In Atlakviea, Gunnar asks his brother why they should be tempted by Atli’s bounty when they themselves own such wealth and such arms (see the Lay stanzas 42–3), and H?gni, not replying directly, speaks of the wolf’s hair twisted round Gudrún’s ring. With no further direct indication of Gunnar’s thoughts, he at once makes the decision to go, crying úlfr mun ráea arfi Niflunga, the wolf shall possess the heritage of the Niflungs, if he does not return. In Atlamál, on the other hand, neither Gunnar nor H?gni are shown to hesitate at all. The runic message that replaced the wolf’s hair of Atlakviea causes them no disquiet. It is only subsequently that H?gni’s wife Kostbera examines the runes and perceives that they have been overlaid on those originally cut; but H?gni dismisses her warning, as he also dismisses her warning dreams. Gunnar’s wife Glaumv?r likewise has oppressive dreams, but they too are dismissed by Gunnar; and the brothers set out next morning. Kostbera and Glaumv?r appear only in Atlamál and are not taken up into the Lay of Gudrún.
In the Saga a further element is introduced, in that Vingi, seeing that the brothers have become drunk, tells them that Atli, now aged, wishes them to become the rulers of his kingdom while his sons are so young (see stanzas 51–2 in the Lay). It is this that makes Gunnar decide to go, and H?gni reluctantly to agree, before the closer examination of the runes and the telling of the dreams take place.
In the Lay my father has taken elements from both the Eddaic lays and from the Saga, but rearranged the context, so that the implications are somewhat altered. Gunnar’s scorn for Atli’s offer and H?gni’s warning about the wolf’s hair are preserved, but Gunnar is now persuaded to accept the invitation by the ostensible meaning of Gudrún’s runic message (45). It is Grímhild, not Kostbera, who warns that the runes have been tampered with, and that the underlying meaning was quite other – and this leads Gunnar to tell Vingi that he will not now come (49). This is the occasion of Vingi’s final seduction (51–2); and though H?gni remains scornfully unconvinced (53–4), Gunnar, who had ‘deep drunken’, cries out echoing the words of Atlakviea: ‘Let wolves then wield wealth of Niflungs!’
The scene ends with a return to the runes: H?gni observing heavily that when Grímhild’s counsel ought to be attended to they dismiss her warning, and Vingi swearing, in an echo of his words in Atlamál, that the runes do not lie. Gunnar’s character is maintained: see p.52(ii).
50 ‘rune-conner’: one who pores over, closely examines, runes.
54 ‘fey saith my thought’: I take, but doubtfully, the word ‘fey’ here to mean ‘with presage of death’.
59 ‘few went with them’: in Atlakviea there is no mention of any companions of Gunnar and H?gni; in Atlamál they had three, H?gni’s sons Sn?var (named in stanzas 87–8 of the Lay) and Sólar, and his wife’s brother Orkning.
59–63 On their journey to the land of the Huns, as my father wrote of the passage in Atlakviea (see p.313), ‘the Niflungs ride fen and forest and plain to Atli’. Stanza 62 is derived from Atlamál, where the furious rowing of Gunnar and H?gni and their companions is described; but in the Lay the localized Scandinavian scene of Atlamál is not intended – they are crossing the Danube.
60 ‘fey’: fated to die.
62 lines 7–8: this also is derived from Atlamál. My father remarked in a lecture that the abandoning of the boat by the Niflungs, since they hoped for no return, seems to be a detail that belongs to the oldest form of the legend as it reached the North, since it is found also in the German Nibelungenlied.
65–67 While the great courts of Atli are obviously quite differently conceived from the farmstead of Atlamál, H?gni’s beating on the doors derives from it, as does the slaying of Vingi – though in Atlamál they struck him to death with axes.
68–92 In Atlakviea there is no fighting when Gunnar and H?gni come to Atli’s halls. Gudrún meets her brothers as they enter and tells them that they are betrayed. Gunnar is at once seized and bound (and it is here that he is called vin Borgunda ‘lord of the Burgundians’, the only surviving trace in Old Norse literature of the Burgundian origin of the Gjúkings: see p.228, note on VII.15). H?gni slew eight men before he was taken.
In Atlamál, on the other hand, as in the German Nibelungenlied, there is fierce fighting on the arrival of Gunnar and H?gni, and Gudrún, in this poem leaving the hall and coming to her brothers outside, takes part in it and herself strikes down two men. The fighting lasted through the morning, and eighteen of Atli’s men were slain before Gunnar and H?gni were taken. Then Atli speaks and laments his marriage and the loss of his men.
In the Lay this part of the narrative is greatly extended beyond what is told in either of the Eddaic lays or in the V?lsunga Saga. The Saga introduces the idea of a lull in the fighting, not found in Atlamál, when Atli spoke of his loss and his evil lot, before the battle was rejoined and the brothers forced their way into the hall (cf. stanzas 71 ff. in the Lay). But after fierce fighting Gunnar and H?gni were taken prisoner; whereas in the Lay the result of the assault is that they hold Atli at their mercy – and Gudrún persuades them to show it.
The Lay is far removed from Atlamál in the portrait of Gudrún, who is naturally not here presented as a fierce warrior-woman; and an entirely new element is introduced in the presence of Gothic warriors at Atli’s court (83), on whom Gudrún calls for aid and who rise against their Hunnish masters (81–6); see the note to 86.
68 Budlungs: men of Budli (Atli’s father).
80 ‘A wolf they gave me’: see the note to stanza 22.
‘Woe worth the hour’: see the note to the Lay of the V?lsungs, IX.29.
86 The introduction in the Lay of the Burgundians’ newfound allies in the Goths at Atli’s court leads to these references to ancient Gothic names remembered in old lays. This stanza is an innovation of my father’s.
Iormunrek (J?rmunrekkr) was the Norse form of the name of Ermanaric, king of the Ostrogoths, the eastern branch of the Gothic people, who dwelt in the South Russian plains in the fourth century. The vast dominion of Ermanaric extended over many tribes and peoples from the Black Sea north towards the Baltic; but about the year 375, in his old age, he took his own life, in the face of the first overwhelming onset of the Asiatic steppe nomads, the Huns, who inspired widespread terror by their savagery and their appearance. To that distant time the song of Gunnar reached back, as did his minstrelsy at the feast held in honour of Sigurd in the halls of Gjúki (the Lay of the V?lsungs, VII.14); the line ‘earth-shadowing king’ in the present stanza no doubt refers to the vastness of Ermanaric’s empire.
In the centuries that followed Ermanaric became a mighty figure in the heroic legends of Germanic-speaking peoples, his name darkened by the evil deeds that attached to his fame. In the few traces of Old English heroic legend that survive he was remembered as wrae w?rloga, ‘fell and faithless’, and in the little poem called Deor he appears in these lines:
We geascodon Eormanrices
wylfenne getoht: ahte wide folc
Gotena rices: t?t w?s grim cyning.
‘We have heard of the wolfish mind of Eormanric: far and wide he ruled the people of the realm of the Goths: he was a cruel king.’
The names in lines 5–8 are derived from The Battle of the Goths and the Huns, a very ancient and ruinous Norse poem embedded in Heiereks Saga (also called Hervarar Saga), which is to be seen as the bearer of remote memories of the first Hunnish attacks on the Goths, with ancient names preserved in a traditional poetry.
Of these names, Angantyr is a Gothic king; and Dúnheier, scene of a great battle, probably contains Norse Dúna, the Danube. ‘Danpar-banks’ in Gunnar’s earlier song (Lay of the V?lsungs VII.14) and ‘Danpar’s walls’ in the present stanza derive from the Norse Danparstaeir, a survival of the Gothic name of the river Dnieper. Of its occurrence in Atlakviea my father noted in his lecture that it was ‘a reminiscence probably of Gothic power and splendour in the old days before Ermanaric’s downfall’.
87 Sn?var is named in Atlamál as one of H?gni’s sons (note to 59).
91 ‘ruth’: sorrow, regret.
93–112 This part of the narrative in the Lay is entirely independent of the Norse sources. Atli, being released, now sent for reinforcements (93), while the Niflungs held the doors of the hall (95) – and in this the German tradition of the legend appears, but strongly influenced by the Old English poetic fragment known as The Fight at Finnsburg (which is not in itself in any way connected with the Niflung legend). Beside stanzas 96–99 may be set the opening of The Fight at Finnsburg (translation by Alan Bliss, cited from J.R.R. Tolkien, Finn and Hengest, ed. Bliss, 1982, p.147):
‘... gables are burning.’