Atli is the Old Norse name of Attila the Hun, who died in 453 – and at the same time the central figure of one of the grimmest revenge stories in Old Norse poetry. It tells of the gold of the Niflungs, the deaths of two Burgundian kings and a woman who serves her husband the flesh of their own sons. We follow the sources one by one: Priscus and Jordanes, the Atlakviða of about 900, the Atlamál, the Völsunga saga, the Nibelungenlied and the Gotland picture stones, which satisfied the same hunger for stories in pictures. Along the way we keep apart what is documented, what scholars suspect and what remains poetry.
The Vikings had no books in our sense. Their stories lived in the spoken word of the skalds, and they lived in images. On the Baltic island of Gotland, hundreds of picture stones have survived – upright slabs showing ships, warriors, riders and women with drinking horns. More than 400 such stones are known in all, most of them standing or once standing on Gotland. Judging by shape and ornament, researchers sort them into three rough groups: straight stones with an axe-shaped top from about 400 to 600, smaller pieces with stylised patterns from roughly 500 to 700, and the tall, curved slabs of 700 to 1100.
It is the late stones that show scenes one longs to read as narrative: ships under lozenge-patterned sails, sacrifices, battles, a rider greeted by a woman with a horn. Some images can be tied to Norse mythology – the eight-legged horse on the Tjängvide stone, usually read as Sleipnir, or the smithy scene on the Ardre stone, which is linked to Völund. But the texts that would explain most of these pictures were never written down, or were lost. That needs saying before we turn to Atli: we are reading images whose captions are missing.
Nor did the stones stand grey in the landscape. According to current research they were painted, with colour in the incised lines and fields. What we see today as a pale groove on dark stone is the sober remainder of a brightly coloured storytelling surface.
The historical Attila ruled the Huns from about 434, at first jointly with his brother Bleda and then alone. What we know of his realm comes almost entirely from outsiders. The most important witness is Priscus, an eastern Roman diplomat and historian who travelled to Attila's court in 449 with an embassy of Emperor Theodosius II. His work survives only in fragments, mostly through later authors. Priscus describes a timber hall, banquets at which the guests were given silver while Attila himself ate from wooden dishes, and a king who kept envoys waiting yet listened. It is the picture of a man who did not need splendour to display power.
The name itself is probably Gothic: atta means "father", and with the diminutive ending -ila Attila would be "little father". The Brothers Grimm proposed this reading, and it remains the most likely, though not settled; Turkic suggestions exist but have not won general acceptance. In the Germanic languages the name lived on as Ætla in Old English, Atli in Old Norse and Etzel in Middle High German.
In 451 Attila led his army into Gaul. On the Catalaunian Plains near Châlons the Roman commander Aëtius and the Visigothic king Theodoric I faced him; Theodoric fell, yet the battle is generally counted a strategic success for the Roman-Visigothic alliance. Jordanes' figure of half a million fighters is far too high. In 452 Attila marched into Italy, and in 453 he died.
"He had given himself up to joy at his wedding; heavy with wine and sleep he lay on his back, and the blood that would normally have flowed from his nose streamed down his throat and killed him … They found Attila dead from a rush of blood, without any wound."Jordanes, Getica 254 (after Priscus), AD 551, own rendering (public domain)
That is how Jordanes, who wrote a history of the Goths around 551 and drew on Priscus, tells it. Shortly before, Attila had married a girl named Ildico. Modern medical historians consider a nosebleed with suffocation or ruptured oesophageal varices; both remain speculation. The chronicler Marcellinus Comes, writing some eighty years later, claims instead that his wife killed him. Most historians dismiss that as hearsay, yet the closeness to the later saga, in which a woman kills the Hun king, is striking. Whether it is more than coincidence cannot be decided.
At the heart of the story stands the fall of two brothers, Gunnar and Högni. Is there a historical anchor? Surprisingly, a good deal can be said. The Burgundians had lived since 413 as Roman federates on the middle Rhine, with the region around Worms probably at the centre. In 435 they rose against Rome and attacked Roman territory in Belgica; Aëtius put them down. In 436 the conflict flared again. The chronicler Prosper of Aquitaine, a contemporary, writes that Aëtius defeated the Burgundian king Gundahar (Latin Gundicharius) and, at his request, granted him peace – which he did not enjoy for long, because the Huns destroyed him together with his people and kin. Hydatius, bishop in Chaves in Spain, speaks of some 20,000 Burgundians slain, a single figure with no further support.
The instrument was evidently a Hunnic contingent that Aëtius had called up in agreement with the Hun leader Rua. For 443 we hear that the remnants of the people were resettled in Sapaudia, the region around Geneva and Savoy. The law code of the later Burgundian kings, the Lex Burgundionum of around 500, lists among the ancestors of the royal house Gibica, Gundomar, Gislahar and Gundahar. The names sound like the legend: Gifica leads the Burgundians in the Old English poem Widsith ("Burgendum Gifica"), in the Nibelungenlied the king is Gunther and his brother Giselher, and the Norse Gunnar is linguistically the same name as Gundahar.
The time gap matters. Between 436 and the oldest Norse version lie some 450 years in which memory travelled by word of mouth, swapped roles and was reinterpreted morally. Even the detail that Gunnar and Högni are brothers of Gudrun, and Gudrun becomes Atli's wife, shows this: the marriage bond between the Burgundians and the Hunnic court belongs to poetry, not to the chronicles.
The oldest Norse form of the story is the Atlakviða, the "Lay of Atli". It stands in the Codex Regius, the Icelandic manuscript of the Poetic Edda from the late thirteenth century, under the title Atlakviða in grœnlenzka, "the Greenlandic Lay of Atli". Most scholars regard this origin as a mistake born of confusion with the Atlamál: Greenland was settled only around 985, while the poem is probably much older. It is usually dated to about 900 and thought more likely Norwegian. In 1926 Felix Genzmer even proposed that the skald Þorbjǫrn hornklofi, author of the Haraldskvæði of about 880, composed it. That remains a hypothesis built on stylistic similarity.
The plot is quickly told and hard to digest. Atli invites his brothers-in-law Gunnar and Högni to the Hunnic court and lures them with wealth. Both already own a treasure, the hoard, and suspect a trap. Gudrun, their sister and Atli's wife, sends a ring with a wolf's hair wound around it, a warning sign. Gunnar rides anyway. He swears that nobody shall have the hoard if he does not return. At court he is seized; Högni kills eight men before he is overpowered. Gunnar is to buy his life with the hiding place of the gold. He demands to see Högni's heart.
First they bring him the heart of the coward Hjalli, and Gunnar sees through the trick because it trembles. Then they cut the heart out of Högni. The poet finds a sentence of unsettling calm for it:
"Loudly laughed Högni as they cut his heart out."Atlakviða, st. 24, after Karl Simrock's German rendering (Stuttgart 1851, public domain), own English version
Now Gunnar alone knows the hiding place, and he does not tell: in Simrock's rendering, "only the Rhine shall rule over the ruinous treasure" (st. 27). The hoard stays hidden in the river. Gunnar is thrown into the snake pit and dies making music: with his hands bound he plays the harp with his toes (st. 31), the serpents hold back, and only when an adder strikes does the song end. Gudrun avenges her brothers by telling Atli at a feast that he has eaten the hearts of their own sons with honey (st. 36). Then she kills him in bed, lets the hounds loose, rouses the bribed housecarls and sets the hall on fire.
It is striking how sparingly the poet judges. He praises Gunnar and Högni, who would rather die than betray, and he does not explicitly condemn Gudrun. Gold appears in the poem as a metal that sows discord among men – a thought that recalls the stanza on the rune fé in the Icelandic Rune Poem: wealth that stirs strife among kinsmen. Whether the final stanza, stressing the deaths of three kings, was added later, as Ursula Dronke considered, cannot be settled.
The second poem, Atlamál in grœnlenzku, tells the story again and at greater length. It has 103 stanzas, is the only Eddic poem composed entirely in málaháttr, and has long been regarded as younger; many scholars place it in the twelfth century, and a polar bear in the story together with the modest world of its chieftains speak for composition in Greenland, as the title claims. That is plausible but not proven.
The Atlamál change the story at one crucial point: Atli here is the instigator and aggressor, and Gudrun becomes the killer of her sons with more weight. The messenger Vingi brings the invitation; Gudrun has sent a rune message, which Vingi falsifies. Högni's wife Kostbera recognises the forgery in the runes and warns her husband, Gunnar's wife Glaumvör dreams of disaster, but the brothers will not be dissuaded. Here too they are overwhelmed, Gudrun fights at their side, and eighteen of Atli's men fall. Afterwards Gudrun kills her two sons, serves Atli their hearts and heads at the feast and slays him with the help of Högni's son Hniflungr.
Laying the two poems side by side one can ask which motifs are older. The warnings through dreams and runes, the female figures Kostbera and Glaumvör and the marked family psychology are generally seen as additions of the younger poet. The coward Hjalli's heart, the Rhine as hiding place and the defiant laughter belong to the older lay.
In the thirteenth century, around 1260 to 1270, an unknown Icelander gathered the whole Sigurd story into the Völsunga saga. It is the bridge between two cycles of legend. For here Atli is the brother of the valkyrie Brynhild, and Gudrun, the widow of Sigurd, is married to him to settle the feud within the family. Atli's greed for the treasure that Sigurd once took from the dragon Fafnir, and which earlier belonged to the dwarf Andvari, drives him to send the invitation. Thought through, the hoard is the cursed gold that brings ruin to every owner.
The saga follows the Atlakviða at the core but changes nuances. Here too Gunnar plays the harp with his feet in the snake pit and lulls the serpents to sleep, all but one, which bites him in the heart. The saga's narrative has something the Edda only hints at: the artist as the prisoner's last resistance. After Atli's death the story goes on; Gudrun throws herself into the sea, is carried ashore and marries again, and vengeance for her daughter Svanhild fills the next chapter. Part of it survives in the Edda as Guðrúnarhvǫt and Hamðismál.
In the south the same story was told differently. The Nibelungenlied, composed around 1200 by an unknown poet in the Bavarian-Austrian region and handed down in three main manuscripts (A, B, C), turns Atli into the mild, almost passive Etzel. Here it is Kriemhild, Siegfried's widow, who marries Etzel in order to take revenge on the killers of her first husband. She invites the Burgundians to court, a great slaughter follows, Hagen and King Gunther are killed, and Kriemhild herself is cut down. Hagen has sunk the hoard in the Rhine beforehand. The king of the Huns is no villain but the instrument of a woman's vengeance.
It is a swap of roles. In the North Atli strikes and Gudrun avenges her brothers; in the South Kriemhild strikes and avenges her husband. Both versions know the loss of the gold in the Rhine, the fall of the Burgundian house, the Huns as the setting. Scholars therefore assume a common earlier stage, probably Low German or Gothic, which reached the North across the Baltic. How exactly that route ran is unclear.
A third version stands in the Norwegian Thidreks saga of the mid-thirteenth century. According to its own preface it was put together in Bergen at the court of King Hákon Hákonarson from the reports of Low German informants; in it Atli rules in Hunaland and the Niflungs come from Worms. The saga shows how firmly the Rhineland had fixed itself in the memory of the Burgundians. The Old English Widsith too names "Ætla" as ruler of the Huns and "Gifica" of the Burgundians; the poem survives in the Exeter Book of the late tenth century, its age is disputed, and proposals range from the sixth to the tenth century. Either way the passage shows that the names Atli and Gundahar were in circulation in central Europe and England long before a Scandinavian wrote them down.
Anyone writing about Atli is writing about a story with three layers, each with its own degree of certainty. The first layer is history: Attila's realm, Priscus, Jordanes, the Catalaunian Plains, the death in 453, the end of the Burgundians in 436. It rests on contemporaries and near-contemporary chroniclers, however patchy these are. The second layer is heroic legend, which grew orally between the fifth and ninth centuries, shifted names and roles and at some point reached the North. It can be grasped only indirectly. The third layer is the texts themselves: the Atlakviða and Atlamál, written down in the late thirteenth century, the Völsunga saga, the Nibelungenlied, the Thidreks saga.
Since the nineteenth century scholarship has sorted these layers again and again. Early philologists such as Karl Lachmann looked for the "genuine" single lays behind the Nibelungenlied; later scholars stressed the independence of each version. Today the broad view is that the Norse lays are not a corrupted copy of the German poem, nor the German a shortening of the Norse. Both draw on a tradition that we know only through later refractions.
Here text and image touch. The Norse knew the Sigurd legend so well that they carved it in stone. The most famous witness is the rock at Ramsund in Södermanland, Sweden, around 1030, where a runic serpent and a sequence of images show Sigurd killing the dragon Fafnir, roasting the heart, understanding the birds and slaying the smith Regin. Similar scenes appear on the Gök stone, on crosses on the Isle of Man, at Halton in England and on the wooden portals of Hylestad stave church in Norway, around 1200. That is the Sigurd half of the story.
The Atli half hardly appears. Research knows of no certain Viking Age depiction of Atli or of the snake pit, even if single images – a man with a harp among snakes, a rider before a gate – have repeatedly been interpreted that way. The picture on our teak panel is therefore not a copy of any known scene. It takes up a method: a saga is put into an image, and the image speaks without words.
To be honest, our Atli motif is not a reproduction. It is a design in the style of the picture stones: a scene full of movement with rider, ship and figures, burned into the wood with a laser. Teak is dense, warm in tone and known for its natural durability; the fine grain gives the bright laser-cut lines depth, and they stand out against the darker wood much like the contours of a picture stone. That the wood comes from South-East Asia and not from the North we state plainly; the imagery is Nordic, the material is not.
The motif promises nothing beyond what it is: a keepsake of a story that has been told for fifteen centuries. Anyone who wants to know more about the figures behind it will find them in our articles on Brynhild, Sigurd and the Burgundians.
"Cattle die, and kinsmen die, and so one dies oneself; but a noble name will never die for the one who earns good renown."Hávamál 76, translation after Henry Adams Bellows (public domain)
The stanza fits Gunnar and Högni, who died for their renown. It also fits the bitter observation of the Atlakviða: in the end, nobody has the hoard.
Who was Atli? Atli is the Old Norse name of Attila, ruler of the Huns, who died in 453. In the Edda and the Völsunga saga he is a legendary king who lures the Burgundian kings Gunnar and Högni into a trap to win their gold. Apart from the name, this figure has little in common with the Attila of the chroniclers.
What does the Atlakviða tell? Atli invites his brothers-in-law Gunnar and Högni, takes them prisoner and has Högni's heart cut out. Gunnar refuses to reveal the hiding place of the gold and dies in the snake pit. His sister Gudrun, Atli's wife, avenges her brothers by serving Atli the hearts of their sons, killing him and setting the hall on fire.
Did the Burgundians really exist, and were they destroyed by the Huns? Yes. According to Prosper and the Gallic Chronicle of 452, the Burgundian king Gundahar fell in 436 with his people and kin, and Hunnic troops took part. No source says Attila himself was there.
How do the Atlakviða, Atlamál and Nibelungenlied differ? The Atlakviða (about 900) is short and hard, the Atlamál (probably twelfth century) longer and more psychological, and the Nibelungenlied (about 1200) makes Etzel a mild host while Kriemhild drives the revenge. All three know the fall of the Burgundians among the Huns and the gold lost in the Rhine.
Do picture stones show Atli? Research knows of no certain Viking Age depiction of Atli. The Gotland picture stones show ships, riders and scenes some of which relate to myth; Sigurd images, on the other hand, exist in Sweden, Norway and England, for instance on the Ramsund rock.
What does the Atli motif from Glanz & Gravur show? It is our own design in the style of the picture stones, with rider, ship and figures, laser-engraved on teak. It copies no particular stone but takes up the idea of putting a saga into an image.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
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