The glittering blade is taken
from me for ever; I shall not see it borne to Voelund's smithy. Now
Boedvild wears my bride's red ring; I expect no atonement.' He sat
and slept not, but struck with his hammer."
Nithud's children came to see him in his smithy: the two boys he slew,
and made drinking-cups for Nithud from their skulls; and the daughter
Boedvild he beguiled, and having made himself wings he rose into the
air and left her weeping for her lover and Nithud mourning his sons.
In the Old English poems allusion is made only to the second part
of the story; there is no reference to the legend of the enchanted
brides, which is indeed distinct in origin, being identical with
the common tale of the fairy wife who is obliged to return to animal
shape through some breach of agreement by her mortal husband. This
incident of the compact (_i.e._, to hide the swan-coat, to refrain
from asking the wife's name, or whatever it may have been) has been
lost in the Voelund tale. The Continental version is told in the late
Icelandic _Thidreks Saga_, where it is brought into connexion with
the Volsung story; in this the story of the second brother, Egil the
archer, is also given, and its antiquity is supported by the pictures
on the Anglo-Saxon carved whale-bone box known as the Franks Casket,
dated by Professor Napier at about 700 A.D. The adventures of the
third brother, Slagfinn, have not survived. The Anglo-Saxon gives
Voelund and Boedvild a son, Widia or Wudga, the Wittich who appears as
a follower of Dietrich's in the Continental German sources.
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