Oxfordshire Folktales (5 page)

Leave a silver coin for Wayland the Smith – there on the capstone in front of his house, the old long barrow they call Wayland’s Smithy – and your horse will be shod by morn and the coin vanished like the stars at daybreak. This custom has been maintained for centuries – no one knows how long – and a good one it is too, as any passing tinker would tell you. It is easy enough to hide in the trees that line the Ridgeway – that ancient English road running alongside it – and wait ‘til fortune smiles. It pays to perpetuate the legend with a rumour here, a tale there, to a stranger at a horse fair, or in a tavern. Everybody wins.

Tinkers have always been workers of metal, as their name suggests, and horses have always been their first love. Nomads from the east, they like to keep moving and earn a little on the way. The luck is passed along by little signs the normal folk would not notice. The price is sleeping rough at such a spooky spot – not much fun in the pouring rain. You have to be careful that your woodsmoke isn’t noticed. It’s hard to keep the chill out, but maybe it’s more than the damp. The barrow is full of bones – the old stone glowering with angry ghosts.

Everyone has a tale to tell.

Sometimes, on a night when the sky seems to hold its breath, they speak. Cynics say it’s just the wind soughing through the beech trees that stand like sentinels around the bone house – but stay there the night and see for yourself; feel the black air press in around you. Listen, listen to the Silent Ones.

At the back of the barrow, in the dark-most dark, a voice from the long ago waits to be heard…

* * *

Some say I acted out of revenge. I say I acted out of love. My name has become muddled up with so much nonsense over the centuries – like an impure alloy.

Let me tell you how it was.

Before I was a god I was a man, Volund, though of elfish blood it had to be said – and perhaps that called me to her. Sons of the King of the Finns, my two brothers, Egil and Slagfinn, and I spied three beautiful swan maidens bathing. Valkyries on holiday from selecting the fallen in battle or serving mead in Valhalla, they had taken off their swan down and slipped into the water. We grabbed their swan skins and ‘persuaded’ them to marry us. Tall and fair, high-breasted and strong-thighed, they were all lovely, but mine, Hervör-Alvitr, was the loveliest. She eventually seemed to accept her fate. She grew to love me, though it took patience – like taming a wild animal. We settled down to married life and we were happy.

But happiness never lasts.

After nine winters we awoke one morning to find the Valkyries had fled. They somehow had found their swan skins and flown away. My brothers, beside themselves, pursued – they put on their snow shoes and headed into the howling blizzard of the north.

I never saw them again.

My bride left me a ring forged of elfish craft from pure Rhine gold. I took this as a sign of her love. In her absence I made seven hundred replicas of it, hoping each time my beloved Hervör would appear. I joined the seven hundred rings together – the true one hidden amongst them, so that only I or my beloved could tell which. One night I discovered the true ring had been taken, which gave me hope that my sweetheart would return, but she never did.

I lost myself in my work. I made my craft my prayer – sweating at the forge, day after day. Nobody could turn metal like me.

Word of my skill, and of my ring hoard, reached King Nidud of Sweden. They caught me while I slumbered, exhausted from my toil. Nidud seized my wealth, and ordered me hamstrung and imprisoned on the island of Sævarstöð. There I was forced to forge items for the Thief-king – otherwise I would starve. I was even forced to make my own prison, a labyrinth.

My precious ring, Hervör’s gift, was given to the King’s only daughter, Bodvild.

Nidud appropriated Gram – the precious sword I forged. I swore vengeance on my captor and his kin. Every day I collected feathers to make a pair of wings with which I could escape when the time was right – white swan feathers. Perhaps my love had not forsaken me after all. A slender hope, but it kept me going during my imprisonment on that bleak island.

One day, the King came – the stolen sword needed mending. I cleverly forged an exact replica and replaced it without him noticing.

When the King’s sons visited me in secret, overcome with hoard-greed, I did not hesitate in taking advantage of what the Norns had gifted me. I got them drunk and slaughtered them with their father’s stolen sword. Then I used my skill to fashion goblets from their skulls; jewels from their eyes; and a brooch from their teeth. I sent the goblet to the King; the jewels to the Queen; and the brooch to the King’s daughter – they were unaware of the nature of their treasures, even praising my skill. How clever was their tame slave, they prated. The trinkets had such a
shine
to them.

Then the Fates smiled again.

Bodvild took ‘her’ ring to me to be mended – my wife’s ring. I seized it and, overcome by a rage, forced myself upon her. From that violent union came a son, so I hear, but I did not stick around to raise him. Escape was all that mattered.

There were enough feathers now. I forged a pair of wings with my skill and made my escape. Grasping my sword and the ring, I soared heavenward like Hervör, my love.

Freedom!

Yet I did not slink off like a coward, but returned to Nidud’s palace to inform him of all that I had done – flying out of reach as I gloated. He ordered his archer, my own brother Egil, under enchantment, to shoot me down, but seeing it was his own sibling, Egil deliberately misfired and his arrow only burst a bladder of the King’s sons’ blood I had hidden on my person, which drenched the King. As he rained down curses upon me, I flew away, laughing.

I headed for Alf-heim, where I was finally reunited with my beloved bride and she agreed to be with me once again. Despite my lame leg, I continued plying my craft – magical swords and impenetrable suits of armour, forged by the ‘crippled blacksmith of uncanny skill’ – and a legend was born. All across the Northern Lands they honoured me. In Iceland a stone labyrinth is known as Volund’s House. Perhaps this tradition inspired their Nordic cousins, the Danes, who settled in these isles to name the barrow on the Ridgeway, close by to the White Horse, Wayland’s Smithy. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

* * *

Day comes and the legends fade like mist in the sun, yet the wise know it is best to honour the Silent Ones. So, the next time you pass Wayland’s House, leave a silver coin to the smith-god and whatever you need mending shall be forged afresh by morning.

It had been an accepted truth in the Vale that there was treasure to be found on the Sinodun Hills – a pair of small wooded knolls outside Little Whittenham, commonly referred to as the Clumps (or the Bubs, or the Buttocks, depending on who you ask and how drunk they are). The one known as Castle Hill had once been a Roman fort – this is plain to see even in this day and age – and the wisdom was that Centurion gold had been buried there and was waiting to be discovered. Many had tried, especially around an area called, enticingly or perhaps ironically, the Money Pit – but not a groat had ever been found there.

Yet, this wasn’t going to put Jack off. A Whittenham man, he had the luck about him. That’s what everyone said: ‘Born lucky, that Jack!’ Things always seemed to go his way, whether it was in the cards, in the courting game, on the sports field or in the field of life.

Having heard about the many failed and foolish attempts to find the Sinodun gold, he decided to try his luck. He had to fair better than those feckless treasure-hunters before him.

And so off he set one misty morning, with a spade on his shoulder, whistling away.

‘Where you off to Jack?’ called a neighbour.

‘I’m off to find that treasure!’

He clomped up to the Clumps, standing lonely in the mist. By the time he got to the top, he was out of puff and stopped to dab his brow at Round Hill. He looked over to the ‘Castle’, the shadow of the earthworks just visible through the mist. ‘Well, no point hanging about,’ he said to himself, and he walked across to the other clump. He passed through a tunnel of fairy thorn. Within the enclosure there was a tangle of old trees. With some difficulty, he negotiated the thicket – each snap of twig seeming louder than usual.