The Poetic Edda

Part 1: The Seeress's Prophecy

Voluspo

Summary

Völuspá, 'the prophecy of the seeress', opens the Codex Regius and gives the whole collection its cosmic frame. A völva, a seeress raised from a long memory that reaches back before the world, asks for silence from 'the holy races' and speaks to Odin, whom she calls Valfather. She remembers the giants who fostered her, the nine worlds and the great tree, and the time when Ymir lived and there was only a 'yawning gap', Ginnungagap.

She tells how the sons of Burr lifted the earth out of the sea, how the gods gave names to night and day, built their shrines at Iðavöllr and played at tables with golden pieces in a golden age. Dwarfs are made and listed; the first human pair, Askr and Embla, are found as lifeless logs and given breath, sense and colour. The ash Yggdrasil stands over the well of Urðr, where the three Norns allot the lives of men. Then comes the first war, between the Æsir and the Vanir, sparked by the burning of the witch Gullveig; Odin hurls his spear over the host, and the wall of the gods is broken.

The seeress shows that she knows where Odin's eye is hidden, in the well of Mímir, and is rewarded with rings. She sees the valkyries ride out, the death of Baldr by the mistletoe shaft, and Loki bound. From here the poem moves into the future: brothers kill each other, the hound Garmr howls, Heimdallr blows the Gjallarhorn, the wolf and the serpent break loose, and the gods fall one by one in Ragnarök while the sun turns black and fire leaps to heaven. Then a new earth rises green from the sea, the surviving gods meet again, Baldr returns, and the righteous dwell in the gold-roofed hall of Gimlé. The last image is the dragon Níðhöggr flying up with corpses on his wings, and the seeress sinks back into silence.

Analysis

The poem is a history of the cosmos in some sixty stanzas, told in the past and then, with growing urgency, in the present and future tense. Its refrain, 'would you know yet more?', both challenges Odin and draws the listener on. The speaker is herself a riddle: she knows more than the chief of the gods, who has paid with his eye for wisdom and must still come to her. Sigurður Nordal read the poem as the work of a single Icelandic poet writing around the year 1000, in the years of the conversion, who looked at the old gods with dread and at the new faith with hope (Sigurður Nordal 1978) (Dronke 2011).

Völuspá survives in two main versions, in the Codex Regius and in Hauksbók (early fourteenth century), which differ in stanza order and content, and Snorri Sturluson quotes and paraphrases it at length in his Edda. The stanza on the 'mighty lord' who comes from above to rule all things (Vsp. 65 in Bellows) is found only in Hauksbók, and its Christian sound has made it central to arguments about the poem's origins. Bellows rearranged stanzas and marked gaps; the reader should remember that the order of the poem is itself an editorial question (Harris 1985) (McKinnell 1994).

For readers who know Old English poetry, the metre is the first point of contact: fornyrðislag, the 'metre of ancient words', is built from paired short lines bound by alliteration, very close to the half-lines of Beowulf. The vision of brothers killing brothers and kinship broken (Vsp. 45) belongs to the same world of feud as the Old English heroic poems, and the poem's double ending, the new earth and the dragon, is a reminder that its picture of renewal is not simple consolation (Clunies Ross 2005).

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Part 2: The Sayings of the High One

Hovamol

Summary

Hávamál, 'the sayings of the High One' (that is, Odin), is the longest poem in the collection and the least like a story. It opens with practical advice for a traveller who enters a strange hall: look about before you go in, for you cannot tell where an enemy sits; a guest needs fire, food, dry clothes and a welcome; speak little, listen well, and do not drink yourself foolish. This long first section, often called the 'guest's wisdom', moves on to friendship, moderation, generosity, the value of a farm of one's own and the shortness of life. It includes the famous stanzas on death and fame: cattle die, kinsmen die, the self dies too, but a good name does not die.

The voice then turns to Odin's own experiences, especially with women: his failure to win the daughter of Billingr, who tricks him with a dog tied to her bed, and his success with the giantess Gunnlöð, whom he seduces in order to steal the mead of poetry. A section addressed to a man called Loddfáfnir gives further counsel, often introduced by a repeated formula.

The poem ends with Odin's account of how he won the runes. He hung on the 'windy tree' for nine nights, wounded with a spear and 'given to Odin, myself to myself', without bread or drink, until he took up the runes, screaming, and fell back. He then lists eighteen spells (the Ljóðatal) that he knows: charms to heal, to blunt an enemy's weapons, to quench fire, to calm the sea, to raise the dead and to win a woman's love, the last of which he will tell to no one.

Analysis

Hávamál is a gnomic poem, a collection of maxims, and much of it is in ljóðaháttr, the 'song metre' of Eddic wisdom: a long line with two alliterating halves followed by a shorter 'full line' that alliterates on its own. Bellows prints the full lines indented, so the shape of the metre can be seen on the page. The maxims are worldly, even calculating: trust is to be returned with trust and falsehood with falsehood. Carolyne Larrington has shown how closely their themes and techniques compare with Old English wisdom poems such as the Maxims and the gnomic passages of The Wanderer and The Seafarer (Larrington 1993).

The stanzas on death and fame (Háv. 77–78 in Bellows, 76–77 in Neckel–Kuhn) are the best-known lines in Old Norse. Their thought, that wealth and kin are lent and only reputation lasts, is very close to The Wanderer's 'here wealth is fleeting, here a friend is fleeting' (108–9) and to the ethic of lof and dom in Beowulf. Whether one hears in them heroic confidence or a rather bleak practicality depends on what stands around them in the poem.

Odin's hanging on the tree (Háv. 139–42 in Bellows; 138–41 in the standard numbering) has been compared ever since the nineteenth century with the Crucifixion, and the comparison raises the question of Christian influence. Many scholars prefer to read it against the evidence for Odin as god of the hanged and of sacrifice: a self-sacrifice through which the god gains hidden knowledge. Either way the passage makes wisdom something won through suffering, which links Hávamál to the other poems in which Odin seeks knowledge at any cost (Turville-Petre 1964) (Evans 1986).

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Part 3: The Wisdom Contests

Vafthruthnismol, Grimnismol

Summary

In Vafþrúðnismál Odin asks his wife Frigg for advice before he goes to test the wisest of the giants, Vafþrúðnir. She warns him, but he goes in disguise, calling himself Gagnráðr. The two stake their heads on the outcome. The giant first questions his guest about the horses of day and night and the river that divides gods from giants; then Odin questions the giant, who tells of the creation of the world from Ymir's body, the origin of the winds, the fate of the gods at Ragnarök and who will survive it. At the end Odin asks what he himself whispered into the ear of his dead son Baldr on the funeral pyre. Only Odin can know the answer, and the giant realises with whom he has been contending.

Grímnismál is framed by a prose tale. Two princes, Agnarr and Geirröðr, are fostered by Odin and Frigg in disguise; Geirröðr becomes king by treachery. To win a wager with Frigg, Odin visits him as a stranger in a blue cloak who calls himself Grímnir, 'the masked one'. The king has him tortured between two fires for eight nights. The king's young son Agnarr brings him a drink, and Odin, now speaking in the fire, pours out a vision of the dwellings of the gods, Valhöll and its warriors, the ravens Huginn and Muninn, the rivers and the tree Yggdrasil with the creatures that gnaw it. He ends by naming himself in a long list of names. Geirröðr stumbles and falls on his own sword, and Agnarr becomes king.

Analysis

The two poems show the main form of mythological knowledge in the Edda: questions and answers in ljóðaháttr, with the stakes set high. In Vafþrúðnismál the contest is literally a matter of life and death, and the last question is unanswerable not because it is difficult but because it belongs to Odin alone. Snorri drew heavily on both poems for his account of the cosmos (Faulkes 1987) (Lindow 2001).

Grímnismál is a poem of revelation under torment. Like the hanging in Hávamál, it shows Odin gaining or displaying power through suffering, and its climax, the god's revelation of his names, is an epiphany that destroys the king who failed the test of hospitality. Terry Gunnell has argued that dialogue poems of this kind may have been performed by more than one speaker, a possibility that brings them close to drama (Gunnell 1995).

The list of Odin's names (Grm. 54) and the attention to the right name for each thing connect these poems to the poetic art itself: much of Old Norse poetry depended on the poet's mastery of heiti, poetic names, and kennings, and Snorri's handbook later systematised this lore (Clunies Ross 2005).

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Part 4: Freyr's Wooing, the Ferryman and Hymir's Cauldron

Skirnismol, Harbarthsljoth, Hymiskvitha

Summary

In Skírnismál the god Freyr, sitting in Odin's high seat, sees the giantess Gerðr in Jötunheimr and falls sick with love. His servant Skírnir rides through flickering fire to woo her for him, taking Freyr's sword. Gerðr refuses gifts of golden apples and the ring Draupnir; she yields only when Skírnir threatens her with a curse of loneliness, madness and a monstrous marriage, carved in runes. She agrees to meet Freyr in the grove Barri after nine nights.

Hárbarðsljóð is a slanging match. Thor, returning from the east, comes to a sound and asks a ferryman to carry him across. The ferryman, Hárbarðr ('grey-beard'), is Odin in disguise; he refuses and mocks Thor's clothes and family. The two boast of their deeds: Thor of killing giants, Odin of seducing women and stirring up wars. Thor never gets across and must walk round.

In Hymiskviða the gods, feasting with the sea-giant Ægir, need a cauldron large enough to brew ale. Thor and Týr go to the giant Hymir to fetch one. Thor eats two oxen at a meal; on a fishing trip he baits his hook with an ox's head and draws up the Miðgarðr serpent, striking it with his hammer before it sinks back. He breaks Hymir's goblet on the giant's own head and carries off the cauldron.

Analysis

These three poems show the gods in dealings with the giants that are by turns erotic, comic and violent. Skírnismál has been read as a fertility myth, with Gerðr as the earth and Freyr as the god of growth, but it is also a disturbing poem about consent, in which the wooing succeeds only by threat. Hárbarðsljóð is a mannjafnaðr, a 'comparison of men', in which two speakers compete in insult and boast. It sets Odin's guile against Thor's strength and suggests that each god has his own social constituency: in the ferryman's words, Odin has the nobles who fall in battle and Thor the race of thralls (Lindow 2001) (Clunies Ross 1998).

Thor's fishing for the world serpent was one of the most widely told Norse myths: it appears on carved stones in Scandinavia and on the Gosforth fishing stone in Cumbria, in northern England, which shows how far this mythology travelled in the Viking-age settlements of Britain. Hymiskviða itself is usually thought to be a late composition, full of kennings and allusions, which collects older stories into a single adventure (Harris 1985).

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Part 5: Loki's Quarrel

Lokasenna

Summary

Lokasenna, 'Loki's flyting', is set at a feast in the hall of Ægir. A prose introduction tells how Loki kills one of Ægir's servants and is driven out, then returns and demands a seat and a drink. Odin, mindful of an old oath of blood-brotherhood, makes room for him. Loki then turns on the gods and goddesses one by one: Bragi is a coward, Iðunn and Freyja have slept with everyone, Odin has given victory to the unworthy and practised effeminate magic, Njörðr was a hostage, Týr lost his hand to the wolf and his wife to Loki, Freyr gave away his sword for a giantess. Each god answers, and Loki caps each answer.

Only the arrival of Thor ends the quarrel. Loki mocks him too, but four times Thor threatens him with his hammer, and Loki leaves, cursing Ægir's hall with fire. The closing prose tells how the gods catch Loki, disguised as a salmon, and bind him with the guts of his son, while a serpent drips poison onto his face; his wife Sigyn holds a bowl to catch it, and when she empties it the poison falls on him and his writhing shakes the earth.

Analysis

Lokasenna is the most sustained senna, or flyting, in Old Norse. Its insults are drawn from a large body of myth, much of which survives nowhere else, and it was long read as a late, even Christian, satire on the pagan gods. Many recent critics see it rather as a poem that knows the mythology intimately and dramatises the moral weaknesses that will lead to Ragnarök. Loki's accusations are mostly true, and the gods' frequent reply, that Frigg and Gefjun know all fates but do not speak them, hints at the doom that hangs over the feast (McKinnell 1994) (Acker 2002).

The poem's structure, a series of exchanges each in a pair of ljóðaháttr stanzas, makes it one of the best candidates for dramatic performance, with several speakers taking roles (Gunnell 1995). It also marks the turning point of Loki's career: after this he is no longer the gods' troublesome companion but their bound enemy, who will break free to lead the giants at the end of the world.

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Part 6: Thor's Hammer and the All-Wise Dwarf

Thrymskvitha, Alvissmol

Summary

Þrymskviða begins with Thor waking to find his hammer gone. Loki borrows Freyja's feather-cloak and learns that the giant Þrymr has buried it eight miles under the earth and will return it only if Freyja is given to him as a wife. Freyja's fury is so great that her necklace, the Brísingamen, bursts. At Heimdallr's suggestion Thor himself is dressed as the bride, with keys at his belt and a veil, and Loki goes with him as his maid. At the wedding feast the bride eats an ox, eight salmon and all the dainties meant for the women, and drinks three casks of mead; Loki explains that Freyja has not eaten for eight nights in her longing for Jötunheimr. When the hammer is laid in the bride's lap to bless the marriage, Thor seizes it and kills Þrymr and all his kin.

In Alvíssmál a dwarf, Alvíss ('all-wise'), arrives to claim Thor's daughter, promised to him in Thor's absence. Thor will consent only if the dwarf can tell him what earth, sky, moon, sun, clouds, wind, sea, fire and other things are called in each of the worlds, among men, gods, giants, elves and dwarfs. Alvíss answers every question, but the questioning lasts all night, and the rising sun turns him to stone.

Analysis

Þrymskviða is the most purely comic of the Eddic poems and one of the best told: its repetitions and swift dialogue make it ideal for reading aloud. Its humour depends on the gap between Thor's masculinity and his disguise, and between the giant's eager innocence and the audience's knowledge. Because it is so polished and so free of obscurity, some scholars have argued that it is a late composition, perhaps of the thirteenth century, while others defend an earlier date (Harris 1985).

Alvíssmál is a poem of the poetic lexicon: each answer lists synonyms of the kind poets used, assigning them to different races. Thor, usually the god of force, wins here by wit, keeping the dwarf talking until dawn. Bellows's Alvissmol and his Thrymskvitha are adjacent in the Codex Regius, where the mythological poems end with Alvíssmál (Clunies Ross 2005).

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Part 7: Poems beyond the Codex Regius

Baldrs Draumar, Rigsthula, Hyndluljoth, Svipdagsmol

Summary

Bellows, like most translators, adds several poems in Eddic style that are not in the Codex Regius. Baldrs draumar ('Baldr's dreams'), preserved in the fragmentary manuscript AM 748 I 4to, tells how Baldr has evil dreams, and Odin rides down to Hel and raises a dead seeress who reveals that Baldr will be killed by his brother Höðr and avenged by Váli. When she recognises Odin she tells him to ride home.

Rígsþula, found in a manuscript of Snorri's Edda (the Codex Wormianus), tells how the god Rígr, identified in the prose with Heimdallr, visits three households in turn and fathers the ancestors of three classes: Þræll the thrall, Karl the free farmer and Jarl the noble, whose youngest son Konr becomes a king. Hyndluljóð, in the late fourteenth-century Flateyjarbók, has Freyja ride to the giantess Hyndla with her favourite Óttarr disguised as a boar, to learn his ancestry; it contains a short prophecy of Ragnarök sometimes called 'the short Völuspá'.

Svipdagsmál is Bellows's name for two poems preserved only in late paper manuscripts, Grógaldr and Fjölsvinnsmál, which were joined into one story in the nineteenth century: the young Svipdagr raises his dead mother Gróa to give him protective spells, and then, at the gate of a fortress guarded by the watchman Fjölsviðr, wins entry to the maiden Menglöð, who has waited for him.

Analysis

These poems widen the picture of Eddic tradition but also raise questions of date and authenticity. Baldrs draumar is close in style to the poems of the Codex and supplies a myth that Völuspá only alludes to. Rígsþula, with its social ideology of noble birth, has been dated anywhere from the tenth to the thirteenth century and read both as an Irish-influenced Viking-age poem and as a learned medieval one. Svipdagsmál, the latest in transmission, may be a late medieval imitation of Eddic style (Harris 1985) (Larrington 2016).

Benjamin Thorpe's 1866 translation, also on this site, includes a further poem in this group, the Christian visionary Sólarljóð ('the song of the sun'), as well as the prose piece on the death of Sinfjötli as a separate item. Comparing the contents of the two translations is a good way to see that 'the Poetic Edda' is a modern editorial category rather than a fixed medieval book (Thorpe 1866).

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Part 8: Völundr the Smith

Völundarkvitha

Summary

Völundarkviða begins the heroic poems in the Codex Regius, though its hero is half-elf and its world closer to folktale. A prose introduction tells how Völundr and his two brothers found three swan-maidens, valkyries, by a lake and lived with them for seven years, until the women flew away. Völundr stays behind, forging rings. King Níðuðr of the Njárar captures him in his sleep, takes his sword and gives one of his rings to his daughter Böðvildr. On the advice of the queen, who sees the hatred in his eyes, the king has Völundr hamstrung and sets him on an island to work for him.

Völundr takes his revenge. He lures the king's two young sons to his smithy, cuts off their heads and makes cups of their skulls for the king, jewels of their eyes for the queen, and a brooch of their teeth for Böðvildr. When Böðvildr brings him her broken ring to mend, he makes her drunk and rapes her. Then he rises into the air, by means the poem does not fully explain, and from above tells Níðuðr what he has done and that his daughter is pregnant. He flies off laughing; the king is left in grief, and Böðvildr laments that she could not resist him.

Analysis

This is the Eddic poem most directly linked to Old English. The Old English poem Deor opens with Weland's suffering in fetters and then turns, in its second stanza, to Beadohild, who grieved for her brothers' death more than for her own trouble when she knew she was pregnant; both stanzas end with the refrain 'that passed away, so may this'. The whalebone Franks Casket, carved in Northumbria in the early eighth century and now in the British Museum, shows Weland in his smithy holding a head in his tongs, a headless body beneath, and offering a cup to a woman, beside a man catching birds; the panel is set next to the Adoration of the Magi. Beowulf's mail-shirt is 'Weland's work' (Beowulf 455) (Malone 1933) (Webster 2012).

The story was therefore known in England centuries before the Codex Regius was written, and some scholars have argued that the Norse poem itself shows West Germanic, perhaps English, influence in its vocabulary and setting. Ursula Dronke's edition discusses the poem's peculiar mixture of the heroic and the uncanny and its sympathy for Böðvildr (Dronke 2011) (McKinnell 1994).

The poem's power lies in its compression and its silences. The parallel stanzas in which the killing of the boys is first narrated and then repeated by Völundr to their father turn the narrative into an accusation. Völundr is both victim and monster, and the closing laughter and the lament of Böðvildr leave the moral balance deliberately unsettled.

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Part 9: The Helgi Poems

Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar, Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I, Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II

Summary

Three poems about heroes named Helgi stand between Völundarkviða and the Sigurd cycle. In Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar the silent, nameless son of King Hjörvarðr is given his name and a sword by the valkyrie Sváva, whom he loves; he avenges his grandfather, but dies in a duel after his brother Heðinn makes a rash vow over the drinking cup to marry Sváva himself. Before he dies, Helgi asks her to take Heðinn as husband.

The two lays of Helgi Hundingsbani ('slayer of Hunding') make Helgi a son of Sigmundr the Völsung and so a half-brother of Sigurd. The first lay tells of his birth, attended by the Norns, his killing of King Hundingr and his sons, and his winning of the valkyrie Sigrún, who has been promised to another king; it includes a fierce flyting between Helgi's half-brother Sinfjötli and an enemy. The second lay, a mixture of verse and prose, retells the story with more episodes. Helgi kills Sigrún's father and one of her brothers, and her surviving brother Dagr kills Helgi with a spear lent by Odin. Sigrún curses her brother. Then Helgi rides back from the dead to his burial mound, and Sigrún spends a night with him there before he must ride away at dawn; she dies soon after of grief.

Analysis

The Helgi poems are the bridge between the mythological and the heroic halves of the collection: they still have valkyries, prophetic Norns and Odin's spear, but their subject is feud between noble houses. The closing prose notes that Helgi and Sváva, and later Helgi and Sigrún, were said to be reborn, which shows the compiler trying to join separate traditions into one cycle (Harris 1985) (Andersson 1980).

The meeting in the mound in the second lay is one of the most moving passages in Old Norse. Sigrún's tears fall on the dead man's breast like blood, and the love between the living woman and the dead warrior is shown without horror. Here, as in the later Guðrún poems, a woman's grief becomes the emotional centre of a heroic poem (Larrington 2016).

Sinfjötli, Sigmundr's son, appears in Beowulf as Fitela, the nephew and companion of Sigemund the dragon-slayer (Beowulf 874–900). The Old English poem gives the dragon to Sigemund, where the Norse gives it to Sigurd: one of several signs that the Völsung legend was shared across the Germanic world before it was written down.

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Part 10: Sigurd's Youth

Gripisspo, Reginsmol, Fafnismol, Sigrdrifumol

Summary

The Sigurd cycle begins with Grípisspá, in which the young Sigurd visits his uncle Grípir, who foresees his whole life: his vengeance for his father, the killing of the dragon, his love for Brynhildr, the deception by which he wins her for Gunnarr, and his death. In Reginsmál the smith Reginn, Sigurd's foster-father, tells how his own father Hreiðmarr received a ransom from Odin, Loki and Hœnir after Loki killed Hreiðmarr's son Otr, who had the shape of an otter. Loki obtained the gold from the dwarf Andvari, who cursed it and especially the ring Andvaranautr. Fáfnir killed his father for the gold and became a dragon. Reginn forges the sword Gramr for Sigurd, who first avenges his father Sigmundr on the sons of Hundingr.

In Fáfnismál Sigurd kills Fáfnir from a pit as the dragon crawls to water. The dying dragon questions him and warns him of the gold. Reginn drinks his brother's blood and asks Sigurd to roast the heart; when Sigurd touches it and licks his finger, he understands the speech of birds, who tell him that Reginn means to betray him. He kills Reginn and takes the treasure. The birds tell him of a sleeping maiden on a mountain.

In Sigrdrífumál Sigurd rides to Hindarfjall, cuts the mail from a sleeping valkyrie and wakes her. She greets the day and the gods, explains that Odin put her to sleep for giving victory to the wrong king, and teaches Sigurd rune lore and wise counsel. The poem breaks off at the great gap in the Codex Regius.

Analysis

These four poems are a mixture of prophecy, story and wisdom, with much prose. Grípisspá, a summary of the whole legend, is generally thought to be late, a learned introduction to the cycle. The others keep the mythological apparatus of the first half of the collection: gods as actors, dragons, a cursed treasure, a valkyrie's wisdom. The curse on Andvari's gold is the thread that runs through the heroic poems to the end, as it passes from the gods to Hreiðmarr, Fáfnir, Sigurd and the Niflungs (Andersson 1980) (Haymes 1996).

A whole gathering of eight leaves is missing from the Codex Regius, beginning where the surviving text of Sigrdrífumál breaks off. It contained the story of Sigurd's betrothal to Brynhildr, his marriage to Guðrún and the deception of Brynhildr, probably including a long lay of Sigurd. Völsunga saga, a thirteenth-century prose retelling based on the poems, lets us reconstruct the outline. Whether Sigrdrífa, the valkyrie of this poem, is the same as Brynhildr was already a question for the medieval compilers; Völsunga saga makes them one (Larrington 2014) (Tolkien 2009).

Sigrdrífa's greeting to day and night (Sd. 2–3) is the closest thing in the Edda to a pagan prayer, and it is one of the most quoted passages in modern adaptations.

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Part 11: Brynhildr and the Death of Sigurd

Brot af Sigurtharkvithu, Guthrunarkvitha I, Sigurtharkvitha en Skamma, Helreith Brynhildar

Summary

After the lacuna the text resumes in the middle of a poem, the 'fragment of a Sigurd lay' (Brot). Brynhildr has been deceived into marrying Gunnarr, son of Gjúki, through Sigurd, who took Gunnarr's shape and rode through the fire for him; Sigurd himself is married to Gunnarr's sister Guðrún. Brynhildr demands Sigurd's death and claims he betrayed Gunnarr. Gunnarr and Högni have their younger brother Guthormr kill him. Brynhildr then laughs, foretells disaster and confesses that Sigurd was faithful: he laid a sword between them in the bed. A prose note records the different traditions of how Sigurd died, in bed or in the forest, and adds that 'German men' tell it the latter way.

In the first Guðrún lay, Guðrún sits by Sigurd's body and cannot weep, though noble women tell their own sorrows to move her. Only when her sister Gullrönd uncovers the corpse does she break into tears. The so-called short lay of Sigurd (in fact long) retells the whole story: Brynhildr's love for Sigurd, her revenge, Sigurd's death in his bed, her laughter at Guðrún's cry, and her suicide, after a long prophecy of what will follow, with the request to be burned beside Sigurd with the sword between them again. In Helreið Brynhildar she drives in a wagon on the road to Hel and answers a giantess who blames her, telling her own life and ending with a defiant claim that she and Sigurd will be together.

Analysis

These poems are the core of the legend of Brynhildr, and the most important for comparison with the Middle High German Nibelungenlied (c. 1200), in which Siegfried is killed by Hagen in the forest and the quarrel of Kriemhild and Brünhild is the cause. Theodore M. Andersson traced the Norse and German versions back through stages to a lost early poem on Brynhildr's revenge and argued that the Norse poems preserve a series of reworkings of that story (Andersson 1980) (Haymes 1996).

The three versions of Sigurd's death in these poems and the compiler's prose comments show that the medieval collector knew he had conflicting traditions and chose to keep them side by side. That choice, more than any single poem, is what makes the Codex Regius a deliberate anthology (Harris 1985) (Clunies Ross 2005).

Brynhildr is the most complex figure in Eddic poetry: deceived, vengeful, truthful, the agent of Sigurd's death and his only true partner. Her laughter (Sg. 30), heard once and 'with all her heart', is one of the great moments of the heroic poems.

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Part 12: Guðrún's Laments and the Fall of the Niflungs

Guthrunarkvitha II, en Forna, Guthrunarkvitha III, Oddrunargratr, Atlakvitha en Grönlenzka, Atlamol en Grönlenzku

Summary

In the second (or 'old') Guðrún lay, Guðrún tells her life to Þjóðrekr (Theodoric) at Atli's court: her love for Sigurd, his death, her flight to Denmark, the potion of forgetfulness her mother Grímhildr gave her, and her forced marriage to Atli, king of the Huns and brother of Brynhildr, with her dark dreams of what will follow. In the third, a short late poem, she clears herself of a charge of adultery with Þjóðrekr by plunging her hand into boiling water. In Oddrúnargrátr ('Oddrún's lament') Atli's sister Oddrún helps a princess through a difficult birth and tells of her own secret love for Gunnarr.

Atlakviða tells how Atli invites Gunnarr and Högni to his hall. Guðrún sends a warning, a ring wound with wolf's hair, but they go. Seized and asked for the gold, Gunnarr demands to see Högni's heart; when it is brought, still and unafraid, he refuses to tell where the treasure lies and declares that the Rhine shall keep it. He is thrown into a snake pit, where he plays the harp until he dies. Guðrún takes her revenge: she kills her sons by Atli and serves them to him as food, kills Atli in his bed and burns the hall. Atlamál, the 'Greenlandic' poem of Atli, tells the same story at greater length and in a more domestic, homely style, with dreams, warnings, a sea crossing and a final quarrel between Guðrún and the dying Atli.

Analysis

Atli is Attila, king of the Huns (died 453), and Gunnarr is Gundaharius, king of the Burgundians, whose kingdom on the Rhine was destroyed by Huns in Roman service in 436–37. The Gothic historian Jordanes, citing Priscus, says that Attila died on his wedding night beside a new bride, and later writers said she killed him. Legend turned these events into the vengeance of Gjúki's daughter for her brothers. In the Nibelungenlied Kriemhild takes vengeance on her brothers for Siegfried; in the Norse she avenges her brothers on Atli. The Old English Widsith names Ætla of the Huns and Guðhere of the Burgundians, so the story was known in England too (Haymes 1996) (Dronke 2011).

Ursula Dronke's first volume, The Heroic Poems, edits Atlakviða and Atlamál with Guðrúnarhvöt and Hamðismál. Atlakviða, harsh, archaic and laconic, is often counted among the oldest poems in the collection; Atlamál, in the heavier málaháttr metre, is usually taken to be late, and its Greenland attribution, given in the manuscript to both poems, fits it better (Dronke 2011) (Clunies Ross 2005).

The elegiac poems of Guðrún and Oddrún bring women's voices to the centre. They are retrospective, told after the events, and their subject is not the deed but the cost. Their mood is close to that of the Old English women's elegies, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, and to the laments of Hildeburh and the Geatish woman in Beowulf (Larrington 2016) (Clunies Ross 1998).

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Part 13: Guðrún's Inciting and the Last of the Line

Guthrunarhvot, Hamthesmol

Summary

Guðrún has tried to drown herself after Atli's death, but the sea carried her to the land of King Jónakr, whom she married. Her daughter by Sigurd, Svanhildr, was married to Jörmunrekkr, king of the Goths, who had her trampled to death by horses on a false charge. In Guðrúnarhvöt ('Guðrún's whetting') she urges her sons Hamðir and Sörli to avenge their half-sister. They go, reproaching her, and she then laments all her sorrows, calls on Sigurd to come to her from Hel, and asks for a pyre.

Hamðismál tells the expedition. On the way the brothers meet their half-brother Erpr, who offers to help them 'as one foot helps another'; they mock him and kill him. At Jörmunrekkr's hall they cut off the king's hands and feet, but he survives to order them stoned, since iron will not bite them. Hamðir realises that if Erpr were alive the king's head would be off as well. The brothers die fighting, proud of their fame, saying that no one outlives the night once the Norns have spoken.

Analysis

Jörmunrekkr is Ermanaric, king of the Goths, who died about 375 according to the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus. Jordanes tells of a woman named Sunilda torn apart by horses at his command and of her brothers Sarus and Ammius who wounded him in revenge. The Old English Deor and Widsith also remember Eormanric as a cruel tyrant with a 'wolfish mind'. Hamðismál therefore joins the Niflung story to the oldest datable figure in Germanic heroic legend (Malone 1933) (Haymes 1996).

The kin-slaying on the road (Erpr's death) repeats in miniature the pattern of the whole cycle: the destruction of the family from within. With the death of Hamðir and Sörli, the last of Guðrún's line is gone, and the heroic half of the Codex Regius ends, as the mythological half did, with the end of a world. Hamðismál is among the poems often dated early, and its terse dignity has been much admired (Dronke 2011) (Andersson 1980).

The final speech of the brothers (Hm. 30) is the heroic ethic in its starkest form: fame is certain, death is certain, and the Norns' decree cannot be undone. It is the human counterpart of Hávamál's 'a noble name will never die'.

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