The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

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 O?inn,

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 Odin’s hope) the saviour at the Ragnarok 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 Volsungakvi?a en nyja, ‘Andvari’s Gold’, and the first nine stanzas of section II, ‘Signy’, stand to the final form as does text A of the Upphaf, in that there is constant difference in detail of vocabulary and phrasing.

GU?RUNARKVI?A EN NYJA

e?a

DRAP NIFLUNGA

GU?RUNARKVI?A EN NYJA

1

Smoke had faded,

sunk was burning;

windblown ashes

were wafted cold.

As sun setting

had Sigurd passed;

and Brynhild burned

as blazing fire.

2

Their bliss was over,

their bale ended;

but Gudrun’s grief

ever grew the more.

Life she hated,

but life took not,

witless wandering

in woods alone.

*

3

Atli ariseth

armies wielding;

on the marches of the East

his might waxeth.

Goths he tramples,