ADVENTURE VI
HOW GUNTHER FARED TO ISENLAND[1] FOR BRUNHILD
New tidings came across the Rhine. ’Twas said that yonder many a fair maid dwelt. The good king Gunther thought to win him one of these; high therefore rose the warrior’s spirits. There lived a queen beyond the sea, whose like men knew not anywhere. Peerless was her beauty and great her strength. With doughty knights she shot the shaft for love. The stone she hurled afar and sprang far after it. He who craved her love must win without fail three games from this high-born dame. When the noble maid had done this passing oft, a stately knight did hear it by the Rhine. He turned his thoughts upon this comely dame, and so heroes must needs later lose their lives.
One day when the king and his vassals sate and pondered to and fro in many a wise, whom their lord might take to wife, who would be fit to be their lady and beseem the land, up spake the lord of the Rhinelands: “I will go down to the sea and hence to Brunhlld, however it may go with me. For her love I’ll risk my life. I will gladly lose it and she become not my wife.”
“Against that do I counsel you,” spake then Siegfried, “if, as ye say, the queen doth have so fierce a wont, he who wooeth for her love will pay full dear. Therefore should ye give over the journey.”
- ↑ Isenland translates here M. H. G. Îslant, which has, however, no connection with Iceland in spite of the agreement of the names in German, Îsen lant, the reading of the MSS. BJh, has been chosen, partly to avoid confusion, and partly to indicate its probable derivation from Îsenstein, the name of Brunhild’s eastle. Boer’s interpretation of Îsen as ‘ice’ finds corroboration in Otfrid’s form îsine steina (‘ice stones,’ i.e. crystals) I, 1. 70. Îsenstein would then mean Ice Castle. In the Thidreksaga Brunhild’s castle is called Saegarðr (‘Sea Garden’), and in a fairy tale (No. 93 of Grimm) Stromberg, referring to the fact that it was surrounded by the sea. Here, too, in our poem it stands directly on the shore.
