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Description
Volund the Smith (or Welund as he is called in Old English, and Wayland as he is known in modern English) is a relatively obscure figure from Norse mythology whose story is told in the Eddic poem Völundarkviða and the later work Þiðreks saga. He is, interestingly, the only character in the entire corpus that is exclusively referred to as an elf. Other characters like the goddess Iðunn and many dwarves are also called elves, but this is in conjunction with other terms that confuse the waters of what exactly an "elf" is supposed to be. Of course, because we can't have nice things, Volund doesn't exactly provide any insight as to what distinguishes an elf from any other mythical being either. Volund is just made out to be a vaguely supernatural entity with masterful prowess over the forge… which sure as hell sounds like a dwarf, lending credence to the idea that elves and dwarves were historically thought of as two flavors of the same creature rather than the contrasting species we often make them in modern fantasy culture. Þiðreks saga claims that Volund was taught smithing by two dwarves, so I guess you could argue it's a coincidence, but that just leaves us back at square one with the elusive nature of elves.

It doesn't help that this saga also deviates heavily from the original narrative told in the Poetic Edda. In the Edda, Volund is the son of a king named Finni, whereas the saga has it that he is the son of a giant named Wade, which I kinda love just for the existence of a giant named "Wade". Anyways, the Eddic story goes that one day Volund and his punk ass brothers stumbled across three smokin' hot babes skinny dipping in a local lake. Their discarded swan cloaks identify them as Valkyries, and while it is often glossed that the elven brothers stole the cloaks to force them to marry them, this detail isn't actually found in Völundarkviða. The text simply says that the Valkyries went home with the elves and married them, so there's room for our modern sensitivities to interpret this as a consensual relationship. Lucky bastards must've really put the charm on to swoon a threesome of naked Valkyries. Of course, the events later on in the poem have no such excuse, but to get there we must first talk about Niðuð.

Niðuð was a neighboring king who had heard tell of Volund's master craftsmanship and fat stacks of cash, and like every politician, he decided that these things should instead belong to him. He sent agents to capture the elf, but found his home empty, as Volund was out hunting, and his wife was called to service as a Valkyrie again. All the agents found were a shitload of golden rings which Volund had forged in her absence, though for whatever reason they only looted one. When Volund returned and counted his rings, he was elated because he thought his wife had come home to take one, but then Niðuð's agents got the drop on him and brought him to their king. Niðuð was then advised by his queen that Volund was a slippery little bastard who might like try to escape and tattle to his Valkyrie muscle mommy and stuff, so Niðuð's only logical course of action was of course to have the tendons in Volund's legs cut and strand him in a workshop on the island of Sævarstoð. The ring was given to Niðuð's daughter Boðvild as a trophy, and Volund was locked away in a cave with a bunch of scraps, forced to slave away at the forge like Tony Stark. Like Tony Stark, though, Volund had an idea, an awful idea, a wonderful awful idea.

One day Niðuð's two unnamed sons come along to pay this poor schmub a visit, and they're positively delighted when Volund pulls them aside and is like hey, yo, guess what my guys, I can show you my real treasure. And they're like heeeell yeah dude let's see it, so Volund brings them over to his chest, opens the lid for them to peak inside, they stick their heads in, but it's sadly not his dick in a box, it's a trap. Volund slams the sharpened lid down and guillotines the poor sons of bitches, and then proceeds to use their skulls as drinking vessels and their blood for mead. Good sweet Jesus. Then Boðvild comes along, asking to have her ring repaired, but instead Volund gets her completely plastered and… uh… performs some very nonconsensual acts on her which I'm not comfortable elaborating on. By this point, though, he has at last completed his latest invention: some sort of ambiguous flying contraption which he straps himself to in order to escape the island. He takes a detour over Niðuð's place and taunts him from the sky, confessing what he did to his children, and revealing that Boðvild has become pregnant with his child. Boðvild thusly weaps to her father that she could not fight him off, a very rare sympathetic moment for a female victim in a medieval source.

According to Þiðreks saga, Volund's brother Egil, who in this version was apparently working for Niðuð all along, is ordered to shoot down the flying elf, but instead hits a bag of blood which Volund had attached to himself as a decoy. Volund thus flies off swearing to never be a slave to anyone ever again. Interestingly, the saga also continues the narrative of Volund and Boðvild's son, whom she names Witege. Witege goes on to be a famous hero in his own right, serving in the counsel of Dietrich von Bern. Dietrich incidentally is the mythical rendition of a real historical figure, Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic king who usurped the throne of the Western Roman Empire. Witege meanwhile is similarly seen as a mythologized version of another historical figure: Vitiges, who was king of the Ostrogoths until the Roman General Belisarius reclaimed Rome for Emperor Justinian in 536. Assuming there is any semblance of truth to this link, that would make Vitiges the only historically attested half-elf on record, which as a D&D nerd I just find endlessly entertaining.

Design notes, there's actually a surprising amount of contemporary imagery depicting Volund, showing that this is a pretty old and widespread tradition. He most famously appears on the 8th century Franks Casket, and in the form of a 10th century pendant wearing his wingsuit found in Uppårka (once believed to be Loki wearing Freyja's feather cloak). The Franks Casket isn't especially detailed, though, and I reserved the Uppårka figure for reference material for my design for his wingsuit which I'll show off tomorrow. So instead I turned to more modern depictions, namely 1848's "Wieland tests the edge of his sword Minmung on Amilias" by Wilhelm von Kaulbach, 1888's "Boðvild in Wayland's Forge" by Johannes Gehrts, and an illustration from Fredrik Sander's 1893 edition of the Poetic Edda. All of these just kind of draw him as an extremely generic blacksmith, though, so to extrapolate a little further, I leaned a little harder into the Iron Man angle XD The color palette makes that pretty obvious, but I also took inspiration from the outline of some of the MCU suits to incorporate into the pattern of his apron. I wasn't entirely happy with it at first, but it's grown on me, I think it suffices.

Description
Volund the Smith (or Welund as he is called in Old English, and Wayland as he is known in modern English) is a relatively obscure figure from Norse mythology whose story is told in the Eddic poem Völundarkviða and the later work Þiðreks saga. He is, interestingly, the only character in the entire corpus that is exclusively referred to as an elf. Other characters like the goddess Iðunn and many dwarves are also called elves, but this is in conjunction with other terms that confuse the waters of what exactly an "elf" is supposed to be. Of course, because we can't have nice things, Volund doesn't exactly provide any insight as to what distinguishes an elf from any other mythical being either. Volund is just made out to be a vaguely supernatural entity with masterful prowess over the forge… which sure as hell sounds like a dwarf, lending credence to the idea that elves and dwarves were historically thought of as two flavors of the same creature rather than the contrasting species we often make them in modern fantasy culture. Þiðreks saga claims that Volund was taught smithing by two dwarves, so I guess you could argue it's a coincidence, but that just leaves us back at square one with the elusive nature of elves.

It doesn't help that this saga also deviates heavily from the original narrative told in the Poetic Edda. In the Edda, Volund is the son of a king named Finni, whereas the saga has it that he is the son of a giant named Wade, which I kinda love just for the existence of a giant named "Wade". Anyways, the Eddic story goes that one day Volund and his punk ass brothers stumbled across three smokin' hot babes skinny dipping in a local lake. Their discarded swan cloaks identify them as Valkyries, and while it is often glossed that the elven brothers stole the cloaks to force them to marry them, this detail isn't actually found in Völundarkviða. The text simply says that the Valkyries went home with the elves and married them, so there's room for our modern sensitivities to interpret this as a consensual relationship. Lucky bastards must've really put the charm on to swoon a threesome of naked Valkyries. Of course, the events later on in the poem have no such excuse, but to get there we must first talk about Niðuð.

Niðuð was a neighboring king who had heard tell of Volund's master craftsmanship and fat stacks of cash, and like every politician, he decided that these things should instead belong to him. He sent agents to capture the elf, but found his home empty, as Volund was out hunting, and his wife was called to service as a Valkyrie again. All the agents found were a shitload of golden rings which Volund had forged in her absence, though for whatever reason they only looted one. When Volund returned and counted his rings, he was elated because he thought his wife had come home to take one, but then Niðuð's agents got the drop on him and brought him to their king. Niðuð was then advised by his queen that Volund was a slippery little bastard who might like try to escape and tattle to his Valkyrie muscle mommy and stuff, so Niðuð's only logical course of action was of course to have the tendons in Volund's legs cut and strand him in a workshop on the island of Sævarstoð. The ring was given to Niðuð's daughter Boðvild as a trophy, and Volund was locked away in a cave with a bunch of scraps, forced to slave away at the forge like Tony Stark. Like Tony Stark, though, Volund had an idea, an awful idea, a wonderful awful idea.

One day Niðuð's two unnamed sons come along to pay this poor schmub a visit, and they're positively delighted when Volund pulls them aside and is like hey, yo, guess what my guys, I can show you my real treasure. And they're like heeeell yeah dude let's see it, so Volund brings them over to his chest, opens the lid for them to peak inside, they stick their heads in, but it's sadly not his dick in a box, it's a trap. Volund slams the sharpened lid down and guillotines the poor sons of bitches, and then proceeds to use their skulls as drinking vessels and their blood for mead. Good sweet Jesus. Then Boðvild comes along, asking to have her ring repaired, but instead Volund gets her completely plastered and… uh… performs some very nonconsensual acts on her which I'm not comfortable elaborating on. By this point, though, he has at last completed his latest invention: some sort of ambiguous flying contraption which he straps himself to in order to escape the island. He takes a detour over Niðuð's place and taunts him from the sky, confessing what he did to his children, and revealing that Boðvild has become pregnant with his child. Boðvild thusly weaps to her father that she could not fight him off, a very rare sympathetic moment for a female victim in a medieval source.

According to Þiðreks saga, Volund's brother Egil, who in this version was apparently working for Niðuð all along, is ordered to shoot down the flying elf, but instead hits a bag of blood which Volund had attached to himself as a decoy. Volund thus flies off swearing to never be a slave to anyone ever again. Interestingly, the saga also continues the narrative of Volund and Boðvild's son, whom she names Witege. Witege goes on to be a famous hero in his own right, serving in the counsel of Dietrich von Bern. Dietrich incidentally is the mythical rendition of a real historical figure, Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic king who usurped the throne of the Western Roman Empire. Witege meanwhile is similarly seen as a mythologized version of another historical figure: Vitiges, who was king of the Ostrogoths until the Roman General Belisarius reclaimed Rome for Emperor Justinian in 536. Assuming there is any semblance of truth to this link, that would make Vitiges the only historically attested half-elf on record, which as a D&D nerd I just find endlessly entertaining.

Design notes, there's actually a surprising amount of contemporary imagery depicting Volund, showing that this is a pretty old and widespread tradition. He most famously appears on the 8th century Franks Casket, and in the form of a 10th century pendant wearing his wingsuit found in Uppårka (once believed to be Loki wearing Freyja's feather cloak). The Franks Casket isn't especially detailed, though, and I reserved the Uppårka figure for reference material for my design for his wingsuit which I'll show off tomorrow. So instead I turned to more modern depictions, namely 1848's "Wieland tests the edge of his sword Minmung on Amilias" by Wilhelm von Kaulbach, 1888's "Boðvild in Wayland's Forge" by Johannes Gehrts, and an illustration from Fredrik Sander's 1893 edition of the Poetic Edda. All of these just kind of draw him as an extremely generic blacksmith, though, so to extrapolate a little further, I leaned a little harder into the Iron Man angle XD The color palette makes that pretty obvious, but I also took inspiration from the outline of some of the MCU suits to incorporate into the pattern of his apron. I wasn't entirely happy with it at first, but it's grown on me, I think it suffices.