Comments on The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún

(avg. read time: 5–11 mins.)

I have commented on quite a few of Tolkien’s works at this point as part of my Biblical and Theological Commentary series. The foci of this series (which, despite the title, go beyond links to the Bible or theological statements per se) are not appropriate for applying as a frame of reference for all of his works. To insist on its application in the absence of pertinent material would ultimately be to put the text on a Procustean bed or a torture rack, whichever image is most suitable for the abuse, stretching, and mutilation that might be done to the text in making it a point of departure for talking about something completely different. One such example is the text titled The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. But just because this text does not fit my series does not mean I do not want to comment on certain elements related to it.

Like some other works of Tolkien’s, it is based on preexisting medieval work, and he composed it likely in the 1930s. He referenced it in Letter #295 to W. H. Auden, saying that the first work included here is “an attempt to unify the lays about the Völsungs from the Elder Edda, written in the old eight-line fornyrðislag stanza.” In another letter to Auden (not part of the published collection), he further said that this was an attempt to “organise” the Edda material (Letter to W. H. Auden dated 29 January 1968). The first of these works is Völsungakviða en n‎yja, the New Lay of the Völsungs, and Guðr‎únarkviða en nyja, the New Lay of Gudrún. The actual title of the book refers to both of these works, as the former was given a subordinate title Sigurðarkviða en mesta “the Longest Lay of Sigurd.”

There is no direct link made within this story to Tolkien’s own fiction, of course (as Tolkien had once planned to do for his Fall of Arthur), but there are certainly features of interest for those looking for similarities with that fiction. Tolkien himself acknowledged an indebtedness to the late Norse versions of the Sigurd-story with regard to the similarities of scenes with Smaug and Fáfnir (Letter #122). Although the chief influence Tolkien acknowledged for Túrin Turambar story is the Story of Kullervo, he also acknowledged that there were elements derived from Sigurd the Volsung (as well as Oedipus; Letter #131).¹ Indeed, Christopher Tolkien explores other ways in which Túrin’s eschatological role in Tolkien’s mythos is reminiscent of what is expected of Sigurd.² Christopher also suggests some analogy between the presentation of Odin in Tolkien’s version of the story and Manwë in his own mythos.³

While the texts themselves do not have anything directly pertinent to the interest of my main series, the relationship of Christians with the story of Sigurd and the Norse tales more generally is noteworthy on multiple fronts. Christians have often depicted scenes from these stories. This volume includes some examples of such images that are derived from wood carvings adorning the doorposts of a twelfth century church of Hylestad in Norway.⁴ These images are based on the story of Sigurd slaying the dragon Fáfnir.

In an introductory lecture by Tolkien that Christopher includes in the volume, we see some reflections on the history of Norse religion and how Christianization of Norse lands interacted with the pagan past. This is naturally similar to ground covered in Tolkien’s commentary and essay on Beowulf that I have addressed elsewhere (see here, here, and here). Much of that history was shrouded in mystery, but what he says about the religious context prior to an in the early days of Christianization is worth quoting extensively:

It must be remembered that the time was a heathen one – still in possession of special, local pagan traditions which had long been isolated; of organized temples and priesthoods. But ‘belief’ was already failing, mythology and still more anything that could be more properly called ‘religion’ were already disintegrating without direct attack from outside – or perhaps better put, without conquest or conversion and without destruction of temples and pagan organization, for the influence of foreign ideas, and of the sudden rending of the veil over the North (rent by men from within) cannot be dismissed. This was a special transition-period – one of poise between old and new, and one inevitably brief and not long to be maintained.

To a large extent the spirit of these poems which had been regarded as (a branch of) the common ‘Germanic spirit’ – in which there is some truth: Byrhtwold at Maldon would do well enough in Edda or Saga – is really the spirit of a special time. It might be called Godlessness – reliance upon self and upon indomitable will. Not without significance is the epithet applied to actual chracters living at this moment of history – the epithet goðlauss, with the explanation that their creed was at trúa á mátt sín ok megin [‘to trust in one’s own might and main’]. [Author’s note, added later: Yet on the reverse it must be remembered that this was applied only to certain commanding and ruthless characters, and would not in any case have been worth saying if many (indeed the bulk of) men had not remained believers and practitioners of pagan worship.]

This applies more to the heroic, of course, than the mythological. But it is not untrue of the mythological. Such tales of gods are of a kind that can well survive to a time when the are rather the themes of tales than the objects of cults, but yet to a time which has not replaced the gods by anything new, and is still familiar with them and interested in them. Nor of course was blót [heathen sacrificial feast] given up. Heathenism was still very strong, though in Sweden rather than in Norway. It had not suffered that uprooting from ancient fanes [temples] and local habitations that is so fatal to it – as it proved in England.

The end of the period began with the violent apostolate of that great heathen figure and hero of the North – the christianizing king Ólaf Tryggvason. After his fall, and the fall of many of the greatest men through him or with him, there was relapse into heathendom. But this was quickly ended by the no less vigorous but far wiser christianizing efforts of Ólaf the Holy, which at the time when Edward the Confessor was reigning in England left Norway completely christianized, and the heathen tradition destroyed.⁵

Whatever there may have been of a “system” of religion or mythology concerning the Norse gods (inclusive of the temples across the Scandinavian landscape), it was already in decay long before Christianity predominated Scandinavia. Memories of traditions faded, and things which once were linked either had their links disintegrated or they may have been replaced with new layers of cult and mythology. The northern spirit of courage persisted, but it was not always connected to a mythos that animated and directed it. As we noted previously, when Christianity predominated the Norse world, some like Alcuin were content to let what remained of the old stories fade into oblivion, for what did they have to do with Christ and his Church? Others conserved only fragmentary relics of their past, such as the use of runes long after the Latinizing of the Scandinavian world that coincided with Christianization.⁶ But the classic dependence of poetry on heathen tradition—as poetry/song was the way of passing on these stories and referencing them in other contexts—had fallen by the wayside in the early years of the second millennium after Christ. And they would have fallen into oblivion were it not for a third group: Christians who preserved the memory of the heathen past.

The most prominent and successful effort to collect and preserve what were now fragments of the distant past happened in Iceland. The Icelandic priest and scholar Sæmundr Sigfússon (or Sæmundr fróði) was one such collector of lore of the Norwegian kings. His work, though now lost, was used as a source by Snorri Sturluson—another Icelander Tolkien describes as a “great prose artist, metrical expert, antiquarian and ruthless politician”⁷—in the thirteenth century, who compiled fragments of old tales. His most well-known work is broadly described as the Edda. It consists of a prose retelling of ancient myths, exposition on old “court poetry,” and an exemplification of that poetry’s verse-forms.⁸ Of the first part, Tolkien says that it was “a pious collection of fragments – to help in the understanding and making of verse which needed a knowledge of myths – when gentle, even tolerant and ironic, learning had supervened upon the struggle between religions.”⁹ Throughout, Sturluson draws on a number of sources, including what was compiled in what is now known as the Poetic/Elder Edda (in contrast to Sturluson’s Prose/Younger Edda),¹⁰ which was preserved in the thirteenth-century Icelandic Codex Regius. But this manuscript was not more widely known until the seventeenth century, after Brynjólfur Sveinsson, the Lutheran bishop of Skálholt, sent it as a gift to King Frederick III of Denmark.

This brief history illustrates how Christians, even as they supplanted pagan traditions and accelerated the demise of their living practice, still preserved something of the memory of pagan forebears. Although there is much we do not know about the Norse pagans, we would know practically nothing without the preservation work of these medieval Christians. Sturluson and others like him were akin to the Beowulf-poet and to earlier scribes without whom so many ancient works would have been consigned to oblivion. I do not know if Sturluson ever knew Basil the Great’s Address to Young Men, but their approaches in using these pagan works for educative purposes were similar.

Moreover, the myths themselves as they are preserved appear to have been subtly formed by Christianization, though not quite in the same fashion as Beowulf, and certainly not with the heavy-handed work that we see, for example, in some Sibylline Oracles. The degree to which the Christianizing touch is present is not necessarily clear, but one respect in which it may be present is in a perception of praeparatio evangelica, a preparation for the gospel. This may be indirectly suggested by one of Tolkien’s notes on this work. He mentions how Sigurd has a special role marked out for the Last Day, as Odin hopes that he shall slay the great Serpent (Jörmungandr) and make possible a new world thereafter. Indeed, the vision of Ragnarök provides the framework for the saga of the Völsungs, of which Sigurd is the central figure. Tolkien comments, “None of the Gods can accomplish this, but only one who has lived on Earth first as a mortal, and died. (This motive of the special function of Sigurd is an invention of the present poet, or an interpretation of the Norse sources in which it is not explicit.)”¹¹ And so, in the beginning portion of the legend (Upphaf), we are told:

If in day of Doom

one deathless stands,

who death hath tasted

and dies no more,

the serpent-slayer,

seed of Ódin,

then all shall not end,

nor Earth perish.

On his head shall be helm,

in his hand lightning,

afire his spirit,

in his face splendour.

The Serpent shall shiver

and Surt waver,

the Wolf be vanquished

and the world rescued. (14–15; pp. 63–64)

When Sigurd’s story comes to an end (for the present), he is again described in these terms:

In the day of Doom

he shall deathless stand

who death tasted

and dies no more,

the serpent-slayer,

seed of Ódin:

not all shall end,

nor Earth perish. (IX.80; pp. 179–80)

I am not suggesting that Sigurd is a Christ-figure as such, but when he is presented in these terms, he is at least a fractured, refracted, and distorted analogy of Christ in terms of such functions, if nothing else. So much other matter in his story obviously does not resonate with the gospel. But perhaps a later Christian heard an echo of the victory of Christ here, as well as of his incarnate mortality followed by his conquest of death never to die again. Maybe that provided some motivation to preserve it.

1. For the larger mythology, not contained in this book, he also acknowledged in Letter #297 that “the names of the Dwarves in The Hobbit (and additions in the L.R.) are derived from the lists in Völuspá of the names of dvergar, but this is no key to the dwarf-legends in The L.R.” Even here, he cautions against drawing the connections too extensively, since “Gandalfr is a dwarf-name in Völuspa!”

2. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrún, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 184–85.

3. Ibid., 186.

4. Ibid., 9.

5. Ibid., 23–24.

6. Ibid., 25.

7. Ibid., 26.

8. Ibid., 33.

9. Ibid., 26.

10. Tolkien himself remarks how this title is inapt for the poetic collection, as it properly belongs to Sturluson’s work (ibid., 29).

11. Ibid., 53–54.