Translating Early Medieval Poetry

by Tom Birkett

  the actions and the setting are all necessarily different in the two texts. But there

  are a number of close detailed parallels which cumulatively make a surprisingly

  strong case for specific al usions to the Old Norse original, even though individual y they might reasonably be dismissed as intriguing coincidences. Thus, for instance,

  when in Vǫlsunga saga Sigurðr meets Brynhildr again, returned from her valkyrie-existence to her foster-father’s hal , she is introduced as ‘Budli’s daughter’.26 Eustacia is a native of Bud mouth – the name of Hardy’s fictional town perhaps suggested to him by Budleigh Salterton, in Devon, whose first element is virtual y the same as

  Brynhildr’s patronymic.

  Eustacia lives an existence isolated from society, like Brynhildr’s isolation on the

  mountaintop, but not entirely alone: she shares a house with her grandfather, old

  Captain Vye, a shadowy character whose function seems only to provide Eustacia

  with a home; their relationship remains very distant, and this distance allows

  Eustacia an unusual degree of independence and freedom of action. Captain Vye is

  the very first figure to appear in the novel, not named or identified, but described by Hardy as ‘an old man’, wearing a hat, a cloak, and travelling on foot along a country

  road (p. 7). The god Óðinn in Old Norse sources typical y appears as just such a

  figure; one of his nicknames is ‘Vegtamr’, the wayfarer.27 Perhaps it is merely coin-

  cidence – or an unconscious association on Hardy’s part? – that the road Vye is

  travelling is like ‘the parting-line on a head of raven hair’, ravens being the birds

  of Óðinn. But later in the novel, an unexpected accident befal s Captain Vye: his

  bucket drops into his wel , and he and Eustacia are unable to draw any water. As we

  learn from stanza 28 of the Old Norse mythological poem Vǫluspá, Óðinn lost one of his eyes because he gave it up to the well of Mímir, in exchange for wisdom. And

  final y, we may return to the eddic stanza from Fáfnismal relating what the birds tell Sigurðr about Brynhildr. She has been punished by Óðinn for her wilfulness by

  24 Deen, ‘Heroism and Pathos’, p. 207.

  25 Ibid., p. 211.

  26 Völsunga saga, trans Morris and Magnússon, p. 83.

  27 See E. O. G. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North (London, 1964), p. 62.

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  being pricked with a sleep-thorn: in Morris’s translation ‘The sleep-thorn set Odin

  / Into that maiden’.28 A version of this story is familiar in fairytale form: the heroine of The Sleeping Beauty is pricked with a distaff and consigned to sleep within a wall of briars until woken by the hero. But it may also remind us of an arresting incident in The Return: Susan Nunsuch pricks Eustacia with ‘a long stocking needle’

  (p. 179), and though Eustacia does not fall into a long sleep, she at least ‘fainted

  away’. Both the bucket in the well and the prick with the needle serve a narrative

  function in bringing together Eustacia and Clym, but the precise form of each event

  is not strictly material to Hardy’s plot; in other words, it is hard to see any necessary rationale for events involving wel s and sharp objects unless Hardy did indeed have

  the material of Vǫlsunga saga and associated Norse myth in mind.

  If, then, we can see some parallels between old captain Vye and Eustacia on the

  one hand, and Óðinn and his valkyrie Brynhildr on the other, what of the other

  characters in the novel? The ‘quadrangular’ structure of the story of Sigurðr and

  Brynhildr begins with Sigurðr’s initial ‘betrothal’ to the valkyrie Brynhildr, following his discovery of her on Hindfel . Morris incorporates several stanzas from the eddic

  poem Sigrdrífumál at this point in the narrative, concluding his chapter with a verse in which Sigurðr seems to commit himself to Brynhildr – ‘Thy love rede will I /

  Hold aright in my heart / Even as long as I may live’ – evidently in an attempt to

  emphasise their betrothal. It is striking that Brynhildr – quite unlike most other saga heroines – concurs without needing to ask any permission for betrothal; the relationship between her and Sigurðr is completely independent of any family involve-

  ment on the part of either of them. Brynhildr gloomily predicts however that their

  love is fated, and that Sigurðr will marry Guðrún, Giúki’s daughter. When Sigurðr

  travels to the court of King Giúki, Guðrún’s mother Grimhildr has ambitions for

  her daughter to marry Sigurðr the dragon-slayer, and gives him an amnesiac potion

  to make him forget about Brynhildr. In turn, Guðrún’s brother Gunnarr is urged

  by Grimhildr to marry Brynhildr, but she is on her mountaintop, surrounded by

  wildfire, and will marry only a hero who is brave enough to ride through the wall of

  flame. Gunnarr is unable to do this – even riding Sigurðr’s horse – but Grimhildr’s

  sorcery extends to allowing Sigurðr to assume the form of Gunnarr, and in this

  form he and his horse Grani leap over the flames, and Brynhildr, ‘in heavy mood’,

  concedes that she must marry the suitor she supposes to be Gunnarr.29 Sigurðr, as

  Gunnarr, ‘abode there three nights, and they lay in one bed together; but he took the

  sword Gram and laid it betwixt them’.30

  Both marriages go ahead, forming the ‘quadrangle’ of the two couples. But when

  Brynhildr boasts to Guðrún that her husband Gunnarr is the better man, having

  ridden through the wall of flame to woo her, Guðrún reveals the true state of affairs: that the rider was Sigurðr. Brynhildr ‘waxed as wan as a dead woman’.31 Her grief

  is enormous, and frightened by her almost catatonic state Sigurðr even offers to

  ‘put away’ Guðrún and marry her, but Brynhildr refuses, and declares: ‘I will not

  28 Völsunga saga, trans Morris and Magnússon, p. 67.

  29 Ibid., p. 97.

  30 Ibid., p. 98.

  31 Ibid., p. 100.

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  live’.32 She incites her husband Gunnarr to kill Sigurðr, and Guðrún’s grief at his

  death is the subject of some of the most powerful poems in the Poetic Edda, the first and second laments of Guðrún, Guðrúnarkviða in fyrsta and Guðrúnarkviða ǫnnur. Significantly, Morris quotes the first lament in its entirety in his translation of the saga, and appends the whole of the second. Brynhildr, though, laughs when

  she hears of Sigurðr’s death, and kil s herself, having demanded that she and Sigurðr

  be burned together on the same funeral pyre, with the sword laid between them.33

  Plainly shapeshifting, wal s of flame, amnesiac potions and funeral pyres have

  no place on Egdon Heath (though there are plenty of bonfires, and the fiery images

  repeatedly associated with Eustacia). But given the major shift in setting and

  register, the story of Eustacia and her lovers in The Return has exactly the same broad outlines as the Old Norse legend of Sigurðr and Brynhildr. Eustacia and

  Wildeve are lovers, extra-marital y committed to one another without any societal

  sanction. But they fail to marry, and Wildeve marries Clym’s cousin Thomasina

  (original y his sister, just as Guðrún was Gunnar’s sister).34 Eustacia marries Clym

  Yeobright instead, but is still committed to Wildeve (and Eustacia, like Brynhildr,

  gloomily predicts the failure of their relationship, which, as in the saga, fails when Eustacia/Brynhildr realises that her husband is not the pre-eminent hero figure she

  believed she had married). In the end, although Wildeve/Sigurðr of
fers to ‘put away’

  his wife and resume a relationship with his first love, she refuses him and commits

  suicide; the lovers are final y reunited in death. Thomasina, like Guðrún, is left the grieving widow. Brynhildr’s primary reason for refusing Sigurðr’s belated advances

  is that, as she declares, she will not have two husbands in one hal . We can compare

  this with Eustacia’s moral delicacy about her relationship with Wildeve; she insists

  that when she lit a bonfire to entice him to her, it was in the confident belief that he had not married Thomasina. She too recoils from the idea of adultery, which might

  otherwise seem surprising in view of her detachment from the norms of society and

  her freedom from social constraint, a liberty which Hardy takes pains to emphasise:

  ‘she had advanced to the secret recesses of sensuousness, yet had hardly crossed the

  threshold of conventionality’ (p. 92).

  However, in spite of this overall similarity, the parallel breaks down with Eusta-

  cia’s lovers. Wildeve is no Sigurðr. In fact, as John Paterson explains, it seems that in the early versions of the narrative he was ‘a squalid and disreputable roué’ who

  had seduced and deceived Thomasina, and that ‘throughout his work on the manu-

  script and first edition ... Hardy was general y at pains to show Wildeve in a more

  generous light’.35 Although it would be assuming too much to suppose that in this

  amelioration of Wildeve’s character Hardy was simply trying to make him more

  like Sigurðr (for if he had this model in mind why then did he not create Wildeve

  as a glamorous figure from the start?) Paterson’s speculation about Hardy’s creative

  motivation is very striking: ‘Since he [Wildeve] was destined to die as her partner in a death by fire, nothing less than a transfiguration at least equal to hers would have 32 Ibid., p. 110.

  33 Ibid., pp. 115 and 117.

  34 Paterson, Making, p. 9.

  35 Ibid., pp. 76–80.

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  been appropriate.’36 It may be that as Paterson – without reference to an Old Norse

  model – has intuited, Hardy had the dramatic Old Norse denouement of his story

  in mind from the outset.

  Clym Yeobright, according to our quadrangular pattern, equates to Brynhildr’s

  husband Gunnarr but in fact there are some very arresting parallels between him

  and his shape-shifted alter ego Sigurðr. Most obvious is his association with what

  can only be called a gold hoard – in the Old Norse, Sigurðr’s booty from the killing

  of the dragon. Clym’s return from Paris causes a stir amongst the inhabitants of

  Egdon Heath, much as Sigurðr’s arrival at the court of King Giúki (from France,

  significantly enough) excites that community. Clym has been working as an assis-

  tant in a jeweller’s shop in Paris. That Clym had been a shopworker has discomfited

  some readers. John Paterson records that Hardy revised his position of ‘jeweller’s

  assistant’ to that of ‘a jeweller’s manager’ but complains that this was not enough

  to dignify Clym as a hero: ‘Assistant or manager, the shopkeeper remained a shop-

  keeper and, as such, incapable of the heroic.’37 Again, Paterson, without reference

  to any Old Norse model, senses that Hardy was striving to present ‘a hero of almost

  mythical proportions’.38 So why make Clym a shopkeeper? It may well have been the

  gold. As the furze-cutter Humphrey describes Clym’s place of work: ‘Tis a blazing

  great shop that he belongs to, so I’ve heard his mother say. Like a king’s palace as far as diments go. Ear-drops and rings by hat-ful s: gold platters: chains enough to hold

  an ox, all washed in gold.’ (p. 106) This is a veritable gold hoard.

  Although as we have seen Wildeve is not at all a figure of the stature of Sigurðr the

  dragon-killer, Hardy associates him with what looks like a rather daring if distant

  echo of Sigurðr’s most famous exploit. Clym’s mother, Mrs Yeobright, is dying on

  the heath, apparently of heat exhaustion and a broken heart. It is discovered that she has, additional y, been bitten by an adder. Notably, the doctor later makes it clear

  that her subsequent death was not directly the result of the snake poison; the adder

  is not a necessary element in the plot. Nevertheless, steps are taken to restore her

  by the application of an old folk remedy: ‘You must rub the place [of the bite] with

  the fat of other adders, and the only way to get that is by frying them’ (p. 297). A

  live adder is consequently killed, and Hardy elevates the stature of this snake with

  Christian Cantle’s characteristical y over-awed response to it: ‘How do we know but

  that something of the old serpent in God’s garden ... lives on in adders and snakes

  still?...’Tis to be hoped he can’t ill-wish us. Look at his eye...’ (p. 297). But more strikingly, while in the Poetic Edda Sigurðr wins a gold hoard once he has killed the

  dragon Fáfnir – as we are told in stanza 13 of Grípisspá, for instance – the same day as the adder is killed on the heath, Wildeve hears the news that he too has come into

  a fortune; an uncle in Canada has left him eleven thousand pounds. So on the one

  hand we have a gold hoard in a jeweller’s shop in Paris, and on the other, a perfectly naturalistic – if adventitious – legacy following the killing of a serpent. And just as the jeweller’s shop caused Hardy some uncertainty, as we have seen, so the killing of

  the adder, so closely associated with Wildeve’s windfal , is not intrinsic to the story 36 Ibid., p. 80.

  37 Ibid., p. 63.

  38 Ibid., p. 59.

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  of Mrs Yeobright’s death. It is hard not to conclude that Hardy has introduced them

  into his narrative under the influence of the Old Norse.

  Before moving on to consider the parallels between the deaths with which the

  novel ends, and the deaths of Sigurðr and Brynhildr in the Old Norse sources, I

  want to look briefly at the role of Mrs Yeobright in The Return. Clearly one of the major aspects of her place in the narrative is her relationship with her son Clym.

  But as Paterson shows, the ‘elaborate development of the mother-son motif was not

  contemplated in the original program of the novel’,39 concluding that the death of

  Mrs Yeobright ‘has less to do with the novel itself than with the personal emotion of

  the author’,40 and from what we know of Hardy’s own relationship with his mother,

  this may well be true. But if, then, the mother-son relationship did not original y

  figure so large, why does Mrs Yeobright play such a large part in the action of the

  novel? Again, I think we may look to the Norse sources. In the saga , the most significant character outside the lovers’ quadrilateral is Grimhildr, Gunnarr’s mother, and

  therefore the equivalent of Mrs Yeobright. It is she who, like Mrs Yeobright, seeks

  to control who marries whom, in the careful y arranged absence of any patriarchal

  figure. When Sigurðr arrives at the court of King Giúki (who plays no part in the

  action at all) his wife Grimhildr immediately schemes to have the great hero married

  to her daughter Guðrún, and then urges her son Gunnarr to marry Brynhildr. The

  first union requires Grimhildr to administer an amnesiac potion to Sigurðr, to

  make him forget his betrothal to Brynhildr; the second is even more difficult, since

  Gunnarr is not powerful enough to surmount the flames surrounding Brynhildr
–

  Grimhildr’s sorcery is required to enable Sigurðr to assume Gunnarr’s form and do

  it for him.

  The specifics of the Old Norse legend – shapeshifting, amnesiac potions – do not

  fit into Hardy’s Wessex world, and the pattern of relationships is not palimpsestic

  either. Mrs Yeobright disapproves of Wildeve from the outset (especial y under-

  standable given the original character Hardy gave him), rather than lionising him,

  as Grimhildr does Sigurðr, and she is heartbroken by Clym’s marriage to Eustacia,

  of whom she disapproves even more. All the stranger, then, that the complexities

  of Hardy’s quadrangular plot at length involve Mrs Yeobright scheming to make

  Wildeve marry Thomasina (even if only to regularise her situation) just as Grim-

  hildr schemes to make Sigurðr marry Guðrún. Broadly, then, the similarity with

  the Old Norse resides in the controlling dominance of both Grimhildr and Mrs

  Yeobright.

  The End of the Affair

  Hardy’s narrative of the deaths of Wildeve and Eustacia reproduces the Old Norse

  narrative in broad outline, if not precise detail, and there are a number of very

  striking elements which parallel the Old Norse. When Brynhildr discovers that she

  is married to the wrong man, as it were – that the hero who surmounted the flame

  wall was not her husband Gunnarr but in fact Sigurðr – she incites Gunnarr to

  39 Paterson, Making, p. 67.

  40 Ibid., p. 75.

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  kill Sigurðr, which he does (or at least, brings about). Hardy does not reflect this

  narrative at al , either directly or al usively. But Eustacia, like Brynhildr, despairingly commits suicide, and Wildeve dies with her.41 The weir-pool in which they

  drown together is described, paradoxical y sustaining the fire imagery associated

  with Eustacia, as ‘a boiling hole’ (p. 375). And both corpses are laid out on two beds like biers in the same room in Wildeve’s inn. This can be compared with Brynhildr’s

  despairing suicide in Vǫlsunga saga (and the poem Sigurðarkviða hin skamma), and her symbolic reunion with Sigurðr on their joint funeral pyre, in the Old Norse

  related even more overtly to their unconsummated marriage bed by Brynhildr’s