The English legendary character Wayland Smith is primarily a craftsman known for his artistic skill and, in one version of his tale, his cunning. He not only fits into the children's fantasy tradition of glorifying Englishness through the use of medievalisms but has also been adapted to a post-Reformation, post-industrialization conception of English virtue as bound to work. There is a tension between these roles, with the former often celebrating an idealized pastoral feudalism and the latter approving capitalism with its accompanying class mobility. This chapter argues that Wayland's hybridity — as both an anachronism and an embodiment of contemporary standards of working virtue — makes him problematic for projects of medievalism because he holds the potential to disrupt their frameworks of nostalgia and desire. Authors who explicitly integrate him into their works must employ strategies to contain the contradictions of Wayland Smith's figuration. This often takes the form of keeping him within the bounds of a narrative organization that denotes him as a workman to assist a more aristocratic hero. Meanwhile, contemporary representations of Wayland often relegate him to the backdrop of circumstantial medievalisms that permeate popular culture. From within these derivative spaces, however, some alternative Wayland Smiths appear, including hyper-sexualized and satirical renderings that reopen discussions about the places of work and craft in Anglophone identity.

Following an overview of the versions of the English Wayland Smith legend, this chapter will progress chronologically, beginning with the Old English sources that refer to his tale. Using Peter Clemoes's and Nicole Guenther Discenza's discussions of cræft in Alfred's translations as a bridge, I touch on the elevation of work and trade to a moral good in Western Europe after the Reformation. With such a history in mind, this chapter considers representations of Wayland Smith as he appears in popular literature influenced by nineteenth-century medievalisms, the British Arts and Crafts movement, and the rise of children's fantasy in the twentieth century.

By the time Alfred the Great translated Boethius's De consolatione Philosophiae in the ninth century, the legend of Wayland Smith must have already been well known to the Anglo-Saxons. Alfred deviates from the original at the line ‘the bones of the faithful Fabricius’, with the king instead reflecting upon the bones of a more native faber, or smith.