The Volsung legend is famously one of the most important and mobile cultural artifacts of the Migration Period. The characters who populate the narrative (Attila/Atli the Hun and his concubine Hildico who, according to legend, caused him to drink himself to death/die of a nosebleed, Gundaharius the king of the Burgundians, the famous tyrant Jormunrek) seem to belong to that era, as do the cycle of stories the legend relates—of the union of Sigmund and Hjordis, the childhood exploits of Sigurd, his coming of age through vengeance and dragon-slaying, his betrothal to proud Brynhild and his betrayal of her through his marriage to Gudrun, the tragic deaths of Brynhild and Sigurd and the subsequent tragedy of Gudrun and her brothers: her reluctant marriage to Atli, who betrays her brothers, leading Gudrun to exact vengeance by murdering her sons by Atli and setting Atli’s hall aflame, and finally, her third marriage to King Jonakr and the destruction of her remaining progeny through the perfidy of her daughter Svanhild’s suitor, the tyrannical King Jormunrek. The narrative is grim yet profound, and has been compelling psychologically, historically, and theologically for a millennium and a half. It transitioned from pre-Christian contexts to Christian ones with relative ease, as its appearance on both runestones and stave church doors attests. The legend’s preservation in Faroese balladry and its continuing life in performative and communal contexts on that archipelago are particularly intriguing records of the legend’s relevance to both ancient and modern culture.
The history of scholarship on the Volsung legend is nearly as old as the discipline of philology itself. It is attended with very high stakes as the legend has provided a foundational story for many Northern European nation-states including Iceland, England, and famously, Germany. The reflexes of the Volsung legend manifest in much material artwork and in such literary masterworks as Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, Völsungasaga, the Eddic poems and Icelandic rímur, and the Faroese ballads concerning the Volsung legend. Of this formidable list, the Faroese ballads have received the least scholarly attention, and to note this fact is to understate matters. For while whole shelves are devoted to the Sigemund/dragon episode in Beowulf alone, and libraries to the Icelandic and German reflexes of the legend, arguably the work completed by Grundtvig and Bloch on the Føroya kvæði/Corpus Carminum Færoensium has never been superseded, and though such scholars as Marianne Clausen, Mortan Nolsøe,Patricia Conroy, Michael Chesnutt, Helen F. Leslie-Jacobsen, and Eyðun Andreassen have worked on or discussed the Faroese ballads in detail and many others have done so in passing as comparanda, these remarkable works remain understudied in the field and undertaught in the classroom.
This elegant edition of translations of the Volsung ballads from the Faroe Islands should do much to change this state of affairs, and, as Helen F. Leslie-Jacobsen makes clear in her introduction, such is the goal; hence the open-access edition of this otherwise prohibitively expensive volume. It is important to bring this material into the hands (or digital folders) of many who might otherwise remain unaware of or unable to access this vibrant tradition. Recorded Faroese balladry represents a particularly exciting tradition. In terms of the Volsung material, it clarifies or preserves parts of the legend garbled or missing in other versions of the story, and develops new spins on a tradition that became exclusively literary elsewhere.
The introduction to the volume features a brief discussion of the ballad in its pan-European contexts and a more detailed explanation of types of Faroese ballads (kvæði or táttur). Anemic representation of scholarship in the footnotes does not mark a failing on Leslie-Jacobsen’s part but rather accurately reveals exactly how understudied this material has remained. And that is unfortunate, as the Faroese oral tradition that has preserved and passed down these poems is fascinating in its own right. The chain/ring dance has been of paramount importance to the continued performance and preservation of the ballads, whose “leaping and lingering” (7) effect is most likely a symbiotic development from the dance steps; see the lively discussion on pp. 5-7. The introduction also discusses the minute variation in multiple stanzas as a formal quality relevant to its performative contexts (8). Turning to the Volsung material, Leslie-Jacobsen offers a report on the legend’s currency in the North Atlantic world, then of its continuing life in the Faroes. Most helpful was an evaluation of the interpretive and textual issues attendant on a living oral tradition that is also medieval. As Leslie-Jacobsen notes, “[i]t has been assumed in scholarship that the productive period of Faroese ballads was in the thirteenth or fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, before entering a period of decline” (8). She argues rightly that this view should be “met with skepticism, since this view seems to be connected to the Faroe Islands losing independence to Norway and then Norway (and thus the Faroe Islands) uniting with Denmark at the dissolution of the Kalmar Union at the end of the fourteenth century, rather than any evidence from the ballad corpus itself. Indeed, since we have no records of Faroese ballads from the period in question, there is no evidence at all for a period of decline...the tradition continues to the present day. The Faroese ballads of presumed medieval origin should be treated as the product of an oral culture that would not have come into being without oral transmission and, as such, they should be read as oral poems” (9). Indeed, as the author points out, Faroese was not a written language until the twentieth century; she discusses the ramifications of these realities on pp. 10-16.
For their translations of each ballad the editor/translators use the A variants contained in the Corpus Carminum Færoensium (CCF) collection, though they do at times refer to other variants and editorial emendations featured in other editions. In general, these translations are graceful, accessible, and a pleasure to read. The first three ballads together make up the cycle of narratives comprising the Sjúrðar kvæði. These are three tættir or ballad sections entitled Regin smiður, Brynhildar táttur,and Høgna táttur.All three are wonderfully rich in English or in Faroese! The Brynhild poem, for example, provides a less confused account of the manner in which Sjúrður (to use the Faroese form of his name) is led to betray Brynhild for Guðrun. And the language of the first meeting between the lovers Sjúrður and Brynhild among the flames is gorgeous. The English translation preserves the beauty of the poetry in this passage even though the translators modestly emphasize their commitment to convey sense to the potential detriment of aesthetics: “We have not tried to produce translations with immense literary value in their own right; the intention behind the translation presented here is not to mirror the beauty of the Faroese but rather to aid in understanding it” (24). In the aforementioned case, the translators succeeded in the former as well as the latter aim, and they achieve similar heights elsewhere. Readers may also notice that the Faroese ballads have made the legend more thoroughly Christian than some other regional versions—Sjúrður often fights heathens, and the church features prominently in heroic marriages. The magical power of such female characters as Brynhild, Guðrun, and Grimhild remains and is at times enhanced as they draw the heroes to them across vast spans of space and time, though their agency is more explicitly moralized as the “evil that women do” in the three interlinking tættir of the Sjúrðar kvæði.
Other poems follow, including “The Second Ballad of Høgni (Annar Høgna táttur),” which follows Høgni’s son as he avenges his father’s murder. All other extant Faroese ballads featuring Sjúrður are then included “The Ballad of Gestur (Gests ríma),” “The Ballad of Nornagestur (Nornagests ríma)”, “Ísmal the Brave Hero (Ísmal fræga kempa),” and several versions of narratives featuring Sjúrður’s adventures concerning an attractive and wealthy dwarf maiden (Dvørgamoy). The collection concludes with two giant-slaying ballads with Sjúrður as hero. All these later ballads offer interesting insights into the complex intersection between violence, hospitality, and power in Sjúrður’s visits to dwarf halls and giant crags and his dalliances, abductions and killings of such supernatural agents as giants, dwarfs, and dragons. The atmospheric depiction of otherworld dangers is particularly effective in stanzas 39-48 of “The Ballad of Kvørfinn”: “Singing started high in the crags, / giants enjoy holy days, / tread hot fire with their feet, / to break hard ore. / Hard rocks cracked apart, / ore runs with poison, / dragons hammer great bars, / fire burns in the smithy” (stanzas 45-46, p. 163). What fun!
The footnotes and other slight textual apparatus of this volume seem aimed not at scholars but rather at an audience relatively new to ballad conventions and unfamiliar with Faroese. The comments point out ways in which the English translation departs in form from the Faroese original (pointing out variations in verbs, etc., in similar stanzas). They gloss likely meaning that is conveyed telegraphically in ballad formulae that may be unfamiliar to readers new to the genre. The editors/translators always note where they reverse the line order for better sense in modern English, and sometimes these reversals were not strictly necessary as in this case: “hvørki kundi fyri hann koma / kristið ella heiðið” is translated as “neither Christians nor heathens / could stand in his way” (p. 133, stanza 11), though one could also say “no one could stand in his way, neither Christians nor heathens.” But in the following case, a change of syntax helped with sense: “hann reið seg at biðja moy / so langt í fremmanda land” is translated more gracefully as “he rode to a foreign land so far away / to propose to a maiden” (p. 145, stanza 30), even though it would still be comprehensible in its original word order.
At times another copyeditor might have helped with the final polish of this volume, but with academic publishing stretched as thin as it is these days, it is admittedly sometimes hard to get an editorial eye on the small stuff. Examples of such quibbles include: i.e., stanza 23 of “The Beautiful Dwarf Maiden” where wont is confused with want (144); a misspelling of “cedarwood” in stanza 4 of “Ása the Dwarf Maiden” (149); and “baring” for “barring” (22). None of these errata cause major problems and they are few and far between.
This reader would have been grateful for a little more contextual information on each ballad in both its Faroese performative context and on its relationship to other versions of the story extant elsewhere. Though the editor stated such was not within the scope of this edition, a few paragraphs of background would especially have helped in the classroom and with orienting readers to where they are in the multigenerational epic narrative, and to where they might look for texts to compare, and to answer such questions as: what is the relationship between the different ballads of Sjúrður and the dwarf maidens? The ballads are all summarized in an appendix at the end of the book, but this reader might have preferred a brief scholarly introduction to each ballad—a discussion of known analogues, variants, and performance contexts if known. Such an intro would not need to rehash all the scholarship but simply to draw English-speakers into the conversation. Readers should learn the basics of what we currently know about these kvæði.
The project that gave rise to this volume (Ballads Across Borders: The Faroe Islands in the Norse Story-Telling World, supported by the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo) states that the project aims are to “determine how the Faroese ballads relate to and are located in the Norse and wider Germanic story-telling world,” and to “integrate the Faroese ballads into the relevant research fields that discuss story-telling traditions of the North.” This volume resists actively taking part in these goals, though it has successfully made “the Faroese ballad material about Sigurðr Fáfnisbani available in English translation, to aid other scholars in building on the project’s findings.” The remaining mandate is clear: to complete the aims of the project and integrate this material into our discussions of the Volsung material and related storytelling traditions. The project states that it also aims to produce “one substantial edited collection on the international context of Faroese ballads, also containing a Stand der Forschung for Faroese ballad studies,” and this reviewer looks forward to that volume. Let us hope for a renaissance in scholarship on the Føroya kvæði (See CAS, Oslo’s Ballads Across Borders [BARD] project description and related event materials on Leslie-Jacobsen’s project).
We must be grateful to Leslie-Jacobsen and Jacobsen and the other participants in this project for reminding us of this critically understudied tradition and for re-presenting this “unparalleled and undervalued material” (17) to us in such an accessible and conscientious edition. This reviewer is personally grateful for this set of thoughtful and often beautiful translations; I will certainly use them in my classroom, both when I next teach a dedicated seminar on “dragonslayers” and when I offer my survey of Old Norse storytelling traditions.