October 11, 2026
Last week a rider nobody named gave a name to a silent boy, and a scribe, centuries later, gave the rider one in return: Svava, king's daughter, valkyrie — a title the verse itself never once confirmed. Tonight the shelf gives us the other Helgi, the one Bellows calls, without a great deal of fondness for the fact, "unquestionably one of the latest of the Eddic poems," composed "probably not earlier than the second quarter of the eleventh century." It is also, he says, something the Helgi poems otherwise never are: a story. "It is, in fact, a ballad, and in the main an exceedingly vigorous one." No annotator stitching prose between the verses this time, patching over gaps. "The annotator, who added his prose narrative notes so freely in the other Helgi poems, here found nothing to do."
He found nothing to do because the poem doesn't need him. It opens with a birth, and the birth needs no scribe to explain who was in the room.
In olden days, | when eagles screamed, And holy streams | from heaven's crags fell, Was Helgi then, | the hero-hearted, Borghild's son, | in Bralund born. — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I 1, trans. Bellows (1923)
Screaming eagles and water pouring down from the sky: portents, Bellows' note says, that a hero has arrived. And then, before anyone else gets near the child:
'Twas night in the dwelling, | and Norns there came, Who shaped the life | of the lofty one; They bade him most famed | of fighters all And best of princes | ever to be. — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I 2, trans. Bellows (1923)
Last week's teaser called this poem's opening scene by name, and it was right to. Bellows' footnote to this exact stanza settles, on the record, something the Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar post spent all last week untangling: "Here it is the Norns who preside over Helgi's early destiny, and not a Valkyrie, as in Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar." He wrote that sentence, I think, precisely because he expected the confusion. Last week the prose overclaimed a valkyrie the verse never named. This week the translator gets there first and rules it out himself, in the footnote to the very first thing the Norns do.
Whatever the Norns are, they work like weavers, and the poem gives them a loom:
Mightily wove they | the web of fate, While Bralund's towns | were trembling all; And there the golden | threads they wove, And in the moon's hall | fast they made them. — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I 3, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Moon's hall," Bellows says, is simply the sky — the thread is fastened up where the moon hangs, so that it can't be picked loose by anything smaller than the heavens. Then they throw the ends of it in three directions:
East and west | the ends they hid, In the middle the hero | should have his land; And Neri's kinswoman | northward cast A chain, and bade it | firm ever to be. — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I 4, trans. Bellows (1923)
East, west, and north — fame in every direction, but the north gets its own extra line, its own named weaver, "Neri's kinswoman." Bellows admits he has no idea who Neri is. "Nothing further is known of Neri, and the word may not be a proper name at all." He reads the geography as the poet's own honesty about where the Helgi legend had actually traveled by his day — a poem confessing, in the shape of a thread, that its hero was famous in places the poet couldn't fully account for.
The stanza that follows starts in grief and ends somewhere else entirely, and the seam between the two halves is exactly where something appears to be missing:
Once sorrow had | the Ylfings' son, And grief the bride | who the loved one had borne.
Quoth raven to raven, | on treetop resting, Seeking for food, | "There is something I know." — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I 5, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows' note says plainly: "it looks as though something had been lost after line 2." Whatever connected the mother's grief to the birds gossiping in the treetop is gone from the manuscript, and what survives is a jump-cut a thousand years old. Two ravens, hungry, perched above a hall where a hero has just been born, and one of them has news. The poem never tells us what the raven knows. It doesn't have to. Something in a nursery, watched by scavenger birds who talk like they've seen this story before — the news travels on wings before the child can even lift his own head.
He lifts it fast enough:
"In mail-coat stands | the son of Sigmund, A half-day old; | now day is here; His eyes flash sharp | as the heroes' are, He is friend of the wolves; | full glad are we." — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I 6, trans. Bellows (1923)
Half a day old, and already armored, already sharp-eyed, already called "friend of the wolves" — a wild epithet to hand an infant, and meant, on this poem's terms, as the highest kind of praise. His father is Sigmund, son of Volsung, and Bellows' note traces the family tree in one dense paragraph: Sigmund's children by his first wife, Borghild, are Helgi and his brother Hamund; his son by his second wife will be Sigurth, the dragon-slayer this series has already walked beside twice. And buried in that same footnote is a small pointer forward, to a grimmer branch of the same family that this series hasn't told yet — Sigmund's son by his own sister, a boy named Sinfjotli, whose story the note sends us to fetch elsewhere: "cf. Fra Dautha Sinfjotla and note." Keep that name. We're coming back for him.
A newborn hero needs a name and a gift, and this poem gives both without any rider on a hill to hand them over:
"Helgi he named him, | and Hringstathir gave him, Solfjoll, Snæfjoll, | and Sigarsvoll, Hringstoth, Hotun, | and Himinvangar, And a blood-snake bedecked | to Sinfjotli's brother." — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I 8, trans. Bellows (1923)
His own father names him — a plainer transaction than last week's, no scolding required, no proposal offered in return, just Sigmund coming home from battle to give his son "a leek full proud" (st. 7), the customary symbol of the lands he's about to hand over, then reading off the deed: five place-names and a sword. One of those names is Sigarsvoll. Anyone who read last week's post already knows what happens there: it's the field where the other Helgi — Hjörvarth's son — falls, generations from now on the shelf's own numbering, a death this series already told in full. Here it's just an infant's christening gift, a patch of ground with no history yet attached to it. The poem hands it over sixteen posts before it becomes a grave.
And the sword is a "blood-snake" — the family's second serpent-sword in two weeks, after last week's blade with the snake twisted round its blade. These poems keep reaching for the same metaphor to describe the same thing: a weapon that is also, somehow, alive.
He grows up fast — "fifteen winters old," the poem says, when he kills the king Hunding who murdered his kin (st. 10) — and goes to war fast too, against Hunding's sons and their ally Hothbrodd. What follows for several stanzas is a shouting match between Helgi's foster-brother Sinfjotli and a watchman named Gothmund on the opposite shore, trading accusations and insults back and forth — the kind of scene Bellows' introductory note singles out as an oddity in this otherwise plain-spoken poem: "the abusive dialogue between Sinfjotli and Gothmund... clearly was based on another and older poem." It's a set piece, borrowed whole from somewhere else, and this series is going to leave it standing where it is rather than repeat what two men shout at each other across a fjord.
What matters more is who's watching the war arrive. Lightning breaks over the mountain before Helgi's forces even land:
Then glittered light | from Logafjoll, And from the light | the flashes leaped; — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I 15, trans. Bellows (1923)
— the stanza breaks off there, the rest lost, but Bellows' note says the missing lines almost certainly described valkyries arriving, and that the lightning is the same cloud-imagery this series has already met twice (the Valkyries as weather, riding storms). One of them dismounts and speaks:
Down from her horse | sprang Hogni's daughter,— The shields were still,-- | and spake to the hero: "Other tasks | are ours, methinks, Than drinking beer | with the breaker of rings. — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I 18, trans. Bellows (1923)
Her name is Sigrun, and she's been promised by her father to Hothbrodd — the enemy king Helgi is sailing to fight. She refuses the marriage, chooses Helgi instead, on the spot, in armor, mid-flight. And Bellows, true to form, immediately complicates the label everyone wants to put on her. His note to this scene doubts an early poet would have "made his Sigrun, daughter of Hogni, a Valkyrie" at all — the same doubt this series already met, word for word in spirit, when №43 told the poem that comes after this one on the shelf and found "nothing in stanzas 5-12 which clearly identifies Sigrun as a Valkyrie" there either. Two poems, one heroine, and Bellows suspects both of them of the same borrowed halo.
So: the Norns who open this poem are ruled OUT of being valkyries, by the translator's own footnote. The woman who chooses Helgi mid-battle is ruled INTO some doubt about the very same title, by that same translator, twice. Nobody in this poem gets to keep a clean label. Whatever Sigrun is, she does the one thing a valkyrie is supposed to do that no Norn ever does: she comes back, again and again, across the whole rest of the story.
She comes back at sea first. Helgi's fleet runs into a storm bad enough that Bellows' note quotes the Volsungasaga's flat understatement of it — "Now there was a great storm" — and the poem gives the waves their own family, daughters of the sea-god trying to drown the ships:
Helgi bade higher | hoist the sails, Nor did the ships'-folk | shun the waves, Though dreadfully | did Ægir's daughters Seek the steeds | of the sea to sink.
But from above | did Sigrun brave Aid the men and | all their faring; Mightily came | from the claws of Ron The leader's sea-beast | off Gnipalund. — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I 30–31, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Sigrun here appears again as a Valkyrie," Bellows notes — no doubt at all this time, because she's flying, and flying above a storm is a job description a human bride doesn't have. It's a lovely, quiet pairing, if you set it beside how this post opened: the Norns wove a hero's whole fate at night, unseen, in a hall nobody was watching, and fastened it to the sky. Now a woman who may or may not be one of them is doing something nearly identical from directly overhead — invisible help, arriving from above, holding a life together against the odds. The poem never says the two kinds of guardianship are related. It doesn't need to. They rhyme on their own.
The fleet lands, the shouting match happens, and the armies finally meet at a place called Frekastein:
Swift as a storm | there smote together The flashing blades | at Frekastein; Ever was Helgi, | Hunding's slayer, First in the throng | where warriors fought; — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I 55, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows' note flags the stanza's last two lines — praise for Helgi's fierce, unyielding heart — as possibly not belonging here at all: some editors think they're spurious, others think they're the surviving half of a different stanza whose other half is gone. Even at the poem's climax, the page keeps confessing its own uncertain seams.
Then the valkyries arrive for the last time, and Sigrun speaks over the field:
From heaven there came | the maidens helmed,-- The weapon-clang grew,-- | who watched o'er the king; Spake Sigrun fair,-- | the wound-givers flew, And the horse of the giantess | raven's-food had:--
"Hail to thee, hero! | full happy with men, Offspring of Yngvi, | shalt ever live, For thou the fearless | foe hast slain Who to many the dread | of death had brought." — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I 56–57, trans. Bellows (1923)
"The horse of the giantess raven's-food had" is Bellows' own example, back in his introduction, of exactly the kind of riddling phrase this poem loves — a giantess rides a wolf, so "the giantess's horse" means wolf, and a wolf fed on corpses is a battlefield that's already decided. The poem hands you the goriest sentence in the whole telling dressed as a compliment to the weather. Then Sigrun gives Helgi the last line he'll get from her in this poem — rings, herself, land, victory, and:
Both now, warrior, | thine shall be, Hogni's daughter | and Hringstathir, Wealth and triumph; | the battle wanes. — Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I 58, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows doesn't even let this last stanza stand unquestioned. "This entire stanza may be an interpolation," his note says, and points out that the "Hringstathir" it awards Helgi as a conquest is the exact same estate his own father gave him as a newborn, back in stanza 8 — the poem, on the editor's own reading, possibly contradicting its own christening gift at the finish line. The battle wanes; so, a little, does the manuscript's certainty about how it should end.
Two women's work bookends this poem, and the poem is careful — or the manuscript's gaps are careful for it — never to let them blur into one. The Norns come once, in the dark, weave a thread nobody living can see, and are never mentioned again. A footnote has to tell you, twice, that they are not a valkyrie, because the poem itself never even raises the possibility. Sigrun, whoever she finally is, keeps showing up: on a hillside in lightning, over a drowning fleet, above a battlefield thick with wolves. One kind of fate-giving happens once and is permanent. The other has to be renewed, storm after storm, by someone willing to come back.
Last week a valkyrie named a silent boy and a scribe named her in return, and neither name was ever quite certain. This week the fate-weavers get no name to argue about at all — only a ruling, in a translator's footnote, that they are not what you might expect — and the woman who is certain, who chooses her king in armor and holds his ships up through a storm with her own two hands, still can't get her title to stick without an editor's hedge trailing behind it. Even in the poem that Bellows calls the plainest one on the whole shelf, nobody gets to keep an easy answer about who was watching over them, and how.
New tellings come to the newsletter before anyone else. May you have women who choose you in a storm, may whatever wove your fate at midnight never need to explain itself to a footnote, and when the ravens on your own roof have something to say, may you be young enough, or brave enough, to ask what it is.
Sources: Helgakvitha Hundingsbana I (The First Lay of Helgi Hundingsbane), with Bellows' introductory note and notes; and Fra Dautha Sinfjotla (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 name we asked you to keep two sections back. Sinfjotli — Sigmund's other son, the one born of an old, dark bargain this series hasn't told — dies at his own stepmother's hand, poisoned in a drinking horn passed three times across a funeral feast. He catches her the first two times: "Muddy is the drink, Father!" His father drinks instead and tells him to be brave about it: "Let it trickle through your beard, Son!" The third time, nothing stops it. What comes for the body afterward, in a boat, may not be a boatman at all. Next week: the drink nobody could refuse twice.