In the British Museum there is a whalebone box, made in Northumbria around 700, carved on all four sides and the lid. On the front, the right-hand panel shows the Adoration of the Magi. The left-hand panel, immediately beside it, shows a lame smith at his anvil holding a cup made from a skull, with a headless body under the bench and a woman standing before him.
The Franks Casket puts Völundr and the Nativity on the same face of the same object, and nobody has satisfactorily explained why.
Völundarkviða
The Eddic poem is one of the harshest texts in the Poetic Edda and it is told with almost no comment.
Three brothers — Völundr, Egill and Slagfiðr — find three women by a lake, swan-cloaks laid beside them, spinning flax. Each takes one. After seven winters the women grow restless and on the eighth they leave; two brothers set off to search, and Völundr stays where he is, forging red-gold rings and setting them on a rope, waiting.
Níðuðr, king of the Njárar, hears that he is alone. Men come at night, count the rings, take one, and lie in wait until Völundr comes back from hunting. He is seized, bound, and brought before the king. The queen looks at him and says his teeth show when he sees the sword and recognises the ring; she advises cutting the sinews of his knees. He is hamstrung and set on an island called Sævarstaðr to make treasures for the king alone. Níðuðr wears his sword. The king's daughter Böðvildr wears his ring.
What he does about it
Völundr sits over his forge and does not sleep. The king's two young sons come out to the island to look at the treasure. He tells them to come back the next day and to tell nobody. They do.
He takes off their heads. He puts the skulls under the hair, mounts them in silver and sends them to Níðuðr as drinking-cups. He makes brooches from their eyes and sends them to the queen, and from their teeth a breast-ornament, and sends it to Böðvildr.
Then Böðvildr breaks the ring and comes to him secretly to have it mended. He gives her beer, she falls asleep, and he takes her.
And then he rises laughing into the air. He flies to the wall of Níðuðr's hall, and from there tells the king everything he has done — makes him swear first, by ship's keel and shield-rim and horse's shoulder and sword's edge, that he will not harm Völundr's wife or the child Böðvildr is carrying — and leaves. Níðuðr calls his daughter in and asks her whether it is true. She says it is; that she had no strength against him, and no wish to resist.
The poem stops there.
How he gets airborne
The poem says he rose up on his feet and flew, and never explains it. Þiðreks saga, a thirteenth-century Norwegian compilation of German material, supplies a mechanism: Velent has his brother Egill shoot birds and gathers the feathers into a flying garment, then tests it by having Egill shoot at him and aim for a bladder of blood under his arm. That story is on the Franks Casket's lid too, where an archer defends a building against attackers and is labelled Ægili.
Whether the wings were always part of the legend or were added to explain an unexplained flight is unresolved. What is clear is that the whole complex — the smith, the archer brother, the mutilation, the escape — was known in England by around 700 and in Norway five centuries later.
Wayland in England
He had a longer and broader life in Old English than in Old Norse.
- Deor, an Old English poem, opens with Weland enduring hardship among snakes, and the sinews cut, and Beadohild's grief for her brothers and her pregnancy — the same story in miniature, used as consolation with the refrain that it passed, so may this.
- Beowulf has the hero say his mail-shirt is Welandes geweorc, the work of Weland. In Old English, Weland's work is a standing guarantee of quality, the way an armourer's mark would be.
- Waldere refers to Weland's sword Mimming.
- Wayland's Smithy, a Neolithic chambered long barrow in Oxfordshire, carries his name in a charter boundary of 955 and is attached to a folk belief that if you leave a horse and a coin there overnight the horse will be shod by morning. That is a Bronze Age tomb named after a Germanic smith by Anglo-Saxons who found it already ancient.
The name in Old English is Wēland, in Old High German Wielant, in Old Norse Völundr, and in French romance it becomes Galans, giving a whole line of enchanted weapons in Continental epic.
Why the story matters
Norse and Germanic literature is full of heroes who fight. Völundr is a craftsman, deliberately crippled so that his skill remains available while he cannot escape — an artisan held as property — and his revenge is executed entirely through his craft. He kills with a workshop and he escapes by inventing something.
The poem also refuses the comfort a modern reader looks for. It does not condemn him and does not celebrate him. Böðvildr's rape is narrated in the same flat register as the drinking-cups, and her father's question and her answer are the last human words in the text.
For the Icelandic heroic material more broadly, see Sigurd and Brynhildr, and the Norse tradition overview for how these legends sit alongside the myths of the gods.
Is Völundr an elf?
Völundarkviða twice calls him vísi álfa, prince of elves, and once álfa ljóði, one of the elves' people. It also gives him a father who is a king of the Finns — Finnar in Old Norse usually meaning Sámi, a people the Norse associated with magic and craft. The two descriptions are not obviously compatible, and both may be ways of marking him as skilled and other rather than as a member of a defined race. Norse álfar are in any case a much vaguer category than modern fantasy allows.
Does the child born to Böðvildr appear anywhere?
In the Continental tradition, yes. Þiðreks saga names him Viðga — Widia in Old English, Vidigoia in Gothic material — and makes him a celebrated warrior in Þiðrekr's retinue, so the German legend closes the loop by turning the assault into a dynasty. Waldere mentions Widia as Weland's son and treats his descent as a distinction. The Norse poem itself says only that the child exists and that his grandfather has sworn not to harm him, which is a bleaker and more careful ending than the tradition around it.