August 23, 2026
There is a poem in the Edda that nobody loves.
It is called Gripisspo — Gripir's Prophecy — almost certainly the last of the Eddic poems to be written, somewhere around the year 1200, by a man Bellows describes with beautiful restraint as "sufficiently skillful in the handling of verse, but... utterly without inspiration." Critics have called it a summary, a table of contents, a poem with no pulse.
I want to spend a telling on it anyway, because of what happens inside it. Sigurd, already warned by a dying dragon and by a waking Valkyrie, rides to his mother's brother — a man said to be "of all men the wisest and most forward-seeing" — and asks for the rest. This time he is not warned in riddles. He is told the ending. He is told the names.
Then he goes and drinks the cup anyway.
Gripir starts generously, the way anyone would. Great deeds, a slain dragon, a hoard, fame beyond all heroes. Then Sigurd keeps asking, and Gripir arrives at the part he cannot make pretty, and does something no prophet in the Edda ever does — he pretends the gift has failed him:
"Before me lay | in clearest light All of thy youth | for mine eyes to see; Not rightly can I | wise be called, Nor forward-seeing; | my wisdom is fled." — Gripisspo, stanza 21, Bellows translation (1923)
It is a lie, and a kind one. Sigurd will not take it. He presses — hide thou nought, though hard it be — and his uncle gives in with a line that sounds like a man setting down something heavy:
"Now to Sigurth | all shall I say, For to this the warrior | bends my will; Thou knowest well | that I will not lie,— A day there is | when thy death is doomed." — Gripisspo, stanza 25, Bellows translation (1923)
What follows is the plainest statement of the whole disaster anywhere in the collection. About the woman on the mountain and the oaths sworn there, Gripir says this:
"Ye twain shall all | the oaths then swear That bind full fast; | few shall ye keep; One night when Gjuki's | guest thou hast been, Will Heimir's fosterling | fade from thy mind." — Gripisspo, stanza 31, Bellows translation (1923)
One night. Not a year of absence, not a long slow cooling. One night under the wrong roof.
Notice what is not in that stanza: a cup. In Gripir's telling the forgetting simply happens, the way weather happens, and the naming of its cause comes two stanzas later and is not a drink either — it is a person.
"Tricked by another, | prince, thou art, And the price of Grimhild's | wiles thou must pay; Fain of thee | for the fair-haired maid, Her daughter, she is, | and she drags thee down." — Gripisspo, stanza 33, Bellows translation (1923)
Grimhild wants him for her daughter Guthrun. That is the entire motive, and it is a horribly ordinary one: a mother with an eligible daughter and the finest young man in the world standing in her hall.
The famous version — the drink itself, the ale of forgetting — comes to us mainly through Völsunga saga, which Bellows notes in his commentary: Grimhild gave Sigurd a magic draught that made him utterly forget Brynhild.
The Edda never describes that cup. But it describes another one: years later, Grimhild mixes a second draught, this time for her own widowed daughter, to make her forget her murdered husband well enough to marry again. Guthrun remembers the taste.
A draught did Grimhild | give me to drink, Bitter and cold; | I forgot my cares; For mingled therein | was magic earth, Ice-cold sea, | and the blood of swine.
In the cup were runes | of every kind, Written and reddened, | I could not read them; A heather-fish | from the Haddings' land, An ear uncut, | and the entrails of beasts. — Guthrunarkvitha II, stanzas 22–23, Bellows translation (1923)
Bellows glosses the ingredients for us. The heather-fish is a snake. The Haddings' land is the world of the dead. The list goes on into burned acorns, blossoms of trees, and "dew of the hearth," which means soot — and it ends on four words that I have not been able to shake:
Much evil was brewed | within the beer, ... The liver of swine,— | all grief to allay. — Guthrunarkvitha II, stanza 24, Bellows translation (1923)
All grief to allay. Snake and graveyard and swine's blood and soot, and the stated purpose is comfort. It is described exactly as a mother would describe it.
Runes she could not read, in a cup she drank anyway. That is the closest the Edda comes to telling us what was done to Sigurd, and it is told by the second person it was done to.
Then comes the part that makes the cup necessary. Gunnar wants the woman behind the wall of fire. Gunnar cannot cross it — his own horse balks, and Sigurd's horse Grani will not stir a step for him, Bellows notes from the saga. So the two men trade shapes, "as Grimhild had taught them how to do," and Sigurd rides through the flame wearing Gunnar's face.
The detail that ruins me is Gripir's:
"The form of Gunnar | and shape thou gettest, But mind and voice | thine own remain." — Gripisspo, stanza 39, Bellows translation (1923)
He is himself in there. Whatever the drink took, it did not take him. And he knows the deed is base before he does it — he says so, in advance, to his uncle's face: "Most evil it seems, | and men will say / Base is Sigurth | that so he did."
Three nights he lies beside her in another man's shape, and lays his sword between them. The Short Lay is grim about how little that helps:
Thereafter went they | Brynhild to woo, And so with them | did Sigurth ride, The Volsung young, | in battle valiant,— Himself would have had her | if all he had seen. — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, stanza 3, Bellows translation (1923)
If all he had seen. Eleven words for the whole tragedy: he would have chosen her, if he had been able to see what was in front of him.
Everyone in this story gets a warning except her.
Sigurd gets three — the dragon, the Valkyrie, the uncle. Grimhild is warned by nothing because she is the one doing it. Gunnar half-knows. And Brynhild, who has arranged her entire life around one condition and had it honestly met by the only man who could meet it, is handed a husband who did not cross her fire, and is not told.
Ill she had known not | in all her life, And nought of the sorrows | of men she knew; Blame she had not, | nor dreamed she should bear it, But cruel the fates | that among them came. — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, stanza 5, Bellows translation (1923)
Blame she had not, nor dreamed she should bear it. Hold onto that line. In the next telling she will be blamed for all of it, by people who know better.
Here is the thing the manuscripts quietly admit: the tradition could never decide whether Sigurd was drugged or simply faithless.
Bellows spends much of his introduction untangling two versions — one in which Sigurd never meets Brynhild until he woos her in Gunnar's shape, and one in which he loves her first on the mountain and then forgets her by magic. The man who wrote Gripisspo knew both and tried, clumsily, to have both: Sigurd visits the Gjukungs, then finds the sleeping Valkyrie, then returns for the false wooing. The seams show.
But the two versions are not arguing about chronology. They are arguing about whether the best man in the North broke the most binding oath in the North because someone poisoned his memory — or because he was in a warm hall with a beautiful girl and a persuasive mother, and it was easier not to remember.
The North kept both, and never chose. I think that is the truest thing in the poem — because it is exactly the argument people have about each other, and about themselves, when a promise fails and everyone would very much prefer there to have been a cup.
Sigurd's own last word to his uncle is not a plea for a different fate. It is a shrug, and it is magnificent, and it is the most human line in a poem critics call bloodless:
"Now fare thee well! | our fates we shun not." — Gripisspo, stanza 52, Bellows translation (1923)
He was told the ending. He said thank you. He rode down into the land of the Gjukungs, and they brought him something to drink.
New tellings land in the newsletter first — no prophecies, no soot, and nothing in the cup you can't read.
Sources: Gripisspo, Guthrunarkvitha II, and Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, in The Poetic Edda, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923), with reference to Benjamin Thorpe (1866); Völsunga saga details and the ingredient glosses as noted in Bellows' commentary. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: two queens go down to the river to wash their hair, and one of them says the wrong true thing. What follows is a ring produced as evidence, a woman who stops speaking for days, and three brothers finding a loophole in an oath they cannot break — so they go looking for a fourth.