of its language, is not altogether intelligible at large, logically or psychologically. As it stands, Gudrún came to meet Atli when he returned from the murder of Gunnar in the snake-pit and welcomed him to the feast with a golden cup (cf. the Lay, stanza 145), brought drink and food to the assembled company, waited on Atli – and then declared with ghastly clarity what she had done and what they were doing. A great cry of horror and noise of weeping arose from the benches, but Gudrún did not weep: ‘she scattered gold, with red rings enriched the men of her household.... Atli unsuspecting had drunk himself bemused; weapons he had not, he was not ware of Gudrún’ (this last phrase is my father’s translation of a Norse verb of uncertain meaning here). Then follows Gudrún’s murder of Atli in his bed before she set the hall on fire.
‘Why the distribution of gold,’ my father wrote, ‘when no help or favour was needed by Gudrún, or could be expected by a declared murderess of princes? Why the foolishness of Atli not suspecting Gudrún?’
His tentative solution was to suppose that while the perishing of Atli’s son, or sons, may have been a very old part of the legend, it was not originally an essential part of Gudrún’s revenge. The form in which we here find it interwoven (he wrote) is certainly mainly a Norse development, and the end of a long process. It is probable that it was not present in the ‘original source’ of Atlakviea, and that its introduction and interweaving with the main theme of revenge was the work of the Atlakviea poet.
He supposed that in an earlier form the story would have moved, after the funeral feast, to the verse describing Gudrún’s gold-giving, which would in this case be naturally interpreted as her continuing the pretence of cheerfulness, and acceptance, distributing rich gifts to allay suspicion. Then Atli, ‘unsuspecting’ – because he had no reason for suspicion – went to his bed very drunk (this being one of the oldest elements in the whole story, see Appendix A, pp.345–46). But when the motive of the murdered children entered it had necessarily to be introduced in the course of the funeral feast. The stanzas referred to above were retained, but they were not successfully fitted to the insertion (‘Why the distribution of gold? Why the foolishness of Atli?’).
In his Lay of Gudrún my father devised a remedy for this in Atli’s swoon of horror that caused the servants to carry him to his bed (148–149).
The author of Atlamál here suddenly turns to a tradition that H?gni had a son who avenged him on Atli, and says (followed by the Saga, and by Snorri) that this son, who has not been previously mentioned in the poem, aided Gudrún in the murder. As is to be expected, this has no place in the Lay of Gudrún.
152–154 The burning of the hall by Gudrún is derived from Atlakviea: see note to 93–112.
156 Lines 5–8 are almost the same as the last lines of the Lay of the V?lsungs (IX.82), and become also the last lines of the Lay of Gudrún (stanza 165) before the parting words of the poet to his audience.
157–165 In a pencilled note on the manuscript my father wrote that all the conclusion of the poem from stanza 157 should be omitted, only the final stanza 166 being retained. Rough lines drawn on the manuscript, however, show the omission as extending only to stanza 164, so that the last four lines of 156 are the same as the last four lines of 165 immediately following.
159–165 The verses given to Gudrún as she sits beside the sea are inspired by the late Eddaic poem Guerúnarhv?t, but there is little close correspondence. The latter part of that brief lay is one of several ‘Laments of Gudrún’; but it includes her grief over the final element in the Northern legend, which for his purposes in these poems my father excluded.
In Guerúnarhv?t Gudrún tells that she attempted to drown herself in the sea, but the waves cast her up (as in the Lay of Gudrún 158), and her story was not ended. Early on, a wholly distinct and very ancient Gothic legend was threaded on to the acquisitive Niflung theme. This legend concerned the death of the Ostrogothic king Ermanaric (see note to 86) at the hands of two brothers, in revenge for the murder of their sister; and the sister, Swanhild (Svanhildr), became the wife of Ermanaric and the daughter of Sigurd and Gudrún, her brothers (Hameir and S?rli) the sons of Gudrún by her third and last marriage to a shadowy king named Iónakr.
Earlier in the Lay of Gudrún, when Gunnar sang of ancient Gothic deeds (86), he named Iormunrek (Ermanaric); and this of itself shows that my father was cutting away the Gothic legend from his Niflung poem, and setting Iormunrek in a historical context – for in history Ermanaric died some sixty years before Gundahari (Gunnar) king of the Burgundians.
Only in Guerúnarhv?t is there any reference in Norse literature to the manner of Gudrún’s death (self-destruction on a funeral pyre); but in the Lay of Gudrún she utters her lament, and again giving herself to the waves is this time taken.
APPENDICES
APPENDIX A
A short account of the
ORIGINS OF THE LEGEND
§ I Attila and Gundahari
In both Lays my father used the expression ‘Borgund lord(s)’, chiefly in reference to Gunnar, or Gunnar and H?gni (who are also called ‘Gjúkings’ and ‘Niflungs’). In the commentary on the Lay of the V?lsungs, VII.15, I have explained that he derived the name ‘Borgund’ from a single occurrence in Atlakviea of the title vin Borgunda ‘lord of the Burgundians’, applied to Gunnar, and that nowhere else in Norse literature was Gunnar remembered as a Burgundian. In this title appears one of the chief elements in the legend.
The Burgundians were in origin an East Germanic people who came out of Scandinavia; they left their name in Bornholm (Norse Borgunda holm), the island that rises from the Baltic south-east of the southern tip of Sweden. In the Old English poem Widsith they are named together with the eastern Goths (Ostrogoths) and the Huns: ‘Attila ruled the Huns, Ermanaric the Goths, Gifica the Burgundians’, which may be taken to be a memory of a time when the Burgundians still dwelt in ‘East Germania’; but they moved westwards toward the Rhineland, and it was there that disaster overtook them.
Early in the fifth century they were settled in Gaul, in a kingdom on the west bank of the Rhine centred on Worms (south of Frankfurt). In the year 435, led by their king Gundahari, the Burgundians, impelled as it seems by the need for land, embarked on an expansion westwards; but they were crushed by the Roman general Aetius and forced to sue for peace. Two years later, in 437, they were overwhelmed by a massive onslaught of the Huns, in which Gundahari and a very large number of his people perished. It has been commonly supposed that the Roman Aetius, whose primary purpose was to defend Gaul from the encroachments of the barbarians, called in the Huns to destroy the Burgundian kingdom of Worms. There is no reason to suppose that Attila was the leader of the Huns in this battle.
But the Burgundians of the Rhineland were not wholly destroyed in 437, for it is recorded that in 443 the survivors were allowed to settle as colonists in the region of Savoy. A curious glimpse of them is found among the writings of Sidonius Apollinaris, a cultivated Gallo-Roman aristocrat, Imperial politician, and poet, born in Lyons about 430, and in his later years the bishop of Clermont, the chief city of the Auvergne. He left in his letters a portrait of the manners and mode of life in the strange society of southern Gaul in the fifth century.
But to the fastidious Sidonius the gross Burgundians were repellent and their culture wholly without interest. In a satirical poem he complained humorously of having to sit among the long-haired barbarians (who were excessively fond of him) and be forced to endure Germanic speech: to praise with a wry face the songs sung by the gluttonous, seven foot tall Burgundians, who greased their hair with rancid butter and reeked of onions. Thus we learn nothing from him of the songs which were sung by the contemporaries of Gundahari and Attila, but only that his own muse fled away from the noise.
That they preserved their traditions, however great the disaster of 437, is suggested by a Burgundian code of laws drawn up King Gundobad not later than the early sixth century, in which the names of ancestral kings are cited: Gibica, Gundomar, Gislahari, Gundahari. These names all appear in later legend, though it cannot be known what were the historical relationships between them. Gundahari is Gunnarr (vin Borgunda) in Norse. He appears in Old English in the very dissimilar but ultimately identical form Guehere: in the poem Widsith the minstrel says that when he was ‘among the Burgundians’
me t?r Guehere forgeaf gl?dlicne maeeum
songes to leane; n?s t?t s?ne cyning.
(‘there Guehere gave me a glorious jewel in reward for my song: he was no sluggish king.’) In the German tradition he is Gunther.
Gibica, in the form Gifica, appears in the Old English Widsith as the ruler of the Burgundians together with the