Hn?f spoke, the warlike young king: ‘Neither is this the dawn from the east, nor is a dragon flying here, nor are the gables aflame; nay, mortal enemies approach in ready armour. Birds are crying, wolf is yelping; spear clashes, shield answers shaft. Now that this moon shines, wandering behind the clouds, woeful deeds are beginning, that will bring to a bitter end this well-known enmity in the people. Awaken now, my warriors! Grasp your coats of mail, think of deeds of valour, bear yourselves proudly, be resolute!’
In the Lay the fighting is said to have lasted for five days (102); and in The Fight at Finnsburg the same is said.
It is interesting to see that in lecture notes on the Nibelungenlied my father wrote ‘compare Finnsburg’ against his reference to the scene when Hagen (H?gni) and his mighty companion Volker the Minstrel guarded at night the doors of the sleeping-hall where the Burgundians were quartered, and saw in the darkness the gleam of helmets. So also he wrote of the Old English poem in Finn and Hengest (edition referred to above, p.27): ‘The Fragment opens with the “young king” espying an onset – like the helmets gleaming when the sleeping hall is attacked in the Nibelungenlied.’
The German tradition is again present in the burning down of the hall in which the Niflungs were besieged. But in the Nibelungenlied, and in the thirteenth century Norwegian Thierekssaga based on North German tales and songs, this is altogether differently motivated, for it was Kriemhild (Gudrún in the Norse legend) who inspired the invitation to Hunland, in order to get vengeance on Gunther and Hagen (Gunnar and H?gni) for the murder of Siegfried (Sigurd). It was Kriemhild who gave the order for the hall in which the Nibelungs slept to be set on fire; whereas in the Lay of Gudrún it is one Beiti, counsellor of Atli, who was the instigator of the burning (105). But the detail of the trapped warriors drinking blood from the corpses (109) is derived from the Nibelungenlied.
In Atlakviea Gudrún set the hall on fire at the end of the poem, after the murder of Atli and their children, and this appears at the end of the Lay of Gudrún (153).
105 The name Beiti is derived from Atlamál, where he is Atli’s steward (see note to 118–131).
112 ‘the Need of the Niflungs’. ‘Need’ is written with a capital because the phrase echoes the last words of the Nibelungenlied: ‘Here the story ends: this was der Nibelunge n?t.’ The word n?t, which is in origin the same as English need, refers to the terrible extremity and end of the Nibelungs.
113–116 Atli’s treatment of the bound Gunnar before Gudrún’s eyes, while taunting her with the vengeance now achieved for Sigurd, is found neither in the Eddaic poems nor in the V?lsunga Saga; but it is the spring of Gudrún’s ‘ruthless hatred’ (133) and of her insanely savage action after her brothers have been killed: she makes her demand for her brothers’ lives (116) in the form ‘by Erp and Eitill our own children’ (and in 120 ‘by those born of us!’).
114 ‘Budlung’s vengeance’: the vengeance of Atli son of Budli.
118–131 In Atlakviea Gunnar, asked if would purchase his life with the gold, replied that ‘The heart of H?gni must lie in my hand.’ They cut the heart from one ‘Hjalli the craven’ instead, and laid it before Gunnar, who knew that it was not H?gni’s heart, because it quivered; but it is not in any way explained why they did this. Then they cut out H?gni’s heart, and Gunnar knew that it was his, since it quivered scarcely at all. In Atlamál it is Atli who commanded the cutting out of H?gni’s heart, but Beiti Atli’s steward suggested that they take Hjalli the cook and swineherd instead, and spare H?gni; they seized the screaming Hjalli, but H?gni interceded for him, saying that he could not endure the noise, and that he would ‘rather play out this game myself’. Then Hjalli was released, and H?gni was killed, and there is no mention of the story of the two hearts.
In the Saga the two are rather crudely combined: Atli commands that H?gni’s heart be cut out, a counsellor of Atli proposes the substitution of Hjalli, H?gni intercedes for him; Atli then tells Gunnar that he can only purchase his life by revealing where the treasure lies, Gunnar replies that he must first see H?gni’s heart, and so Hjalli is seized again and his heart cut out, and the rest of the story is as in Atlakviea.
In the Lay of Gudrún the sources are interwoven more skilfully: it is Gunnar who demands to see H?gni’s heart, as in Atlakviea, but an explanation is provided (121) for the preliminary assault on Hjalli the swineherd: ‘wisemen bade him / wary counsel’ (they told Atli to beware), fearing the queen’s wrath. H?gni does not inter-cede for Hjalli, but merely expresses his distaste for the shrieking; and the swineherd is given no respite.
120 ‘Of his troll’s temper / yet true were the words!’ Atli refers, I believe, to Gunnar’s words (118) concerning H?gni and the gold: ‘to his latest breath / he will loose it not.’
122 ‘Woe worth the wiles’: A curse on the wiles; cf. ‘Woe worth the while’ in the Lay of the V?lsungs IX.29 and note.
124 ‘liever’: more acceptable.
128–130 In Atlakviea, when they brought the heart of H?gni to Gunnar, he declared that ‘Always I had a doubt, while two of us lived; but now I have none, since I alone am living. The Rhine shall possess the gold that stirs men to strife, the Niflungs’ inheritance. In the rolling water shall the fatal rings gleam, rather than that gold should shine on the hands of the sons of the Huns.’
The actual casting of the gold into the Rhine is not referred to in Atlakviea (as it is in the Lay, 130, line 5, ‘in the deeps we cast it’), and this led to the contention that Gunnar meant no more than that he would rather see the hoard drowned in the Rhine than adorning the Huns. My father strongly rejected this, on several grounds: the syntax of the passage; the statement by Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda that ‘before they [Gunnar and H?gni] departed from their land they concealed the gold, the heritage of Fáfnir, in the Rhine river, and that gold has never since been found’; and the references in the Nibelungenlied to the sinking of the treasure in the Rhine. He thought it probable that it was already part of the legend when it came North.
He noted also that the answer to the question, if the treasure was in the Rhine, what would it matter whether H?gni were alive or dead, must be that H?gni was the only party to the secret of where in the great river it lay; so in the V?lsunga Saga Gunnar says: ‘And now I alone know where the gold is, and H?gni will not tell you’, and Snorri’s ‘that gold has never since been found’. ‘Doubtless it could have been fished up,’ my father wrote, ‘if you knew just where to look.’ He believed nonetheless that the episode was a later elaboration (he called it ‘theatrical-dramatic’), not perfectly fitting with the Rhine-gold motive: see further the note to 148–150.
130 lines 5–8: compare the lines from near the end of Beowulf, 3166–8:
forleton eorla gestreon eorean healdan,
gold on greote, t?r hit nu gen lifae
ealdum swa unnyt, swa hit ?ror w?s.
They gave the ancient wealth to earth’s keeping,
under stone the gold, that there still dwelleth
as profitless to men as it proved of yore.
(From an alliterative translation by my father of Beowulf lines 3137–82.)
132–140 In Atlamál it is said, and it is repeated by Snorri, that Gunnar in the snake-pit played the harp with his feet, an idea that may have arisen from the observation that he was bound, as is told in Atlakviea (and in the Lay, 113). In the Lay, following Atlakviea, Gunnar used his hands. Other features of this episode in the Lay are derived from the Saga: that Gudrún sent him the harp (135), that his playing put the serpents to sleep (136), and that he was finally stung to death by a huge adder (139).
141–147 The great funeral pyres are not in the Eddaic poems, but Gudrún’s revenge on Atli is told in both – the same hideous motive as appears in the Greek legend, told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, of Procne, who for vengeance killed her own son Itys and gave his flesh to her husband, Tereus King of Thrace, to eat.
142 Lines 5–8 are repeated almost exactly from the first stanza of the poem, where they are used of the pyre of Sigurd and Brynhild.
148–50 I have said (p.312) that my father ‘tentatively interpreted the state of Atlakviea as the reworking of an earlier poem, a reworking that had then itself undergone “improvements”, additions, losses, and disarrangements’. He believed that both the ‘H?gni-Hjalli episode’ (see note to 118–131) and Gudrún’s revenge on Atli through their own children were later elaborations by ‘the Atlakviea poet’ on the earlier poem that he was reworking.
This last section of Atlakviea, constantly difficult to interpret in the detail