Wayland’s Smithy is, in my opinion, one of the most enchanting heritage sites in the UK. It is a Neolithic barrow (burial mound/tomb) constructed in two phases, the earliest dating to around 3500 BCE. When the site was properly excavated in 1963, archaeologists discovered the remains of 14 individuals, all interred over the span of around 15 years — perhaps the unfortunate victims of disease or violent conflict. After some time, the tomb was buried, thus sealing the departed in their hollow earthen barrow for more than five thousand years. A second tomb was ultimately built on top of the mound (around 3400 BCE), which was used for around a century before also being sealed.

As early as the 10th century, local records referred to the site as Welandes Smidðan (‘Weland’s Smithy’) — the legendary forge of the mythic craftsman, Wayland. It is unclear how long this name had been attributed to the site, though it certainly arises from the Anglo-Saxons, and the association with Wayland has given rise to an array of legends surrounding the barrow — the most prominent being that, if you need a horse shod or a tool repaired, you can leave them at the barrow with a token offering of sixpence, and return to find your tools mended and horses shod, presumably by the magical smith himself.

Wayland was once a tremendously popular figure in Germanic folklore, featured in written sources like Beowulf and the Elder Edda, and also appearing on the 8th century Franks Casket, held at the British Museum. It is assumed that, around 2,500 years ago, he would have been known to Proto-Germanic speakers as *Wēlandaz (the ‘Crafty One’), which gives us the names Völundr in Old Norse, Wieland in German, and of course Wēland in Old English/Anglo-Saxon. The oldest written mention of the name, however, comes from an old Frisian coin minted between the 5th-6th centuries CE, which bears the runes ᚹᛖᛚᚪᛞᚢ, indicating Wela(n)du, though it is uncertain whether this is a reference to the legendary smith or simply a personal name.

Wayland is principally known for his magical smithing work, namely his forging of famous weapons and armour, like Siegfried’s sword Gram (from the Völsunga Saga) and the chainmail shirt worn by Beowulf. He was also said to have forged swords for Merlin, King Horn, Walter of Aquitaine, and Dietrich von Bern, as well as more solidly historical figures like Emperor Charlemagne and Roland.

The Story of Wayland

Our best surviving literary source for the story of Wayland comes from the Elder or ‘Poetic’ Edda, which formed the basis for the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturlusson (1179-1241). In one of the poems, known as the Völundarkviða, we are told that Völundr was the youngest of three sons of a Sámi king (the Sámi being the indigenous inhabitants of the far north of Sandinavia and the Kola Peninsula). After a nine-year love affair with a Valkyrie, Völundr was abducted by the Swedish king Níðuðr and taken prisoner to the Island of Sævarstöð, where he was forced to forge metalwares and jewellery for the king and his family. In many versions of the tale, Völundr was physically incapacitated by having the tendons behind his knees slashed, thus preventing him from escaping by any conventional means.

One day, the king’s two sons visited Völundr’s smithy and began to covet his precious creations. Detecting their “ill intent”, Völundr tells them to return alone the following day, and they did. But instead of providing them with the riches they desired, he cut off their heads, buried their limbs beneath the anvil, and forged jewellery from their skulls. Their skullcaps he covered with silver, and with them fashioned a set of drinking vessels for King Níðuðr; from their eyes he crafted precious jewels and sent them to Níðuðr’s queen, Hervör; and with their teeth he made brooches for the king’s daughter, Böðvildr. Impressed by his skill (and ignorant of the true nature of the materials used for these treasures), Böðvildr commissioned Völundr to fix one of her rings. But when she arrived at his smithy, Völundr raped and impregnated her, before flying away with a set of wings he had secretly prepared for his grand escape. In this final act of flight, it should come as no surprise that, in Icelandic tradition, the terms Labyrinth and Domus Daedali (the ‘domicile of Daedalus’) were glossed as Vǫlundarhús, the ‘house of Völundr’.

Notably, Völundr is regarded in this poem as álfa ljöði (a ‘citizen of the elves’) and even vísi álfa (the ‘leader of the elves’), connecting him to a very old tradition in which elves were regarded as masterful smiths (a skill usually later attributed to dwarves). While he is elsewhere simply represented as being a magical or otherworldly figure, it is in the Norse tradition that we see him explicitly identified as a member of the Elven ‘race’. It’s worth noting that, in Old Norse tradition, the term álfr was sometimes used in reference to the Sámi — likely tied to long-standing popular associations between the Sámi and magic/sorcery, and further used to identify Sámi peoples as ‘other’. They were, notably, among the last Europeans to be (forcefully) converted to Christianity (16th-18th centuries), originally practicing an animistic form of spirituality or ‘religion’ presided over by local shamans or noaidi (South Saami nåejttie). An echo of this old association is still surprisingly prevalent today, ultimately leading to the motif of Santa’s ‘elves’ living in ‘Lapland’ (a somewhat pejorative and largely defunct name for Sápmi).

Tolkien and Wayland

Since we’re dealing with elves here, it is natural that one might ask if any traces of the Wayland myth made their way into Tolkien’s Legendarium — and indeed they did, via some scattered notes in a document entitled ‘Enʒlaʒesíþ’ (ER1 in Parma Eldalamberon XV, 94-7). This fascinating text was produced around 1918-1920, after Tolkien returned to Oxford from the First World War and began working on the Oxford English Dictionary (specifically contributing to entries beginning with the letter W, which also seems to be the focus of the present document). This supremely enigmatic text contains, in Tolkien’s own words, “Notes of words of Interest”, “place names”, and “hints of legends” which seem to function as a bridge between ‘Middle-earth’ and our own primary world. Its Old English title, Enʒlaʒesíþ (or ‘Engla-gesíth’) literally means something to the effect of the ‘English Companion’.

On the fourth page of the document, Tolkien writes the following under the entry for ‘Wéland':

“Eriol asks innocently is not Aule him that we call Wéland and they (Rúmil?) laughing says no and tells of Velindo or Gwilion the fay — one of Aule’s folk who was sent by Aule into the world to fetch at his need some of the good heavy red gold of the dwarves.
There his pride swelled by reason of the amazement of men and dwarves at his skill; and he never returned to Aule but set up on his own — and was once famous far and wide but with the fading of the fairies his power has waned.
He was not wicked but very vain — Eriol touches on the Böðvildr legend and Rúmil says that if it is true it shows the vanity of Wéland (Niðhad must be a dwarf king).” (Parma Eldalamberon XV, 96)

The names Velindo (presumably presented in Qenya), and its cognate Gwilion (presumably Gnomish), are never given an explicit gloss. It is, of course, to be assumed that these names arose as ‘Quendianised’ adaptations of Wayland/Völundr’s actual name. But it’s worth noting that, in the (already-extant) Qenya Lexicon (in Parma Eldalamberon XII), the Early Primitive Elvish root √GWILI is given the meaning ‘to fly’, while √VILI means ‘air’ (found in words like vilya, which means the same). By the time the ‘Enʒlaʒesíþ’ text was composed, these meanings had already been established for at least a few years, thus making this a rather remarkable coincidence which Tolkien would have certainly enjoyed (even though he made no explicit note of it).

The ‘Böðvildr legend’ to which Tolkien refers is, of course, when Wayland/Völundr assaults and impregnates King Niðhad(/Níðuðr)’s daughter to seek revenge for his thraldom. On the sixth and seventh pages of the document, Tolkien begins to sketch out his own version of the myth, which he identifies as being “A Story {from} of the wars of [?Melko] and [?fairies]”:

“Weyland
captured by {Melko} Niðad / King of the {Orcs} Niaroth

How Beaduhilde, a fair maiden {of the (daughter of —, King of —)} his daughter {was in Melko’s durance} How Wélund forged wings and slew {Melko’s} N[iðad]’s [?sons] {captain of orcs} and how he {made love to} came upon Beaduhilde in the garden and made love to her and fled with her but dropped her in a wood and could not find her — {Lament of Wélund for Beaduhilde} How B[eaduhilde] forgave W[élund] and despite Niðad’s wrath obtains a blessing upon her son.” (PE XV, 97)

Note that the names used in this extract, Nið(h)ad and Beaduhilde, are taken from the Old English poem Dēor, but are cognate with Niðuðr and Böðvildr in the Elder Edda. This is, of course, a slightly different story than we get in the ancient legends. As John Garth notes, Tolkien effectively “exonerates the vengeful Wéland of barbarism” by making his captor an Orc lord, or even Melko(r) himself; and his impregnation of Böðvildr is transformed from a violent assault into a love affair. Such augmentations of the character of Wayland elevate him from a magical anti-hero to a more potentially venerable character (albeit also a vain one, according to Rúmil).

The most fascinating part of this extract, however, is the short list of name associations scribbled above it: “Weyland = Feanor / Wade = Earendel” (97). At this time in Tolkien’s mythopoeic process, the character of Fëanor was nowhere near fully developed, but he was already known for both his unparalleled smithing skills and, quite clearly, his vanity and arrogance. While this tale did not ultimately make its way into the ‘formal’ materials of the Legendarium, it is notable that Tolkien — at least for a time — sought to draw a direct correlation between the legendary figure of Wayland and the greatest elven smith in the history of Arda. This aided in his ambition to establish the Legendarium as a ‘real’ primary-world mythology, explicitly linked to other (primarily Indo-European and Finno-Ugric) mythic traditions. This intention was far more explicit at this nascent phase of the Legendarium’s development, while it became somewhat subtler across subsequent layers of the work.

Of course, the association between Wade and Earendel/Eärendil is also highly noteworthy, though certainly not surprising to anyone familiar with the former’s mythos. Wade (ON Vaði) is a legendary Germanic mariner, first attested in the Old English poem Wīdsīþ, found in the 10th century Exeter Book collection; and later mentioned in the Þiðrekssaga (another source for the story of Völundr, here identified as Vaði’s son). His story was evidently known to Geoffrey Chaucer, who casually mentions the character, and his boat, in works like The Merchant’s Tale. The boat reference, in particular, is used strictly metaphorically (presumably as a sexual euphemism), which strongly suggests that the story was sufficiently embedded in the cultural consciousness to be meaningful to Chaucer’s readers. According to Thomas Speght (an important editor of Chaucer’s works in the 16th-17th c.), the name of the boat was also known — and he records it as ‘Guingelot’. It is unclear where Speght got this information, but there can be no doubt that this detail inspired Tolkien’s naming of Vingilot, the famous ship of Eärendil (Tolkien’s own ‘Wade’).

Fëanor’s Smithy

While Wayland’s Smithy itself would have certainly been known to Tolkien, being located only around 22 miles from Oxford, this obviously could never have been the ‘real’ smithy of our Velindo. At this stage of the Legendarium’s development, Britain was still identified as none other than the Lonely Isle of Tol Eressëa — only drawn across the ocean to its present position on the shore of mainland Europe during the great ‘Faring Forth’. But even in a primary-world mythological context, attempts to neatly align a folkloric site like Wayland’s Smithy with formal literary mythology is a fool’s errand. Wayland, after all, ultimately escaped his thraldom, thus it would seem unlikely that he would be hanging around to shod people’s horses for six pence.

But sites like these are not meant to be approached as an ordinary ‘historical’ site — nor are figures like Wayland to be treated as historical figures with a definitive and fixed biography. Wayland’s Smithy is, in this mythic context, not a place where something happened, but rather a place where stories are continuously unfolding — a liminal space on the borders of history and myth, where legendary figures still act, untethered by the fixed plots of their associated myths. Particularly in oral storytelling traditions, characters like Wayland were never concretised in the pages of a book. Their stories were ever-unfolding, never truly ending, at least as long as there were folks to recount and add to them. Figures like Wayland could ‘re-forge’ themselves time and time again, taking on new life as their stories passed between generations, territories, and traditions.

But Wayland, like Fëanor, can certainly be seen to embody certain perennial archetypes, which continue even into the latter’s more ‘fixed’ narrative in the ‘Silmarillion’ materials: a superlative craftsman overtaken by covetousness, vanity, and self-obsession, who commits atrocities in the name of retribution. The treasures forged by both are powerful, indeed fay, but also uniquely perilous and destructive. Smithing, after all, was long seen as a dangerously magical, even alchemical, art — aptly embodied in Wayland’s transformation of tooth into brooch, skull into goblet, eye into jewel. It is thus quite fitting that a barrow would be identified as his workshop. It is a tomb for the dead, yes — but also a womb of new creation. A threshold between worlds. A place of metamorphosis.

It’s worth noting, in light of Fëanor’s ‘fiery’ spirit (his name literally means ‘fire-spirit’ and his body self-combusts after his death), that Wayland is often associated with Hephaestus, Greek god of metallurgy, fire, and volcanoes. And like Wayland, Hephaestus is often represented as being disabled, with The Iliad reporting that he made a number of bronze-wheeled tripods to help him move around. While Fëanor/Velindo has no such impairment, the clear similarities (and potential narrative intermixing) between Wayland and the volcanic Hephaestus, and the distinctive fieriness of Fëanor, further suggests a basic affinity between these characters — all of whom take on the role of a brilliant, if tortured and problematic, other-than-human smith.

Sites like Wayland’s Smithy are living seams in the mythic landscape: far more than mere stones and soil, and indeed more than the human remains and grave goods that were once interred within. They are places where story lingers in the air like the smoke from an ancient forge. They mark not the past, but the ever-unfolding mythic present — enchanted (but not wholly bound) by the mysterious tales of yore. Here, the tale-forge never truly cools. And if you listen closely — and have sixpence to spare — you might just hear the echo of an elven hammer still ringing in the Earth.