The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

Brot, and so attributed it to the otherwise wholly lost ‘Sigur?arkvi?a 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 Hogni (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 Hogni 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 Sigur?arkvi?a 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 Gu?runarkvi?a en forna (the Old Lay of Gudrun) that Sigurd and the sons of Gjuki 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  Grimhild’s offspring: the author of the Saga regarded Gotthorm (Gottormr) as a full brother of Gunnar and Hogni, 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 Hyndluljo?, that Gotthorm was the half-brother of Gunnar and Hogni, being ‘Grimhild’s offspring’; Snorri Sturluson, also, says that Gotthorm was Gjuki’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 Sigur?arkvi?a en skamma, Brynhild dying foretold all the later history of Gudrun; 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 Sinfjotli, except that the reading there is Volsung, not Volsungs. The plural form here is clear, but may nonetheless be erroneous. On the form Valhollu 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 Hakon the Good (see the note on V.54) there is a remarkable image of the coming of an ‘Odin hero’ to Valholl. The poem opens with Odin declaring that he has had a dream in which he was preparing Valholl to receive a company of the slain. There is a great noise of many men approaching the hall, and Odin calls on the dead heroes Sigmund and Sinfjotli 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 Odin: ‘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 Odin 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 Gudrun. 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 Volsung 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 Sigur?arkvi?a 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 Gjuki, and his reception; his oath of brotherhood with the king’s sons; and his wedding with Gudrun: 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 Gudrun, 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].