by Ben Waggoner
10. Wade or Wate is alluded to as a mighty giant or hero, often associated somehow with the sea, in several German and English medieval romances (McConnell, The Wate Figure in Medieval Tradition). Few tales of him have survived, although Chaucer mentions an entertaining “tale of Wade” in Troilus and Criseyde (Wentersdorf, “Chaucer and the Lost Tale of Wade,” pp. 274-280). Wade was also remembered in northern English folklore as a giant who built roads and forts (in fact Roman ruins; Young, History of Whitby, pp. 724-726).
11. Zealand is the largest island in Denmark, home to the present-day capital Copenhagen. (This contradicts the statement in ch. 23 that Wade’s estates were in Sweden; this is probably just a mistake by the writer.)
12. Some manuscripts call the place Kallava, but Paff argues that Ballova is more correct, meaning something like “fire mound.” He adds that this is probably the present-day town of Balve in Westphalia (Geographical and Ethnic Names, pp. 115-116). There are in fact many large and deep caves near Balve, along the Hönne River valley.
13. The motif of a giant wading across a strait or sound, carrying a person or people, is widely distributed in Celtic lore (Mac Cana, “Note on the Motif of the Wading Giant,” pp. 141-147), and might have been borrowed. The Grønsund (Norse Grænasund) separates the island of Falster from the islands Møn and Bogø, all part of Denmark. An ell was more or less two feet (60 cm), although the precise definition varied.
14. Tricky. Norse eptir can mean either “after” or “according to”. “After the appointed day” seems the likeliest reading of eptir stefnudag, implying that Wade will be there on time; but Haymes interprets it as “according to the appointed day,” meaning that Wade won’t be there on time.
15. Chaucer mentions “Wades boot [Wade’s boat]” in the Merchant’s Tale, as a metaphor for deception. It’s possible that Wieland’s boat was transferred to his father, or vice versa, but this is not certain (McConnell, The Wate Figure, p. 79; Wentersdorf, “Chaucer and the Lost Tale of Wade”, pp. 280-284). Incidentally, Wade’s boat in English folklore was called Guingelot or Wingelock—a name which J. R. R. Tolkien later borrowed for Eärendil’s ship Vingilótë (The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 142-144).
16. The northwest coast of Jutland, facing the North Sea. Wieland would have drifted more or less due north, from the mouth of the Weser along the west coast of Denmark.
17. The motif of a lifelike statue mistaken for a real person seems to have been borrowed from the lay of Tristan and Isolde. It appears in several sagas (Kalinke, “Arthurian Echoes”, pp. 155-156) and may have entered Norse literature by way of Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, a translation of a now-lost early version of the lay (chs. 79-86; transl. Schach, pp. 119-130).
18. Testing a sword by letting a river current carry wool against its edge appears in Völsunga saga ch. 15, and may be alluded to in a few other sagas. (Ellis Davidson, The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 163-164)
19. Richard Wagner’s opera Siegfried (Act I, scene 3) depicts the hero filing down his father’s broken sword into shavings before melting and reforging it. Wagner is known to have read a German translation of Þiðreks saga, and the plot of Siegfried is closer to Sigurd’s early life as told in Þiðreks saga than to the Nibelunglied, Völsunga saga, or the Eddic poems. In Þiðreks saga Sigurd has no ancestral sword to reforge; since Wagner needed his Siegfried to have one, he may well have borrowed this detail from Velents þáttr (Cooke, I Saw the World End, pp. 105-106; Magee, Richard Wagner and the Nibelungs, p. 19, 47).
20. As unlikely as it sounds, this may be based on actual techniques. Smelting steel with bird dung supposedly makes it stronger by adding carbon and nitrogen (Hummel, Understanding Materials Science, p. 133). The 11th-century Arabic scholar al-Biruni cites an 8th-century reference to refining iron by feeding it to ostriches; he also claims that the Rus and Slavs did this in his time (Biruni, Book of Precious Stones, p. 214; Zeki Validi, “Die Schwerter der Germanen”, pp. 23-24). A paste including pigeon dung and other ingredients was used by medieval armorers in forging pattern-welded swords. Also, because poultry swallow shiny grains in preference to dull ones, metal extracted from bird intestines contains less slag. (Ellis Davidson, The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 159-161, Appendix A p. 220)
21. This sword also appears in Fragment A of the Old English poem Waldere, in which Waldere (Walter of Aquitaine) carries Mimming and praises it as Welandes weorc. In Saxo’s telling of the Balder myth, Mimingus is a “satyr” who owns the only sword sharp and strong enough to kill Balder (History of the Danes III.70-71, transl. Ellis Davidson and Fisher, pp. 70-71, n9 p. 52). It’s possible that Saxo confused the name of the sword with the name Mimir, who appears in Þiðreks saga as the smith who first taught Wieland and Siegfried. (Whether this Mimir is related to the god Mimir in Snorri’s Edda is far beyond my scope.)
22. Varangians (Norse Væringjar) means Norsemen; it was the common term used for the Vikings in Russia and Byzantium. The Norse word originally meant “sworn persons; persons united in a pact”.
23. Studas and his famous horse herds were introduced in an earlier section of Þidreks saga called Æska Þiðreks konungs (King Thidrek’s Youth). Later, in the section Veizla Þiðreks konungs (King Thidrek’s Feast), we find out that Sigurd’s horse Grani and Thidrek’s own horse Fálki are brothers of Skemming, all coming from Studas’s stud. The name Skemmingr probably means “shortener”, i.e. “the one that makes a journey short.”
24. In Völundarkvíða Egil is said to have married the swan-maiden Ölrún. This has no connection with the plot of Þíðreks saga, in which Ölrún does not appear. The Norse translator may have added this brief observation to his text so that his readers could recognize the figure from their own version of the story.
25. Several versions of the “William Tell” legend appear in Norse lore. Toko (Palnatoki in other sources) is forced by King Harald Gormsson of Denmark to shoot an apple from his own son’s head (Saxo Grammaticus, Danorum Regum Heroumque Historia X.ii, transl. Christiansen, p. 6); and Heming Áslaksson is forced by King Harald Harðráði to shoot a nut from the head of his brother Bjorn (Hemings þáttr, transl. Faulkes, p. 16). This is probably a widespread folktale motif; the Scottish border ballad “Adam Bell, Clem of the Clough, and William of Cloudesley” (Child 116, verses 151-170) tells how William of Cloudesley shot an apple from his son’s head (Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 3, pp. 29-30).
26. The original uses two different words, gripr and gambr; both mean “vulture”, but gripr is apparently borrowed from German Griff, while gambr is the usual Norse word.
27. The name is Viðga in Norse; I’ve used a German form. Witege/Viðga goes on to become one of Theodoric’s mightiest heroes, wielding the sword Mimung that Wieland himself forged. As early as the fourth century, the historian Jordanes mentioned a legendary Gothic hero named Vidigoia. By at least the late Anglo-Saxon period, he was associated with both Weland and Theodoric; the fragmentary epic Waldere mentions Weland’s son Widia, and the poem Widsith mentions two heroes named Wudga and Hama, probably the same as Viðga and Heimir in Þiðreks saga.