The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún

COMMENTARY

on

VÖLSUNGAKVIÐA EN NÝJA

The subtitle Sigurðarkviða en mesta means ‘The Longest Lay of Sigurd’: see p.234.

Throughout the commentary the poem Völsungakviða en Nýja is referred to as ‘the Lay’ or occasionally ‘the Lay of the Völsungs’, and the Völsunga Saga as ‘the Saga’. The name ‘Edda’ always refers to the ‘Elder Edda’ or ‘Poetic Edda’; the work of Snorri Sturluson is named the ‘Prose Edda’.

The nine sections of the poem following the Upphaf are referred to by Roman numerals and the stanzas by Arabic numerals: thus ‘VII.6’ refers to stanza 6 in the section ‘Gudrún’. Notes are related to stanzas, not lines; and a general note on the section precedes notes to individual stanzas.

UPPHAF

This prelude to the Lay of the Völsungs echoes and reflects the most famous poem of the Edda, the Völuspá, in which the Völva, the wise woman or sibyl, recounts the origin of the world, the age of the youthful Gods, and the primeval war; prophesies the Ragnarök, the Doom of the Gods; and after it the renewal of the Earth, rising again out of deep waters (see the third part of my father’s poem The Prophecy of the Sibyl, given in Appendix B at the end of this book).

But the images of the Völuspá are here ordered to an entirely original theme: for the sibyl declares (stanzas 13–15) that the fate of the world and the outcome of the Last Battle will depend on the presence of ‘one deathless who death hath tasted and dies no more’; and this is Sigurd, ‘the serpent-slayer, seed of Ódin’, who is ‘the World’s chosen’ for whom the mailclad warriors wait in Valhöll (stanza 20). As is made explicit in my father’s interpretative note (iv) given on p.53–54, it is Ódin’s hope that Sigurd will on the Last Day become the slayer of the greatest serpent of all, Miðgarðsormr (see note to stanza 12 below), and that through Sigurd ‘a new world will be made possible’.

‘This motive of the special function of Sigurd is an invention of the present poet’, my father observed in the same brief text. An association with his own mythology seems to me at least extremely probable: in that Túrin Turambar, slayer of the great dragon Glaurung, was also reserved for a special destiny, for at the Last Battle he would himself strike down Morgoth, the Dark Lord, with his black sword. This mysterious conception appeared in the old Tale of Turambar (1919 or earlier), and reappeared as a prophecy in the Silmarillion texts of the 1930s: so in the Quenta Noldorinwa, ‘it shall be the black sword of Túrin that deals unto Melko [Morgoth] his death and final end; and so shall the children of Húrin and all Men be avenged.’ Very remarkably a form of this conception is found in a brief essay of my father’s from near the end of his life, in which he wrote that Andreth the Wise-woman of the House of Bëor had prophesied that ‘Túrin in the Last Battle should return from the Dead, and before he left the Circles of the World for ever should challenge the Great Dragon of Morgoth, Ancalagon the Black, and deal him the death-stroke.’ The extraordinary transformation of Túrin is seen also in an entry in The Annals of Aman, where it is said that the great constellation of Menelmakar, the Swordsman of the Sky (Orion), ‘was a sign of Túrin Turambar, who should come into the world, and a foreshadowing of the Last Battle that shall be at the end of Days.’^*

Beyond this, in the absence (so far as I know) of any other writing of my father’s bearing on his enigmatic conception of Sigurd, I think that speculation on its larger significance would fall outside the editorial limits that I have set for myself in this book.

My father’s Ódin does indeed retain his ancient character of gathering his ‘chosen’ to Valhöll to be his champions at the Ragnarök, and in the Lay of the Völsungs he appears against Sigmund, Sigurd’s father, and disarms him in his last fight, so that he is slain (IV.8–11). In Norse legend a belief is expressed that Ódin, faithless, ambiguous, and sinister, desiring strife among kinsmen, turning against his favourites at the last and felling those whom he has favoured, has reason for his conduct: he needs his own, needs his favourites against the day of the Ragnarök (see the note to IX.77–78).

But from the extraordinary complex of ideas that surround Ódin in Northern antiquity – suggesting layer upon layer of shifting belief and symbolism – a God is glimpsed in my father’s work who has retained little of the subtle, sinister, and enigmatic deity of ancient writings: the god of war, lord of the Valkyries; exciter of madness; the initiate, the lord of the gallows, the self-sacrificed, the master of obscene magic, the inspiration of poetry; the shape-changer, the old one-eyed man, the faithless friend, and on the Last Day the victim of the Wolf. ‘Weighed with wisdom woe foreknowing’ (Upphaf 18), and seen by my father, referring to his own poem and to his treatment of the old legend, as symbolizing prudence and wisdom beside the malice and folly of Loki, Ódin seems more like Manwë of his own mythology; and he calls them both ‘Lord of Gods and Men’.

I On this stanza see p.246. It echoes the third stanza of the Völuspá; and citing the Norse verse in a lecture my father followed it with this first stanza of the Upphaf, with some differences: ‘shivering waves’, ‘unraised heaven’.

II It is told by Snorri in the Prose Edda that Heimdal (Heimdallr) was the warden or sentinel of the Gods (Æsir), dwelling beside Bifröst (‘the quaking path’), the rainbow bridge between Ásgard, the realm of the Æsir, and Midgard, the world of Men (see note to 12), which he guards against the rock-giants; but at the Ragnarök (the Doom of the Gods) Bifröst will be crossed by the hosts coming from the fiery land of Múspell, and will break beneath them. The red part of the bow is blazing fire. Heimdal’s horn is the Gjallarhorn, whose blast is heard over all the worlds; and he will blow it at the Ragnarök.

The Ash is Yggdrasill, the World Tree, whose branches stretched out over earth and heaven. The Wolf is Fenrir (named in stanza 13), whom the Gods chained; but at the Ragnarök Fenrir will break his chains and devour Ódin.

12 Surt (Surtr): the great demon of fire, at the Ragnarök coming out of Múspell, the land of fire, against the Gods.

The ‘slumbering Serpent’ is Miðsgarðsormr, the Serpent of Midgard, who lay coiled through all the seas encompassing Midgard, the world of Men. The Norse name Miðgarðr corresponds to Old English Middan-geard, Middan-eard, which lie behind the later form Middle-earth.

The ‘shadowy ship’ is Naglfar, made of dead men’s nails.

13 Frey (Freyr): the chief god of fertility, of peace and plenty, in Norway and Sweden; Freyja (stanza 17) was his sister.

The ‘deep Dragon’ is the Serpent of Midgard: see note on stanza 12.

I ANDVARA-GULL (Andvari’s Gold)

For the story in §I of the Lay of the Völsungs the sources are the Eddaic poem known as Reginsmál, the Lay of Regin, which is indeed less a poem than fragments of old verse pieced together with prose; a passage in Snorri Sturluson’s version of the Völsung legend in the Prose Edda; and the Völsunga Saga. The few verses in Reginsmál that bear on this part of the narrative (dialogue between Loki and Andvari, and between Loki and Hreidmar after the gold had been paid over) are here and there a model for the Lay, but only lines 5–6 in stanza 8 are a translation (Andvari ek heiti, Óinn hét minn faðir).

Apart from this, Andvara-gull in the Lay is a new poem. It is very allusive, and deliberately so, and I give here in abbreviated form the course of the story as it is known from the prose narratives: for the most part the two versions differ little.

It is told that three of the Æsir, Ódin, Hœnir, and Loki, went out into the world, and they came to a waterfall known as the Falls of Andvari, Andvari being the name of a dwarf who fished there in the form of a pike (Snorri says nothing of Andvari at this point). At that place there was an otter that had caught a salmon, and was eating it on the river bank; but Loki hurled a stone at the otter and killed it. Then the Æsir took up the salmon and the otter and went on their way until they came to the house of a certain Hreidmar. Snorri describes him as a farmer, a man of substance, greatly skilled in magic; in the Saga he is simply an important and wealthy man; whereas in the headnote to this section of the Lay he is ‘a demon’.

The Æsir asked Hreidmar for lodging for the night, saying that they had enough food with them, and they showed Hreidmar their catch; but the otter was Hreidmar’s son Otr, who took the form of an otter when he was fishing (the name Otr and the Norse word otr ‘otter’ being of course the same). Then Hreidmar called out to his other sons, Fáfnir and Regin, and they laid hands on the Æsir and bound them, demanding that they should ransom themselves by filling the otter-skin with gold, and also covering it on the outside with gold so that no part of it could be seen.

Here the prose versions separate. According to Snorri (who had not previously mentioned Andvari) Ódin now sent Loki to Svartálfaheim, the Land of the Dark Elves; it was there that he found the dwarf Andvari who was ‘as a fish in the water’, and Loki caught him in his hands. In the Saga, on the other hand, Loki’s errand was to seek out Rán, the wife of the sea-god Ægir, and get from her the net with which she drew down men drowning in the sea; and with that net he captured the dwarf Andvari, who was fishing in his falls in the form of a pike. This is the story that my father followed (stanza 7).

Andvari ransomed himself with his hoard of gold, attempting to keep back a single little gold ring; but Loki saw it and took it from him (stanza 9). In Snorri’s account only, Andvari begged to keep the ring because with it he could multiply wealth for himself, but Loki said that he should not have one penny left.

Andvari declared that the ring would be the death of any who possessed it, or any of the gold. According to Snorri, ‘Loki said that this seemed very well to him, and he said that this condition should hold good, provided that he himself declared it in the ears of those who should receive the ring.’ Then Loki returned to Hreidmar’s house, and when Ódin saw the ring he desired it, and took it away from the treasure. The otter-skin was filled and covered with the gold of Andvari, but Hreidmar looking at it very closely saw a whisker, and demanded that they should cover that also. Then Ódin drew out Andvari’s ring (Andvaranaut, the possession of Andvari) and covered the hair. But when Ódin had taken up his spear, and Loki his shoes, and they no longer had any need to fear, Loki declared that the curse of Andvari should be fulfilled. And now it has been told (Snorri concludes) why gold is called ‘Otter’s ransom’ (otrgjöld) or ‘forced payment of the Æsir’ (nauðgjald ásanna): see p.36.

An important difference between the two prose versions is that Snorri began his account of the Völsung legend with ‘Andvari’s Gold’, whereas in the Saga this story is introduced much later, and becomes a story told by Regin (son of Hreidmar) to Sigurd before his attack on the dragon. But although my father followed Snorri in this, he nonetheless followed the Saga in giving a brief retelling of ‘Andvari’s Gold’ by Regin to Sigurd in the fifth section of the poem, with a number of verse-lines repeated from their first occurrence (see V.7–11).

1 Of all the Northern divinities Loki is the most enigmatic; ancient Norse literature is full of references to him and stories about him, and it is not possible to characterize him in a short space. But since Loki only appears here in these poems, and in my father’s words concerning him given on p.54, it seems both suitable and sufficient to quote Snorri Sturluson’s description in the Prose Edda:

‘Also counted among the Æsir is Loki, whom some call the mischief-maker of the Æsir, the first father of lies, and the blemish of all gods and men. Loki is handsome and fair of face but evil in his disposition and fickle in his conduct. He excels all others in that cleverness which is called cunning, and he has wiles for every circumstance. Over and over again he has brought the gods into great trouble, but often got them out of it by his guile.’

In this stanza he is called ‘lightfooted Loki’, and in Snorri’s version of the story of Andvari’s Gold it is said, as already noted, that after the payment of the ransom to Hreidmar Ódin took up his spear ‘and Loki his shoes’. Elsewhere Snorri wrote of ‘those shoes with which Loki ran through air and over water’.

Of the god Hoenir no more is said in the Lay than that while Loki went on the left side of Ódin, Hœnir went on his right. In my father’s somewhat mysterious interpretation given on p.54 (iv) he calls the companion of Ódin who walks on his right hand ‘a nameless shadow’, but this must surely be Hœnir, or at least derived from him. However, if there is no end to what is told of Loki in the Norse mythological narratives, very little can now be said of Hœnir; and to my understanding, there is nothing in the vestiges that remain that casts light on the ‘nameless shadow’ that walks beside Ódin.

6 Ásgard is the realm of the Gods (Æsir).

7 Rán: the wife of the sea-god Ægir; see p.189.

8 ‘I bid thee’: I offer thee.

13–15 In these concluding stanzas the references to the hope of Ódin, and Ódin’s choice, have of course no counterparts in the Norse texts.

II SIGNÝ

This is a rendering in verse of elements of the narrative of the earlier chapters of the Völsunga Saga. No old poetry recounting or referring to this story exists apart from a single half-stanza (see the note to stanzas 37–39), but this section of the Lay of the Völsungs can be seen as an imagination of it. It is a selection of moments of dramatic force, and many elements of the prose Saga are omitted; in particular the most savage features of the story are eliminated (see notes to stanzas 30–32, 37–39).

The Gauts of the headnote to this section are the Gautar of Old Norse, dwelling in Gautland, a region of what is now southern Sweden, south of the great lakes. The name Gautar is historically identical with the Old English Geatas, who were Beowulf’s people.

1–2 These two stanzas are an extreme reduction of the opening chapters of the Saga which tell of Völsung’s immediate ancestry in a prosaic fashion: my father clearly found this unsuited to his purpose.

2 ‘child of longing’: Rerir’s wife was for long barren.

4 In the Saga the tree in the midst of King Völsung’s hall is named the Barnstock, and is said to have been an apple-tree.

7 ‘Birds sang blithely’: the birds were sitting in the boughs of the great tree that upheld the hall; so again in stanza 11, and see III.2.

10 King Siggeir and many other guests came to the wedding feast held in King Völsung’s hall.

12–13 In the Saga the old man is described in terms that make it plain that he was Ódin, but he is not named. Here in the Lay he is Grímnir ‘the Masked’, a name of Ódin that does not appear at all in the Saga but is derived from the Eddaic poem Grímnismál.

The ‘standing stem’ in 13 line 3 is the trunk of the Barnstock, into which Ódin thrust the sword.

14 ‘Gaut and Völsung’: Völsung’s children and race are often called Völsungar, Völsungs, as in the name of the Saga, and in the head-note to this section.

16 This was the beginning of hatred and the motive for Siggeir’s attack on Völsung and his sons when they came to Gautland as his guests (21–23); Siggeir was enraged at Sigmund’s answer, but (in the words of the Saga) ‘he was a very wily man, and he behaved as if he were indifferent’.

‘bade’: offered (so also ‘I bid thee’ in I.8); ‘boon’: request.

17–22 It is told in the Saga that on the day following the night of the wedding feast (‘last night I lay / where loath me was’, 19) Siggeir left very abruptly and returned with Signý to Gautland, having invited Völsung and his sons to come as his guests to Gautland three months later (21). Signý met them when they landed to warn them of what Siggeir had prepared for them (22), but (according to the Saga) Völsung would not listen to Signý’s entreaty that he return at once to his own land, nor to her request that she should be allowed to stay with her own people and not return to Siggeir.

20 ‘toft’: homestead.

29 In the Saga the sons of Völsung were set in stocks in the forest to await the old she-wolf who came each night. Signý, on the tenth day, sent her trusted servant to Sigmund, who alone survived, to smear honey over his face and to put some in his mouth. When the wolf came she licked his face and thrust her tongue into his mouth; at which he bit into it. Then the wolf started back violently, pressing her feet against the stocks in which Sigmund was set, so that they were split open; but he held on to the wolf’s tongue so that it was torn out by the roots, and she died. ‘Some men say,’ according to the Saga, ‘that the wolf was King Siggeir’s mother, who had changed herself into this shape by witchcraft.’

While in the Saga the stocks are an important element in the story at this point, in the Lay there is no suggestion of stocks, but only of fetters and shackles; the wolf is ‘torn and tongueless’, but ‘by the tree riven’. See the note on stanzas 30-32.

30–32 This passage is very greatly condensed, and elements in the Saga essential to the narrative are passed over. Thus in the Saga, Signý found Sigmund in the woods, and it is explicit that they decided that he should make a house for himself under the ground, where Signý would provide for his needs. There is nothing in the Saga to explain Signý’s words in the Lay ‘Dwarvish master, thy doors open!’ In the opening prose passage of this section (p.72) it is said that ‘Sigmund dwelt in a cave in the guise of a dwarvish smith.’

In this connection it is curious, if nothing more, to observe that in William Morris’ poem The Story of Sigurd the Volsung Sigmund’s dwelling is explicitly ‘a stony cave’ that was once ‘a house of the Dwarfs’. It is also said in that poem (see the note to stanza 29) that by Siggeir’s orders the men who led the sons of Völsung into the forest cut down the greatest oak-tree that they could find and bound them to it ‘with bonds of iron’; and when the wolf came for Sigmund he ‘burst his bonds’ and slew it with his hands.

Signý had two sons by Siggeir, and when the elder was ten years old she sent him out to Sigmund in the forest to be a help to him should he attempt to avenge Völsung; but the boy, told by Sigmund to make the bread while he himself went out for firewood, was frightened to touch the bag of flour because there was something alive in it. When Sigmund told Signý about this she told him to kill the boy, since he had no heart; and Sigmund did so. The next year Signý sent her second son by Siggeir out into the woods, and things went in the same way.

After that Signý changed shapes with a sorceress, and the sorceress slept with Siggeir for three nights in Signý’s form, while Signý slept with her brother. The son born to them was named Sinfjötli.

33 On lines 5–6 of this stanza see the note to 35–36.

‘bast’: flexible bark, used for making baskets, and for tying.

33–34 In the Saga Sigmund subjected Sinfjötli to the same test as Siggeir’s sons, and when he came back to the underground house Sinfjötli had baked the bread, but he said that he thought that there had been something alive in the flour when he started kneading it. Sigmund laughed, and said that Sinfjötli should not eat the bread he had baked, ‘for you have kneaded in a great venomous snake.’ There is no mention in the Saga of Sinfjötli’s bringing Sigmund’s sword (see note to 37–39).

35–36 A long passage is devoted in the Saga to the ferocious exploits of Sigmund and Sinfjötli in the forest, where they became werewolves; and it is an important point that Sigmund thought that Sinfjötli was the son of Signý and Siggeir (cf. 33 ‘Fair one, thy father / thy face gave not’), possessing the energy and daring of the Völsungs but the evil heart of his father.

37–39 In the Saga Sigmund and Sinfjötli entered Siggeir’s hall and hid themselves behind ale barrels in the outer room; but the two young children of Siggeir and Signý were playing with golden toys, bowling them across the floor of the hall and running along with them, and a gold ring rolled into the room where Sigmund and Sinfjötli sat. One of the children, chasing the ring, ‘saw where two tall, grim men were sitting, with overhanging helms and shining mailcoats’; and he ran back and told his father.

Signý, hearing this, took the children into the outer room and urged Sigmund and Sinfjötli to kill them, since they had betrayed their hiding-place. Sigmund said that he would not kill her children even if they had given him away, but the terrible Sinfjötli made light of it, slew both children, and hurled their bodies into the hall. When Sigmund and Sinfjötli had at last been captured Siggeir had a great burial-mound made of stones and turf; and in the midst of the mound there was set a huge stone slab so that when they were put into it they were separated and could not pass the slab, but could hear each other. But before the mound was covered over Signý threw down a bundle of straw to Sinfjötli, in which was meat. In the darkness of the mound Sinfjötli discovered that Sigmund’s sword was thrust into the meat, and with the sword they were able to saw through the stone slab.

I have said that there is no old poetry treating this story save for one half-stanza, and those verses are cited by the author of the Saga at this point:

ristu af magni

mikla hellu,

Sigmundr, hjörvi,

ok Sinfjötli.

‘They cut with strength the great slab, Sigmund and Sinfjötli, with the sword’.

When they got out of the mound it was night, and everyone was asleep; and bringing up wood they set fire to the hall.

40–41 It was now, when Sigmund told Signý to come forth, that in the Saga she revealed the truth about Sinfjötli – this is no doubt implied in stanza 41 of the Lay, ‘Son Sinfjötli, Sigmund father!’ In her last words, according to the Saga, before she went back into the fire, she declared that she had worked so mightily to achieve vengeance for Völsung that it was impossible for her now to live longer.

III

DAUÐI SINFJÖTLA (The Death of Sinfjötli)

There intervenes now in the Saga, after the deaths of Signý and Siggeir, the history of Helgi Hundingsbani, an originally independent figure who had been connected to the Völsung legend by making him the son of Sigmund and Borghild (only referred to as ‘the Queen’ in this section of the Lay). In this the Saga follows the ‘Helgi lays’ of the Edda; but in his poem my father entirely eliminated this accretion, and Helgi is not mentioned.

The sources for this section of the Lay are the Saga and a short prose passage in the Edda entitled Frá dauða Sinfjötla (Of Sinfjötli’s death): the compiler of the Codex Regius of the Edda evidently wrote this, in the absence of any verses, in order to conclude the histories of Sigmund and Sinfjötli. There are no important differences between the Lay and the old narratives.

1–2 In the Saga Sigmund, returning to his own land, drove out a usurper who had established himself there.

3 ‘Grímnir’s gift’: see II.12–13 and note.

4 In Frá dauða Sinfjötla and in the Saga Sigmund’s queen is named Borghild; in the Lay she is given no name (perhaps because my father regarded the name Borghild as not original in the legend, but entering with the ‘Helgi’ connection). It is not said in the sources that she was taken in war.

6 In both sources Sinfjötli slew Borghild’s brother, not her father; they were suitors for the same woman. In the Saga it is told that Borghild wished to have Sinfjötli driven out of the land, and though Sigmund would not allow this he offered her great riches in atonement; it was at the funeral-feast for her brother that Sinfjötli was murdered.

7 It is told in the Saga, at the time of the bread-making incident, when Sinfjötli kneaded in a poisonous snake (see note to II.33–34), that Sigmund could not be harmed by poison within or without, whereas Sinfjötli could only withstand poison externally; the same is said in Frá dauða Sinfjötla and in the Prose Edda.

9–10 In both sources Sigmund said to Sinfjötli, when Borghild offered him drink for the third time: Láttu grön sía, sonr (‘Strain it through your beard, my son’). Sigmund was very drunk by then, says the Saga, ‘and that is why he said it’.

12 The boatman was Ódin (the verses describing him here are repeated in varied form in IV.8). This is not said in the old sources. In those texts the boatman offered to ferry Sigmund across the fjord, but the boat was too small to take both Sigmund and the body of Sinfjötli, so the body was taken first. Sigmund walked along the fjord, but the boat vanished. The Saga tells that Borghild was banished, and died not long after.

13 in Valhöllu: the Norse dative inflexion is retained for metrical reasons.

IV FŒDDR SIGURÐR (Sigurd born)

After the expulsion of Borghild Sigmund took another wife very much younger than himself (IV.2), and she was the mother of Sigurd. In the Saga and in Fra dauða Sinfjötla her name was Hjördis, the daughter of King Eylimi; whereas in the Lay she is Sigrlinn. This difference depends on the view that a transference of names took place: that originally in the Norse legends Hjördis was the mother of Helgi (see the note to III), while Sigrlinn was Sigmund’s wife and Sigurd’s mother. After this transference Sigrlinn became the mother of Helgi (and so appears in the Eddaic poem Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar, the Lay of Helgi son of Hjörvarð) and Hjördis became the mother of Sigurd. In the German poem Nibelungenlied, written about the beginning of the thirteenth century, Sieglind (Sigrlinn) was King Siegmund’s queen, the mother of Siegfried (Sigurd).

The narrative in this section of the Lay has been changed and reduced from that in the Saga (to which there is no poetry corresponding in the Edda). In the Saga, King Lyngvi was a rival to Sigmund for the hand of Hjördis, but Hjördis rejected him; and it was Lyngvi, not the seven suitors, ‘sons of kings’, of the Lay (stanzas 3 and 5), who came with great force against Sigmund in his own land.

Hjördis accompanied only by a bondwoman was sent into the forest and remained there during the fierce battle. In the Saga as in the Lay (stanzas 8–9) Ódin appeared, and Sigmund’s sword (‘Grímnir’s gift’, 5) broke against the upraised spear of the god, and he was slain (on the significance of Ódin’s intervention see the note on the section Upphaf, pp.185–86).

As in the Lay, in the Saga Hjördis (Sigrlinn) found Sigmund where he lay mortally wounded on the battlefield, and he spoke to her, saying that there was no hope of healing and he did not wish for it, since Ódin had claimed him (stanza 11); he spoke also of Sigurd, her son unborn, and told her to keep the shards of the sword, which should be made anew.

Immediately upon Sigmund’s death, a further fleet came in to the shore, commanded, it is said in the Saga, by Alf son of King Hjálprek of Denmark (stanza 14 of the Lay, where the newcomers are not named). Seeing this Hjördis ordered her bondwoman to exchange clothes with her, and to declare that she was the king’s daughter. When Alf returned with the women, still disguised, to his own country the truth of the subterfuge emerged. Alf promised to marry Hjördis after her child was born, and so it came about that Sigurd was brought up in King Hjálprek’s household. In the Lay the curious story of the disguising of Sigrlinn (Hjördis) is reduced to the words ‘The bride of Sigmund / as a bondwoman / over sounding seas / sadly journeyed’.

11 ‘wanhope’: despair.

13 In the Saga Sigmund named the sword that should be made from the shards Gramr; this appears in the next section of the Lay, V.18.

V REGIN

The sources of the story in this section of the Lay are not only the Völsunga Saga but also poems of the Edda on which the Saga drew: the conclusion of Reginsmál (see the note to section I, p.188), and Fáfnismál; the story is also briefly told by Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda, whereby he explains why ‘gold’ is called in poetry ‘the abode of Fáfnir’ and ‘Grani’s burden’.

There is little, in strictly narrative terms, in this part of the Lay that is not found in these sources, and in places (notably in the dialogue between Sigurd and Regin after Fáfnir’s death) the tenor of the verses of Fáfnismál is followed; but only here and there do they correspond at all closely.

The legend of ‘Andvari’s gold’ as told in section I of the Lay does not extend beyond the departure of the Æsir from Hreidmar’s house after the payment of the ransom for his son Otr. In the note to that section (p.190) I have noticed that Snorri Sturluson in his version of the Völsung legend began with ‘Andvari’s gold’, whereas in the Saga it is not introduced until much later, and enters as a story told by Regin himself, son of Hreidmar, to Sigurd before his attack on the dragon. In this section of the Lay we reach that point.

After telling that Sigurd grew up in the house of King Hjálprek the Saga says no more than that Regin became his fosterfather, and that he taught Sigurd many accomplishments, including a knowledge of runes and many languages (see stanza 2). Snorri, on the other hand, continues the story of Hreidmar and the gold of Andvari beyond the point where my father left it at the end of section I of the Lay.

‘What more is to be said of the gold?’ Snorri wrote, and then told this story. Hreidmar took the gold, but his other sons Fáfnir and Regin claimed for themselves some part of the blood-money paid for their brother. Hreidmar would give them nothing (‘Redgolden rings I will rule alone’, I.15); and Fáfnir and Regin slew their father. Then Regin demanded that Fáfnir should share the treasure with him equally, but Fáfnir replied that there was small chance of that, since he had killed his father for the sake of it; and he told Regin to be gone, or else he would suffer the same fate as their father.

Then Fáfnir took the helm which Hreidmar had owned, and set it upon his head – the helm which is called œgishjálmr, Helm of Terror: all living things fear it. Then Fáfnir going up onto Gnitaheiði made himself a lair; and he turned himself into a dragon, and laid himself down upon the gold (as Glaurung did in Nargothrond). But Regin fled away, and came to King Hjálprek, and became his smith; Sigurd was his fosterson.

Having already told the story of the origin of the hoard, Snorri continued now with the story of Regin’s dealings with Sigurd and the slaying of Fáfnir. With that story this section of the Lay is concerned; but before reaching it, as noted earlier (see pp.190–91), my father followed the Saga in introducing here the story of Andvari’s gold (or, in the case of the Lay, reintroducing it) as a story told by Regin in answer to Sigurd’s demanding why he egged him on to slay Fáfnir. In this second appearance of the story in the Lay verse-lines are repeated or nearly repeated in a characteristic way (compare I.2–6, 9 with V.7–11), but the Æsir are excluded, and Loki is replaced by a nameless ‘robber roving ruthless-handed’ (8). In V.12–14, however, Regin’s tale now brings in the slaying of Hreidmar (by Fáfnir – that Regin had a part in it is not mentioned, either in the Saga or in the Lay), the strife between the sons, and the transformation of Fáfnir into a dragon ‘on Gnitaheiði’.

An important element in the story as told in the Saga is entirely absent from this section of the Lay. After the making of the sword Gram and the acquisition of the horse Grani, Sigurd declared to Regin that he would not attack Fáfnir until he had avenged his father; and setting out with a great host and fleet provided by King Hjálprek he achieved this in a bloody battle in which he slew King Lyngvi. But a form of the story of Sigurd’s revenge appears in the Lay at a later point in the narrative (VII.24–29).

14 Gnitaheiði: this name in Old Norse is Gnitaheiðr, of which the second element is Old Norse heiðr ‘heath’, and it is variously anglicized as ‘Gnitaheid’, ‘Gnitaheith’, or ‘Gnitaheath’. In my father’s poems it appears several times but always in the combination ‘on Gnitaheiði’. This may be a retention of the dative case, or it may be a use of the modern Icelandic form of the word, which is heiði.

17–18 It was Sigurd who broke the two swords by striking them on an anvil; whereupon, according to the Saga, he went to his mother and asked whether it were true that Sigmund had entrusted to her the fragments of his sword, and she gave them to him. On the name Gram (Gramr) see the note to IV.13.

20 Both Snorri Sturluson and the Saga know of Sigurd’s testing of the sharpness of Gram by its cutting of the tuft of wool when it drifted in the water onto the sword’s edge; but only in the Lay is the river called the Rhine (Rín in Norse).

‘sheer’: clear.

21 ‘Now rede me’: Now give me counsel.

22–24 Only in the Saga is this story found of how Sigurd came to possess his grey horse Grani (very frequently named in poems of the Edda). The old man is once again Ódin (with the description here compare II.12, III.12, IV.8).

The name Busiltarn is derived from the Saga; the Norse form is Busiltjörn, which was the form first written by my father in the manuscript of the Lay, later corrected in pencil. The English word tarn, a small lake, is derived from the Norse word; but in the Saga the Busiltarn is said to be a river, as it clearly is also in the Lay.

Sleipnir was the name of Ódin’s eight-legged horse.

25 Gand: Regin’s horse is not named elsewhere, but this must be the Old Norse word gandr (contained in ‘Gandalf’). Its original or primary meaning is uncertain, but it has reference to sorcery and magic, both beings and things, and especially to the staff used in witchcraft; it is also use of wolves. The word gandreið is used of the witches’ nocturnal ride.

In a lecture on the text of Fáfnismál my father remarked on the huge height of the cliff from which Fáfnir drank as a good detail in the Saga absent from the poem, since Sigurd thus ‘first got a notion of what he was in for.’

26 ‘long there lurked he’: i.e. Sigurd. In the prose preamble to Fáfnismál in the Codex Regius, as also in the Saga and in Snorri Sturluson’s brief account, Sigurd dug a pit in the path which the dragon took when he crawled to the water (the ‘hollow’ of stanzas 26–27, 29, which is not said to have been made by Sigurd); in the Saga an old man (Ódin) came to Sigurd while he was digging it and advised him to dig other trenches to carry off the dragon’s blood. On this matter my father noted in a lecture:

Ódin and his advice, however, do not appear very intelligible, and the intrusion of Ódin has perhaps been imitated from other places (e.g. the choosing of Grani). The several pits do not seem of much use, for in any case Sigurd has got to be in one, and it is only in the one in which he is (immediately under the wound) that the blood is likely to pour down. The Saga version is due to harping on Ódin, and to an appreciation that the inherited plot did not paint Sigurd’s dragon-slaying (which is later referred to as his great title to fame) in the best light. It could not be altered in manner, and therefore the dragon and his poisonousness must be magnified; but it is not successfully done.

His view was that the original significance of the pit was to enable Sigurd to escape the blast of flame which passed over his head (cf. 27, lines 1–3).

30 In Fáfnismál, repeated in the Saga, Sigurd, in answer to Fáfnir’s question, replies that he is called göfugt dýr, that is ‘noble beast’; and a prose note at this point in the Codex Regius explains that ‘Sigurd concealed his name, because it was believed in ancient times that the word of a dying man might have great power if he cursed his foe by his name.’ My father observed that this note was ‘doubtless perfectly correct for the original writer of the poem, whose audience were probably sufficiently of the “ancient times” not to need the explanation!’ He said also that ‘the mysterious words göfugt dýr are probably meant to be obscure, even nonsensical’, though they might be ‘a riddling way of saying “man”.’

33 ‘glamoured’: enchanted.

34 Sigurd’s words in this stanza refer to the œgishjálmr ‘Helm of Terror’ which Heidmar possessed and which Fáfnir took to wear himself: see p.205, and stanza 14. At the words ‘hell now seize him!’ Fáfnir died.

36–41 My father declared the ‘undermeaning’ of Regin’s ‘dark words’ in his preamble to this section of the Lay; and in notes for a lecture (written in pencil at great speed and now not entirely legible) he discussed in detail the relationship in this episode between the Saga and Fáfnismál, seeking to determine not only how the writer of the Saga compressed and modified the verses but why he did so. I give here, with some slight editing, a part of this discussion, since it well illustrates his critical treatment of such problems in the Edda.

He begins with a summary of the dialogue of Regin and Sigurd after the death of Fáfnir in the Saga (I give references to the stanzas and lines of the Lay in brackets).

After the death of Fáfnir Regin came to Sigurd and said: ‘You have won a great victory: your glory from it will be eternal’ [35, 1–4]. Then Regin is suddenly or affects to be suddenly stricken with disquiet – ‘he looks upon the ground for a long while’ and says with great emotion ‘it is my brother you have killed and I cannot be accounted innocent of this’ [36, 5–8]. Sigurd dries his sword on the grass, and simply replies ‘you were a long way off at the time when I tested the sword’ (implying therefore ‘innocent enough!’) [37, 1–4].

Regin counters with the fact that he made the sword [37, 5]; Sigurd counters with ‘brave heart is better than sharp sword in battle’ [38, 3–4].

Regin does not rebut this, but repeats again ‘with great emotion’ almost his exact words ‘You slew my brother, &c.’ Then Regin cut out the dragon’s heart, drank the dragon’s blood, and asked Sigurd as a sole boon (no sort of reason for which is given) to roast the heart for him.

The repetition by Regin of the words ‘You killed my brother and I can hardly be accounted innocent’ is not a feature of Fáfnismál. Does it serve an artistic purpose – or is it just accidental, due to some confusion in the saga-writer’s source, or in the handing down of the saga? It is probably intentional, and perhaps not bad. The saga-writer has constructed a picture of Regin, already plotting Sigurd’s removal, and trying as it were to justify himself to himself. Scornfully relieved of any share of responsibility by Sigurd, he contents himself with mere repetition – he adheres to his remorse, and to his ‘You slew my brother’ ( i.e. his vengeance).

After such words Sigurd should have needed no igður [the birds whose voices he could understand, see 41, 8 and 43, 1–3]. That the brother of one you had slain was unsafe was learnt almost at the mother’s knee, certainly on the father’s lap, in Scandinavia – especially when he went out of his way to point it out to you.

There is a curious absence of explanation of the reason why Sigurd must roast the heart. The real reason is of course that Sigurd must cook the heart so as to hear the birds. Fáfnismál supplies a not overwhelming but sufficient reason – ek mun sofa ganga [I shall go to sleep] (we may presume, after the potent draught of dragon’s blood) [39, 5–8, and 40]. Whether there ever was a better reason – connected with this remnant of very ancient belief, the eating of flesh and drinking of blood (of foes especially) to obtain their wisdom and power [40, 5–8; 46, 1–4] we perhaps can no longer say.

It may be noted that Snorri Sturluson says that Regin expressly proposed to Sigurd as terms of reconciliation for the slaying of Fáfnir, that he roast the heart for him.

39 Ridil: Old Norse Riðill, Regin’s sword; Snorri names it Refill.

42–44 In Fáfnismál there are seven stanzas ascribed (in a prose linking-passage) to the words of the birds (of a kind called igður, of uncertain meaning) chattering in the thicket, whose voices Sigurd could at once understand after the blood from the dragon’s heart touched his tongue; but these stanzas are in two different metres. The poem Fáfnismál is not in the verse-form fornyrðislag in which the greater number of the poems of the Edda are written, but in ljóðaháttr. In this metre the stanza falls into two halves of three lines each, of which the third line in each half usually has three stressed elements and double (or treble) alliteration within itself. Only three of the ‘bird-verses’ are in ljóðaháttr, the others being in fornyrðislag; and my father argued forcefully and in detail that the fornyrðislag verses come from another poem (see further the note to 49–54).

The three ljóðaháttr verses, he held, are spoken by two birds, with two main motives selected : gold, fear of treachery, and gold repeated. This is the basis for these three stanzas in the Lay (though the suggestion in 42, 5–6 that Sigurd should eat Fáfnir’s heart himself is introduced from one of the other verses); but – rather oddly – they are cast in ljóðaháttr, thus apparently marking them out as intrusive, since the Lay is in fornyrðislag.

To illustrate the form as it appears in Old Norse I give here the first of the three ljóðaháttr verses with a close translation:

Höfði skemra láti hann inn hára þul

Fara til heljar heðan!

Öllu gulli þá kná hann einn ráða,

fjölð, því er und Fáfni lá.

(Shorter by a head, / let him send the grey-haired wizard / hence to hell! All the gold / then can he possess alone, / the wealth, that under Fáfnir lay.)

46–48 In the Saga Sigurd ate some only of the dragon’s heart, and some he set aside. The purpose of this is seen later in the saga, where it is told that at some time after the wedding of Sigurd and Gudrún ‘Sigurd gave Gudrún some of Fáfnir’s heart to eat, and thereafter she was far more grim than before, and wiser also.’ This element is excluded from the Lay; my father considered it ‘a late piece of machinery to explain Gudrún’s tangled psychology.’

These verses derive from a prose passage in Fáfnismál, closely similar to that in the Saga, which tells that after the death of Regin Sigurd rode on Grani following the tracks of Fáfnir to his lair, which was standing open. The doors and door-posts were of iron, as were all the beams of the house, which was dug down into the earth (46). Sigurd found there a vast store of gold and filled two great chests with it; he took the Helm of Terror and a golden mailcoat and many other precious things, and he loaded them onto Grani; but the horse would not move until Sigurd leaped upon his back.

49 ‘their wit he knew not’: this very unusual use of the word ‘wit’ seems in the context to be equivalent to ‘meaning’, ‘signification’.

49–54 In Fáfnismàl, after Sigurd has slain Regin and eaten the dragon’s heart he hears the igður again; and these five verses are again in fornyrðislag (see the note to 42–44). There is no indication of how many birds spoke, but the first two verses concern Gudrún, and the last three concern a Valkyrie on the mount of Hindarfell, surrounded by fire, sleeping: Ódin stabbed her with the thorn, for she had felled a warrior against his command. See the note on 54 below.

My father held that these verses, like the previous ‘bird-verses’ in fornyrðislag, came from a poem ‘which enlarged on the situation, and probably attempted through the bird-tradition to tell more of the tale’- a trace of a poem that attempted ‘to compress a great deal of the story into one situation.’ While accepting that ‘it is useless to discuss which bird says what’, he thought the guess that one bird speaks the verses concerning Gudrún and a second those about the Valkyrie ‘as good as any’.

In the Lay he did however retain this second group of ‘bird-verses’ (or more accurately, composed verses that echo their meaning), and gave them to a raven (those about the Valkyrie) and a finch (those about Gudrún), and interlaced them. But he displaced them to follow Sigurd’s entry into Fáfnir’s lair and his loading Grani with the treasure that he found there, so that these birds are speaking of things that may lie ahead for Sigurd as he rides away from Gnitaheiði; whereas in Fáfnismál the prose passage cited in the note to 46–48 follows the second group of ‘bird-verses’.

54 ‘her power wielding, / victory swaying as Valkyrie’. In northern legend and poetry the course and outcome of battles was governed by Valkyries, demonic warrior-women sent out as emissaries of Ódin.

The word Valkyrja means ‘chooser of the slain’: it is given to them to determine who is to die, and to award victory. Perhaps the most striking example of this conception is found in the Hákonarmál, a poem composed in the tenth century on the death of King Hákon the Good of Norway, son of King Harald Fairhair. The poem opens thus:

Göndul and Skögul Gautatýr sent

to choose who of kings of Yngvi’s race

should go to Ódin and dwell in Valhöll.

Göndul and Skögul are Valkyries; Gautatýr is a name of Ódin. In the poem King Hákon is pictured sitting on the ground with his shield rent and his mailshirt gashed, listening to the words of the Valkyries.

Then said Göndul, as she leant on the shaft of her spear,

‘Now will the might of the Gods grow greater,

since they have summoned Hákon with a great host

to their dwellings.’

The king heard what the Valkyries were saying

as they sat on their horses, thoughtful their

countenance,

with helms on their heads and their shields held

before them.

Then Hákon speaks to the Valkyrie named Skögul:

‘Why have you decided the battle thus, Geirskögul?

We have deserved victory of the Gods.’

‘We have brought it about,’ said Skögul, ‘that you

have held the field, and your foes have fled

away.

Now we must ride to the green homes of the Gods, to tell to Ódin that a mighty king is coming to him.’

VI BRYNHILDR

In the note to V. 46–48 I have given the content of the prose passage provided in the Codex Regius describing how Sigurd entered Fáfnir’s lair and took from it the great treasure of gold, which he loaded in chests on his horse Grani. This passage is treated in editions of the Edda as the conclusion of the poem Fáfnismál; but in fact it continues without break or new title into the story of Sigurd’s encounter with the Valkyrie asleep on Hindarfell, and this part is treated as the prose introduction to a strange work to which the name Sigrdrífumál is given.

This latter part of the prose passage, which is found in closely similar form in the Saga, tells that Sigurd rode up onto Hindarfell (Hindarfjall ) and turned south. On the mountain he saw a great light, as of a fire burning, and it lit up the sky; and when he came to it there stood a shield-wall (skjaldborg), and above it a banner. Sigurd went in to the skjaldborg, and saw a man there lying asleep, with all his armour and weapons. First he took the helmet from his head; and then he saw that it was a woman. The hauberk was so tight that it seemed to have grown into the flesh. Then with his sword Gram he cut the hauberk from the neck and along both sleeves, and he took the hauberk off her; and she woke, and sat up, and saw Sigurd.

It will be seen that stanzas 2–4 of the Lay follow the content of this prose passage quite closely, with the ‘wall of woven shields’, the standard, and ‘her corslet fast as on flesh growing’; but the leaping of the flames by Grani is an addition in the Lay, taken from Sigurd’s second visit to Brynhild, when he came to her in Gunnar’s shape. On the occasion of his first coming to her the sources say no more than that he ‘went in’ to the skjaldborg. This word, which is found both in the Saga and in the prose passage in the Edda, is often interpreted to mean here a tower, or a fortress, but my father referred in other writing to Brynhild having ‘surrounded herself with a wall of flame’.

With the Valkyrie’s first words to Sigurd the verses of the so-called Sigrdrífumál begin:

Hvat beit brynju?

Hvi brá ek svefni?

Hverr feldi af mér

fölvar nauðir?

What bit the mail?

How am I roused from sleep?

Who has cast down from me

the pale bonds?

Then in this opening verse Sigurd replied that the son of Sigmund with the sword of Sigurd had cut her free. This verse is in fornyrðislag, but the poem that follows is in ljóðaháttr (see note to V.42–44), with a few stanzas in fornyrðislag. The Valkyrie celebrates her awakening in verse that is echoed in the Lay in stanzas 5–6, and then says:

Long did I sleep, long was I cast in sleep,

long are the ills of men!

Ódin ordained it that I could not break

the runes of slumber.

There follows then in the Codex Regius manuscript another prose passage beginning ‘She named herself Sigrdrífa, and she was a Valkyrie’; she told Sigurd that two kings had fought, that Ódin had promised victory to one of them, but the Valkyrie had felled him in the battle. In retribution for this ‘Ódin stabbed her with the sleep-thorn’ (as in the words of the Raven in V.52), and said that never again should she win victory in battle, but that she should wed. ‘And I said to Ódin that in return I made a vow that I would marry no man who knew fear’ (the same words are used in the Saga). In the version of Snorri Sturluson she vowed to wed none but the man who should dare to ride through the fire that surrounded her dwelling. In her oath in the Lay (VI.8) the original text had ‘world’s renown’: I have adopted the late change to ‘chosen’ and capitalized the ‘w’.

The name Sigrdríf or Sigrdrífa of the sleeping Valkyrie has given rise to a great deal of speculative discussion. In the last of the five ‘bird-verses’ that constitute the end of Fáfnismál (and which are represented in the Lay by stanzas V.50–54) there is a reference to ‘the sleep of Sigrdríf’, and in the prose passage just cited she is twice named Sigrdrífa. It has been supposed that this name is unreal, a misunderstanding on the part of the compiler of the Codex Regius, who took the word in the Fáfnismál verse to be a proper name, whereas it is in fact a descriptive term of a Valkyrie, perhaps meaning ‘giver of victory’, used of Brynhild. In the Saga the Valkyrie on Hindarfell is called Brynhild; while Snorri Sturluson says that she named herself Hildr (which means ‘battle’), but adds that ‘she is called Brynhild, and she was a Valkyrie’.

On the other hand, it has been held that ‘Sigrdrífa’ and ‘Brynhild’ were originally two distinct beings who came later to be identified; and thus ‘Sigrdrífa’ becomes an element in the most intractable problem of the Norse Völsung legend, the treatment in the sources of Brynhild in two altogether distinct and incompatible ways. The Lay itself provides no evidence of my father’s view of the name ‘Sigrdrífa’, which does not occur in it. See further the Note on Brynhild, p.243.

The prose passage in the Codex Regius ends, after the Valkyrie’s words to Sigurd concerning her vow, by his asking her ‘to teach him wisdom’, and there follows a stanza in which Brynhild brings him ale brewed with good spells and gamanrúna, which may be translated as ‘joyful runes’ or ‘gladness runes’. On this is founded stanza 12 in the Lay: the last lines of this, ‘rimmed with runes of running laughter’, suggest that my father was thinking of runes graven on the cup.

Of the Sigrdrífumál he remarked: ‘This poem, more than almost any other in the Edda, is a composite thing of more or less accidental growth, and not as one poet left it’; and following the verse about the bringing of ale there is a long series of verses concerned with rune-lore (the magical use of runes, for example victory-runes, speech-runes, wave-runes, birth-runes, and the places on which they should be carved). ‘It does not need much persuasion’, he said, to ‘convince one that all this stuff is accretion. It has no connection with Sigurd’s later life. Its cause is gamanrúna. It is very interesting and important, but it does not concern the Völsungs.’

It is remarkable that the author of the Völsunga Saga included all these verses of runic lore, as verses, in his text. My father saw in this a good example of the saga-writer’s method: ‘Nearly all of this has no point or significance for the tale, is probably a late addition, is not fit for prose; here was a chance if anywhere for omission, if the compiler had been inspired with a truly artistic purpose.’

There is naturally no vestige of these verses in the Lay. In the Eddaic poem the Valkyrie now gave to Sigurd a series of eleven counsels. This element appears, though in greatly reduced form, in the Lay (stanzas 15–16); my father believed them to be, unlike the rune-lore verses, part of the original poem, since they can for the most part be related to Sigurd’s story.

No more is to be learned from the Sigrdrífumál about the first meeting of Sigurd and the Valkyrie beyond her counsels to him, for no more of the poem is preserved: it is here that the ‘great lacuna’ of the Poetic Edda begins. This is the calamitous loss from the Codex Regius of a whole gathering, probably of eight leaves (see p.28): my father guessed that those leaves contained perhaps 200–300 stanzas. For this vitally important part of the Völsung legend there is no Eddaic poetry, except for four fornyrðislag stanzas quoted in the Völsunga Saga; and thus from this point the sources are the Saga and the very brief version in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. The lacuna ends, in terms of the Lay, at stanza 46 in its last section.

My father believed that the troth-plighting of Sigurd and Brynhild (stanza 19), which is found in the Saga immediately after a prose paraphrase of the counsels, derived from the lost conclusion of the Sigrdrífumál.

20–23 The Saga, after the words ‘and this they swore to each other with oaths’, continues at once ‘Now Sigurd rides away’. The conclusion of this section of the Lay, referred to in the prose preamble that precedes it (‘They depart together, but the pride of Brynhild causes her to bid Sigurd depart and come back to her only when he has won all men’s honour, and a kingdom’), is a development altogether peculiar to the Lay.

VII GUÐRÚN

When in the Lay Sigurd parted from Brynhild his journey took him by intention to the land of the Gjúkings, as is seen from the words (VI.23) ‘green ran the roads / that Grani strode’ together with those of the Finch (V.51) ‘Green run the roads / to Gjúki’s land’. So it is also in Snorri’s greatly condensed account.

In the Saga, on the other hand, he rode from Hindarfell until he came to the house of a great lord named Heimir. He was married to Brynhild’s sister Bekkhild, who stayed at home and did fine needlework, whereas Brynhild wore helmet and hauberk and went to battle (hence their names, Norse bekkr ‘bench’, of the long seats in an old Scandinavian hall, and brynja ‘hauberk, coat of mail’). Sigurd stayed in that house for a long time in high honour.

We are then told that Brynhild was Heimir’s foster-daughter, and that she had come back to his house and was living apart and working on a tapestry that showed the deeds of Sigurd, the slaying of the dragon, and the taking of the treasure. One day Sigurd’s hawk flew up to a high tower and settled by a window. Sigurd climbed up after it, and saw within a woman of great beauty working on a tapestry of his deeds, and he knew that it was Brynhild.

On the next day he went to her, and at the end of a strange conversation she said to him: ‘It is not fated that we should dwell together; I am a shield-maiden and I wear a helmet among the warrior-kings. To them I give aid in battle; and battle is not hateful to me.’ But when Sigurd said that if this were so ‘the pain that lies therein is harder to bear than a sharp sword’ Brynhild replied that she would muster men for battle, ‘but you will wed Gudrún, Gjúki’s daughter.’ ‘No king’s daughter shall beguile me,’ said Sigurd; ‘I am not double-hearted; and I swear by the gods that I shall have you or no woman else.’ Then Brynhild spoke in the same way; and Sigurd gave her a gold ring, ok svörðu nú eiða af nýju, ‘and they renewed their oaths’. Then Sigurd left her, and the chapter in the Saga ends.

Brynhild is here the daughter of King Budli (Buðli) and the sister of Atli (Attila), and Snorri says the same.

Of this extraordinary development in the story of Sigurd and Brynhild there is no trace in the Lay; but I postpone discussion of the treatment of this part of the legend by the author of the Saga to the end of my commentary on the Lay (Note on Brynhild, p.241).

The Saga now turns to the kingdom of Gjúki, which lay ‘south of the Rhine’, to his wife Grímhild (described as a sorceress, and of a grim disposition), his three sons Gunnar, Högni, and Gotthorm, and his daughter Gudrún (Guðrún). It is told that one day Gudrún spoke to one of her waiting-women and told her that she was downcast because of a dream.

With Gudrún’s dream the Lay takes up at the beginning of section VII, but my father treated this episode very differently from the form it has in the Saga. In the latter, Gudrún dreamt that she had in her hand a marvellous hawk with golden feathers: she cared for nothing more than that hawk, and she would rather lose all her wealth than lose it. The woman interpreted the dream to mean that some king’s son would come to ask for Gudrún; he would be a fine man and she would greatly love him. Then Gudrún said: ‘It grieves me that I do not know who he is; but let us go to seek Brynhild, for she will know.’

And so they did. Gudrún and her attendants came to Brynhild’s hall, which was all adorned with gold and stood on a hill. There Gudrún related to Brynhild her dream: but not the dream that she had spoken about before, for now she told of the great stag with golden hair which appears in the Lay. But in his poem (VII.1–5) my father combined and interwove the two episodes, rejecting the dream of the hawk; and the interpreter of Gudrún’s dream(s) is neither the waiting-woman nor Brynhild, but Grímhild, her mother. The dream of the stag in the Lay (VII.2–4) derives in content from the Saga, but there is an important difference. In the Saga Gudrún says to Brynhild that it was ‘you’ who shot down the stag at her feet, and it was ‘you’ who gave her a wolf-cub which spattered her with her brothers’ blood; whereas in the Lay it is ‘a woman wildly / on the wind riding’ who brought down the golden hart, and it was an unidentified ‘they’ who gave her the wolf.

In the Saga, when Gudrún has recounted her dream, Brynhild says to her: ‘I will explain it as it will come to pass. Sigurd, whom I chose to be my husband, will come to you. Grímhild will give him mead that is drugged, which will bring great affliction to us all. You will have him, but you will soon lose him; then you will be wedded to King Atli. You will lose your brothers, and then you will slay Atli.’ Then Gudrún expressed her sense of ‘overwhelming sorrow’ to know such things, and returned to her father’s house.

It may be that this episode was derived by the writer of the Saga from a poem in which the substance of the story was told prophetically, as is seen elsewhere in the Edda; but as a simple element in the narrative, recording Brynhild’s power of foretelling, it is grotesque. As my father observed, ‘Foreknowledge is a dangerous element in a tale.’ In the Lay he of course got rid in its entirety of Gudrún’s visit to Brynhild, and Grímhild offers no interpretation of the dream, but tries to calm her with soothing words about the weather (as does the waiting-woman in the Saga) and the idea that ‘dreams oft token / the dark by light, / good by evil’. Gone too are Brynhild’s sister Bekkhild; Atli son of Budli likewise disappears as Brynhild’s brother. Where Brynhild dwelt after she parted from Sigurd we are not told: ‘to her land she turned / lonely shining’, ‘to her land she came, / long the waiting’ (VI.23). At the beginning of VIII she is seen in her courts of ‘wealth and splendour’, awaiting Sigurd (1–2).

In the Saga, as in the Lay, Sigurd now arrives at King Gjúki’s halls, riding on Grani with his treasure. He was received with honour; and he rode abroad with Gunnar and Högni and was foremost among them. Grímhild observed how deeply he loved Brynhild, and how much he spoke of her, but she thought how fine a thing it would be if he, with his great qualities and his vast riches, should marry Gudrún and remain among them. She prepared therefore a potion and gave it to Sigurd to drink; and with that drink he lost all memory of Brynhild.

In the Lay, at the feast held on his arrival, a new element enters in the songs sung to the harp by Gunnar (of war between the Goths and the Huns, 14–15), and by Sigurd (of Fáfnir and the golden hoard, and of Brynhild on Hindarfell, 16–18); and there is an account of a campaign led by Sigurd to the old land of the Völsungs in vengeance for the death of Sigmund (24–29). In the Saga this took place far earlier, and was carried out with the aid of King Hjálprek (see pp.205–6), whereas in the Lay he was aided by the Gjúkings. Ódin appears here in the Lay as he does in the Saga, but his rôle is altogether different. In the Saga (deriving from verses of Reginsmál) the ships were caught in a great storm, but Ódin stood on a headland and called to them, and when they took him on board the storm abated. In the Lay (28–29) he appears at the end of the fighting, accosting Sigurd at the old house of Völsung, now roofless and the great tree that upheld it dead, to warn him that his fate does not lie in the land of his ancestors; but Ódin says ‘Now king thou art / of kings begotten, / a bride calls thee / over billowing seas’, and after his return Sigurd recalls the words of Brynhild, ‘a queen was I once, / and a king shall wed’ (VI.22, VII.35).

8 ‘Niflung land, Niflung lord’, and 12 ‘Niflungs’: on the name Niflungar Snorri Sturluson was specific: Gjúkingar, þeir eru ok kallaðir Niflungar, ‘ the Gjúkings, who are also called Niflungs’. In this commentary, conceived fairly strictly as an elucidation of the treatment of the Norse Völsung legend in my father’s Lay, it is unnecessary to enter even cursorily into the deep matter of origins that lies behind the name Niflungs (German Nibelungen, Nibelungs); but something is said of this in Appendix A, pp.356–63.

14 Mirkwood: Not occurring in the Saga, the Norse name Myrkviðr, Anglicized as ‘Mirkwood’, was used of a dark boundary-forest, separating peoples, and is found in poems of the Edda in different applications; but it seems probable that in its origin it represented a memory in heroic legend of the great forest that divided the land of the Goths from the land of the Huns far off in the south and east. This is what the name means in the Eddaic poem Atlakviða, the Lay of Atli (Attila), whence its appearance here in the Lay.

Danpar: Like Mirkwood, this name is not found in the Saga, but occurs in Atlakviða and elsewhere in Old Norse poetry (see further the note to stanza 86 in the Lay of Gudrún). It is a survival of the Gothic name of the Russian river Dnieper.

15 ‘Borgund lords’: This expression occurs again in stanza 20. My father derived it from the notable words in a verse of the Atlakviða, where Gunnar is called vin Borgunda, lord of the Burgundians. Nowhere else in Norse is Gunnar recognised as a Burgundian, nor is the word found as the name of a people; but very remarkably the same expression is found in one of the fragments of the Old English poem Waldere, where Guðhere is called wine Burgenda. Both the Old Norse Gunnarr and the Old English Guðhere are descended from the name of the historical Burgundian king Gundahari, who was killed by the Huns in the year 437. For an account of the historical origins of the Gjúkings see Appendix A.

Budli’s brother: in the Saga the killing of the brother of King Budli, father of Atli and Brynhild, by the Gjúkings is mentioned at a later point in the narrative.

28 ‘and blind his eye’: Ódin had only one eye: according to the myth that he gave up one of his eyes as a pledge in order to gain a drink from the spring of Mímir, the water of wisdom at the root of the Tree of the World.

38 It is not said in the Lay as it is in the Saga that after drinking Grímhild’s potion Sigurd lost all memory of Brynhild: ‘he drained it laughing, / then sat unsmiling’; but the meaning is clear from IX.4.

39 ‘glamoured’: a word used in V.33 and 47: ‘enchanted’, in the sense of being brought under a spell.

VIII SVIKIN BRYNHILDR (Brynhild Betrayed)

In the Saga the wedding of Sigurd to Gudrún follows, and the swearing of brotherhood between Sigurd and the sons of Gjúki (stanzas 7–10 in the Lay); it is said that by this time he had dwelt among the Gjúkings for two and a half years. After they were wedded Sigurd gave Gudrún some of Fáfnir’s heart to eat: see the note to V.46–48. They had a son named Sigmund.

The coming of Ódin to Brynhild among the suitor kings (2–5) is peculiar to the Lay. It seems (stanza 6) that it was only after his coming that the fire rose about her hall, and that Brynhild conceived it as a barrier against all comers save Sigurd. The description of the fire in the Lay resembles that in VI.2, when on Hindarfell Sigurd saw Brynhild’s fire as a ‘fence of lightning’ that ‘high to heavenward / hissed and wavered’.

In the Saga there follows Grímhild’s counselling of Gunnar to woo Brynhild (stanzas 12–17 in the Lay); and Sigurd is said to have been as eager for the match as were Gjúki and his sons. But they rode first to King Budli, Brynhild’s father, to gain his assent before they went to the hall of Heimir, Brynhild’s fosterfather (see p.223). Heimir said that her hall was not far off, and that he thought that she would only marry the man who would ride through the fire that blazed about it. In the Lay Budli and Heimir are of course eliminated.

The story in the Saga of the refusal of Gunnar’s horse to enter the fire, the loan of Grani, the refusal of Grani to bear Gunnar, and the shape-changing taught them by Grímhild, is followed in the Lay; the Saga here quotes two stanzas from an unknown poem concerning the sudden roaring of the fire and the trembling of the earth as Sigurd entered it, and its sinking down again (followed in stanzas 25–26 in the Lay).

The substance of the dialogue between Sigurd and Brynhild (28–31) is mostly derived from the Saga: her doubt as to how to answer, his promise of a great bride-price, her demand that he slay all who had been her suitors (stanza 30, lines 3–4), and his reminder of her oath. It is strongly implied in stanza 31 that Brynhild had vowed to wed none but the man who dared to pass through the fire, and at this point in the Saga Sigurd explicitly reminds her that she has sworn to go with the man who should do so. With this is to be compared Brynhild’s words to Sigurd on Hindarfell (VI.8):

An oath I uttered

for ever lasting,

to wed but one,

the World’s chosen.

We must understand that in Brynhild’s thought the one who rides the fire must be ‘the World’s chosen’, and that is Sigurd; but it is Gunnar, and she is ‘sore troubled’, and in her doubt likened to a swan ‘on swaying seas’.

In the Saga Sigurd in Gunnar’s form remained three nights with Brynhild, and they slept in the same bed; but he laid the sword Gram between them, and when she asked him why he did so, he replied that it was fated that he should hold his bridal thus, or else get his death.

An important distinction between the Saga and the Lay lies in what is said of the exchange of rings. In the Saga it was told (see p.223) that at their meeting in Heimir’s halls ‘Sigurd gave her a gold ring’, though nothing more is said of it, and now it is said that at his departure ‘he took from her the ring Andvaranaut that he had given her, and gave her another ring from Fáfnir’s hoard’. In the Lay (33), on the other hand, he took from her while she slept the ring that she wore on her finger and put Andvaranaut in its place. In this the Lay follows Snorri’s account: ‘in the morning he gave Brynhild as bridal gift the same gold ring which Loki had taken from Andvari, and took another ring from her hand for remembrance’. See further IX.9–10 and note.

After this, in the Saga, Sigurd rode back through the fire, and he and Gunnar changed into their own semblances; but Brynhild went back to her fosterfather Heimir and told him what had happened, and of her doubt: ‘He rode through my flickering fire . . . and he said that he was named Gunnar; but I said that only Sigurd would do that, to whom I swore faith on the mountain.’ Heimir said that things must rest as they were; and she said ‘Áslaug, Sigurd’s daughter and mine, shall be brought up here with you’. My father regarded the introduction of Áslaug as a ‘grievous damage’ to the story (and see p.242, (6)). It was unquestionably an invention made in order to link together Sigurd and Brynhild and the most celebrated viking of legend, Ragnar Loðbrók: in the largely fabulous Ragnars Saga Áslaug is said to be one of his wives and the mother of several of his numerous viking sons.

4 ‘dreed’ : submitted to, endured.

‘choosing not the slain’: a reference to Brynhild as Valkyrie.

17 In line 6 ‘thee’ refers to Gunnar; in line 8 ‘you’ is plural and refers to Gunnar and Sigurd.

20 ‘rowel’: a spiked revolving disc at the end of a spur.

29 ‘meted’: allotted, apportioned.

IX DEILD (Strife)

As I have said (p.221), the great lacuna in the Codex Regius caused the loss of all ancient Norse poetry for the central part of the legend of Sigurd. The manuscript does not take up again until near the end of a lay of Sigurd which is known as the Brot (af Sigurðarkviðu), the ‘Fragment’ (of a lay of Sigurd). Only some 20 stanzas of this poem are preserved, and these come late in the development of the tragedy, after ‘the quarrel of the queens’, as they washed their hair in the waters of the Rhine. My father noted that it can be seen from what is left of the Brot that there has been lost the greater part of ‘an old and very vigorous poem – for example the supreme vigour and economical force of

Mér hefir Sigurðr

selda eiða,

eiða selda,

alla logna . . .’

These words of Gunnar’s come almost at the beginning of the preserved part of the Brot, and are closely echoed in the Lay, IX.46.

What was contained in the pages removed from the Codex Regius has been much discussed. An important factor is the existence in the manuscript of a poem named Sigurðarkviða en skamma, ‘the Short Lay of Sigurd’; but this is 71 stanzas long – almost the longest of all the heroic lays of the Edda. This title must have been used in contrast to something else, very probably in the same collection. My father’s view of the matter was closely argued but tentatively expressed; as he said, ‘one must remember that all this sort of thing (like the dating of individual poems, on which each scholar with equal certitude seems to give a different opinion) is very “guessy” and dubious.’ He thought it possible that there were three Sigurd lays: Sigurðarkviða en skamma, preserved in the Codex Regius; Sigurðarkviða en meiri, ‘the Greater (Longer) Lay of Sigurd’, which is totally lost; and ‘an ancient, terse, poem, concentrated chiefly on the Brynhild tragedy’, of which the conclusion is preserved in the Brot. (To his own poem he gave an alternative title, written under the primary title on the first page of the manuscript of the Lay, Sigurðarkviða en mesta, ‘the Longest Lay of Sigurd’, for in it the whole history is told.)

However this may be, for almost all the narrative from Sigurd’s coming to the court of the Burgundians (Niflungs, Gjúkings) to the beginning of the Brot (Gunnar’s declaration to Högni that Sigurd had broken his oaths) we are largely dependent on the Völsunga Saga, for Snorri tells the story with great brevity, and the preserved Sigurd lay, Sigurðarkviða en skamma, is chiefly concerned with the deaths of Sigurd and Brynhild. In my father’s view, it can be assumed that in so far as the relevant chapters of the Saga had an Eddaic basis they depended on poetry very closely similar to that carried away in the lacuna of the Codex Regius.

Thus, to recapitulate, Eddaic poetry concerning the deaths of Sigurd and Brynhild is preserved, most importantly, in Sigurðarkviða en skamma, and in the conclusion (the Brot or Fragment) of another Sigurd lay. They were used, of course, by the writer of the Saga, and my father wove his version from these sources independently.

3–4 At the end of the feast of the bridal of Gunnar and Brynhild, according to the Saga, Sigurd remembered all his oaths to Brynhild, but he made no sign. There is no suggestion in the Saga of what is implied in stanza 3.

6–11 The quarrel between Brynhild and Gudrún when they washed their hair in the river follows the story as told by Snorri Sturluson and in the Saga, except in the matter of the rings that revealed the truth to Brynhild: see the note to 9–10. A long dialogue between Brynhild and Gudrún which follows in the Saga is eliminated in the Lay.

9–10 As I have noted earlier (p.231), in the Saga Sigurd in Gunnar’s form took the ring Andvaranaut from Brynhild and gave her another from Fáfnir’s hoard, whereas in the Lay, following Snorri Sturluson, this is reversed. So here, in Snorri’s words: ‘Gudrún laughed, and said: “You think that it was Gunnar who rode through the flickering fire? But I think that he who slept with you was the one who gave me this gold ring; but the gold ring which you wear on your hand and which you received as a wedding gift is called Andvaranaut; and I do not think that Gunnar got it on Gnitaheiði.”’ On Gnitaheiði see V.14.

12–20 Brynhild’s withdrawal to her bedchamber in black silence, lying like one dead, and her words with Gunnar when he came to her, derive in a general way from the Saga; but the long reproach that in the Saga she casts at him differs greatly from the equivalent passage in the Lay (stanzas 15–19). In the Saga she began, when at last prevailed upon by Gunnar to speak, by asking him: ‘What have you done with the ring I gave you, which king Budli gave me at our last parting, when you Gjúkings came to him and vowed to harry and burn unless you gained me?’ Then she said that Budli had given her two choices, to wed as he wished, or to lose all her wealth and his favour; and seeing that she could not strive with him she promised to wed the one who would ride through her fire on the horse Grani with Fáfnir’s hoard. This further confusion arising from the ‘doubled’ view of Brynhild is once again eliminated in the Lay, as are other details of the story in the Saga: the fettering of Brynhild by Högni after her threat to kill Gunnar, and her tearing of her tapestry apart.

20 Lines 3–4: In the Saga Brynhild ordered the door of her chamber to be set open so that her lamentations could be heard far off.

21–34 The dialogue between Sigurd and Brynhild derives most of its elements from that in the Saga, but in the Lay it is much more compressed and coherent. In the Saga Brynhild does not curse Gudrún, and Sigurd does not say that he would even be willing to kill Gunnar.

26 In the Saga Brynhild said that she wondered at the man who came into her hall, and she thought that she recognised Sigurd’s eyes, but she could not see clearly because ‘her fortune was veiled’.

27 Lines 7–8: see VIII.33 lines 3–4 and IX.10 lines 5–8.

29 Lines 1, 3: ‘Woe worth’: A curse upon; ‘Woe worth the while’: A curse upon the time. Again in stanzas 37, 50.

30 Lines 7–8: ‘I sat unsmiling, no sign making’: see IX.3–4.

35 Here in the Saga the writer quoted a verse from a poem that he called Sigurðarkviða, in which it is said that Sigurd’s grief was so great that the links of his mailshirt snapped. Of this verse my father remarked that he did not believe it to come from the same hand as the Brot, and so attributed it to the otherwise wholly lost ‘Sigurðarkviða en meiri’ (see p.234). In the Lay the extravagant idea is characteristically reduced.

39–40 Stanzas 39 lines 5–8 and 40 lines 1–4 echo VIII.30.

39–50 Elements in the arrangement of dialogue are altered in the Lay, and the development set in a clearer light and sharper focus. Brynhild’s lie to Gunnar, that Sigurd had possessed her (43), leads to his words to Högni (46): ‘oaths he swore me, all belied them’, which are almost the first words of the Brot (see p.233).

51–64 There were two distinct versions of the story of the murder of Sigurd, each represented in poems of the Edda. In the Brot he was slain out of doors, and Högni had a part in it (despite his perception that Brynhild had lied to Gunnar, which is seen in a verse of the Brot that is echoed in stanza 47 of the Lay); but in Sigurðarkviða en skamma and other poems he was slain by Gotthorm in his bed (see further pp.243–44). The compiler of the Codex Regius put in a prose note about this at the end of the Brot:

In this poem is told of the death of Sigurd, and here the story is that they slew him out of doors; but some say that they slew him within doors, in his bed, sleeping. But German men say that they slew him out in the forest; and so also it is told in Guðrúnarkviða en forna (the Old Lay of Gudrún) that Sigurd and the sons of Gjúki had ridden to the council place when he was slain. But all are agreed in this, that they broke their troth to him, and fell upon him when he was lying down and unprepared.

The Saga follows the story of his death as he slept in the house, and the Lay likewise adopts this version, but introduces (54–57) a brief episode in which Gotthorm encountered Sigurd as he hunted in the forest, and hailed him abusively – perhaps to give colour to what is said in the Saga, and repeated in stanzas 52–3 – that the diet of wolf and snake on which he was fed made him exceedingly bold and fierce.

51 Grímhild’s offspring: the author of the Saga regarded Gotthorm (Gottormr) as a full brother of Gunnar and Högni, and had Gunnar say that they should persuade Gotthorm to do the deed, because he was young and had sworn no oath. My father here followed a tradition, found in the poem Hyndluljóð, that Gotthorm was the half-brother of Gunnar and Högni, being ‘Grímhild’s offspring’; Snorri Sturluson, also, says that Gotthorm was Gjúki’s stepson.

58–59 In the Saga, Gotthorm went twice to Sigurd’s chamber in the morning, but Sigurd looked at him, and Gotthorm dared not attack him on account of his piercing gaze; when he came the third time Sigurd was asleep.

67–69 These stanzas echo the concluding verses of the Brot, which does not extend to the death of Brynhild.

73 In the Saga, following Sigurðarkviða en skamma, Brynhild dying foretold all the later history of Gudrún; this has no place in the Lay.

77 Lines 5–7 are an exact repetition of lines 3–5 in III.13, where the ‘son’s son’ is Sinfjötli, except that the reading there is Völsung, not Völsungs. The plural form here is clear, but may nonetheless be erroneous. On the form Valhöllu see the note to III.13.

77–82 The concluding passage is of course peculiar to the Lay. With stanzas 79–81 cf. Upphaf, the opening section of the Lay, stanzas 11, 14–15.

77–78 In a fragmentary poem of the tenth century on the death of the ferocious Eirik Blood-axe, son of King Harold Fairhair and brother of Hákon the Good (see the note on V.54) there is a remarkable image of the coming of an ‘Ódin hero’ to Valhöll. The poem opens with Ódin declaring that he has had a dream in which he was preparing Valhöll to receive a company of the slain. There is a great noise of many men approaching the hall, and Ódin calls on the dead heroes Sigmund and Sinfjötli to rise up quickly and go to meet the dead king who is coming, saying that he believes it to be Eirik.

Sigmund says to Ódin: ‘Why do you hope for Eirik, rather than for other kings?’ And the god replies: ‘Because he has reddened his sword in many lands.’

Then Sigmund asks: ‘Why have you robbed him of victory, when you knew him to be brave?’ And Ódin answers: ‘Because it cannot be clearly known. . .’ – and then (at any rate as the text stands) he breaks off, and concludes: ‘The grey wolf is gazing at the dwellings of the Gods’ (see the commentary on the Upphaf (‘Beginning’), pp.185–86.

Note on Brynhild

In what follows I set out, with minor editing, the content of some notes of my father’s, written very rapidly in soft pencil and difficult to read, on his interpretation of the tangled and contradictory narratives that constitute the tragedy of Sigurd and Brynhild, Gunnar and Gudrún. I will repeat here what I have said in my Foreword, that there is nothing in these or any other notes for his lectures on Old Norse literature that bears on the question of whether he had written, or intended to write, poems on the subject of the Völsung legend; but that views expressed in the lectures may illuminate, naturally enough, his treatment of the sources in his Lays.

In my commentary on the last part of the Lay I referred (p.234) to my father’s belief that the fragment of a Sigurd lay known as the Brot, with which the Codex Regius takes up again after the lacuna, is the conclusion of ‘an ancient, terse, poem, concentrated chiefly on the Brynhild tragedy’. For this poem he used in his notes the title Sigurðarkviða en forna, ‘the Old Lay of Sigurd’. In notes for a lecture on the content of the lacuna he suggested (following the great scholar Andreas Heusler) that the poem probably began with Sigurd’s coming to the halls of Gjúki, and his reception; his oath of brotherhood with the king’s sons; and his wedding with Gudrún: all this probably brief and without reference to Sigurd’s previous knowledge of Brynhild. He proposed that the chief elements of the conception of Brynhild in that poem were these.

(1) A semi-magical personage, ultimately derived from a Valkyrie legend.

(2) She surrounded herself with a wall of flame, and vowed only to wed the hero who rode it – intending it to be Sigurd.

(3) The wall of flame is ridden by Sigurd, but under the appearance of Gunnar. The oath holds her. She comforts herself with the thought of Gunnar’s deed.

(4) Her comfort fails and her pride is mortally wounded when she discovers that it was Sigurd after all who rode the flame: in addition she has been tricked into breaking her oath to wed the actual rider.

(5) Her vengeance takes this form: she cannot have Sigurd now, and therefore she will destroy him (and so mortally wound Gudrún, the natural object of her hate); but she will by this very act avenge herself on Gunnar by involving him in a dreadful oath-breaking – so that after all is over, Sigurd dead, and she about to follow, she can turn and say, ‘Sigurd is pure of all such vileness, you Gunnar alone are shamed’ [this is the end of the Brot, echoed in stanzas IX.67–69 in the Lay].

(6) To do this she lies terribly against Sigurd and herself. She accuses him of broken faith when he lay in her bed after the riding of the flame. This was her only means of getting Gunnar to slay him [see stanzas IX. 43, 46, and 49 of the Lay]. Later she reveals the truth [stanza 68, lines 5–8].

That is why Áslaug is such a fatal addition in the Saga, even if she was begotten upon the mountain-top, not at the second riding of the flame (see p.232).

I think that we should accept (he wrote) such a conception for the poem, of which the twenty stanzas of the Brot are all that are left, and for one of the oldest lines of tradition. The resolution of the Brynhild-Valkyrie difficulty does not lie in the assumption that one was mortal (Brynhild) and the other a Valkyrie from an older ‘myth’, which later became confused. The solution, I think, is that the Valkyrie is the one essential part of the whole story, which is always present. [In a separate note my father wrote: ‘Brynhild cannot be a “human” character mythicized (or confused with a Valkyrie Sigrdrífa). She is a Valkyrie humanized.’]

But she was treated in at least two different ways. There was the mountain-top awakening of the Ódin-enchanted Valkyrie (perhaps the more specifically Scandinavian conception and therefore the later, since the story was not originally Scandinavian). There was also the proud princess tricked by her own stratagem (when Sigurd rode the fire but in the form of Gunnar) – the more southern one. That the lost poem that ends in the Brot represented this older ‘more southern version’ is probably borne out by the important point in which it does agree with the non-Scandinavian versions, namely that Sigurd was murdered out of doors in a wood and that Högni had a part in it (in the Brot itself Gudrún is shown standing at the doors of the hall as the brothers ride back).

It is significant that the compiler of the Codex Regius entered a note about this since it clearly puzzled him and his contemporaries (see p.238, note to stanzas 51–64). He notes that the Old Lay of Gudrún says the same – in this case, that Sigurd was slain at the Thing (the council place); and he is aware that this is the ‘southern’ version (þyðvestur menn, German men). The other story, the slaying of Sigurd in bed in Gudrún’s arms, in keeping with the Norse tendency to the personal, and to the concentration of action in time and place, is represented in Sigurðarkviða en skamma, the extant Sigurd lay (see p.234), and this is the version followed (without comment) in the Saga, and in the Lay (see p.238).

My father did not discuss in these notes the development, in incompatible ways, seen in the Völsunga Saga, of the story of Sigurd and Brynhild in the Norse tradition. But his opinion on the cardinal question seems clear from a passing observation elsewhere that, in his view, the drink of forgetfulness given to Sigurd was ‘invented by the author of the lost Sigurðarkviða en meiri [see p.234] to account for the difficulties raised by the previous betrothal of Sigurd and Brynhild.’

In conclusion, he wrote: There is nothing left for us now, therefore, but to express surprise that the author of the Saga, who could so decisively and unhesitatingly adopt one of the conflicting accounts of the murder, could not adopt a single view of Brynhild. Since the adoption of a single view of the murder must be due to artistic preference, one is perhaps only being just to the author of the Saga in assuming that the vagueness and uncertainty of Brynhild’s position was not pure bungling on his part. He wanted a complex of conflicting motives and emotions for the central tragedy – to have these he was content to leave the previous relations of Brynhild and Sigurd confused. He had to, since each theory contributed to her motives.

In the Saga Brynhild’s passion of rage and grief is in part due to pride – she has not wedded the supreme hero (and hates Gudrún on that account); but also, she has been wedded by a trick (and hates Gunnar and Sigurd on that account). Her oath has been broken and she hates herself. She really loves Sigurd alone: her heart’s desire is frustrated, and she would kill what she loves rather than let a rival share it. Her betrothal to Sigurd has been broken by both of them – both by fate and by magic. She is wroth with Sigurd (and herself) on this account – and will not in any case endure her marriage to Gunnar longer. Behind all hangs Ódin, and his doom, and the vanity of her vows – he doomed her to wed. Inextricably interwoven is the curse on the gold.

Truly complicated! And though in building up largely a product of accident, its retention is due perhaps to taste. We may accept this, even if we are still on safe ground in affirming that a better artist could have retained all that was necessary of the two divergent Brynhild-heroines and not made them so obscure and indeed contradictory and unintelligible.

Earlier Workings of

Völsungakviða en nýja

The earlier manuscript material of the Upphaf is not easy to interpret. There are two versions, which are readily placed in sequence: these I will call for ease of reference text A and text B. The first, or text A, with the title Upphaf, has almost as many stanzas as the final form, but not all in the same order, and the wording constantly differing, if for the most part only slightly. The opening stanza is among those that underwent the most change to reach the final form:

Ere the years there yawned

yearless ages,

without sand or sea

silent, empty;

Earth was not moulded

nor arched Heaven:

an abyss gaping

without blade of grass.

Stanza 4 (‘Unmarred their mirth. . .’) was not present. Stanza 13 (in text A stanza 12) reads:

The wolf for Óðinn

at the world’s ending (> waits unsleeping),

for Frey the fair

flames of Surtur;

the doom of Thór

the Dragon beareth:

all shall be ended

and Earth perish.

Though not so marked in the manuscript, the words of the Sibyl clearly end here, and stanzas 14–15, in which the Sibyl speaks of the rôle of Sigurd at the Ragnarök, are here absent. Then follow in A stanzas 16–20 of the final text, the conclusion of the Upphaf, in which the Gods prepare for the Last Battle according to the prophecy, and ending with the words ‘for one they waited, / the World’s chosen’. In A at this point the meaning of those words is not explained. But in this version it is the stanzas 14–15 of the final form, absent here from the prophecy of the Sibyl, that form the conclusion of the Upphaf. The first reads:

In Day of Doom

he should deathless stand

to die no more

who had death tasted,

the serpent-slayer.

seed of Óðinn,

the walls defending,

the World’s chosen.

And the concluding stanza in text A is virtually the same as stanza 15 in the final form. Thus the prophecy concerning Sigurd is present in A, but not as the words of the Sibyl.

The second text B is not titled Upphaf but The Elder Edda (the reason for this will appear in a moment). It is far closer to the final form in the detail of its wording, indeed it only differs here and there. That it was developed from text A is clear from the pencilled corrections made to A that appear in B as written. But it is much shorter than A. The opening stanza is absent (the poem begins ‘The Great Gods once / began their toil’) – but stanza 1 in the final form (‘Of old was an age / when was emptiness . . .’) is scribbled in pencil in the margin. Stanza 4 (‘Unmarred their mirth. . .’) is also absent, as it is in A; but most curiously, the whole of the prophecy of the Sibyl (stanzas 10–15) is missing. The B-text has thus only 12 stanzas. The last verse begins ‘The guests are many’; and the last lines of the verse read, not ‘for one they waited, / the World’s chosen’, as in A and the final text, but ‘long awaiting / the last battle’. Thus the motive of Sigurd as (in Ódin’s hope) the saviour at the Ragnarök is absent.

This truncated version of Upphaf is the opening of a paper read to, or perhaps more probably designed to be read to, a society, presumptively at Oxford. The first words following the poem were:

And that is, I think, all I have to say (of my own) concerning the Elder Edda. There is the ancient measure and strophe in which most of it is written – in which our own poetry was once composed, and in which it still can be if one will learn the craft (not an easy one) – there is the background of the imagination of its poets; and though this is not a translation of an Eddaic poem it is just like one, and all its elements may be found in that book, most of them in the very first poem of all which deals directly with this very theme.

Only the opening paragraphs of the paper are preserved, either because they were written on the same page as the last stanza of the poem and the rest was discarded, or because the paper never went beyond this point, at any rate in this form.

There is no indication of date. There is also no way of knowing for certain why my father reduced the poem in this way; but a perhaps plausible explanation offers itself. The earlier text A had introduced his very strange and distinctive conception of ‘the special function of Sigurd’, ‘an invention of the present poet’, in his words (see Commentary, pp.183–85). He now had the idea of introducing his paper with a brief recital of a piece of his own ‘Norse’ poetry; but to use his Upphaf for this purpose would require the omission of all the verses that bore upon the idea of ‘the World’s chosen’, the ‘special function of Sigurd’ – the imposition of a new significance on the myth.

Did he see this brief work, when he wrote it, as the prelude to a long poem on the legend of Sigurd? It seems impossible to say (the title Upphaf does not necessarily imply this: it may refer to the content of the poem, as I incline to suppose).

The other surviving earlier texts mentioned on p.40, section I of Völsungakviða en nýja, ‘Andvari’s Gold’, and the first nine stanzas of section II, ‘Signý’, stand to the final form as does text A of the Upphaf, in that there is constant difference in detail of vocabulary and phrasing.