by Adam Roberts
I shall come back to Hamlet in a moment. For now, I am trying to tease out some of the riddles of ‘characterisation’ as they appear in Tolkien’s work. To that end I am going to discuss a lesser-known piece of Tolkienian writing.
In the mid to late 1930s, at around the time he was working on The Hobbit, Tolkien was also pondering the story of Volsungs. More to the point he was attempting to solve what he took to be one of the large-scale riddles of this body of myth; and to that end he wrote, apparently for his own satisfaction (certainly he did not try to publish it during his own lifetime), a modern English poem in a scrupulously imitated pastiche of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. This was later edited for publication by his son Christopher as Sigurd and Gudrún: 170 pages of heroic poetry, attended by 200 pages of detailed editorial commentary. It is possible that you are already familiar with the story of the Volsungs and the Niblungs; perhaps from the original Sagas, or from the Prose Edda—or perhaps in one or other modern retelling. The most celebrated of these are both later nineteenth century. Englishman William Morris’s The Story of Sigurd the Volsung (1876) was once a fairly famous poem, and one Tolkien certainly knew. Most famous of all is Wagner’s operatic recasting of the legends, Der Ring des Nibelungen (1869–74). But it is a complicated legend that involves a whole chunk of story, and it seems to me that Tolkien addresses it as a riddle, in the larger sense. Accordingly I am going to summarise it here; for it is not really possible to talk about the poem without reference to the legend Tolkien is retelling, and these legends perhaps are not as well known as they might be.
The story starts, as the best ones do, with an enormous pile of treasure. The Norse god Odin has been imprisoned by an individual called Hreidmar. It so happens that Hreidmar and his sons can take the form of animals, if they choose; and Odin has been imprisoned because he previously killed Hreidmar’s son Otr (in the form of an otter). To get free again, Odin ransoms himself with a hoard of treasure that he, in turn, takes from the dwarf Andvari. The dwarf is naturally enough unhappy about having to relinquish his gold, and begs Odin’s middleman (Loki) to be allowed to keep one ring. Denied this, he curses the whole hoard, and the ring especially. Hreidmar gets his gold, though, and Odin goes free.
That, in effect, is the backstory. Tolkien’s focus is not so much on these supernatural beings as the mortal dynasty of the Volsungs; but it is worth touching on what happens to this gold in the meantime. Hreidmar’s remaining sons, Regin and Fafnir, desire it, and kill their father to get it. Regin demands his share, but Fafnir wants to keep it all to himself, so he puts on a ‘Helm of Terror’ to scare his brother away. Fafnir then takes the form of a terrible dragon, and curls up on his pile of gold in a lair, which is, as we all know, how dragons like to enjoy their wealth.
It is at this point that Odin’s grandson, Volsung, enters the story. He has eleven children, and we are particularly concerned here with his son and daughter Sigmund and Signy. Signy marries a neighbouring king, Siggeir of the Gauts. But Siggeir is a bad sort. He betrays the alliance and chains up all ten sons of Volsung in the forest to be eaten by wolves. Only Sigmund survives that unpleasant fate, and he takes his vengeance on nasty Siggeir with the help of a son conceived upon his sister Signy, wife of his enemy and Queen of the Gauts. The Gauts are slaughtered, but Signy chooses to die with her husband, which, since she hates him, is a rather puzzling decision.
Sigmund returns to his land and rules as king, and here (a) his incestuously conceived son is killed, and (b) he marries again and fathers Sigurd. Since Sigmund dies in battle before his son is born, and since his mother also dies, Sigurd is raised in the forest by Regin (from the backstory). Now we get onto more familiar, Wagnerian story-territory. Sigurd grows up to be the greatest warrior in the world. Regin decides to use him to get his hands on the treasure hoarded by his dragon-brother, sending him to do what Regin is too weak or cowardly to do himself: kill Fafnir. Regin intends, after Sigurd has managed this, to eat the dragon’s heart—thus gaining supernatural wisdom—and afterwards to dispose of Sigurd. And indeed Sigurd does kill the dragon. On Regin’s instruction he cuts out and cooks the dragon’s heart for him. But the fat spits and burns Sigurd’s hand. When he instinctively puts this wound to his mouth Sigurd tastes the dragon and acquires the ability to understand the birds. They tell him of Regin’s evil plan and Sigurd quickly kills him with his sword.
The treasure is now Sigurd’s. What next? Well, some birds tell Sigurd that the most beautiful woman in the world, the celebrated Brynhild, is lying on a mountaintop, surrounded by a wall of fire, waiting for the mightiest warrior in the world to brave the flames and claim her. So off Sigurd goes, leaps the fire and wakes Brynhild with a kiss. The two fall in love, and swear oaths of fidelity to one another. This takes us up to the end of Wagner’s opera Siegfried, Siegfried being the German form of Sigurd’s name.
Now Gudrún enters the tale. She is the daughter of king Gjúki and his sorceress-queen Grímhild. When Sigurd goes to stay with them (now we are into the story of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung) Grímhild decides he would make a good husband for her daughter. That he is in love with, and sworn to, Brynhild is clearly an obstacle, but Grímhild gets around this by giving him a memory-erasing magic potion. I say memory-erasing, although presumably the only portion of Sigurd’s memory that gets erased is the bit about having met and fallen in love with Brynhild. Anyway, under the influence of this potion Sigurd agrees to marry Gudrún. Since this makes Brynhild once again marriageable material, Grímhild decides that her son, Gudrún’s brother Gunnar, can marry her. The problem here is that Gunnar is not the mightiest warrior in the world (that is Sigurd) and so can not broach the wall of fire to get to her. But by means of another handy magic potion, Grímhild gives Sigurd the outward appearance of Gunnar. He then, obligingly enough, rides off and claims Brynhild on Gunnar’s behalf. Brynhild is, as you might expect, a bit confused by this, but goes along with it; and Sigurd-in-the-likeness-of-Gunnar seals the deal by giving Brynhild the cursed ring from Andvari’s hoard.
Brynhild, coming to the court of Gjúki as Gunnar’s betrothed, is naturally distressed to find Sigurd already in residence, and pledged to Gudrún. Things get, narratively, a little confused at this point. You might think Gunnar would be grateful to Sigurd for taking on his form and braving the wall of fire to win him the world’s most beautiful woman. But instead he decides he is going to kill him, and although he is too squeamish, or scared, to do so directly, he persuades his half-brother Gotthorn to stab Sigurd in his sleep. (According to the legend the dying Sigurd hurls his sword at Gotthorn and cuts him in half.) When grief-stricken Brynhild goes off to throw herself onto Sigurd’s funeral pyre, everyone seems happy to see her go, which again seems odd given the trouble they all went to get her in the first place. In Tolkien’s version they say: ‘Crooked came she forth / from cursed womb / to man’s evil / and our mighty woe.’2
That is the end of the story of Sigurd and Brynhild. The remainder is Gudrún’s story. Griefstruck at this turn of events, she is nevertheless married off to ‘Atli’ (Atilla the Hun) in a dynastic treaty-style wedding. But Atli has heard of the huge hoard of gold. He wants it; and when he invites Gudrún’s brothers Gunnar and Högni—the two men in the world who know where the treasure is—to a mighty feast, he is actually planning to torture them into revealing its location. Gunnar and Högni come with their war band, and there is a big fight at Atli’s court, with a good deal of hewing, smiting and slaying. Eventually the Huns capture both brothers. Gunnar promises to tell Atli where the treasure is, provided he brings him his brother Högni’s heart, cut out of his breast. Atli cuts out a slave’s heart and tries to pass it off as Högni’s (although why he should wish to spare Högni is far from clear); but the heart trembles with fear when it is presented to Gunnar, so he knows it can not be Högni’s. So finally Atli chops out Högni’s actual heart. It doesn’t tremble, so Gunnar knows his brother really is dead. Then he refuses to tell Atli what he wants to know (even though he prom
ised to); and, wrathful, Atli throws him in a pit of snakes.
Naturally upset by the deaths of her brothers, Gudrún decides on revenge. She and Atli are parents to two children, the rather sweetly-named Erp and Eitill. Sweetness is not their fate though: Gudrún kills them, makes their skulls into cups, liquifies their flesh, serves it in the skull-goblets and feeds it to her husband. After Atli has supped she tells him what she has just done. The horrified man takes to his bed without even pausing to punish Gudrún for her crime. Gudrún creeps in later that night and knifes him to death. Then she burns the palace down, wanders in the woods for a while forlorn, and finally drowns herself in the ocean. That is the end.
This is the story Tolkien decided, probably in the early 1930s, to retell in verse. He did so, in Christopher Tolkien’s opinion, in part to come up with solutions to the various problems, the narrative chicanes and oddities of motivation the original presents the reader, amongst which are: why does Sigurd leave after winning Brynhild the first time? Why not marry her straight away? Why, since she is already betrothed to Sigurd, does Brynhild agree to marry Gunnar? Sure, he breaches the wall of fire (it was actually Sigurd in his likeness, though Brynhild does not know that) but not only does she not want to marry him, she has already sworn herself to somebody else. After he wins Brynhild why does Gunnar decide to kill Sigurd? And having done so, why does he let Brynhild immolate herself? And finally, after traveling together to Atli’s court, and fighting side by side against Hunnish treachery, why does Gunnar demand the heart of his beloved brother Högni? The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún offers answers to most of these questions, although sometimes a little obscurely. In part this is a function of the poem’s extreme terseness. Events are compressed, elided or even omitted altogether, such that going through Sigurd and Gudrún feels like reading the epitome of a longer poem.
The main lacuna in the Volsung story is accidental. The earliest version of the tale is today preserved in a document called the Codex Regius, now kept in Copenhagen. It is in two parts: after the first thirty-two leaves, or pages, a passage has been lost, perhaps eight pages long. Tolkien thought these eight pages, containing a significant chunk of ‘the Long Lay of Sigurd’ had been deliberately stolen.
Without it we have two separate stories. Story A takes the conventional, satisfying form of the hero overcoming the monster and getting the girl: Sigurd slays Fafnir, and wins the beautiful Brynhild. That, we might think, looks like a very serviceable Happily Ever After. But wait, here is Story B: Brynhild will only marry the bravest warrior in the world. She loves Sigurd, who fits that bill. But Sigurd is betrothed to Gudrún; and Brynhild is won instead by Gunnar. The braided wires of these four lovers’ destinies go into the black box of the story and come out the other side with Sigurd murdered in his sleep, a grieving Brynhild throwing herself on his funeral pyre, and Gudrún heartbroken.
Now, the big question (the missing section of Codex Regius) is how we get from Story A to Story B. But the black box portion of Story B is a problem too. As far as that goes, Tolkien jotted down ‘notes … on his interpretation of the tangled and contradictory narratives that constitute the tragedy of Sigurd and Brynhild, Gunnar and Gudrún’, written, in Christopher Tolkien notes, ‘very rapidly in soft pencil, and difficult to read’. Tolkien’s sequence of events, rather clearer in his notes than in his actual poem, is: Brynhild finds out about the deception (that it was not Gunnar, but Sigmund-in-the-likeness-of-Gunnar, that won her) and is ‘mortally wounded’ in her pride; so wounded, indeed, that she decides not only to kill Sigurd, but to ‘avenge herself upon Gunnar’ for his part in the deception. Accordingly she ‘lies terribly against Sigurd and herself’, and tells Gunnar that when Sigurd—in Gunnar’s form—rode through the flames, he had sex with her. This, not being part of the deal, outrages Gunnar. He has Sigurd killed; but once this is accomplished Brynhild comes out with the truth, so revealing that Gunnar has unjustly slain his sword-brother and widowed his sister. It all makes sense, although according to a rather stiffly limitedly consecutive logic of human motivation. But it does not address the bigger problem of how Brynhild is still behind the wall of flame waiting to be claimed after Sigurd has already ridden the wall of flame and claimed her in his own name. How, in other words, do we get from Story A to Story B? How can Sigurd, having once sworn himself to Brynhild, then go on to swear himself to Gudrún?
There are two possible answers to this question. One of them is simple and psychologically interesting. The other is implausible, awkward and much less interesting, psychologically speaking; but because it preserves a sense of Sigurd’s ‘noble heroism’ it is the one Morris, Wagner and Tolkien follow.
This second explanation has already been mentioned: Sigurd unwittingly drinks a magic potion that makes him forget his first love. But it does not have to be that way. There is a much simpler and more satisfying explanation available to us. Why does Sigurd act this way? Because especially where matters of love and sexual desire are concerned, men’s oaths are not necessarily to be trusted. Now this solution to the ‘riddle’ has the advantage not only of being—to put it simply—true as far as the world-at-large is concerned. It also turns Sigurd from a type into a character. It stops him being an improbable epitome of manly virtue, and presents him instead as genuine, resonant and three-dimensional—shifts him from being a static icon from myth. Turns him, in other words, from an antique statue into a modern individual.
But I know of no version of the story that spins things this way. Our investment in Sigurd’s dull Heroic Nobleness and absolutely unimpeachable honour is, perhaps, too profound. And something of the same marionette-like logic rusts Tolkien’s Brynhild too: her only motivation her own wounded pride, her method dependent upon an assumption of absolute truthfulness.
This is where the comparison with Hamlet comes in. The story that Shakespeare worked into his celebrated play is an ancient one, and found in many cultures. In the sources that Shakespeare used it is fairly straightforward. Hamlet is the king’s son. His father is killed by his uncle in a palace putsch. There is nothing secret about this palace revolution—it is an open coup d’état. To consolidate his power the usurper executes key figures of the old guard. Hamlet, as the old king’s son and heir, is evidently at danger of death, and to avoid this he lights on a clever plan. He pretends insanity, hoping that his uncle will consider him harmlessly beneath contempt as a madman. The ruse works, and Hamlet is able, under the disguise of madness, to kill his father’s murderer.
Now what is crucial here is the way Shakespeare adapts this story. In his version Hamlet is still the son of a royal father killed by his uncle in a palace putsch. But the coup d’état is secret; Claudius murders Old Hamlet in his garden and everyone thinks the old king died of natural causes in his sleep. Claudius’s succession to the throne is regarded as legitimate. Moreover, one of the first things Claudius does in Shakespeare’s play is announce to the whole court that young Hamlet is next in line to the throne, effectively adopting him as his son. So rather than facing his imminent death, Hamlet finds himself royal heir and a prince of the realm. He has no need to protect his life by pretending to be mad.
He pretends to be mad anyway.
Why? In Shakespeare’s play it is hard to say exactly; or more precisely it is hard to say why in the terms of the play’s sources, because those sources treat characters as logical and rational agents. If characters in those sorts of stories do a certain thing or act in a certain way, there must be a straightforward reason why. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a much more profound piece of characterisation. The play precisely requires us to try and puzzle out why Hamlet acts the way he does. To what extent is his madness play-acting, and how far has grief forced an actual irrationality to the surface in his behaviour? Shakespeare understood what Freud, centuries later, was to build a career elaborating: that often our motives are hidden even from ourselves; that our subjectivity is made up as much of the irrational as the rational (of the unconscious as the conscious). That, more
over, this is particularly true with respect to traumatic events such as bereavement; and it is equally so with regard to repressed and taboo desires. Even Hamlet does not really understand why he gets so very furious with his mother in her bedroom. He rationalises his rage as a commitment to public chastity, especially for the over-forties, but that is not the real reason he gets so murderously het-up. Where sex is concerned it can be hard for us to untangle our motives.