InGermanic mythology,Wayland the Smith (Old English:Wēland;Old Norse:Vǫlundr[ˈvɔlundr̩],Velent[ˈvelent];Old Frisian:Wela(n)du;German:Wieland der Schmied;Old High German:Wiolant;Old French:Galans (Galant);[1]Proto-Germanic: *Wēlandaz from*Wilą-ndz, lit. "crafting one"[2]) is a master blacksmith originating inGermanic heroic legend, described byJessie Weston as "the weird and malicious craftsman, Weyland".[3]
Wayland's story is most clearly told in the Old Norse sourcesVölundarkviða (a poem in thePoetic Edda) andÞiðreks saga.[4] In them, Wayland is a smith who is enslaved by a king. Wayland takes revenge by killing the king's sons and then escapes by crafting a winged cloak and flying away. A number of other visual and textual sources clearly allude to similar stories, most prominently the Old English poemDeor and theFranks Casket.
Wayland is also mentioned in passing in a wide range of texts, such as the Old EnglishWaldere andBeowulf, as the maker of weapons and armour. He is mentioned in theGerman poems about Theoderic the Great as the father ofWitige.[3] He is also attributed to have made various swords forCharlemagne and hispaladins, namelyCurtana,Durendal andJoyeuse.[5]
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The oldest reference known to Wayland the Smith is possibly a goldsolidus with a Frisian runic inscriptionᚹᛖᛚᚪᛞᚢwela[n]du 'wayland'.[6] It is not certain whether the coin depicts the legendary smith or bears the name of a moneyer who happened to be called Wayland (perhaps because he had taken the name of the legendary smith as an epithet). The coin was found nearSchweindorf, in the regionOstfriesland in north-west Germany, and is dated AD 575–625.[7]
Wayland's legend is depicted onArdre image stone VIII,[8][9] and probably on a tenth-century copper mount found in Uppåkra in 2011.[10][9] A number of other possible visual representations exist in early medieval Scandinavia, but are harder to verify as they do not contain enough distinctive features corresponding to the story of Wayland found in textual sources.[11]
According toVölundarkviða, the king of theFinns (the Old Norse term for theSámi)[12][13][14] had three sons: Völundr (Wayland) and his two brothersEgil andSlagfiðr. In one version of the myth, the three brothers lived with threeValkyries:Ölrún,Hervör alvitr andHlaðguðr svanhvít. After nine years, the Valkyries left their lovers. Egil and Slagfiðr followed, never to return. In another version, Völundr married theswan maiden Hervör, and they had a son, Heime, but Hervör later left Völundr. In both versions, his love left him with aring. In the former myth, he forged seven hundred duplicates of this ring.
Later, KingNiðhad captured Völundr in his sleep inNerike and ordered himhamstrung and imprisoned on the island of Sævarstöð. There Völundr was forced to forge items for the king. Völundr's wife's ring was given to the king's daughter,Böðvildr. Niðhad wore Völundr'ssword.
In revenge, Völundr killed the king's sons when they visited him in secret, and fashionedgoblets from their skulls, jewels from their eyes, and abrooch from their teeth. He sent the goblets to the king, the jewels to the queen and the brooch to the king's daughter. When Böðvild takes her ring to Völundr for mending, he tricks and seduces her, and gets her pregnant. Later, he flies to Niðhad's hall where he explains how he has murdered the king's sons, fashioned jewelry from their bodies and fathered a child with Böðvild. The crying king laments that his archers and horsemen can't reach Völundr, as the smith flies away never to be seen again. Niðhad summons his daughter, asking her if Völundr's story was true. The poem ends with Böðvild stating that she was unable to protect herself from Völundr as he was too strong for her.
Þiðreks saga also includes a version of the story of Wayland (Old Norse:Velent).[15] This part of the saga is sometimes calledVelents þáttr smiðs.
The events described at KingNiðung's court (identifiable with Niðhad in the Eddic lay) broadly follow the version in the Poetic Edda (though in the saga his brother, Egil the archer, is present to help him to make his wings and to help Velent escape[16]). However, the rest of the story is different. It tells of how Wayland was the son of a giant namedWade (Old Norse:Vadi), and how he was taught to smith by two dwarfs.[17] It also tells of how he came to be with King Niðung, crossing the sea in a hollow log, and how he forged the swordMimung as part of a bet with the king's smith.[18] And it also tells about the argument that led to Niðung's hamstringing of Wayland, and ultimately to Wayland's revenge: Niðung had promised to give Wayland his daughter in marriage and also half his kingdom, and then went back on this promise.[19]
The saga elaborates on the flying contraption he builds using feathers collected by Egil; the contraption was called theflygil which suggests it was a pair of wings (German:Flügel[20]) in the original German version, but conceived of as afjaðrhamr (feather cloak) by the saga-writers. Wayland here also wears a blood-filled bladder as a prop, instructing Egil to aim his arrow at this bag, thus feigning injury and deceiving the king.[21][16][22]
The saga also tells of the birth of a son,Wideke (Old Norse:Viðga), to Wayland and Niðung's daughter. While he was still in captivity, the couple have a conversation, and they vow to each other love; the smith also reveals that he has fashioned a weapon and hidden it in the forge for his unborn son.[23] He settles in his native Sjoland and eventually marries the princess with the blessing of her brother who became the next king after Niðung's death.[24]
This son inherits the sword Mimung, and goes on to become one of Þidrek/Didrik's warriors.[25]
In Icelandic manuscripts from the fourteenth century onwards, the termsLabyrinth andDomus Daedali ('home ofDaedalus') are renderedVǫlundarhús ('house of Vǫlundr'). This shows that Völundr was seen as equivalent to, or even identical with, the classical hero Daedalus.[26]
InÞorsteins saga Víkingssonar, Völundr is the manufacturer of themagic swordGram (also namedBalmung andNothung) and themagic ring that Þorsteinn retrieves.
TheFranks Casket is one of a number of other early English references to Wayland, whose story was evidently well known and popular, although no extended version in Old English has survived. In the front panel of the Franks Casket, incongruously paired with anAdoration of the Magi, Wayland stands at the extreme left in the forge where he is held as a slave by KingNiðhad, who has had hishamstrings cut to hobble him. Below the forge is the headless body of Niðhad's son, whom Wayland has killed, making a goblet from his skull; his head is probably the object held in the tongs in Wayland's hand. With his other hand Wayland offers the goblet to Böðvildr, Niðhad's daughter. Another female figure is shown in the centre; perhaps Wayland's helper, brother Egil, or Böðvildr again. To the right of the scene his brother catches birds, from whose feathers he makes wings with which he escapes.[27][28]
During theViking Age innorthern England, Wayland is depicted in his smithy, surrounded by his tools, atHalton, Lancashire, and fleeing from his royal captor by clinging to a flying bird, on a cross atLeeds Minster,West Yorkshire, and stone carvings atSherburn, North Yorkshire andBedale, also inNorth Yorkshire.[29]
English local tradition placed Wayland's forge in a Neolithic long barrow mound known asWayland's Smithy, close to theUffington White Horse in Oxfordshire. If a horse to be shod, or any broken tool, were left with asixpenny piece at the entrance of the barrow the repairs would be executed.[4]
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TheOld English poemDeor, which recounts the famous sufferings of various figures before turning to those of Deor, its author, begins with "Welund":
Welund tasted misery among snakes.
The stout-hearted hero endured troubles
had sorrow and longing as his companions
cruelty cold as winter - he often found woe
OnceNithad laid restraints on him,
supple sinew-bonds on the better man.
That went by; so can this.
ToBeadohilde, her brothers' death was not
so painful to her heart as her own problem
which she had readily perceived
that she was pregnant; nor could she ever
foresee without fear how things would turn out.
That went by, so can this.[30]
Weland had fashioned themail shirt worn byBeowulf according to lines 450–455 of theepic poem of thesame name:
— (Heaney trans.)
The reference inWaldere is similar to that in Beowulf – the hero's sword was made by Weland[31] – whileAlfred the Great in his translation ofBoethius asks plaintively: "What now are the bones of Wayland, the goldsmith preeminently wise?"[32]: 29
Swords fashioned by Wayland are regular properties of medievalromance. KingRhydderch Hael gave one toMerlin, and Rimenhild made a similar gift toChild Horn. English literature was also aware of the characterWade, whose name is similar to that of Vaði, the father of Wayland inÞiðreks saga.[3]
Wayland is known by the nameWieland in line 965 of the Latin epicWaltharius, a literary composition based onOld High German oral tradition, as the smith who made the poem's eponymous protagonist's armor:
Et nisi duratis Wielandia fabrica giris
Obstaret, spisso penetraverit ilia ligno.
And had not Weland's work obstructed with hardened rings,
He would have pierced his guts with the tough wood.
Wayland is associated withWayland's Smithy, aburial mound in theBerkshire Downs.[32]: 109 This was named by the English, but themegalithic mound significantly predates them. It is from this association that the folk belief came about that ahorse left there overnight with a small silver coin (groat) would beshod by morning.
This belief is mentioned in the first episode ofPuck of Pook's Hill byRudyard Kipling, "Weland's Sword", which narrates the rise and fall of the god.[32]: 351
Sir Walter Scott includes Wayland Smith as a character in his novelKenilworth set in 1575.[citation needed]
Both the AustriancomposerSiegmund von Hausegger (1904) and the Russian composerLeopold van der Pals (1913) used the Wayland saga as inspiration for symphonic poems.[citation needed]
In the 1978BBC TV seriesThe Moon Stallion, the character of the Green King (played byMichael Kilgarriff) states that he is also known as Wayland the Smith.[33]
In theITV seriesRobin of Sherwood, Wayland the Smith was credited for creating seven swords charged with "the Power of Light and Darkness".
”Morax, Solas, Orias, Albion, Elidor, Beleth, Flauros. On each of them, words of high magic unspoken since they were made. Wayland knew the danger. Oh yes, he knew. That’s why he scattered them, and for hundreds of years they remained apart. Two of them were buried. Others lost in battle, and some so cunningly hidden that none had knowledge of them, except the Cauldron of Lucifer. They knew. The search took many years, many lives.” — Morgwyn of Ravenscar
Of the seven, the protagonist Robin of Loxley is given Albion byHerne the Hunter at the beginning of the series.[34]
InGene Wolfe's bookThe Wizard Knight, Weland the smith was the forger of the sword Eterne, which forms a central part of the novel's plot.[35]
In theRivers of London book series, the Sons of Weyland are a modern day magical blacksmithing society responsible for creation of magical artefacts in the United Kingdom.
One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Wayland the Smith".Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 28 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 431–432.
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