SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

20 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
for the company, as kings with their own fingers choose
the best pieces from a dish to show favour to honoured
guests. Outwardly, she is an attentive hostess, proud
of her hospitality, but beneath the control is disgust and
revulsion - revulsion against the food, revulsion against
the Huns, pallid with the drink she has zealously plied
them with. Her antagonism, her inner segregation from
the others in the hall, is expressed by the repeated abrupt
juxtapositions, afkd» dis, iofrom . . . . natttJug, neffolom.
The poet delights in placing words so as to exploit them to
the full, and his art reaches its climax here. When Gul'5nin
tells Atli the truth, her terms are sickeningly plain: he is
chewing, digesting, roast human meat. When he believed
he was showing royal favour to his warriors by graciously
sharing with them the delicacies of his table, he was
drawing them too into his crime of cannibalism, his last
sacrilege. His wife has defiled him as a father and a king.
Neckel, in his labyrinthine Beitrdge zur Eddaforschung
(p. 133), after giving his own summary of AtlakvitJa, remarks:
"Even from this summary, I think we cansee indications
that our poem is not originally a unity, that it is held
together only by the partial restoration of lost parts of the
poem that are essential to its structure. The stanzas
concerning the Burgundian brothers in general breathe
a different spirit from those which treat of Gul'5nin and
Atli." He failed to see the logical and insistent structure
of the poem; he saw complexity and thought it a tangle.
A more willing attention to the motivation of the poem
as it stands, and an open sympathy towards the notion
that a poet might have composed in a manner we have
not met before, may lead us nearer to solving the problems
of AtlakvitJa. Subjective pitfalls lie on either side, but
those who dogmatically criticise the unity of the poem
are as likely to fall into them as those who interpret it with
too admiring an imagination. Had Genzmer tried to
recreate for himself the reasoning of the poet who shaped
the plot of Atlakoioa, rather than study statistics of