Atlakviða
poem in the Poetic Edda
Atlakviða (The Lay of Atli) is one of the heroic poems of the Poetic Edda. One of the main characters is Atli who originates from Attila the Hun. It is one of the most archaic Eddic poems, possibly dating to as early as the 9th century. Owing to its stylistic similarity to Hrafnsmál it has been suggested that the poem might have been composed by Þorbjörn Hornklofi. It is preserved in the Codex Regius and the same story is related in the Völsunga saga. In the manuscript the poem is identified as Greenlandic but most scholars believe that this results from a confusion with Atlamál. The metre of the poem alternates irregularly between málaháttr and fornyrðislag. This may be an indication that two or more original poems have been merged or that the short and long lines were not felt as constituting two different metres at the time the poem was composed.
Historical background
Atlakviða's subject relates to the historical interaction between Burgundians and Huns in the 5th century. The poem is the oldest surviving version of the legend about the visit of the Burgundian rulers to Atli's court and the revenge of Guðrún.
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This entry incorporates text from “Atlakviða” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.