September 28, 2026
Last week's telling ended with three swan-maidens who "flew away to find battles, and came back no more," and a promise: the next poems on Bellows' shelf are the ones where a Valkyrie who flew to battles does come back. Two corrections before anything else, because that is this series' habit when a teaser has overreached, and this one did it twice. First, the small one: I said the poem we wanted was "the one after next." Count the doors honestly and it is the one after the one after next — from the smith's poem, Bellows' shelf runs Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar, then the first Helgakvitha Hundingsbana, then this. I am skipping two Helgi poems to get here, and I owe the accounting: the first of them, Helgi Hjorvarthsson's lay, gave this series its harbor-flyting long ago — №36 borrowed Hrimgerth from it, and its finest scene is spent; the second, the first Hundingsbane lay, is the smooth consecutive telling of the same story this poem tells in pieces, and the pieces, as Bellows will say in a moment, are where the treasure is. The series has always gone where the treasure is.
The second correction is bigger, and I will make it in the open where it belongs, a little further down, because to make it properly you need to know what this poem is. Which is the strangest thing the series has yet opened: a great poem that is not, in any ordinary sense, a poem at all.
Bellows' introductory note starts by taking the poem apart in his hands:
The second Helgi Hundingsbane lay is in most respects the exact opposite of the first one: it is in no sense consecutive; it is not a narrative poem, and all or most of it gives evidence of relatively early composition, its origin probably going well back into the tenth century. — Bellows (1923), introductory note to Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II
And then, flatly: "It is frankly nothing but a piece of, in the main, very clumsy patchwork, made up of eight distinct fragments, pieced together awkwardly by the annotator with copious prose notes." Eight scraps of old verse, stitched with prose by the same sort of hand this series met last week — the annotator, the reciter's-patter man, the one who made №42's swan-maidens into Valkyries on the strength of one obscure word. Here he has outdone himself: he has built a whole poem out of leftovers, "on the basis of the narrative told in the first Helgi lay and of such stories as his knowledge of prose sagas may have yielded." One of his scraps he even labels for us. Stanzas 13 to 16, the prose says, come from "the old Volsung lay" — and the manuscript heads the entire poem "Of the Volsungs," though "most editions give it the title used here." Readers who walked the dark arc of this series, №19 through №24, may feel the floor shift a little: there was an old Volsung lay, older than what survives, and it is lost, and four stanzas of it are pinned inside this patchwork like a moth under glass. What was in the rest of it? Bellows: "Conclusive answers to these questions have baffled scholarship, and probably always will do so."
So why open it at all? Because of what follows the demolition. Take away two of the eight fragments — the sixth and the eighth — and, Bellows says, "the poem would be little more than a battle-ground for scholars, but those two sections are in many ways as fine as anything in Old Norse poetry." What lives in those two: "Sigrun's curse of her brother for the slaying of Helgi," her lament for her husband, "and the extraordinary vividness of the final scene in the burial hill" — which together, he finishes, "have a quality which fully offsets the baffling confusion of the rest of the poem."
As fine as anything in Old Norse poetry. The series has kept a vellum ledger all year — too whole to be old, too damaged to be young — and here is the ledger's limit case: the finest scenes in the literature survive inside the worst-made poem in it, eight fragments in a bad glue of prose. The treasure is not in spite of the wreck. The treasure is why anyone kept the wreck.
Now the teaser's larger debt. I promised "a brother who kills him and curses himself for it." Half of that is true. A brother kills him. Nobody in this poem curses himself.
The curse — and it is one of the great curses of the north, we are almost there — is hers. Bellows says so twice in the note above: "Sigrun's curse of her brother," "her curse on her brother." The brother's own words, when we reach them, are regret, a plea, and an offer of money; and the blame he lays is on Othin. The teaser gave the killer a conscience the page does not give him, and the correction would be worth a sentence and no more — except that in checking it, the apparatus handed over something better. Here is Bellows on where the annotator got his facts for this stretch of the poem:
The only new features are the names of Hogni's sons, Bragi and Dag. Bragi is mentioned in stanza 19, though it is not there stated that he is Hogni's son. Dag, who figures largely in stanzas 28-34, is a puzzle, for the verse never names him, and it is an open question where the annotator got his name. — Bellows (1923), note to Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II
Read that again. Dag — the brother, the killer, the man the whole tragedy turns on — is never named in the verse. Every stanza he speaks, he speaks namelessly; "Dag" exists only in the annotator's prose, and the editor cannot say where the annotator found it. The poem itself knows him only as brother. The teaser called him by the wrong conscience; the poem does not even call him by a name. In a series that has spent all year watching editors patch broken lines with guessed words, this is the largest patch yet: a person.
The patchwork opens with an adventure, and the adventure opens with a costume. Helgi, spying in King Hunding's hall under a false name, slips away, is hunted, "and Helgi could not save himself in any other way, so he put on the clothes of a bond-woman and set to work at the mill." The leader of the search party looks at the slave-girl grinding grain and is not fooled by the dress, because he is looking at the eyes:
Then Blind spake out, | the evil-minded: "Of Hagal's bond-woman | bright are the eyes; Yon comes not of churls | who stands at the quern; The millstones break, | the boards are shattered.
"The hero has | a doom full hard, That barley now | he needs must grind; Better befits | his hand to feel The hilt of the sword | than the millstone's handle." — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 2–3, trans. Bellows (1923)
The eye-ledger this series has kept since Thor's burned through a bridal veil (№29) gets its strangest entry: bright eyes at a quern, and the millstones breaking because the hand on the handle was made for a hilt. And then Helgi's foster-father Hagal, covering for him, produces the poem's first Valkyrie:
"Small is the wonder | if boards are splintered By a monarch's daughter | the mill is turned; Once through clouds | she was wont to ride, And battles fought | like fighting men, (Till Helgi a captive | held her fast; Sister she is | of Sigar and Hogni, Thus bright are the eyes | of the Ylfings' maid.)" — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 4, trans. Bellows (1923)
She is no bond-woman, says Hagal — she is a king's daughter who rode through clouds and fought battles like fighting men, captured by Helgi and set to the mill. It is a magnificent lie, and Bellows waves off any attempt to mine it: "As Hagal is, of course, deliberately lying, it is useless to test any part of his speech for accuracy." So mark the ledger: the first sky-riding battle-maiden in this poem is a fiction, invented on the spot to explain a disguised man's eyes. №29 put Thor in a bridal veil and let a hall talk itself out of the evidence; №32 put Othin in a ferryman's coat; here a hero in a slave-girl's dress is explained as a Valkyrie. The old poems keep telling us the same thing from new angles: the costume never quite covers the eyes.
And the real one is one section away.
The second fragment opens with the annotator doing introductions: "Hogni was the name of a king. His daughter was Sigrun; she was a Valkyrie and rode air and water; she was Svava reborn." There she is — the Valkyrie this series has been walking toward since the fire-ring. And right underneath her, in the apparatus, the same quiet demolition №42's readers will recognize. Bellows, on this prose: "the annotator's notion of Sigrun as the reincarnated Svava (cf. Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar, concluding prose note) represents a naive form of scholarship. There is nothing in stanzas 5-12 which clearly identifies Sigrun as a Valkyrie, or which, except for the last line of stanza 12, identifies the speaker as Sigrun."
Nothing in the verse. It is the annotator again — and when the verse itself, later, comes closest to calling her one, it does it with a word Bellows has met before. Under stanza 18 he writes: "Maid: the word thus rendered is the same doubtful one which appears in Völundarkvitha, 1 and 5, and which may mean specifically a Valkyrie (Gering translates it 'helmed' or 'heroic') or simply 'wise.'" The same doubtful word. The one obscure word that could not, last week, make three swan-maidens into Valkyries — the word Bellows suspected the annotator of building his whole mythology on — is the word this poem hangs on Sigrun. Two poems, one word, and on that word, twice, the question of who is a chooser of the slain. The apparatus built the bridge from №42 to №43 itself; I am only walking across it.
But whatever the word proves, the woman arrives like weather. She rides to Helgi's ship unasked and interrogates him — "Why is thy byrnie | spattered with blood, / Why helmed dost feast | on food uncooked?" — and when he answers evasively, she tells him what he did and when:
Not far was I | from the lord of the folk, Yester morn, | when the monarch was slain; Though crafty the son | of Sigmund, methinks, When he speaks of the fight | in slaughter-runes. — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 11, trans. Bellows (1923)
Slaughter-runes — and Bellows' gloss belongs to №18's ledger: "The word 'rune' had the meaning of 'magic' or 'mystery' long before it was applied to the signs or characters with which it was later identified." Equivocal battle-talk; speech with a veil on. She saw the battle. She was not far. Then the recognition stanza, and inside it, one more hole in the vellum exactly where the weight sits:
On the long-ship once | I saw thee well, When in the blood-stained | bow thou wast, (And round thee icy | waves were raging;) Now would the hero | hide from me, But to Hogni's daughter | is Helgi known. — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 12, trans. Bellows (1923)
But to Hogni's daughter is Helgi known. The line the whole scene exists for — she knows him, she has watched him from the air, no alias will do — and Bellows' note: "The manuscript omits Helgi's name in line 5, thereby destroying both the sense and the meter." The name is supplied. №41 turned on a name said aloud that burst a house open; №42 found the word long was an editor's guess in the stanza about waiting; now the name in the recognition line is the editor's too. The manuscript keeps doing this — losing precisely the word the poem is carrying — and the editors keep quietly handing it back, and the only honest way to read the old poems is with the note in one eye and the verse in the other.
Then the fragment the annotator labeled: "she rode with the Valkyries over air and sea to seek Helgi," found him battle-weary under the eagle-stone, "and ran to throw her arms about his neck, and kissed him, and told him her tidings, as is set forth in the old Volsung lay." Four stanzas of the lost poem, and they are the choosing:
Sigrun the joyful | chieftain sought, Forthwith Helgi's | hand she took; She greeted the hero | helmed and kissed him, The warrior's heart | to the woman turned.
From her heart the daughter | of Hogni spake, Dear was Helgi, | she said, to her; "Long with all | my heart I loved Sigmund's son | ere ever I saw him. — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 13–14, trans. Bellows (1923)
There is the word again — long — the word №41 titled itself on and №42 caught the editor guessing at. Here it stands in a stanza whose lines, Bellows' note admits, are themselves "rearranged in accordance with Bugge's emendation"; in the manuscript they come in another order entirely. Long with all my heart I loved Sigmund's son ere ever I saw him — loved him before seeing him, the way the dead mother in №41 loved down the road she could not walk. And then she says the thing the teaser promised, in her own voice, with the fear told in the same breath:
"At the meeting to Hothbrodd | mated I was, But another hero | I fain would have; Though, king, the wrath | of my kin I fear, Since I broke my father's | fairest wish." — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 15, trans. Bellows (1923)
Her father promised her to Hothbrodd at a kings' meeting — a council transaction, a treaty with a bride in it. She flew over air and sea to the man she chose instead, and she does not pretend it is free: I broke my father's fairest wish, and she is afraid. Helgi's answer is four lines of plain shelter — "Fear not ever | Hogni's anger … Maiden, thou | with me shalt live" — and if the poem stopped here it would be the brightest thing this series has told since the apples. The poem does not stop here.
The battle comes at Frekastein, and the way in is through weather: "lightning flashed overhead and the bolts struck the ship. They saw in the air that nine Valkyries were riding, and recognized Sigrun among them." Nine riders above the lightning, and one of them is hers — then, the prose says, the storm abated; it does not say by whom. On the far side of the battle, the prose reports it plainly: all of Hothbrodd's brothers dead, and among the allies who came to fight for the jilted bridegroom, Sigrun's own father and all but one of her brothers. She walks the field. She finds the man she was sold to as he dies, and gives him her account:
"Never shall Sigrun | from Sevafjoll, Hothbrodd king, | be held in thine arms; Granmar's sons | full cold have grown, And the giant-steeds gray | on corpses gorge." — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 17, trans. Bellows (1923)
The giant-steeds are wolves — the steeds of giantesses, Bellows notes — already at the bodies. Then she finds Helgi, "full of joy," and Helgi tells her what the joy is standing on: "This morn there fell | at Frekastein / Bragi and Hogni | beneath my hand." Hogni is her father. Bragi, the annotator's prose says flatly, is her brother; Bellows' more careful note allows only "probably Sigrun's brother." Either way, Helgi blames the Norns for it — the same reach the killer will make later toward Othin; note 18 points the two blames at each other — and he does not soften the arithmetic: "Most are there | of the men of thy race." Then Sigrun wept. And here the patchwork does something no smooth poem would dare. A stanza in a different meter entirely — Bellows: "The difference of meter would of itself be enough to indicate that this stanza comes from an entirely different poem" — is pressed into the seam, and it carries the exchange the whole tradition needed said:
"Grieve not, Sigrun, | the battle is gained, The fighter can shun not his fate." "To life would I call | them who slaughtered lie, If safe on thy breast I might be." — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 21, trans. Bellows (1923)
I would call the dead back to life, if I could still be safe on your breast. She does not choose between her kin and her love; she wants the impossible both, and says so, and the poem lets the wish stand unanswered. Somebody, somewhere, in some lost poem, wrote those two lines for this woman, and the annotator — bless his clumsy glue for once — could not bear to leave them out, wrong meter and all. It is the most honest stanza about grief-in-joy the series has met, and it is a stowaway.
(The fifth fragment, for the record, is an older version of the ship-to-shore flyting the first Helgi lay tells at length — the annotator pastes it in, Bellows says, "manifestly in the wrong place," and the manuscript abbreviates stanza 27 "to the first letters of the words, except for line 5": the same vellum shorthand №29 found under the Thrymskvitha and №31 under the Lokasenna. Everyone knew the words. The scribe wrote initials. Fame, again, in vellum.)
The sixth fragment is one of the two Bellows crowned, and the annotator's prose walks us to it in six sentences that spend a marriage, a family, and a life:
Helgi took Sigrun to wife, and they had sons. Helgi did not reach old age. Dag, the son of Hogni, offered sacrifice to Othin to be avenged for his father's death; Othin gave Dag his spear. Dag found Helgi, his brother-in-law, at a place which is called Fjoturlund. He thrust the spear through Helgi's body. Then Helgi fell, and Dag rode to Sevafjoll and told Sigrun the tidings: — prose link, Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, trans. Bellows (1923)
Fjoturlund is "Fetter-Wood" — the poem gives no reason for the name, and I will not invent one; but a series that told Gleipnir (№5) does not walk past a wood named for fetters without feeling the ground. The spared brother — spared because he swore loyalty to Helgi, oaths we are about to hear itemized — sacrifices to Othin, is handed the god's own spear, and puts it through his sister's husband. Then he rides to her door to say so:
"Sad am I, sister, | sorrow to tell thee, Woe to my kin | unwilling I worked; In the morn there fell | at Fjoturlund The noblest prince | the world has known, (And his heel he set | on the heroes' necks.)" — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 28, trans. Bellows (1923)
Unwilling I worked. That is the whole of the self-reproach the teaser inflated into a self-curse. The curse belongs to the widow, and here it is, whole, dots and all, because Bellows was right about this section and you should have it as the page has it:
"Now may every | oath thee bite That with Helgi | sworn thou hast, By the water | bright of Leipt, And the ice-cold | stone of Uth.
"The ship shall sail not | in which thou sailest, Though a favoring wind | shall follow after; The horse shall run not | whereon thou ridest, Though fain thou art | thy foe to flee.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "The sword shall bite not | which thou bearest, Till thy head itself | it sings about.
"Vengeance were mine | for Helgi's murder, Wert thou a wolf | in the woods without, Possessing nought | and knowing no joy, Having no food | save corpses to feed on." — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 29–32, trans. Bellows (1923)
She turns his own oaths into teeth — may every oath thee bite — oaths sworn by the bright water of Leipt — the note's whole gloss is an arrow to the Grimnismol, the map №39 read — and by the ice-cold stone of Uth, a daughter of the sea-god Ægir, of whose sacred stone, the note admits, "we know nothing." Then she unbuilds his world item by item: no ship will sail under him, no horse will run, no sword will serve him except the one that ends him. The dots in stanza 31 are Bellows', and his note repeats №42's quiet scandal: "No gap indicated in the manuscript, but most editors have assumed that either the first or the last two lines have been lost. Bugge adds a line: 'The shield shall not help thee which thou holdest.'" Even the great curse has a hole in it, and even here an editor could not resist writing the missing malediction himself. And the last stanza is the one I would set beside anything in the dark arc: her best wish for her brother is that he be a wolf in the woods, owning nothing, joyless, eating corpses — vengeance were mine, if only he could be made that. Wolves have eaten well all through this poem; she knows exactly what she is wishing.
His answer is the poem's plainest window into how these people survived their own ethics — she is mad, the fault is the god's, and there is compensation on the table:
"Mad art thou, sister, | and wild of mind, Such a curse | on thy brother to cast; Othin is ruler | of every ill, Who sunders kin | with runes of spite.
"Thy brother rings | so red will give thee, All Vandilsve | and Vigdalir; Take half my land | to pay the harm, Ring-decked maid, | and as meed for thy sons." — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 33–34, trans. Bellows (1923)
Othin is ruler of every ill — from the mouth of the man holding Othin's spear. Rings, two districts, half his land: wergild, the lawful price of a husband. She does not curse again. She answers the offer with the only currency she has left, which is what mornings look like now — "I shall sit not happy | at Sevafjoll … If the light cannot show, | in the leader's band, / Vigblær bearing him | back to his home" — his horse, Battle-Breather, never again in the ranks with him on it. And then the lament closes on the stanza where this poem's dew begins:
"Helgi rose | above heroes all Like the lofty ash | above lowly thorns, Or the noble stag, | with dew besprinkled, Bearing his head | above all beasts, (And his horns gleam bright | to heaven itself.) — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 37, trans. Bellows (1923)
Hold the dew. The teaser promised "the dew of grief," and I could not find that phrase on the page, and the correction is coming due in the burial hill: the poem is about to spend the word three more times, and the third time it will explain the teaser better than the teaser explained itself.
Between the lament and the mound, the annotator does two things Bellows refuses to let pass. First: "A hill was made in Helgi's memory. And when he came to Valhall, then Othin bade him rule over every thing with himself." Helgi co-ruling Valhall — and the note: "there is no indication as to where the annotator got this notion of Helgi's sharing Othin's rule. It is most unlikely that such an idea ever found place in any of the Helgi poems, or at least in the earlier ones; probably it was a late development of the tradition in a period when Othin was no longer taken seriously." A footnote that dates a stanza by the decay of a god's credibility. Second, the seventh "fragment" entire: a single stanza of Helgi assigning Hunding his afterlife chores — wash every hero's feet, kindle fires, tie dogs, tend horses, feed the swine before sleeping — which the annotator, "through an obvious misunderstanding," read as Helgi exercising his new co-regency. It is, Bellows says, the remnant of a lost flyting "inserted absurdly out of place," and even the name Hunding "may have been substituted for another one beginning with 'H.'" A dead king swabbing Valhall's floors because a paste-up man misfiled an insult: the patchwork at its worst, two pages before the patchwork at its best.
"One of Sigrun's maidens went one evening to Helgi's hill, and saw that Helgi rode to the hill with many men." Nightfall, as promised; a serving-maid, not the widow, is the first to see the dead ride home. Her question is the finest door in the poem:
"Is this a dream | that methinks I see, Or the doom of the gods, | that dead men ride, And hither spurring | urge your steeds, Or is home-coming now | to the heroes granted?" — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 39, trans. Bellows (1923)
Three guesses, in rising order of impossibility: a dream, the end of the world, or — the one she can hardly say — are the dead allowed home now? And under this stanza, of all stanzas, Bellows drops the note that quietly corrects an entire modern vocabulary, including this series'. The phrase translated "doom of the gods" is ragna rök — and, he says, it "is not a proper name"; the word rök, "doom," "has been confused with rökkr, 'darkness,'" and so translated "dusk of the Gods" — "Götterdämmerung." №14 told the end the gods knew by heart, and used the word the whole world uses; here, in a footnote under a ghost story, is the confession that the word is a misreading — not a name, not a twilight, just doom, of the powers, plural and lower-case, the sort of thing a frightened girl at a grave-mound might list between "a dream" and "are you allowed home?" The dead man's answer takes her three guesses in order, and the third answer is the coldest line in the section:
"No dream is this | that thou thinkest to see, Nor the end of the world, | though us thou beholdest, And hither spurring | we urge our steeds, Nor is home-coming now | to the heroes granted." — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 40, trans. Bellows (1923)
Not a dream. Not the end. And no — home-coming is not granted. He has ridden back, and he has not come home; the mound is as far as the dead may ride, and he says so himself, in a stanza most of which the manuscript — one more time, №29's habit — abbreviates "to the first letters of the words." Even the ghosts were known by heart.
The maid runs for Sigrun, and her report has the blood the teaser promised: "(The hill is open, | Helgi is come;) / The sword-tracks bleed; | the monarch bade / That thou his wounds | shouldst now make well." Sword-tracks, Bellows glosses: wounds. The dead man's wounds are open and running, and he is asking for her. What Sigrun says when she reaches the hill is the strangest joy in the old poems:
"Now am I glad | of our meeting together, As Othin's hawks, | so eager for prey, When slaughter and flesh | all warm they scent, Or dew-wet see | the red of day. — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 42, trans. Bellows (1923)
Glad as carrion-birds smelling warm slaughter — a Valkyrie's simile if ever one breathed, whatever the doubtful word proves — and there, second entry, dew-wet … the red of day: dawn with wet on it, in the mouth of a woman greeting her dead husband at dusk. Then she touches him:
"First will I kiss | the lifeless king, Ere off the bloody | byrnie thou cast; With frost thy hair | is heavy, Helgi, And damp thou art | with the dew of death; (Ice-cold hands | has Hogni's kinsman, What, prince, can I | to bring thee ease?)" — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 43, trans. Bellows (1923)
There is the phrase the teaser reached for and bent: not the dew of grief — the dew of death. Frost in his hair, death-dew on his skin, and one detail the apparatus makes unbearable: she calls him Hogni's kinsman, and Bellows' note says the word is "literally 'son-in-law.'" At the moment of the kiss, the poem names the dead man by his bond to the father he killed — the family knot pulled tight around the embrace. And then Helgi answers, and the answer is the truth under the teaser's phrase, and I will let the correction pay itself:
"Thou alone, Sigrun | of Sevafjoll, Art cause that Helgi | with dew is heavy; Gold-decked maid, | thy tears are grievous, (Sun-bright south-maid, | ere thou sleepest;) Each falls like blood | on the hero's breast, (Burned-out, cold, | and crushed with care.) — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 44, trans. Bellows (1923)
Thou alone art cause that Helgi with dew is heavy. The dew of death on him is her weeping. Every tear she sheds falls "like blood | on the hero's breast" — her grief rains on his corpse and wounds it; the sword-tracks bleed because she will not stop crying. So the teaser's phrase was wrong and right in the worst way: "the dew of grief" appears nowhere on the page, and it is what the page is about. The stag in her lament stood dew-besprinkled; her gladness was dew-wet dawn; his hair is damp with the dew of death; and the dead man's one request, gently, from inside the mound, is that she understand what the dew is made of. Four dews, and they are all one dew. The old poets did not have our vocabulary for what grief does to the dead and the living both. They had weather.
What Helgi asks for instead of tears is a wake: "Well shall we drink | a noble draught, / Though love and lands | are lost to me; / No man a song | of sorrow shall sing, / Though bleeding wounds | are on my breast; / Now in the hill | our brides we hold, / The heroes' loves, | by their husbands dead." No dirges over the beer, though the wounds still bleed — and brides, plural, which perplexes the apparatus into the strangest question of the year: "both 'brides' and 'loves' are uncompromisingly plural in the text. Were the men of Helgi's ghostly following likewise visited by their wives?" The note's one clue is the annotator's own prose — "the women went home to the dwelling," plural — which, Bellows concedes, may mean no more than Sigrun and her maid. A hill full of dead men, and maybe a hill full of living women come down to them; nobody wrote the rest.
"Sigrun made ready a bed in the hill."
"Here a bed | I have made for thee, Helgi, To rest thee from care, | thou kin of the Ylfings; I will make thee sink | to sleep in my arms, As once I lay | with the living king." — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 46, trans. Bellows (1923)
This telling takes its title from that last line, because everything the scene is lives inside one word. Not my king, not the king — the living king. She knows. She has known since the frost in his hair. She makes the bed anyway, in the grave, and says the word that measures exactly what she is holding and exactly what she is holding instead of. Helgi's answer is wonder — "Now do I say | that in Sevafjoll / Aught may happen, | early or late, / Since thou sleepest clasped | in a corpse's arms, / So fair in the hill, | the daughter of Hogni!" — anything may happen now, says the ghost, astonished by the living woman in his arms. And then dawn business, brisk as a man leaving early for work:
"Now must I ride | the reddened ways, And my bay steed set | to tread the sky; Westward I go | to wind-helm's bridges, Ere Salgofnir wakes | the warrior throng." — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, 48, trans. Bellows (1923)
Wind-helm is the sky; the bridge is Bifrost, the one №13 stood under; Salgofnir, "Hall-Crower," is the cock Gollinkambi, whose crow, per the note, "awakes the gods and warriors for the last battle" — and the dead must be home before he clears his throat for an ordinary morning. He rides; the women go home.
And then the poem does the thing that separates it from every consolation ever written. It shows the second night. "Another evening Sigrun bade the maiden keep watch at the hill. And at sunset when Sigrun came to the hill she said: 'Now were he come, | if come he might.'" If come he might. Hope, already conjugated in the subjunctive — and Bellows notes that "many editors assign this speech to the maid," so we cannot even be sure whether it is the widow hoping aloud or the servant gentling her toward the truth. The last stanza of the poem is the maid's, and it is a door being closed kindly: "For mightier now | at night are all / The ghosts of the dead | than when day is bright." Come away. And the annotator, who has botched so much, writes the ending no poet could better:
"Sigrun was early dead of sorrow and grief."
One paragraph of prose remains, and it is the one the teaser promised — with a barb in it the teaser did not know about:
It was believed in olden times that people were born again, but that is now called old wives' folly. Of Helgi and Sigrun it is said that they were born again; he became Helgi Haddingjaskati, and she Kara the daughter of Halfdan, as is told in the Lay of Kara, and she was a Valkyrie. — concluding prose, Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, trans. Bellows (1923)
Born again, both of them — he a hero, she a Valkyrie again, under new names. And listen to the man writing it down: that is now called old wives' folly. The annotator — a Christian-era compiler embarrassed by his own material — sneers at the belief in the same sentence in which he preserves it. Bellows reads him exactly: "The attitude of the annotator is clearly revealed by his contempt for those who put any faith in such 'old wives' folly' as the idea that men and women could be reborn." He did not believe it. He wrote it anyway. Every reader who has ever met these lovers owes their next life to a scribe who thought the whole thing was nonsense and could not bring himself to leave it out.
And the next life is a lost book. The Lay of Kara does not survive; its outline reaches us through a later saga whose compilers, Bellows says, "appear to have known" it, and he retells what they kept: Helgi, in that poem, is protected in battle by the Valkyrie Kara, "who flies over him in the form of a swan (note once more the Valkyrie swan-maiden confusion)" — his own parenthesis, the №42 knot tied off by the editor himself — "but in his fight with Hromund he swings his sword so high that he accidentally gives Kara a mortal wound." He kills her. Reaching too high, with her above him, he brings down his own guardian; and then, unprotected, he falls. Bellows tallies it with an accountant's calm: "As this makes the third recorded death of Helgi (once at the hands of Alf, once at those of Dag, and finally in the fight with Hromund), the phenomenon of his rebirth is not surprising." Three deaths, three poems, one of them lost; a love that keeps being reborn and keeps ending in a blade held by someone bound to the beloved. The swan-maidens of №42 flew away to find battles and came back no more. One of them, the tradition insists — against its own annotator's contempt — kept coming back. It cost her every life she had.
The light-turn asked for a Valkyrie who comes back, and I owe the honest reckoning of what the page delivered. It delivered her twice. Once in the mound: one night, granted once, the bed made in the grave, the tears rationed at the dead man's own asking, and the second evening empty — the poem is not a resurrection, it is a visitation, and it says so in the ghost's own mouth: home-coming is not granted. And once past the poem's edge: born again, in a lost lay, as a swan over a battlefield — written down by a man who called it folly.
But mark where Bellows found the treasure. Not in the victories; the consecutive, well-made poem next door has those. The two sections "as fine as anything in Old Norse poetry" are the curse and the mound — the widow unbuilding her brother's world, and the widow making a bed in a grave. What the tradition kept, when it kept only fragments and glued them badly, was her: choosing against her father, weeping her husband's wounds open, loving past the frost. The killer's name fell out of the verse. The theft of the swan-robes fell out of №42. The word long fell into an editor's guess. Her lines survived. Eight fragments, and the woman is load-bearing in six of them.
The old words do not offer the consolation we would write. They offer this: that a night in the mound was worth the mound; that the dead man's last request was mercy for the living woman's eyes; that the record-keeper who believed none of it kept all of it. The maidens flew to find battles and came back no more, said the smith's poem. This one answers: one came back. Briefly. Bleeding. Beloved. And then again, in another life, over another battle, until the stories ran out of vellum. The light in the old tellings was never the kind that stays. It is the kind that returns.
New tellings reach the newsletter before anyone else — the hill is open, and no one has to be back before the rooster.
Sources: Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923) — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, its introductory note, prose passages and notes. All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: Sigrun's mountain is called Sevafjoll, and Bellows glosses it "Wet Mountain" — sea and rock held together in one name. The next telling, if the road holds, is the marriage that tried to hold them in one house: Njörð of the harbors and Skaði of the peaks, the bride who chose her husband by his feet (№17 told the choosing), and the treaty that followed — nine nights in the mountains against nights by the sea, with the two sources keeping two different counts of the split; the gulls that woke the huntress, the wolves that howled the sailor awake; and the honest ending the myths rarely give: two people who loved their homes more than each other, and said so, and went home. Njörð and Skaði, told whole: the halls, the sums, and the parting.