Historical Background

Atlakviða

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Hunninge Image Stone on Gotland, Sweden, with imagery that probably refers to Atlakviða, or another story or poem on the same events. On the top of the stone, there is a man carrying a ring, who may be Sigurd or the messenger Knéfrøðr. On the bottom left, the scene depicts a woman watching the snake pit where Gunnar is lying.

Atlakviða (The Lay of Atli) is one of the heroic poems of the Poetic Edda. One of the main characters is Atli who originates from Attila the Hun. It is one of the most archaic Eddic poems, possibly dating to as early as the 9th century. Owing to its stylistic similarity to Hrafnsmál it has been suggested that the poem might have been composed by Þorbjörn Hornklofi.^[1]^[2]^[3] It is preserved in the Codex Regius and the same story is related in the Völsunga saga. In the manuscript the poem is identified as Greenlandic but most scholars believe that this results from a confusion with Atlamál. The metre of the poem alternates irregularly between málaháttr and fornyrðislag. This may be an indication that two or more original poems have been merged or that the short and long lines were not felt as constituting two different metres at the time the poem was composed.

Historical background

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Atlakviða’s subject relates to the historical interaction between Burgundians and Huns in the 5th century. The poem is the oldest surviving version of the legend about the visit of the Burgundian rulers to Atli’s court and the revenge of Guðrún. Ultimately derived from Burgundian heroic legend, the Scandinavian literature about the subject is believed to be based on either Low German models or Gothic poems that reached Scandinavia via the Baltic region.^[4]

Scholars date the composition of Atlakviða to around the year 900, which makes it one of the oldest lays of the Poetic Edda. The 13th-century Codex Regius, in which the poem survives, says that it was written in Greenland, but the early composition date makes this implausible, since Greenland was not colonized until around 985. A Norwegian origin is considered likely.^[4] Due to stylistic similarities to the skaldic poem Hrafnsmál, the medievalist Felix Genzmer argued that Atlakviða was written by that poem’s author Þorbjörn Hornklofi in 872;^[5] it may at least have been inspired by Hrafnsmál.^[4] The metre in Atlakviða combines málaháttr and fornyrðislag, which together with stylistic variations also has led to suggestions that the poem was written by several authors. In the Scandinavian material, the same story is treated in a different way in the later poem Atlamál and retold in prose in the Völsunga saga.^[4]