Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Page 140

138 The Valkyries in the Heroic Literature
them. We will pay special attention to their supernatural traits and their connec-
tion with Óðinn.
II
1. Helgakviða Hundingsbana Iand //(Edda, pp. 130-9 and 150-61). The first
Lay ends on a triumphant note at the zenith of Helgi’s career. The second Lay,
which ends with Helgi’s tragic death, consists of fragments that could well
originally have belonged to different poems.39 Yet, although the fragments
sometimes overlap, they seem to belong to one story, and we will assume that it
is one story.‘‘° We will also assume that both Lays contain essentially the same
story.
Helgi Hundingsbani is a king, a fact that is greatly emphasized in all three
poems. There is no other text in which there are so many synonyms for “king”,
which denote so many facets of kingship and the virtues the king ought to
possess.41 The name “Helgi” itself is the weak form of the adjective “heilagr”, that
is “full of heil, luck, prosperity, well-being”. After Höfler it has been more or less
generally accepted that the word (perhaps originally a title or a synonym for king)
points towards the religious dedication of its bearer, the center of the community
to which he belonged, or, in other words, the “sacral king”.42 Undoubtedly the
god to whom the Helgis were dedicated was Óðinn, the god of warriors and
Vikings. The Helgis were warrior-kings and Viking-leaders in the first place,
although their reign also stretched over countries.
In the second Lay Helgi is killed in the wood called Fjöturlundr (“wood of
fetters”). This links up with a story of Tacitus about the holy wood of the
Semnones - though there is some distance in time as well as in place to be
overbridged. Religious meetings were lield in that wood, during which people
must enter it bound with fetters, and sacrifices were offered there to the ruler of
all the gods.43 According to Höfler and Ebenbauer Helgi’s death by the hand of
his brother-in-law Dagr and by means of the holy spear of Óðinn, is a remnant
of an old ritual and must be seen as a sacrifice.4'1. For our purpose it is enough to
stress that if the valkyrie had a forerunner in the ritual of the Semnones (not
mentioned by Tacitus), this woman could not have been a valkyrie there, but
some other kind of woman, perhaps a priestess.
Helgi’s name and the possibility that his death is a sacrifice, makes us ask if he
is perhaps a sacral king. There has been a heated discussion on the question of
whether or not the Scandinavians had a sacral king. The only thing we can say
39 Wessén (1927) derives the fragments from not fewer than four separate poems.
40 Kuhn (1962 and 1971).
41 For the first Helgi Lay a list of these words is given by Klingenberg (1974), p. 67.
42 Höfler (1952 a and b).
43 Germania, ch. 39, Stadele (1991), pp. 123-25.
44 Höfler (1952 a), Ebenbauer (1970) Their theory has recently been denied by Picard (1991).