October 11, 2026
Last week ended on a promise, and it took us back to the Edda's shelf. After two posts in the history books, with a king's poet choosing Valhalla for a king who had left the choice to others, we return to Henry Adams Bellows and The Poetic Edda, and to a poem this series has walked past twice. In №36 we borrowed its giantess, Hrimgerth, the one who talked until sunrise and turned to stone in a harbor. In №43 we skipped over it to reach Sigrun at the burial mound. Tonight we go in through the front door.
Bellows opens his introduction to the Helgi poems with a sentence that ought to hang over every scholar's desk: "It is, indeed, scarcely possible to make any unqualified statement regarding these three poems for which a flat contradiction cannot be found in the writings of some scholar of distinction." Consider yourself warned. This is the most patched-together poem on the whole shelf. The prose links, Bellows says, "contain practically all the narrative, the verse being almost exclusively dialogue," which means the story is mostly told by a later hand stitching fragments together, and the old verses are the voices shouting through the seams.
Two corrections to my own teaser before we start, because this series keeps its books open. I called the woman on the hill "the first valkyrie in the Helgi poems." That is what the prose says. The verse never says it, and that gap turns out to be the most interesting thing in the poem, so we'll get there properly. And I said the sword was "hidden" on an island. Her word is lying. Swords lying on an island, waiting, which is a little lonelier than hidden.
The poem begins a generation early, with a king called Hjorvarth who has four wives and has made a vow to marry whichever woman he knows to be the fairest. He hears of Sigrlin, daughter of King Svafnir, and sends his man Atli to ask for her. Atli spends the winter there and is refused. Then, standing in a wood, he hears a bird in the branches above him, and the bird has opinions. It will help, but it names its price:
"A fane will I ask, | and altars many, Gold-horned cattle | the prince shall give me, If Sigrlin yet | shall sleep in his arms, Or free of will | the hero shall follow." — Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar 4, trans. Bellows (1923)
A temple, altars, cattle with gilded horns. Bellows' note is dry about it: "The bird's demands would indicate that it is in reality one of the gods." Some god, perhaps, in feathers, haggling over a marriage. The prose then rushes on. Svavaland is found burning, the work of a rejected suitor named Hrothmar, who has killed Sigrlin's father. Sigrlin is found hidden in a house guarded by her foster-father, Jarl Franmar, who had "changed himself into the likeness of an eagle" to protect her by magic. Atli kills the eagle, which the poem seems not to notice was the girl's own protector, and Hjorvarth takes Sigrlin home.
Bellows glosses her name as "The Conquering Serpent." Keep the serpent in mind. It comes back on a sword.
Hjorvarth and Sigrlin have a son, and the prose describes him in one of the loveliest sentences in the Edda:
Hjorvarth and Sigrlin had a son, mighty and of noble stature; he was a silent man, and no name stuck fast to him. He sat on a hill, and saw nine Valkyries riding; one of them was the fairest of all. — Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar, prose before st. 6, trans. Bellows (1923)
No name stuck fast to him. Bellows reads it plainly: "this probably means that Helgi had always been so silent that he would answer to no name, with the result that he had none." A name, in this world, is something that has to stick, and it sticks to someone who answers. This boy didn't answer, so nothing stuck. He is grown, strong, a king's son, and there is no word for him.
Then nine riders come by, and the fairest one speaks. Listen to what she calls him.
"Late wilt thou, Helgi, | have hoard of rings, Thou battle-tree fierce, | or of shining fields,-- The eagle screams soon,-- | if never thou speakest, Though, hero, hard | thy heart may cry." — Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar 6, trans. Bellows (1923)
Helgi. She doesn't perform a naming ceremony. She doesn't announce, "I name you." She simply calls him by it, as though it had always been his, and in the same breath tells him why he needs one: a man who never speaks will be late to treasure and late to land, however loudly his heart cries out inside him. The naming and the scolding are the same sentence. She gives him a name by speaking to him, and the price is that he has to speak back.
He does. The silent boy's first recorded words, the first thing he says once a name has stuck, are these:
"What gift shall I have | with Helgi's name, Glorious maid, | for the giving is thine? All thy words | shall I think on well, But I want them not | if I win not thee." — Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar 7, trans. Bellows (1923)
I love this boy. He has been silent his whole life, and his first speech is a negotiation and a proposal. What comes with the name? Bellows' note explains the first half: gifts went with a naming, for a child and also when a grown man earned a lasting byname, so he isn't being greedy. He's asking what's customary. The second half is his own. I'll think hard on everything you've said, but I don't want any of it unless I win you. He has had a name for about four lines, and he's already put it all on the table.
She doesn't answer the proposal. She answers the question about the gift, which is its own kind of answer:
"Swords I know lying | in Sigarsholm, Fifty there are | save only four; One there is | that is best of all, The shield-destroyer, | with gold it shines.
"In the hilt is fame, | in the haft is courage, In the point is fear, | for its owner's foes; On the blade there lies | a blood-flecked snake, And a serpent's tail | round the flat is twisted." — Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar 8–9, trans. Bellows (1923)
Forty-six swords on an island ("Fifty there are | save only four," which is the most Eddic way possible to count), and one of them shines. Fame in the hilt, courage in the grip, fear in the point, and a snake down the blade. Bellows: "The sword is carved with magic runes and with snakes." The boy whose mother was called the Conquering Serpent receives a sword with a serpent on it, from a woman who has just given him the name he'll carry into every battle.
And then the prose tells us who she was.
Eylimi was the name of a king, whose daughter was Svava; she was a Valkyrie, and rode air and sea. She gave Helgi this name, and shielded him oft thereafter in battle. — Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar, prose after st. 9, trans. Bellows (1923)
There she is, named, fathered, and made a valkyrie, all in one sentence. It's a lovely sentence. It is also, according to Bellows, the annotator talking, not the poem: "The annotator insists here and in the prose after stanza 9 that Svava was a Valkyrie, but there is nothing in the verse to prove it, or, indeed, to identify the Svava of the last section of the poem with the person who gave Helgi his name."
Sit with that. In the verse, the woman on the hill has no name. She's "Glorious maid." She is the fairest of nine riders, and she knows where the swords are, and she gives a nameless boy his name, and the old poem never tells us hers. It was a later hand, centuries on, who gave her one: Svava, king's daughter, valkyrie. The girl who named the boy was named, in turn, by a scribe. Whether he was right, nobody can say. He may have had older poems we've lost. He may have been guessing. Bellows leans hard toward the second.
There is one witness in the poem itself, though, and she's hostile, which makes her testimony worth more. Later in the poem, when Helgi's fleet lies in a fjord at night and the giantess Hrimgerth comes to wreck it (the scene №36 borrowed for its sunrise), she complains that she can't. Someone protected the ships. She calls the protector a gold-decked maid who bore magic, and Helgi, unbothered, asks her whether that protector came alone or with company. Here is what the giantess saw:
"Thrice nine there were, | but one rode first, A helmed maid white of hue; Their horses quivered, | there came from their manes Dew in the dales so deep, (Hail on the woods so high, Thence men their harvest have, But ill was the sight I saw.)" — Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar 28, trans. Bellows (1923)
Twenty-seven riders this time, one leading, white, helmed. Their horses shake their manes and dew falls into the valleys and hail onto the high woods, and the farmers below get their harvest from it. Bellows notes that the last three lines look like later additions, and that "the passage suggests the identification of the Valkyries with the clouds." The giantess watched the weather ride over her and knew it was on the prince's side.
It still doesn't name her. But if you're looking for proof in the verse that Helgi's protector rode with the choosers, this is the closest the poem comes: a woman at the head of a riding host, armed, bright, keeping the ships safe, and weather falling from her horse. The annotator saw it too, I think, and wrote Svava.
A name, and then a sword, and then something the silent boy has never done: he tells his father he's wrong.
"Hjorvarth, king, | unwholesome thy counsels, Though famed thou art | in leading the folk, Letting fire the homes of heroes eat, Who evil deed had never done thee.
"Yet Hrothmar still the hoard doth hold, The wealth that once our kinsmen wielded; Full seldom care the king disturbs, Heir to dead men he deems himself." — Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar 10–11, trans. Bellows (1923)
His mother's father was murdered and his mother's country burned, and Hrothmar still sits on the dead men's treasure, untroubled. Heir to dead men he deems himself. Nobody in this kingdom had said so. The prince who couldn't be bothered to answer to a name now finds the words for what everyone else had let lie. Hjorvarth gives him men, and "Then Helgi got the sword that Svava had told him of." Hrothmar dies. The name has stuck.
Now the poem jumps (Bellows marks a fourth section) to Helgi grown and famous, betrothed to Svava, who "was still a Valkyrie as before," says the prose. Bellows adds, a little tartly, that "Svava in the ensuing stanzas certainly does not behave like a Valkyrie." He's right, and in the same note he says the annotator has "apparently nothing but his own imagination" to go on. In what follows, Svava rides nowhere. She is at home with her father while Helgi is in the field, and what finds her there is grief.
It begins with Helgi's brother, Hethin, walking home alone through a forest on Yule-eve, the night when, as Bellows puts it, "the spirits had their greatest power." He meets a troll-woman who "rode on a wolf, and had snakes in place of a bridle." She asks for his company. He says no. She says: "Thou shalt pay for this at the king's toast."
That night the great vows are made, and the prose describes the ritual in one of the few places the Edda shows us a heathen feast from the inside: "the sacred boar was brought in, the men laid their hands thereon, and took their vows at the king's toast." Readers who've ridden with this series will know that boar's family. Freyr's golden one lit the road in №28 and led the funeral procession in №45, and another one, in №38, turned out to be a man in disguise. Bellows says this one was "a boar consecrated to Freyr, an integral part of the Yule rites." A vow sworn with your hand on it could not be taken back.
Hethin puts his hand on the boar and vows that he will have Svava, his brother's beloved. The troll-woman's revenge has gone into his mouth. Bellows: Hethin's vow "is too sacred to be broken, but he immediately realizes the horror of his oath." The prose says that "such great grief seized him that he went forth on wild paths southward over the land," until he finds Helgi, and confesses:
"A deed more evil | I have done Than, brother mine, | thou e'er canst mend; For I have chosen | the child of the king, Thy bride, for mine | at the monarch's toast." — Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar 32, trans. Bellows (1923)
(Bellows warns that the second line is a scholar's patch. A line is lost there, and "various emendations have been suggested." The shape of the confession survives.)
What would you expect a Norse hero to say to that? We have seen sworn brothers and blood brothers kill each other for less; the Völsung cycle is paved with them. Here is what Helgi says:
"Grieve not, Hethin, | for true shall hold The words we both | by the beer have sworn; To the isle a warrior | wills that I go, (There shall I come | the third night hence;) And doubtful must be | my coming back, (So may all be well, | if fate so wills.)" — Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar 33, trans. Bellows (1923)
Grieve not. He doesn't curse his brother. He doesn't even argue. The words sworn over the beer will hold, both his brother's and his own. He has been challenged to fight on an island in three nights' time, and he isn't sure he'll come back. The prose tells us why he's so calm: "Helgi spoke thus because he foresaw his death, for his following-spirits had met Hethin when he saw the woman riding on the wolf." The fylgja, Bellows explains, is "a female guardian spirit whose appearance generally betokened death." The woman on the wolf wasn't only a troll with a grudge. She was Helgi's own death, out walking, and she stopped his brother on the road.
The man who couldn't answer to a name answers his brother with forgiveness before his brother has finished apologizing.
The battle is set at a place called Sigarsvoll. Helgi says, as it closes in:
"On a wolf there rode, | when dusk it was, A woman who fain | would have him follow; Well she knew | that now would fall Sigrlin's son | at Sigarsvoll." — Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar 35, trans. Bellows (1923)
Look back at the start. The sword came from Sigarsholm, and Bellows' note there says it is "a place not identified, but probably related to the Sigarsvoll where Helgi was slain." The Isle of Sigar and the Field of Sigar. The gift and the grave carry the same name.
And look at the shape of his whole life. It begins on a hill with a woman riding, who calls him by a name and tells him where a sword is. It ends at dusk with a woman riding, on a wolf, bridled with snakes, who wants him to follow. His mother was a serpent, his sword wore a serpent, and the last rider's reins were serpents. The poem never draws those lines for you. It's patched from pieces, and whoever wrote each piece may never have seen the others. But the stitches landed where they landed, and it's hard to unsee.
He takes a mortal wound, and sends his man Sigar riding for Svava: "Bid her swiftly | ready to be, / If her lover | alive she would find."
What he says to her when she arrives is the most generous speech in the poem, and the hardest to hear:
"Hail to thee, Svava! | thy sorrow rule, Our meeting last | in life is this; Hard the wounds | of the hero bleed, And close to my heart | the sword has come.
"I bid thee, Svava,-- | weep not, bride,-- If thou wilt hearken | to these my words, The bed for Hethin | have thou ready, And yield thy love | to the hero young." — Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar 40–41, trans. Bellows (1923)
He is trying to make his brother's cursed vow come true gently, so that it isn't a curse anymore. Weep not. Marry him. It will be all right.
And Svava, who in the verse has never once been called a valkyrie, refuses to be handed over:
"A vow I had | in my dear-loved home, When Helgi sought | with rings to have me, That not of my will, | if the warrior died, Would I fold in my arms | a man unfamed." — Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar 42, trans. Bellows (1923)
Everyone in this poem makes vows. Hjorvarth vowed to marry the fairest. Hethin vowed on the boar. Helgi swore over the beer. And Svava has her own, older than any of theirs, made at home when Helgi first came courting: not of my own will, and never a man without fame. She doesn't say no to Hethin. She says not yet, and not as you are.
Hethin hears it. His last lines in the poem are the answer:
"Kiss me, Svava, | I come not back, Rogheim to see, | or Rothulsfjoll, Till vengeance I have | for the son of Hjorvarth, The king who was noblest | beneath the sun." — Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar 43, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows is emphatic about who speaks here: "A few editions make the extraordinary blunder of ascribing this speech to the dying Helgi. The point, of course, is that Hethin will satisfy Svava's vow by becoming famous as the slayer of Alf." Alf, Hrothmar's son, is the man who killed Helgi. So the brother who swore the wrong oath goes out to earn the right to keep it. He won't come home until he's the kind of man her vow allows.
And one small echo, for anyone keeping count. The first stanza of the valkyrie's speech told the silent boy he'd be late to "shining fields," and Bellows says those words may be a place-name, Rothulsvoll. The last stanza of the poem names Rothulsfjoll, which Bellows glosses as "Sun-Mountain." The poem starts with a boy who won't reach the shining fields unless he speaks, and ends with a man who won't see the Sun-Mountain again until he's earned his name.
The prose closes: "Of Helgi and Svava it is said that they were born again." We've already been to the other side of that sentence, in №43, where she came back as Sigrun and waited at a mound. That's the annotator's story, and he was fond of it.
The poem's one clear teaching, if a patchwork this ragged can be said to teach, is in its first real scene. A name doesn't stick to someone who won't answer. The woman on the hill didn't give Helgi a word. She gave him a reason to speak, and everything else followed from speaking: the sword, the rebuke to his father, the vengeance for his grandfather, the fame. And when his brother came to him with the worst news a brother can bring, what he spoke was grieve not.
She gave him his name, and a scribe gave her hers. Neither of those gifts is in the verse the way we'd like it to be. But the verse does have the dew off the horses' manes and the hail on the high woods, twenty-seven riders over a harbor at night, and a giantess who couldn't touch the ships. Somebody was watching over him, and the old poem didn't need a name for her to know it.
New tellings come to the newsletter before anyone else. May someone call you by your right name before you've earned it, may you have the grace to answer, and when the worst news comes to your door on a wild path, may you find it in you to say grieve not.
Sources: Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar (The Lay of Helgi the Son of Hjorvarth), with Bellows' introductory note and notes; and Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I (for the teaser), translated by Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923). All quoted texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: the other Helgi, the middle poem on the shelf that №43 stepped over. This one has no annotator to stitch it; Bellows calls it a ballad. It opens "when eagles screamed," at night, with the Norns in the house, where they wove golden threads and made them fast "in the moon's hall." A raven says to another raven, "There is something I know": a son of Sigmund is standing in a mail-coat, "A half-day old." No valkyrie names this boy. His father does. "Helgi he named him," and among the lands he gave him was Sigarsvoll, the very field where tonight's Helgi fell, and with it "a blood-snake." Bellows says it plainly in his note: here the Norns preside over the hero's beginning, "and not a Valkyrie, as in Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar." Next week: the Helgi whose name was waiting for him.