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ELVES HAVE BEEN a fixture in the European mentality for a long time in fairytales and legends and, recently, in the most popular novels and films of our age. In this article, my aim is to determine the function of elves in Old Norse narratives from the thirteenth century by concentrating on the figure of Volundr, the protagonist of Volundarkviða, who to my mind is the most important Old Norse elf. The poem portrays his marriage to a southern swan-maiden who later leaves him. He then retires into solitude, hunting bears, and counting his rings until he is captured and enslaved by the avaricious King Níðuðr. The poem ends with Volundr's gruesome revenge on the king and his family.
Volundarkviða is the tenth of twenty-nine poems in the Codex Regius MS of the Poetic Edda. Few Eddie poems have suffered less from scholarly neglect: a recent bibliography lists over 100 studies, not counting editions (von see, et al. 77-81). There are grounds for this attention. To take one, Volundarkviða is usually classified as a heroic rather than mythological poem and shares common characteristics with some of the more ancient heroic poems in the Elder Edda, and yet it stands among the mythological Eddie poems in the manuscript between Prymskviða and Alvíssmál. Another distinguishing feature of Volundarkviða, is its age. Most scholars believe that it is one of the oldest Eddie poems.1 Furthermore, the poem has interesting connections with non-Nordic Germanic heroic poetry, English place-names, English and Gothic artifacts from the Viking age or even earlier, as well as Greek mythology (Dronke, The Poetic Edda II 258-90; Jón Helgason 27-52; von See, et al. 82-9 and 93-105; McKinnell 1-13). It is not surprising that considerable scholarly attention has been given to the historical background of the poem, and much effort has gone into attempting to distinguish young material from old and discerning later additions to the basic story (Dronke, The Poetic Edda II 258-90; Jón Helgason 42-52; von See, et al. 82-106; Burson; Motz, "New Thoughts"). But while these matters are interesting and important, it might be fruitful to disregard for the moment the origins of individual motifs and narrative elements in order to focus instead on their function in Volundarkviða in its present form.2
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