"Hildina" is a traditional ballad thought to have been composed in Orkney in the 17th century,[1][2] but collected on the island of Foula in Shetland in 1774, and first published in 1805.
[7] In 1774 George Low, a young Scottish clergyman, visited the small and remote island of Foula in Shetland hoping to find remnants of oral literature in Norn, a language then nearing extinction.
[8][9][10] In 1893, when the Faroese philologist Jakob Jakobsen visited Shetland, he found that, though further fragments of folk poetry could still be collected, all memory of the ballad had been lost.
[13][1] Finally, a scholarly edition of "Hildina" by the Norwegian linguist Marius Hægstad under the title Hildinakvadet med utgreiding um det norske maal paa Shetland i eldre tid appeared in 1900.
This legend is attested in sources from across the Teutonic world, notably Snorri Sturluson's "Skáldskaparmál", the Icelandic "Sörla þáttr", the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus, and the Middle High German poem Kudrun.
[20] Parallels to the wedding of Hildina and Hiluge have been found in the Icelandic poem "Guðrúnarkviða II", in which the heroine Gudrun is urged to marry king Atli, the murderer of her lover Sigurd.
These include the motif of "hurling the head", which is also found in the Irish stories Bricriu's Feast and Mac Da Thó's Pig, and the "king and goddess" theme, found also in the Galatian story of Camma, Sinatus and Sinorix (recorded by Plutarch) and in the Irish saga Baile in Scáil.