Völundr

Summary

Völundr is a smith of Norse legend, known to the Old English as Weland and to the Germans as Wieland, and his story is told in Völundarkviða, the Lay of Völundr, in the Poetic Edda. The poem calls him "lord of elves" three times, and the prose before it says he was "the most skilful man known in ancient stories".

The prose says that a king of the Finns had three sons, Slagfiðr, Egill and Völundr, who went on skis and hunted, and built a house in Wolfdales by a lake. One morning they found three women on the shore spinning linen, with their swan-feather cloaks beside them; they were valkyries. The brothers married them, Völundr taking Alvitr. The women stayed seven winters, yearned in the eighth, and in the ninth flew off to visit battles and did not come back. The two brothers went in search of their wives, and Völundr stayed alone in the valley, beating red gold around precious stones and hanging his rings on a cord of bast, waiting for his wife to come back to him.

Níðuðr, a king in Sweden, heard that Völundr was alone, and his men came by night, saw seven hundred rings hanging, and took one. Völundr came back from the hunt, roasted bear's flesh, sat on the bearskin counting his rings, found one missing, and thought his wife had come back and taken it; he sat until he fell asleep, and woke with his hands and feet bound. The king gave the ring to his daughter Böðvildr and wore Völundr's sword at his own belt. The queen said: his eyes are like a gleaming serpent's, and he bares his teeth when he sees the sword and Böðvildr's ring; cut the sinews of his legs and set him on Sævarstaðr. The prose says: the sinews of his knees were cut and he was set on an island close to the land, where he made the king every kind of treasure, and no one dared go to him except the king.

So Völundr sat without sleeping, beating with his hammer, and made a device against Níðuðr. The king's two sons came asking to see the treasures; he opened the chest, they saw much gold in it, and he said: come tomorrow, the two of you alone, and tell no one. When they came he cut off their heads and hid their feet in the mud; he took their skulls, sheathed them in silver and sent them to Níðuðr as cups, made jewels from their eyes and sent them to the queen, and beat breast-brooches from their teeth and sent them to Böðvildr. Then Böðvildr brought him the ring, which she had broken, daring to tell no one but him; he said he would mend it so that it would look fairer to her father and better to her mother, gave her beer until she fell asleep on her seat, and had his way with her.

Then Völundr rose laughing into the air, and Böðvildr left the island weeping. He settled on the hall's fence and called the king, made him swear by the ship's board, the shield's rim, the horse's shoulder and the sword's edge not to harm Völundr's wife or child, and then said: go to the smithy you built and you will find the bellows spattered with blood; he told him what he had done with his sons, and said that Böðvildr was now with child. The king said: no man is tall enough to take you from your horse, nor strong enough to shoot you down from below where you hover against the sky. Völundr rose laughing, and Níðuðr sat behind him in grief. Then he called his daughter and asked whether it was true that she had sat with Völundr on the island, and she said: it is true, for one hour that never should have been, and I could do nothing against him. The poem does not say how he flew; it says he rose "on webbed feet", like a water bird's, and readers take the device he made at the forge to be his wings.

The idea the story turns on is that a craftsman enslaved for his craft makes his revenge and his escape out of it. The king took a ring and a sword from him and cut his sinews to keep him on the island making things, so Völundr made cups and jewels out of the king's sons as gifts to that same house, and out of the king's daughter a child to inherit it, and then made himself the means to fly. The fetter on his legs did not fetter his hands.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the project's essays do not read Völundr. Völundr ends in -undr, which Cleasby and Vigfusson treat as an agent ending, as in höfundr, "judge", leaving vǫl-, with w and l. We read it as Arabic ḥīla: in Lane ḥīla is "art, artifice, cunning, ingenuity, or skill", and "an artful contrivance or device, a machination, a stratagem". The ḥ drops outside Semitic, leaving w and l. The poem itself names his work with this sense: "he made a device against Níðuðr", and its word is vél, which the Norse dictionary gives as "an artifice, craft, device". From w and l Arabic also has āla, "an instrument, a tool". On this reading Völundr is the man of device and tool, which is what the poem makes him: a smith who is fettered and makes his way out with his craft.

Linguistic Root

Cleasby and Vigfusson call Völundr "a myth. hero common to all Teutonic people", say the name was "prop. an appellative (?), like höfundr", and give the common noun völundr as "a master smith, a great artist", setting beside it Greek δαίδαλος, the word that became the name of Daedalus. In Icelandic one still says of a great smith "he is a great Völund". The dictionary also gives Völundar-hús, "Wayland's house", as "a labyrinth", a word "still in use in Icel." So the dictionary itself joins the two craftsmen, in the word and in the building no one can find the way out of.

The same dictionary gives vél as "an artifice, craft, device" and véla as "to defraud, trick", and vél is the word the poem uses for what Völundr made for Níðuðr. Lane derives ḥīla from ḥāla, yaḥūlu, noting that aḥyal is "originally aḥwal", so the w belongs to the root; he defines ḥīla as "a means of effecting one's transition from that which he dislikes to that which he likes", and as a wile and a stratagem. Āla, from ʾ-w-l, is "an instrument; a tool; an implement" with which one works for himself or for another. So in Arabic the letters w and l hold both the device and the tool, as Norse vél does.

The comparison follows the Juthoor laws: w becomes w or v, l stays l, and the ḥ and the hamza at the start of the two Arabic words drop, as gutturals usually do. The weak point is that the dictionaries do not connect vǫl- with vél, the vowels differ, and Old English writes the name Wēland with a long vowel.

Key Mythic Narratives

Völundr in England

The front of a small whalebone box made in Northumbria in the early eighth century, the Franks Casket in the British Museum, has two scenes side by side: on the left Weland the smith standing in his forge, holding a skull in a pair of tongs; on the right the Magi bringing their gifts. The lid shows an episode of the hero Egil, Völundr's brother in the poem, labelled with his name. England also has a Neolithic long barrow on the Ridgeway in Oxfordshire, first built around 3590 BC, which a Saxon charter of 955 already calls "Weland's Smithy". Local tradition says that if you left your horse tethered there with a small coin, the invisible smith would shoe it while you were away.

The Old English poem Deor opens with Weland: the poet tells what he suffered when Niðhad bound him, then Beadohild when she found herself with child, and each stanza closes with the refrain: that passed away, so may this.

Symbolic Reading

The Norse essays do not read Völundr, but the essay rereading the Greek myths reads smiths close to him: it makes the one-eyed Cyclopes a picture of the smith who shuts one eye to protect his sight from the sparks, their making of Zeus's thunderbolt the invention of smelting, and the story of Daedalus and his son Icarus an attempt at flight in which the wax melted in the sun's heat. Those are its readings of the Greek myths.

The poem itself gives a clear picture of a master craftsman's place at a king's court: he is taken to an island near the land, his sinews are cut so he cannot run, no one but the king goes in to him, and he makes him "every kind of treasure". His revenge comes from the craft itself: the gifts a craftsman sends into the palace.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The craftsman closest to Völundr is the Athenian Daedalus. Minos, king of Crete, holds him on the island as Níðuðr holds Völundr on his, and Daedalus makes wings of feathers laid in order and bound with thread and wax and flies away on them, as Völundr rises into the air. They differ in the sons: Daedalus loses his son Icarus in the flight, Völundr kills the king's two sons before he flies. The Norse dictionary itself sets δαίδαλος beside völundr and calls the labyrinth "Völundr's house".

Hephaestus resembles him in his lameness and in revenge by a gift. Pausanias tells that Hera threw Hephaestus down from heaven when he was born, and in revenge he sent her a golden chair with invisible fetters; when she sat in it she was held fast, and he would listen to none of the gods but Dionysus. The project's Greek essay reads his name from nafatha, the one who blows on the fire.

Völundr's device, the gift sent in welcome that carries death, is one form of the trickster's work, and his craft is one of the things people owed to culture heroes. The makers of treasures in the North are another people, the dwarves, who made the treasures of the gods.