The Legend Of Sigurd And Gudrun;
By J.R.R. Tolkein; Edited by Christopher Tolkein;
HarperCollins;
Pages: 377; Price: Rs 899
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Two years after The Children Of Hurin, Christopher Tolkein has once again brought to light a hitherto unknown and unpublished manuscript that his father, that most canonical of fantasy writers, J.R.R. Tolkein, had prepared, perhaps in the early 1930s. These are two closely related poems that deal with the Nordic Volsung and Niflung legend, poems that have been virtually unknown until now — The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun written in the ‘old eight-line fornyrdislag stanza’, the Norse alliterative stanzaic metre.
These poems — The New Lay of the Volsungs, the story of the Volsung family, Odin’s chosen warriors, divided into nine sections, and its sequel, The New Lay of Gudrun — form part of a corpus of poetry of ancient Norway and Iceland known as the Poetic Edda. This, as is explained in the fascinating ‘Introduction’, actually the opening lecture of a series delivered by J.R.R. Tolkein to the English faculty at Oxford, titled The Elder Edda, date back to the Viking age, sometime after AD 700, and is “founded on ancient indigenous mythology and religious beliefs … legends and folk-tales and heroic stories of many centuries telescoped together …”
Faithful followers of Tolkein’s greatest creation (some would say one of the greatest creations in the entire genre of fantasy — Middle Earth) might be in for a surprise, however, for this is neither a tale of hobbits, nor of wizards, elves, or exiled kings; although the key ingredients of what makes a good fantasy yarn — hoards of gold, proud warriors, beautiful maidens ‘gleaming-lovely’, prophecies, battles, jealousy, spells, passion and unrequited love — are aplenty. But what comes through is not so much the voice of the Tolkein of The Lord Of The Rings, or The Hobbit, or Silmarillion (traces of these are not entirely absent; but more on that later), but that of Tolkein the Oxford don, the Professor of Anglo-Saxon, “a presentation of his perceptions … of a literature that he greatly admired”.
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To that extent, The Legend f Sigurd... would rank more among works of classical literature than among the straightforward fantasy genre, although Christopher Tolkein warns that “it is not to be judged by views prevailing in contemporary scholarship”, and is likely to appeal to students of literature, mythology and folklore, rather than those readers of fantasy fiction whose tastes run more towards, say, a Harry Potter novel.
The detailed commentaries that Christopher Tolkein provides are a veritable treasure house of information that cut across a range of ideas and theories — from the meanings of obscure words to deliberations on the possible motives of central characters in the Lays, to those of Tolkein himself, gleaned from scrawls scribbled hastily in the margins; from comparisons of Tolkein’s version of the Lays with the original Elder Edda and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, “great prose artist, metrical expert, antiquarian …” of the 13th century, when poetry of the “heathen tradition” was dead, and all that remained were disjointed fragments.
And most tantalising is the realisation that the etymological origins of Middle Earth hark back to this corpus of Nordic mythology: the Norse Midgardr, “the Serpent of Midgard who lay coiled through all the seas encompassing Midgard, the world of men”, corresponds to the English ‘Middan-geard’, ‘Middan-eard’, which led to the later form ‘Middle Earth’; the old Norse word ‘gandr’, with its reference to sorcery and magic, is contained in the name ‘Gandalf’.
The image of Otr being slain while fishing along a river bank in the ‘Upphaf’ to ‘The New Lay of the Volsungs’ brings to mind Gollum’s betrayal by Frodo and his subsequent capture; the story of the dragon Fafnir, keeping watch over the hoard of gold beneath his belly reminds one of Bilbo Baggins and the dwarves’ quest in The Hobbit ; the gentle, impulsive Gudrun and the Valkyrie Brynhilde appear to have come together in the person of the beautiful, brave Eowyn; and one could be forgiven for visualising the rousing Battle of Helm’s Deep, brought to cinematic life in such fabulous detail in Peter Jackson’s epic venture based on The Lord Of The Rings, while reading of the battle in Atli’s fortress in The New Lay of Gudrun. This, then, is where it all began, where Middle Earth and the quest for the ring, where Gandalf and Isengard, all have their etymological and creative roots — old Norse literature and Nordic mythology.
In his introduction, Tolkein states that reading an Eddaic poem is akin to meeting “something of tremendous force”, which seems “to leap across the barrier of the difficult language and grip one …”. And this is no less true about his own New Lays; while the metric form of the poems (what is called the Old Lore Metre, an ancient Germanic metre) with its alliterative stanzas (and, in accordance with Germanic verse, the alliteration refers not to letters, but to sounds) might take a while getting used to, the effort is worth it — the poems are beautiful, the language vivid, the descriptions enchanting, the emotions profound; the narrative does “hit you in the eye” with its powerful visual imagery, and the characters seem to leap out of the very pages to enact an all but forgotten saga that leaves you shaken and enthralled. It is hard to not linger over the verses that describe Sigurd’s journey to Hindarfell in ‘The Lay of the Volsungs’, where he meets the love of his life, Brynhild:
“Ever wide and wild / the wandering path; / long lay the shadow / of lone rider.”
Or not feel Gudrun’s pain’s upon Sigurd’s death in ‘The Lay of Gudrun’ in the lines:
“Life she hated, / but life took not, / witless wandering / in woods alone.”
And in such rousing scenes of battle as:
“Hard were handstrokes, / hewn were corselets, / as on hundred anvils / were hammers ringing.”
Eddaic poetry may have received a new lease of life through Tolkein’s poems; the old Norse mythology, especially the Norse pantheon, on the other hand, escaped the fate that befell the folklore of the time, and continued to thrive in that most unlikely of places — comics. From Thor, the greatest of all Northern gods, the mischief-maker Loki, the Valkyries and Valhalla have also been derived some of best fantasy fiction — for instance, Neil Gaiman’s classic American Gods, and the more recent Anansi Boys. But one will be forever grateful to Christopher Tolkein for allowing us a glimpse into this fascinating literature, and for giving us an opportunity to enter, once again, J.R.R. Tolkein’s captivating world, and savour the brilliance of his learning and imagination, and the magic of his prose.
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