The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún

COMMENTARY

on

GUÐRÚNARKVIÐA EN NÝJA

In this commentary Guðrúnarkviða en Nýja is referred to as ‘the Lay of Gudrún’, or where no confusion is possible as ‘the Lay’, and Völsungakviða en Nýja as ‘the Lay of the Völsungs’. As there are no sections in this poem, references are made simply by the numbers of the stanzas.

The subordinate title Dráp Niflunga means ‘The Slaying of the Niflungs’: on this name see the Lay of the Völsungs, VII.8 and note.

The relation of the Lay of Gudrún to its ancient sources is not essentially different from that of the Lay of the Völsungs, but in this case the sources are very largely extant in the poems of the Edda, and the Völsunga Saga is of far less importance. In its content the Lay of Gudrún is essentially a complex interweaving of the Eddaic poems Atlakviða and Atlamál, together with some wholly independent developments.

My father devoted much time and thought to Atlakviða, and prepared a very detailed commentary (the basis for lectures and seminars) on this extraordinarily difficult text. It is a poem that he much admired. Despite its condition, ‘we are in the presence (he wrote) of great poetry that can still move us as poetry. Its style is universally and rightly praised: rapid, terse, vigorous – while maintaining, within its narrow limits, characterization. The poet who wrote it knew how to produce the grim and deadly atmosphere his theme demanded. It lives in the memory as one of the things in the Edda most instinct with that demonic energy and force which one finds in Old Norse verse.’

But the text as it stands in the Codex Regius, with its clearly corrupt, defective or unintelligible lines or stanzas, its incompatible additions, its strange variations in metre, has inevitably given rise over many years to a great deal of discordant critical analysis. Here I need say no more, however, than that my father tentatively interpreted the state of Atlakviða as the reworking of an earlier poem, a reworking that had then itself undergone ‘improvements’, additions, losses, and disarrangements.

Following Atlakviða in the Codex Regius is Atlamál, the longest of all the heroic poems of the Edda. Whether or not the author of this poem was familiar with Atlakviða (my father thought it improbable) it is decidedly later, and if it tells the same story and keeps the old names, it has nonetheless undergone an extraordinary imaginative transposition: it could be said that the story has been removed from the Heroic Age and re-established in a wholly different mode. Concerning this my father wrote: ‘Atlakviða seems to preserve a most primitive (unelaborated and unaltered) version of events. There is still a sense of the great kingdom of Atli, and the wide-flung conflicts of the ancient heroic days; the courts are courts of mighty kings – in Atlamál they have sunk to farmhouses. The geography, vague of course, is in keeping: the Niflungs ride fen and forest and plain to Atli (in Atlamál they seem only to row over a single fjord). We may notice also the old traditional vin Borgunda of Gunnar, and the Myrkviðr (‘Mirkwood’) specially associated with ancient Hun-stories’ (see the notes to the Lay of the Völsungs VII.14 and 15). But in Atlamál, while the old ‘plot’ survives, the sense of an archaic and distant world, passed down through many generations, has altogether disappeared. And with it has gone altogether the hoard of the Niflungs and Atli’s greed.

3–4, 6 These stanzas echo in their language the verses that Gunnar sang when he first came to the halls of Gjúki, and use several of the same phrases: see the Lay of the Völsungs, VII.14–15 and notes. Gunnar was recalling the earlier wars of Goths and Huns (14), and the battles in which ‘the Borgund lords met Budli’s host’, and slew Budli’s brother (15).

The compiler of the Codex Regius wrote a prose passage entitled Dráp Niflunga ‘The Slaying of the Niflungs’, evidently intended as an introduction to the poem that follows in the manuscript, which is Guðrúnarkviða en forna, the Old Lay of Gudrún. The passage begins thus:

Gunnar and Högni seized all the gold, the patrimony of Fáfnir. At that time there was strife between the sons of Gjúki and Atli: he charged them with the death of Brynhild. This was how they were reconciled: they were to give him Gudrún in marriage – and they gave her a draught of oblivion to drink, before she would consent to be married to Atli.

Here, as in the Old Lay of Gudrún itself, Brynhild is the daughter of Budli, and the sister of Atli. Since in my father’s version of the story Brynhild was not associated with Atli this element is absent from his Lay of Gudrún. ‘There is no trace in Atlakviða of Brynhild and all that complication,’ he wrote, ‘and in so far as the motive is apparent – it is not explicit – it is the greed of Atli and the cursed hoard that are at the bottom of the trouble.’ On the drink of oblivion see the note to 17–28.

10–16 Atlakviða and Atlamál do not take up the story until the coming of Atli’s messenger to the Gjúkings. The primary source for the story of Gudrún after the death of Sigurd is Guðrúnarkviða en forna (which has the story that Sigurd was not murdered in his bed but out of doors, see the note to IX.51–64 in the Lay of the Völsungs). In this poem Gudrún looks back in lamentation, and tells how she went and sat at night by the body of Sigurd where it lay in the forest; from there she wandered on and came at last to Denmark. It was in Denmark with Thora Hákon’s daughter that the tapestry was woven, and it was there that Gunnar and Högni came to her, together with Grímhild.

In the Lay (stanza 2) Gudrún is said to have gone ‘witless wandering in woods alone’, and when Grímhild and her sons found her she was still living alone, and weaving her tapestry in a ‘woodland house’ (10).

In the brief text (iii) concerning this poem given on pp.52–53 my father wrote: ‘Gudrún did not take her own life, but for grief was for a time half-witless. She would not look upon her kinsmen nor upon her mother, and dwelt apart in a house in the woods. There after a while she began to weave in a tapestry the history of the Dragon-hoard and of Sigurd.’ Thus the introduction of the tapestry in the Eddaic poem became a device, having a wholly different content, to link Guðrúnarkviða en nýja to Völsungakviða en nýja.

17–28 An important element in Guðrúnarkviða en forna which is absent from the Lay of Gudrún is the draught of forgetfulness given to Gudrún by Grímhild, intent on making her forget her injuries and consent to be wedded to Atli. In the poem, followed by the Saga, several stanzas are devoted to Grímhild’s potion, and its curious ingredients enumerated at length. But very strangely, the draught has no effect on Gudrún’s mind: in the verses that follow she fiercely withstands Grímhild’s persuasions; and it has been commonly supposed therefore that stanzas have been disordered, those referring to the potion being placed too early.

My father did not accept this explanation. The first draft of oblivion, administered by Grímhild to Sigurd, he believed to have been invented ‘to account for the difficulties raised by the previous betrothal of Sigurd and Brynhild’ (see p.244). ‘Here,’ he wrote, ‘we have the same mechanism again resorted to – and I think deplorably: for the mere repetition is distasteful, these drinks of Grímhild are too powerful or too powerless: why not give one to Atli too, and make him forget the Hoard!’

He thought it very probable that the stanzas relating to Grímhild’s drink of forgetfulness was an interpolation by a later hand. In his Lay of Gudrún it is gone, and Gudrún (as is seen from stanza 28) submitted without sorcery to the strength of purpose of her formidable mother. In the Saga her last words to Grímhild were ‘Then so it must be, but it is against my will; and no joy will come of it, but rather grief.’

22 Gudrún’s dream is repeated from the Lay of the Völsungs, VII.2–4; lines 5–8 of the present stanza, referring to Atli, are repeated from VII.4, with change of ‘A wolf they gave me’ to ‘A wolf thou gavest me’.

23 ‘boot’: remedy.

24 ‘dreed’: endured (as in the Lay of the Völsungs, VIII.4).

29 ‘of gold he dreamed him’: this is a relic, apparently, of an old impersonal construction of the verb ‘dream’: ‘he dreamed of gold’. These lines reappear in stanza 33.

32–34 In Atlamál the life of Atli and Gudrún has been a horror of hatred and dissension; stanzas 32 and 34 of the Lay suggest rather the story glimpsed in Atlakviða, where when Gudrún stabs Atli in his bed it is said:

‘Often had the ways of love been better, when those twain were wont many a time to embrace before their noble court.’ In the Lay of Gudrún Atli is explicitly presented as torn between his love of Gudrún and his desire for the Niflung hoard.

35 In Atlamál (followed by the Saga) Gudrún overheard what Atli and his men said together in secret; in the Lay this is changed to her overhearing what Atli muttered in his sleep.

36 ‘kith’: friends, neighbours, acquaintance (the original sense of the word in the phrase ‘kith and kin’); again in stanza 40.

37–48 The narrative elements of the Hunnish messenger and the ring and runes sent by Gudrún are derived from both Atlakviða and Atlamál. The name Vingi is from Atlamál, but ‘Cold fell his cry’ (38) comes from Atlakviða, where Atli’s messenger, there called Knefröðr, kallaði kaldri röddu ‘cried with a cold voice’, which as my father noted bore here a distinct sense, ‘ill-boding, fateful’.

From Atlakviða come also the great gifts offered by Atli, and the words of Gunnar and Högni concerning Atli’s invitation. In Atlakviða Gudrún’s warning takes this form, in Högni’s words:

Hár fann ek heiðingja

riðit í hring rauðum.

Ylfskr er vegr okkar

at ríða örindi.

(I found a hair of the heath-roamer / wound in the red ring./ Treacherous as a wolf is the road for you and me / if we ride on this errand.) But in Atlamál the wolf’s hair is eliminated, and Gudrún sent a message in runes, which Vingi altered before he delivered it.

In the Lay of Gudrún both motives are combined (stanzas 44–5), and in this my father was following the Saga and the note entitled Dráp Niflunga in the Codex Regius. This latter adds that the ring was Andvaranaut (taken by Sigurd from Brynhild and given to Gudrún: but not so in the Lay of the Völsungs, see the note to IX.9–10).

39 ‘boon’: request, entreaty.

40 ‘dights’: prepares, makes ready.

42–58 I set out here the interweaving of sources in this passage in some detail, since it exhibits very clearly my father’s narrative method in this poem.

In Atlakviða, Gunnar asks his brother why they should be tempted by Atli’s bounty when they themselves own such wealth and such arms (see the Lay stanzas 42–3), and Högni, not replying directly, speaks of the wolf’s hair twisted round Gudrún’s ring. With no further direct indication of Gunnar’s thoughts, he at once makes the decision to go, crying Úlfr mun ráða arfi Niflunga, the wolf shall possess the heritage of the Niflungs, if he does not return. In Atlamál, on the other hand, neither Gunnar nor Högni are shown to hesitate at all. The runic message that replaced the wolf’s hair of Atlakviða causes them no disquiet. It is only subsequently that Högni’s wife Kostbera examines the runes and perceives that they have been overlaid on those originally cut; but Högni dismisses her warning, as he also dismisses her warning dreams. Gunnar’s wife Glaumvör likewise has oppressive dreams, but they too are dismissed by Gunnar; and the brothers set out next morning. Kostbera and Glaumvör appear only in Atlamál and are not taken up into the Lay of Gudrún.

In the Saga a further element is introduced, in that Vingi, seeing that the brothers have become drunk, tells them that Atli, now aged, wishes them to become the rulers of his kingdom while his sons are so young (see stanzas 51–2 in the Lay). It is this that makes Gunnar decide to go, and Högni reluctantly to agree, before the closer examination of the runes and the telling of the dreams take place.

In the Lay my father has taken elements from both the Eddaic lays and from the Saga, but rearranged the context, so that the implications are somewhat altered. Gunnar’s scorn for Atli’s offer and Högni’s warning about the wolf’s hair are preserved, but Gunnar is now persuaded to accept the invitation by the ostensible meaning of Gudrún’s runic message (45). It is Grímhild, not Kostbera, who warns that the runes have been tampered with, and that the underlying meaning was quite other – and this leads Gunnar to tell Vingi that he will not now come (49). This is the occasion of Vingi’s final seduction (51–2); and though Högni remains scornfully unconvinced (53–4), Gunnar, who had ‘deep drunken’, cries out echoing the words of Atlakviða: ‘Let wolves then wield wealth of Niflungs!’

The scene ends with a return to the runes: Högni observing heavily that when Grímhild’s counsel ought to be attended to they dismiss her warning, and Vingi swearing, in an echo of his words in Atlamál, that the runes do not lie. Gunnar’s character is maintained: see p.52(ii).

50 ‘rune-conner’: one who pores over, closely examines, runes.

54 ‘fey saith my thought’: I take, but doubtfully, the word ‘fey’ here to mean ‘with presage of death’.

59 ‘few went with them’: in Atlakviða there is no mention of any companions of Gunnar and Högni; in Atlamál they had three, Högni’s sons Snævar (named in stanzas 87–8 of the Lay) and Sólar, and his wife’s brother Orkning.

59–63 On their journey to the land of the Huns, as my father wrote of the passage in Atlakviða (see p.313), ‘the Niflungs ride fen and forest and plain to Atli’. Stanza 62 is derived from Atlamál, where the furious rowing of Gunnar and Högni and their companions is described; but in the Lay the localized Scandinavian scene of Atlamál is not intended – they are crossing the Danube.

60 ‘fey’: fated to die.

62 lines 7–8: this also is derived from Atlamál. My father remarked in a lecture that the abandoning of the boat by the Niflungs, since they hoped for no return, seems to be a detail that belongs to the oldest form of the legend as it reached the North, since it is found also in the German Nibelungenlied.

65–67 While the great courts of Atli are obviously quite differently conceived from the farmstead of Atlamál, Högni’s beating on the doors derives from it, as does the slaying of Vingi – though in Atlamál they struck him to death with axes.

68–92 In Atlakviða there is no fighting when Gunnar and Högni come to Atli’s halls. Gudrún meets her brothers as they enter and tells them that they are betrayed. Gunnar is at once seized and bound (and it is here that he is called vin Borgunda ‘lord of the Burgundians’, the only surviving trace in Old Norse literature of the Burgundian origin of the Gjúkings: see p.228, note on VII.15). Högni slew eight men before he was taken.

In Atlamál, on the other hand, as in the German Nibelungenlied, there is fierce fighting on the arrival of Gunnar and Högni, and Gudrún, in this poem leaving the hall and coming to her brothers outside, takes part in it and herself strikes down two men. The fighting lasted through the morning, and eighteen of Atli’s men were slain before Gunnar and Högni were taken. Then Atli speaks and laments his marriage and the loss of his men.

In the Lay this part of the narrative is greatly extended beyond what is told in either of the Eddaic lays or in the Völsunga Saga. The Saga introduces the idea of a lull in the fighting, not found in Atlamál, when Atli spoke of his loss and his evil lot, before the battle was rejoined and the brothers forced their way into the hall (cf. stanzas 71 ff. in the Lay). But after fierce fighting Gunnar and Högni were taken prisoner; whereas in the Lay the result of the assault is that they hold Atli at their mercy – and Gudrún persuades them to show it.

The Lay is far removed from Atlamál in the portrait of Gudrún, who is naturally not here presented as a fierce warrior-woman; and an entirely new element is introduced in the presence of Gothic warriors at Atli’s court (83), on whom Gudrún calls for aid and who rise against their Hunnish masters (81–6); see the note to 86.

68 Budlungs: men of Budli (Atli’s father).

80 ‘A wolf they gave me’: see the note to stanza 22.

‘Woe worth the hour’: see the note to the Lay of the Völsungs, IX.29.

86 The introduction in the Lay of the Burgundians’ newfound allies in the Goths at Atli’s court leads to these references to ancient Gothic names remembered in old lays. This stanza is an innovation of my father’s.

Iormunrek (Jörmunrekkr) was the Norse form of the name of Ermanaric, king of the Ostrogoths, the eastern branch of the Gothic people, who dwelt in the South Russian plains in the fourth century. The vast dominion of Ermanaric extended over many tribes and peoples from the Black Sea north towards the Baltic; but about the year 375, in his old age, he took his own life, in the face of the first overwhelming onset of the Asiatic steppe nomads, the Huns, who inspired widespread terror by their savagery and their appearance. To that distant time the song of Gunnar reached back, as did his minstrelsy at the feast held in honour of Sigurd in the halls of Gjúki (the Lay of the Völsungs, VII.14); the line ‘earth-shadowing king’ in the present stanza no doubt refers to the vastness of Ermanaric’s empire.

In the centuries that followed Ermanaric became a mighty figure in the heroic legends of Germanic-speaking peoples, his name darkened by the evil deeds that attached to his fame. In the few traces of Old English heroic legend that survive he was remembered as wrað wærloga, ‘fell and faithless’, and in the little poem called Deor he appears in these lines:

We geascodon Eormanrices

wylfenne geþoht: ahte wide folc

Gotena rices: þæt wæs grim cyning.

‘We have heard of the wolfish mind of Eormanric: far and wide he ruled the people of the realm of the Goths: he was a cruel king.’

The names in lines 5–8 are derived from The Battle of the Goths and the Huns, a very ancient and ruinous Norse poem embedded in Heiðreks Saga (also called Hervarar Saga), which is to be seen as the bearer of remote memories of the first Hunnish attacks on the Goths, with ancient names preserved in a traditional poetry.

Of these names, Angantýr is a Gothic king; and Dúnheiðr, scene of a great battle, probably contains Norse Dúna, the Danube. ‘Danpar-banks’ in Gunnar’s earlier song (Lay of the Völsungs VII.14) and ‘Danpar’s walls’ in the present stanza derive from the Norse Danparstaðir, a survival of the Gothic name of the river Dnieper. Of its occurrence in Atlakviða my father noted in his lecture that it was ‘a reminiscence probably of Gothic power and splendour in the old days before Ermanaric’s downfall’.

87 Snævar is named in Atlamál as one of Högni’s sons (note to 59).

91 ‘ruth’: sorrow, regret.

93–112 This part of the narrative in the Lay is entirely independent of the Norse sources. Atli, being released, now sent for reinforcements (93), while the Niflungs held the doors of the hall (95) – and in this the German tradition of the legend appears, but strongly influenced by the Old English poetic fragment known as The Fight at Finnsburg (which is not in itself in any way connected with the Niflung legend). Beside stanzas 96–99 may be set the opening of The Fight at Finnsburg (translation by Alan Bliss, cited from J.R.R. Tolkien, Finn and Hengest, ed. Bliss, 1982, p.147):

‘... gables are burning.’

Hnæf spoke, the warlike young king: ‘Neither is this the dawn from the east, nor is a dragon flying here, nor are the gables aflame; nay, mortal enemies approach in ready armour. Birds are crying, wolf is yelping; spear clashes, shield answers shaft. Now that this moon shines, wandering behind the clouds, woeful deeds are beginning, that will bring to a bitter end this well-known enmity in the people. Awaken now, my warriors! Grasp your coats of mail, think of deeds of valour, bear yourselves proudly, be resolute!’

In the Lay the fighting is said to have lasted for five days (102); and in The Fight at Finnsburg the same is said.

It is interesting to see that in lecture notes on the Nibelungenlied my father wrote ‘compare Finnsburg’ against his reference to the scene when Hagen (Högni) and his mighty companion Volker the Minstrel guarded at night the doors of the sleeping-hall where the Burgundians were quartered, and saw in the darkness the gleam of helmets. So also he wrote of the Old English poem in Finn and Hengest (edition referred to above, p.27): ‘The Fragment opens with the “young king” espying an onset – like the helmets gleaming when the sleeping hall is attacked in the Nibelungenlied.’

The German tradition is again present in the burning down of the hall in which the Niflungs were besieged. But in the Nibelungenlied, and in the thirteenth century Norwegian Thiðrekssaga based on North German tales and songs, this is altogether differently motivated, for it was Kriemhild (Gudrún in the Norse legend) who inspired the invitation to Hunland, in order to get vengeance on Gunther and Hagen (Gunnar and Högni) for the murder of Siegfried (Sigurd). It was Kriemhild who gave the order for the hall in which the Nibelungs slept to be set on fire; whereas in the Lay of Gudrún it is one Beiti, counsellor of Atli, who was the instigator of the burning (105). But the detail of the trapped warriors drinking blood from the corpses (109) is derived from the Nibelungenlied.

In Atlakviða Gudrún set the hall on fire at the end of the poem, after the murder of Atli and their children, and this appears at the end of the Lay of Gudrún (153).

105 The name Beiti is derived from Atlamál, where he is Atli’s steward (see note to 118–131).

112 ‘the Need of the Niflungs’. ‘Need’ is written with a capital because the phrase echoes the last words of the Nibelungenlied: ‘Here the story ends: this was der Nibelunge nôt.’ The word nôt, which is in origin the same as English need, refers to the terrible extremity and end of the Nibelungs.

113–116 Atli’s treatment of the bound Gunnar before Gudrún’s eyes, while taunting her with the vengeance now achieved for Sigurd, is found neither in the Eddaic poems nor in the Völsunga Saga; but it is the spring of Gudrún’s ‘ruthless hatred’ (133) and of her insanely savage action after her brothers have been killed: she makes her demand for her brothers’ lives (116) in the form ‘by Erp and Eitill our own children’ (and in 120 ‘by those born of us!’).

114 ‘Budlung’s vengeance’: the vengeance of Atli son of Budli.

118–131 In Atlakviða Gunnar, asked if would purchase his life with the gold, replied that ‘The heart of Högni must lie in my hand.’ They cut the heart from one ‘Hjalli the craven’ instead, and laid it before Gunnar, who knew that it was not Högni’s heart, because it quivered; but it is not in any way explained why they did this. Then they cut out Högni’s heart, and Gunnar knew that it was his, since it quivered scarcely at all. In Atlamál it is Atli who commanded the cutting out of Högni’s heart, but Beiti Atli’s steward suggested that they take Hjalli the cook and swineherd instead, and spare Högni; they seized the screaming Hjalli, but Högni interceded for him, saying that he could not endure the noise, and that he would ‘rather play out this game myself’. Then Hjalli was released, and Högni was killed, and there is no mention of the story of the two hearts.

In the Saga the two are rather crudely combined: Atli commands that Högni’s heart be cut out, a counsellor of Atli proposes the substitution of Hjalli, Högni intercedes for him; Atli then tells Gunnar that he can only purchase his life by revealing where the treasure lies, Gunnar replies that he must first see Högni’s heart, and so Hjalli is seized again and his heart cut out, and the rest of the story is as in Atlakviða.

In the Lay of Gudrún the sources are interwoven more skilfully: it is Gunnar who demands to see Högni’s heart, as in Atlakviða, but an explanation is provided (121) for the preliminary assault on Hjalli the swineherd: ‘wisemen bade him / wary counsel’ (they told Atli to beware), fearing the queen’s wrath. Högni does not inter-cede for Hjalli, but merely expresses his distaste for the shrieking; and the swineherd is given no respite.

120 ‘Of his troll’s temper / yet true were the words!’ Atli refers, I believe, to Gunnar’s words (118) concerning Högni and the gold: ‘to his latest breath / he will loose it not.’

122 ‘Woe worth the wiles’: A curse on the wiles; cf. ‘Woe worth the while’ in the Lay of the Völsungs IX.29 and note.

124 ‘liever’: more acceptable.

128–130 In Atlakviða, when they brought the heart of Högni to Gunnar, he declared that ‘Always I had a doubt, while two of us lived; but now I have none, since I alone am living. The Rhine shall possess the gold that stirs men to strife, the Niflungs’ inheritance. In the rolling water shall the fatal rings gleam, rather than that gold should shine on the hands of the sons of the Huns.’

The actual casting of the gold into the Rhine is not referred to in Atlakviða (as it is in the Lay, 130, line 5, ‘in the deeps we cast it’), and this led to the contention that Gunnar meant no more than that he would rather see the hoard drowned in the Rhine than adorning the Huns. My father strongly rejected this, on several grounds: the syntax of the passage; the statement by Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda that ‘before they [Gunnar and Högni] departed from their land they concealed the gold, the heritage of Fáfnir, in the Rhine river, and that gold has never since been found’; and the references in the Nibelungenlied to the sinking of the treasure in the Rhine. He thought it probable that it was already part of the legend when it came North.

He noted also that the answer to the question, if the treasure was in the Rhine, what would it matter whether Högni were alive or dead, must be that Högni was the only party to the secret of where in the great river it lay; so in the Völsunga Saga Gunnar says: ‘And now I alone know where the gold is, and Högni will not tell you’, and Snorri’s ‘that gold has never since been found’. ‘Doubtless it could have been fished up,’ my father wrote, ‘if you knew just where to look.’ He believed nonetheless that the episode was a later elaboration (he called it ‘theatrical-dramatic’), not perfectly fitting with the Rhine-gold motive: see further the note to 148–150.

130 lines 5–8: compare the lines from near the end of Beowulf, 3166–8:

forleton eorla gestreon eorðan healdan,

gold on greote, þær hit nu gen lifað

ealdum swa unnyt, swa hit æror wæs.

They gave the ancient wealth to earth’s keeping,

under stone the gold, that there still dwelleth

as profitless to men as it proved of yore.

(From an alliterative translation by my father of Beowulf lines 3137–82.)

132–140 In Atlamál it is said, and it is repeated by Snorri, that Gunnar in the snake-pit played the harp with his feet, an idea that may have arisen from the observation that he was bound, as is told in Atlakviða (and in the Lay, 113). In the Lay, following Atlakviða, Gunnar used his hands. Other features of this episode in the Lay are derived from the Saga: that Gudrún sent him the harp (135), that his playing put the serpents to sleep (136), and that he was finally stung to death by a huge adder (139).

141–147 The great funeral pyres are not in the Eddaic poems, but Gudrún’s revenge on Atli is told in both – the same hideous motive as appears in the Greek legend, told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, of Procne, who for vengeance killed her own son Itys and gave his flesh to her husband, Tereus King of Thrace, to eat.

142 Lines 5–8 are repeated almost exactly from the first stanza of the poem, where they are used of the pyre of Sigurd and Brynhild.

148–50 I have said (p.312) that my father ‘tentatively interpreted the state of Atlakviða as the reworking of an earlier poem, a reworking that had then itself undergone “improvements”, additions, losses, and disarrangements’. He believed that both the ‘Högni-Hjalli episode’ (see note to 118–131) and Gudrún’s revenge on Atli through their own children were later elaborations by ‘the Atlakviða poet’ on the earlier poem that he was reworking.

This last section of Atlakviða, constantly difficult to interpret in the detail of its language, is not altogether intelligible at large, logically or psychologically. As it stands, Gudrún came to meet Atli when he returned from the murder of Gunnar in the snake-pit and welcomed him to the feast with a golden cup (cf. the Lay, stanza 145), brought drink and food to the assembled company, waited on Atli – and then declared with ghastly clarity what she had done and what they were doing. A great cry of horror and noise of weeping arose from the benches, but Gudrún did not weep: ‘she scattered gold, with red rings enriched the men of her household.... Atli unsuspecting had drunk himself bemused; weapons he had not, he was not ware of Gudrún’ (this last phrase is my father’s translation of a Norse verb of uncertain meaning here). Then follows Gudrún’s murder of Atli in his bed before she set the hall on fire.

‘Why the distribution of gold,’ my father wrote, ‘when no help or favour was needed by Gudrún, or could be expected by a declared murderess of princes? Why the foolishness of Atli not suspecting Gudrún?’

His tentative solution was to suppose that while the perishing of Atli’s son, or sons, may have been a very old part of the legend, it was not originally an essential part of Gudrún’s revenge. The form in which we here find it interwoven (he wrote) is certainly mainly a Norse development, and the end of a long process. It is probable that it was not present in the ‘original source’ of Atlakviða, and that its introduction and interweaving with the main theme of revenge was the work of the Atlakviða poet.

He supposed that in an earlier form the story would have moved, after the funeral feast, to the verse describing Gudrún’s gold-giving, which would in this case be naturally interpreted as her continuing the pretence of cheerfulness, and acceptance, distributing rich gifts to allay suspicion. Then Atli, ‘unsuspecting’ – because he had no reason for suspicion – went to his bed very drunk (this being one of the oldest elements in the whole story, see Appendix A, pp.345–46). But when the motive of the murdered children entered it had necessarily to be introduced in the course of the funeral feast. The stanzas referred to above were retained, but they were not successfully fitted to the insertion (‘Why the distribution of gold? Why the foolishness of Atli?’).

In his Lay of Gudrún my father devised a remedy for this in Atli’s swoon of horror that caused the servants to carry him to his bed (148–149).

The author of Atlamál here suddenly turns to a tradition that Högni had a son who avenged him on Atli, and says (followed by the Saga, and by Snorri) that this son, who has not been previously mentioned in the poem, aided Gudrún in the murder. As is to be expected, this has no place in the Lay of Gudrún.

152–154 The burning of the hall by Gudrún is derived from Atlakviða: see note to 93–112.

156 Lines 5–8 are almost the same as the last lines of the Lay of the Völsungs (IX.82), and become also the last lines of the Lay of Gudrún (stanza 165) before the parting words of the poet to his audience.

157–165 In a pencilled note on the manuscript my father wrote that all the conclusion of the poem from stanza 157 should be omitted, only the final stanza 166 being retained. Rough lines drawn on the manuscript, however, show the omission as extending only to stanza 164, so that the last four lines of 156 are the same as the last four lines of 165 immediately following.

159–165 The verses given to Gudrún as she sits beside the sea are inspired by the late Eddaic poem Guðrúnarhvöt, but there is little close correspondence. The latter part of that brief lay is one of several ‘Laments of Gudrún’; but it includes her grief over the final element in the Northern legend, which for his purposes in these poems my father excluded.

In Guðrúnarhvöt Gudrún tells that she attempted to drown herself in the sea, but the waves cast her up (as in the Lay of Gudrún 158), and her story was not ended. Early on, a wholly distinct and very ancient Gothic legend was threaded on to the acquisitive Niflung theme. This legend concerned the death of the Ostrogothic king Ermanaric (see note to 86) at the hands of two brothers, in revenge for the murder of their sister; and the sister, Swanhild (Svanhildr), became the wife of Ermanaric and the daughter of Sigurd and Gudrún, her brothers (Hamðir and Sörli) the sons of Gudrún by her third and last marriage to a shadowy king named Iónakr.

Earlier in the Lay of Gudrún, when Gunnar sang of ancient Gothic deeds (86), he named Iormunrek (Ermanaric); and this of itself shows that my father was cutting away the Gothic legend from his Niflung poem, and setting Iormunrek in a historical context – for in history Ermanaric died some sixty years before Gundahari (Gunnar) king of the Burgundians.

Only in Guðrúnarhvöt is there any reference in Norse literature to the manner of Gudrún’s death (self-destruction on a funeral pyre); but in the Lay of Gudrún she utters her lament, and again giving herself to the waves is this time taken.