Heidrek had escaped justice for his brother's slaughter, at least for a while. Armed with his ancestral sword, he recapitulated the earlier success of his forebears, and attracted the notice of Harald, King of the Goths. Heidrek did the king a series of unsavory favors, most of which involved doing away with rebellious subjects. Impressed with the young man's ruthlessness and efficiency, King Harald gave him his daughter, Helga, as a wife. Within a short time, Helga bore her husband a son. Heidrek named him Angantyr, in memory of his beloved brother whom he had murdered. The boy gave every indication of being as fierce and warlike as his father and grandmother, and Heidrek loved him as much as his stunted heart allowed.
Some years later, the land of the Goths was stricken with crop failure and famine. Instructed by his priests to sacrifice a prince of his blood to Odin, King Harald determined to offer up his young grandson, Angantyr. If he imagined that his son-in-law would be compliant with this plan, he soon found that he had sorely misjudged the man. Heidrek rose up in rebellion against his father-in-law, and slew him with Tyrfing. When Helga heard that her husband had killed her father, she hung herself in despair.
Little disposed to mourn his wife and her family, Heidrek quickly assumed the Gothic kinship and used Tyrfing to forcibly consolidate and then expand his territory. He set his sights on the land of the Huns, who defended their land as best they could, whereupon he kidnapped the daughter of the Hunnish king, and raped her. After impregnating her, he sent the Hunnish princess home, where she gave birth to a son named Hlöd. Subsequently, Heidrek married and divorced a succession of Scandinavian princesses; not surprisingly, each marriage was more loveless than the last. However, his fourth wife bore him a daughter, whom he named Hervor, for his mother. Heidrek wasn't much of a husband, but he does seem to have been attached to his children, or at least interested in their welfare. From the time of his daughter's birth, he seems to have curtailed his raiding activity and stayed close to home. At least for a while.
It turns out that Hlöd, Angantyr's long-neglected younger half-brother and son of the Hunnish princess whom Heidrek had ill-used, felt that he was entitled to half of their father's territory. He even went so far as to name boundary points between the lands that he and Angantyr would divide (one of these was a forest called Mirkwood). Hlöd's efforts were wasted. Self-assured and comfortably in possession of the Gothic kingship, Angantyr publicly named Hlöd a bastard, thereby implying that the Hunnish prince was ineligible to inherit any portion of their father's patrimony. This turned out to have been a dangerous move, for Hlöd was fully prepared to fight his half-brother for what he considered his rightful inheritance.
According to the early saga sources, Hlöd brought an improbably enormous force of 343,200 mounted Huns to invade his brother’s lands. Even more improbably, Angantyr and his Goths defeated the Hunnish horde; Angantyr struck down his brother Hlöd on the field of battle with Tyrfing. The deed was done swiftly and without remorse, yet Angantyr lingered for a moment over Hlöd's body. As he held the gore-spattered blade over the bloodied carcass of his only brother, he spoke:
Bölvat es okkr, bróðir,
bani em ek þinn orðinn; þat mun æ uppi; illr er dómr norna. |
We are cursed, brother,
I am become your slayer it is yet again true cruel is the decree of the Norns (Fates). |
It is also written there that the slaughter was such that the bodies of numerous warriors choked the rivers and flooded the valleys with dead men and horses. Walking among the dead, Angantyr found his half-sister, Hervor, who had fought the Huns bravely as a shieldmaiden, just as her grandmother and namesake had.
Hervor, daughter of Angantyr, thought that she had bought herself a Happily Ever After when she claimed and took her dead father's sword, the dwarf-forged Tyrfing. But she reckoned without the curse laid on the blade by its vengeful makers. When she retired from the Viking lifestyle to become a full time homemaker, she laid the sword aside. And there it waited, silently thirsting for blood and destruction.
At some point, Heidrek committed some act of brutality which resulted in his permanent estrangement from his father. We do not know what crime he committed, but it must have been serious, for Hervor's husband banished their younger son, and sent him away, ne
As the sword left its sheath, Heidrek felt a tremor run through his body, and his sword arm began to shake. A roar burst from his lips as he felt a wave of blood rush up to his brain. His head felt hot, and his vision dimmed as a red haze filmed his eyes. As the berserker frenzy took hold, Heidrek lost all reason, overwhelmed by the imperative to kill. He felt his arm rise and then gave a great animal howl as he struck out with the powerful sword. He felt Tyrfing's blade make contact, heard the groan of his victim, and plunged the blade in again and again. Blood spattered his face and he roared again, lifting Tyrfing to the sky in triumph. 
Nothing daunted, Hervor faced the dark mound and summoned the spirit of Angantyr, demanding the sword which his father had given him, so that she might wield it in turn. The tiny flames along the ground shuddered, but there was no response. Impatient, Hervor called out again, less respectful but with greater urgency. She would not leave without the sword. Again, her voice resounded in silence, with nothing but the moan of the wind to answer her. Enraged and desperate, Hervor shrieked curses upon the dead, wishing eternal torture upon the decaying flesh in the lonely barrow, where her father and uncles lay. That got a response.
With her impressive dowry, Hervor had her pick of suitors, and she married a viking prince. She sheathed Tyrfing for the last time, and lived with her husband in peace, bearing him two sons. The elder one she named for her father, Angantyr; against all expectations, he was both handsome and well-liked, making friends easily. But Hervor's younger son, Heidrek, was quarrelsome and given to unprovoked acts of violence. Hervor's husband was fond of Angantyr, but looked with disfavor upon Heidrek. The prince had heard dark rumors of his wife's forebears and their reputation; he knew that something would have to be done about his second son, lest disaster strike the House of Arngrim once more..................
The story of Hervor is ancient, its earliest known version dating from the 12th century. Despite having been raised to be a servant and kept in ignorance of her ancestry, her bloody parentage made itself known even before she hit puberty. Given to bursts of savage violence and brutality, unusual even in Viking culture, Hervor made few friends, and her enemies feared her. Whoever told her about her lineage was probably hoping that the news would motivate her to move on. It did.
So who were these Berserker relatives? Therein lies a
When it was over, the Swedes had triumphed, but just barely. Hjallmar only lived long enough to sing his own death song, but it was a song of victory nonetheless. The twelve sons of Arngrim lay mutilated and dead in a gory heap on the field of battle. The battered Swedish warriors, eager to leave the scene of slaughter, hastily covered over the gruesome corpses with the blood-soaked dirt upon which they lay. In this manner they formed a traditional warriors' barrow in which to contain the dead, whose feats of arms they grudgingly acknowledged with a runestone marking the place where the twelve Berserkers had fallen. No doubt everyone hoped that this marked the end of the reign of terror of the House of Arngrim. No such luck; as we already know, Angantyr's wife bore Hervor several months after the carnage on Samsø. Despite her attempts to keep the story of her daughter's heritage buried, along with her late unlamented husband and his cursed sword, Hervor eventually learned the truth. She somehow got her hands on a ship, recruited a crew, and sailed for Samsø, intent on claiming her inheritance. And that's when things began to get really interesting!
I like this story, in part, because it is about fiber arts, and I'm an avid knitter. It starts with a young woman who hates to spin, and won't take part in any of the work around her home. She's a daydreamer, and if she had known how to read, she would most likely have been an unrepentant bookworm, like myself. In short order, the heroine of the story finds herself in a large room filled with flax that needs spinning. This is about where you'd expect someone like Rumpelstiltskin to show up, and make her an offer she can't refuse, if you know what I mean, but instead a cheerful and peculiarly deformed small woman - of obvious fairy extraction - appears, and does the spinning for her, in exchange for nothing more than an invitation to the heroine's wedding feast, which is anticipated with confidence.
This being a fairytale, of course there are a total of three visitations made by three mysteriously misshapen fairy females; the twist at the end comes when our heroine actually fulfills her obligation to her three helpers, against all expectation. This rather shocked me when I first read this tale, since throughout the story, the young woman is portrayed rather unsympathetically; I confess that my expectations of her moral and intellectual fiber were pretty low. It really took me by surprise when she actually follows through on her promises and allows these three strange looking creatures to attend her wedding feast. 
