That there should be, nonetheless, so much else in the book requires some explanation. It may be felt that some account should be given of the actual nature of my father’s distinctive treatment of the legend. To provide a comprehensive account of the much discussed problems that he sought to resolve would lead all too easily to the first appearance of the ‘New Lays’ after some eighty years with a great weight of scholarly discussion hung about their necks. This is not to be thought of. But it seems to me that the publication of his poems provides an opportunity to hear the author himself, through the medium of the notes with which he prepared for his lectures, speaking (as it were) in characteristic tones on those very elements of doubt and difficulty that are found in the old narratives.
It must also be said that his poems are not at all points easy to follow, and this arises especially from the nature of the old poems that were his models. In one of his lectures he said: ‘In Old English breadth, fullness, reflection, elegiac effect, were aimed at. Old Norse poetry aims at seizing a situation, striking a blow that will be remembered, illuminating a moment with a flash of lightning – and tends to concision, weighty packing of the language in sense and form . . .’ That ‘seizing a situation’, ‘illuminating a moment’, without clear unfolding of narrative sequence or other matters with a bearing on the ‘moment’, will be found to be a marked characteristic of the ‘New Lays’; and here some guidance may be looked for in addition to the brief prose statements that he added to some of the sections of the Völsungakviða en nýja.
After much deliberation I have therefore provided, at the end of each poem, a commentary, which is intended to clarify references, and passages that may seem obscure; and also to point out significant departures made by my father from the Old Norse sources or between variant narratives, in such cases indicating his views, where possible, by reference to what he said in his lectures. It must be emphasized that nothing in those notes suggests that he had written, or had it in mind to write, poems on the subject himself; on the other hand, as one might expect, congruence between the views expressed in his lecture notes and the treatment of the Norse sources in his poems can often be observed.
As a general introduction in this book to the Elder Edda I have cited at length a more finished lecture with that title; and following this I have contributed brief statements on the text of the poems, the verse-form, and some other topics. At the end of the book I have given a brief account of the origins of the legend and cited some other related verses of my father’s.
In thus making much use of my father’s notes and draft discussions on ‘the Matter of Old Norse’, and the tragedy of the Völsungs and the Niflungs, hastily set down and unfinished as they are, I have chosen to try to make this book, as a whole, as much his work as I could achieve. Of its nature it is not to be judged by views prevailing in contemporary scholarship. It is intended rather as a presentation and record of his perceptions, in his own day, of a literature that he greatly admired.
In the commentaries I refer to the two poems as ‘the Lay of the Völsungs’ (Völsungakviða) and ‘the Lay of Gudrún’ (Guðrúnarkviða). But in the title of the book, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, I have taken up the subordinate title that my father gave to the Völsungakviða on the opening page of the manuscript, Sigurðarkviða en mesta, ‘the Longest Lay of Sigurd’, on which see p.234.
The sections of this book are each preceded by drawings made by Mr Bill Sanderson. These are derived closely from wood carvings that adorn the wide door-posts of the twelfth century church of Hylestad in the south of Norway, which are now preserved in the Oldsaksamlingen of the University of Oslo.
The scenes depict in continuous vertical series on each side of the doorway the story of Sigurd’s most famous deed, which in the Lay of the Völsungs is told in section V, Regin: the slaying of the dragon Fáfnir, which gave him the name Fáfnisbani. The carvings begin with the forging of swords by Regin the smith and their testing. Then follow the slaying of Fáfnir; Sigurd tasting his blood with his finger, which enabled him to understand the voices of the birds (stanza 41 in the Lay); the slaying of Regin (stanza 45); and Sigurd’s horse Grani, famous in legend, foal of Sleipnir, the mythical horse that Ódin rode: he is shown here laden with the treasure of the dragon, although not portrayed by that artist as so huge a burden as it is in the Völsunga Saga and in the Lay (stanza 48). The continuous carving ends with a different scene: Gunnar playing the harp in Atli’s snake-pit (the Lay of Gudrún, stanza 135): in this version playing it with his feet, his hands being bound (see p.330).
It will be seen that there is no reference in this book to the operas of Richard Wagner that are known by the general title of Der Ring des Nibelungen, or The Ring.
For his work Wagner drew primarily on Old Norse literature. His chief sources, known to him in translation, were the lays of the Poetic Edda and the Saga of the Völsungs, as they were my father’s also. The great epic poem Das Nibelungenlied, written about the beginning of the thirteenth century in Middle High German, was not a source for Wagner’s libretti in at all the same sense as were the Norse works, though this may be superficially disguised by his use of German name-forms (Siegfried, Siegmund, Gunther, Hagen, Brünnhilde).
But Wagner’s treatment of the Old Norse forms of the legend was less an ‘interpretation’ of the ancient literature than a new and transformative impulse, taking up elements of the old Northern conception and placing them in new relations, adapting, altering and inventing on a grand scale, according to his own taste and creative intentions. Thus the libretti of Der Ring des Nibelungen, though raised indeed on old foundations, must be seen less as a continuation or development of the long-enduring heroic legend than as a new and independent work of art, to which in spirit and purpose Völsungakviða en nýja and Guðrúnarkviða en nýja bear little relation.
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Many years ago my father referred to the words of William Morris concerning what he called ‘the Great Story of the North’, which, he insisted, should be to us ‘what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks’, and which far in the future ‘should be to those that come after us no less than the Tale of Troy has been to us.’ On this my father observed: ‘How far off and remote sound now the words of William Morris! The Tale of Troy has been falling into oblivion since that time with surprising rapidity. But the Völsungs have not taken its place.’
It is obviously desirable that a theme and a mode become so exotic should be ‘introduced’ in some fashion; and for this first publication of my father’s ‘Norse’ poems I have thought that it would be both interesting and suitable if such an introduction could be provided by the author rather than the editor.
Nowhere in his Norse papers is there any reference whatsoever to the New Lays, except for a collection of four small slips of paper of unknown date on which my father hastily wrote interpretative remarks about them (they are given on pages 51–55). While of great interest in themselves they do not constitute any large view of the mode and matter of his Norse lays in an historical context; and in the absence of any such writing I have ventured to include here a substantial part of the opening lecture (with the heading General Introduction) of a series in the English Faculty at Oxford titled The ‘Elder Edda’.