SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

TWO LITTLE-KNOWN RENDERINGS OF THE
OLD NORSE "WAKING OF ANGANTYR"
By BRUCE DrCKINS
ESPECIALLY after the publication in 1768 of Gray's
versions from the Old-Norse Tongue of "The Fatal
Sisters" (Darraoarlj60, from Njdla) and "The Descent of
Odin" (Vegtamskvioa, or Baldrs Draumari there was
a lively, if scarcely well-informed, interest in Old Norse
poetry. From this field no work proved so compelling to
the English translator or adapter as "The Waking of
Angantyr", of which several versions are recorded at
pp. xxxiv-xxxv of the introduction to Chr. Tolkien's
edition (London 1960) of Saga Heioreks Konungs ins
V itra, the alternative title of which is H ervarar Saga ok
Heioreks konungs. Two, however, seem to have escaped
the notice of the editor, those by William Bagshawe
Stevens (1775) and the Rev. Joseph Sterling (1794).
Stevens was in 1775 a demy (that is a scholar receiving
half of the maximum allowance of a fellow) of Magdalen
College, Oxford, and did not graduate till the next year,
when he was appointed First Usher of Repton School, of
which he became Headmaster in 1779. He held the post
till his death in 1800, along with the rectory of Seckington
and the vicarage of Kingsbury (both in Warwickshire) of
which the patrons were the Burdetts of Foremark,
Derbyshire. N"0 great success either as a headmaster or
as a parish priest, he was popular with the local gentry,
perhaps because he was in some way connected with the
Bagshawes of Ford Hall, Chapel-en-Ie-Frith. Stevens's
most distinguished pupil was Joseph Bosworth (1789­
1876), the Anglo-Saxon lexicographer, who was in r858
elected to the re-constituted Rawlinson Chair in Oxford
and added to its endowment; moreover he gave £ro,ooo
in 1867 to establish the Elrington and Bosworth