by Tom Birkett
11
From Heroic Lay to Victorian Novel:
Old Norse Poetry about Brynhildr and
Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native
Heather O’Donoghue
The Poetic Edda and Its Transformations
Around the year 1270, an unknown Icelandic scribe copied an anthology of
poems into a manuscript now known as the Codex Regius, or Konungsbók
(the royal manuscript); this collection is usual y called the Poetic Edda.
Some leaves of the manuscript are missing now, but over two dozen poems are
preserved in what is left of it. Of these, eleven are mythological, placed together in the first half of the manuscript. The remaining poems are based on heroic legends
about the Volsungs – a dynasty including Sigmundr the Volsung, descended from
the god Óðinn, and his son Sigurðr the celebrated dragon-slayer, who is betrothed
to the valkyrie Brynhildr, but marries Guðrún, the sister of the Burgundian heroes
Gunnarr and Hǫgni.1
It is not known how, or from where, these poems were sourced by the anthologist,
so we know nothing of their age, authorship or provenance, which might have been
very various in each respect. But it is clear that the anthologist – or his immediate
source – careful y ordered the individual poems in ‘chronological’ narrative order
to produce a legendary history of the Volsungs in which key episodes such as the
killing of the dragon by Sigurðr, or his murder at Brynhildr’s perverse and vengeful
instigation, are each represented by a vividly dramatic poem either largely or whol y
made up of the speech of the protagonists, interspersed with some explanatory
prose links.
Many of these episodes were evidently popular and had long been widely known
throughout northern Europe in the Middle Ages. There are plenty of Viking Age
stone carvings of Sigurðr killing the dragon, for instance, a good number of them in
1 See
The Poetic Edda, 2nd edn, trans. Carolyne Larrington (Oxford, 2014). The latest edition of the Poetic Edda is Eddukvæði, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, 2 vols (Reykjavík, 2014).
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northern England.2 Another unknown medieval Icelandic author took the legendary
material of the Codex Regius – before some of the poems were lost – and turned it
into saga narrative: Vǫlsunga saga ( The Story of the Volsungs).3 This prose account necessarily loses some of the drama and immediacy of the original poems, but offers
in its place continuity, consistency and some (arguably unconvincing) explanation
of character and motive (many readers have judged the saga to be a disimprovement
of the material). The thirteenth-century Icelandic Laxdœla saga ( The Story of the People of Laxardale) is by contrast a satisfyingly successful reworking of the poetic story of Sigurðr and Brynhildr: like Sigurðr, its hero Kjartan fal s in love with an
exceptional and strong-willed woman but like Brynhildr she ends up married to a
lesser man, and her thwarted pride leads to Kjartan’s murder. Most interestingly, the
author of Laxdœla saga has taken legendary material of dragons, treasure hoards, heroes and valkyries and set its heroic age narrative in a plausible recent historical actuality – in this case, the early medieval Iceland of his ancestors – acted out by
naturalistic characters in a distinctly domestic ambience.4 I shall argue in what
follows that, around six centuries later, Thomas Hardy effected a very similar trans-
formation of the poetic material in The Return of the Native. 5 And as we shall see, Hardy’s transformation also involved a shift in genre: to the characteristic literary
form of his era, the Victorian novel.
When Old Icelandic literature was rediscovered by the antiquarians and poets of
early modern Europe the most popular texts were at first either those which depicted
brave warriors laughing in the face of death, or those which seemed to offer ancient
information about the early history of northern Europe. The mythological poems of
the Poetic Edda also excited interest as supposed evidence of the beliefs and religion of the ancestors of northern European peoples.6 But in spite of its medieval popularity, it was some time before the story of Sigurðr and Brynhildr was taken up. The
notorious eddic translations of Amos Cottle, for instance, published in 1797, were
based on the first volume of the Copenhagen Edda, which had come out a decade
earlier, but which did not include the heroic poems.7 The poet William Herbert had
published translations of a couple of the poems relating to Sigurðr and Brynhildr
in 1842,8 but even Benjamin Thorpe’s influential first volume of eddic translations,
2 See Richard Bailey, England’s Earliest Sculptors (Toronto, 1996), and Lil a Kopár, Gods and Settlers (Turnhout, 2012).
3 See
Vǫlsunga saga: The Saga of the Volsungs, ed. and trans. R. G. Finch (London, 1965).
I have throughout used the Old Norse form of proper names, though quotations from the
saga are from William Morris’s translation (see note 11, below).
4 See
Laxdaela saga, trans. Magnús Magnússon and Hermann Pálsson (Harmondsworth, 1969). The standard edition of the original text is Laxdœla saga, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Íslenzk Fornrit vol. IV (Reykjavík, 1934).
5 Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, ed. Simon Gatrell (Oxford, 1990). All citations from the novel in the text are from this edition.
6 See Heather O’Donoghue, English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History (Oxford, 2014).
7 Ibid., pp. 104–5.
8 William Herbert, Works, 3 vols (London, 1842). See Carolyne Larrington, ‘Translating the Poetic Edda into English’, in Old Norse Made New, ed. David Clark and Carl Phelpstead (London, 2007), pp. 21–42, at pp. 24–5.
Heroic Lay to Victorian Novel
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published in 1866, did not include the heroic poems, though he made this good in
this second volume, published later the same year.9 However, in 1870 William Morris
and the Icelander Eiríkr Magnússon published a translation of Vǫlsunga saga which included translations of the poetic material on which it was based, both incorporated in the text itself and as an appendix to it.10 Morris published his masterly long poem Sigurd the Volsung in 1877;11 and the first performance of Wagner’s complete Ring – itself mostly based on the Old Norse originals – took place in 1876; in 1877
Wagner visited London and himself conducted a series of concerts of extracts from
his work – including the Ring – at the Royal Albert Hal .12 Hardy began writing The Return of the Native in 1876; the first version was completed in 1878. The emergence of these three very different translations of the legend within such a short period is remarkable. As well as simply being a response to the newly available material about
Sigurðr and Brynhildr, and part of the ever-increasing interest in Old Norse matters
more general y, it may also be that by the second half of the nineteenth century
the implicit erotic charge of the story could at last be given full rein. Certainly,
William Herbert’s 1842 adaptation (not translation) of the story of Brynhildr – his
poem ‘Brynhilda’ – struck a completely new note in the history of English-language
poetry under the influence of Old Norse myth.13
Morris’s translation of Vǫlsunga saga is extremely faithful to the original, which is in turn closely based on the poetry in the Edda. And as I have explained, Morris also incorporates his translations of eddic stanzas in the prose narrative and appends others to his tra
nslation of the saga. Although he does not closely imitate his originals, Morris preserves the short alliterative two-stress lines characteristic of eddic poetry, and his poetic diction is careful y archaised. Thus, Morris made available to
his readers not only the saga itself, but also the eddic verse associated with it, dramatic heroic lays about Sigurðr and Brynhildr. The main body of this chapter will trace
the parallels between Thomas Hardy’s extraordinary heroine Eustacia Vye and the
valkyrie Brynhildr as represented in the Edda and subsequently in Morris’s translation. I will extend the parallels between Eustacia and her eddic counterpart Bryn-
hildr to include the other main characters in the novel: Clym, Thomasina, Wildeve
and Mrs Yeobright. This will of necessity involve comparing the central plot of The Return – what one critic has tellingly called ‘the quadrangular situation involving four lovers who assume precisely those combinations least likely to produce their
happiness – the highly artificial situation, in short, upon which the whole novel is
predicated’14 – with the very same quadrangularity and eventual outcome in the
Old Norse sources. In a somewhat tentative conclusion, I will consider what value
9 Larrington, ‘Translating the Poetic Edda’, pp. 25–6.
10 Völsunga saga: The Story of the Volsungs and the Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda, trans. William Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon (London, 1870).
11 William Morris, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (A Poem) (London, 1877 for 1876).
12 Hardy copied out an extract from a newspaper article about Wagner in London in his notebook. See Lennart A. Björk, ed., The Literary Notes of Thomas Hardy (Göteborg, 1974), note 1023.
13 See O’Donoghue, English Poetry and Old Norse Myth, p. 137.
14 John Paterson, The Making of The Return of the Native (Berkeley, CA, 1963), p. 130.
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Hardy might have hoped to get out of the Norse sources – essential y, why he might
have based so much of his novel on them – and, more problematical y, why he only
very obliquely makes reference to these sources, especial y given that, as Lennart A.
Björk has said of The Return, Hardy was even by his own standards unusual y free with al usions to other authorities.15
Brynhildr the Valkyrie and Eustacia Vye
The figure of the valkyrie is not very consistently represented in Old Norse texts – as if the authors themselves did not have a clear idea of the characteristics of these
supernatural females. As the etymology of their Old Norse name indicates, they
are ‘choosers of the slain’, attending battlefields and conducting the bravest of the
dead warriors to Valhǫll – Óðinn’s hall Valhal a. How far they were free to select
the favoured dead themselves – or even cause the warriors’ deaths, and thus direct
the course of the battle – and how far they were simply carrying out Óðinn’s wishes,
varies in different Old Norse texts. So too do the duties of valkyries back in Valhǫll vary – there is sometimes an implication that they are the lovers of their immortal
chosen slain, though more often they are portrayed more decorously as simply
handing round the beer.
Sigurðr, having killed the dragon Fáfnir, is directed by birds – whose language
he has magical y come to understand – to a high hall surrounded by flame on a
mountain called Hindfel , where according to the birds – in Morris’s translation of
several stanzas of the eddic poem Fáfnismál quoted in the saga at this point: Soft on the fel
A shield-may [valkyrie] sleepeth
The lime-trees’ red plague [fire]
Playing about her:
The sleep-thorn set Odin
Into that maiden
For her choosing in war
The one he willed not.16
The ‘shield-may’ is the valkyrie Brynhildr, marked from the outset by her wilful
rebelliousness, and banished by Óðinn to a remote mountain top, isolated from
society. This is immediately reminiscent in general terms of Eustacia Vye – ‘she
felt like one banished’ to Egdon Heath, Hardy writes, but ‘here she was forced to
abide’ (p. 65).17 That Hardy should characterise Eustacia’s rebelliousness as ‘smoul-
dering’ (p. 64) is only one of the many connexions Hardy repeatedly makes between
Eustacia and the element of fire (as John Paterson, among many other critics, notes,
15 Björk notes that ‘the number of ... al usions to pre-Christian and classical places, heroes, heroines and goddesses, poets, philosophers, legends and monuments is remarkable’,
‘“Visible Essences” as Thematic Structure in Hardy’s The Return of the Native’, English Studies 53:1 (1972), 52–63, at p. 53.
16 Völsunga saga, trans Morris and Magnússon, p. 67.
17 In the light of the verse quotation, note also that Paterson characterises Eustacia as
‘captious’, Making, p. 20.
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‘Eustacia was ... persistently identified with fire’).18 Brynhildr is discovered by
Sigurðr surrounded by fire on a mountaintop; Eustacia – again at first unidenti-
fied – is discovered by the reader standing on top of a barrow on top of a hil . She
is not surrounded by fire; such an image, striking in the context of heroic legend,
would not be possible in the naturalistic context of The Return. But Hardy associates Eustacia’s hill top isolation as closely as possible with the bonfires of November the Fifth, the date on which the novel opens, for the moment her mysterious figure, the
‘queen of the solitude’ (p. 12), descends the hil , she is replaced by local men and boys carrying firing for a great bonfire, which they proceed to light. Eustacia and Wildeve use smaller fires as a signalling device for their trysts. Hardy describes one of these trysting signals as creating ‘a scene [which] had much the appearance of a fortifica-tion upon which had been kindled a beacon fire’ (p. 54) – an even closer reflection of Brynhildr’s high hall on Hindfel . And as we shall see, fire is a profoundly significant element in the final fate of both Wildeve and Eustacia, as it is in the Norse sources.
Hardy stresses the supernatural in his heroine: ‘Eustacia Vye was the raw material
of a divinity’ (p. 63). The local people see this supernatural aspect more negatively; Timothy Fairway cal s her ‘the lonesome dark eyed creature up there, that some say
is a witch’ (p. 47), and Mrs Yeobright also reports the popular view of her as a witch:
‘People say she’s a witch, but of course that’s absurd.’ (p. 164) As Paterson has shown, in Hardy’s various revisions of the text, Eustacia’s ‘actual’ identity as a witch has been consistently played down, and recast rather as rural superstition,19 but ‘the witch-like Avice Vye [Eustacia’s original in the earliest draft of the novel] was not easily suppressed’.20 Whether as witch or goddess, the supernatural aspect of Eustacia Vye
was clearly fundamental to Hardy’s conception of her.
Valkyries are most obviously associated with warriors and battlefields. In a
powerful scene, much commented on by critics of the novel, Eustacia dresses as a
Turkish knight and joins a party of mummers performing in the Yeobright house. In
her disguise, she is ‘armed from top to toe’ (p. 128) – just like Brynhildr the valkyrie in Vǫlsunga saga, first described in Morris’s translation as ‘all-armed’.21 Sigurðr does not therefore immediately recognise Brynhildr as a woman, but ‘he takes the helm
off the head of him, and sees that it is no man, but a woman, and she was clad in
a byrny...’22 Eustacia’s cr
oss-dressing is just as effective in the novel’s narrative, for she is general y accepted as a male figure. Clym Yeobright is the only one to suspect
Eustacia’s real gender – ‘He was gazing at her ... After lingering a few seconds he
passed on again’ – and then he confirms his suspicions, ‘“I have an odd opinion,” he
said, “and should like to ask you a question. Are you a woman – or am I wrong?”’
(p. 145)
Leonard W. Deen writes with telling specificity about the ‘heroic masculine role
to which [Eustacia] is always aspiring’ as being fulfilled in the mumming scene,23
18 Paterson, Making, p. 145 .
19 Ibid., p. 88.
20 Ibid., p. 80.
21 Völsunga saga, trans Morris and Magnússon, p. 69.
22 Ibid.
23 Leonard W. Deen, ‘Heroism and Pathos in Hardy’s The Return of the Native’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 15 (1960), 207–19, at p. 211.
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and without apparently noticing the Norse parallels, repeats his sense of an heroic
dimension to the representation of her: ‘Eustacia Vye, more than any other of
Hardy’s protagonists, seems intended to be grandly heroic ... She is alone, rebellious, even powerful.’24 However, Deen also seems to sense that this heroic dimension to
Eustacia is somewhat factitious, and not, as it were, arising in any way natural y from Hardy’s creation of her character, for he goes on to complain that ‘she does little to demonstrate or justify the dazzling array of qualities Hardy ascribes to her’.25 And
again very oddly, Eustacia describes herself to Wildeve as one who ‘desires unrea-
sonably much in wanting what is called life – music, poetry, passion, war’ (p. 285, my emphasis). This is a curious collocation of desires for a woman, or, indeed, any
non-soldier. But it is fundamental to the nature and function of Old Norse valkyries
to long for war; Brynhildr’s very name means ‘battle-byrnie’.
One might feel that the mumming episode alone is not close enough in detail
to bear the weight of the case that Eustacia is a latter-day valkyrie, purposeful y
based by Hardy on Brynhildr in the Old Norse sources. And of course the register,
