Nibelungenlied, there is fierce fighting on the arrival of Gunnar and Hogni, and Gudrun, 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 Hogni 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 Volsunga Saga. The Saga introduces the idea of a lull in the fighting, not found in Atlamal, 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 Hogni were taken prisoner; whereas in the Lay the result of the assault is that they hold Atli at their mercy – and Gudrun persuades them to show it.
The Lay is far removed from Atlamal in the portrait of Gudrun, 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 Gudrun 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 Volsungs, 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 (Jormunrekkr) 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 Gjuki (the Lay of the Volsungs, 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 wra? w?rloga, ‘fell and faithless’, and in the little poem called Deor he appears in these lines:
We geascodon Eormanrices
wylfenne ge?oht: ahte wide folc
Gotena rices: ??t w?s 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 Hei?reks 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, Angantyr is a Gothic king; and Dunhei?r, scene of a great battle, probably contains Norse Duna, the Danube. ‘Danpar-banks’ in Gunnar’s earlier song (Lay of the Volsungs VII.14) and ‘Danpar’s walls’ in the present stanza derive from the Norse Danparsta?ir, a survival of the Gothic name of the river Dnieper. Of its occurrence in Atlakvi?a 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 Sn?var is named in Atlamal as one of Hogni’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.’
Hn?f 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 (Hogni) 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 Thi?rekssaga based on North German tales and songs, this is altogether differently motivated, for it was Kriemhild (Gudrun in the Norse legend) who inspired the invitation to Hunland, in order to get vengeance on Gunther and Hagen (Gunnar and Hogni) 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 Gudrun 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 Atlakvi?a Gudrun set the hall on fire at the end of the poem, after the murder
