[In the following excerpt from his introduction to Patricia Terry's English translation of the Elder Edda, Dunn summarizes the pre-Christian ethos of these Old Icelandic lays, also discussing character, theme, and poetic style within the works.]

Deyr fé, deyia fraendr,
          deyr siálfr it sama;
en orztírr deyr aldregi,
          hveim er sér góðan getr.
Cattle die, kinsmen die,
          one day you die yourself;
but the words of praise will not perish
          when a man wins fair fame.

(Sayings of the High One, 76)

The poems that are here so vividly translated by Patricia Terry unfold the traditional lore of the Norsemen concerning their gods and heroes. “Fair fame” is their chief subject; and such has been the potency of their “words of praise” that Odin the god, Sigurd the hero, and Brynhild the valkyrie still live. But who were the poets? Ironically, all we know of them is that they were the kinsmen of the Viking warriors who are popularly thought of as savage pirates of the western seas. Their literary legacy therefore deserves careful assessment.

In the remote obscurity of the past the adventurous Germanic ancestors of the Norsemen had carried their culture and their particular Germanic dialects from the mainland of Europe northward first into Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, then by the year 874 into Iceland, and by a.d. 986 into Greenland. Thereafter, as skilled seamen they set no limits to their explorations. From their Scandinavian bases they established beachheads at almost every estuary in western Europe. They founded notable realms in Normandy and in the English Danelaw. They sailed through the Mediterranean and settled in Sicily; they passed over the Black Sea; they penetrated the Baltic and settled in what is now Russia; they sailed around the North Cape to the isolated White Sea; and they traveled at large across the wide Atlantic. They supported their travels by ransacking (this was one of their own Norse words borrowed into English); but presumably they considered their activities to be expansive rather than aggressive. As Caesar said of their continental forefathers, “those raids which they make beyond the boundaries of each community are not in any way considered disgraceful.”

The Scandinavians were, indeed, much more than raiders. They brought law (another Norse word); they established trade; and they carried a rich oral culture. They tenaciously retained their native mythology, religion, beliefs, rites, and cults until at last in approximately the year 1000, after much deliberation, they adopted Christianity.

The lays here translated are basically a product of the pre-Christian Norse culture of Norway and Iceland. For the most part they are survivals typical of the oral culture of the tenth century, but we know them only as they were written down by antiquarian Christian scribes in the thirteenth century. The great Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson (who died in 1241) led the way in recording his native traditions by compiling a handbook of pre-Christian Norse lore known as The Prose Edda (or, misleadingly, The Younger Edda). Following his lead, anonymous compilers recorded the fragments of their ancient poetic tradition. Their collection of poems known as The Elder Edda, upon which we are principally dependent for our knowledge of this vanishing repertoire, provides a priceless but incomplete and partial sampling of the great period of Old Norse poetry.

The oldest extant manuscript of The Elder Edda, the Codex Regius, was compiled in Iceland at a date no earlier than 1270. The poems which it contains vary in antiquity and are marred by gaps and discrepancies.

The pre-Christian composers and singers who had circulated the poems obviously served as custodians of the pagan lore cherished by their people. The later scribes, on the contrary, neither accepted nor wholly understood the old religious myths; they did not entirely believe in the historicity of the ancient legends; and the wisdom cherished in the poetry of the Heroic Age had lost much of its relevance for a people whose prosperity depended no longer upon war-galleys and swords but upon farms and merchant ships. The marvel is that so much has survived of their lore concerning the gods and heroes and so much of their poetic wisdom.

THE GODS

Þá gengo regin oοll á roοkstóla,
ginnheilog goð, ok um þat gaettoz.
Then all the gods met to give judgment,
the holy gods took counsel together.

(The Sibyl's Prophecy, 6)

It is difficult now to reconstruct Norse religion—as difficult, in fact, as if a latter-day archaeologist were forced to reconstruct Christianity from an excavation that yielded only a fourteenth-century crucifix, a piece of Victorian stained glass, and a twentieth-century Christmas-tree light. As in most primitive religions, the Norse concept was comprehensive and systematic; the relation of the gods to man provided a vital working hypothesis concerning the origin and nature of man's universe. The function of the myths, as of Kipling's Just So Stories, was in part etiological. At the same time, as in most primitive religions, the pre-Christian Norse believed that, by sacrifices and other cult practices, they could avert misfortune and propitiate the gods and obtain their assistance. Thus the function of the gods might be said also to be providential, though one must add that the gods seem to have been poor providers.

The common Germanic system was complex and subject to many inconsistencies and local variations. The Norse gods differed in kind (the Aesir and the Vanir), and they were opposed by various sorts of demons known as giants and dwarves. They were, moreover, subject to fate even as men are. Over them forever hung the impending doom known as “the fate of the gods” or, in Wagner's famous mistranslation, “the twilight of the gods.”

The leading gods clearly played varied roles. Odin, for instance, the father of all, was the director of battle. He commanded the valkyries, who (as the etymology of the name suggests) “chose out” those who were to be slain in combat. In order to gain victory, Norse warriors used to sacrifice their prisoners to him, and they hoped that they could spend their own afterlife in his Valhalla, where their bravery would be rewarded by eternal banqueting and fighting. As the one-eyed seer, however, Odin was also the god of knowledge who knew the past, the present, and the future.

Odin's son Thor, the god of thunder, controlled the forces of nature, and as the supreme wielder of weapons he was therefore revered by hard-smiting warriors. It is no coincidence that his name appears as the first element in innumerable Norse personal names such as Thorberg, Thorbrand, Thorfinn, Thorgrim, Thorkell, Thorsteinn, Thorvald, and the like; such names were doubtless given by parents anxious to obtain Thor's protection for their sons.

Among the Vanir, on the other hand, Frey and Freyja, the brother-and-sister divinities, controlled fertility. In The Lay of Thrym the poet does not treat Freyja very seriously, but her role must once have been considered most important. Not only did she and her brother control the propagation of all living things; they could also provide continuity to a family line by effecting the rebirth of a hero or heroine. Before the adoption of Christianity their favors were desperately courted in fertility rites which later converts have hesitated to describe in detail.

The impact of Christianity upon Norse belief was obviously shattering. During Saint Olaf's mission in Norway (ca. 1021), for instance, Gudbrand of Loar tried to turn back the Christians by producing the portable shrine of Thor. Thanks to a miracle carefully prearranged by Saint Olaf, the idol burst apart, and from it “mice as big as cats, adders, and serpents” sprang forth. Disgruntled with his god, Gudbrand became a Christian, remarking opportunistically to Olaf that, since the old god “couldn't help us, we'll now believe in the god in whom you believe.”

In somewhat the same spirit, during the conversion of the Icelanders (a.d. 1000), Hjalti composed an impromptu verse:

I don't wish to revile the gods,
but Freyja seems to me a bitch.

But even if Hjalti could no longer approve of the tales and rituals associated with the time-honored goddess of fertility, it seems most unlikely that he was able immediately to forget and abandon all his inherited beliefs.

Naturally the later scribes who recorded The Poetic Edda were just as skeptical as Hjalti had been. One of them writes (at the end of The Second Lay of Helgi Hunding's Bane) concerning the doctrine of reincarnation: “In olden times it was believed that people could be born again, although that is now considered an old woman's tale.” Yet the scribe does not seem to have carried his skepticism far beyond Hjalti's; his care in recording the old belief betrays his respect for a lay which he obviously wishes to preserve.

THE HEROES

“Munak ek floeia, þótt mik feigan vitir,
          emka ek með bleyði borinn.”
“I will not flee though you foretell my death—
          I was never called a coward.”

(The Lay of Sigrdrifa, 21)

Like the mythology of the Germanic gods, the legends of the Germanic heroes were not particularly compatible with Christianity. To be sure, the heroic ideals were noble and magnificent. The hero wrestled on behalf of his people with the conflicting forces of love and war and fate. Yet the ethics of Sigurd, or of his German counterpart Siegfried, are not the ethics of Christianity.

The heroes are, moreover, legendary rather than historical; and their actions are significantly controlled by the supernatural forces that were an accepted part of the Norse mythological system. The purely historical basis of the whole cycle of lays connected with Sigurd can, in fact, be summarized within the brief compass of a single diagram [described as follows]:

Gunnar (Gudrun's brother) corresponds to the historical Gundicar, king of the Germanic tribe of Burgundians who were defeated and displaced in 437 by the invading Huns. Atli (Gudrun's second husband) corresponds to the notorious Attila, king of the Huns, who overran much of northern Europe. Jormunrek corresponds to Ermanaric, king of the once-powerful Goths, who has here, with considerable chronological violence, been dragged into the story of Sigurd.

The other characters in the cycle do not even have any historical prototypes. All the related Germanic legends agree that Sigurd is the son of Sigmund; but Sigmund the son of Volsung, who claims direct descent from Odin, is partly legendary and partly mythological. Brynhild, the femme fatale of the Sigurd cycle, was one of Odin's valkyries and was obviously thought of, in the pre-Christian tradition, as a supernatural being.

The tribal history involved in the tale of Sigurd is just as obscure to the singers of the Norse lays as the individual identity of the heroes. Sigurd's father, we are told, is king of the Franks—a plausible enough identification, since the powerful Germanic tribe of Franks did in fact continue to hold their territory at the mouth of the Rhine even when Attila drove the neighboring Burgundians south and extended his empire to the eastern banks of the Rhine. Sigurd himself, however, is inconsistently referred to as king of the Huns; and Gunnar, the king of the Burgundians, is sometimes quite impossibly referred to as king of the Goths. And the vaguely imagined territory of Atli, though it is consistently enough referred to as Hunland, seems a shadowy thing compared to that vast historical empire of Attila so vividly described by Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

For the singers who composed the heroic lays five hundred years or more after the event, these tribal divisions understandably had little significance. What concerned them was the heroic ideal of an imagined past. Essentially, the leitmotif of all their songs, though variously developed by the singers, was the human dilemma of divided loyalties. They well understood that the demands of familial duty to one's kinsmen and of martial allegiance to one's lord were inexorable. They knew, too, that duty and allegiance constantly required the hero to defend his honor and to execute revenge. Within this rigid Germanic tribal system they realized that human affection, friendship, and love could play only a poignantly helpless role. Such matters are the very sum and substance of the heroic lays, just as they are of the later Norse sagas and, significantly, of the last great reworking of Scandinavian legend in European literature, namely Shakespeare's Hamlet.

The pessimistic determinism of the heroic lays seems also to reflect the fundamental assumptions of Norse mythology. The myths could provide an explanation for the origin of evil, but they could supply no cure. If Ibsen had written the tale of Sigurd, he would no doubt have emphasized the human fact that the hero was destroyed by an over-ambitious mother-in-law. The Norse poets, however, imply that Sigurd and all his friends and foes were doomed to destruction because of the gods. The immediate enemy of the people is Regin the dwarf, whom the poet aptly calls “the folk-destroying enemy.” It is through him that Sigurd wins for mankind the supernatural treasure, and the treasure bears a curse upon it. The ultimate cause of the curse, in turn, is the crime of Loki, the laughing, mischievous, indifferent, sinister giant. His capricious slaying of Otter the dwarf precipitates a long chain of obligatory acts of vengeance in which gods, giants, dwarves, and human beings all suffer.

Summarized in bare narrative form, the tribal warfare of the Franks, Burgundians, and Huns may seem not to differ much from present-day gangland slayings, but the singers of the lays saw a cosmic meaning in their songs. Heroes and heroines do what they must, and their fate in this unfriendly universe can at least be explained by a supernatural cause even if it cannot be justified.

WISDOM

Heill, sá er kvað! Heill, sá er kann!
          Nióti, sá er nam!
          Heilir, þeirs hlýddo!
Hail to the speaker! Hail the one he taught!
          They're lucky who have the lore,
          happy if they heed it.

(Sayings of the High One, 164)

The all-wise god Odin gave his eye in order to acquire wisdom; and Sigurd, in his wooing of Brynhild, spent most of his time in absorbing her supernaturally acquired lore. Like the gods and the heroes, the Norse singers of lays also treasured wisdom for wisdom's sake. To modern readers of the lays, the poet's preoccupation with sententiousness may seem both irrelevant and unaesthetic, but the role of the pre-Christian Norse poet was that of a shaman, a tribal seer. He was not primarily concerned, like a romantic poet, with the creation of beauty; rather he was expected, through his control of the magical process of poetry, to discover and reveal wisdom. The poet was not only obliged to narrate the deeds of the gods and heroes; he was also required to prescribe pungently and memorably in his gnomic verse the kind of behavior appropriate to heroes. If his sententious utterances sometimes sound a trifle fatuous, the same may often be said of well-intentioned advice including that contained in medieval courtesy books or modern guides to etiquette. And usually, it must be admitted, his sententious utterances are dramatically appropriate and manifestly true.

There is only one particular form of poetic wisdom that demands special judgment, and that is the encyclopedic listing of esoteric mythological details such as are itemized in The Lay of Grimnir. The key to this treasure-trove has been lost. Yet even here the reader, like a sympathetic anthropologist on his first visit to some strange tribal ceremony, can reach some appreciation for the poetry if he remembers that the Norsemen once considered such lore to be vital to their well-being.

STYLE

As Patricia Terry's flexible translations suggest, the style of the lays varies greatly. Some early lays are written in standard meters; others contain loose, eccentric stanzas; and some of the late accretions to The Edda tend towards a complex and decorative style. Scholars have traditionally scanned the lays by a system devised in the nineteenth century by Eduard Sievers, but the relevance of his rigorous doctrine to actual compositional techniques now seems questionable. Suffice it to say that the reciter (who possibly sang to a musical accompaniment) composed his lines, like most oral performers, on the basis of customary formulas and tied them together in stanzaic units.

Typically the stanza contains four lines; each line is divided by a caesura; and each line is decorated by an alliteration connecting a stressed initial sound in the first half to a stressed initial sound in the second half of the line. (Any vowel alliterates with itself or any other vowel.) Each half-line contains two stresses unrestricted as to position. The archaic stanza known as fornyrdislag or “ancient verse” allows generally only two unstressed syllables per half-line; another similar stanza, known as málaháttr or “speech verse,” allows three unstressed syllables per half-line. Typical is the following:

(Literally: I know on the fell a folk-
protectress sleeps, and there licks above
her the linden's foe [fire]. The frightful
one [Odin] stuck a thorn in her; other men
she had felled, the linen-giver [lady], other
than he had wished to have.)

(The Lay of Fafnir, 43)

A different stanza, known as the ljódaháttr, “song-measure,” contains first and third lines like those just described, alternating with three-stressed second and fourth lines:

(Silent and thoughtful ought a king's son
to be and battle-bold. Contented and
cheerful ought every man to be till in
time he meets death.)

(Sayings of the High One, 15)

The reader can best realize the effect of such poetry by reciting it aloud either in the original or in Patricia Terry's translation, which imitates the effects of the original. The melody, it will be noticed, arises not just from the alliterative echoes, but from the contrast of alliterating and non-alliterating stressed sounds. Diagrammatically, the two stanzas quoted above present the following patterns:

The ear is constantly affected by the unpredictable alternations of similarities and dissimilarities; and, because of the freedom of the syllabic count, the placement of the beat in each half-line is also unpredictably varied. One can train oneself to hear such music; and music it is.

The literal translations accompanying the preceding metrical illustrations serve at the same time to suggest two further characteristics of the lays, namely, the tight interweaving of the words within each stanza and the rich allusiveness of their language. But the most subtle consideration in our reading of the lays is less a question of technique than of tone. The scribes may have lost their faith, but the poets who preceded them treated their subject matter with a high seriousness. The poet's attitude towards the gods may seem frivolous in The Lay of Thrym, but if so the frivolousness is of a nervous kind. More typically, as in The Sibyl's Prophecy, the gods are viewed as awesome, remote, and mysterious beings. Man's life is thought of as essentially tragic; an inexorable fate constantly threatens to snatch him away to a cold and cheerless after-world.

The deepest kind of human passion lies implicit in the narratives, but the stern poets of the Heroic Age seldom choose to give it expression. Oddrun may for a moment sound like a Victorian heroine when, in describing her love affair with Gunnar, she says, “We were not strong enough to strive with love.” But her utterance was not intended romantically. The more typical expression of love is to be found rather in The Short Lay of Sigurd at that terrible and tragic moment when the vengeful Brynhild laughs speechlessly after discovering that the only man in the world whom she could love has been killed.

The intensity of this heroic tone is, of course, not always maintained; and the late Greenland Lay of Atli, in particular, descends from the noble to the most utterly banal. But in general the Norse lays represent a high achievement in the literary history of Europe. On later readers they have exercised various kinds of fascinations. From a lay in The Elder Edda and another embedded in Njal's Saga, Thomas Gray in the eighteenth century distilled the essence of Gothic horror. A century later Richard Wagner converted the legend of a hero and valkyrie into a drama of high romantic passion. In the twentieth century the student can read the lays in the light of the solid results achieved by intensive and detached scholarship; he can understand them historically and appraise them comparatively. But, best of all, through translation everyone can admire the sparkling brilliance of their iceberg-like beauty.