The Legend of Brynhild

Islandica #43

by Theodore Murdock Andersson

THE definitive (English-language) book on the Volsung-Nibelung cycle of legends. This is good, solid philology not so much a critical analysis of the works but an essential volume on sources, textual transmissions, variations, and so forth. Beside the simple -- but very important -- fact that the story of the Volsungs and Nibelungs is one of the great tragic-heroic legends of the world, what is unique about studying this cycle is the opportunity it gives us for examining the "same" legend as it manifests itself throughout an all-but bewildering variety of versions, spread over numerous centuries and across several different geographic regions. Andersson's is a fascinating, highly detailed work.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Volsung]

THE definitive (English-language) book on the Volsung-Nibelung cycle of legends. This is good, solid philology old-style: not so much a critical analysis of the works but an essential volume on sources, textual transmissions, variations, and so forth. Beside the simple -- but very important -- fact that the story of the Volsungs and Nibelungs is one of the great tragic-heroic legends of the world, what is unique about studying this cycle is the opportunity it gives us for examining the "same" legend as it manifests itself throughout an all-but bewildering variety of versions, spread over numerous centuries and across several different geographic regions. Andersson's is a fascinating, highly detailed work.

[Siren · Rating 4 out of 5]

An in depth analysing of the character Brynhild from the heroic lays of Sigurd Fafnísbane. Andersson states in his introduction that sadly not much space has been made for this character in traditional norse scholarship, and he is right. This book is a much needed illumination of the best character (I'm not biased) written in Norse medieval literary tradition.

Andersson is a swell scholar. He comes from a long german tradition and it shows in his focus on stemma and recreating original texts. Some interpretations can feel a bit far fetched and wishful thinking based on very little from time to time, but what isn't in this field of philology?

What I liked about this is Andersson taking the time to extract the texts in summarised English, and translating all quotes done in German and Norse into English for quick reading. He is also very transparent in his favourtism towards Brynhild, and that is always appreciated.

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andersson reopens the theories of Andreas Heusler on source studies of the texts surrounding Siegfried and Brynhild. Andersson puts forward the idea that there was a lost Brynhildslied, that brynhild was originally the main character of the poem. In reconstructing the lost Brynhildslied, Andersson analyses the heroic poems in the Edda and compares them to texts such as Das Lied Vom Hurnen Seyfred, Thidrekssaga, Nibelungenlied and the Volsunga saga. An excellent study of the Norse heroic poems.

[Joseph Leake]

A very good guide through what is a notoriously knotty subject, the (often-bewildering) multiplicity of medieval German and Norse versions of the "Nibelung" legend -- a subject that seems to have a penchant for yielding either lost texts or conflicting accounts at exactly the moments most crucial for analysis. Hugo Kuhn once said that the complexities of the legend offer the "Königsproblem," the "king" or "master problem," of German philology: there's something haunting about it, as well as inexhaustibly intriguing, and it's no wonder that it has fired the imagination of artists as different as Richard Wagner and J.R.R. Tolkien.

But Andersson's clear writing and careful organization of material nicely conducts the reader through the maze of medieval tellings and retellings, adaptations, syntheses, variants, and lost poems (plus of course their hypothetical reconstructions).

The book is now over forty years old, and therefore not up-to-date in scholarship; on the other hand, the pre-1980 scholarship it engages with remains foundational and influential today. Andersson also offers many original insights and interpretations of his own, some of it (in my estimation) spot-on, some of it doubtful, but always worth reading.

For example, if you assume that the legend as we have it emerged from an originally distinct "mythological" story which was joined to a "historical" one, then a number of aspects of the legends development and transmission look rather different from what Andersson asserts. (I personally am of the conviction that the motif of the revelatory ring, a motif present but different in each version of the story, is central to the issues at hand, but Andersson gives little attention to it.)

This is a rich and thought-provoking book -- granted that philological puzzles of this sort are exactly my kind of thing; but even were they not, this would still prove a highly illuminating work.