THE TERRIBLE ONE'S HORSE: CHAPTER 10

VOLUND THE SMITH, PRINCE OF ELVES: THE FORGING OF LIFE AND DEATH

For those unfamiliar with the Old Norse myth of Volund the Smith (OHG Wielant, AS Weland or Welond, Velent in the Thidrekssaga, modern English Wayland, as in ‘Wayland’s Smithy’, the Neolithic chambered long barrow in Oxfordshire), a brief, point-by-point summary is in order before any kind of interpretation can be offered.  The following is drawn from the poem Volundarkvida of the Elder or Poetic Edda.  The longer Thidrekssaga prose account is not taken into consideration here, as details added by this later source appear to be mere literary invention and do not serve to elucidate the mythic substrate of the poem.

We begin with Volund, called a son of a Finnish king, a line of descent which points to a possible affinity with the Finnish smith-god Ilmarinen.  He takes a swan-maiden (i.e. a valkyrie) named Hervor Alvitr to wife, presumably (if later folklore is any guide) by stealing her swan-cloak.  Hervor and her two sisters are spinning on a lake-shore, which points to their also being the Norns.  One of Hervor’s sisters actually bears the epithet ‘Swan-white’, and this will be important when we consider Hervor's divine nature below.

After seven years, Hervor flies off to war, leaving Volund alone.  Once again, she had probably found her hidden swan-cloak and used that to make her escape.  He spends his time making gold rings and placing them on a rope.  A king called Nidud learns Volund is living by himself and sends his men.  They take one of the gold rings and we learn later that the king gives this ring to his daughter, Bothvild.  Volund was off hunting.  He kills and consumes a bear, but before falling asleep on its hide notices one gold ring is missing.  He believes Hervor has returned to him.

Nidud’s men pounce upon him while he is asleep, and at the suggestion of Nidud’s wife Volund is lamed and left on an island (this last bears a strong resemblance to Zeus’s tossing of Hephaestus, the Greek divine smith, onto the island of Lemnos, where the fall cripples him).  There he is forced to work a forge for the king.

But it is not long before he begins to work his revenge, and to plot his escape.  First, he entices Nidud’s sons to his forge and murders them.  He places their feet under the slack tub (the water tank used for cooling hot iron), makes silver-coated drinking cups out of their skulls as a gift for Nidud, gems out of their eyes for Nidud’s wife and brooches out of their teeth for Bothvild.

Bothvild then comes to him with the ring that had been meant for Hervor.  She has somehow broken it and it requires mending by the smith.  He reclaims the ring, plies her with beer and seduces her.  Then he mentions his webbed feet – a reference to the fact that he has transformed into some kind of bird (Carolyn Larrington, in her translation of the Poetic Edda, theorizes this is a swan-shape, perhaps making use a swan-cloak, although see below for a better explanation) – and he flies off, leaving the king and queen bereft of his services, their sons and with a pregnant daughter.

What are we to make of this story?  Well, it has all the hallmarks of a fairly typical seasonal sun myth, and we can work through its meaning step by step thusly:

The swan-maiden/valkyrie/Norn Hervor Alvitr is a moon goddess.  Some have wanted to make a case for her being a solar deity, or even an aspect of Venus.  Others are opted for an earth goddess or Sovereignty goddess or some combination of the two.  However, the swan-shape, and the white color, and the ability to fly through the air, are characteristics that are only to be found in a lunar goddess.  The sun is not white.  It is gold, and this is the color and metal always associated with the sun in the mythology.  This is so despite the Eddaic tradition which insists the sun, Sol, is female, and the moon, Mani, is male.

 As is true of any pagan religious system that was practiced over a wide area for many centuries, the Germanic or Norse pantheon was not a fixed or standardized one.  Many apparently conflicting – or complementary – beliefs were subscribed to by these peoples.  We need only think of any number of other early religions – the Egyptian, for example – where male and female sun and moon gods were worshipped side by side with no apparent difficulty.  Furthermore, the Norse mythology is replete with symbols that are essentially kennings – employing different poetic descriptions for identical or similar objects and concepts. Lastly, gods like Odin are famous for being shape-shifters AND sex-changers.  As a sky god, Odin’s eyes were the sun and moon.  Thus, he could manifest himself at will as either heavenly body.  If we restrict ourselves to the sun being female and the moon being male, we will not be able to understand the subtleties of Norse myth.

The killing and consuming of the bear, as well as Volund’s falling asleep atop its pelt, is symbolic for the death of Volund himself as the god of half of the solar year.  This death corresponds with Nidud’s taking of the gold ring, itself an emblem of the sun.  In other words, Volund dies at the end of his half-year reign as solar deity.  This death corresponds with his losing the moon goddess Hervor as well as the gold sun ring.  Nidud now takes over as the living sun god of the second half-year.

Volund is lame for the duration of his incarceration on the island because he is the dead sun god.  His being forced to work at the forge and produce weapons and treasure for Nidud will be discussed fully below, when the nature of dwarves is examined.

The sons of Nidud are surrogates for the father.  Thus killing the sons represents the slaying of Volund’s solar twin, Nidud himself.  The slack tub is spattered with their blood, almost as if it were an altar receiving an offering.  The feet of the boys are perhaps the most profound statement of Volund’s revenge, for they point directly to his own useless feet, made unusable by Nidud’s having severed the sinews in the hollows of his knees.  But this act also reads like a foundation sacrifice.  The skulls of the boys are coated in silver, the metal sacred to the moon.

At the same time, Volund gets the sun-ring back from the goddess, and embraces her in the sexual act.  All of this means that he has been reborn for his half of the solar year.  His transformation into avian form as the resurrected sun god is echoed in Odin’s transformation into the sun-eagle when flying back to Asgard with the mead of poetry (see the chapter on this subject), or Loki’s flying back to the same place with the sun-apples of immortality dressed in the falcon-cloak loaned to him by Freyja (owner of the famous solar necklace, the Brisingamen, which I’ve also written about in another essay).     

So if Volund was indeed a sun god, why is he called (twice) visi alfa, ‘master of elves’ and (once) alfa liodi, ‘prince of elves’?

Part of the answer is easy:  a poetic term for the sun was Alfrodull, “Elf-halo or Elf-glory” (see the Cleasby-Vigfusson Icelandic Dictionary).  But things get more complicated when we compare Volund, the dead sun god bound to an earth-island, slaving away at his forge, and the dwarves, occupying themselves in similar fashion under the ground or inside rocks.

Much has been made by students of Norse religion and myth of the fact that some of the dwarves AND elves bear names relating to death.  One of them – Dain – is listed as both a dward AND an elf, and his name means ‘Dead One’.  It has been claimed that further confusion was introduced by Snorri Sturluson in his Prose Edda, as he indicates dwarves lived in the Home of the Black Elves, the Svartalfar, whom he also calls Dark Elves or Dokkalfar.  He then goes on to mention Light Elves or Ljosalfar as well, and places these last in heavenly halls, as opposed to the Black Elves/Dark Elves/Dwarves, who are always underworld residents.

Most scholars believe that Snorri’s placement of Light Elves in heaven and the dwarves or dark/black elves in the earth betrays Christian influence.  In other words, either the originally pagan designations for such beings were likened to the saved and the damned (or to angels and demons), or the division itself was, in fact, a Christian dualistic development.  However, the problem with these notions is that Snorri does not impart an overt ETHICAL DISTINCTION between the Light Elves and the Dark Elves.  He says

 “They [the dark elves] are different from the light elves in appearance, and far more so in nature.  The light elves are more beautiful than the sun, while the dark elves are blacker than pitch.”

The “more so in nature” could imply a moral dimension, with light elves being “good” and dark elves being “evil”, but Snorri’s statement remains ambiguous.  We would, of course, expect the natures of creatures living in the earth to be vastly different from those living in heaven.

I have in other essays explored the nature of the Norse dragon and, briefly, that of the Norse draug or “revenant”.  In both cases, there is a strong suggestion in the sources that these monsters, dwelling in the earth-barrow, were in some way identified with the moon.  They had been men who, upon death, took on a monstrous shape and guarded the treasures that had been buried with them.  In other stories the dead are in some sense “alive” within their barrows (see the stories of Helgi Hundingsbane and Sigrun and Angantyr and Hervor; in this last, the heroine must procure a sword from her dead father).

There is a strange correspondence between stories of heroes breaking into barrows to combat draugs or dragons and stealing their treasure or weapons and heroes struggling with or threatening dwarves with death in order to procure the same items.  And, indeed, in such stories the dwarves and the draugs or dragons are interchangeable.  This tells me in no uncertain terms that the reason dwarves were thought of as producers of treasure and magical (or cursed) weapons is because they were originally dead men within their barrows - dead men who had been buried with their earthly treasures and weapons.

But if this is so, why were they identified with the moon monster?  This seems to hearken back to the point I raised above about the moon, Mani, being male.  And what about the Light Elves who live in heaven?

The Light Elves are easy enough to dispense with: they are spirits of the dead who have been identified with the sun god in his resurrected form.  The same sun god who, like Volund, took on bird form and flew up into the sky, free from his death-prison.

But the lunar nature of the dead man/dwarf/dark-black elf/dragon/draug in the barrow mound is puzzling.  It does not seem to fit into the picture.  This means either that I’m wrong with the interpretation just offered for the Volund myth, or that I’m missing something.

The clue to solving this troublesome riddle may lie in the fact that the sons of Nidud, who represented the king himself, the solar twin of Volund, had their skulls plated in the silver of the moon.  And that when Odin descended into the earth-mountain Hnitbjorg (see again the essay on the mead of poetry), he had to transform into the lunar serpent to do so.

While one solar twin was alive and ruling for his half-year, where did the dead twin reside?  The obvious answer would be within the earth – the earth that was symbolized by the barrow mound.  But there may be more to it than this.

Loki (a hypostasis of Odin; see my chapter on Loki as a sky god) is bound in the underworld upon THREE LUNAR STONES.  These three lunar stones have their counterpart in the three vats of the mead myth.  We are told, of course, that Loki will not escape his bonds until Ragnarok – but this is not exactly true.  It is a poetic exaggeration.  We could be talking about a solar eclipse in the case of Loki were it not for the mead story, wherein the mead is itself a symbol for the sun’s light drunk out of and spat back into the moon.

The mead of poetry divinely inspired poets and scholars, according to Snorri Sturluson.  It was made originally from the blood, i.e. sunlight, of the sun god Kvasir, poured into the three lunar vats.  My reading of this, then, is that the mead was the spirit of the seasonally slain sun god.  Those partaking of the mead were not only infused with this divine spirit, but as with Christians who partook of the wine/blood of the sun god Christ, the drinker became “one” with the deity and would thus, when he died, be resurrected in the same fashion. Hence the Voluspa poem's insistence that the lunar dragon Nidhogg carries dead men on its wings across the night sky.  These 'dead men' are the spirits who were identified with the slain sun god and they are, in essence, the 'light' of the moon.

I would see the lunar monster, then, as a strange fusion of the goddess – whether we call her Hervor Alvitr, Bothvild, Idunn or Freyja, it matters little -  and the spirit of the dead sun god.  One thinks of Bothvild being made pregnant by Volund and cannot help but wonder if the child she carried was not, in fact, the spirit of Volund’s dead solar twin, Nidud.  She had, after all, been made drunk with beer just prior to her rape.

As this myth of the competing solar twins is a seasonal one, it readily took upon itself the motif of the Everlasting Battle.  I have discussed this motif in my essay on the Brisingamen necklace.