f the gold. According to Snorri, ‘Loki said that this seemed very well to him, and he said that this condition should hold good, provided that he himself declared it in the ears of those who should receive the ring.’ Then Loki returned to Hreidmar’s house, and when ódin saw the ring he desired it, and took it away from the treasure. The otter-skin was filled and covered with the gold of Andvari, but Hreidmar looking at it very closely saw a whisker, and demanded that they should cover that also. Then ódin drew out Andvari’s ring (Andvaranaut, the possession of Andvari) and covered the hair. But when ódin had taken up his spear, and Loki his shoes, and they no longer had any need to fear, Loki declared that the curse of Andvari should be fulfilled. And now it has been told (Snorri concludes) why gold is called ‘Otter’s ransom’ (otrgj?ld) or ‘forced payment of the ?sir’ (nauegjald ásanna): see p.36.
An important difference between the two prose versions is that Snorri began his account of the V?lsung legend with ‘Andvari’s Gold’, whereas in the Saga this story is introduced much later, and becomes a story told by Regin (son of Hreidmar) to Sigurd before his attack on the dragon. But although my father followed Snorri in this, he nonetheless followed the Saga in giving a brief retelling of ‘Andvari’s Gold’ by Regin to Sigurd in the fifth section of the poem, with a number of verse-lines repeated from their first occurrence (see V.7–11).
1 Of all the Northern divinities Loki is the most enigmatic; ancient Norse literature is full of references to him and stories about him, and it is not possible to characterize him in a short space. But since Loki only appears here in these poems, and in my father’s words concerning him given on p.54, it seems both suitable and sufficient to quote Snorri Sturluson’s description in the Prose Edda:
‘Also counted among the ?sir is Loki, whom some call the mischief-maker of the ?sir, the first father of lies, and the blemish of all gods and men. Loki is handsome and fair of face but evil in his disposition and fickle in his conduct. He excels all others in that cleverness which is called cunning, and he has wiles for every circumstance. Over and over again he has brought the gods into great trouble, but often got them out of it by his guile.’
In this stanza he is called ‘lightfooted Loki’, and in Snorri’s version of the story of Andvari’s Gold it is said, as already noted, that after the payment of the ransom to Hreidmar ódin took up his spear ‘and Loki his shoes’. Elsewhere Snorri wrote of ‘those shoes with which Loki ran through air and over water’.
Of the god Hoenir no more is said in the Lay than that while Loki went on the left side of ódin, H?nir went on his right. In my father’s somewhat mysterious interpretation given on p.54 (iv) he calls the companion of ódin who walks on his right hand ‘a nameless shadow’, but this must surely be H?nir, or at least derived from him. However, if there is no end to what is told of Loki in the Norse mythological narratives, very little can now be said of H?nir; and to my understanding, there is nothing in the vestiges that remain that casts light on the ‘nameless shadow’ that walks beside ódin.
6 ásgard is the realm of the Gods (?sir).
7 Rán: the wife of the sea-god ?gir; see p.189.
8 ‘I bid thee’: I offer thee.
13–15 In these concluding stanzas the references to the hope of ódin, and ódin’s choice, have of course no counterparts in the Norse texts.
II SIGNY
This is a rendering in verse of elements of the narrative of the earlier chapters of the V?lsunga Saga. No old poetry recounting or referring to this story exists apart from a single half-stanza (see the note to stanzas 37–39), but this section of the Lay of the V?lsungs can be seen as an imagination of it. It is a selection of moments of dramatic force, and many elements of the prose Saga are omitted; in particular the most savage features of the story are eliminated (see notes to stanzas 30–32, 37–39).
The Gauts of the headnote to this section are the Gautar of Old Norse, dwelling in Gautland, a region of what is now southern Sweden, south of the great lakes. The name Gautar is historically identical with the Old English Geatas, who were Beowulf’s people.
1–2 These two stanzas are an extreme reduction of the opening chapters of the Saga which tell of V?lsung’s immediate ancestry in a prosaic fashion: my father clearly found this unsuited to his purpose.
2 ‘child of longing’: Rerir’s wife was for long barren.
4 In the Saga the tree in the midst of King V?lsung’s hall is named the Barnstock, and is said to have been an apple-tree.
7 ‘Birds sang blithely’: the birds were sitting in the boughs of the great tree that upheld the hall; so again in stanza 11, and see III.2.
10 King Siggeir and many other guests came to the wedding feast held in King V?lsung’s hall.
12–13 In the Saga the old man is described in terms that make it plain that he was ódin, but he is not named. Here in the Lay he is Grímnir ‘the Masked’, a name of ódin that does not appear at all in the Saga but is derived from the Eddaic poem Grímnismál.
The ‘standing stem’ in 13 line 3 is the trunk of the Barnstock, into which ódin thrust the sword.
14 ‘Gaut and V?lsung’: V?lsung’s children and race are often called V?lsungar, V?lsungs, as in the name of the Saga, and in the head-note to this section.
16 This was the beginning of hatred and the motive for Siggeir’s attack on V?lsung and his sons when they came to Gautland as his guests (21–23); Siggeir was enraged at Sigmund’s answer, but (in the words of the Saga) ‘he was a very wily man, and he behaved as if he were indifferent’.
‘bade’: offered (so also ‘I bid thee’ in I.8); ‘boon’: request.
17–22 It is told in the Saga that on the day following the night of the wedding feast (‘last night I lay / where loath me was’, 19) Siggeir left very abruptly and returned with Signy to Gautland, having invited V?lsung and his sons to come as his guests to Gautland three months later (21). Signy met them when they landed to warn them of what Siggeir had prepared for them (22), but (according to the Saga) V?lsung would not listen to Signy’s entreaty that he return at once to his own land, nor to her request that she should be allowed to stay with her own people and not return to Siggeir.
20 ‘toft’: homestead.
29 In the Saga the sons of V?lsung were set in stocks in the forest to await the old she-wolf who came each night. Signy, on the tenth day, sent her trusted servant to Sigmund, who alone survived, to smear honey over his face and to put some in his mouth. When the wolf came she licked his face and thrust her tongue into his mouth; at which he bit into it. Then the wolf started back violently, pressing her feet against the stocks in which Sigmund was set, so that they were split open; but he held on to the wolf’s tongue so that it was torn out by the roots, and she died. ‘Some men say,’ according to the Saga, ‘that the wolf was King Siggeir’s mother, who had changed herself into this shape by witchcraft.’
While in the Saga the stocks are an important element in the story at this point, in the Lay there is no suggestion of stocks, but only of fetters and shackles; the wolf is ‘torn and tongueless’, but ‘by the tree riven’. See the note on stanzas 30-32.
30–32 This passage is very greatly condensed, and elements in the Saga essential to the narrative are passed over. Thus in the Saga, Signy found Sigmund in the woods, and it is explicit that they decided that he should make a house for himself under the ground, where Signy would provide for his needs. There is nothing in the Saga to explain Signy’s words in the Lay ‘Dwarvish master, thy doors open!’ In the opening prose passage of this section (p.72) it is said that ‘Sigmund dwelt in a cave in the guise of a dwarvish smith.’
In this connection it is curious, if nothing more, to observe that in William Morris’ poem The Story of Sigurd the Volsung Sigmund’s dwelling is explicitly ‘a stony cave’ that was once ‘a house of the Dwarfs’. It is also said in that poem (see the note to stanza 29) that by Siggeir’s orders the men who led the sons of V?lsung into the forest cut down the greatest oak-tree that they could find and bound them to it ‘with bonds of iron’; and when the wolf came for Sigmund he ‘burst his bonds’ and slew it with his hands.
Signy had two sons by Siggeir, and when the elder was ten years old she sent him out to Sigmund in the forest to be a help to him should he attempt to avenge V?lsung; but the boy, told by Sigmund to make the bread while he himself went out for firewood, was frightened to touch the bag of flour because there was something alive in it. When Sigmund told Signy about this she told him to kill the boy, since he had no heart; and Sigmund did so. The next year Signy sent her second son by Siggeir out into the woods, and things went in the same way.
After that Signy changed shapes with a