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Poetic Edda

[1]There was a king in Sweden named Nithuth[2]. He had two sons and one daughter; her name was Bothvild[3]. There were three brothers, sons of a king of the Finns[4]: one was called Slagfith[5], another Egil[5], the third Völund. They went on snowshoes and hunted wild beasts. They came into Ulfdalir[6] and there they built themselves a house; there was a lake there which is called Ulfsjar[6]. Early one morning they found on the shore of the lake three women, who were spinning flax. Near them were their swan-garments, for they were Valkyries[7]. Two of them were daughters of King Hlothver[8], Hlathguth the Swan-White and Hervor the All-Wise, and the third was Olrun, daughter of Kjar[8] from Valland[6]. These did they bring

  1. ↑ Prose.
  2. ↑ Nithuth ("Bitter Hater"): here identified as a king of Sweden, is in the poem (stanzas 9, 15 and 32) called lord of the Njars, which may refer to the people of the Swedish district of Nerike. In any case, the scene of the story has moved from Saxon lands into the Northeast. The first and last sentences of the introduction refer to the second part of the poem; the rest of it concerns the swan-maidens episode.
  3. ↑ Bothvild ("Warlike Maid"): Völund's victim in the latter part of the poem.
  4. ↑ King of the Finns: this notion, clearly later than the poem, which calls Völund an elf, may perhaps be ascribed to the annotator who composed the prose introduction. The Finns, meaning the dwellers in Lapland, were generally credited with magic powers.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Egil appears in the Thithrekssaga as Völund's brother, but Slagfith is not elsewhere mentioned.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Ulfdalir ("Wolf-Dale"), Ulfsjar ("Wolf-Sea"), Valland ("Slaughter-Land"): mythical places without historical identification.
  7. ↑ Valkyries: cf. Voluspo, 31 and note; there is nothing in the poem to identify the three swan-maidens as Valkyries except one obscure word in line 2 of stanza 1 and again in line 5 of stanza 5, which may mean, as Gering translates it, "helmed," or else "fair and wise." I suspect that the annotator, anxious to give the Saxon legend as much northern local color as possible, was mistaken in his mythology, and that
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1

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