The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún

There appear to have been no losses at beginning and end – where losses frequently occur.

This is all we know about this remarkable survivor of time, fire, and flood. In 1662 King Frederick III of Denmark sent the well-known Thormod Torfæus with an open letter to the celebrated Brynjólfr Sveinsson. Since 1639 Brynjólfr had been bishop of Skálaholt in Iceland, and had been a keen collector of manuscripts. Torfæus was commissioned to get his help in collecting for the king materials for ancient history, and any antiquities, curiosities, or rarities that could be found in Iceland. In 1663 the bishop sent the choicest of his collection to the king. Among these now priceless treasures was the Codex Regius. Where the bishop had found it, or what was its previous history is unknown, except that he had picked it up twenty years earlier: for on the front page he had written his monogram and a date (LL 1643, i.e. Lupus Loricatus = Brynjólfr), just as we should scrawl our name and a date on a new and interesting acquisition from a second-hand bookshop.

Two hundred and fifty years have followed

– of examining, puzzling, construing, etymologizing, analysis, theorizing, arguing and sifting argument, of asserting and refuting, until, short as are its contents, Eddaic ‘literature’ has become a land and a desert in itself. From all this study, amidst a vast disagreement, certain things have reached, more or less, the stage of authoritative consensus of opinion.

We now know (#ulink_392c2de9-b2b4-5901-a3f7-96b86f611eb1), at any rate, that this collection of poems should not be called Edda at all. This is a perpetuation of an act of baptism on the part of the bishop in which he acted ultra vires. The collection had no comprehensive title at all so far as we know or the manuscript shows. Edda is the title of one of the works of Snorri Sturluson (died 1241), a work founded on these very poems, and others now lost like them, and it is the title of that work only, by rights; a work which is concerned primarily, even in the earlier parts which are cast in narrative or dialogue form, with the technicalities of Northern poetry, which for us it rescued from oblivion. The name is therefore quite inapplicable to a collection of actual antique poems, collected largely for their merits as verse, not as exemplars of a craft.

Beyond this we can say little about the manuscript. It appears that the Codex Regius belongs palaeographically to say about 1270 (early in the latter half of the thirteenth century), and is itself apparently a copy of an original belonging to 1200 (some say earlier). It belongs in fact actually as we have it to a period thirty years after the death of Snorri; but even if it were not a fact that Snorri used these very poems substantially as we have them, it is clear enough internally that the matter, the manner, and the language of the poems entitles them to the name ‘Elder’.

As for when they were written, we have no information other than an examination of the poems themselves will yield. Naturally the datings differ, especially in the case of individual poems. None of them, in point of original composition, are likely to be much older than 900 A.D. As a kind of central period which cannot possibly be extended in either direction we can say 850–1050 A.D. These limits cannot be stretched – least of all backwards. Nothing of them can have been cast into the form we know (or rather into the forms of which our manuscript offers us often a corrupt descendant), except for occasional lines, allusions, or phrases, before 800. Doubtless they were afterwards corrupted orally and scribally – and even altered: I mean that in addition to mere corruption producing either nonsense, or at least ill-scanning lines, there were actual variants current. But in the main these things were the products of individual authors, who, whatever they used of old tradition, even older poems, wrote new things which had not before existed.

The antiquity and origin of the mythology and legends met in the poems is another matter. In general it is not really so important to criticism (however attractive to curiosity) to know what answers can be made to this sort of question, as it is to remember that wherever they got their material the authors lived in the last centuries of heathenism in Norway and Iceland, and treated their material in the style and spirit of those lands and times. Even formal etymology has seldom much to say, attractive though I personally find it. Even when, as often happens, we can equate a name with its form in other Germanic languages it does not tell us much. Thus Jörmunrekkr is Ermanaríks, and his name an echo of the history of the Goths, their power and ruin [see pp.322 (#litres_trial_promo)–23 (#litres_trial_promo), note to stanza 86]; Gunnarr is Gundahari, and his story an echo of events in Germany in the fifth century [see Appendix A, pp.337 (#litres_trial_promo)–39 (#litres_trial_promo)]. But this does not tell us much of the state in which these tales first reached the North, or the paths (certainly various) they came by. And still less does it help us to unravel the literary problems concerning the various treatment of the Burgundian theme in Scandinavia.

But intriguing as all this questioning is, we may end on the note we struck before: it is not of the first importance. Far more important than the names of the figures, or the origins of the details of the story (except where this helps us to understand what is unintelligible or to rescue a text from corruption) is the atmosphere, colouring, style. These are products only in a very small degree of the origin of the themes: they chiefly reflect the age and country in which the poems were composed. And we shall not be far wrong in taking the mountains and fjords of Norway, and the life of small communities in that disconnected land, as the physical and social background of these poems – a life of a special sort of agriculture, combined with adventurous sea-faring and fishery. And the time: days of the fading of a special, individual, pagan culture, not elaborate materially, but in many ways highly civilized, a culture which had possessed not only (in some degree) an organized religion, but a store of partly organized and systematized legends and poetry. Days of a fading of belief, when in a sudden changing of the world the South went up in flames, and its plunder enriched the wooden halls of the Norse chieftains till they shone with gold. Then came Harald Fairhair, and a great kingship, and a court, and the colonization of Iceland (as an incident in a vast series of adventures), and the ruinous wars of Ólaf Tryggvason, and the dying down of the flame, into the gentle smoulder of the Middle Ages, taxes and trade-regulations, and the jog-trot of pigs and herrings.

It may be that it was with that characteristic flourish that my father ended this lecture; at any rate (though the manuscript text continues, and soon turns to a consideration of individual poems) it seems a good place to end it here.

I append here a number of notes and brief statements on various topics that are best treated separately, as follows.

§1 The ‘Prose Edda’ of Snorri Sturluson

§2 The Saga of the Völsungs (Völsunga Saga)

§3 The text of the poems

§4 The spelling of Norse names

§5 The verse-form of the poems

§6 Notes on the poems by the author

§1 THE ‘PROSE EDDA’ OF SNORRI STURLUSON

The name Edda properly belongs only to a celebrated work by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241). This is a treatise on the distinctive art of Icelandic poetry which in Snorri’s day was dying out: the old metrical rules disregarded, the old mythological knowledge essential to it attacked by a clergy hostile to any survival of heathendom. This book, in its three parts, is a retelling in prose narrative of ancient myths and legends; an account of, and explanation of, the strange diction of the old ‘court poetry’; and exemplification of its verse-forms.

In my father’s lecture (p.29 (#ulink_efb86c47-d927-5bab-a8f1-45fe71df4fce)) he noted that the application of the name Edda by Bishop Brynjólf of Skálaholt to the poems of the great Codex that he acquired in 1643 was without historical justification. In Brynjólf’s time it had come to be supposed among Icelanders interested in the ancient literature that there must have been ‘an older Edda’ from which Snorri’s work was derived. Brynjólf himself wrote in a letter in 1641, before he knew of the existence of the Codex: ‘Where now are those huge treasuries of all human knowledge written by Sæmund the Wise, and above all that most noble Edda, of which we possess now, beyond the name, scarcely a thousandth part; and that indeed which we do possess would have been utterly lost, had not the epitome of Snorri Sturluson left to us rather the shadow and footprints than the true body of that ancient Edda.’

Sæmund the Wise (1056–1133) was a priest whose prodigious learning became a legend, but for the title Sæmundar Edda that Brynjólf gave to the Codex there was no foundation. Thus arose the conception of the two Eddas, the Poetic or Elder Edda and the Prose or Younger Edda. Why Snorri’s work was named Edda is not known, but there have been several explanations: by some it is related to the word óðr in the sense ‘poem, poetry’, as if it meant ‘Poetics’, by others derived from the place Oddi in south-west Iceland, a centre of Icelandic learning where Snorri grew up.

From the ‘Poetic Edda’ emerged the adjective Eddaic (and Eddic), used in contrast to Skaldic (#ulink_2586d137-cc98-512d-aac7-cecd2ebc2949) (a modern derivative from the Old Norse word skáld meaning ‘poet’). Of Skaldic verse my father wrote in his lecture on the Elder Edda (p.20 (#ulink_2586d137-cc98-512d-aac7-cecd2ebc2949)): ‘It was not until relatively late that “kings” in the North were rich enough or powerful enough to hold splendid court, and when this did come about . . . verse developed its local brief, pithy, strophic, often dramatic form not into epic, but into the astonishing and euphonious but formal elaborations of Skaldic verse.’ This ‘court poetry’, as it may also be called, was an extraordinarily intricate and distinctive art, with extreme elaboration of verse-forms subject to rules of exacting strictness: ‘elaborations’, in my father’s words, ‘in which various kinds of internal and final full-rhyme and half-rhyme both vocalic and consonantal are interwoven with the principles of “weight” and stress and alliteration, with the deliberate object of utilizing to the full the vigour, force and rolling beat of the Norse tongue.’ To which must be added the huge poetic vocabulary, and the extraordinary cultivation (described below) of the device of the ‘kenning’.

‘To us,’ he wrote, ‘thinking of the Elder Edda, “Eddaic” means the simpler, more straightforward language of the heroic and mythological verse, in contrast to the artificial language of the Skalds. And usually this contrast is thought of as one of age as well: old simplicity of good old Germanic days, unhappily given up in a new taste for poetry become an elaborate riddle.

‘But the opposition between “Eddaic” and “Skaldic” verse is quite unreal as one of time, as between older and younger, as of a fine old popular manner being pushed out by a younger, newer fashion. They are related growths, branches on the same tree, essentially connected, even possibly sometimes by the same hands. Skalds can be found to write in fornyrðislag, the oldest of old metres; Skaldic kennings can be found in Eddaic lays.

‘All that remains true of this contrast of age is the fact that the simpler metres, e.g. fornyrðislag and the style that goes with it, are far older, much closer, for instance, to other Germanic things, to Old English verse, than the specially Skaldic verse and manner. The Eddaic poems we have belong to the same period as Skaldic, but the metrical traditions and style they employ carries on still, without fundamental alteration, something of the common Germanic tradition. Old and new in metre rubbed shoulders – it was as we have seen already a transition period, a period of poise between old and new, not maintainable for long [see p.23 (#ulink_f4adff59-5f85-5d1b-93b8-2550fd6fb392)].’

It is the highly artificial Skaldic poetry that is the subject of Snorri’s instruction in his Edda, and indeed by far the greater part of what survives of it owes its survival to him. In the second part of the book, Skáldskaparmál (‘Poetic Diction’), he treats above all of kennings, with a great number of exemplifying verses by named skalds: but very many of these kennings are wholly incomprehensible without a knowledge of the myths and legends to which they allude – and such themes are not characteristically the subject of the Skaldic poems themselves. In the first part of the Edda (the Gylfaginning) Snorri drew extensively on Eddaic poetry; and in the Skáldskaparmál also he told the stories on which certain kennings rest. The following is a single example.

Hvernig skal kenna gull? How shall gold be named?

Thus: by calling it the Fire of Ægir; the Pine-needles of Glasir; the Hair of Síf; the Head-band of Fulla; Freyja’s Tears; the Drop, or Rain, or Shower of Draupnir [Ódin’s gold ring, from which dropped other rings]; Otter’s Ransom; Forced Payment of the Æsir; . . .

Following (#litres_trial_promo) such a list as this, Snorri gave explanations of these locutions.

Hver er sök til þess, at gull er kallat otrgjöld? What is the reason that gold is called Otter’s ransom?

It is told that when the Æsir, Ódin and Loki and Hœnir, went out to explore the world they came to a certain river, and they went along the river to a waterfall; and by the waterfall was an otter . . .

And thus it is that we have the story of Andvari’s Gold told both by the author of the Völsunga Saga and by Snorri Sturluson (see the Commentary on the Lay of the Völsungs, pp.188 (#litres_trial_promo)–91 (#litres_trial_promo)); but indeed Snorri here continued his narrative into a résumé of the whole history of the Völsungs.

It remains to add that the celebrity of Snorri’s book in the centuries that followed, and most especially of the Skáldskaparmál, led, before the emergence of the Codex Regius, to the term Edda being widely used to mean, expressly, the technical rules of the old ‘court’ poetry, or ‘Skaldic’ verse. In those days poets complained of the tyranny of Edda, or offered apologies for their lack of proficiency in the art of Edda. In the words of Gudbrand Vigfússon: ‘An untaught poet who called a spade a spade, instead of describing it by a mythological circumlocution, would be scouted as “Eddaless”’ (Eddu-lauss, ‘having no Eddaic art’). Thus the term ‘Eddaic’, as now used, in opposition to ‘Skaldic’, is a perfect reversal of its former meaning (#ulink_2586d137-cc98-512d-aac7-cecd2ebc2949).

§2 THE SAGA OF THE VÖLSUNGS (Völsunga Saga)

The Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda is a collection of poems of great diversity, composed by poets who lived centuries apart; but it was compiled and ordered with intelligent care. Most of the heroic poems are concerned with the story of the Völsungs and the Niflungs; and these the compiler of the collection arranged, so far as the diverse structure and scope of the individual lays allowed him, in a narrative sequence, adding explanatory passages in prose at the beginning and end of many of the lays, and narrative links in the course of them.

But much of the material thus arranged is of the utmost difficulty. Poems are disordered or defective, or even patchworks of different origin altogether, and there are very many obscurities of detail; while worst of all, the fifth gathering of the Codex Regius disappeared long ago (see p.28 (#ulink_f58d68c7-c2a7-5474-8337-03bc5be269e9)), with the loss of all Eddaic poetry for the central part of the legend of Sigurd.

In this situation, there is an essential aid to the understanding of the Northern legend. This is the Völsunga Saga, written, probably in Iceland, in the thirteenth century, though the oldest manuscript is much later: a prose tale of the fate of the whole Völsung race from the far ancestry of Sigmund, father of Sigurd, and continuing on to the fall of the Niflungs and the death of Atli (Attila) and beyond. It is founded both on Eddaic lays that survive and other sources now lost; and ‘it is solely from the lays that it has used,’ my father said in a lecture, ‘that it derives its power and the attraction that it has for all those who come to it,’ for he did not hold the author’s artistic capacity in high regard.

This author was faced with wholly divergent traditions (seen in the preserved Eddaic lays) concerning Sigurd and Brynhild: stories that cannot be combined, for they are essentially contradictory. Yet he combined them; and in doing so produced a narrative that is certainly mysterious, but (in its central point) unsatisfying: as it were a puzzle that is presented as completed but in which the looked for design is incomprehensible and at odds with itself.

In the commentary that follows each poem in this book I have noticed many features in which my father departed from the Völsunga Saga narrative, more especially in the case of his Lay of the Völsungs, where the Saga is of much greater importance as a source. He seems not to have set down any critical account of the Saga as a whole, or if he did it has not survived; but comments of his on the author’s work in individual passages will be found in the commentary (see pp.208 (#litres_trial_promo)–11 (#litres_trial_promo), 221 (#litres_trial_promo), 244 (#litres_trial_promo)–45 (#litres_trial_promo)).

§3 THE TEXT OF THE POEMS

It is at once obvious that the manuscript of the two lays is a fair copy intended to be final, for my father’s handwriting is clear and uniform throughout, with scarcely any corrections made at the time of writing (and of very few of his manuscripts, however ‘final’ in intention, can that be said). While it cannot be shown to be the case, there is at any rate no indication that the two poems were not written out consecutively.

It is a remarkable fact that no more than a few pages survive of work on the poems preceding the final text, and those pages relate exclusively to the opening (Upphaf, the Beginning) of Völsungakviða en nýja, to section I ‘Andvari’s Gold’, and to a small part of section II, ‘Signý’. Beyond this point there is no trace of any earlier drafting whatsoever; but the earlier manuscript material is interesting, and I have discussed it in a note on p.246 (#litres_trial_promo)–49 (#litres_trial_promo).

The final manuscript of the poems did however itself undergo correction at some later time. By a rough count there are some eighty to ninety emendations scattered through the two texts, from changes of a single word to (but rarely) the substitution of several half-lines; some lines are marked for alteration but without any replacement provided.

The corrections are written rapidly and often indistinctly in pencil, and all are concerned with vocabulary and metre, not with the substance of the narrative. I have the impression that my father read through the text many years later (the fact that a couple of the corrections are in red ball-point pen points to a late date) and quickly emended points that struck him as he went – perhaps with a view to possible publication, though I know of no evidence that he ever actually proposed it.

I have taken up virtually all these late corrections into the text given in this book.

There are two notable differences in the presentation of Völsungakviða en nýja and Guðrúnarkviða en nýja in the manuscript. One concerns the actual organization of the poem. The Lay of the Völsungs following the opening section Upphaf (‘Beginning’) is divided into nine sections, to which my father gave titles in Norse without translation, as follows:

I have retained these titles in the text, but added translations, as above, to those which are not simply proper names. In the Lay of Gudrún, on the other hand, there is no division into sections.

To sections I, II, V, and VI in the Lay of the Völsungs, but not to the other five, explanatory prose head-notes are added (perhaps in imitation of the prose notes inserted by the compiler of the Codex Regius of the Edda).

The marginal indications of the speakers in both poems are given exactly as they appear in the manuscript, as also are the indications of new ‘moments’ in the narrative.

The second difference in presentation between the two poems concerns the line-divisions. In Upphaf, alone of the sections of the Lay of the Völsungs, but throughout the Lay of Gudrún, the stanzas are written in eight short lines: that is to say, the unit of the verse, the half-line or vísuorð, is written separately: