October 19, 2026
Most poems in the Edda are about someone who didn't know. This one is about someone who asked.
A young man rides alone to his mother's brother, a king said to see the whole shape of a life before it is lived, and says, in effect: tell me. Not a riddle, not a wager with a god, not a drink offered at a crossroads for an eye. Just a boy at a gate, asking his uncle what happens to him. And his uncle, who loves him, has to decide how much of the truth a person can carry in one afternoon.
Bellows, the translator, is not warm about the poem as a poem. His introductory note calls it "unquestionably one of the latest of the poems in the Eddic collection," dated "not much before the year 1200," and he is blunt about its author: "sufficiently skillful in the handling of verse, but he was utterly without inspiration; his characters are devoid of vitality." What it is, he says, is "a condensed outline of Sigurth's whole career as told piecemeal in the older poems." A summary, in other words, written by someone who may have had the older poems open on the desk. Bellows even floats, "not without plausibility," that the author was the very man who compiled the Codex Regius.
So we should say plainly what we're reading: not a lost voice from the dark, but a twelfth-century Icelander putting a great story in order. And it is still, somehow, the most unbearable thing in the shelf's long road to the fire. Let's see why.
The poem opens in prose. Gripir, Bellows' translation tells us, was the brother of Sigurth's mother Hjordis, "of all men the wisest and most forward-seeing." Sigurth, riding alone, finds a man in front of the hall whose name is Geitir, and asks whose hall it is. The serving-man goes in to announce him, and Gripir's answer is that Sigurth is welcome, and has been "long since." Bellows' note, with some delight, informs us that Gripir "was probably a pure invention of the poet's," and that Geitir "is likewise apparently an invention." The Volsungasaga mentions the uncle, but "presumably only because of his appearance here." The wisest man in the family exists because someone needed a wise man to say the plot out loud.
I find that I don't mind. Invented or not, he serves. They sit; they talk "of many things"; and then:
To me, if thou knowest, | my mother's brother, Say what life | will Sigurth's be.
Of men thou shalt be | on earth the mightiest, And higher famed | than all the heroes; Free of gold-giving, | slow to flee, Noble to see, | and sage in speech. — Gripisspo 6–7, trans. Bellows (1923)
For eighteen stanzas, the poem is a pleasure. Sigurth keeps saying forward look, and further tell, and Gripir keeps obliging. The father avenged, Hunding's sons felled. The dragon next, in one flat line of summary:
The fiery dragon | alone thou shalt fight That greedy lies | at Gnitaheith; Thou shalt be of Regin | and Fafnir both The slayer; truth | doth Gripir tell thee. — Gripisspo 11, trans. Bellows (1923)
Then the treasure, and the road to Gjuki's hall. And then a woman on a mountain:
On the rocks there sleeps | the ruler's daughter, Fair in armor, | since Helgi fell; Thou shalt cut | with keen-edged sword, And cleave the byrnie | with Fafnir's killer. — Gripisspo 15, trans. Bellows (1923)
A small confession of the footnotes: this woman is not named. The poet, Bellows explains, based this on the poem of the waking valkyrie and "does not identify" her with Brynhild, Buthli's daughter, "at all," and the dead hero she mourns is called Helgi, though another poem names him Hjalmgunnar — Bellows asks whether the poet slipped or meant it. Brynhild shows up a dozen stanzas later, as though she were someone new. Bellows chalks it up to "Brynhild's dual identity" and the tangle of northern and southern tellings the poet was trying to keep in one hand: he "tried, rather clumsily, to combine them." One woman, in the old stories, had been told so many ways that the poem splits her in two, and the hero will be asked to love and betray both without being told they are the same.
Then comes the moment the whole poem turns on. Gripir has just sent Sigurth to Heimir's hall, and he says it:
Ended, Sigurth, | is all I see, No further aught | of Gripir ask. — Gripisspo 19, trans. Bellows (1923)
Look at that. A man who has seen everything, who has been reading the boy's life aloud in fine order, suddenly goes blind at the exact point where the joy ends. Sigurth is not fooled for a stanza.
Sorrow brings me | the word thou sayest, For, monarch, forward | further thou seest; Sad the grief | for Sigurth thou knowest, Yet nought to me, Gripir, | known wilt make.
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.
No man, Gripir, | on earth I know Who sees the future | as far as thou; Hide thou nought, | though hard it be, And base the deeds | that I shall do. — Gripisspo 20–22, trans. Bellows (1923)
The poem never says Gripir is lying. It says his sight fails. The reading — mine, not the poet's, and not Bellows' — is that a kind uncle has just found out what he sees, and is trying, with a straight face, to be a worse prophet than he is. And a boy who loves him enough to say you know, and you won't tell me is the one thing that can break it. Hide thou nought, though hard it be. That line is the title of this post, and it is the whole of the poem's bravery.
Gripir yields at stanza 25. He says it flat, and he says it as a kindness to the one asking:
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.
No scorn I know | for the noble king, But counsel good | from Gripir I seek; Well will I know, | though evil awaits, What Sigurth may | before him see. — Gripisspo 25–26, trans. Bellows (1923)
And then he tells the rest, in order, and the order is a staircase: the maiden at Heimir's, whom Sigurth first brushes off — what is it to me, though the maiden be so fair? — and Gripir answers that she will rob him of sleep. Then the oaths, and the turning:
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.
What sayst thou, Gripir? | give me the truth, Does fickleness hide | in the hero's heart? Can it be that troth | I break with the maiden, With her I believed | I loved so dear? — Gripisspo 31–32, trans. Bellows (1923)
Few shall ye keep. If you've read the earlier posts in this series, you already know what happens one night in Gjuki's hall. Here is something worth noticing: the poem itself never mentions a cup. Gripir says only that the maiden "will fade from thy mind," and that it is "the price of Grimhild's wiles." The draught, the thing we told in the ale-of-forgetting post, comes in only through Bellows' footnote, which cites the Volsungasaga. In the poem, the forgetting is just something that happens to a man, and Gripir cannot say why.
He tells Sigurth about the false wooing next, the changed shapes, the three nights, and Sigurth's answer is the one I would underline in any copy of this poem:
Most evil it seems, | and men will say Base is Sigurth | that so he did; Not of my will shall | I cheat with wiles The heroes' maiden | whom noblest I hold.
Thou dwellest, leader | lofty of men, With the maid as if | thy mother she were; Lofty as long | as the world shall live, Ruler of men, | thy name shall remain. — Gripisspo 40–41, trans. Bellows (1923)
He is told, in advance, that he will do the thing he would never choose to do, and the first thing he says is I don't want to be that man. The poem's whole comfort is Gripir's answer. Bellows warns that this part of the manuscript is scrambled — stanzas 41–43 are out of order, and the last two lines of 41 "got in here by mistake," a repeat of stanza 23 — but the sense survives the shuffle. It is the one place Gripir assures him: no shame thou gavest (st. 49), the monarch's wife with wiles didst cheat. Not forgiveness. A ruling.
Then Sigurth asks the last question, the one he has been walking toward since the gate:
Shall Gunnar the wise | to the woman's words, And Gotthorm and Hogni, | then give heed? Shall Gjuki's sons, | now tell me, Gripir, Redden their blades | with their kinsman's blood?
Heavy it lies | on Guthrun's heart, When her brothers all | shall bring thee death; Never again | shall she happiness know, The woman so fair; | 'tis Grimhild's work. — Gripisspo 50–51, trans. Bellows (1923)
Notice what Gripir answers. Not yes. Not the day, not the place, not the method. He answers with the grief of the woman left behind: heavy it lies on Guthrun's heart. Sigurth asks if he will die, and the prophet tells him who will mourn.
Sigurth takes it standing. "Now fare thee well! our fates we shun not." And Gripir, with his last stanza, gives him the only thing he has left to give, which is not a way out:
Ever remember, | ruler of men, That fortune lies | in the hero's life; A nobler man | shall never live Beneath the sun | than Sigurth shall seem. — Gripisspo 53, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Shall seem." I'll leave the word alone. The poem doesn't explain it.
What it offers instead of a plot twist is an old, hard comfort: that a person told the whole shape of their life, down to the worst night, is not thereby a smaller person, and that the telling can be done kindly. There is no sword in the last stanza, no fire, no raven. A boy rides off. A man at a gate watches him go, with a great deal more in his head than he said aloud, and the one thing he chose to leave in the boy's hands is that name.
New tellings come to the newsletter before anyone else. May the people who see too far ahead for you have the courage to stop, and the grace to start again when you ask them to; may your own worst hour, whenever it comes, have somebody in it who tells you the truth in the right order; and may you say, at your own gate, hide thou nought, though hard it be.
Sources: Gripisspo (Gripir's Prophecy), with Bellows' introductory note and notes, translated by Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923). Public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: back to the beginning of Sigurth's own story, which the shelf, by an accident of copyists, tells right after the end. A boy chooses a horse. A dwarf-smith takes him in and tells him how the gold got cursed: a killed otter, a pike in a waterfall, a ransom of gold, a ring, and a curse. And then a storm, and a stranger on a headland who calls himself Hnikar and gives the boy advice about omens, and whom Bellows' note says is Othin. Next week: the Reginsmol, and the man on the mountain who stills the sea.