Wayland the Smith

Seven hundred rings hung on a rope of bast in a hall at the edge of Wolf-Dale, and the man who made them counted them the way a farmer counts sheep. He had come in from hunting with bear meat to roast, and the wind-dried wood caught fast and burned well. He ate. He stretched out on the bearskin and went along the rope, ring by ring, and found one gone. He decided his wife had come home while he was out. He slept on that thought, and woke with chains on his hands and fetters holding his feet together.

That is where the oldest story the Germanic world tells about a craftsman turns, and it turns because a man was too good at his work to be left in peace. The Norse call him Vǫlundr, the English called him Welund and Weland, the Germans Wieland, the French Galans. The name goes back to a Proto-Germanic form built on the word for skill, so he is, quite literally, the crafting one. A gold coin dug out of a field near Schweindorf in East Frisia and now in the Ostfriesisches Landesmuseum in Emden carries the runes wela(n)du and dates to somewhere between 575 and 625, which would make it the earliest surviving trace of the name. Whether it names the legend or a moneyer who had borrowed the legend’s name for himself is not settled.

By the early eighth century an English carver was cutting the scene into whale bone. On the front of the Franks Casket, a small box in the British Museum barely twenty three centimetres long, Weland stands in his forge gripping a skull in a pair of tongs while a headless body lies under his anvil, and immediately to the right of him three kings approach the Virgin under the carved label mægi. Whoever designed that box thought the two births belonged side by side. Two centuries later a scribe copying the Exeter Book opened the poem now called Deor with Welund, who tasted misery among snakes, a stout-hearted man who had sorrow and longing for company and cold as sharp as winter, and then the refrain that carries the whole poem: that passed away, so may this. Weland made the mail shirt Beowulf wears. Weland made the sword in Waldere. Alfred the Great, translating Boethius, asks where now are the bones of Wayland, goldsmith preeminently wise. In the Latin Waltharius a spear fails to go through a man because Wieland’s rings of hardened mail stop it. He is everywhere in early English and German verse, always as the guarantee of a weapon’s quality, and no full account of him survives in Old English at all.

For that we go to Iceland. The Völundarkvitha stands in the Codex Regius in poor condition, full of gaps and prose patches, and it is one of the oldest poems in the collection. Its prose introduction makes Völund and his brothers Egil and Slagfith the sons of a king of the Finns, though the verse itself calls him the master of elves and the greatest of elves, which does not fit a Finnish prince at all. The Thithrekssaga gives him a different family again, making him the son of the giant Vadi and having him taught his trade underground by two dwarfs, then sending him to King Nithung’s court across the sea inside a hollow log. The stories cannot agree on where he came from. They agree completely on what happened to him.

Three women in swan garments came to the lake at Wolf-Dale and stayed with the three brothers for seven winters, and in the eighth their longing came back and they left. Egil went east after Olrun and Slagfith south after Swan-White. Völund stayed, made gold and rings, and waited. Then Nithuth, lord of the Njars, heard that the smith was alone. His men came by night in studded mail with their shields shining in the waning moon, took one ring off the rope and left the rest, and lay in wait. When Völund was in chains, it was the queen who looked at him and said his eyes gleamed like a snake’s, and told them to cut his sinews and set him on an island. They cut the tendons behind his knees. They put him on Sævarstath, where he made precious things for the king and no one but the king dared visit him. The stolen ring went to the king’s daughter Bothvild. The king wore Völund’s own sword on his belt.

The king’s two young sons came to see the treasure chest. Völund told them to come back the next day, alone, and to tell nobody. They came. He struck off their heads and hid their feet under the sooty straps of the bellows, set their skulls in silver and sent them to their father as drinking cups, made gems of their eyes for their mother and a brooch of their teeth for their sister. Then Bothvild broke her ring and brought it to the only man who could mend it. He gave her beer until she slept, and he raped her, and the poem does not soften it. Vengeance I have now for all my hurts, he says, save one alone. This is a revenge story and the revenge is monstrous.

He rose from the island laughing and Bothvild went from it weeping. How he rose the poem never says, which is the largest of its many holes; the Thithrekssaga fills it with a feather cloak sewn from birds his brother Egil shot for him, and with a bladder of blood strapped under Wayland’s arm so that Egil’s arrow, aimed on the king’s order, would seem to kill him. Hovering out of reach, Wayland made the king swear oaths on the rail of a ship and the rim of a shield and the shoulder of a horse and the edge of a sword that no harm would come to the woman carrying his child, told him exactly what had become of his sons, and flew. The last words belong to Bothvild, who tells her father it is all true and that she had no strength against such a man.

Everything he can do follows from the forge, and so does everything that can be done to him. His power is that no one else can make what he makes, which is why kings take him alive rather than kill him, and why the sword, the ring and the mail shirt keep surfacing in other people’s poems centuries later. His weakness is the same fact seen from the other side. Skill is portable, so a man can be carried off and set on an island with it. He can be crippled, and he stays crippled; the sinews are never healed and his one stated regret is that they were cut. He can be robbed while he sleeps, which happens because he is waiting for a woman who is not coming back. What cannot be taken from him is the work itself, and he uses it to make the worst objects in Northern legend out of the bodies of children.

England kept him longest, and kept him gentler. A Neolithic long barrow on the Ridgeway above the Vale of the White Horse, built in two phases between about 3590 and 3400 BC and holding the bones of eleven men, two women and a child, was called Weland’s Smithy in a Saxon charter of AD 955, thousands of years after the last burial and long after anyone remembered who was in it. John Aubrey recorded it in the seventeenth century. It became one of the first monuments in the country to be legally protected, in 1882. The tradition attached to it is the mildest thing anyone ever said about him: tether your horse at the stones, leave a small coin, walk away, and the invisible smith inside will have shod it by the time you come back. Iceland kept a stranger memory. From the fourteenth century, Icelandic scribes writing about a labyrinth called it Völundarhús, the house of Völundr, translating the Latin domus Daedali. Two lamed masters, two flights, one word for the maze.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Wayland the Smith?

Wayland the Smith is a legendary master blacksmith of Germanic legend, known in Old English as Weland, in Old Norse as Vǫlundr and in German as Wieland. He is famous for two things: making weapons and armour of unmatched quality, and taking a terrible revenge on the king who crippled and enslaved him. His fullest surviving story is the Old Norse poem Völundarkvitha in the Poetic Edda.

What did Wayland do to King Nithuth’s family?

After King Nithuth had his sinews cut and imprisoned him on an island to work as a captive smith, Wayland killed the king’s two young sons when they came to see his treasure chest. He made silver-mounted drinking cups from their skulls and sent them to the king, gems from their eyes for the queen, and a brooch from their teeth for the king’s daughter Bothvild, whom he then drugged and raped before escaping by air.

How did Wayland escape from the island?

The Poetic Edda simply shows him rising into the air out of reach of the king’s archers and does not explain how, which is one of several gaps in a badly preserved poem. The Thithrekssaga supplies the missing method: his brother Egil shot birds and gave him the feathers, and Wayland made himself a feather cloak or set of wings from them.

Is Wayland the Smith a god?

No source treats him as a god with a cult. The Völundarkvitha calls him the greatest of elves, its prose introduction makes him the son of a king of the Finns, and the Thithrekssaga makes him the son of a giant and a pupil of dwarfs, so the traditions disagree about what he is. He is best understood as a legendary hero and craftsman rather than a deity.

Why is a Neolithic burial mound called Wayland’s Smithy?

A chambered long barrow on the Ridgeway in Oxfordshire, built between about 3590 and 3400 BC, was already being called Weland’s Smithy in an English charter of AD 955. Local tradition held that if you left your horse tethered there with a small coin, the invisible smith would shoe it while you were away. The name was given by the English long after the tomb’s builders were forgotten.

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