Úlfdalir, Úlfsjár and Sævarstaðr

Opening prose: “They came to Ulfdal, and there made themselves a house, where there is a water called Ulfsiar.”

5. “But Volund alone remained in Ulfdal.”

13. Then cried Nidud, the Niarars’ lord: “Whence gottest thou, Volund! Alfars’ chief! our gold, in Ulfdal?”

Prose after stanza 16: “This was done; he was hamstrung, and then set on a certain small island near the shore, called Sævarstad.”

The prose that opens Völundarkviða says three brothers, sons of a king of the Finns, hunt on snow-shoes and come to Úlfdalir, where they build a house beside a water called Úlfsjár. On the lake’s border they find three women spinning flax, with swan-plumages beside them, and take them as wives. After seven years the women fly away, and Völundr stays behind in Úlfdalir, threading rings on a bast cord.

Níðuðr’s men come at night, take the rings and bind Völundr in his sleep. On the queen’s advice he is hamstrung and set in Sævarstaðr, which the prose after stanza 16 calls a small island near the shore. There he forges for the king, and no one may go to him but the king. Stanzas 19 and 22 set the killing of the king’s sons in Sævarstaðr, and Völundr rises into the air to leave in stanza 27.

The poem calls Völundr “Alfars’ chief” in stanza 13 and “the Alfar’s companion” in stanza 10, but it names no home for the Alfar and does not set any of these three places among them.

The names read plainly as “wolf-dales”, “wolf-lake” and “sea-stead” (a place by the sea). The poem gives no description of what these places look like.

The title “Alfars’ chief” puzzled Thorpe, who noted that it may come from the poem belonging to the heroic tradition and not to the gods’ mythology. The entry on Völundr, lord of elves, deals with the title. It does not make his dwelling an elven realm, and the site’s page on Álfheimr gives what the sources say of that realm.