The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

which may be taken to be a memory of a time when the Burgundians still dwelt in ‘East Germania’; but they moved westwards toward the Rhineland, and it was there that disaster overtook them.

Early in the fifth century they were settled in Gaul, in a kingdom on the west bank of the Rhine centred on Worms (south of Frankfurt). In the year 435, led by their king Gundahari, the Burgundians, impelled as it seems by the need for land, embarked on an expansion westwards; but they were crushed by the Roman general Aetius and forced to sue for peace. Two years later, in 437, they were overwhelmed by a massive onslaught of the Huns, in which Gundahari and a very large number of his people perished. It has been commonly supposed that the Roman Aetius, whose primary purpose was to defend Gaul from the encroachments of the barbarians, called in the Huns to destroy the Burgundian kingdom of Worms. There is no reason to suppose that Attila was the leader of the Huns in this battle.

But the Burgundians of the Rhineland were not wholly destroyed in 437, for it is recorded that in 443 the survivors were allowed to settle as colonists in the region of Savoy. A curious glimpse of them is found among the writings of Sidonius Apollinaris, a cultivated Gallo-Roman aristocrat, Imperial politician, and poet, born in Lyons about 430, and in his later years the bishop of Clermont, the chief city of the Auvergne. He left in his letters a portrait of the manners and mode of life in the strange society of southern Gaul in the fifth century.

But to the fastidious Sidonius the gross Burgundians were repellent and their culture wholly without interest. In a satirical poem he complained humorously of having to sit among the long-haired barbarians (who were excessively fond of him) and be forced to endure Germanic speech: to praise with a wry face the songs sung by the gluttonous, seven foot tall Burgundians, who greased their hair with rancid butter and reeked of onions. Thus we learn nothing from him of the songs which were sung by the contemporaries of Gundahari and Attila, but only that his own muse fled away from the noise.

That they preserved their traditions, however great the disaster of 437, is suggested by a Burgundian code of laws drawn up King Gundobad not later than the early sixth century, in which the names of ancestral kings are cited: Gibica, Gundomar, Gislahari, Gundahari. These names all appear in later legend, though it cannot be known what were the historical relationships between them. Gundahari is Gunnarr (vin Borgunda) in Norse. He appears in Old English in the very dissimilar but ultimately identical form Gu?here: in the poem Widsith the minstrel says that when he was ‘among the Burgundians’

me ??r Gu?here forgeaf    gl?dlicne ma??um

songes to leane;    n?s ??t s?ne cyning.

(‘there Gu?here gave me a glorious jewel in reward for my song: he was no sluggish king.’) In the German tradition he is Gunther.

Gibica, in the form Gifica, appears in the Old English Widsith as the ruler of the Burgundians together with the rulers of the Goths and the Huns, as I have mentioned above. In Norse the name became by regular phonetic change Gjuki, who is the father of Gunnar; in forms of the German tradition Gibeche is likewise the father of Gunther; but (especially in view of the placing of Gifica in Widsith) it may be that he was in history an illustrious ancestor of an older time.

‘It is easy to understand,’ wrote R.W. Chambers in his edition of Widsith (1912) ‘why the story of the fall of Gundahari and his men in battle against the Huns was of interest not merely to the Burgundian, but to all his neigh-bours, till, as the centuries passed, it became known from end to end of Germania. Eight centuries after his fight Gundahari was still remembered from Iceland to Austria.’

With this view my father did not altogether concur. In notes for lectures primarily on the knowledge of the Volsung legend among Old English poets, he said: ‘Gu?here’s tale is one of downfall after glory – and sudden downfall, not slow decay – sudden and overwhelming disaster in a great battle. It is the downfall, too, of a people that had already had an adventurous career, and disturbed things in the west by their intrusion and by the rise of a considerable power at Worms. It is easy to see how their defeat by Aetius only two years previously would be telescoped in the dramatic manner of legend into the defeat by the Huns (if not actually connected in history, as it may have been).

‘Gu?here, already valiant and a generous goldgiver as patron in Widsith, must have been very renowned. Mere downfall, without previous glory, did not excite minstrels to admiration and pity. However, we are probably not far wrong in guessing that there must – quite early – have been some other element than mere misfortune in this tale to give it the fire and vitality it clearly had: living as it did down the centuries. What this was we can hardly guess. Gold? It may well have been that gold, or the acquisition of some treasure (that later still became connected with some renowned legendary gold) was introduced to explain Attila’s attack. Attila (when legend or history is not on his side) is represented as grasping and greedy. It may have been in this way that Gu?here ultimately got connected with the most renowned hoard, the dragon’s hoard of Sigemund [in Old English], of Sigurd [in Old Norse].’

My father did not mean to imply that, in history, Attila was the leader in the attack on the Burgundians in 437, for which there is no evidence. He saw that ‘Attila only appears in the story by an early legendary, or dramatic, simplification and heightening of the importance of the battle in which Gu?here perished. He became essential to it.’ In the eighth century the Lombard historian Paul the Deacon (monk of Monte Cassino) knew Attila as the foe; and from his account it is seen that by then the tradition was that Gundahari was not slain in his own town of Worms, but marched eastwards to meet Attila: and this was an invariable feature of the legend in all its forms.

Profound as was the impression made in Germanic legend by the colossal figure of Attila, there is no occasion in this book to outline the history of the most renowned of all the barbarian kings, which necessarily involves the political and military complexities, often obscure, of his relations with the disrupted Empire; and indeed, in the development of the legend in Norse, it could be said that it was the manner of his death that counted for more than his life. At the same time there is no need, I think, to pass over altogether the extraordinarily clear glimpse of that fearful tyrant and destroyer that survives from more than fifteen centuries ago (in such contrast to Gundahari, of whose personal characteristics we know nothing at all).

This is owing to an accomplished and well-informed historian named Priscus of Panium (that being a town of Thrace), whose large work in Greek Of Byzantium and the events connected with Attila survives, lamentably, only in fragments; but one of those fragments contains the story of his journey into Hungary as a member of a small diplomatic deputation to Attila sent out from Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Empire, in the summer of the year 449. Attila received the Roman embassy in the village of wooden buildings that was his headquarters, standing in the midst of a vast plain without stone or tree; and Priscus not only narrowly observed the banquet at which Attila presided, and much else, but described it in such sharp detail as to suggest that he took notes at the time of all that he saw. In this unique account of a barbarian banquet in the Heroic Age Priscus described the elaborate and interminable ceremony in which Attila drank to the health of each guest in turn, and the fine feast served on looted silver dishes with looted drinking-cups of silver and gold – in contrast to the unadorned simplicity of Attila, who drank from a wooden cup and ate only meat, on a wooden plate. He described the entertainment provided: there were singers who chanted songs in praise of the great deeds of Attila; there was a madman, and a buffooning dwarf, who aroused loud laughter, but not from Attila, who sat through all this in grim and rigid silence. But when his youngest son Ernac entered the hall Priscus saw that Attila looked at him ‘with softened gaze’ and stroked his face. He asked a Hun who sat beside him for an explanation of this, and he replied that the soothsayers had told Attila that the fortunes of his family would fail, but would be restored to greatness by this son. The carouse lasted far on into the night, but the Romans prudently withdrew long before it ended.