ABSTRACT
Egill and Slagfi nn go after their women, while Wayland stays behind for his. It is hard to say whether this is from pride at not running after, or from a hope that waiting will bring her back. But Wayland loses his brothers too, and after a period of solitude in which he crafts ring after ring possibly to lure his wife back, he fi nds himself made captive by Níðuðr, king of the ‘Niárar’. Here the story enters the phase known also in Deor and on the Frank’s Casket. Wayland is classed as a wild animal by Níðuðr’s unnamed queen, his sinews are cut so that he cannot escape, and he is placed in a smithy on an island in a lake in order to fashion trinkets for the king and queen and their two sons and daughter. The daughter’s name is Blðvildr, identical with Beadohild in Deor. The children grow curious, and one day Níðuðr’s two sons overcome their fears and come to the álfa ljóði ‘prince of demons’ in his secluded smithy, accepting his invitation to return on a second, this time utterly secret, visit. He kills them, making bowls, jewels and brooches out of respectively their skulls, eyes and teeth, which he passes on as objets d’art to the unwitting parents. True wealth lies in human not material resource. This message is to be found not only in Wayland’s warning rattle to the king in stanza 15, but less cruelly also in Sayings of the High One, stanza 47 (see Poems on the Meaning of Life). Blðvildr then visits Wayland, drawn to the lonely recluse by emotional curiosity as well as for the apparent reason that her ring, the one that Wayland had once made for his bride, needs a repair. Wayland repairs himself by making Blðvildr his new bride. He rapes her, taking advantage after plying her with beer. She proceeds home pregnant while Wayland, now magically empowered it seems by the return of his ring, lifts himself laughing into the sky like a Lappish shaman.
