Völundarkviða — The Smith's Revenge

The poem opens with swan-maidens flying from the south to a lakeshore, where three brothers — Völund among them — take them as wives.^[1] But after years the maidens fly away again; and while his brothers go to seek theirs, the smith Völund stays alone at his forge, waiting, making rings for his lost wife's return.

It is a tender, melancholy beginning to a brutal poem: the great craftsman in love, waiting faithfully at his anvil for a wife who has flown. The rings he forges are tokens of that waiting — and they will be his undoing, for it is his hoard of gold rings that draws the greed of a king. The smith's art, born here of love and longing, will become, by the poem's end, an instrument of horror.

King Níðuð, coveting the smith's matchless work and his gold, seizes Völund in his sleep, robs him of his rings and his sword — and, to keep so valuable a craftsman from ever escaping, has him hamstrung, the sinews of his legs cut, and set on a lonely island to forge treasures for the king alone.^[1]

This is the cold, calculated cruelty at the poem's heart: maim the genius, and keep the genius working. Níðuð does not kill Völund — he cripples him, reducing the proud smith to a lamed prisoner at a forge, a tool to be owned. It is the most chilling kind of greed: not destroying what it wants but disabling it into captivity. And it plants, in the maimed smith left brooding on his island, a revenge that will be exact and total.

Völund begins his revenge. He lures the king's two young sons to his smithy with the promise of treasure, and kills them — and then makes of their bodies a craftsman's horror: their skulls, hidden by their hair, he sets in silver and sends to Níðuð as drinking-cups; their eyes he makes into gems for the queen; their teeth into brooches for the princess.^[1]

It is one of the most savage passages in all the Edda — the maimed smith turning his unmatched skill to atrocity, sending the murdered children back to their parents as tableware and jewels they will wear and drink from unknowing. The genius that Níðuð maimed to possess is now an engine of revenge, and Völund's craft — the very thing the king prized — becomes the instrument of his ruin. The horror is deliberate, exact, and cold.

The king's daughter Böðvild brings Völund a broken ring to mend — and the smith, completing his revenge, plies her with drink, lies with her against her will, leaving her with child, and so dishonours the king's line as he has destroyed it.^[1]

The violation of Böðvild is the third and last stroke of the smith's vengeance, and the darkest — the daughter ruined as the sons were killed, the royal house dishonoured in every branch. The poem does not flinch from it, and a modern reader cannot either: Völund's revenge, for all the wrong done to him, makes innocents its victims, and the maimed smith becomes as monstrous as the king who crippled him. The wronged genius and the atrocity are held together, unresolved.

His revenge complete, Völund rises into the air — for he has secretly forged himself a pair of wings — and hovers over the hall to taunt the broken king with all he has done: the sons dead, the daughter dishonoured, the treasures made of their bodies.^[1] Níðuð, sleepless and joyless since his sons were slain, can only listen; and the smith flies free, beyond all reach.

So the poem ends with the maimed prisoner escaping on wings of his own making — the ultimate triumph of the craftsman over the king who thought to own him. Völundarkviða is the corpus's darkest study of revenge: genius wronged and maimed, turned to atrocity, and rising at the last out of captivity on the very skill its captor coveted. Níðuð is left with everything — the smith's gold, his sons dead in his hall, his line poisoned — and Völund, lamed but unbroken, vanishes into the sky. The wronged craftsman destroyed by no one, and destroying all.