The Story of the Volsungs

questions, but are content to abide by existing authorities, doing our utmost to make our rendering close and accurate, and, if it might be so, at the same time, not over prosaic: it is to the lover o

he student over well known to be worth mentioning, but which ma

nd finally from songs, which, written down about his time, are still existing: the greater part of these last the reader will find in this book, some inserted amongst the prose text by the original story-telle

e prose of the Volsung Story, premising that these are the only met

the prose is put together; to a certain extent they cover the same ground; but the latter half of the second is, wisely as we think, left untouched by the Sagaman, as its interest is of itself too great not to encumber

King Alf, there is no trace left of any metrical origin; but we meet the Edda once more where Regin tells the tale o

rifir of the Saga), where the whole story to come is told with some detail, and which certa

to the "Lay of Fafnir"; for the insertion of the song of

which, in its metrical form, is inserted by the Sagaman into his prose; but the stanza relating Brynhild's awaking we

him, of the quarrel of the Queens, the brooding grief and wrath of Brynhild, and the interview of Sigurd with her - of all this, the most dramatic and best-considered parts of

ntly at the beginning, gives us something of Brynhild's awakening wrath and jealousy, the

as this last, but giving a different account of Sigurd's slaying; it is very incomplete, though th

"First Lay of Gudrun", the most lyrical, the most complete, and the most beautiful of all the

. the Sagaman has rendered into prose the "Ancient Lay of Gudrun", except for the beginning,

anything in the prose except that the Sagaman has supplied from it a link or two

s, and court, are recounted in two lays, called the "Lays of Atli"; the longest of these, the "

d of in the last four chapters of the Saga, are very grandly and poetically given in the songs

has dealt with; but one other, the "Lament of Oddrun",

anners or unused element may at first trouble him, and to meet the nature and beauty with which it is filled: we cannot doubt that such a reader will be intensely touc

or this is the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks - to all our race first, and afterwards, when the change of t

d EIRIKR MAGNUSSO