The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

A description of the physical appearance of Attila is found in the work of a sixth-century historian of the Goths named Jordanes, and this description is directly derived from Priscus, though the original is lost. He was short in stature with a broad chest; his small beady eyes were set in a huge face; his nose was flat and his skin swarthy, his beard straggly and flecked with grey. His step was haughty, and he had a way of darting his glance hither and thither, ‘so that the power of his great spirit appeared in the movement of his body’.

Most important for the large evolution of the legend was the great event of the year 451, the most famous battle of that age. In that year Attila moved with a huge army westwards towards the Rhine, mounting an attack on Gaul for which his motives are obscure. The Huns had destroyed the Ostrogothic power in the east in the fourth century, and Attila ruled over a great mixed dominion, as the Goths had done under Ermanaric (see the commentary on the Lay of Gudrun, stanza 86, pp.322–3). In his empire, and so also in his armies, were many East Germanic peoples; and now in his host came the Ostrogoths under their king Valamer, the Gepids under Ardaric, Rugians, Thuringians, and warriors of other nations beside. Against them came in uneasy alliance the Visigoths (the western Goths) of Tolosa (Toulouse) under their aged king Theodoric, Aetius the Roman general, Burgundians from their new lands in Savoy, Franks, even a contingent of Saxons. The battle is known as the Catalaunian plains (the plain of Champagne) and the Mauriac plain; it was fought in the region of Troyes (a hundred miles south-east of Paris).

Of the course of the battle very little is known. Jordanes, writing a century later, said that it was bellum atrox, multiplex, immane, pertinax (ferocious, confused, monstrous, unrelenting). Theodoric, king of the Visigoths, was among the vast numbers of the slain. The fighting continued into the night, and Attila retreated into his camp, which he had fortified with waggons. According to Jordanes, he had a great funeral pyre heaped up out of horses’ saddles on which he intended to be burnt before final defeat should overtake him.

But the final assault was never made. The alliance against him broke up. Again according to Jordanes, the imminent prospect of the total destruction of the Huns filled Aetius with alarm. His deepest fear was the power of the Visigothic kingdom in the south of France, centred on Toulouse; and despite the eagerness of the young king of the Visigoths, Thurismund, to avenge on the Huns the death of his father in the battle, Aetius advised him to return to Toulouse, lest his brothers should seize the throne in his absence. This counsel Thurismund accepted (‘without perceiving its duplicity’); the Visigoths departed from the battlefield, and Attila was allowed to escape from Gaul.

In the year 452, following the great battle, Attila crossed the Alps, and came down into Italy from the north-east. The cities of the north Italian plain were not only ravaged by the Huns but in some cases actually razed to the ground. Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic, which both as fortress and great trading centre was one of the foremost cities of northern Italy, was so utterly destroyed that when Jordanes wrote, a century later, there was scarcely a trace of it to be seen. Patavium suffered the same fate, and though unlike Aquileia it rose again, it is a striking fact that Padua has no Roman remains.

But Attila never crossed the Apennines, making for Rome. Whatever the reason, he returned to Hungary; and in the following year, 453, he died. The story of his death is known from Jordanes; but Jordanes expressly stated that he was following the authority of Priscus, and it can be taken to be precise history.

Attila in this year added one more to his many wives (innumerabiles uxores in Jordanes’ words: the Huns were highly polygamous). His wife was a very beautiful girl named Ildico (it has been commonly thought probable that her name shows her to have been of Germanic origin – a diminutive form of Hild, or any name ending in -hild; perhaps a Burgundian). At the wedding feast Attila became hugely drunk and took to his bed, ‘heavy with wine and sleep’; and there as he lay on his back he suffered a violent nose-bleeding, and was choked to death by the blood passing down his throat. Late on the following day his servants broke down the doors and found him lying dead and covered with blood ‘without a wound’, his bride weeping, covered by her veil.

Jordanes described the funeral of Attila, clearly still following the lost narrative of Priscus. His body was laid in a silken tent out on the plain, and the finest horsemen of the Huns rode round in circles, ‘after the manner of the circus-games’; and they told of his deeds in a funeral song. After wild extremes of grief and joy his body was buried at night, covered in gold, and silver, and iron, with weapons taken from his enemies and many treasures; and then, ‘in order that human curiosity should be kept away from such riches’, those who performed the work of burial were killed. In the same way, after the death of Alaric king of the Visigoths in 410, the captives were made to divert the mountain-river Busento in Calabria from its bed, and then after the burial of the king and the returning of the river to its ordinary course they were all put to death.

But the figure of Attila rose from his tomb and took different shapes in the centuries that followed. Among Latin-speaking peoples he was taken up into what has been called ‘ecclesiastical mythology’, and became Flagellum Dei, the Scourge of God, divinely appointed to the devastation of a wicked world. In the lands of Germania there were two radically distinct traditions concerning him: he appears in a double light, generous patron and monstrous foe, and it is not difficult to see how this should have come about. On the Catalaunian plains there was a colossal conflict between men of many Germanic nations. As I have said, in the hosts of Attila went men of many East Germanic peoples subject to the Huns, most notably the Ostrogoths, and for them Attila was the great King and overlord, to whom their own kings paid allegiance: indeed his very name Attila looks like a diminutive form of the Gothic word atta, ‘father’. In South German (High German) tradition Attila, his name changed in the course of time through phonetic movement to Etzel, is a benevolent monarch, hospitable and ineffectual, far removed from the Attila of history.

But in more northerly lands his legendary image was derived from his enemies, and thence, by whatever route it came, the Scandinavians derived their grim and covetous king Atli, murderer of the Burgundians for the sake of the Nibelung hoard.

The story that Jordanes, following Priscus, told of the manner of Attila’s death is beyond question the historical fact; and the knowledge that that was how he died was known to Chaucer more than nine hundred years later. His scoundrelly Pardoner finds in the death of Attila an anecdote to illustrate the evil of drunkenness:

Looke, Attila, the grete conquerour,

Deyde in his sleepe, with shame and dishonour,

Bledynge ay at his nose in dronkenesse;

A capitayn sholde lyve in sobrenesse.

But a chronicler named Marcellinus Comes, writing in Constantinople at about the same time as Jordanes, knew a different story: Attila was stabbed in the night by a woman. It may well be that this story originated almost as soon as the true report – it was lying ready to hand.

In very brief remarks on this matter, my father sketched out his view of the further evolution of the Burgundian legend when the story that Attila was murdered by his bride had taken root. Such a deed must have a motive, and no motive is more likely than that it was vengeance for the murder of the bride’s father, or kinsmen. Attila had come to be seen as the leader of the Huns in the massacre of the Burgundians in 437 (see p.341); now, the murder was done in vengeance for the destruction of Gundahari and his people. Whether or not Ildico was a Burgundian, her role in the evolving drama must make her so. And she avenges her brother, Gundahari.

The essential features of the Burgundian story are then present. Gundahari-Gunnar, vin Borgunda, was killed by Attila-Atli, and for this he was murdered, in his bed, by a woman. And the woman was Gudrun. But where the gold came from is of course a