The Centenary of Styrbiorn the Strong, by E. R. Eddison

E. R. Eddison (1882-1945) was young when he was struck by what he called "saga-madness." By 1901, when he was eighteen, he had translated for himself the short and little-known violent "Saga of Vermund Kögur Fjorleif's Son"--the first published translation into English would not appear until 1997, in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, volume 4, as a part of  "The Saga of the People of Reykjadal and of Killer-Skuta." This short text is complicated, and Eddison did not translate the additional text associated with it (which appears with it in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders). Eddison looked into the matter in 1935, but didn't pursue it.  In late 1944, publisher Stanley Unwin (of George Allen and Unwin) asked Eddison about translating an Icelandic saga for his firm, but Eddison, by then fully engaged in the writing of his novel The Mezentian Gate, turned him down. Eddison died the following year at age 62. 

Between all this activity are two related and very important books by Eddison, his 1930 translation of Egil’s Saga (Cambridge University Press), and the book whose centenary we are observing, the novel Styrbiorn the Strong, published in September 1926 by Jonathan Cape in London and by Albert & Charles Boni in New York, both of whom had previously published Eddison first novel, The Worm Ouroboros.

 Jonathan Cape asked Eddison himself to supply a blurb of one hundred words for the publisher's catalog, and the blurb was also used on the front free end-paper of Cape's dust-wrapper of the book: 

The Swedish prince, called Styrbiorn the Strong, after a meteoric career in which he shook the lands of the Baltic, fell in the year 983, still in his early youth, in an attempt to wrest the kingdom from his uncle. 

The writer follows history closely. His intimate knowledge of the Viking civilization and spirit is taken at first hand from the ancient literature of the North. In his swift, dramatic narrative he takes no sides, but leaves his actors--Styrbiorn, King Eric the Victorious, and his fatal Queen--to impress their personalities on the reader by their own words and actions. 

Eddison crafted the book slowly, and not in sequential order. He wrote chapter I in August 1922 (following the publication of The Worm in May), and by January 1923, he had written what became chapters II, XI, and the final XVI. He intermixed the writing with periods, some long, of research. He finally finished the book in late November 1925, shortly after his 43rd birthday. Eddison wrote most of the book at his desk at his Club, the Atheneum, in London. After a short period for revision, the book went to his publisher Jonathan Cape, who read it himself,  and they set terms for its publication. 

Styrbion the Strong was published by Jonathan Cape, with a dust-wrapper and interior illustrations by Keith Henderson (Eddison‘s brother-in-law). Albert & Charles Boni used a small number of Henderson’s decorations (without credit), and used a dust-wrapper illustration by another artist (also not credited). The book was well reviewed in both England and the U.S. 

The New York Times noted:  “Not in a long time has any writer in English made of an old Norse saga so fresh and heroic and resounding a tale as has Mr. Eddison in Styrbiorn the Strong” (19 September 1926). Both L.P. Hartley in The Saturday Review and Mary Agnes Hamilton in Time and Tide singled out Eddison’s ending for especial praise. Hartley wrote “the last scene is finely worked up to and described with economy of detail and great dramatic effect” (2 October 1926) and Hamilton: “Mr. Eddison is superb in description of fighting, and possibly one is paying his hero the highest tribute when one avows that the final chapter—the one in which he is received into Valhalla—is the most moving of any” (8 October 1926). Yet in later years Eddison himself noted that if he were writing the book then, he would end the book before the final chapter. A very short review (signed P.S.) in The New Statesmen lumped Styrbiorn together with Kenneth Morris’s recent collection, The Secret Mountain and Other Tales, claiming the two books which “deserve much more space than I am able to devote to them here, come as close to pure romanticism as prose fiction conveniently can. . . . Both books, I should add, are produced with care and (what is not always the same thing) with taste” (29 January 1927). In commenting upon the book to a friend, Eddison himself compared it to The Worm Ouroboros as follows: “only about one-third the length of the Worm, narrower in scope, tragical & (except the last chapter) staged purely on earth, whereas the Worm was staged in Heaven” (letter to Thomas Moult, 5 November 1926). I leave it open for debate as to how to interpret that the Worm was set in Heaven!

Styrbiorn, ironically Eddison’s most accessible book, languished for many years. In 2011, the University of Minnesota Press re-issued it in an expanded affordable trade paperback, including for the first time Eddison’s four page “Letter of Introduction” to the dedicatee, his brother Colin; and the full unabridged form of Eddison’s “Closing Note.”  An “Afterword” by Paul Edmund Thomas is also included.