Poul Anderson: The Sorrow of Odin the Goth

Feeling awkward, I glanced again around the room. On a high floor, it was an oasis of quiet and cleanliness. Bookshelves lined the walls, save for three excellent pictures and a pair of Bronze Age spears. Else the only obvious souvenir was a polar bear rug that he had remarked was from tenth-century Greenland.

“You’ve been married twenty-three years, to the same lady,” Everard remarked. “These days, that indicates a stable character.”

There was no sign of femininity here. To be sure, he might well keep a wife, or wives, elsewhen. “No children,” Everard went on. “Hm, none of my business, but you do know, don’t you, that if you want, our medics can repair every cause of infertility this side of menopause? They can compensate for a late start on pregnancies, too.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Fallopian tubes—Yes, Laurie and I have discussed it. We may well take advantage someday. But we don’t think we’d be wise to begin parenthood and my new career simultaneously.” I formed a chuckle. “If simultaneity means anything to a Patroller.”

“A responsible attitude. I like that.” Everard nodded.

“Why this review, sir?” I ventured. “I wasn’t invited to enlist merely on the strength of Herbert Ganz’s recommendation. Your—people put me through a whole battery of far-future psych tests before they told me what it meant.”

They’d called it a set of scientific experiments. I’d cooperated because Ganz had asked me to, as a favor to a friend of his. It wasn’t his field; he was in Germanic languages and literature, the same as me. We’d met at a professional gathering, become drinking buddies, and corresponded quite a bit. He’d admired my papers on Deor and Widsith, I’d admired his on the Gothic Bible.

Naturally, I did not know then that it was his. It was published in Berlin in 1853. Later he was recruited into the Patrol, and eventually he came uptime under an alias, in search of fresh talent for his undertaking.

Everard leaned back. Across the pipe, his gaze probed at me. “Well,” he said, “the machines told us you and your wife are trustworthy, and would both be delighted by the truth. What they could not measure was how competent you’d be in the job for which you were proposed. Excuse me, no insult intended. Nobody is good at everything, and these missions will be tough, lonesome, delicate.” He paused. “Yes, delicate. The Goths may be barbarians, but that doesn’t mean they are stupid, or that they can’t be hurt as badly as you or me.”

“I understand,” I said. “But look, all you need do is read the reports I’ll have filed in my own personal future. If the early accounts show me bungling, why, just tell me to stay home and become a book researcher. The outfit needs those too, doesn’t it?”

Everard sighed. “I have inquired, and been told you performed—will perform—will have performed—satisfactorily. That isn’t enough. You don’t realize, because you haven’t experienced it, how overburdened the Patrol is, how ghastly thin we’re spread across history. We can’t examine every detail of what a field agent does. That’s especially true when he or she isn’t a cop like me, but a scientist like you, exploring a milieu poorly chronicled or not chronicled at all.” He treated himself to a swallow of his drink. “That’s why the Patrol does have a scientific branch. So it can get a slightly better idea of what the hell the events are that it is supposed to keep careless time travelers from changing.”

“Would it make a significant difference, in a situation as obscure as that?”

“It might. In due course, the Goths play an important role, don’t they? Who knows what a happening early on—a victory or a defeat, a rescue or a death, a certain individual getting born or not getting born—who knows what effect that could have, as its results propagate through the generations?”

“But I’m not even concerned with real events, except indirectly,” I argued. “My objective is to help recover various lost stories and poems, and unravel how they evolved and how they influenced later works.”

Everard grinned ruefully. “Yeah, I know. Ganz’s big deal. The Patrol has bought it because it is an opening wedge, the single such wedge we’ve found, to getting the history of that milieu recorded.”

He knocked back his drink and rose. “How about another?” he proposed. “And then we’ll have lunch. Meanwhile, I wish you’d tell me exactly what your project is.”

“Why, you must have talked to Herbert—to Professor Ganz,” I said, astonished. “Uh, thanks, I would like a refill.”

“Sure,” Everard said, pouring. “Retrieve Germanic literature of the Dark Ages. If ‘literature’ is the right word for stuff that was originally word of mouth, in illiterate societies. Mere chunks of it have survived on paper, and scholars don’t agree on how badly garbled those copies are. Ganz’s working on the, um-m, the Nibelung epic. What I’m vague about is where you fit in. That’s a story from the Rhineland. You want to go gallivanting solo away off in eastern Europe, in the fourth century.”

His manner did more than his whisky to put me at ease. “I hope to track down the Ermanaric part,” I told him. “It isn’t properly integral, but a connection did develop, and besides, it’s interesting in its own right.”

“Ermanaric? Who dat?” Everard gave me my glass and settled himself to listen.

“Maybe I better backtrack a little,” I said. “How familiar are you with the Nibelung-Volsung cycle?”

“Well, I’ve seen Wagner’s Ring operas. And when I had a mission once in Scandinavia, toward the close of the Viking period, I heard a yarn about Sigurd, who killed the dragon and woke the Valkyrie and afterward mucked everything up.”

“That’s a fraction of the whole story, sir.”

“ ‘Manse’ will do, Carl.”

“Oh, uh, thanks. I feel honored.” Not to grow fulsome, I hurried on in my best classroom style:

“The Icelandic Volsungasaga was written down later than the German Nibelungenlied, but contains an older, more primitive, and lengthier version of the story. The Elder and the Younger Edda have some of it too. Those are the sources that Wagner mainly borrowed from.

“You may recall that Sigurd the Volsung got tricked into marrying Gudrun the Gjuking instead of Brynhild the Valkyrie, and this led to jealousy between the women and at last to his getting killed. In German, those persons are called Siegfried, Kriemhild of Burgundy, Brunhild of Isenstein; and the pagan gods don’t appear; but no matter now. According to both stories, Gudrun, or Kriemhild, later married a king called Atli, or Etzel, who is none other than Attila the Hun.

“Then the versions really diverge. In the Nibelungenlied, Kriemhild lures her brothers to Etzel’s court and has them set on and destroyed, as her revenge for their murder of Siegfried. Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogoth who took over Italy, gets into that episode under the name of Dietrich of Bern, though in historical fact he flourished a generation later than Attila. A follower of his, Hildebrand, is so horrified at Kriemhild’s treachery and cruelty that he slays her. Hildebrand, by the way, has a legend of his own, in a ballad whose entirety Herb Ganz wants to find, as well as in derivative works. You see what a cat’s cradle of anachronisms this is.”

“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.”