Four Swords of Wayland

According to legend, the Great King and Emperor Charlemagne had four swords, each forged by Wayland the Smith. 

His own sword was called Joyeuse. He wielded it in battle against the Turk, and after his death it became the coronation sword of the Kings of France. After the Revolution it was moved to the Louvre museum, where it remains to this day.

A second sword, known as Durendal, Charlemagne gave to his most famous paladin Roland, who carried it at the battle of the Roncevaux Pass, where he died. With his last strength Roland cast Durendal away, rather than let it be captured by the Enemy, and there is to this day a sword protruding the living rock of a cliff-face in Rocamadour in south-western France. It can still be seen by visitors to the region, despite the local tourist board’s insistence that it is not original.

Also at the Battle of the Roncevaux Pass died Bishop Turpin of Rheims, another ally of Charlemagne, whose sword, though less well known than Durendal, was also forged by Wayland from the same steel. Its name was called Almace.

A fourth sword, also brother to Durendal, was given by Charlemagne to his former enemy Ogier the Dane, who thereafter became one of the Great King’s most loyal liegemen in the Turkish wars. Its name was Curtana, and it had long before been the sword of Sir Tristan of Lyonesse.

Ogier is the Danish equivalent of King Arthur, and according to one legend after his last battle he was taken to Avalon by Morgan le Fay. Also like Arthur, as well as like Frederick Barbarossa of Germany and Duke St Wenceslaus of Bohemia, he is thought to be not dead but sleeping under a mountain, waiting to return to his country’s aid in its darkest hour.

Ogier’s sword Curtana though was broken, much like Siegfried’s sword in The Nibelungenlied. It has since become one of the coronation swords of the Kings of England, where it is called the Sword of Mercy and is borne in the coronation ceremony as one of the three Swords of Justice. According to legend, it was broken by an angel when an attempt was made to use it to commit an unjust act. Some say that the sword that is used to this day was recreated for the coronation of Charles II. Others though maintain that the Swords of Justice were amongst the few royal relics that survived being melted down by Oliver Cromwell.

Loki and Sigyn

[Mårten Eskil Winge]

[Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg]

Another artist who has depicted this scene has been W. G. Collingwood, whose line-drawing version is here.

This, from John Coulthart, is very sweet.

Heroes vs. Monsters - from Germany to America

The above picture got me thinking...

For a long time I've felt that comic-book superheroes were the natural successors of the heroes of legend and, to a lesser extent, myth. They inhabit the same imaginative space that St George or Siegfried or Hercules or Apollo once did. For whatever reason, we like stories about men (and sometimes women) who are like us only better and who fight terrifying monsters on our behalf.

And of course sometimes the heroic re-modelling has been quite conscious and deliberate. Was Superman unconsciously modelled on Jesus? (Or Merlin? Or Moses? Or Cyrus the Great?) Well, possibly! (He was invented by a couple of Jewish teenagers, who'd presumably heard of Nietzsche's original but hadn't read him.) But the comic-book character Wonder Woman is actually an Amazon. And the comic-book Thor is, well, Thor. It's easy to scoff at George Lucas for lifting Star Wars straight from the pages of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (though it's not quite so easy to scoff when one remembers that Lucas became a multi-millionaire on the back of it). But it had all (more or less!) been done before.

But when was the actual point of crossover? Where was the cultural nexus between the old world and the new? More specifically, when did American comics stop being about detectives (like Dick Tracy or, for that matter, The World's Greatest Detective himself - basically Sherlock Holmes in an even sillier costume - in the pages of what were then still called Detective Comics) and start being about "enhanced individuals"?

I suspect it really was in the 1930s and '40s, and as with so much of America culture the source and inspiration came from the old country. And, as with everything "all American", from apple-pie to frankfurters to jelly doughnuts to hamburgers, not to mention marching bands and blond-haired, blue-eyed, lantern-jawed jock-boys, the "old country" in particular was, of course, Germany.

By the 1930s of course Germany's heroes were back in vogue partly thanks to Wagner (who dusted down Siegfried and Parsifal and gave them their own show-stoppers) and partly thanks to Fritz Lang (who first brought the medieval world's greatest dragon-slayer to the big screen). And, let's not beat about the bush, it was partly thanks to dear old Adolf.

It's hardly surprising then that, just as Nazi Germany produced a Third Reich version of Fanta, America produced authentically Yankee versions of Norse/Arthurian heroes - just as Walt Disney would get on a produce his own Americanised versions of the Grimms' fairy stories.

Nihil sub sole novum!