The Saga of King Gautrek, in many ways a prequel to the longer Saga of Hrolf Gautreksson, is something of a mixed bag. It seems that the unnamed Icelandic author, like the British writer Nennius, ‘made a heap of all he found’, incorporating pagan sacrificial rituals, Odinic heroes, ‘male Cinderellas’, tight fisted earls, kings of dubious intellectual prowess, and cunning folklore heroes. The saga begins with King Gauti, a son of Odin, lost in the trackless woodlands of what is now Southern Sweden, where he meets the curious people who live deep in the woods. A fitting beginning for a scary movie, you might think, and indeed, the sinister rituals of the forest dwellers inspired 2019 Swedish folk horror film Midsommar . The propensity of Odin worshippers towards eugenics was first hinted at by Procopius, discussing the Heruli in his History of the Wars . This Germanic tribe practised a form of human sacrifice whereby the elderly and infirm were placed upon a pyre before being stabbed to death and burnt to ashes, bearing a fleeting resemblance to the horrors discovered by King Gauti in the forests of his kingdom. The notion of self-slaughter to avert calamity, involving the suicides jumping over a cliff, is also echoed in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History , Chapter XIII, where St Wilfrid finds the famine struck South Saxons doing precisely that, in droves, in one of the last heathen kingdoms of England. St Wilfred’s evangelising is believed to have put an end to such benighted pagan practices, although it is notable that, for no reason anyone today can explain, one of the most notorious suicide blackspots in England, Beachy Head, is also in Sussex. Moving swiftly on from this distasteful subject (at least in the longer version of the saga) we are confronted by the grim, uncompromising Odinic hero, Starkad. So shocked by his bloody, fate-haunted career were the moralising writers of medieval Iceland that Starkad’s Saga remains unwritten, although some of its plot threads are interlaced into several other stories, including The Saga of the Ynglings, Sagas of Ancient Kings, The Yarn of Norna-Gest (where he is pitted against his fellow Norse hero Sigurd, and comes off significantly worse for the encounter, but lives to fight another day), and most fully in Saxo Grammaticus’ Latin Gesta Danorum. A kind of northern Hercules, Starkad is a troubled, doomed hero, blessed with a life three times as long as others (like Norna-Gest) but cursed, like the dwarf forged sword Tyrfing, to commit three shameful deeds, one per lifetime. The background to this doom-haunted weird lies in the past, indeed in the life of his grandfather, another Starkad of whom he is said to be the reincarnation, who was Thor’s rival in love. In return for his foster father Odin’s doubtful blessings, Starkad brings about another act of human sacrifice rather less comical than the crazy antics of the backwoodsmen of King Gauti’s realm: the hanging of King Vikar, Starkad’s liege lord, promised to Odin by his mother while he was still in the womb, according to a variant version recorded in The Saga of Half and Half’s Champions. After all this high drama and human sacrifice, the entertaining tale of King Gautrek, son of Gauti, and the cunning trickster Gift-Ref, comes as comic relief. Although the saga starts out as that of King Gautrek, by the end it is said to be that of the cunning Ref (Old Icelandic for ‘fox’.). However, it is King Gautrek’s son Hrolf who takes centre stage in the dramatic sequel, The Saga of Hrolf Gautreksson.