The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun - By J. R. R. Tolkien Page 0,2
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.