The Edda, Volume 2

The Edda, Volume 2

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Title: The Edda, Vol. 2 The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular
Studies in Mythology, Romance, and Folklore, No. 13
Author: Winifred Faraday
Release Date: July 23, 2004 [EBook #13008]
Language: English
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Popular Studies in Mythology, Romance, and Folklore, No. 13
The Edda
II
The Heroic Mythology of the North

By
Winifred Faraday, M.A.

Published by David Nutt, at the Sign of the Phoenix, Long Acre,
London 1902

Author's Note
The present study forms a sequel to No. 12 (_The Edda: Divine
Mythology of the North_), to which the reader is referred for
introductory matter and for the general Bibliography. Additional
bibliographical references are given, as the need occurs, in the notes to
the present number.
Manchester, July 1902.

The Edda: II. The Heroic Mythology of the North
Sigemund the Waelsing and Fitela, Aetla, Eormanric the Goth and
Gifica of Burgundy, Ongendtheow and Theodric, Heorrenda and the
Heodenings, and Weland the Smith: all these heroes of Germanic
legend were known to the writers of our earliest English literature. But
in most cases the only evidence of this knowledge is a word, a name,
here and there, with no hint of the story attached. For circumstances
directed the poetical gifts of the Saxons in England towards legends of
the saints and Biblical paraphrase, away from the native heroes of the
race; while later events completed the exclusion of Germanic legend
from our literature, by substituting French and Celtic romance.
Nevertheless, these few brief references in Beowulf and in the small
group of heathen English relics give us the right to a peculiar interest in
the hero-poems of the Edda. In studying these heroic poems, therefore,
we are confronted by problems entirely different in character from
those which have to be considered in connexion with the mythical texts.
Those are in the main the product of one, the Northern, branch of the
Germanic race, as we have seen (No. 12 of this series), and the chief
question to be determined is whether they represent, however altered in
form, a mythology common to all the Germans, and as such necessarily
early; or whether they are in substance, as well as in form, a specific
creation of the Scandinavians, and therefore late and secondary. The
heroic poems of the Edda, on the contrary, with the exception of the
Helgi cycle, have very close analogues in the literatures of the other
great branches of the Germanic race, and these we are able to compare
with the Northern versions.

The Edda contains poems belonging to the following heroic cycles:
(_a_) Weland the Smith.--Anglo-Saxon literature has several references
to this cycle, which must have been a very popular one; and there is
also a late Continental German version preserved in an Icelandic
translation. But the poem in the Edda is the oldest connected form of
the story.
(_b_) Sigurd and the Nibelungs.--Again the oldest reference is in
Anglo-Saxon. There are two well-known Continental German versions
in the Nibelungen Lied and the late Icelandic Thidreks Saga, but the
Edda, on the whole, has preserved an earlier form of the legend. With it
is loosely connected
(_c_) The Ermanric Cycle.--The oldest references to this are in Latin
and Anglo-Saxon. The Continental German version in the Thidreks
Saga is late, and, like that in the Edda, contaminated with the Sigurd
story, with which it had originally nothing to do.
(_d_) Helgi.--This cycle, at least in its present form, is peculiar to the
Scandinavian North.
All the above-named poems are contained in Codex Regius of the Elder
Edda. From other sources we may add other poems which are Eddic,
not Skaldic, in style, in which other heroic cycles are represented. The
great majority of the poems deal with the favourite story of the
Volsungs, which threatens to swamp all the rest; for one hero after
another, Burgundian, Hun, Goth, was absorbed into it. The poems in
this part of the MS. differ far more widely in date and style than do the
mythological ones; many of the Volsung-lays are comparatively late,
and lack the fine simplicity which characterises the older popular
poetry.
_Völund_.--The lay of Völund, the wonderful smith, the Weland of the
Old English poems and the only Germanic hero who survived for any
considerable time in English popular tradition, stands