“Attila the Hun, eh?” Everard murmured. “Not a very nice man. But he operated in the middle fifth century, when those bully boys were already riding high in Europe. You’re going to the fourth.” “Correct. Let me give you the Icelandic tale. Atli enticed Gudrun’s brothers to him because he wanted the Rhinegold. She tried to warn them, but they came anyway under pledge of safe conduct. When they wouldn’t surrender the hoard or tell Atli where it was, he had them put to death. Gudrun got even for that. She butchered the sons she’d borne him and served them to him as ordinary food. Later she stabbed him as he slept, set his hall afire, and left Hunland. With her she took Svanhild, her daughter by Sigurd.”
Everard frowned, concentrating. It couldn’t be easy to keep track of these characters.
“Gudrun came to the country of the Goths,” I said. “There she married again and had two sons, Hamther and Sorli. The king of the Goths is called Jormunrek in the saga and in the Eddie poems, but there is no doubt that he was Ermanaric, who is a real if shadowy figure around the middle and late fourth century. Accounts differ whether he married Svanhild and she was falsely accused of infidelity, or she married somebody else whom the king caught plotting against him and hanged. In either case, he had poor Svanhild trampled to death by horses.
“By this time, Gudrun’s boys, Hamther and Sorli, were young men. She egged them on to kill Jormunrek in vengeance for Svanhild. Along the way they met their half-brother Erp, who offered to accompany them. They cut him down. The manuscripts are vague as to the reason why. My guess is he was their father’s child by a concubine and there was bad blood between them and him.
“They proceeded to Jormunrek’s headquarters and the attack. They were two alone, but invulnerable to steel, so they slew men right and left, reached the king, and wounded him severely. Before they could finish the job, though, Hamther let slip that stones could hurt them. Or, according to the saga, Odin suddenly appeared, in the guise of an old man with one eye, and betrayed this information. Jormunrek called to his remaining warriors to stone the brothers, and that is how they died. There the tale ends.”
“Grim, hey?” said Everard. He pondered for a minute. “But it seems to me that whole last episode- Gudrun in Gothland – must’ve been tacked on at a much later date. The anachronisms have gotten completely out of hand.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “That very commonly happens in folklore. An important story will attract lesser ones to it. Even in trifling ways. For instance, it wasn’t W. C. Fields who said that a man who hates children and dogs can’t be all bad. It was somebody else, I forget who, introducing Fields at a banquet.”
Everard laughed. “Don’t tell me the Patrol should monitor Hollywood history!” He grew serious again. “If that sanguinary little yarn doesn’t really belong in the Nibelung canon, why do you want to trace it? Why does Ganz want you to?”
“Well, it did reach Scandinavia, where it did inspire a couple of pretty good poems – if those weren’t just redactions of something earlier – and did hook up to the Volsung saga. The connections, the whole evolution, interest us. Also, Ermanaric gets mention elsewhere – in certain Old English lays, for instance. So he must have figured in a lot of legend and bardic work that was since forgotten. He was powerful in his day, though apparently not a very nice man himself. The lost Ermanaric cycle might well be as important and brilliant as anything that has come down to us from the West and the North. It may have influenced Germanic literature in scores of unsuspected ways.”
“Do you intend to go straight to his court? I wouldn’t recommend that, Carl. Too many field agents get killed because they got careless.”
“Oh, no. Something horrible happened, from which stories sprang and traveled far, even reaching into historical chronicles. I think I can bracket when it happened, too, within about ten years. But I mean to familiarize myself thoroughly with the whole milieu before I venture into that episode.”