriors at one day old. At least I hope not.

 

 

The Towering Goddess

The Viqueen, I can report, is beyond excited at her upcoming trip to extremely northern latitudes in Norway in a couple of days' time. Heading north in January means that there are two desiderata above all, snow and the northern lights. It is true that the Viqueen has seen quite a lot of snow in her lifetime, and she even finally achieved one of her all-time goals when she saw the aurora borealis on a trip to Iceland last November (as proven by the rather murky photo, right). But global warming means snow is not as reliable as it once was, while one glimpse of some rather faint northern lights can only whet a Viqueen's appetite for even more, and perhaps even more spectacular, displays.

So what does a Viqueen do? Well she knows to pray to Skaði for snow, for the skiing goddess/giantess just cannot do her thing without it. But what about the northern lights? The Viqueen duly consulted her friend the Snowqueen on this important matter, and the oracle suggested that an appropriate deity to propitiate would be the otherwise not very well known goddess Gná. This sent the Viqueen back to her books to remind herself about this rather obscure figure, and what she found there is rather interesting.

Like many other obscure goddesses, Gná occurs a few times in kennings, where she is mostly just a synonym for 'goddess', in those woman-kennings where a goddess, any goddess, depending on the requirements of rhyme or alliteration, forms the base-word. Still, it is interesting that Gná appears in kennings in both very early poetry (Ölvir hnúfa, one of the poets of Haraldr Finehair in the 9th century) and quite late poetry (in the Jómsvíkingadrápa by the Orcadian bishop Bjarni Kolbeinsson, in the late 12th or early 13th century), suggesting a longevity in the minds of those who cared about these things.

Another bit of evidence that she was better-known in those days than she is now is the way in which she is mentioned in Snorri's Edda. There, she appears as no. 14 in the list of goddesses and her main characteristic seems to be as a kind of errand-girl for the top goddess Frigg (aka Mrs Óðinn). But then Snorri tells us a bit more, that she has a horse, called Hófvarfnir, that can run on both the sky and the sea. Snorri also goes on to quote a couple of stanzas from a poem occasioned by her riding through the air. On being seen by 'certain Vanir' doing this, one of them asked:

'Hvat þar flýgr? / Hvar þar ferr / eða at lopti líðr?'

What flies there? What goes there, or travels in the air?

to which the goddess herself answers:

'Né ek flýg / þó ek fer / ok at lopti líðk / á Hófvarfni / þeim er Hamskerpir / gat við Garðrofu.'

' I do not fly, though I go and travel in the air on Hófvarfnir, whom Hamskerpir conceived on Garðrofa.'

  (quoted from Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning, ed. Anthony Faulkes, 1982, p. 30, my translation)

Just a little snippet of mythological knowledge there, not unlike the many names, of mythological horses as well as many other things, that we find in Grímnismál. But what is perhaps more interesting than that is the fact that these two stanzas are among the very few Eddic, mythological stanzas in Snorri that must derive from longer poems that do not otherwise survive, again suggesting that this goddess was once better known than she is now.

Snorri then goes on to add, in some guesswork etymology, that 'From the name of Gná, a thing which goes up high is said to tower (gnæfa)'. So, indeed, an appropriate deity for the northern lights up there in the sky. The Viqueen can only hope that she recognises this humble approach and arranges things accordingly next week.

P.S. If you want to read a much more learned disquisition on the possible significance of Gná and other flying females in Norse myth and superstition, then do have a look at Stephen Mitchell, 'Gudinnan Gná', Saga och Sed (2014), 23-41.

Valkyries Revisited

Picture stone from Tjängvide, Alskog, Gotland.
Wikimedia Commons
 

Martin Rundkvist's recent blog on shield maidens has inspired me to air in a little more detail my views on women warriors by looking first a bit more closely at their close cousins, the Valkyries.

 

The valkyrie is a mythological being with widespread currency, since she appears in art, archaeology and a wide range of literary texts. Valkyries (valkyrjur lit. ‘choosers of the slain’) were defined by Snorri Sturluson as figures:

 

whose job is to serve in Valhall, bringing drink and looking after the tableware and the drinking vessels ... These are called valkyries. Óðinn sends them to every battle, they choose who is to die and allot victory. (my translation)

Snorri does not specify that they bear arms, though this might be deduced from the second aspect of their role. The figure is further developed in Old Norse literature, often with a strong romantic angle involving love between a valkyrie and a male warrior, and Snorri himself testifies to the enduring popularity of this figure in the thirteenth century. But the two functions of valkyries identified by Snorri have their origins in the Viking Age, where they can be traced in the material culture, as well as in both Eddic and skaldic poetry.

The first of the functions identified by Snorri is most easily identified in pictorial representations. Some of the earliest examples are scenes on several Viking Age (8th to 11th centuries) picture stones from the Baltic island of Gotland, which show female figures proferring drinking horns to warriors about to enter a building that can be interpreted as Valhall, the mythological hall of the slain, as in the Tjängvide stone shown above. This image is repeated in art, particularly metalwork, but also sculpture, from across the Viking world. Even the scene of Mary Magdalene at the Crucifixion on the tenth-century Gosforth cross in Cumbria has been seen by most scholars as owing something to this visual tradition.

Images of armed female figures are less common. However, the exciting metal detectorist discovery from Hårby on the island of Fyn in Denmark in 2012 appears to represent just such a figure, as discussed here some months ago. This is a very rare, perhaps unique, visual representation of a female figure with a sword. When valkyries are represented in literary texts as being armed, their weapons of choice tend to be a spear and protective armour, but not swords, as in stanza 15 of the Eddic poem Helgakviða Hundingsbana I. There, the valkyrie Sigrún arrives with some of her mates in the middle of Helgi's battle with Hundingr, and they are said to have helmets, blood-spattered mailcoats, and shiny spears. The figurine from Hårby has none of these attributes.

However, a closer study of skaldic poetry does show an occasional association of valkyries with swords, though mostly indirectly, in kennings. In a large number of kennings, battle is figured as a storm, or tumult, or din, or meeting, which is further determined by a term for weapons, or for a valkyrie, either her name, or a further kenning for her. Using examples from vol. I of Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, there are simple kennings which call battle þing hrings ‘assembly of the sword’ or gný Gunnar ‘din of Gunnr’, with Gunnr a valkyrie-name. A more complex battle-kenning such as snerra geirvífa ‘onslaught of the spear-women’ incorporates a valkyrie-kenning with her traditional attribute of the spear. Occasionally, such valkyrie-kennings do associate them with swords, though most often embedded in more complex kennings where the direct association of valkyries and swords is less clear. Thus, a kenning for ravens or eagles figures them as the gjóðir dísar dolgeisu ‘ospreys of the woman of battle-fire’, in which ‘battle-fire’ is an embedded kenning for sword. But in the same way, valkyries can be associated with other weapons such as bows, or just with weapon-points in general. Thus, the skaldic evidence suggests the possibility that any female figure associated with weapons of any kind can be interpreted as a valkyrie.

In themselves, though, these figures from art and literature do not yet prove the case for warrior women, or for any association between women and the weapons of war other than as an aspect of myth and ideology. It would be difficult in any case to pin down any such association in real life, though burials, despite their heavily symbolic nature, might give a clue. We know that warriors were men, and we know that many men were buried with weapons. This does not make every man buried with weapons into a warrior, but the association is widespread and consistent. There are a few examples of women buried with weapons, though their number is not great. Most of these burials are problematic in some way, many of them antiquarian finds with inadequate contexts. Nevertheless, it seems likely that occasionally people could be buried with items more commonly associated with the opposite gender (and of course there are many grave-goods that are gender-neutral). The reasons for these very occasional deviations from the norm are difficult to discern from this distance, and could be various, including the items belonging to someone else in a double or mass burial, or the finds from two adjacent burials becoming mixed, or even people being buried with items belonging to their (deceased?) partner. But that the very few women buried with weapons were warrior women in life seems the least likely explanation of all.

Sword-Girl

Most Vikingologists will already be aware of the small metal figurine (apparently it's silver) found by a detectorist last year on the island of Fyn in Denmark, and depicted on Martin Rundkvist's Aardvarchaeology blog earlier this month (from where I have 'borrowed' the photo, taken by Jan Hein). It is there described as a 'valkyrie' and indeed the figure, as far as I can tell from the photo, has long hair and is wearing a long dress with an apron (?), while carrying a shield in its left hand and holding a drawn sword in its right. I say 'its' because I do think we always have to reserve judgement, and I was amused to see that the first comment on Martin's blog post asks whether we are sure it isn't a man. Good question. Having said that, it looks fairly female to me, so let's go with the idea that it does indeed represent a valkyrie, that enigmatic figure who plays a wide variety of roles in Old Norse literature and mythology. The interesting question is, how to link the various material 'valkyries' found in recent years with their literary sisters. Now there's a fruitful topic for some aspiring student...

 

One thing that struck me about the Hårby figure is that it is holding a sword, as is the one on another, rather indistinct, brooch from Jutland also pictured in Martin's blog (where I do think there is a greater chance the figure is intended to be male). For some reason, I had always had it stuck in my head that swords were very much a male weapon, and that valkyries, when armed, were armed with shields and spears (the latter a weapon particularly associated with Odin), as well as protective armour, but not swords. I'm not sure where I got this idea from, though probably from st. 15 of Helgakviða Hundingsbana I. There, the valkyrie Sigrún arrives with some of her mates in the middle of Helgi's battle with Hundingr, and they are said to have helmets, blood-spattered mailcoats, and shiny spears. Later on, in st. 54, the valkyries are said to be 'helmet-creatures'.

 

But clearly I wasn't paying that much attention, since there is in fact a valkyrie-kenning sverðman 'sword-girl' in a poem I once wrote an article about. Oops. The poem is Hallvarðr háreksblesi's Knútsdrápa (to be published next month, edited by Matt Townend in vol. I of Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages). There, the valkyrie-kenning is embedded in a raven/eagle kenning ('gull of the sword-girl'), but the sword is clearly there. There is at least one other valkyrie kenning with a sword-word as a determinant in a Viking Age poem, so the connection exists, even if it is not especially common.

 

Finally, I did wonder whether this detectorist find was genuine - it's almost too good to be true. But archaeologists I have asked seem to have no doubts. It will be great to read a detailed analysis of it some time. In the meantime, it provides lots of food for thought in the emerging discipline of valkyrieology.

Three Daughters Deprive Me of Sleep

Although my recent visits to Norway (see the previous post for more on these) were not made in a particularly runological frame of mind, I kept coming across interesting runic inscriptions, in particular several involving women. So here's a quick tour of some of these, in the order of their chronology, rather than the order in which I saw them. Most obscure was probably the Tune stone (side B pictured right), well-lit and displayed in the Prehistoric Norway section of the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, which basically includes everything up to and including the Viking Age. The inscribed stone itself contradicts the OED definition of 'prehistoric' as 'Of, relating to, dating from, or designating the time before written historical records', though I suppose you could argue about what was or was not a 'historical record'. Anyway, pedantry aside, it is a lovely stone with an intriguing inscription. I quote the English translation from Terje Spurkland's Norwegian Runes and Runic Inscriptions (now available in paperback, by the way):

(A) I, WiwaR, in memory of WoduridaR the master of the household, made these runes. (B) I entrusted the stone to WoduridaR. Three daughters arranged the funeral feast, the dearest / most devoted / most divine of the heirs.

Much of the detail is obscure, so do read Terje's discussion of this 'extraordinary piece of writing' to find out what it might all mean.  But there are two particular points of interest. Sometime around 400 AD, daughters could inherit property (Terje suggests that WoduridaR was the father of the three daughters, but had no son, and that WiwaR was his grandson). Secondly, the inscription is metrical, in something not unlike the ljóðaháttr of the Eddic poems. Both the supposed inheritance patterns and the verse form of the Tune inscription have their counterparts in the Viking Age and even later (since the laws and the poems were not written down until after the Viking Age). This means that either we have important evidence for an astounding longevity of certain cultural patterns in Scandinavia, or some odd coincidences.

Skipping the Viking Age, for once, it's interesting to note the presence of women in the medieval churches of Norway, both as the subject and object of the statements made in the inscriptions. A wooden pillar now in the Historical Museum in Bergen was originally in Stedje church in Sogndal. Stedje was one of those stave churches that did not survive the rebuilding craze of the nineteenth century, but the pillar at least was saved, along with a finely carved portal, also in the museum. The inscription records that 'Sigríðr of Hváll gave this staff for mercy towards the souls of Arnþórr and herself.' Arnþórr was presumably her husband, and Hváll is the farm Kvåle near the church. A man of that name at that place is mentioned in Sverris saga in the winter of 1183-4, and the saga also mentions the burning of Stedje by Sverrir's Birkibeinar, though the church itself was saved. How all this fits with the runic inscription, if it does, is impossible to tell. Magnus Olsen came to the conclusion that  Sigríðr and Arnþórr were the grandparents of the saga's Arnþórr and dates the inscription to c. 1175. The runes were at about head height and are deeply carved - Sigríðr clearly wanted the world to know about her gift to the church.

Much less obvious, and only discovered in 1966, is a more casual inscription in Bø gamle kyrkje, on the wooden panel of a repositorium, a kind of nook in the south wall of the chancel. The inscription puzzled many learned minds, though eventually Jonna Louis-Jensen arrived at the very ingenious solution. The Old Norse text reads:

Svefn bannar mér, sótt er barna,
fjón svinkanda, fjalls íbúi,
hests erfaði, ok heys víti,
þræls vansæla. Þat skulu ráða.

which can roughly be translated as 'It deprives me of sleep, it is a children's disease, the enemy of the worker, inhabitant of the mountain, toil of the horse and danger to hay, the bad luck of the slave; people need to work it out.' The simple alliterative stanza poses a question, 'what deprives me of sleep?' and gives the answer in riddling form. Each of the following phrases works out as a word which is also the name of a particular rune, so the 'inhabitant of the mountain' is an ogre, or Old Norse þurs - the name of the third rune. The six phrases give the runes k u þ r u n giving, of course, the female name Guðrún. So that is clear enough. But who was she and who was she depriving of sleep? Normally, only priests went into the chancel... Was he in love, or is it just an intellectual exercise? Is it the effort of working out the riddles that keeps the writer awake? If only we could tell... The inscription is dated to around 1200, when love poetry certainly was in fashion.

My last inscription comes from this fine pair of wrist-warmers I purchased in Heddal and knitted by a local lady who does other runic knits, too. Unfortunately, the runes don't say anything intelligible, which might be because they are based on an inscription in the gallery of Heddal stave church, which also does not say anything intelligible. Despite unconvincing attempts to make out that the runes represent the date 1242, all we can say for certain is that the runes say either -m-rn or mmrn (by interpreting the last, and possibly the first and third, runes as cryptic runes). Which could, I suppose be a cack-handed attempt to write Maria, to whom the church is in fact dedicated, or, more charitably, an abbreviation for some kind of phrase involving her name. I append a picture of the runic inscription, too, so you can compare, though it was hard to photograph through the protective glass.

 

RIP

Half a year ago, all Vikingologists were mourning the loss of three great scholars in various branches of the subject. Now we have lost two more this month, both with a more literary and linguistic bent, Ursula Dronke and Raymond Ian Page. Neither was young, and both had had full and productive lives, so I hope they are glad to have shuffled off this mortal coil and are likewise carousing in the Valhalla of Norse and Viking studiers (with its 'hearth-encircling benches and delicious ale'). But we shall miss them and it is worth pausing to remember their achievements, which are of course far too many to list here.

Many years ago, I had the honour of having my PhD thesis examined by Ursula Dronke, but I remember her chiefly for her wonderful translations of Eddic poetry. One of the first Eddic poems I ever read was Atlakviða (maybe that's why we're imposing it on our first-years even as I speak...). Ursula's translation was both a delight in itself, and a real incentive to grapple with the difficult but completely spell-binding language of the original.

Ray Page had even more of a beneficial effect on my career - he contributed to my appointment to this job way back when in my youth, and he was both friend and benevolent academic guide ever after. He too had a real way with words, and I still think his Chronicles of the Vikings is a great place for beginners to start thinking about how we really go about studying the Viking Age. He also produced lucid and accessible books for the general reader on both Norse myths and runes. Ray was quite a polymath: an expert in Old English and Anglo-Saxon studies, Old Norse and Viking studies, manuscripts and librarianship, but his greatest influence was as a runologist and that is what I and many others will most of all remember him for.

Nightwatchman

There has been some kerfuffle about the choice of a black actor to play Heimdallr in Kenneth Branagh's forthcoming film about Thor (eh? Kenneth Branagh making a film about Thor? What is the world coming to?) - see for instance this article in the Guardian. The kerfuffle is apparently between the politically correct who see this as a laudable example of colour-blind casting and the racists who point out that (a) Norse gods weren't black and (b) Heimdallr is called 'the whitest of gods'.

What no one seems to have taken into account is the fact that the Vikings might have had a sense of humour. It was once pointed out to me by an older gentleman, with extensive experience of  male bonding-groups during the war, that nicknames in such groups often mean the opposite of what they say, thus people called Shorty are usually quite tall. Although Snorri does call Heimdallr 'the white god', I think the only poetic source for this epithet  is Þrymskviða, that joky poem in which nothing is as it seems, which does call Heimdallr hvítastr ása. Given this, I wouldn't be surprised if Heimdallr was black.

Ice and Fire: Eyjafjallajökull Erupts

It was my first trip to Iceland, many years ago, that opened my eyes to the wonders of geology. It was a tourist cliché, but when I stood at Þingvellir and was told that I was standing on the faultline between the continents, then plate tectonics suddenly made more sense than from any number of diagrams. On that same trip, we went to Vestmannaeyjar and stood on the still-warm sulphurous volcano that had erupted on Heimaey only a few years earlier, in 1973. There's something about Iceland that brings out the latent geologist in everyone - or at least in me. It certainly makes me like to think I should have had an alternative career as a geologist, though it was already too late then, on that first visit. Icelandic volcanoes, unlike those in some other parts of the world, tend to erupt slowly and rarely cause loss of life. So, despite the destruction of houses and roads, we can marvel at their majesty and wild, ferocious beauty, and understand how a poem like Völuspá came to be composed under their influence. And now it's happening again. Eyjafjallajökull, which last erupted in 1821, is acting up. According the BBC report, some 500-600 people have been evacuated, ash is falling everywhere, and aviation is not currently possible. The picture shows the area on a glorious late summer day last year, when molten lava and ash were the furthest things from anyone's mind.

Sól mun sortna,
søkkr fold í mar.
Hverfa af himni
heiðar stjörnur.
Geisar eimi
ok aldrnari,
leikr hár hiti
við himin sjálfan.

Old Norse Invades YouTube

Nowhere is safe from Old Norse, not even YouTube. Here are a couple of links, unintentionally a bit funny, but with some educational value too:
Extract from Konungs skuggsjá spoken by two oddly-dressed chaps using the modern Norwegian pronunciation of Old Norse and with subtitles in Nynorsk. I wonder what the background is?
Extract from Atlakviða with interesting sound-effects (and an oddly-dressed chap - btw what is the other chap doing in jeans?). Pronunciation as before, but subtitles in Old Norse (including hooked o!), English and Bokmål.
If you want to practise your Norwegian-Old Norse, there are exercises on this page at the University of Bergen (go to the end of the page and click on 'norrøne øvingar'). If you click on 'norrønt' a bit higher up, you will also get the second extract listed above (this is clearly its source), but without the Old Norse or English text.
And if you suffer from insomnia, I can recommend this rather soporific lecture on the Old Norse language - it will send you off pretty soon!