August 23, 2026
He is asleep when it happens. That is the version this poem tells, and the man who assembled the manuscript knew there was another one, and said so.
At the end of the Brot — the twenty surviving stanzas of the "Long" Lay of Sigurth, all that came through the gap of eight missing leaves — the annotator stops copying and writes a note in his own voice. It is one of the first pieces of literary criticism in the North, and what it says is the sources disagree, and here is how.
Here it is told in this poem about the death of Sigurth, and the story goes here that they slew him out of doors, but some say that they slew him in the house, on his bed while he was sleeping. But German men say that they killed him out of doors in the forest… But in this they are all agreed, that they deceived him in his trust of them, and fell upon him when he was lying down and unprepared. — prose passage following the Brot, Bellows translation (1923)
In this they are all agreed. He can't reconcile the geography, so he goes looking for what survives every version, and he finds it: the betrayal of a man who was not braced. Whether it happened in a bed or under trees is scenery. The thing itself is the same shape in every telling, and the shape is a man's own household, and his back turned.
The Short Lay of Sigurth has sixty-nine stanzas to spend. On the murder it spends part of one.
It was easy to rouse | the reckless one. . . . . . . . . . . The sword in the heart | of Sigurth stood. — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, stanza 21, Bellows translation (1923)
The dots are in the manuscript's gap, not in mine; a line at least, perhaps a whole stanza, is gone. What remains is better than anything the lost lines could have been. It was easy to rouse the reckless one — after all that whetting, all those councils, all that arithmetic about a three-year-old, the poet gives the killing itself one flat clause of contempt. Then the sword is simply standing in him. No blow is described. No struggle. The greatest warrior in the North is dispatched in a subordinate clause.
And then he gets up.
In vengeance the hero | rose in the hall, And hurled his sword | at the slayer bold; At Gotthorm flew | the glittering steel Of Gram full hard | from the hand of the king.
The foeman cleft | asunder fell, Forward hands | and head did sink, And legs and feet | did backward fall. — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, stanzas 22–23, Bellows translation (1923)
Gram is the sword reforged from the shards of his father's, the one that opened Fáfnir. Sigurd, with a blade already through him, throws it — and it cuts Gotthorm in half at the waist as he flees, so that the top of him pitches forward and the legs go on falling backward. The North liked its violence anatomical. But notice who dies here. The oath-loophole, the boy they had to feed wolf and snake to make brave, the one man in the plot the vow did not cover — he outlives Sigurd by about four seconds. All that legal ingenuity buys them one brother's death instead of none.
Guthrun soft | in her bed had slept, Safe from care | at Sigurth's side; She woke to find | her joy had fled, In the blood of the friend | of Freyr she lay. — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, stanza 24, Bellows translation (1923)
Safe from care. The poet puts that in on purpose, one line before the worst waking in Norse poetry. "Friend of Freyr" is probably just a kenning for a king, though Bellows notes a tradition making Freyr the Völsungs' ancestor.
Dying, Sigurd talks — and what he says is not what you would expect from a man who has just been murdered by his wife's brothers.
So hard she smote | her hands together That the hero rose up, | iron-hearted: "Weep not, Guthrun, | grievous tears, Bride so young, | for thy brothers live." — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, stanza 25, Bellows translation (1923)
He is comforting her. About her brothers. Who have just killed him. The consolation he can find, on the way out, is that she has not been left alone in the world — and the men who are the reason she is not alone are the men who did this. It is the most quietly devastating line in the poem, and I do not think the poet meant it as irony. I think he meant it as the ordinary decency of a man who is still, in his last minute, doing the arithmetic of somebody else's grief.
Then his verdict:
"No son will ride, | though seven thou hast, To the Thing as the son | of their sister rides; Well I see | who the ill has worked, On Brynhild alone | lies the blame for all."
"Above all men | the maiden loved me, Yet false to Gunnar | I ne'er was found; I kept the oaths | and the kinship I swore; Of his queen the lover | none may call me." — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, stanzas 27–28, Bellows translation (1923)
He names her, and he is not wrong about the mechanism — she demanded it, and it was done. He is also, as this series has been saying for two tellings now, standing at the end of a chain of causes he cannot see the beginning of, because the beginning is a cup he drank at a table where a mother-in-law was smiling.
And one more thing is on his mind while he bleeds:
"Too young, methinks, | is my son as yet, He cannot flee | from the home of his foes." — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, stanza 26, Bellows translation (1923)
The boy is Sigmund — Sigurd and Guthrun's son, named for Sigurd's father, three winters old. Last telling recorded what Brynhild asked for, in the coldest verse in the cycle: let not long the wolf-cub live, because the blood-price is cheaper with no heir to collect it. It was granted. They killed the child too, the same day, and no poem in the collection spends more than a passing clause on it; Bellows records it in a footnote, the way you would record a date. His father, dying, could see it coming and could not get up.
She hears it happen. The poems are specific about this: Brynhild is lying down, at a distance, and what reaches her is the sound.
In a swoon she sank | when Sigurth died; So hard she smote | her hands together That all the cups | in the cupboard rang, And loud in the courtyard | cried the geese.
Then Brynhild, daughter | of Buthli, laughed, Only once, | with all her heart, When as she lay | full loud she heard The grievous wail | of Gjuki's daughter. — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, stanzas 29–30, Bellows translation (1923)
The Brot keeps the same moment in fewer words and gives it a stage direction that has never been improved on:
Then Brynhild laughed-- | and the building echoed-- Only once, | with all her heart; "Long shall ye joy | in lands and men, Now ye have slain | the hero noble." — Brot af Sigurtharkvithu, stanza 10, Bellows translation (1923)
Only once, with all her heart. Two poems, working from a common source, both keep that phrase, which means it was already famous. It is the single most quoted half-line of the cycle and it is almost always read as triumph — the villainess getting what she wanted.
The Brot does not let you read it that way. Five stanzas on, it tells you what the household saw:
Silent were all | who heard her speak, And nought of the heart | of the queen they knew, Who wept such tears | the thing to tell That laughing once | of the men she had won. — Brot af Sigurtharkvithu, stanza 15, Bellows translation (1923)
That is a poet reaching across a thousand years to correct you. Nought of the heart of the queen they knew. She has been weeping over the very thing she laughed to demand — and the laugh that everyone in the hall heard was the only part of her they were ever shown. Between the laugh and the tears is the whole distance between what a person does and what a person is, and the Brot poet built a stanza whose only job is to hold that distance open.
Before the laugh she wakes the house before dawn with the plainest thing she ever says:
"Love me or hate me, | the harm is done, And my grief cries out, | or else I die." — Brot af Sigurtharkvithu, stanza 14, Bellows translation (1923)
Gunnar hears the laugh and understands none of it:
"Thou dost not laugh, | thou lover of hate, In gladness there, | or for aught of good; Why has thy face | so white a hue, Mother of ill? | Foredoomed thou art." — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, stanza 31, Bellows translation (1923)
Mother of ill. He got what he asked for, by asking, and the first thing he does with it is call the woman he did it for a monster. This family's other great talent, after pouring things into people, is finding somebody else to have been the reason.
There is one more poem in this part of the manuscript, and it does something none of the others attempt. Guthrunarkvitha I — the First Lay of Guthrun — stops the whole cycle dead and spends twenty-five stanzas on a woman sitting beside a body, unable to cry.
Guthrun sat by the dead Sigurth; she did not weep as other women, but her heart was near to bursting with grief. The men and women came to her to console her, but that was not easy to do. — prose headnote to Guthrunarkvitha I, Bellows translation (1923)
Women come, one after another, and each offers her own catalogue of losses, and each is worse than the last, and none of it works — the poem simply repeats, like a bell: Grieving could not Guthrun weep. Then her sister Gollrond does the only useful thing anyone does in the entire Völsung cycle. She stops talking.
The shroud she lifted | from Sigurth, laying His well-loved head | on the knees of his wife: "Look on thy loved one, | and lay thy lips To his as if yet | the hero lived."
Once alone did | Guthrun look; His hair all clotted | with blood beheld, The blinded eyes | that once shone bright, The hero's breast | that the blade had pierced. — Guthrunarkvitha I, stanzas 12–13, Bellows translation (1923)
Once alone did Guthrun look. And that does it:
Then Guthrun bent, | on her pillow bowed, Her hair was loosened, | her cheek was hot, And the tears like raindrops | downward ran. — Guthrunarkvitha I, stanza 14, Bellows translation (1923)
Whoever composed this understood grief better than most people writing about it now: that comfort is not what unlocks it, that the thing which finally breaks a person is being allowed to look. And when Guthrun speaks at last it is not a curse but a comparison, and it is the loveliest thing in the poem —
"So was my Sigurth | o'er Gjuki's sons As the spear-leek grown | above the grass, Or the jewel bright | borne on the band, The precious stone | that princes wear."
"…As little now | as the leaf I am On the willow hanging; | my hero is dead." — Guthrunarkvitha I, stanzas 17–18, Bellows translation (1923)
The curse comes after, and it is aimed exactly where it belongs:
"So shall your land | its people lose As ye have kept | your oaths of yore; Gunnar, no joy | the gold shall give thee, (The rings shall soon | thy slayers be,) Who swarest oaths | with Sigurth once." — Guthrunarkvitha I, stanza 20, Bellows translation (1923)
Every word of that comes true, in poem after poem, for the rest of the collection.
Brynhild does not wait to be dealt with. She puts on armour to do it — her byrnie of gold she donned — and runs herself through, and then, wounded, lies down on a pillow and starts giving instructions. The poet says she "pondered o'er" her plan while bleeding. There are twenty-three stanzas left and she is going to use all of them.
First she offers her women gold and fine cloth to come with her. They refuse — and their refusal is one of the most human moments in the Edda:
"Slain are enough; | we seek to live, Not thus thy women | shall honor win." — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, stanza 49, Bellows translation (1923)
She takes it well, which nobody expects: for my sake now shall none unwilling | or loath to die her life lay down.
Then she turns to Gunnar and prophesies — Guthrun's remarriage, Atli's treachery, the snake-pit, Svanhild, the whole ruin of two houses running out ahead of them like a road. She is right about all of it. And then the last request:
"Yet one boon | I beg of thee, The last of boons | in my life it is: Let the pyre be built | so broad in the field That room for us all | will ample be." — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, stanza 64, Bellows translation (1923)
Room for us all. She lists them: slaves and hounds and hawks at his head and feet, in the old manner — Bellows notes the burning of servants and beasts to accompany a master was long practised in the North — and then, at the centre of the arrangement, this:
"Let between us | lie once more The steel so keen, | as so it lay When both within | one bed we were, And wedded mates | by men were called." — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, stanza 67, Bellows translation (1923)
The sword goes back. The blade Sigurd laid between them during the three nights behind the fire — the proof of his honour and the instrument of the fraud, the same object doing both jobs at once — she asks for it one last time, on the fire, between their bodies. She will not be given in death what she was cheated of in life. She would rather have the honest version of the lie.
Her final words are a poet's joke about poets, and they are not funny at all:
"Much have I told thee, | and more would say If fate more space | for speech had given; My voice grows weak, | my wounds are swelling; Truth I have said, | and so I die." — Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, stanza 70, Bellows translation (1923)
You would think that was the end. It is not, because there is a small poem called Helreith Brynhildar — "Brynhild's Ride on Hel-Way" — and it exists for one reason: she is not finished being right.
Thus it is told, that Brynhild went in the wagon on Hel-way, and passed by a house where dwelt a certain giantess. — prose prologue to Helreith Brynhildar, Bellows translation (1923)
(The prologue says two pyres were built, one for each of them — flatly contradicting the Short Lay's one broad fire. Bellows suspects the annotator simply got it wrong. The poems fight; that is what being a thousand years old does to a story.)
The giantess blocks the road, and what she says is the verdict of every respectable person in the world:
"More seemly it were | at thy weaving to stay, Than another's husband | here to follow."
"Thou wast, Brynhild, | Buthli's daughter, For the worst of evils | born in the world; To death thou hast given | Gjuki's children, And laid their lofty | house full low." — Helreith Brynhildar, stanzas 1 and 4, Bellows translation (1923)
Brynhild — dead, burnt, on her way to Hel, with nothing left to gain — argues.
"Chide me not, woman | from rocky walls, Though to battle once | I was wont to go; Better than thou | I shall seem to be, When men us two | shall truly know." — Helreith Brynhildar, stanza 3, Bellows translation (1923)
When men us two shall truly know. She is appealing to posterity from beyond the pyre. And then she gives her account — the helmed Valkyrie of Hlymdalir, everything this series told back in the fire-ring telling, now in her own mouth. But she opens the defence somewhere the retellings almost never go. She opens it by naming the god.
"Next I let | the leader of Goths, Hjalmgunnar the old, | go down to hell, And victory brought | to Autha's brother; For this was Othin's | anger mighty.
"He beset me with shields | in Skatalund, Red and white, | their rims o'erlapped; He bade that my sleep | should broken be By him who fear | had nowhere found.
"He let round my hall, | that southward looked, The branches' foe | high-leaping burn; Across it he bade | the hero come Who brought me the gold that Fafnir guarded." — Helreith Brynhildar, stanzas 8–10, Bellows translation (1923)
Read the last one again, slowly, because it quietly rearranges the entire cycle.
The wall of fire is not her idea. Odin built it. And Odin wrote the specification for the man who would be permitted through it — not the bravest man, not the best man, but the one carrying the gold that Fafnir guarded.
We know precisely how a ring came to be in that gold. This series told it at the otter's ransom: when the hoard was paid over, it was Odin who held Andvari's ring back and kept it, and Odin who laid it on the skin when one whisker was still showing and the debt came up a hair short. He knew what was on it. Loki had announced the curse to the room before he left.
So lay the pieces in a row. The god keeps the cursed ring. The god gives it up. It goes to the dragon; the dragon's killer takes it. The god's own fire-test then names that man, and no other, as the one who may reach her. And the ring arrives on her hand as a morning-gift — where, years later, in a river, another woman recognises it.
The Edda never says Odin planned any of it. He is given no motive here, and the curse on the ring is Andvari's, not his. What the poem does is put every one of those pieces in his hands and leave the counting to you. Brynhild counted. Dead and burnt, with a giantess blocking the road and no reason left to be careful, the first thing she wants the record to show is whose anger this was.
(Bellows suspects stanzas 6–10 may have wandered in from the Sigrdrífumál at some point in the copying. Even if they did, they are old, and she is the one saying them.)
And then the two stanzas that are the reason the poem exists:
"Happy we slept, | one bed we had, As he my brother | born had been; Eight were the nights | when neither there Loving hand | on the other laid.
"Yet Guthrun reproached me, | Gjuki's daughter, That I in Sigurth's | arms had slept; Then did I hear | what I would were hid, That they had betrayed me | in taking a mate." — Helreith Brynhildar, stanzas 12–13, Bellows translation (1923)
Then did I hear what I would were hid. There it is, plainly, from the only person entitled to say it: until that morning at the river, she did not know. She had been married for years to a man she believed had ridden the fire. The truth reached her in the form of a rival's laugh, in front of witnesses, in a river, and everything after it — the whetting, the child, the wolf-meat, the sword through the sleeping man, the pyre — was a woman rearranging a world that had been rearranged around her while she slept, twice.
The last stanza is defiance and something stranger:
"Ever with grief | and all too long Are men and women | born in the world; But yet we shall live | our lives together, Sigurth and I. | Sink down, Giantess!" — Helreith Brynhildar, stanza 14, Bellows translation (1923)
Bellows points out that the hope of two lovers being reunited in some life after this one is not a Norse pagan idea at all — the poem is late, eleventh century, and Christianity had arrived. He is right, and it does not matter. A borrowed hope is still a hope, and she spends it on the one thing she has wanted since the fire, and then she orders a giantess out of her way and drives on.
This run began with an otter's skin and a dwarf's curse laid on a ring. It ends with a burnt queen on a road, telling a monster to get out of the way because she has somewhere to be.
That is the fall of the Völsungs, told as the old words actually have it, with nothing softened and nothing skipped. Next time, we let some light in.
New tellings land in the newsletter first — and after this one, I promise you, there are apples.
Sources: Brot af Sigurtharkvithu, Guthrunarkvitha I, Sigurtharkvitha en skamma, and Helreith Brynhildar, in The Poetic Edda, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923), including the annotator's prose passages; with reference to Benjamin Thorpe (1866) and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916). Notes on the two versions of Sigurd's death, the "friend of Freyr," the burning of slaves and beasts, and the late Christian colouring of Helreith's final stanza as given in Bellows' commentary. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: an orchard, a woman with a box, and the only thing standing between the gods of Asgard and old age. Then a kidnapping, a bad bargain, and a god of mischief in a falcon-skin flying for his life with a nut in his claws. The dark is told; now the light — Iðunn and the apples.