77–78 In a fragmentary poem of the tenth century on the death of the ferocious Eirik Blood-axe, son of King Harold Fairhair and brother of Hákon the Good (see the note on V.54) there is a remarkable image of the coming of an ‘Ódin hero’ to Valhöll. The poem opens with Ódin declaring that he has had a dream in which he was preparing Valhöll to receive a company of the slain. There is a great noise of many men approaching the hall, and Ódin calls on the dead heroes Sigmund and Sinfjötli to rise up quickly and go to meet the dead king who is coming, saying that he believes it to be Eirik.

  Sigmund says to Ódin: ‘Why do you hope for Eirik, rather than for other kings?’ And the god replies: ‘Because he has reddened his sword in many lands.’

  Then Sigmund asks: ‘Why have you robbed him of victory, when you knew him to be brave?’ And Ódin answers: ‘Because it cannot be clearly known. . .’ – and then (at any rate as the text stands) he breaks off, and concludes: ‘The grey wolf is gazing at the dwellings of the Gods’ (see the commentary on the Upphaf (‘Beginning’), pp.185–86.

  Note on Brynhild

  In what follows I set out, with minor editing, the content of some notes of my father’s, written very rapidly in soft pencil and difficult to read, on his interpretation of the tangled and contradictory narratives that constitute the tragedy of Sigurd and Brynhild, Gunnar and Gudrún. I will repeat here what I have said in my Foreword, that there is nothing in these or any other notes for his lectures on Old Norse literature that bears on the question of whether he had written, or intended to write, poems on the subject of the Völsung legend; but that views expressed in the lectures may illuminate, naturally enough, his treatment of the sources in his Lays.

  In my commentary on the last part of the Lay I referred (p.234) to my father’s belief that the fragment of a Sigurd lay known as the Brot, with which the Codex Regius takes up again after the lacuna, is the conclusion of ‘an ancient, terse, poem, concentrated chiefly on the Brynhild tragedy’. For this poem he used in his notes the title Sigurðarkviða en forna, ‘the Old Lay of Sigurd’. In notes for a lecture on the content of the lacuna he suggested (following the great scholar Andreas Heusler) that the poem probably began with Sigurd’s coming to the halls of Gjúki, and his reception; his oath of brotherhood with the king’s sons; and his wedding with Gudrún: all this probably brief and without reference to Sigurd’s previous knowledge of Brynhild. He proposed that the chief elements of the conception of Brynhild in that poem were these.

  (1) A semi-magical personage, ultimately derived from a Valkyrie legend.

  (2) She surrounded herself with a wall of flame, and vowed only to wed the hero who rode it – intending it to be Sigurd.

  (3) The wall of flame is ridden by Sigurd, but under the appearance of Gunnar. The oath holds her. She comforts herself with the thought of Gunnar’s deed.

  (4) Her comfort fails and her pride is mortally wounded when she discovers that it was Sigurd after all who rode the flame: in addition she has been tricked into breaking her oath to wed the actual rider.

  (5) Her vengeance takes this form: she cannot have Sigurd now, and therefore she will destroy him (and so mortally wound Gudrún, the natural object of her hate); but she will by this very act avenge herself on Gunnar by involving him in a dreadful oath-breaking – so that after all is over, Sigurd dead, and she about to follow, she can turn and say, ‘Sigurd is pure of all such vileness, you Gunnar alone are shamed’ [this is the end of the Brot, echoed in stanzas IX.67–69 in the Lay].

  (6) To do this she lies terribly against Sigurd and herself. She accuses him of broken faith when he lay in her bed after the riding of the flame. This was her only means of getting Gunnar to slay him [see stanzas IX. 43, 46, and 49 of the Lay]. Later she reveals the truth [stanza 68, lines 5–8].

  That is why Áslaug is such a fatal addition in the Saga, even if she was begotten upon the mountain-top, not at the second riding of the flame (see p.232).

  I think that we should accept (he wrote) such a conception for the poem, of which the twenty stanzas of the Brot are all that are left, and for one of the oldest lines of tradition. The resolution of the Brynhild-Valkyrie difficulty does not lie in the assumption that one was mortal (Brynhild) and the other a Valkyrie from an older ‘myth’, which later became confused. The solution, I think, is that the Valkyrie is the one essential part of the whole story, which is always present. [In a separate note my father wrote: ‘Brynhild cannot be a “human” character mythicized (or confused with a Valkyrie Sigrdrífa). She is a Valkyrie humanized.’]

  But she was treated in at least two different ways. There was the mountain-top awakening of the Ódin-enchanted Valkyrie (perhaps the more specifically Scandinavian conception and therefore the later, since the story was not originally Scandinavian). There was also the proud princess tricked by her own stratagem (when Sigurd rode the fire but in the form of Gunnar) – the more southern one. That the lost poem that ends in the Brot represented this older ‘more southern version’ is probably borne out by the important point in which it does agree with the non-Scandinavian versions, namely that Sigurd was murdered out of doors in a wood and that Högni had a part in it (in the Brot itself Gudrún is shown standing at the doors of the hall as the brothers ride back).

  It is significant that the compiler of the Codex Regius entered a note about this since it clearly puzzled him and his contemporaries (see p.238, note to stanzas 51–64). He notes that the Old Lay of Gudrún says the same – in this case, that Sigurd was slain at the Thing (the council place); and he is aware that this is the ‘southern’ version (þyðvestur menn, German men). The other story, the slaying of Sigurd in bed in Gudrún’s arms, in keeping with the Norse tendency to the personal, and to the concentration of action in time and place, is represented in Sigurðarkviða en skamma, the extant Sigurd lay (see p.234), and this is the version followed (without comment) in the Saga, and in the Lay (see p.238).

  My father did not discuss in these notes the development, in incompatible ways, seen in the Völsunga Saga, of the story of Sigurd and Brynhild in the Norse tradition. But his opinion on the cardinal question seems clear from a passing observation elsewhere that, in his view, the drink of forgetfulness given to Sigurd was ‘invented by the author of the lost Sigurðarkviða en meiri [see p.234] to account for the difficulties raised by the previous betrothal of Sigurd and Brynhild.’

  In conclusion, he wrote: There is nothing left for us now, therefore, but to express surprise that the author of the Saga, who could so decisively and unhesitatingly adopt one of the conflicting accounts of the murder, could not adopt a single view of Brynhild. Since the adoption of a single view of the murder must be due to artistic preference, one is perhaps only being just to the author of the Saga in assuming that the vagueness and uncertainty of Brynhild’s position was not pure bungling on his part. He wanted a complex of conflicting motives and emotions for the central tragedy – to have these he was content to leave the previous relations of Brynhild and Sigurd confused. He had to, since each theory contributed to her motives.

  In the Saga Brynhild’s passion of rage and grief is in part due to pride – she has not wedded the supreme hero (and hates Gudrún on that account); but also, she has been wedded by a trick (and hates Gunnar and Sigurd on that account). Her oath has been broken and she hates herself. She really loves Sigurd alone: her heart’s desire is frustrated, and she would kill what she loves rather than let a rival share it. Her betrothal to Sigurd has been broken by both of them – both by fate and by magic. She is wroth with Sigurd (and herself) on this account – and will not in any case endure her marriage to Gunnar longer. Behind all hangs Ódin, and his doom, and the vanity of her vows – he doomed her to wed. Inextricably interwoven is the curse on the gold.

  Truly complicated! And though in building up largely a product of accident, its retention is due perhaps to taste. We may accept this, even if we are still on safe ground in affirming that a better artist could have retained all that was necessary of the two divergent Brynhild-heroines and not made them so obscure and indeed contradictory and unintelligible.

  Earlier Workings of

  Völsungakviða en nýja

  The earlier manuscript material of the Upphaf is not easy to interpret. There are two versions, which are readily placed in sequence: these I will call for ease of reference text A and text B. The first, or text A, with the title Upphaf, has almost as many stanzas as the final form, but not all in the same order, and the wording constantly differing, if for the most part only slightly. The opening stanza is among those that underwent the most change to reach the final form:

  Ere the years there yawned

  yearless ages,

  without sand or sea

  silent, empty;

  Earth was not moulded

  nor arched Heaven:

  an abyss gaping

  without blade of grass.

  Stanza 4 (‘Unmarred their mirth. . .’) was not present. Stanza 13 (in text A stanza 12) reads:

  The wolf for Óðinn

  at the world’s ending (> waits unsleeping),

  for Frey the fair

  flames of Surtur;

  the doom of Thór

  the Dragon beareth:

  all shall be ended

  and Earth perish.

  Though not so marked in the manuscript, the words of the Sibyl clearly end here, and stanzas 14–15, in which the Sibyl speaks of the rôle of Sigurd at the Ragnarök, are here absent. Then follow in A stanzas 16–20 of the final text, the conclusion of the Upphaf, in which the Gods prepare for the Last Battle according to the prophecy, and ending with the words ‘for one they waited, / the World’s chosen’. In A at this point the meaning of those words is not explained. But in this version it is the stanzas 14–15 of the final form, absent here from the prophecy of the Sibyl, that form the conclusion of the Upphaf. The first reads:

  In Day of Doom

  he should deathless stand

  to die no more

  who had death tasted,

  the serpent-slayer.

  seed of Óðinn,

  the walls defending,

  the World’s chosen.

  And the concluding stanza in text A is virtually the same as stanza 15 in the final form. Thus the prophecy concerning Sigurd is present in A, but not as the words of the Sibyl.

  The second text B is not titled Upphaf but The Elder Edda (the reason for this will appear in a moment). It is far closer to the final form in the detail of its wording, indeed it only differs here and there. That it was developed from text A is clear from the pencilled corrections made to A that appear in B as written. But it is much shorter than A. The opening stanza is absent (the poem begins ‘The Great Gods once / began their toil’) – but stanza 1 in the final form (‘Of old was an age / when was emptiness . . .’) is scribbled in pencil in the margin. Stanza 4 (‘Unmarred their mirth. . .’) is also absent, as it is in A; but most curiously, the whole of the prophecy of the Sibyl (stanzas 10–15) is missing. The B-text has thus only 12 stanzas. The last verse begins ‘The guests are many’; and the last lines of the verse read, not ‘for one they waited, / the World’s chosen’, as in A and the final text, but ‘long awaiting / the last battle’. Thus the motive of Sigurd as (in Ódin’s hope) the saviour at the Ragnarök is absent.

  This truncated version of Upphaf is the opening of a paper read to, or perhaps more probably designed to be read to, a society, presumptively at Oxford. The first words following the poem were:

  And that is, I think, all I have to say (of my own) concerning the Elder Edda. There is the ancient measure and strophe in which most of it is written – in which our own poetry was once composed, and in which it still can be if one will learn the craft (not an easy one) – there is the background of the imagination of its poets; and though this is not a translation of an Eddaic poem it is just like one, and all its elements may be found in that book, most of them in the very first poem of all which deals directly with this very theme.

  Only the opening paragraphs of the paper are preserved, either because they were written on the same page as the last stanza of the poem and the rest was discarded, or because the paper never went beyond this point, at any rate in this form.

  There is no indication of date. There is also no way of knowing for certain why my father reduced the poem in this way; but a perhaps plausible explanation offers itself. The earlier text A had introduced his very strange and distinctive conception of ‘the special function of Sigurd’, ‘an invention of the present poet’, in his words (see Commentary, pp.183–85). He now had the idea of introducing his paper with a brief recital of a piece of his own ‘Norse’ poetry; but to use his Upphaf for this purpose would require the omission of all the verses that bore upon the idea of ‘the World’s chosen’, the ‘special function of Sigurd’ – the imposition of a new significance on the myth.

  Did he see this brief work, when he wrote it, as the prelude to a long poem on the legend of Sigurd? It seems impossible to say (the title Upphaf does not necessarily imply this: it may refer to the content of the poem, as I incline to suppose).

  The other surviving earlier texts mentioned on p.40, section I of Völsungakviða en nýja, ‘Andvari’s Gold’, and the first nine stanzas of section II, ‘Signý’, stand to the final form as does text A of the Upphaf, in that there is constant difference in detail of vocabulary and phrasing.

  GUÐRÚNARKVIÐA EN NÝJA

  eða

  DRÁP NIFLUNGA

  GUÐRÚNARKVIÐA EN NÝJA

  1

  Smoke had faded,

  sunk was burning;

  windblown ashes

  were wafted cold.

  As sun setting

  had Sigurd passed;

  and Brynhild burned

  as blazing fire.

  2

  Their bliss was over,

  their bale ended;

  but Gudrún’s grief

  ever grew the more.

  Life she hated,

  but life took not,

  witless wandering

  in woods alone.

  *

  3

  Atli ariseth

  armies wielding;

  on the marches of the East

  his might waxeth.

  Goths he tramples,

  gold despoiling,

  his horsemen countless

  hasten westward.

  4

  He, Budli’s son,

  blades remembers

  that of Budli’s brother

  were the bane of old;

  he, gold-greedy,

  grimhearted king,

  hath heard of the hoard

  on the Heath that lay.

  5

  Of Fáfnir’s treasure

  fame was rumoured,

  that Niflungs held

  in Niflung-land;

  of Gudrún’s beauty

  gleaming-lovely;

  of Gjúki aged

  to his grave passing.

  *

  6

  From mighty Mirkwood

  came message darkly:

  ‘Atli ariseth

  armies mustering.

  Hate awakens,

  hosts are arming;

  under horses’ hooves

  Hunland trembles!’

  7

  Gunnar spake then

  gloomy-hearted:

  Gunnar

  ‘Fierce will the feud be,

  fell the onslaught!

  With gold and silver

  shall his greed be stayed,

  with gold and silver

  or gleaming swords?’

  8

  Then spake Högni,

  haughty chieftain:

  Högni

  ‘The might of Sigurd

  we mourn at last!

  Victory rode ever

  with the Völsung lord;

  now alone will war

  our land defend.’

  9

  Then spake Grímhild

  grey with wisdom:

  Grímhild

  ‘Gudrún is fair,

  gleaming-lovely –

  let us bind him in bonds

  as brother wedded,

  in Hunland’s queen

  our help seeking!’

  10

  Gudrún they sought,

  grieving found her

  in woodland house

  weaving lonely;

  weaving wondrous

  webs bright-figured

  with woe tangled

  and with works of old.

  *

  11

  Ódin she wrought

  old, blue-mantled;

  Loki lightfooted

  with locks of flame;

  the falls of Andvari