September 28, 2026
Last week's telling ended with a name said aloud and a house bursting open, and with a warning at the tail: the next poem on Bellows' shelf is about a smith, and it would be the light-turn's hardest test. I said I would tell it if the road led there. The road led there. So here is the honest thing to say at the top: this is the darkest poem this series has opened since the pyre in №24, and it is not even in the dark half of the book.
Bellows puts it at the head of his second volume, Lays of the Heroes, the first poem after the gods are done. But the manuscript does not. "Between the Thrymskvitha and the Alvissmol in the Codex Regius stands the Völundarkvitha." Between the funniest poem in the Edda (№29) and the one where a dwarf is talked to death by the sunrise (№36). This series has walked past this poem twice, going in and coming out of Thor's hall, without stopping. It is time to stop.
Last week's poem came out of paper and was, by Bellows' own reckoning, too well preserved to be old. This one is the exact inverse, and he says so in the first paragraph:
Between the Thrymskvitha and the Alvissmol in the Codex Regius stands the Völundarkvitha. It was also included in the Arnamagnæan Codex, but unluckily it begins at the very end of the fragment which has been preserved, and thus only a few lines of the opening prose remain. This is doubly regrettable because the text in Regius is unquestionably in very bad shape, and the other manuscript would doubtless have been of great assistance in the reconstruction of the poem. — Bellows (1923), introductory note to the Völundarkvitha
Two vellum books had it. One of them tears off at the very end of what survives — the Arnamagnæan fragment, the same one that picks up the Vafthruthnismol in the middle of a line (№40), here gives out with a few lines of prose and nothing of the verse at all. The other, Regius, has the whole thing "in very bad shape." And Bellows, who last week found a poem too clean to be old, here finds one so scarred that he gives up on cataloguing the repairs: "The manuscript of the Völundarkvitha is in such bad shape, and the conjectural emendations have been so numerous, that in the notes I have attempted to record only the most important of them." Only the most important. The reader will see what that means in a moment, because the poem as he prints it has fourteen rows of dots in it, and a half-row besides, and I am going to keep every one.
And it is old. "For linguistically the poem belongs among the oldest of the Eddic collection." Here is the vellum ledger this series has kept, run the other way: damage is what old things have, and this thing is nearly all damage.
It is also not from here. Bellows is unusually flat about it: "There can be little question that the story came to the North from Saxon regions, along with many of the other early hero tales. In stanza 16 the Rhine is specifically mentioned as the home of treasure; and the presence of the story in Anglo-Saxon poetry probably as early as the first part of the eighth century proves beyond a doubt that the legend cannot have been a native product of Scandinavia." The Anglo-Saxon poem is Deor's Lament, and Bellows hears "sundry striking parallels" between its diction and this poem's — "distinctly probable that a Saxon song on this subject had found its way to Scandinavia or Iceland." And the smith did not stay in the North either. "In one form or another, however, the legend of the smith persisted for centuries throughout all the Teutonic lands, and the name of Wayland Smith is familiar to all readers of Walter Scott, and even of Rudyard Kipling's tales of England." Weland, Velent, Völund, Wayland — "all being, of course, identical," Bellows says, and the Thithrekssaga has a whole Velentssaga of him in prose, "a long story for which the Völundarkvitha can have supplied relatively little, if any, of the material." The poem is one telling of a story that was everywhere. Hold onto the saga; Bellows keeps reaching for it in the notes, because it knows things the poem has lost.
Two more things from the introduction, and then the shore. First, the poem is really two stories — "the story of the laming of the smith by King Nithuth (or by some other enemy) and of Weland's terrible revenge," to which "by way of introduction, has been added" the story of the swan-maiden. Some critics think they were two poems glued together with prose; Bellows thinks "the poem as a whole has a kind of dramatic unity" and that "an early poet … used two distinct legends, whether in prose or verse, as the basis for the composition of a new and homogeneous poem." Second, the poem is "full of prose narrative links, including an introduction," and Bellows says plainly what those are: "This prose was put in by each reciter according to his fancy and knowledge, and his estimate of his hearers' need for such explanations; some of it, as in this instance, eventually found its way into the written record." A reciter's patter, written down. Keep that in mind too, because the man who wrote this poem's patter, per Bellows, did not know the story.
The prose introduction is the fullest the series has met since the Grimnismol's, and it is worth having whole:
There was a king in Sweden named Nithuth. He had two sons and one daughter; her name was Bothvild. There were three brothers, sons of a king of the Finns: one was called Slagfith, another Egil, the third Völund. They went on snowshoes and hunted wild beasts. They came into Ulfdalir and there they built themselves a house; there was a lake there which is called Ulfsjar. Early one morning they found on the shore of the lake three women, who were spinning flax. Near them were their swan garments, for they were Valkyries. Two of them were daughters of King Hlothver, Hlathguth the Swan-White and Hervor the All-Wise, and the third was Olrun, daughter of Kjar from Valland. These did they bring home to their hall with them. Egil took Olrun, and Slagfith Swan-White, and Völund All-Wise. There they dwelt seven winters; but then they flew away to find battles, and came back no more. Then Egil set forth on his snowshoes to follow Olrun, and Slagfith followed Swan White, but Völund stayed in Ulfdalir. He was a most skillful man, as men know from old tales. King Nithuth had him taken by force, as the poem here tells. — prose introduction to the Völundarkvitha, trans. Bellows (1923)
Nithuth is "Bitter Hater." Bothvild is "Warlike Maid." Ulfdalir is "Wolf-Dale," Ulfsjar "Wolf-Sea," and Valland "Slaughter-Land" — "mythical, places without historical identification." Hlothver, Bellows notes, "is the northern form of Ludwig," and the name gives the game away about where the story came from. And then there is the sentence that the author of this blog, of all people, is obliged to read twice: Near them were their swan garments, for they were Valkyries.
Bellows does not believe it. His note under the prose is one of the longest in the poem, and it is a case against the annotator:
Valkyries: cf. Voluspo, 31 and note; there is nothing in the poem to identify the three swan maidens as Valkyries except one obscure word in line 2 of stanza 1 and again in line 5 of stanza 5, which may mean, as Gering translates it, "helmed," or else "fair and wise." I suspect that the annotator, anxious to give the Saxon legend as much northern local color as possible, was mistaken in his mythology, and that the poet never conceived of his swan-maidens as Valkyries at all. However, this identification of swan-maidens with Valkyries was not uncommon; cf. Helreith Brynhildar, 7. The three maidens' names, Hlathguth, Hervor, and Olrun, do not appear in the lists of Valkyries. — Bellows (1923), note to the prose introduction
One obscure word, twice, that might mean helmed or might mean fair and wise. That is the whole of the poem's evidence that these are choosers of the slain. Everything else is the reciter, "anxious to give the Saxon legend as much northern local color as possible." Bellows counts his additions at the end of the note: "his only additions are making Nithuth a king of Sweden and Völund's father a king of the Finns, supplying the name Ulfsjar for the lake, identifying the swan-maidens as Valkyries, and giving Kjar a home in Valland." Five things, and the Valkyries are one of them. The poem itself, when it gets round to saying what Völund is, does not say Finn: it says elf — "the master of elves," "greatest of elves" — and Bellows' note is short: "the poem here identifies Völund as belonging to the race of the elves." The king of the Finns is the annotator's; the elf is the poet's. №7 of this series told the Valkyries as the sources have them, and one of the things it did not have room for is this: a smith's poem where the Valkyries are a footnote's suspicion, and the footnote's author thinks the footnote is wrong.
I followed his cross-reference, as this series does. Helreith Brynhildar 7 is a stanza №24 did not quote — that telling took Brynhild's ride from the giantess's challenge to Sink down, Giantess! and passed over the stanza where she says how she came to be a Valkyrie in the first place:
"The monarch bold | the swan-robes bore Of the sisters eight | beneath an oak; Twelve winters I was, | if know thou wilt, When oaths I yielded | the king so young. — Helreith Brynhildar 7, trans. Bellows (1923)
A king carried off the swan-robes of eight sisters under an oak, and one of the eight, twelve winters old, swore herself to him. Bellows' introduction to that poem calls it "the confusion of traditions manifest in all the later poems; for example, Brynhild is here not only a Valkyrie but also a swan-maiden." And his note under the stanza sends the reader straight back here: "Regarding the identification of swan-maidens with Valkyries, and the manner in which men could get them in their power by stealing their swan-garments, cf. Völundarkvitha, introductory prose and note, where the same thing happens."
Where the same thing happens. Now look at this poem's page. The prose says the brothers found the women and their swan-garments and "did they bring home." It does not say they took the garments. And the first stanza's note says why: "two lines may have been lost before or after lines 1-2, and two more, or even six, with the additional stanza describing the theft of the swan-garments, after line 4." The theft is a lost stanza. So the Helreith's note points to the Völundarkvitha for the stealing of the swan-robes, and the Völundarkvitha's note says the stealing of the swan-robes is a gap in the manuscript. Two cross-references pointing at each other across the whole width of the book, and the thing they are both pointing at is on neither page. This is what the vellum ledger looks like when it is kept honestly: the most famous motif in the poem — the man who keeps a swan-wife by hiding her feathers — survives in Bellows' edition as an editor's guess about how many lines are missing.
Here is what the verse does have, dots and all:
Maids from the south | through Myrkwood flew, Fair and young, | their fate to follow; On the shore of the sea | to rest them they sat, The maids of the south, | and flax they spun. — Völundarkvitha 1, trans. Bellows (1923)
Myrkwood, "a stock name for a magic, dark forest," Bellows says, and sends you to the Lokasenna, stanza 42 — the poem №31 told. Their fate to follow — the line will come back. And notice: the prose put them on the shore of a lake it had a name for; the verse puts them on "the shore of the sea." The annotator supplied the lake. Then:
. . . . . . . . . . Hlathguth and Hervor, | Hlothver's children, And Olrun the Wise | Kjar's daughter was. — Völundarkvitha 2, trans. Bellows (1923)
. . . . . . . . . . One in her arms | took Egil then To her bosom white, | the woman fair. — Völundarkvitha 3, trans. Bellows (1923)
Swan-White second,-- | swan-feathers she wore, . . . . . . . . . . And her arms the third | of the sisters threw Next round Völund's | neck so white. — Völundarkvitha 4, trans. Bellows (1923)
Three stanzas, and not one of them whole. Stanza 2's two lines "in the manuscript … stand after stanza 16" — editors have moved them up here because the prose says this is where the names belong. Stanza 3's two lines follow stanza 1 "with no gap indicated." Stanza 4 is missing a line that "one editor fills … out with a second line running: 'Then to her breast Slagfith embraced.'" What is left, when the dots are subtracted, is this: a woman's arms, a white bosom, swan-feathers, a white neck. The wooing in this poem is three broken stanzas of embraces and one line about feathers. And then the years:
There did they sit | for seven winters, In the eighth at last | came their longing again, (And in the ninth | did need divide them). The maidens yearned | for the murky wood, The fair young maids, | their fate to follow. — Völundarkvitha 5, trans. Bellows (1923)
Last week's teaser said seven winters, and the prose says seven. The verse says seven, and then the eighth, and then — in parentheses, because Bellows thinks the line "looks like an interpolation" — the ninth. Seven years of staying; a year of longing; a year of need. The maidens "yearned | for the murky wood," and the last line is the first stanza's second line come round again — their fate to follow — which Bellows thinks "may be the superfluous one." I think it is the truest line in the section. They came following their fate and they left following it, and the men were the seven winters in between.
Völund home | from his hunting came, From a weary way, | the weather-wise bowman, Slagfith and Egil | the hall found empty, Out and in went they, | everywhere seeking. — Völundarkvitha 6, trans. Bellows (1923)
Out and in went they, everywhere seeking. Three hunters come home to an empty hall and search it. That opening phrase, Bellows says — "Völund home from a weary way" — "is an emendation of Bugge's, accepted by many editors"; the same phrase stands in stanza 12, and Bellows' note there says so: the editor has borrowed it backward to fill a hole here. Then the brothers split three ways:
East fared Egil | after Olrun, And Slagfith south | to seek for Swan-White; Völund alone | in Ulfdalir lay, . . . . . . . . . . — Völundarkvitha 7, trans. Bellows (1923)
Two go looking. One does not. Bugge suggested a line for the missing fourth — "Till back the maiden bright should come" — and some editors have taken it, and Bellows prints dots instead. And then the stanza I want to stop on:
Red gold he fashioned | with fairest gems, And rings he strung | on ropes of bast; So for his wife | he waited long, If the fair one home | might come to him. — Völundarkvitha 8, trans. Bellows (1923)
Last week this series took its title from a dead mother at a grave: Long is the way, long must thou wander, / But long is love as well. A late poem, paper-only, too whole to be old. Here is the next poem on the shelf, among the oldest in the collection, so damaged that the editor stopped listing the repairs, and in it a smith strings rings on bast rope and waits long for his wife. And Bellows' note: "In line 3 the word long is sheer guesswork, as the line in the manuscript contains a metrical error."
Guesswork. The word that last week's whole poem turned on — the mother's word, the bride's word, long have I waited, long have I sat — is, in the old poem, a hole in the vellum with an editor's word in it. The manuscript's line does not scan; something is wrong with it; Bellows needed a word there and reached for the one the story wanted. I am not going to make more of this than the page allows. But the series keeps a ledger of what the page says, and what the page says here is that the waiting is certain and the long is a guess. He fashioned red gold, he strung seven hundred rings — the number is coming — and he sat, and the length of it is something an editor supplied. Every reader knows how long it was anyway. That is what the editor was counting on.
This Nithuth learned, | the lord of the Njars, That Völund alone | in Ulfdalir lay; By night went his men, | their mail-coats were studded, Their shields in the waning | moonlight shone. — Völundarkvitha 9, trans. Bellows (1923)
The Njars: Bellows has "much, and inconclusive, discussion" of the name to report, and settles for "a semi-mythical people somewhere vaguely in 'the East.'" What matters is the first line. This Nithuth learned — that the smith was alone. The king moves against a man because his brothers have gone and his wife has flown. Studded mail, shields in the moonlight, and a house with one man in it. Last week's teaser said the king came for him while he slept. He did — but not the first time. The first time, Völund was not there:
From their saddles the gable | wall they sought, And in they went | at the end of the hall; Rings they saw there | on ropes of bast, Seven hundred | the hero had. — Völundarkvitha 10, trans. Bellows (1923)
Off they took them, | but all they left Save one alone | which they bore away. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . — Völundarkvitha 11, trans. Bellows (1923)
Seven hundred rings on bast rope, and the armed men take them all down, and leave them all, and carry off one. Bellows' note, which is the whole plot of the poem in a sentence: "The one ring which Nithuth's men steal is given to Bothvild, and proves the cause of her undoing." One ring out of seven hundred. Readers of №19 through №24 will feel the shape of that, and I will not push it — this is a Saxon story, not a Völsung one, and the ring here has no curse on it but the ordinary one, which is that a man made it for his wife and someone else's daughter is going to wear it. Then he comes home:
Völund home | from his hunting came, From a weary way, | the weather-wise bowman; A brown bear's flesh | would he roast with fire; Soon the wood so dry | was burning well, (The wind-dried wood | that Völund's was). — Völundarkvitha 12, trans. Bellows (1923)
A man home from hunting, roasting bear-meat on dry wood. This is the poem's one domestic stanza, and it comes right before the worst thing in the first half, which is not the chains. It is this:
On the bearskin he rested, | and counted the rings, The master of elves, | but one he missed; That Hlothver's daughter | had it he thought, And the all-wise maid | had come once more. — Völundarkvitha 13, trans. Bellows (1923)
He counts the rings. One is gone. And he thinks she came back for it. Hlothver's daughter is Hervor, All-Wise, his own swan-wife; and the one sign that the king's men have been in his house, the smith reads as the one sign he has waited long — the editor's word — to see. She was here. She took one. She has come once more. He lies down on the bearskin with that in his heart:
So long he sat | that he fell asleep, His waking empty | of gladness was; Heavy chains | he saw on his hands, And fetters bound | his feet together. — Völundarkvitha 14, trans. Bellows (1923)
His waking empty of gladness was. He fell asleep believing his wife had come home, and woke in irons. There is no other stanza in the poem that does what this one does, and it does it in four lines with no dots in it. The theft was the homecoming. The homecoming was the ambush. And now the king is standing over him.
"What men are they | who thus have laid Ropes of bast | to bind me now?"
Then Nithuth called, | the lord of the Njars: "How gottest thou, Völund, | greatest of elves, These treasures of ours | in Ulfdalir?" — Völundarkvitha 15, trans. Bellows (1923)
Ropes of bast. The same bast he strung his rings on, now binding him — the poem does not remark it, and neither does Bellows, and I will only point. And note what the king says: these treasures of ours. He charges the smith with theft. Bellows: "Nithuth, of course, has come with his men to capture Völund, and now charges him with having stolen his treasure." A king walks into a smith's house at night in mail, and the first thing out of his mouth is that the smith is the thief. Völund's answer is the stanza with the Rhine in it, the one that told Bellows where the story came from:
"The gold was not | on Grani's way, Far, methinks, is our realm | from the hills of the Rhine; I mind me that treasures | more we had When happy together | at home we were." — Völundarkvitha 16, trans. Bellows (1923)
Grani. Sigurd's horse — "on which he rode to slay Fafnir and win Andvari's hoard," in the tellings №20 and №19 gave. His name, in a smith's poem in the mythological half of the manuscript, between Thor's stolen hammer and a dwarf's bad night. "This and the reference to the Rhine as the home of wealth betray the southern source of the story," Bellows says — the Völsungs are a German story too, and the smith has come north by the same road. But the interesting thing is who is speaking. "The manuscript definitely assigns this stanza to Völund, but many editors give the first two lines to Nithuth." And Bellows lays out what each reading would mean, and they are opposites: "If lines 1-2 belong to Völund, they mean that Nithuth got his wealth in the Rhine country, and that Völund's hoard has nothing to do with it; if the speaker is Nithuth, they mean that Völund presumably has not killed a dragon, and that he is far from the wealth of the Rhine, so that he must have stolen his treasure from Nithuth himself." The same two lines are either the smith's defence — your gold came from the Rhine, mine did not — or the king's accusation — you are no dragon-slayer, so where did you get it. The manuscript says the smith. The editors say the king. The lines say both. And the last two lines are the smith's either way: I mind me that treasures more we had / When happy together at home we were. We had more, once, when we were happy. That is all he says about her.
Without stood the wife | of Nithuth wise, And in she came | from the end of the hall; On the floor she stood, | and softly spoke: "Not kind does he look | who comes from the wood." — Völundarkvitha 17, trans. Bellows (1923)
The queen enters — and the manuscript is missing her entrance; "Line 1 is lacking," Bellows says, and editors have borrowed it forward from stanza 32, where she enters again in the same words. But "certainly it is Nithuth's wife who utters line 4," and line 4 is the hinge of the whole poem. Not kind does he look who comes from the wood. She looks at the bound man and reads his face. And here the annotator, in Bellows' phrase, "inserted this note rather clumsily in the midst of the speech of Nithuth's wife":
King Nithuth gave to his daughter Bothvild the gold ring that he had taken from the bast rope in Völund's house, and he himself wore the sword that Völund had had. — prose link, Völundarkvitha, trans. Bellows (1923)
The one ring goes on the daughter. The sword goes on the king. The reciter could not wait for the queen to finish her sentence before telling you, because the queen's next stanza is about both:
"The glow of his eyes | is like gleaming snakes, His teeth he gnashes | if now is shown The sword, or Bothvild's | ring he sees; Let them straightway cut | his sinews of strength, And set him then | in Sævarstath." — Völundarkvitha 18, trans. Bellows (1923)
This series has kept a ledger of eyes since Thor's burned through a bridal veil (№29): Hymir's glance that split a beam (№30), Hrungnir's "no friendly eyes" (№34), Þjazi's flung up as stars. Here is the entry that outweighs them. The queen looks into the smith's eyes and sees snakes, and watches his teeth when the sword and the ring go by — Bothvild's ring, she calls it already — and gives the order. Not kill him. Cut his sinews of strength. And the annotator, in prose, does it:
So was it done: the sinews in his knee-joints were cut, and he was set in an island which was near the mainland, and was called Sævarstath. There he smithied for the king all kinds of precious things. No man dared to go to him, save only the king himself. — prose link, Völundarkvitha, trans. Bellows (1923)
Sævarstath is "Sea-Stead." A lamed smith on an island near the shore, making precious things for the man who lamed him, and no one dares go near him but the king. That last sentence is going to matter, because two people who are not the king are about to go. But first the smith speaks, and the stanza he speaks is the one Bellows prints with his own knife-marks showing:
"At Nithuth's girdle | gleams the sword That I sharpened keen | with cunningest craft, (And hardened the steel | with highest skill;) The bright blade far | forever is borne, (Nor back shall I see it | borne to my smithy;) Now Bothvild gets | the golden ring (That was once my bride's,-- | ne'er well shall it be.)" — Völundarkvitha 19, trans. Bellows (1923)
"This stanza is obviously in bad shape." The parentheses are Bellows': "The elimination of the passages in parenthesis produces a four-line stanza which is metrically correct, but it has little more than guesswork to support it." So he prints the seven lines and brackets the three he would cut and then tells you the cut is a guess. And look at what is in the brackets. Nor back shall I see it borne to my smithy. That was once my bride's — ne'er well shall it be. The line about never seeing his sword again, and the line that names the ring as his wife's and curses it on the girl's hand, are the lines the meter says do not belong. The poem's clearest statement of what was taken from him is in the editor's parentheses. I am keeping the brackets. They are the truest punctuation in the poem.
He sat, nor slept, | and smote with his hammer, Fast for Nithuth | wonders he fashioned; Two boys did go | in his door to gaze, Nithuth's sons, | into Sævarstath. — Völundarkvitha 20, trans. Bellows (1923)
He sat, nor slept. The last time he sat, he slept, and woke in chains. Not again. The king's two sons — "No man dared to go to him, save only the king himself," the prose said, and here are two who are not men yet — come to the island to look. And:
They came to the chest, | and they craved the keys, The evil was open | when in they looked; To the boys it seemed | that gems they saw, Gold in plenty | and precious stones. — Völundarkvitha 21, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows glosses the second line: "The evil was open: i.e., the gold in the chest was destined to be their undoing." Remember these two lines exactly. They come back.
"Come ye alone, | the next day come, Gold to you both | shall then be given; Tell not the maids | or the men of the hall, To no one say | that me you have sought." — Völundarkvitha 22, trans. Bellows (1923)
Come alone. Tell no one. The Thithrekssaga, in Bellows' note, has a colder version of the instruction, and I give it as the saga's and not the poem's: there Völund "sends the boys away with instructions not to come back until just after a fall of snow, and then to approach his dwelling walking backward. The boys do this, and when, after he has killed them, Völund is questioned regarding them, he points to the tracks in the snow as evidence that they had left his house." Footprints walking away from the smithy. The poem does not have the snow. It has this:
. . . . . . . . . . Early did brother | to brother call: "Swift let us go | the rings to see." — Völundarkvitha 23, trans. Bellows (1923)
Two boys, early, calling each other to go look at rings. And then the two lines from stanza 21 again, word for word, and this time the third line is different:
They came to the chest, | and they craved the keys, The evil was open | when in they looked; He smote off their heads, | and their feet he hid Under the sooty | straps of the bellows. — Völundarkvitha 24, trans. Bellows (1923)
The poem has a refrain, and it is a chest being opened. The first time, the third line is to the boys it seemed that gems they saw. The second time, it is he smote off their heads. Same chest, same keys, same evil open; the first opening is the seeing and the second is the killing, and the poem does not change a syllable of the approach. The Thrymskvitha's scribe (№29) abbreviated repeated stanzas to their first letters because everyone knew them; this repetition is not that. This is the same door, walked through twice, and the second time the room is different.
The series' creed is the old words as they are, so here is what the smith made, in the poem's own inventory:
Their skulls, once hid | by their hair, he took, Set them in silver | and sent them to Nithuth; Gems full fair | from their eyes he fashioned, To Nithuth's wife | so wise he gave them. — Völundarkvitha 25, trans. Bellows (1923)
And from the teeth | of the twain he wrought A brooch for the breast, | to Bothvild he sent it; . . . . . . . . . . — Völundarkvitha 26, trans. Bellows (1923)
Skulls in silver for the king. Gems from the eyes for the queen — so wise, the poem calls her, the one who read his eyes and gave the order. A brooch of teeth for the daughter, to wear over her heart. And every one of them received and, so far as the poem tells, worn. Three gifts, one for each of the three people who took something from him: the king has the sword, the daughter has the ring, and the queen had the counsel. The thing the light-turn's teaser called "the darkest craftsman's revenge in the North" is not the killing. It is that he made the killing into jewelry and the family put it on.
Stanza 26 breaks off. "The loss of something is so obvious," Bellows says, "that practically all editors have noted it, although they have differed as to the number of lines lost."
Bothvild then | of her ring did boast, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | "The ring I have broken, I dare not say it | save to thee." — Völundarkvitha 27, trans. Bellows (1923)
One line of boasting, a row of dots, half a row more, and then her voice. The girl has broken the ring — his ring, his wife's ring — and she comes to the island with it, and says she dare not tell anyone but him. Bellows fills the hole — "the line and a half," he calls the gap — tentatively, "partly with the aid of late paper manuscripts": "But soon it broke, | and swiftly to Völund / She bore it and said--" and there the patch stops and the vellum resumes. She came alone, then. As the boys did. And he answers her as a smith:
"I shall weld the break | in the gold so well That fairer than ever | thy father shall find it, And better much | thy mother shall think it, And thou no worse | than ever it was." — Völundarkvitha 28, trans. Bellows (1923)
Thy father, thy mother, and thou. He names the three, in the order he sent them the gifts. Then:
Beer he brought, | he was better in cunning, Until in her seat | full soon she slept.
"Now vengeance I have | for all my hurts, Save one alone, | on the evil woman." — Völundarkvitha 29, trans. Bellows (1923)
The poem does not say what happened while she slept. It says he brought beer, and he was better in cunning, and she slept, and then he says his vengeance is complete but for one. The manuscript does not even mark him as the speaker of the last two lines — Bellows notes it, and notes that Vigfusson "again inserts his convenient line" naming him. What the beer was for, the poem tells you thirteen stanzas later in the smith's own mouth, and then in the girl's. I will not get ahead of it. Save one alone, on the evil woman — which woman is unglossed; the queen, I take it, the one who counselled the sinews, but the page does not say and neither will I. Then two more rows of dots, and a line about his legs:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Quoth Völund: "Would | that well were the sinews Maimed in my feet | by Nithuth's men." — Völundarkvitha 30, trans. Bellows (1923)
Would that well were the sinews. A wish. He cannot walk. And the next stanza is the one every retelling of Wayland has him in, and here is exactly what is on the page:
Laughing Völund | rose aloft, Weeping Bothvild | went from the isle, For her lover's flight | and her father's wrath. — Völundarkvitha 31, trans. Bellows (1923)
Rose aloft. Not flew. Not on wings. A man who has just wished aloud that his hamstrings were whole rises into the air, laughing, and a girl leaves the island weeping — and the poem calls him her lover, in the same breath as her father's wrath, and gives her both griefs in one line. Now Bellows' note, which is the find this whole telling has been walking toward:
Something has probably been lost before this stanza, explaining how Völund made himself wings, as otherwise, owing to his lameness, he could not leave the island. The Thithrekssaga tells the story of how Völund's brother, Egil, shot birds and gave him the feathers, out of which he made a feather-garment. This break in the narrative illustrates the lack of knowledge apparently possessed by the compiler who was responsible for the prose notes; had he known the story told in the Thithrekssaga, it is hardly conceivable that he would have failed to indicate the necessary connecting link at this point. Some editors reject line 3 as spurious. The manuscript does not indicate any lacuna. — Bellows (1923), note to Völundarkvitha 31
The wings are not in the poem. The feather-coat that every picture of Wayland Smith gives him — the one his brother Egil, who went east after Olrun and never comes back into this poem, made possible by shooting birds — lives in the saga, and in Bellows' note, and nowhere on this page. "The manuscript does not indicate any lacuna." On the vellum, a lamed smith says would that my sinews were well, and then he is in the air. And the man who wrote the prose links for this poem — the reciter's patter, the annotator who made the swan-maidens Valkyries and Völund a Finn — did not fill the gap, and Bellows draws the conclusion: he could not have known the story, or he would have. The compiler of the Völundarkvitha did not know how Völund flew.
This series has tracked the laughs of the old poems since Brynhild's, which a whole hall misread (№24); Hárr's, because his story came out right (№25); and the one Thor kept inside his chest under a veil (№29). Add this one. Laughing Völund rose aloft — the poem says it twice, here and nine stanzas on — and it is the only laugh in the ledger that happens in the air, and the only one the poem cannot explain. Last week's teaser called him the smith the story could not keep on the ground. I undersold it. The story cannot keep him on the ground and cannot say how he left it.
Without stood the wife | of Nithuth wise, And in she came | from the end of the hall; But he by the wall | in weariness sat: "Wakest thou, Nithuth, | lord of the Njars?" — Völundarkvitha 32, trans. Bellows (1923)
The queen enters exactly as she entered in stanza 17 — the same two lines; this is the stanza the editors borrowed her entrance from — and this time the man on the floor is her husband:
"Always I wake, | and ever joyless, Little I sleep | since my sons were slain; Cold is my head, | cold was thy counsel, One thing, with Völund | to speak, I wish. — Völundarkvitha 33, trans. Bellows (1923)
Cold is my head, cold was thy counsel. The king, who has not slept since the boys were killed, says it to the woman who looked into the smith's eyes and said cut his sinews. He does not say you were wrong. He says cold. And what he wants is one thing: to speak with Völund. Then the poem, missing something again — "it seems clear that something has been lost," and Bellows adds the stage direction the vellum did not: "Völund is now flying over Nithuth's hall" — has the king shout up:
. . . . . . . . . . "Answer me, Völund, | greatest of elves, What happed with my boys | that hale once were?" — Völundarkvitha 34, trans. Bellows (1923)
Greatest of elves — the king uses the poet's word for him, not the annotator's. And he asks. Last week's teaser said this poem ends with a king who asked for the truth and got it; here is the asking. The smith, in the air, sets a price on the answer, and the price is an oath:
"First shalt thou all | the oaths now swear, By the rail of ship, | and the rim of shield, By the shoulder of steed, | and the edge of sword, That to Völund's wife | thou wilt work no ill, Nor yet my bride | to her death wilt bring, Though a wife I should have | that well thou knowest, And a child I should have | within thy hall. — Völundarkvitha 35, trans. Bellows (1923)
Ship's rail, shield's rim, horse's shoulder, sword's edge — the four things a king swears by, and the sword is the smith's own, at the king's girdle. And what the oath protects: Völund's wife. My bride. A child I should have within thy hall. Bellows' note: "Völund's wife: the reference is to Bothvild, as Völund wishes to have his vengeance fall more heavily on her father than on her." He calls the king's daughter his wife and his bride before he tells the king what he did, and makes the king swear to her life and the child's before he will say a word. The editor reads it as a way of making the blow land on the father. I will give the reading and also the plain words: a man in the air, bargaining for the safety of a girl and a child, with the only leverage he has, which is that the king does not yet know. And then he tells him. And the way he tells him is the poem's last find, and it is a formal one:
"Seek the smithy | that thou didst set, Thou shalt find the bellows | sprinkled with blood; I smote off the heads | of both thy sons, And their feet 'neath the sooty | straps I hid. — Völundarkvitha 36, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Their skulls, once hid | by their hair, I took, Set them in silver | and sent them to Nithuth; Gems full fair | from their eyes I fashioned, To Nithuth's wife | so wise I gave them. — Völundarkvitha 37, trans. Bellows (1923)
"And from the teeth | of the twain I wrought A brooch for the breast, | to Bothvild I gave it; Now big with child | does Bothvild go, The only daughter | ye two had ever." — Völundarkvitha 38, trans. Bellows (1923)
Go back and set these against stanzas 24, 25 and 26. They are the same stanzas. Bellows' note on 37 is four words longer than it needs to be: "Identical, except for the pronouns, with stanza 25." He took has become I took; he fashioned, I fashioned; to Bothvild he sent it, to Bothvild I gave it. The king asked for the truth, and the truth he got is the narration of the poem, repeated back to him in the first person. The smith does not describe what he did. He recites it, in the words the poem already used, as if the poem were a thing he had read and was now confessing to. And where stanza 26 broke off into dots, stanza 38 does not: the line the manuscript lost in the telling is there in the confession. Now big with child does Bothvild go, / The only daughter ye two had ever. The beer, the sleep, the lover of stanza 31 — here is what they were. The king asked what happened to his boys. The smith answered that, and then answered the question the king had not asked, about his daughter.
"Never spakest thou word | that worse could hurt me, Nor that made me, Völund, | more bitter for vengeance; There is no man so high | from thy horse to take thee, Or so doughty an archer | as down to shoot thee, While high in the clouds | thy course thou takest." — Völundarkvitha 39, trans. Bellows (1923)
From thy horse — the king reaches for the word for a mount, because there is no word for what the smith is riding. No man tall enough, no archer good enough. And Bellows' note here is where the story goes when it leaves the vellum: in the Thithrekssaga, "Nithuth actually compels Egil, Völund's brother, to shoot at Völund. The latter has concealed a bladder full of blood under his left arm, and when his brother's arrow pierces this, Nithuth assumes that his enemy has been killed." The brother who went east comes back, in the saga, as the archer forced to shoot — and shoots the bladder. And then this: "This episode likewise appears among the scenes from Völund's career rudely carved on an ancient casket of ivory, bearing an Anglo-Saxon inscription in runic letters, which has been preserved." The story was carved into a box, in runes, in England, and the box is still here. №18 told what the runes cost; here is one thing they kept.
Laughing Völund | rose aloft, But left in sadness | Nithuth sat. . . . . . . . . . . — Völundarkvitha 40, trans. Bellows (1923)
The laugh, a second time, and the king left sitting — the posture the queen found him in. "The manuscript indicates no lacuna," Bellows notes — and prints a row of dots anyway.
If the poem ended there — the smith in the clouds, the king on the floor — it would be the poem the teaser promised. It does not end there. There are three more stanzas, and they belong to the girl.
Then spake Nithuth, | lord of the Njars: "Rise up, Thakkrath, | best of my thralls, Bid Bothvild come, | the bright-browed maid, Bedecked so fair, | with her father to speak." — Völundarkvitha 41, trans. Bellows (1923)
"The first line is a conjectural addition." Thakkrath, "probably the northern form of the Middle High German name Dancrat" — a German thrall's name in a Swedish king's hall, the story's origin showing through one more time. Bedecked so fair. He wants her brought in her finery. The reader knows what her finery is.
. . . . . . . . . . "Is it true, Bothvild, | that which was told me; Once in the isle | with Völund wert thou?" — Völundarkvitha 42, trans. Bellows (1923)
He asks a second time. He asked the smith what happened to his sons and was told; now he asks his daughter whether what he was told about her is true. A king who asked for the truth, twice, and got it twice — the teaser was right about that, and it did not say how the second answer goes, so here it is, whole, because the creed of this series is the old words as they actually are:
"True is it, Nithuth, | that which was told thee, Once in the isle | with Völund was I, An hour of lust, | alas it should be! Nought was my might | with such a man, Nor from his strength | could I save myself." — Völundarkvitha 43, trans. Bellows (1923)
That is the last stanza of the Völundarkvitha. The manuscript does not name the speaker; "different editors have rejected one or another of the last three lines"; and because the manuscript marks line 4 as the start of a new stanza, "the loss of two or three lines has likewise been suggested." But as the poem stands, the last voice in it is Bothvild's, and what she says is nought was my might with such a man, nor from his strength could I save myself. The stanza that called him her lover was the narrator's. This one is hers.
Bellows' last note reaches for the saga one more time, and the saga has a coda the poem does not: "According to the Thithrekssaga, the son of Völund and Bothvild was Vithga, or Witege, one of the heroes of Dietrich of Bern." The child the smith made the king swear to protect grew up, in the German stories, into a hero. The poem does not know that. The poem ends on the girl's alas.
I said at the top that this was the hardest test of the light-turn, and I owe an honest reckoning at the bottom. Here it is: there is not much light in this poem, and I am not going to manufacture any. The old words are what they are. A man was lamed and caged; he killed two boys and made their skulls into cups; he got a girl drunk and she could not save herself; he laughed and left. That is the Völundarkvitha, and the series' creed does not permit me to tell it as anything else.
But the creed also says to tell what the page says, and the page says three things that are not dark. The first is that the poem does not end on the laugh. Whoever made this poem — an early poet, Bellows thinks, out of two legends, with "a kind of dramatic unity" — gave the last word not to the smith in the clouds or the king on the floor but to the person with the least power in it, and let her say plainly what was done to her. The smith's confession was the poem's own narration handed back with the pronouns changed. Her confession is the only speech in the poem that is not somebody else's words. She gets the last stanza, and the manuscript, which loses lines everywhere, kept it.
The second is the oath. Before the smith would say a word, he made the king swear by ship and shield and horse and the smith's own sword that the girl and the child would live. Bellows reads that as a way of sharpening the blow. Maybe. But it is also the only thing in the poem that anyone does to protect anyone, and the smith did it, and he did it first, from the air, when the king did not yet know what had become of his sons. The child was Witege, in the stories that came after. The oath held.
And the third is the gap. The compiler did not know how Völund flew. The poet, if the manuscript is honest — and "the manuscript does not indicate any lacuna" — may not have said. A lamed man says would that my sinews were well and then he is aloft, laughing, and there is nothing on the vellum between the wish and the sky. Every later hand — the saga, the ivory box, Scott, Kipling, every picture of Wayland with his feather-coat — has filled that gap with wings. The oldest page in the tradition leaves it empty. I find I prefer the page. Last week a boy got into a house by saying his name, with no key, and told the bride the gift was unearned. This week a smith got out of an island with no wings, and the poem does not say how, and the editor says the compiler did not know. The North kept two poems side by side on Bellows' shelf in which the way through is not on the page, and in both of them the way through is taken anyway. That is not light, exactly. But it is a door, and this series has learned to notice doors.
Next week, if the road holds, a Valkyrie who flew away to find battles comes back.
New tellings reach the newsletter before anyone else — no island, no chest, and nobody will count your rings.
Sources: Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923) — the Völundarkvitha, its introductory note, prose introduction and links, and its notes; Helreith Brynhildar, introductory note, stanza 7 and its note. All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: the swan-maidens of this poem "flew away to find battles, and came back no more." The next poems on Bellows' shelf are the ones where a Valkyrie who flew to battles does come back — the Helgi lays — and the one after next is the poem this series has been walking toward since the fire-ring: a Valkyrie named Sigrún who rides to a battlefield and chooses a man against her father's will, a brother who kills him and curses himself for it, and a burial mound at nightfall where the dead man comes back, bleeding, to sleep one more night with his wife — and a prose tail that says the two of them were born again. Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II: the dew of grief, and what a Valkyrie does when the battle is over.