The Cold Radiance of Fate
Christopher Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (2009) is not merely a posthumous Tolkien curiosity; it is a serious act of literary recovery. The volume centres on two long poems, The New Lay of the Völsungs and The New Lay of Gudrún, with Christopher Tolkien’s commentary, appendices, and an introductory frame that situates the work in the world of the Elder Edda. The book also makes plain that J.R.R. Tolkien composed these poems in the 1930s, working in an English version of Old Norse alliterative meter and trying to “unify” and “organise” legendary material rather than simply translate it.
What is most striking is the poem’s devotion to hardness of form. Tolkien’s lines do not aim for the fluent transparency of modern narrative verse; they seek an older music, one that sounds carved rather than spoken. The opening gesture, “Of old was an age / when Ódin walked,” immediately establishes that ritual distance, as if the poem were less a story being told than a past being re-entered. That effect is central to the book’s power: the language keeps lifting the legend out of anecdote and back into saga, into the realm where fate feels communal, cosmic, and ancient.
The tragedy itself is rendered with remarkable severity. Tolkien’s version of the Sigurd material is preoccupied with treasure, oath, marriage, betrayal, and the terrible continuity of blood guilt, but he refuses any sentimental cushioning. The most devastating passages are often the simplest: Gudrún’s lament that “the world is empty, / the waves are cold” compresses grief into elemental desolation, while the line “Crooked came she forth / from curséd womb” gives Brynhild’s condition the inescapable force of mythic doom. The author understands that this legend does not merely narrate catastrophe; it anatomizes how desire turns into ruin, and how once the curse enters the gold, every human attachment becomes vulnerable to corruption.
The editor’s presence deepens the experience rather than interrupting it. His notes and commentary make the book feel partly like a poem and partly like a philological excavation, showing how carefully the modern text is shaped from Eddaic sources and how much labor went into making the legend coherent again. That scholarly density will be too heavy for readers who want a straightforward mythic retelling, but for readers attentive to language and tradition it is one of the book’s great strengths. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun is therefore best read as a work of austere beauty: formally exacting, intellectually rich, and emotionally pitiless in the way the oldest heroic poetry often is. It stands apart from Middle-earth, but it belongs unmistakably to the same imagination that loved the “nameless North.”