Tolkien out-Wagners Wagner

The most unexpected of Tolkien’s posthumous publications is his poetic response to the gap in the Nibelung legend

Many years ago William Morris declared that the legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, the Völsungs and the Nibelungs, deserved to become the Northern Homer, and he was right. It has everything: the dragon Fáfnir and the valkyrie Brynhild, werewolves and dwarves, mysterious interventions by a one-eyed deity, a sword broken and reforged, a fabulous treasure-hoard and, above all, a magic ring with a curse on it. It also has – and this may have prevented it from realizing its potential, at least in Morris’s long verse retelling of 1876 – many lurking embarrassments: incest, child-murder, human sacrifice, what looks very like ceremonial female suicide or suttee. Yet even more alluring and provoking than what is in the legend, is what might have been there once but is there no more.

The relationship between the various forms of the Nibelung legend was recognized in the nineteenth century as the Königsproblem of Germanic philology, which has never been solved. We still possess four main ancient sources, two Norse (the Völsunga saga and a brief epitome in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda), one in German (the Nibelungenlied), and one in Norse but derived from German, in the legendary compendium of the Þiðrekssaga. There is a fifth, for the legend gave rise to over half (fifteen out of twenty-nine) of the poems contained in the main manuscript of Eddic poetry surviving, the Codex Regius. However, some of those poems concern later additions to the cycle, several deal only with the complaints of Gudrún after all is over, and where the heart of the story should be, there is a gap. Before the manuscript was rediscovered in Iceland, some medieval vandal tore out the eight pages dealing (probably) with the centre of the tragedy. Both Snorri and the author of Völsunga saga seem to have known the poem(s) we have lost, but in crucial matters their reports do not agree. None of our extant ancient sources gives a completely credible narrative.

The gap has been a standing temptation for writers, like Morris and Wagner, as also a puzzle for scholars, best restated by Theodore Andersson’s The Legend of Brynhild (1980). Scholars of an older generation furthermore made no bones about reconstructing works they knew were lost. Axel Olrik wrote his long Danish version of the lost Old Norse Bjarkamál, based on the two surviving stanzas and a paraphrase in Latin by Saxo Grammaticus, and not many years later J. R. R. Tolkien followed suit, writing the two poems in the volume reviewed here, in English but in the original Old Norse metre, sometime (his son Christopher believes) in the early 1930s. They are sure of a wider readership than Morris ever received. Can they match Wagner – whom, let it be said at once, Tolkien regarded as at best a gifted amateur, and whose libretti, Christopher Tolkien says firmly, “In spirit and purpose . . . bear no relation” to his father’s poems?

What did Tolkien aim to do? In his own words, he meant “to unify the lays about the Völsungs from the Elder Edda . . . to organise the Edda material dealing with Sigurd and Gudrún”. These are perhaps understatements. In a lecture on Eddic poetry given at Oxford and here reprinted, Tolkien said that the poems had attracted “connoisseurs of new literary sensations” and the main aspect of that sensation was “an almost demonic energy and force”. Though the Eddic poems might often share the same metre as Old English poetry, the latter was relatively relaxed, expansive. By contrast, “To hit you in the eye was the deliberate intention of the Norse poet”, and Tolkien aimed to do that too.

Vital, then, were metre and language. Tolkien argued that the Old Norse fornyrðislag or “old lore metre”, essentially the same as the Old English one, still came naturally to modern English speakers, but the point can be challenged. Because of the loss of grammatical endings, modern English uses many more filler words, articles and prepositions and auxiliary verbs. The old metre was not based on syllable-counting and could therefore incorporate a number of unstressed items, but still rules out many possibilities natural to English now. Its basis is readily imitable: a line divided into two halves, two stressed syllables in each, the third of the four always carrying alliteration, to be matched by one or both of the first two, the fourth never (or the second half-line would become identical to the first and the sense of the line itself would disappear). Tolkien wrote many such in his Old English imitations, as for instance in Éomer’s epitaph for Théoden, “Mourn not overmuch! Mighty was the fallen . . .”, but Old Norse is harder. Where Norse clashes, English tends to patter. Even Tolkien’s friend W. H. Auden had trouble in his brilliant translations of the Eddic poems, reviewed many years ago for the TLS by this reviewer (February 25, 1982). Nevertheless, Tolkien wanted to keep the metre, to reach out for the “demonic energy”.

He accordingly accepted many archaic features: the -eth ending, which alternates with -s as metrically required; the “not” negative, as in “the king came not” for “the king never came”; most commonly, word-order shifts, to break up the increasingly invariant structure of modern English. Some will find these hard to follow: it takes a moment to grasp what Sigurd is saying to the dying dragon, in reply to the threat that his treasure brings death, “Life each must leave, / on his latest day, / yet gold gladly / will grasp living” (“living”, elliptical for “any living person”, is the grammatical subject and “gold” the object). Obscurity is the price paid by Tolkien, and gladly paid by his Norse predecessors, for force.

Much of that force comes from concision taken to its limits. Parataxis and asyndeton are normal, short clauses and phrases, sometimes paralleling and varying each other, sometimes linked by unspoken connections. Speaking of Sigrlinn, Sigurd’s mother, Tolkien writes: “Seven sons of kings / sued the maiden: / Sigmund took her; / sails were hoisted”. There is a silent “But” between the second and third half-lines, perhaps an implied “so” before the fourth. Sometimes the result is hard to make out. Brynhild broods on her position once she knows she was not won by Gunnar but by Sigurd, now married to Gudrún, and soliloquizes: “Mine own must I have / or anguish suffer, / or suffer anguish / Sigurd losing”. The chiasmus is a familiar device in Eddic poetry, but though the rhetoric is familiar, the exact nature of Brynhild’s dilemma escapes me.

Even without the rhetoric, abrupt shifts are frequent and deliberate. Why does Signý ask her husband to kill her ten brothers slowly? Tolkien doesn’t tell us, but it is to give her twin Sigmund a chance to escape. And how does he escape? The husband’s servants find “Nine brothers’ bones / under night gleaming”, and by them “she-wolf lying / torn and tongueless / by the tree riven”. Signý put honey on her twin’s face, and when her werewolf mother-in-law came to kill him, she started to lick it off, Sigmund tore out her tongue with his teeth and her recoil burst his shackles. You have to fill that in for yourself, perhaps from Christopher Tolkien’s exceptionally well-informed and professional commentary. But if you need everything spelt out, Eddic poetry is not for you, and nor is Icelandic saga: read Trollope instead. You must listen also for slight but significant changes in repeated wording, sometimes made more significant in meaning by the slightness of the verbal change.

Enigma, in short, is part of both medium and message, but some of it comes from the accidents of long transmission. Tolkien dealt with the latter partly by cutting out confusions and sidetracks created by the author of Völsunga saga, of whom he had no high opinion, and more contestably by putting a frame of Odinic purpose round what was left. However, the heart of the legend concerns Sigurd’s dealings with Brynhild, Gunnar and Gudrún, and these were in the eight-page Codex Regius gap. Before the gap we have Sigurd killing the dragon, winning the treasure, waking the valkyrie. After it we have the end of a poem – which in its non-extant complete form scholars call “The Old Lay of Sigurd” – and another complete poem, “The Short Lay of Sigurd”. Both of them deal with Brynhild urging her husband Gunnar to take revenge on Sigurd for his betrayal of him and her. What happened in between? It must have been told in the missing and hypothetical “Great Lay of Sigurd”, which scholars have tried to reconstruct from the conflicting accounts of their other four ancient sources. Tolkien signals his ambition by giving his first and longer poem the title “The New Lay of the Völsungs” (so it deals with Sigurd’s father and family as well), and the subtitle “The Greatest Lay of Sigurd”, Sigurðarkviða en mesta (so it will fill the gap and more besides).

But what did happen in that lost, original, complete version? The story has baffled ancient and modern rewriters alike. In brief, it is agreed that King Gunnar asked his friend Sigurd to win for him the valkyrie Brynhild behind her ring of fire, and he did so, taking Gunnar’s shape. Why, if he had already woken her and been betrothed to her? He was given a potion of oblivion by Gunnar’s witch-wife mother, and promised the hand of Gunnar’s sister Gudrún. How did he win Brynhild? Just by crossing the ring of fire, or was something else involved? One can see furthermore why Brynhild feels betrayed when she finds out about the deception, but what harm has been done to Gunnar? And the critical point: how does Brynhild find out? Again, there is general agreement that Gudrún, provoked by a clash over precedence, tells her, and proves it by pointing to a ring. But what is the ring? Is it The Ring, the fatal ring Andvaranaut taken from the dwarf Andvari by the gods and passed from gods to giant to dragon to hero with a curse following it? If so, who is wearing it, Brynhild or Gudrún, and what in the world is it supposed to prove? The ancient sources do not agree, the author of the Nibelungenlied seeming especially baffled, and Wagner after him.

The trouble is, there is an answer no one wants to admit. Völsunga saga says the ring is Andvaranaut and Gudrún has it: Sigurd took it from Brynhild while pretending to be Gunnar, and the fact Gudrún has it exposes the deception. Snorri says the ring is Andvaranaut and Brynhild has it: Sigurd gave it to her as “linen-fee” or “morning-gift”, in early Norse and English society traditionally given to the bride the morning after the wedding, in exchange for her virginity. And there lies the crux of the matter, rubbed in, in the Nibelungenlied, by the word kebse, politely translatable as “paramour”, and in Þiðrekssaga by the word frumverr, “first man”. Maybe Sigurd not only crossed the fire-wall for Gunnar, and through his disguise won Brynhild’s acceptance of Gunnar as husband, he also consummated the marriage and took Brynhild’s virginity – and in so doing seemingly removed the magic strength which, in the Nibelungenlied version, meant no ordinary man (like Gunnar) could dominate her. And perhaps that is why Sigurd gave her the precious ring Andvaranaut as “morning-gift”, the only fitting return he could make.

This all fits together, but where does it leave Sigurd? As a sexual predator, who furthermore betrays his friend and blood- brother. The neat solution has therefore proved unacceptable, but attempts to remedy it have consistently made matters worse. The challenge for Tolkien was to cut to the heart of the story, make events psychologically plausible, and do so without losing tragic force.

This he has done, though I forbear from giving the details in mere summary. Yet one may note that the pivotal moment of the story may be signalled by metre. Christopher Tolkien mentions that his father was much impressed by the terse chiastic verse in the fragmentary “Old Lay”, where Gunnar says, “Mér hefir Sigurðr / selda eiða, / eiða selda, / allir logna”, for once closely translated by Tolkien as “Evil wrought Sigurd, / oaths he swore me, / oaths he swore me, / all belied them”. Sigurd and the narrator meanwhile both declare, with slight variation, “Oaths swore Sigurd, / all fulfilled them”. But there is an oath he has broken, under the power of the potion of oblivion, and that is the one made to Brynhild. When she comes to her husband’s court and sees Sigurd there, married to Gudrún, she blanches and Sigurd’s oblivion is dispelled: “oaths were remembered / all unfulfilled”. The last two words are un-metrical. The stresses must fall on “all” and “un-”, both of which, beginning with vowels, alliterate with “oaths” in the first half-line. But in a second half-line the second stress (this time, the “un-”) must never alliterate. Only ears attuned to the metre will hear it, but the shock of recognition is matched by a jarring discord. To understand this poetry, one has to listen hard – a skill not much developed in modern literate and literary culture.

Tolkien’s first and longer poem ends with the death of Sigurd and Brynhild, his second with the death of the Nibelung brothers and their sister Gudrún, at the court of Attila. Tolkien cut away the extension of the story to the court of Ermanaric the Goth. In so doing he lost one of the greatest Eddic poems, “The Old Lay of Hamthir”, but also set history straight. It is a remarkable fact, pointed out by Christopher Tolkien in an appendix, that the Nibelung story does have a historical basis in the destruction of the Burgundian kingdom on the Rhine by the Huns in ad 437, and that there is a trace of this in both Old English and Old Norse legend in the use of the phrase vin Borgunda, “lord of the Burgundians”, or its cognate. Placing the death of Ermanaric after that, as the Codex Regius does, is, however, several generations wrong, for the Huns destroyed Ermanaric’s Gothic kingdom sixty years before.

Adding the Gothic King Theodoric to Attila’s court, as the Nibelungenlied does, is meanwhile a generation out the other way. Nevertheless, Tolkien did not want to shed the Goths entirely, for Gothic was one of his favourite languages, and (the point was made by his son in his 1960 edition of Heithreks saga) it is certain that some traces of Gothic survived as place names in Old Norse poetry centuries later. Tolkien accordingly follows and combines the two Eddic Attila poems dealing with the luring of the Nibelungs to the Hunnish court, but once they are there, extends the battle scenes by having the Gothic janissaries in the service of Attila change sides and rebel against their master. Much of Tolkien’s “New Lay of Gudrún” incorporates material from non-Eddic heroic poetry, the Old English Finnsburg Fragment yielding an awakening scene, and the Nibelungenlied contributing a hall-burning, while there are cameo appearances also from Beowulf and the Eddica Minora.

At its heart, however, there remains the strange psychology of the characters. Why should Gudrún wish to protect the brothers who murdered her husband? Is that just because kinship is stronger than love? Why do the brothers accept Attila’s obviously treacherous invitation? Is it just because they have been warned – which means, of course, that they cannot now refuse what has become a dare? Once they have been captured, why does Gunnar refuse to speak until he has seen his brother Högni’s heart? Even the Huns realize there is something strange about this, and try to trick him by taking the wretched cook Hjalli’s heart instead. The poem Atlamál, said to have been composed in Greenland and distinctly downmarket in scale and tone, turns this into gruesome comedy, which Tolkien omits, but Gunnar’s reaction in Atlakviða to the fake heart, and then the true heart, is a touchstone for the true heroic temper: proud, mean, contemptuous, ending in silence. When he sees his brother’s heart, he says, in my very literal translation, “Here I have the heart of Högni the bold, not like the heart of Hjalli the coward. It trembles little as it lies on the plate, it trembled still less when it lay in his breast”. The four lines fall into English alliterative verse just by themselves, but they have become, strictly speaking, unmetrical. Auden gave the last two very much as I have, but using “trencher” for “plate” to strengthen the alliteration. Tolkien renders them as “Unshaken lies it, / so shook it seldom / beating in boldest / breast of princes”. As for why Gunnar puts the strange request – just like Signý earlier demanding a slow death for her brothers – the explanation is clear enough. Gunnar loved his brother, but he didn’t trust him. He only trusts himself. When two men knew the location of Fáfnir’s hoard, it was not a secret: now it is, and Gunnar knows they cannot make him talk.

As for the fate of the two poems here published, Tolkien fans will need no persuasion of their merits. Scholars will read them with close attention, to see what Tolkien’s famously original mind made of the old Königsproblem. The general reader? Many will stumble over the archaisms, for the poems are seventy years old at least, and written by a man closer in time and spirit to William Morris than to modern readers. Those who persevere will learn much about Eddic poetry and the great legend of the North, and feel something of the “demonic energy” they project and the “new literary sensation” they created on rediscovery. This is the most unexpected of Tolkien’s many posthumous publications; his son’s “Commentary” is a model of informed accessibility; the poems stand comparison with their Eddic models, and there is little poetry in the world like those.



J. R. R. Tolkien
THE LEGEND OF SIGURD AND GUDRÚN
Edited by Christopher Tolkien
377pp. HarperCollins. £18.99.
978 0 00 731723 3 (deluxe edition, £100. 978 0 00 731725 7)



Tom Shippey’s most recent book is his collection of papers, Tolkien, Roots and Branches, 2007. The Shadow-walkers, a collection of essays on Grimm’s mythology that he edited, won the Mythopoeic Society’s award for scholarship in 2008.