My next novel, The Valkyrie, features Attila the Hun as a fairly major character, and it takes place in the context of the changes to the Roman Empire in the 5th century CE. In other words, it takes place in what textbooks call the Migration Period. I think this might surprise some readers, given that it also features familiar mythological figures like Loki and Odin, who we tend to associate with what we sometimes call the Viking Age, a few centuries later and based in more northerly parts of Europe.

But in fact, that Migration Period setting is taken directly from the old stories I’m retelling — and I think that aspect of it, the weird mix of history and legend, is pretty cool, because of what it says about the connections between people and places. And the “migration” part is a big reason why those stories ended up being told in far-flung countries, centuries later.

When I first starting thinking about retelling this story, I faced a condundrum, because I knew this apparent mismatch of setting might throw some readers off, and reader expectations can be a big factor in how a book is received. I considered filing off the historical elements in the original stories, and just telling them in a sort of vague, unspecified Medieval Europe (TM) or even an entirely mythological land. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that the historical threads were important to this story. The way I approach retellings is to excavate them down to the oldest bones I can fine, and look at all the layers, to help me consider how later tellings were situated in their own time and place, and how each layer changed or enhanced the themes. And then I make my own version, as a reflection of my own time and concerns, and as a respectful offering to the source material.

The fact that the oldest version we know of this story was already very old is integral to the way it came down to us, in my opinion. So here’s a post about that historical background. (Note: if you don’t already know these stories and you don’t want any spoilers for The Valkyrie, you might want to come back to this post after reading the novel — I don’t talk about the version in the novel much below, but there are some key points in the source material that will give you some ideas.)

There are many versions of the story of Sigurd (or Siegfried) and Brynhild (or Brünhild) and Gudrun (or Kriemhild). The two best-known early written versions are:

• the Nibelungenlied, which was written in medieval German around 1200 CE
• the Volsunga Saga, which was written around the same time in Old Norse

Like a lot of old stories, these were themselves historical fiction. They were telling each other tales about what happened long ago (about 700 or 800 years before, in fact!) and sometimes, far away. As much time separates the earliest manuscripts of these stories from their historical setting as separates us from those manuscripts. So these stories aren’t about people living in medieval Bavaria or Iceland, just as Beowulf isn’t a story about people living in England on the eve of the Norman Conquest – those were the people who told us the story, not the story itself.

So it’s a Viking story (in a very colloquial manner of speaking) but it’s not about Vikings.

Both versions of the story take place in and around the very real Burgundian kingdom, centred on the city that is known as Worms, Germany today. This is a little confusing because it’s not really close to what is now called Burgundy. The reason for that is that the Burgundians were expelled from the Worms area in the 5th century CE and relocated to what is now France – and that relocation is, in fact, the historical event that these sagas hinge on.

The original Burgundian kingdom along the Rhine was inside the Roman Empire, and they seem to have been granted the use of that land by at least one emperor. But for whatever reason (possibly that they were raiding outside of it), the kingdom was a thorn in the empire’s side, and the general Aëtius partnered up with the recently arrived Huns to attack the kingdom, during which the Burgundian king died. Then for not entirely clear reasons, Aëtius gave the surviving Burgundians a chance to settle in another part of the empire, and that’s why we drink Burgundy wine today. And the king of the Huns was Attila, who would go on to become the Roman Empire’s great enemy. Attila died, not in battle, but by a hemorrhage at his wedding feast; some say his bride assassinated him by poison or some other means, and some say he just drank too much.

In the Nibelungenlied, a dragon-slayer named Siegfried comes to Worms to marry Kriemhild, the king’s sister. The king is named Gunther, and Siegfried helps Gunther marry Brunhild, a warrior-queen. Tragic events ensue, and after the death of Siegfried, Kriemhild ends up marrying “Etzel”, the king of the Huns, and taking bloody revenge on her kinsmen who killed Siegfried, setting the hall on fire with them inside.

In the Volsunga saga, the dragon Sigurd slew is Fafnir, who has a backstory that involves Odin and Loki, so they get involved. Brynhild is a shieldmaiden and, in some of the Norse versions, a valkyrie. (She may also have some historical roots in a 6th century Merovingian queen; everything goes into the pot.) Sigurd comes to Worms and marries the princess, who is named Gudrun in this version. Tragic events ensue, and after Sigurd’s death, Gudrun marries “Atli”, king of the Huns. This time, Gudrun stabs Atli before she sets his hall on fire.

The map above gives a rough and incomplete sense of just how much people were moving around in the time of Attila (that green line that says “Huns” is basically Attila.) There was a lot of movement in particular between the people we think of as “Scandinavian” and the people we think of as “Germanic.” In fact, some traditions say the Burgundians themselves had a Scandinavian homeland.

When people move, their stories go with them. They pick up new bits and pieces as they go. There’s no reason why Scandinavians wouldn’t have included their gods in these old stories, and in fact, the gods were as old and well-travelled as the stories. Odin was worshipped by Germanic peoples at the time of the height of the Roman Empire, often identified with Mercury. This is why his day of the week is Wednesday (Woden’s Day) in English and mercredi in French. So while we most closely associate those gods with the people we call “Vikings” today, it’s a bit arbitrary to try to draw a line between cultures and stories that way.

These stories are part of the fabric of English history too — not only because of Woden/Odin, but because one day, a young boy was reading the Red Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, and came across something called The Story of Sigurd, which had this introduction:

(This is a very old story: the Danes who used to fight with the English in King Alfred’s time knew this story. They have carved on the rocks pictures of some of the things that happen in the tale, and those carvings may still be seen. Because it is so old and so beautiful the story is told here again, but it has a sad ending—indeed it is all sad, and all about fighting and killing, as might be expected from the Danes.)

Seem a bit unfair to the Danes, but anyway, that boy read that story of Fafnir the dragon, and Sigurd and his magic ring, and he grew up to write The Lord of the Rings. So is it a Danish story? Or an English story? Or a German story? Or an Icelandic story? One of its characters, Attila, was a nomadic king born to a people who’d recently come from Central Asia. Another is a Roman general born in what is now Bulgaria.

One of the things that drew me to this story in the first place is that it is a living, evolving example of the fact that people, places and stories are always diverse and fluid. Europe has never been the homogenous place that the white supremacists who walk around with runes on their hoodies like to pretend. And these stories have always been not only about entertainment but about transmitting oral history. All of this, to me, makes the story richer, so that’s why I kept the real historical elements that appear in the oldest manuscript versions that we have.