ANDVARI’S RING AND THE
BRISINGAMEN NECKLACE
Wagner
made the story of Andvari’s ring famous in his RING CYCLE opera – where,
however, Andvari’s place is taken by Alberich the ‘Elf-king’. Tolkien also utilized the story of Andvari’s
cursed ring to forge his mighty LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy. Yet behind these works of art and storytelling
there is myth, raw and waiting to be tamed.
What I would like to do in this article is to first give a summary of
the story of Andvari’s ring – as it is found in the Norse sources – and then to
analyze it as a mythic construct.
Following this I will similarly treat of the Brisingamen myth.
The
story of Andvari’s ring is all bound up with that of Sigurd the Dragon-slayer,
the Volsungs and Gjukings, Atli (= Attila the Hun), etc. It all begins when the gods kill a man called
Otter and must pay a wergild or ‘man-payment’ in recompense. They capture Andvari and threaten him with
death unless he gives them his treasure.
He is forthcoming with his gold, but tries to hold back one gold ring
because with this ring he could make more wealth for himself. He is not allowed to keep even this, however,
and the gods take possession of treasure and ring. Andvari curses the ring, saying it shall
bring death to whoever possesses it.
Fafnir,
brother of Otter, now kills his father and takes the gold up onto a heath,
where he builds a lair for himself. He
transforms into a dragon and lies upon the gold, guarding it as dragons are
wont to do. Sigurd the Volsung, son of
Sigmund, ends up slaying Fafnir and taking the gold. He comes upon a mountain with a hall atop it
that is surrounded by a flickering fire.
Being unusually brave, he rides through the fire and awakens the
valkyrie within the hall. Her name is
Brynhild. She had displeased Odin and he
had put her to sleep with a thorn, saying that she would never again be a
valkyrie, but would marry a mortal man.
Sigurd
then unaccountably leaves Brynhild, still trapped in her fiery hall atop the
mountain. He arrives at the court of the
Gjukings, where he meets and eventually marries Gudrun. It turns out that Brynhild is the sister of
Atli, and Gunnar, Gudrun’s brother, wishes to marry the valkyrie. But Gunnar, not being as brave as Sigurd,
cannot ride his horse through the flames atop the mountain. So Sigurd magically assumes Gunnar’s shape,
enters the hall, sleeps with Brynhild (the placing of the sword between them is
transparently Freudian) and gives her the cursed ring to wear. He takes one of her rings in exchange.
They
all travel back to the land of the Gjukings, and Brynhild believes the man who
entered the hall and freed her from the fire is Gunnar, whom she marries. The two queens get in an argument about the
degree of prowess of their respective husbands and in anger Gudrun reveals to
Brynhild that it was Sigurd, and not Gunnar, who rescued her from the mountain
imprisonment. As proof she flashes the
ring Brynhild had given Sigurd, which the hero in turn had thoughtlessly
granted to Gudrun.
Brynhild
now incites Gunnar and his brother Hogni to slay Sigurd. They do so, and Brynhild immolates herself on
Sigurd’s funeral pyre. The treasure and the cursed ring pass to the Gjukings.
Gudrun
is married to Atli in an attempt to mollify the king for the loss of his
sister, Brynhild. But Gudrun, seeking
revenge for her husband, eggs on Atli to destroy the Gjukings and take their
treasure. He invites the Gjukings to his
court, where he has them killed. There
is no treasure for him to enjoy, however, for the Gjukings had hidden in it the
Rhine. Gudrun then kills Atli and the
two sons she had by him, before throwing herself into the sea.
This,
in brief, is the story of the cursed ring.
My
analysis: the gold ring, and indeed gold
in general, is symbolic of the sun. I
have discussed before the lunar nature of the dragon, and how this monster’s
lying upon the gold and guarding it within the funeral mound has to do with the
sun and the moon being in the underworld.
So what is the curse of the sun-ring?
We cannot rest content with seeing the curse as merely a plot device,
something many interpreters of the story have done in the past.
Firstly,
it is the gods, and chiefly Odin, who introduce the sun-ring to men. This is important. Odin’s role was to foment war and bring as
many slain warriors to Valholl as he could manage. The cursed ring is thus his tool to bring
this about. The fire and mountain of
Brynhild can be likened to the many saga accounts of funeral barrows surrounded
by the same flames. I have suggested
previously that these flames stand for the fiery cloud, through which the sun
and moon and other planets must pass before they can set into the earth. Brynhild herself, being a valkyrie, is the goddess
over whom warriors will contend. But as
the story of the Brisingamen necklace will show (see below), there is more to
it than this. Sigurd and Gunnar,
Gjukings and Huns – these individual men or entire armies are the avatars of
celestial deities. They are locked
forever into an everlasting seasonal battle.
One party is victorious and wins the goddess, but only holds onto her
for half a year. Then his ‘double’ defeats
him, takes the goddess and rules for the remaining half-year. The battle is truly an Everlasting one, for
year after year passes by, and the sun, moon, etc., die and are reborn over and
over again.
The
ring is thus cursed in precisely this fashion: whoever possesses it is doomed
to be slain by his seasonal twin.
Everything in the Eddaic mythology strongly points to the goddess being
the moon, and the god being the sun – despite Snorri Sturluson’s insistence
that the moon is male and the sun is female.
We can be relatively certain that the GOLDEN ring does, in fact, represent
the sun. Gold is the color and metal of
the sun, and in the story the object is taken from the underworld
(Svartalfaheim or ‘Black Elf Home’) up into the world/sky, back into the dragon
lair/underworld of Fafnir (the dead man-turned-into-lunar dragon), then into
the underworld-mountain/barrow with Brynhild, back out of the
underworld-mountain/barrow, and finally back into the underworld via the Rhine
river.
The
hero-as-god makes his journey to the underworld, of course. We are to see this as emblematic of death,
and his return from the underworld as an act of rebirth. Ultimately, all those
who contend for the sun-ring/goddess will die, but the corollary is a promise
resurrection. This is the principle
lying behind Valholl, where the champions are constantly slaying each other,
only to rise again to continue battling.
A
warrior best honored his beloved valkyrie by either slaying his rival, or being
slain by his rival. Either way, he
assured himself of immortality.
Let
us now take a look at the Brisingamen necklace.
To begin, the name is related to Norwegian brisa, ‘to shine’. We are told in the “Sorla thattr” that the
necklace was forged by four dwarves; hence, like Andvari’s ring it has a
subterranean origin. Freyja must spend a
night with each of the dwarves in order to obtain it. When Loki tells Odin about the goddess’s
indiscretions, Odin forces Loki to get the necklace for him. Loki does so, but Freyja demands its
return. Odin makes such a return
conditional on her starting an eternal conflict between two kings.
This
myth is fairly easy to interpret. Freyja
obtains the sun-necklace from the underworld.
The sky-father, one of whose eyes is the sun (the same eye he deposits
in the Well of Mimir), takes the sun from her.
His giving the sun back to the goddess marks his establishment of the
seasonal battle, something that shows the usual patriarchal prerogative being
asserted over that which had originally belonged solely to Freyja. In other words, Freyja’s starting of the
Everlasting Battle is made dependent on her being forced to do so by Odin.
We
are also told that Loki and Heimdall, two gods, contended for the Brisingamen
on an island in the shape of seals.
However, this is Snorri’s “take” on an obscure strophe in the Husdrapa,
where the object being contended for is called hafnyra or ‘sea-kidney’. Various theories have been proposed to
account for the true nature of this object (see Simek). The Cleasby-Vigfusson Icelandic Dictionary
has: haf-nýra, n., poët. a 'sea-kidney,' a pearl, Hd. If this is correct, then the Brisingamen necklace
may have been a pearl necklace or, at least, a necklace whose pendant was
thought to be an unusually large and fine pearl. Needless to say, while some pearls are
irregularly shaped, it would not be usual to define one in a kenning as being
like a kidney in form.
I
think a more profitable angle to take would be to recall that Freyja’s tears
were said to become red gold (in Snorri’s “Skaldskaparmal”). As tears regularly fall upon one's neck and
breast, the idea of the goddess wearing a necklace of red gold may easily have
developed. Once again, gold is the color
and metal of the sun.
The
Brisingamen appears as Brosinga mene in “Beowulf”, where we are told Hama
carried it off from Eormanric’s hall.
Although I have not seen the connection made before, this looks like an
allusion to the German “Koning Ermenrikes Dot’ or “King Ermanaric’s
Death”. In this ballad, Ermanaric is
lodged in his castle Friesach. Dietrich
of Bern and his warriors enter disguised as dancers and slay Ermanaric and his
men. Friesach is spelled FREISACK in the
text, and while of Slavic origin this place-name may well have been fancifully
associated with the goddess name Freyja.
Hama is the champion Heime of the Dietrich epics, a name which could
well have been brought into connection with the Norse god Heimdall.
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