by Tom Birkett
instruction that a sword must be laid chastely between their bodies even in death.
It might be noted at this point that the motif of an unconsummated marriage,
supposed by onlookers to have proceeded more conventional y, belongs both to the
Old Norse story of Sigurðr, impersonating Gunnarr and sharing a bed with Bryn-
hildr, though with the sword between them, and the exquisitely embarrassing scene
at the beginning of The Return when, supposing the marriage between Wildeve and Thomasina to have taken place, the locals sing in celebration outside Wildeve’s inn,
The Quiet Woman.
In the Old Icelandic Laxdœla saga, as I have explained, the author similarly
transposes the heroic narrative of the legend of Brynhildr into the context of natu-
ralistic society. In the saga, the blameless Hrefna, the faute-de-mieux wife of the Sigurðr-figure Kjartan, who fails to marry his first love, is even more reminiscent
of Thomasina, whom Wildeve concedes rueful y to be ‘a confoundedly good little
woman’ (p. 80). In the tragedy of the lovers’ deaths, Thomasina, like her saga coun-
terpart, is left as the grieving widow. However, in the Poetic Edda, with the death
of Sigurðr the whole course of the narrative shifts to focus on Guðrún’s subsequent
history. From passive, blameless victim of the consuming passion of Sigurðr and
Brynhildr who in her grief speaks the two great laments for Sigurðr which dominate
this section of the Edda, Guðrún takes over as the central figure in a new set of
episodes. But Thomasina too, who is presented as loving and remaining loyal to
the unworthy Wildeve, is distraught at his death, and although Thomasina is not
nearly as dominant a figure as her equivalent in the Old Norse, Hardy represents
her great grief in terms which inescapably recall the Old Norse. Guðrúnarkviða
in fyrsta, Guðrún’s first lament for Sigurðr, al udes to a melodramatic version of his murder in which Guðrún awakes to find Sigurðr bleeding and dying in their
marital bed. In the second lament, however (in Morris’s poetic appendix) Guðrún
is awaiting Sigurðr’s return, and recal s her shock at the sight instead of his riderless horse Grani returning home. In Morris’s translation, Guðrún speaks:
Then greeting [weeping] I went
With Grani to talk,
And with tear-furrowed cheeks
I bade him tell all;
But drooping laid Grani,
41 See Frank Giordano, ‘Eustacia Vye’s Suicide’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22 (1980), 501–21.
194
Heather O’Donoghue
His head in the grass,
For the steed well wotted
Of his master’s slaying.42
In The Return, Wildeve is missing from home, and Thomasina, fearing that he is planning to run away with Eustacia, begs Clym to go after him. Her first indication
of the tragedy is the sight of Wildeve’s horse: ‘When she came to the covered car, the horse, though fresh from the stable, was standing perfectly stil , as though conscious of misfortune [my italics]. She saw for the first time whose it was. She nearly fainted
...’ (p. 376).
Many readers have felt that Egdon Heath itself plays such a major role in The
Return – presented by Hardy almost as having a life of its own – that one should consider its character alongside the other personages in the novel. This raises more
intriguing parallels with the Norse material, and takes us some way towards the first
of the two questions with which I plan to conclude this piece: that is, what might
Hardy’s purpose have been in his use of the Norse material?
Egdon Heath and the Settings of Eddic Verse
Egdon Heath is a place – and its inhabitants, the characters in the novel, are a
community – distinctly isolated from any wider context, both geographical and
social; I have already cited Eustacia’s sense of having been ‘banished’ there. In fact, Hardy explicitly associates Egdon Heath with Iceland – the home of Vǫlsunga saga
and the Poetic Edda (though not the actual setting of the heroic legend) – at the
outset. He argues that there may come a time when bleak landscapes such as Egdon
Heath will become attractive to tourists, and speculates that similarly ‘a gaunt waste in Thule’ or ‘spots like Iceland’ may, like Egdon, come to serve a new appreciation
of what constitutes a beautiful landscape (p. 4). Further, Hardy peppers this stretch
of speculation with oblique al usions which, in conjunction with the explicit refer-
ence to Iceland, may be taken to evoke Old Norse mythology. For example, he
imagines the heath as a sentient entity which is in a permanent state of anticipation, awaiting ‘one last crisis – the final Overthrow’ (p. 4). Of course, it is not only Old Norse mythology that features a final apocalypse – in Old Norse, Ragnarǫk, or the
judgement of the gods. However, in the opening chapter, Hardy al udes twice to
the notion of ‘Twilight’, and the Old Norse Ragnarǫk was invariably translated into
English as ‘the Twilight of the Gods’.
Hardy stresses the immense age of Egdon Heath, and the way it has remained
unchanged from time immemorial, ‘from prehistoric times unaltered’, continuing:
‘The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence’ (p. 6). Significantly for our
purposes, the rituals and practices of the heath’s inhabitants are also presented as
enduringly ancient. In fact, at the novel’s opening and closing scenes, these ancient
practices are specifical y identified as Norse traditions – the only specifical y Norse al usions in the whole narrative. Thus, the bonfires which are lit on November the
Fifth are said by Hardy to owe less to the relatively recent history of the Gunpowder
42 Völsunga saga, trans Morris and Magnússon, p. 216.
Heroic Lay to Victorian Novel
195
Plot than to ‘festival fires to Thor and Woden’ – that they are, indeed ‘lineal descendants’ of pagan rites to ‘the fettered gods of the earth’, ‘fettered gods’ being a phrase used of the divinities of Old Norse paganism (p. 15). Similarly, at the end of the
novel, the maypole festivities are described as ‘fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten’ (p. 390) – in the nineteenth century, ‘Teutonic’ was
the adjective most commonly used of Old Norse mythology. It seems that part of
Hardy’s purpose is to present the heath’s inhabitants too as time-travellers, contem-
porary manifestations of ancient, unchanged humanity; latter-day heroes and
valkyries, even.
The Old Norse material, relating events presumed to have taken place in a far
distant heroic age, has very little detail in terms of geographical or physical setting.
The actions of Sigurðr and Brynhildr seem to take place in a sort of epic other-
world, far removed from history and present time. Egdon Heath furnishes just such
a setting for the action of The Return. I have already discussed Eustacia’s feeling of having been banished there, and the physical and social isolation of the heath is
everywhere apparent in Hardy’s narrative. Anne Alexander takes this further: ‘the
reader regards the country through a strangely subdued light – as if the reader were
regarding a “dream”, or kind of projection from an unconscious world’.43 Though
I would not follow Alexander any further in her exploration of dreams and the
unconscious in relation to the novel, her sense of the landscape and society of Egdon
Heath as a p
lace ‘out of time’ is reminiscent of the way the Old Norse authors isolate their characters and action from any geographical or historical context. The court
of King Giúki is never materialised as a place in time; it has no explicit chronotope.
Many of the poems in the Poetic Edda begin with an assertion that the events took
place so long ago that it cannot be known just how old they are.
Hardy’s Use of the Poetic Edda: Some Final Thoughts
Even with the evidence of earlier versions of the novel, and the consequent possi-
bility of establishing Hardy’s changing or developing conceptions of character and
action, it is not possible – and perhaps not even justifiable – to pinpoint just when in the conception or development of the novel the influence of the Old Norse may have
taken effect. For instance, a chilling feature of Brynhildr’s response to the death of Sigurðr is her terrible and vengeful laughter. Sinister laughter from Eustacia seems
to have been a feature of early versions of the novel – but as John Paterson has
shown, Hardy tended to minimise this laughter. For example, Eustacia’s expressions
of impatience and dissatisfaction with her exile on the heath original y included
sardonic laughter, which Hardy revised out; Paterson supposes that Hardy felt that
this would have been ‘a laughter which, under the circumstances – the darkness of
the heath, and her complete solitude – could only have had an evil significance’.44
Even more strikingly, when Eustacia sees a light in the window of Wildeve’s inn, she
can make out Thomasina and Wildeve, who, in an early version of The Return, must have considered themselves properly married. In this situation, Eustacia emits ‘a
43 Anne Alexander, Thomas Hardy: The ‘Dream Country’ of His Fiction (London, 1987).
44 Paterson, Making, p. 19.
196
Heather O’Donoghue
satirical laugh’ – subsequently deleted by Hardy. Paterson reads Eustacia’s laugh as
follows: ‘that the dark figure ... was actuated by an emotion more typical of the angry witch than the lovesick woman. The “satirical laugh” strongly suggests a vengeful or at least malicious intention.’45 I think that Paterson is right in his response to Hardy’s first draft, but I would argue that the laughter derives from Hardy’s knowledge of
Brynhildr. However, excising it makes Eustacia less like her Old Norse counterpart.
It may also be worth mentioning that the Old Norse word cognate with the
English word ‘heath’, heiðr, is a prominent element in the placenames associated with the Norse legends. As related in the eddic poem Fáfnismál, and foretold in Grípisspá, for example, Sigurðr slays his dragon, and finds the gold hoard, on Gnitaheiðr: ‘Glittering heath’. Did Hardy create Egdon Heath under the influence
of the Old Norse texts, with their prominent ‘heath’ placenames; texts to which he
was attracted because of their ‘quadrangular’ story of a missed match and unhappy
marriages ending in tragedy? Or having established Egdon Heath as his setting for
a story about an unhappy marriage, was he struck by the similarity between this
and some Old Norse texts he had come across, sufficiently struck by it to adapt his
original conception to mirror more closely the Old Norse narrative, and to embel-
lish his own narrative with some intriguing echoes of it (though in due course, to
play down some of the parallels, such as Eustacia’s unnatural laughter)?
Without clear evidence of Hardy’s reading, these issues are hard to resolve.46 It
is evident that he did indeed know some Old Norse literature. In The Woodlanders
there are several overt references to Old Norse mythology. Marty South steps out
into the dark night which was ‘like the very brink of an absolute void, or the ante-
mundane Ginnung-Gap believed in by her Teuton forefathers’.47 She shies away
from looking at herself in a mirror when she has cut off her long hair: ‘she dreaded
it as much as did her own ancestral goddess in the reflection in the pool after the
rape of her locks by Loke the Malicious’ (p. 21). Giles Winterbourne, cutting away
the top of a tree on a foggy evening, is described as inhabiting a ‘gloomy Niflheim’
– the dank and misty underworld of Old Norse myth (p. 95), and Grace Melbury
and her father make their way past trees whose leaves ‘rustled in the breeze with a
sound almost metallic, like the sheet-iron foliage of the fabled Jarnvid wood’ (p. 53).
Mary Jacobus plausibly speculates on Hardy’s reading of Old Norse: ‘Hardy may
have known Mallet’s Northern Antiquities and the Prose Edda; certainly he would have known the account of Norse mythology which Carlyle derived from it in the
opening lecture of On Heroes and Hero-Worship.’48 She is just as definite in sourcing these al usions in The Woodlanders: ‘there is a source nearer to home for his al usions to Niflheim and Jarnvid wood – Arnold’s “Balder Dead”’. But none of these
texts in fact provides a source for the Sigurðr and Brynhildr material in The Return; they are, rather, al usions to Old Norse mythology – a different body of material
45 Ibid., p. 29.
46 See Lennart Björk, ‘Hardy’s Reading’, in Thomas Hardy: The Writer and his Background, ed. N. Page (London, 1980), pp. 102–27.
47 Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, ed. Dale Kramer (Oxford, 1996), p. 16. All citations from the novel in the text are from this edition.
48 Mary Jacobus, ‘Tree and Machine: The Woodlanders’, in Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (London, 1979), pp. 116–34, at p. 118.
Heroic Lay to Victorian Novel
197
– and not to the heroic material of the Poetic Edda and its derivative Vǫlsunga saga.
And a more pressing issue than tracking down Hardy’s reading emerges here. Why
(unlike in The Woodlanders) are there no proper names from Old Norse myth or legend in The Return – especial y given that, as I have indicated, and other critics have noted, Hardy is notably free with his al usions to other pagan mythologies?
In fact, Hardy takes pains to efface any specifical y Norse element in his narra-
tive. Although, as I hope I have shown, the figure of Eustacia owes a great deal to
the character and actions of Brynhildr in the Norse material about Sigurðr, Hardy
explicitly denies any Germanic origin for her: describing her features he writes: ‘that mouth did not come over from Sleswig with a band of Saxon pirates whose lips met
like the two halves of a muffin’ (p. 64). In the course of his many revisions, he final y specifical y identifies her father as being from Corfu, one of ‘a series of changes that would establish Eustacia Vye as the incarnation on Egdon Heath of the glory that
was Greece’, as Paterson puts it.49 Throughout The Return, Eustacia is associated with Greece. As we have seen, she is introduced as ‘the raw material of a divinity’
– but specifical y one of the Greek pantheon, on Mount Olympus (p. 63). Lennart
Björk notes that Eustacia ‘is throughout the novel associated with the pagan world’,
and that The Return is ‘the most pagan of all Hardy’s books’50 but John Paterson is clear that this pagan world is a classical one: ‘In establishing his heroic context, Hardy evoked the antiquity of the Celts and the Hebrews as well as that of the
Greeks. The classical al usions, however, far outnumber the Celtic and Hebraic.’51
It should be noted again that Paterson – in my view very insightful y – identifies
Hardy’s commitment to a heroic register in what seems to me to be an awkward
conjunction with his rural setting. In fact,
I would argue that this disjunction and
the resulting discomfiture one may feel with the novel dominate the narrative and
our experience of it.
We are left, then, with a novel which tries, and arguably fails, to present the rural
in terms of the heroic. My sense is that this is the result of Hardy’s recourse to an
heroic source – the Old Norse lays of Sigurðr and Brynhildr – and his attempt not to
elevate but by contrast to lower the register to the rural, the domestic, the everyday.
Hardy evidently wanted more for his novel than that it should simply be a version
– a translation, almost – of his sources: like Morris’s ‘Sigurd the Volsung’. This in
itself may account for his careful concealment of the Old Norse. Further, it may be
the case that Hardy felt that classical Greek al usions were more acceptable than Old
Norse ones. In his study of Hardy’s revisions, John Paterson writes of the pressures
on Hardy not to offend the readers of the Belgravia magazine in which The Return
was serialised: ‘although The Return of the Native frequently dramatizes the opposition between Christian and pre-Christian attitudes ... no explicit denigration of
Christianity was permitted to enter the text’.52 I wonder if Hardy felt that Eustacia’s 49 Paterson, Making, p. 110.
50 Björk, ‘Visible Essences’, pp. 55 and 53.
51 John Paterson, ‘The “Poetics” of The Return of the Native’, Modern Fiction Studies 6
(1960), 214–22, at p. 215, note 6.
52 Paterson, Making, p. 88.
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Heather O’Donoghue
thrillingly ‘pagan eyes’ (p. 64) might have been more acceptable to his audience if
they assumed that they were classical y, rather than Nordical y, pagan.
In conclusion, it seems to me undeniable that in terms of structure, event and
character, Hardy turned to Old Norse traditions about Sigurðr and Brynhildr in
creating The Return of the Native. It is clear that there was an explosion of interest in Old Norse literature and mythology in Victorian England around this time, as
Andrew Wawn has so persuasively shown,53 so it is perhaps not surprising that
Hardy was amongst those taken up by the Old Norse. And yet it is also clear that
incorporating the Old Norse, and especial y, his transposition of the heroic to the
