The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

Atlakvi?a as the reworking of an earlier poem, a reworking that had then itself undergone “improvements”, additions, losses, and disarrangements’. He believed that both the ‘Hogni-Hjalli episode’ (see note to 118–131) and Gudrun’s revenge on Atli through their own children were later elaborations by ‘the Atlakvi?a poet’ on the earlier poem that he was reworking.

      This last section of Atlakvi?a, constantly difficult to interpret in the detail of its language, is not altogether intelligible at large, logically or psychologically. As it stands, Gudrun came to meet Atli when he returned from the murder of Gunnar in the snake-pit and welcomed him to the feast with a golden cup (cf. the Lay, stanza 145), brought drink and food to the assembled company, waited on Atli – and then declared with ghastly clarity what she had done and what they were doing. A great cry of horror and noise of weeping arose from the benches, but Gudrun did not weep: ‘she scattered gold, with red rings enriched the men of her household.... Atli unsuspecting had drunk himself bemused; weapons he had not, he was not ware of Gudrun’ (this last phrase is my father’s translation of a Norse verb of uncertain meaning here). Then follows Gudrun’s murder of Atli in his bed before she set the hall on fire.

      ‘Why the distribution of gold,’ my father wrote, ‘when no help or favour was needed by Gudrun, or could be expected by a declared murderess of princes? Why the foolishness of Atli not suspecting Gudrun?’

      His tentative solution was to suppose that while the perishing of Atli’s son, or sons, may have been a very old part of the legend, it was not originally an essential part of Gudrun’s revenge. The form in which we here find it interwoven (he wrote) is certainly mainly a Norse development, and the end of a long process. It is probable that it was not present in the ‘original source’ of Atlakvi?a, and that its introduction and interweaving with the main theme of revenge was the work of the Atlakvi?a poet.

      He supposed that in an earlier form the story would have moved, after the funeral feast, to the verse describing Gudrun’s gold-giving, which would in this case be naturally interpreted as her continuing the pretence of cheerfulness, and acceptance, distributing rich gifts to allay suspicion. Then Atli, ‘unsuspecting’ – because he had no reason for suspicion – went to his bed very drunk (this being one of the oldest elements in the whole story, see Appendix A, pp.345–46). But when the motive of the murdered children entered it had necessarily to be introduced in the course of the funeral feast. The stanzas referred to above were retained, but they were not successfully fitted to the insertion (‘Why the distribution of gold? Why the foolishness of Atli?’).

      In his Lay of Gudrun my father devised a remedy for this in Atli’s swoon of horror that caused the servants to carry him to his bed (148–149).

The author of Atlamal here suddenly turns to a tradition that Hogni had a son who avenged him on Atli, and says (followed by the Saga, and by Snorri) that this son, who has not been previously mentioned in the poem, aided Gudrun in the murder. As is to be expected, this has no place in the Lay of Gudrun.

152–154   The burning of the hall by Gudrun is derived from Atlakvi?a: see note to 93–112.

156  Lines 5–8 are almost the same as the last lines of the Lay of the Volsungs (IX.82), and become also the last lines of the Lay of Gudrun (stanza 165) before the parting words of the poet to his audience.

157–165   In a pencilled note on the manuscript my father wrote that all the conclusion of the poem from stanza 157 should be omitted, only the final stanza 166 being retained. Rough lines drawn on the manuscript, however, show the omission as extending only to stanza 164, so that the last four lines of 156 are the same as the last four lines of 165 immediately following.

159–165   The verses given to Gudrun as she sits beside the sea are inspired by the late Eddaic poem Gu?runarhvot, but there is little close correspondence. The latter part of that brief lay is one of several ‘Laments of Gudrun’; but it includes her grief over the final element in the Northern legend, which for his purposes in these poems my father excluded.

      In Gu?runarhvot Gudrun tells that she attempted to drown herself in the sea, but the waves cast her up (as in the Lay of Gudrun 158), and her story was not ended. Early on, a wholly distinct and very ancient Gothic legend was threaded on to the acquisitive Niflung theme. This legend concerned the death of the Ostrogothic king Ermanaric (see note to 86) at the hands of two brothers, in revenge for the murder of their sister; and the sister, Swanhild (Svanhildr), became the wife of Ermanaric and the daughter of Sigurd and Gudrun, her brothers (Ham?ir and Sorli) the sons of Gudrun by her third and last marriage to a shadowy king named Ionakr.

      Earlier in the Lay of Gudrun, when Gunnar sang of ancient Gothic deeds (86), he named Iormunrek (Ermanaric); and this of itself shows that my father was cutting away the Gothic legend from his Niflung poem, and setting Iormunrek in a historical context – for in history Ermanaric died some sixty years before Gundahari (Gunnar) king of the Burgundians.

      Only in Gu?runarhvot is there any reference in Norse literature to the manner of Gudrun’s death (self-destruction on a funeral pyre); but in the Lay of Gudrun she utters her lament, and again giving herself to the waves is this time taken.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

A short account of the

ORIGINS OF THE LEGEND

§ I Attila and

Gundahari

In both Lays my father used the expression ‘Borgund lord(s)’, chiefly in reference to Gunnar, or Gunnar and Hogni (who are also called ‘Gjukings’ and ‘Niflungs’). In the commentary on the Lay of the Volsungs, VII.15, I have explained that he derived the name ‘Borgund’ from a single occurrence in Atlakvi?a of the title vin Borgunda ‘lord of the Burgundians’, applied to Gunnar, and that nowhere else in Norse literature was Gunnar remembered as a Burgundian. In this title appears one of the chief elements in the legend.

The Burgundians were in origin an East Germanic people who came out of Scandinavia; they left their name in Bornholm (Norse Borgunda holm), the island that rises from the Baltic south-east of the southern tip of Sweden. In the Old English poem Widsith they are named together with the eastern Goths (Ostrogoths) and the Huns: ‘Attila ruled the Huns, Ermanaric the Goths, Gifica the Burgundians’,