The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

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 Atlakvi?a as the reworking of an earlier poem, a reworking that had then itself undergone ‘improvements’, additions, losses, and disarrangements.

Following Atlakvi?a in the Codex Regius is Atlamal, the longest of all the heroic poems of the Edda. Whether or not the author of this poem was familiar with Atlakvi?a (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: ‘Atlakvi?a 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 Atlamal they have sunk to farmhouses. The geography, vague of course, is in keeping: the Niflungs ride fen and forest and plain to Atli (in Atlamal they seem only to row over a single fjord). We may notice also the old traditional vin Borgunda of Gunnar, and the Myrkvi?r (‘Mirkwood’) specially associated with ancient Hun-stories’ (see the notes to the Lay of the Volsungs VII.14 and 15). But in Atlamal, 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 Gjuki, and use several of the same phrases: see the Lay of the Volsungs, 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 Drap Niflunga ‘The Slaying of the Niflungs’, evidently intended as an introduction to the poem that follows in the manuscript, which is Gu?runarkvi?a en forna, the Old Lay of Gudrun. The passage begins thus:

Gunnar and Hogni seized all the gold, the patrimony of Fafnir. At that time there was strife between the sons of Gjuki and Atli: he charged them with the death of Brynhild. This was how they were reconciled: they were to give him Gudrun 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 Gudrun 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 Gudrun. ‘There is no trace in Atlakvi?a 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   Atlakvi?a and Atlamal do not take up the story until the coming of Atli’s messenger to the Gjukings. The primary source for the story of Gudrun after the death of Sigurd is Gu?runarkvi?a 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 Volsungs). In this poem Gudrun 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 Hakon’s daughter that the tapestry was woven, and it was there that Gunnar and Hogni came to her, together with Grimhild.

      In the Lay (stanza 2) Gudrun is said to have gone ‘witless wandering in woods alone’, and when Grimhild 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: ‘Gudrun 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 Gu?runarkvi?a en nyja to Volsungakvi?a en nyja.

17–28   An important element in Gu?runarkvi?a en forna which is absent from the Lay of Gudrun is the draught of forgetfulness given to Gudrun by Grimhild, 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 Grimhild’s potion, and its curious ingredients enumerated at length. But very strangely, the draught has no effect on Gudrun’s mind: in the verses that follow she fiercely withstands Grimhild’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 Grimhild 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 Grimhild 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 Grimhild’s drink of forgetfulness was an interpolation by a later hand. In his Lay of Gudrun it is gone, and Gudrun (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 Grimhild were ‘Then so it must be, but it is against my will; and no joy will come of it, but rather grief.’

22  Gudrun’s dream is repeated from the Lay of the Volsungs, 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 Volsungs, 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 Atlamal the life of Atli and Gudrun has been a horror of hatred and dissension; stanzas 32 and 34 of the Lay suggest rather the story glimpsed in Atlakvi?a, where when Gudrun 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 Gudrun Atli is explicitly presented as torn between his love of Gudrun and his desire for the Niflung hoard.

35  In Atlamal (followed by the Saga) Gudrun overheard what Atli and his men said