A seeress tells of the beginning of the world. She describes the ordering of the cosmos, the creation of the earth and sea, of time, tools, men and women and fate. This begins the history of gods and men.
One day, three gods kill an otter they find by a waterfall. They show the otter's skin to King Hreidmar, their host for the night, only to discover that the otter was the king's son, transformed to catch fish. Hreidmar vows to kill the gods unless they cover the otter's skin, inside and out, with gold. The god Loki goes back to the waterfall and catches the enchanted pike that lives there, guarding a hoard of gold. The pike, a transformed dwarf, gives Loki all of his gold, except for one dazzling ring. When Loki takes the ring, the pike warns him that it is cursed and will bring misery to whoever holds it. Loki covers the otter skin with the gold, inside and out. A single whisker pokes out, and Hreidmar demands that Loki cover it with the dazzling ring. Loki tells the king of the curse, but Hreidmar claims all the gold and drives the gods away.
King Hreidmar refuses to share the gold with his two remaining sons, Fafnir and Regin. Fafnir kills his father but refuses to share the gold with Regin. Fafnir transforms into a dragon, nesting on his brood of gold. Regin bides his time while he grooms the young warrior Sigurd to win back the gold for him.
Regin makes Sigurd a sword called Gram, sharp enough to slice the anvil that forged it. At Regin's urging, Sigurd slays Fafnir and roasts the dragon's heart. When a drop of the dragon's blood touches Sigurd's tongue, he suddenly understands the language of birds. The birds tell him to kill Regin before Regin kills him, and take the gold for his own. So Sigurd hacks off Regin's head while he sleeps. Following the bird's advice, Sigurd takes the gold and goes to seek a wife.
Sigurd rides his horse, Grani to the mountain where a valkyrie sleeps and through an enchanted ring of fire that surrounds her. He finds Brynhild, a supernatural warrior woman who is fated to marry whomever can ride through the ring of fire the god Odin has placed around her. Sigurd and Brynhild fall in love, but before they can marry, Sigurd must follow his fate to the court of King Gjuki and Queen Grimhild.
Grimhild decides to win the hero and his gold for her daughter, Gudrun. She gives Sigurd a potion of forgetfulness. He forgets his vows to Brynhild. He marries Gudrun and swears an oath of brotherhood with her brothers, Gunnar and Hogni. Then Grimhild decides that Gunnar should marry Brynhild. Sigurd rides with Gunnar to the valkyrie's mountain, but Gunnar cannot pass through the ring of fire. So Sigurd shape-shifts with Gunnar and rides through the fire to Brynhild in Gunnar's form. Brynhild must marry the warrior who rides through the fire, and so she marries Gunnar, though she still loves Sigurd. When Brynhild realizes that she was tricked into marrying Gunnar, her sorrow turns to rage. She presses Gunnar to kill Sigurd and he sorrowfully agrees. He and Hogni have sworn brotherhood with Sigurd, so they convince their brother Guthorm to do the deed. Guthorm kills the hero, but as he dies, Sigurd slices Guthorm in half. The cursed gold passes on to Gunnar and his kin.
Her revenge accomplished, Brynhild plunges a knife into her own breast, and asks to be burned on a funeral pyre with her beloved Sigurd. Gudrun is devastated by her loss of her love. She wanders the wilderness like a mad woman. Her mother presses her to marry King Atli, Brynhild's wealthy and powerful brother. Gudrun protests, but to no avail. And as she predicts, Atli soon plots to acquire the gold Sigurd left when he died.
Atli invites Gunnar and Hogni to visit, but when they arrive, they are captured. Atli offers to trade Hogni's life for Sigurd's gold. Gunnar demands his brother's heart instead, and Hogni laughs as his heart is cut out. Gunnar too chooses to die rather than tell Atli where the gold is hidden. The secret of the gold dies with him in a pit of vipers.
Gudrun gives Atli food and drink, which turn out to be the flesh and blood of their two young sons. Mourning fills the hall, but Atli has drunk himself to sleep. Gudrun stabs her husband and then tosses flames across the doors, barring exit. Fire consumes all within.
The seeress returns. She recalls the first war in the world, the first oath to be broken, misery, death and destruction for gods and men. Then she sees life return and all is well. But a dark dragon too has returned. And over the land it casts a dark shadow.
Introduction to the "project Edda"
by Benjamin Bagby
At a time when the Romans were loosing their grip on a vast colonial empire, a wandering tribe of warlike Germanic people from the Baltic coast came to central Europe, finally settling on the Rhine River in 413 and agreeing to an alliance with the Empire. But these ambitious folk, who were called Burgundians, expanded a little too fast and too far, and were eventually wiped out in 436 by another tribal alliance of fighters called Huns. The Burgundian survivors followed a long, Roman-dictated "trail of tears" and after many years ended up in the region we still call Burgundy today. One of their kings was called Gundaharius: he is the man named Gunnar in our story.
Most of early Germanic history is a collection of fragments, hearsay, reports from homesick Romans and the randomly scattered contents of burial mounds. The legend of the cursed Rhinegold, of the boy-hero Sigurd, of King Gunnar and his beautiful sister Gudrun, of Attila the Hun and his Valkyrie-sister Brynhild, are contradictory, weird, and seem to take place in a dreamscape which easily includes both Mirkwood forest, the Rhine River and the glaciers of Iceland. It is a legend based on names of places and people (some of whom existed), freely mixed with the old Germanic gods, cunning dwarves, dragons, shape-changers, magical swords and horses, supernatural beings and talking birds; an archaic story which enthralled many generations of Europeans as they listened to the bards and minstrels who formed the fabric of their tribal memories. As centuries passed, the Romans went home, Christianity was imposed, new stories were heard, and many old orally-transmitted tales lost their immediacy or were transformed into mere adventures until they were utterly unrecognizable or lost. But in a far corner of Europe, in Iceland, dozens of these stories lived on in the language of the Vikings and - luckily for us - were copied in the 13th century into a small parchment book: a humble, untitled manuscript which is now the greatest single cultural treasure of the Icelanders and is called the "Edda". The poems found there, which serve as the basis for our reconstructions, represent the highest art of bardic story-tellers and singers, whose tradition stretches into the people's remote pagan past. Their masterful style makes use of ingenious meters, a telegraphic, pithy diction perfect for vocalization, employing gnomic devices and poetic circumlocutions intended more to arouse associative imaging than to deliver information. Despite a marked tendency towards unsentimentality, pragmatism, even grisly humor, these Old Norse stories are full of the uncanny, the dreamlike: the reconstructions we present here bear witness to this. The Edda manuscript includes these tales of envy, gold-lust, revenge and the horrible power they have over that most sacred and holy human institution: the family. These are the archaic stories which we have liberated from the written page, where they were never really at home, and put back into the mouths of bards and the hands of minstrels.
We do not limit ourselves to this one dreadful family epic, but frame it with a prophecy taken from the same manuscript. The northern peoples' uncommon respect for worlds beyond their own was manifested in a willingness to heed what was spoken in prophetic and poetic modes. Völuspá is the name of one of the central poems of Old Icelandic tradition and can be translated as "the prophecy or vision (spá) of the seeress (völva)". These are the words of an immortal female being who speaks in the enigmatic expressions of oracle to a questioning but silent god Odinn; she speaks of time's flux, of the urges for growth and order, and the unconquerable forces of chaos. She tells how the world came about, and she also tells how it will end, stopping to ask her questioner: "Do you really want to know more?".
If this story is at all familiar to us today, it is probably thanks to the 19th-century German Romantics' fascination with all medieval stories and legends. We find these Eddic poems translated into German and published (by the Brothers Grimm!) already in 1815, and it is this edition, among other sources, which an industrious young composer named Richard Wagner consulted when working on the libretto for his "Ring of the Nibelung" music drama cycle, re-working and re-weaving a conflation of medieval sources and his own fertile imagination, in which Brynhild becomes Brünnhilde, Sigurd becomes Siegfried, and the terrifying apocalyptic battle between giants and gods becomes Götterdämmerung. But Wagner did not "rediscover" these stories any more than we did: 800 years ago an anonymous southern German court poet produced a hugely successful and extravagant verse retelling of the story, the "Nibelungenlied"; and not long thereafter the famously literary Icelanders themselves were re-acquianted with the whole deadly family affair through the prose "Volsunga Saga". Indeed, we are using material from this saga to fill in the gaps in the story where the Edda is silent. Sequentia and Ping Chong are in good company.
Sources: sung texts from the Codex Regius (Stofnun Årna Magnússonar, Reykjavik, Iceland) in the editions of Gustav Neckel / Hans Kuhn (Heidelberg, 1962) and Ursula Dronke (Oxford, 1969 & 1997). Additional story material for the video titles taken from the Volsunga Saga.
Instruments: 6-string lyres by Rainer Thurau (Wiesbaden, 1997 and 2001);
4-string fiddle by Richard Earle (Basel, 2001); wooden flutes by Neidhart Bousset (Berlin, 1992-98); swan's bone flute by Friedrich van Huene (Boston, 1998).
Sequentia wishes to thank Heimir Pálsson (Reykjavík) for his inspiring help with these difficult texts and their pronunciation. Thanks also to the Stofnun Árna Magnússonar (Reykjavík) for generous use of its sound archives during three research visits to Iceland, and to Prof. Ursula Dronke (Cambridge, UK) for access to her important work on the Edda prior to its publication.
The Reconstruction of Eddic Performance
Although we know that medieval epic poetry was the domain of bards and singers, no written musical sources of the Eddic poems dating from the Middle Ages are known to exist; indeed, we would have no reason to expect such sources to have been written at all. The milieu in which these poems were originally transmitted, sung, and acted out was that of a uniquely oral culture, and professional minstrels passed on repertoires and techniques from generation to generation without the hindrance and expense of writing. As is almost always the case with medieval song, the use of musical notation is linked to the world of the monkish scriptorium and the noble or ecclesiastical collector, not to the world of the practicing musician. We can assume that the performing traditions of the Edda were probably already in decline by the time the main text manuscript, Codex Regius, was copied in the 13th century. Given this situation, how can we possibly reconstruct sung performances of Eddic poems as they would have been known in pre-Christian Iceland?
The earliest witness which we possess to musical settings from the Edda is an account found in Benjamin de la Borde´s Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne, published in 1780. Among other examples (collected by a musician at the Danish Royal Court, Johann Ernst Hartmann), we find a strophe from the Völuspá set to a simple melody. Unfortunately, we will never know if this melody represents part of an unrelated Icelandic folk tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries, or if it indeed survived in this form from its origins as an oral formula for the vocalization of Eddic poetry.
In searching for paths to the vocalization of these texts, it was obvious to me that more musical information would be needed than this scrap of melodic material from the late 18th century, and I decided to make use of the techniques of "modal language" which Sequentia has developed over the years in work with medieval song. Briefly, we identify a mode not as a musical scale, but rather as a collection of gestures and signs which can be interiorized, varied, combined and used as a font to create musical "texts" which can be completely new while possessing the authentic integrity of the original material. But like the powerful magic mead which gives the god Odin the gift of poetry, this "modal mead" is a concoction which is both inspiring and dangerous. We need a strong knowledge of the practice of singing epic poetry as it still exists in various world cultures to show us how such performances must be given a form and a soul, to temper the limitless freedom of modal intoxication.
Having temporarily put aside monsieur de la Borde, where did I turn first for the basic ingredients of this modal brew? Iceland, of course. To give one example: in the sung oral poetry known as rímur - which in itself is a tradition dating from the 15th century, but whose roots may touch much earlier skaldic poetry - I found a vast repertoire of modal material, which clearly could be grouped into several types. During research residencies in Reykjavík in 1995 and again in 2001, I was graciously permitted to work in the tape archives of the Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, where I listened to hundreds of recorded performances of rímur and related song-types, making notes and analyses of the types and uses of modal materials. The result of this process of digestion (which included a weeding-out of obviously later melodic types) was a series of modal vocabularies grouped by structural "signals", which could then be taught to the other singers and applied to the metrics of the Eddic texts as taught to us by the Icelandic philologist Heimir Pálsson. Everything was learned in a process very much resembling oral tradition: we have only worked with our Edda texts and our memories; there were rarely any written musical documents. And in light of this knowledge, the melody found in de la Borde began to make sense. However one chooses to see its transmission, the fact is that this melody demonstrates characteristics which point to the use of a specific modal vocabulary consisting of a few limited elements which are repeated and varied. And so, the attentive listener might hear its "genetic code" echoed in our reconstructions, just as an experienced Icelandic rímur-singer hearing us sing these poems might find at times that some undefinable element makes him feel he actually knows the unknown piece being sung.
In cases where two singers declaim the same text, different versions of the modal gestures may sometimes be heard simultaneously, resulting in a kind of heterophonic texture (verging on improvised polyphony) typical of traditional musical cultures. The sound of parallel 5ths, still sung in Iceland today in the two-voiced tvísöngur, is also heard.
Other aspects of the reconstructive work include a study of Icelandic sources besides rímur, as well as a study of the ancient dance-song melodies of the Faroe Islands and certain Baltic traditional song forms.
Equally important in these musical reconstructions are the instruments which play independent pieces and also accompany the vocalists. In the 12th century, the two most important European instruments for courtly entertainment were certainly the fiddle and the harp, although other types of instruments (for instance, wind and percussion) were certainly known in popular culture. The harp which is used in this performance is copied from remains of instruments found in 7th-century Germanic burial sites. This type of "lyre" would have been known throughout northern Europe, together with the related triangular cithara which we recognize as the most common harp form. These instruments have very few strings (the lyre, for instance, has six gut strings), and the tuning systems, based on medieval theories of consonance, yield a series of basic intervals which in turn can inform the text being accompanied. The tuning system of the instrument is closely related to the mode which the singer has chosen, so that the instrument must be re-tuned to accompany in a new mode. Regarding playing technique, it hardly needs stating that an instrument of six strings is not suited to playing chords and elaborate melodies. Instead, we have here a harp type (such as is still known in several non-European musical cultures) which has as its means of expression the use of pattern and variation, and on the playing of modal vocabularies. Just as the singers rely on a small repertoire of potent modal gestures for the vocalization of their texts, the harp makes a virtue of its seeming limitations and, like an interlaced Viking design, brings a richness of articulation to the expression of the mode. The fiddle used here is based on one of the earliest depictions of a fiddle in Europe, dating from the 10th century, and was created especially for this production. Techniques of early northern fiddle playing can still be found today hidden within the thriving hardingfele tradition of Norway, and Elizabeth Gaver's own in-depth researches into the possible medieval antecedants to this tradition have yielded a convincing style of stringing, tuning and articulation which harmonizes easily with general medieval ideas about the use of bowed instruments in courtly music. Likewise, the use of flute in this production is based on concepts of tuning and consonance from the early Middle Ages, and one instrument in particular has an almost shamanistic aura, making it ideal for the announcement of the oracular völva: a tiny flute made from a swan's bone. Fragments of such bone flutes have been found in early Germanic burial sites. In developing the instrumental pieces and accompaniments for this production, the players have made use of the same modal vocabularies and language as the vocalists (we share a common prima materia) but then they have factored in the particular playing and tuning characteristics of their own instruments, so that in the end each piece is unique and can only be played by the musician and instrument which shaped it. There is no "improvisation" as such, but then there are also no written scores aside from a few sketches, and we prefer to think of ourselves as working within a rather strict oral tradition.
Music for Kim
Album: Edda: Myths from Medieval Iceland
Arist: Sequentia
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The Prophesy of the Seeress 1
The Prophesy of the Seeress 2
The Prophesy of the Seeress 3
Odin's Runes
The Song of Fire and Ice