#volundarkvida

Three swan-maidens are flying through Mirkwood when they decide to stop by a lake and do some spinning, as you do. Here they meet and decide to marry three brothers, but after several years they catch wanderlust again and move on. The three brothers are devastated. The two eldest head out into the world in search of their wives, but the third and youngest, a smith named Volund, decides to wait at home for his wife to return. He spends the time forging an arm-ring for her.

One night he's fast asleep when Nidud arrives, a mortal king who has heard of Volund's remarkable smithcraft and wants a bit of it for himself. Volund wakes up thinking his wife has returned, but finds himself in the middle of a home invasion. Nidud's queen advises Nidud to hamstring Volund so that he will be unable to escape. She also takes the arm-ring Volund made for his bride, and gives it to her and Nidud's daughter, Bodvild. Nidud also nicks Volund's sword.

Nidud drags the crippled Volund back to his own palace and installs him in a smithy on an island, where Volund is forced to craft magnificent artefacts for his captor. Volund then lures Nidud's two sons to visit him on the island, where he kills them and forges their eyes and bones into jewels and brooches for Nidud and the queen. A little later Bodvild brings the arm-ring to Volund for mending. He gets her drunk and then, when she's asleep, rapes her. This done, Volund flies away - other versions of the story suggest that he has crafted his own wings, Daedalus style - and leaves the island for Nidud's palace, where he tells the king and queen exactly what he has done to their children: he turned their sons into the fine gems and drinking-cups they've been enjoying, and now their only heir is Bodvild, and she's currently pregnant with Volund's child. Volund threatens Nidud to do no harm to Bodvild and then flies away, leaving the girl to lament, in the final stanzas, that she was unable to resist Volund, whose strength was too great for her.

WHEW.

So first of all, yes - this is a REALLY dark and grisly tale. But it went through me like a knife. The story first grabbed me in a fierce and horrified empathy with Volund, who is so horribly abused - and then ripped that sense of empathy away as Volund's brutal revenge plays out. It's a breathtaking emotional rollercoaster in under 7 pages of terse Icelandic verse. I loved it immediately, and ever since, I've wanted to write a retelling.

Anwyay, so I was rereading THE SILMARILLION last year, and there's a specific story in there that caught my attention, because it struck me as having certain strong parallels with the Volund myth. My interest whetted, I searched online for anyone else who'd noticed the same parallels - and lo and behold, I found this terrific article by Lillian Hammen: "Skilled Smiths and Princes of Elves: The Wayland-legend and the First Age of Middle-earth."

What a read. WHAT a read. Not just because Hammen refuses to follow a certain other academic I also read recently in blaming Bodvild for her own rape (!!!!!!). And not just because Hammen blows my mind by presenting explicit proof from Tolkien himself that the story of Feanor started out originally as as retelling of the Volund myth, complete with a flight from captivity with a female character named Beaduhilde. While the story changed dramatically by the time Christopher Tolkien compiled the SILMARILLION, Feanor clearly retains strong Volund influences. He's a skilled smith, who creates jewels by magic, and who, when those jewels are stolen, reacts with a possessive and irrational rage that leads him to a bloody vengeance.

The tale of Eol and Aredhel is where Tolkien tackles the gender and family dynamics of the Volund myth. In this story, we have another smith who uses magic to lure a princess to his forge, where he takes her as a "not wholly unwilling" (and therefore, not wholly willing either) wife. A son is then conceived, but, like the swan-bride in the original story, Aredhel ultimately abandons Eol. Like Volund, Eol attempts a revenge, pursuing Aredhel to Gondolin and ultimately killing her; like Volund, he exits the story through the air, only instead of a triumphant flight, he is hurled to his death.

IOW, if Feanor is Wayland in his aspect as controlling maker, Eol is Wayland in his aspect as controlling patriarch.

Hammen points out that "Eöl’s actions towards his son largely treat Maeglin as a possession – in Eöl’s final words, he describes Maeglin as ill-gotten, a term better suited to describing stolen treasure than one’s own child – but, crucially, this possessiveness is linked to Eöl’s smithcraft: Eöl regards Maeglin as his own creation."

She further concludes what I had also noticed: that Tolkien's retelling of the Volundarkvida reframes Volund's possessive, vindictive actions as unambiguously bad:

"Tolkien’s handling of his medieval inheritance emphasizes the moral dimension of his sub-creative instincts and the philosophical feelings underpinning his writing. Fëanor and Eöl may have been suffused with Wayland’s characteristics, but Tolkien, in his tales, firmly classifies these personality traits – Fëanor’s extreme possessiveness over his creations and Eöl’s egotistic domination of his spouse and son – as destructive, even sinful."

Here I have to emphasise that I have read a bunch of men on the Volundarkvida, and most of them have had takes that range from mid to atrocious. Maybe they recognise Volund's treatment of Bodvild as rape, but fail to give her as much internality and agency as the poem does. Or, they misread Bodvild's agency in the poem as deserving of rape. Tolkien, always a Certified Wifeguy, does none of this with Aredhel and Eol!!! In his version of the story, there's no explicit rape as in the Volundarkvida, because at some point Tolkien decided he was too classy to write flippantly about rape in Middle-Earth, and on behalf of women everywhere, honestly: bless him for that. The ambiguity is a really refreshing thing: we know that Aredhel probably wouldn't have chosen this of her own accord, but there is room left for her own agency and desires in a situation with limited choices. Tolkien is being kind and merciful to his characters, and therefore also to his female readers here.

But here's the thing that makes me flip out a bit. Even though Tolkien transmutes the Volundarkvida's sexual violence to something far more ambiguous and implicit…he doesn't use this ambiguity to let Eol off lightly for his crimes. First off, he uses it to be kind to Aredhel. When my book club/author group read the Sil last year, we spent a bit of time discussing whether we thought that Aredhel's wayward nature was something she needed to be punished for; whether it was there in the story to suggest that she deserved her fate. But Hammen sees Aredhel's wanderlust not as something for which she needed to be punished, but as a legacy from the Volundarkvida: she is an amalgam of both Bodvild and Hervor, the swan-bride. Wanderlust is in her nature. However much desire Aredhel may have initially felt for Eol, his reclusive, controlling, possessive nature meant that they were never going to be a good fit; he was always going to be a bad husband to her. In other words, Aredhel's wanderlust, in the context of a Volund retelling, makes it very clear that she was ENTIRELY legit in wanting to escape her husband.

Second, by removing explicit rape from the story, Tolkien takes the emphasis of the tale off rape as a sexual/social transgression, and focuses it squarely on the root issue: power, control, and domination. Again, this absolutely blows my mind. Today most people understand that rape is not a crime of desire or passion, but a crime of control and domination. And all the way back in the 1930s or whenever, Tolkien looked at the Volundarkvida and identified Volund's sin as possession, domination, and control, not just over the works of his hands, but also over his own family. If you're a Tolkien nerd you understand, obviously, that this was a really strong theme in Tolkien's works. In his Letter to Milton Waldman in which he explained the foundational themes of his work, Tolkien wrote:

"All this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine. …This [creative] desire has various opportunities of 'Fall'. It may become possessive, clinging to the things made as 'its own'; the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation. He will rebel against the laws of the Creator - especially against mortality. Both of these (alone or toegether) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective, - and so to the Machine (or Magic). By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents - or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills."

I knew all this, of course; and I had seen how Tolkien developed the theme in his work: it is a perennial mark of the bad guys in Tolkien's work, that they seek domination over the wills of others. But it's in the tale of Eol and Aredhel, specifically, that Tolkien extended this theme to abusive, patriarchal family structures, with a crystal clear moral insight and impeccable poetic justice.