Revisiting the Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend (Routledge Medieval Casebooks) by Revisiting the Poetic Edda Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend (Routledge Medieval Casebooks)

Author:Revisiting the Poetic Edda Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend (Routledge Medieval Casebooks)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136227868
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-06-26T07:00:00+00:00

Introduction to Chapter 7

The Later Heroic Poems of the Edda

Atlakviða, Atlamál, Guðrúnarhvöt, and Hamðismál

(Lay of Atli, Greenlandic Poem of Atli, The Whetting of Guðrún, and The Lay of Hamðir)

Critical History

The last four poems in the Poetic Edda compilation in the Codex Regius manuscript treat the later career of Sigurðr’s wife Guðrún. The first two poems relate the outcome of her second marriage, in which she is wedded against her will to Atli (Attila the Hun), and the death of her brothers Gunnarr and Högni. Both poems are said in the manuscript headings to be Greenlandic, though it seems likely that this attribution became attached to Atlakviða (The Lay of Atli) because it was already attached for good reason to Atlamál (The Poem of Atli). In both poems, Gunnarr and Högni journey to visit their brother-in-law Atli, despite the warnings sent by their sister that Atli has evil intentions; in Atlakviða his aim is to gain possession of Fáfnir’s treasure, which has passed into their keeping after the death of Sigurðr, while Atlamál leaves his hostility to the brothers largely unmotivated. Högni’s horrible death—his heart cut out of his living body, as also in Atlakviða—is here intended to wreak revenge on his wife for the miserable state of their marriage. Guðrún’s revenge is merciless: she kills her sons by Atli and serves them to him to eat, though in Atlamál the final murder of her husband is delayed until Högni’s son can come to aid his aunt. Atlakviða is a fast-moving, highly allusive account of terrible deeds, which passes no direct judgment on its uncompromising heroine; Atlamál is twice as long as the poem that precedes it, chronicling both the dramatic battle at Atli’s farmstead and its bitter aftermath in which recriminations fly between husband and wife.

The second set of poems begin with an identical scene: Guðrún urges her two sons by her third marriage, Hamðir and Sörli, to go on a mission to avenge their half-sister Svanhildr, Guðrún’s daughter by Sigurðr. Svanhildr’s husband, Iörmunrekkr, emperor of the Goths, the accompanying prose explains, has executed her; she has been trampled to death by horses for suspected adultery with his son Randvér, whom his father has hanged. In Guðrúnarhvöt (The Whetting of Guðrún), the focus of the poem remains with the mourning Guðrún once the brothers have ridden away; she utters a tregróf (chain of misery) (see Daniel Sävborg, Chapter 4, this volume), chronicling her many sorrows as she prepares to commit suicide, finally to re-join her beloved Sigurðr.

Hamðismál (The Lay of Hamðir) follows Hamðir and Sörli after their mother’s provocations. Invulnerable to the Goths’ weapons, they wreak a terrible revenge on their sister’s husband Iörmunrekkr but are themselves overcome when the mutilated king calls on his men to stone them—a fate they have brought on themselves by their murder of their half-brother Erpr, who had offered them his help in a riddling speech as they rode furiously away from their mother’s home.

Scholarship on these final poems from 1955 to 1984 is listed and discussed in Harris 1985.

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