Atli

Summary

Atli, son of King Buðli, is the king of the Huns in Norse poetry, brother of Brynhildr and of Oddrún, and husband of Guðrún after Sigurd. He invited her brothers Gunnarr and Högni to his hall out of greed for Fáfnir's gold and killed them; Guðrún killed his two sons by her and fed him their hearts, then killed him in his bed and burned his hall. His story is told in Atlakviða, Atlamál, the second and third Lays of Guðrún, Oddrúnargrátr, "Oddrún's lament", and the prose Dráp Niflunga, in Snorri's Skáldskaparmál 50, and in the Völsunga saga 29–39. In history he is Attila, king of the Huns, who died in 453.

Over Sigurd's body Brynhildr says: Atli, my brother, son of Buðli, is the cause of all the evil. In the saga Brynhildr says that when the sons of Gjúki came to woo her, Atli took her aside and asked whether she would have the man who rode Grani, that is, Sigurd. When his sister died on Sigurd's pyre Atli blamed the sons of Gjúki for her death, and the settlement was that they should marry him to their sister Guðrún; her mother gave her a drink of forgetfulness before she would consent.

Atli thought of all the gold that had passed to his wife's brothers and sent them a messenger promising gifts and land; Guðrún warned them, and they did not turn back. When they reached his hall his men seized Gunnarr and set him in fetters. Atli asked him to buy his life with the gold; Gunnarr asked for his brother's heart, Högni's heart was cut out, and Gunnarr said: now no one knows the gold but I, and the Rhine shall rule it. Atli said: bring up the wagons, the captive is in bonds, and drove Gunnarr to the snake pit and rode home. Guðrún came out to meet him with a gilded cup and served the Huns food and drink, and then told him: you have chewed your sons' hearts with honey; you will never again call Erpr and Eitill to your knees. Then she went in to him as he lay drunk and unarmed, gave his bed his blood to drink with a sword's point, and burned the hall.

In Atlamál Atli wakes to his wound and asks who killed Buðli's son. Guðrún says: I did, and Högni's son. He says: I went out to woo you as a widow, and paid as your bride-price thirty thralls, seven bondwomen and much silver, and you counted it as nothing. She says: you lie, Atli. Then he asks her to give him an honourable burial, and she promises him a ship, a painted coffin and a waxed shroud, and keeps her word.

The idea the story turns on is greed and hospitality. Atli is a king who invites his in-laws into his house to take their gold, and fetters his guests instead of honouring them, so the feast turns on him: his wife feeds him his two sons in the cups he drinks from, kills him in his bed, and burns the hall where he received her brothers. The gold he wanted never reaches him; it goes to the Rhine.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the two essays do not read it. Norse poets themselves heard Atli as atall, "fierce, savage": a hero in Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar says, "Atli is my name, atall shall I be to you". We read it as Arabic ʿutull: the ʿ drops as it does outside Semitic, t is t, l is l. Lane gives ʿutull as "a great eater, who denies, or refuses to give, and draws, or drags, [to him] a thing roughly, or violently; gross, coarse, rough, or rude", and ʿatalahu as "he drew him along, or dragged him, roughly", "to the prison". On this reading Atli is "the brute", which is what the story makes him: he coveted the gold and denied his kin, led his guests away in fetters, and in the end ate his own sons' flesh.

Linguistic Root

Cleasby–Vigfusson gives atall as "fierce, Lat. atrox", used of fierce, piercing eyes and of a loathsome witch, and notes that in Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar 15 "the poet plays on the likeness between the pr. name Atli and the adj. atall: my name is 'Savage;' savage shall I prove to thee". Orel derives it from *atulaz, whence Norse atall and Old English atol, "dire, terrific, terrible", and compares Latin odium, hatred. Magnús Snædal notes that Old Norse is assumed to have had a name Atli derived from atall, with which the name of Attila the Hun coalesced.

As for the historical name Attila, Snædal says it was long held to be Gothic, from atta, "father", with a diminutive suffix, "little father"; he doubts this and proposes a Hunnic origin meaning a horseman, an owner of warhorses. So the name's origin among the Huns is not settled; the name in Norse verse was heard by its own speakers as "the fierce one".

Lane, under ʿ-t-l: ʿatalahu, "he drew him along, or dragged him, roughly, or violently", or seized him by the clothes at the bosom and dragged him "to prison, or to trial"; ʿatala al-nāqa, he led the she-camel roughly; ʿatil, quick to do evil; ʿutull, "a great eater, who denies, or refuses to give, and draws, or drags, [to him] a thing roughly", "gross, coarse, rough, or rude", also a thick spear and a hard mountain. The word occurs in the Qurʾan, 68:13. So the Arabic sense joins the roughness of atall and the greed of the story. The comparison follows the Juthoor laws: the ʿ drops or becomes a vowel outside Semitic, and t and l stay.

Key Mythic Narratives

Oddrún, Atli's sister

In Oddrúnargrátr Oddrún, Atli's sister, tells how her father Buðli said before he died that she should be given to Grímhildr's son, and that Brynhildr should be a battle-maiden. She came to love Gunnarr; Gunnarr offered Atli a great bride-price, and Atli would take no bride-price from Gjúki's son. Atli sent his spies through the dark forest, they found the two under one cover and told him. When Gunnarr was laid in the snake pit he played the harp, because he thought Oddrún would come to help him; she heard the strings from a far island and crossed the sea to Atli's hall, but Atli's mother came crawling out and dug into Gunnarr's heart before she arrived. So the adder that killed Gunnarr is, in this poem, Atli's mother, as the she-wolf that ate Sigmund's brothers was Siggeir's mother.

The boiling water

In Guðrúnarkviða III Herkja, Atli's servant, accuses Guðrún with Þjóðrekr; Atli grieves; Guðrún clears herself by taking the stones from the bottom of the boiling cauldron with her hands unhurt, Atli's heart laughs, and then Herkja's hands are plunged in and scalded.

Atli's dreams

In Guðrúnarkviða II Atli dreams that Guðrún stabs him with a poisoned sword; that two saplings he wished to keep were torn up, bloodied, and brought to him to eat; that two hawks flew from his hand to the house of the dead and he ate their hearts with honey; and that two whelps broke loose from his hand and he ate their flesh against his will. Each of these dreams comes true in the next two poems.

Historical Context

Attila in the chronicles

Priscus, the historian who went with Maximinus's Roman embassy to Attila's court, says he found him in his tent sitting on a wooden chair, and then saw him at his feast, where the guests were served in cups of gold and silver, while he drank from a wooden cup and ate meat on a wooden trencher; two men sang verses of his victories before him; and that night he smiled only at his youngest son Ernas, pinching his cheek and gazing on him with satisfaction, because prophets had said this son would restore his falling house. In Atlakviða Guðrún comes out to Atli with a gilded cup and tells him he will never again call his two sons to his knees.

Jordanes, following Priscus, tells that at the end of his life Attila married a beautiful girl named Ildico; when he lay on his back drunk and asleep on the wedding night, the blood that usually ran from his nose flowed into his throat and choked him, and next morning his servants found him dead without a wound and the girl weeping beneath her veil. Marcellinus Comes says in his chronicle, under 454, that Attila "was stabbed at night by a woman's hand and a knife", and that some say he died vomiting blood. Jordanes and Marcellinus also record that Attila killed his brother Bleda by treachery. So the woman who kills Atli in his bed while he is drunk has two witnesses in the chronicles.

Symbolic Reading

The essay rereading the Norse myths reads the unending feast of Valhalla as "the dream of plenty" in a society that knew hunger. Atli's hall in the poems is the reverse of Valhalla: a king rich in gold and wine invites his guests in order to rob them, the table becomes the place of killing, and the king drinks his sons' blood from the cup. The story measures the worth of hospitality by what happens when it is broken.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Atli eats his two sons without knowing it, and his wife tells him what he has eaten. In Hesiod's Theogony Kronos swallows his children to keep his kingship, and his wife Rhea wraps a stone in swaddling clothes and gives it to him as her youngest son, and he swallows it. In both stories a wife deceives her husband about what he eats of their children; but Rhea deceives him to save her son, and Guðrún deceives him to feed him his sons.