



Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Distributed Proofreaders Team.





Popular Studies in Mythology, Romance, and Folklore, No. 13


The Edda

II

The Heroic Mythology of the North



By

Winifred Faraday, M.A.



Published by David Nutt, at the Sign of the Phoenix, Long Acre, London
1902




Author's Note


The present study forms a sequel to No. 12 (_The Edda: Divine Mythology
of the North_), to which the reader is referred for introductory matter
and for the general Bibliography. Additional bibliographical references
are given, as the need occurs, in the notes to the present number.

Manchester,
July 1902.




The Edda: II. The Heroic Mythology of the North


Sigemund the Waelsing and Fitela, Aetla, Eormanric the Goth and Gifica
of Burgundy, Ongendtheow and Theodric, Heorrenda and the Heodenings,
and Weland the Smith: all these heroes of Germanic legend were known
to the writers of our earliest English literature. But in most cases
the only evidence of this knowledge is a word, a name, here and there,
with no hint of the story attached. For circumstances directed the
poetical gifts of the Saxons in England towards legends of the saints
and Biblical paraphrase, away from the native heroes of the race;
while later events completed the exclusion of Germanic legend from our
literature, by substituting French and Celtic romance. Nevertheless,
these few brief references in _Beowulf_ and in the small group of
heathen English relics give us the right to a peculiar interest in the
hero-poems of the Edda. In studying these heroic poems, therefore,
we are confronted by problems entirely different in character from
those which have to be considered in connexion with the mythical
texts. Those are in the main the product of one, the Northern,
branch of the Germanic race, as we have seen (No. 12 of this series),
and the chief question to be determined is whether they represent,
however altered in form, a mythology common to all the Germans, and
as such necessarily early; or whether they are in substance, as well
as in form, a specific creation of the Scandinavians, and therefore
late and secondary. The heroic poems of the Edda, on the contrary,
with the exception of the Helgi cycle, have very close analogues in
the literatures of the other great branches of the Germanic race,
and these we are able to compare with the Northern versions.

The Edda contains poems belonging to the following heroic cycles:

(_a_) _Weland the Smith_.--Anglo-Saxon literature has several
references to this cycle, which must have been a very popular one;
and there is also a late Continental German version preserved in
an Icelandic translation. But the poem in the Edda is the oldest
connected form of the story.

(_b_) _Sigurd and the Nibelungs_.--Again the oldest reference is in
Anglo-Saxon.  There are two well-known Continental German versions
in the _Nibelungen Lied_ and the late Icelandic _Thidreks Saga_,
but the Edda, on the whole, has preserved an earlier form of the
legend. With it is loosely connected

(_c_) _The Ermanric Cycle_.--The oldest references to this are in Latin
and Anglo-Saxon. The Continental German version in the _Thidreks Saga_
is late, and, like that in the Edda, contaminated with the Sigurd
story, with which it had originally nothing to do.

(_d_) _Helgi_.--This cycle, at least in its present form, is peculiar
to the Scandinavian North.

All the above-named poems are contained in Codex Regius of the Elder
Edda. From other sources we may add other poems which are Eddic, not
Skaldic, in style, in which other heroic cycles are represented. The
great majority of the poems deal with the favourite story of the
Volsungs, which threatens to swamp all the rest; for one hero after
another, Burgundian, Hun, Goth, was absorbed into it. The poems in this
part of the MS. differ far more widely in date and style than do the
mythological ones; many of the Volsung-lays are comparatively late, and
lack the fine simplicity which characterises the older popular poetry.

_Voelund_.--The lay of Voelund, the wonderful smith, the Weland of
the Old English poems and the only Germanic hero who survived for
any considerable time in English popular tradition, stands alone in
its cycle, and is the first heroic poem in the MS. It is in a very
fragmentary state, some of the deficiencies being supplied by short
pieces of prose. There are two motives in the story: the Swan-maids,
and the Vengeance of the Captive Smith. Three brothers, Slagfinn,
Egil and Voelund, sons of the Finnish King, while out hunting built
themselves a house by the lake in Wolfsdale. There, early one
morning, they saw three Valkyries spinning, their swancoats lying
beside them. The brothers took them home; but after seven years the
swan-maidens, wearied of their life, flew away to battle, and did
not return.

"Seven years they stayed there, but in the eighth longing seized
them, and in the ninth need parted them." Egil and Slagfinn went to
seek their wives, but Voelund stayed where he was and worked at his
forge. There Nithud, King of Sweden, took him captive:

"Men went by night in studded mailcoats; their shields shone by
the waning moon. They dismounted from the saddle at the hall-gable,
and went in along the hall. They saw rings strung on bast which the
hero owned, seven hundred in all; they took them off and put, them on
again, all but one. The keen-eyed archer Voelund came in from hunting,
from a far road.... He sat on a bear-skin and counted his rings, and
the prince of the elves missed one; he thought Hlodve's daughter,
the fairy-maid, had come back. He sat so long that he fell asleep,
and awoke powerless: heavy bonds were on his hands, and fetters
clasped on his feet."

They took him away and imprisoned him, ham-strung, on an island to
forge treasures for his captors. Then Voelund planned vengeance:

"'I see on Nithud's girdle the sword which I knew keenest and best,
and which I forged with all my skill. The glittering blade is taken
from me for ever; I shall not see it borne to Voelund's smithy. Now
Boedvild wears my bride's red ring; I expect no atonement.' He sat
and slept not, but struck with his hammer."

Nithud's children came to see him in his smithy: the two boys he slew,
and made drinking-cups for Nithud from their skulls; and the daughter
Boedvild he beguiled, and having made himself wings he rose into the
air and left her weeping for her lover and Nithud mourning his sons.

In the Old English poems allusion is made only to the second part
of the story; there is no reference to the legend of the enchanted
brides, which is indeed distinct in origin, being identical with
the common tale of the fairy wife who is obliged to return to animal
shape through some breach of agreement by her mortal husband. This
incident of the compact (_i.e._, to hide the swan-coat, to refrain
from asking the wife's name, or whatever it may have been) has been
lost in the Voelund tale. The Continental version is told in the late
Icelandic _Thidreks Saga_, where it is brought into connexion with
the Volsung story; in this the story of the second brother, Egil the
archer, is also given, and its antiquity is supported by the pictures
on the Anglo-Saxon carved whale-bone box known as the Franks Casket,
dated by Professor Napier at about 700 A.D. The adventures of the
third brother, Slagfinn, have not survived. The Anglo-Saxon gives
Voelund and Boedvild a son, Widia or Wudga, the Wittich who appears as
a follower of Dietrich's in the Continental German sources.

_The Volsungs_.--No story better illustrates the growth of heroic
legend than the Volsung cycle. It is composite, four or five mythical
motives combining to form the nucleus; and as it took possession
more and more strongly of the imagination of the early Germans, and
still more of the Scandinavians, other heroic cycles were brought
into dependence on it. None of the Eddic poems on the subject are
quite equal in poetic value to the Helgi lays; many are fragmentary,
several late, and only one attempts a review of the whole story. The
outline is as follows: Sigurd the Volsung, son of Sigmund and brother
of Sinfjoetli, slays the dragon who guards the Nibelungs' hoard on
the Glittering Heath, and thus inherits the curse which accompanies
the treasure; he finds and wakens Brynhild the Valkyrie, lying in
an enchanted sleep guarded by a ring of fire, loves her and plights
troth with her; Grimhild, wife of the Burgundian Giuki, by enchantment
causes him to forget the Valkyrie, to love her own daughter Gudrun,
and, since he alone can cross the fire, to win Brynhild for her son
Gunnar. After the marriage, Brynhild discovers the trick, and incites
her husband and his brothers to kill Sigurd.

The series begins with a prose piece on the Death of Sinfjoetli,
which says that after Sinfjoetli, son of Sigmund, Volsung's son (which
should be Valsi's son, Volsung being a tribal, not a personal, name),
had been poisoned by his stepmother Borghild, Sigmund married Hjoerdis,
Eylimi's daughter, had a son Sigurd, and fell in battle against the
race of Hunding. Sigmund, as in all other Norse sources, is said to be
king in Frankland, which, like the Niderlant of the