October 19, 2026
Here is a poem that begins with a stolen life and a bargain nobody keeps, and ends with a man in a storm telling a boy to wash his face and eat breakfast.
I mean that as praise, mostly.
The Reginsmol is the first of three poems the Codex Regius runs together without a seam, and Bellows, its translator, is frank about what it is. It follows the Gripisspo, he says, only because "some stupid copyist" may have wedged the prophecy in where the story broke; before that, the prose here "connects directly" with the tale of Sinfjotli's death. As for the poem itself, he is not kind; his note on the next poem says so in passing: "The Reginsmol is little more than a clumsy mosaic." Different stanza forms, fragments from more than one source, a stretch that "might equally well stand in the Hovamol." The compiler "took his verse fragments pretty much wherever he happened to find them," and bound them with prose.
I think that's exactly why it's worth reading slowly. A mosaic is made of pieces that were cut for somewhere else, and you can still see the edges.
It opens in prose, with a boy and a horse. Sigurth goes to the king's stud and picks for himself the horse "who thereafter was called Grani." (Bellows' note, in passing, says another tradition makes the horse Sleipnir's colt and a gift of Othin's; the poem's own introduction "tells a different story," and we leave it.) Meanwhile there has come to the same court a man named Regin: "more ingenious than all other men, and a dwarf in stature; he was wise, fierce and skilled in magic." He takes Sigurth's education in hand, "and loved him much."
And then, as teachers will, he tells him a family story.
This is the tale of three gods on a road, Othin and Hönir and Loki, who come to a waterfall where a dwarf named Andvari has lived "long… in the shape of a pike." Regin has a brother, Otr, who often went into the fall as an otter. He has caught a salmon and sits on the bank "eating it with his eyes shut," and Loki throws a stone and kills him. The gods think they have had "great good luck." They flay the animal, and that evening, looking for a bed for the night, they show the skin to their host, who happens to be Hreithmar, the otter's father.
The family seizes them. The ransom for their lives: fill the skin with gold, and cover it outside with red gold as well.
Loki is sent to get it. He borrows Rán's net (she is the sea-goddess who drags drowning men down in it), casts it before the pike, and the pike leaps into it. And here the poem finally speaks in verse, and what it says first is a riddle with a knife behind it:
"What is the fish | that runs in the flood, And itself from ill cannot save? If thy head thou wouldst | from hell redeem, Find me the water's flame." — Reginsmol 1, trans. Bellows (1923)
The "water's flame" is gold; Bellows' note tells us Ægir the sea-god "was wont to light his hall with gold." Andvari pays it all. But he holds back one ring, and Loki takes that too, and the dwarf, going into his rocky hole, leaves a curse behind him:
"Now shall the gold | that Gust once had Bring their death | to brothers twain, And evil be | for heroes eight; Joy of my wealth | shall no man win." — Reginsmol 5, trans. Bellows (1923)
I want to be careful here, and Bellows is careful for me. This stanza, he writes, "apparently comes from a different source" than the ones around it. It names someone called Gust whom nobody can identify, and "may originally not have referred to Andvari's treasure at all." The "eight" may have been a substitution; the eight he suggests are "Sigurth, Gotthorm, Gunnar, Hogni, Atli, Erp, Sorli and Hamther," all of whom die before the story is done. In the poem as we have it, then, the curse is stitched on: Bellows thinks the stanzas around it are fragments of a poem about "Loki's (not Andvari's) curse." The seam shows. And still it works, because of what comes next.
The gods heap up the gold and stand the otter-skin on its feet. Hreithmar steps forward and spots "a single whisker," and tells them to cover it. Othin brings out the ring, Andvaranaut, and covers the hair with it. Loki, who has been listening to his head being bargained for, says the line that, in a poem full of omens, may be the most accurate prophecy in it:
"The gold is given, | and great the price Thou hast my head to save; But fortune thy sons | shall find not there, The bane of ye both it is."
"Gifts ye gave, | but ye gave not kindly, Gave not with hearts that were whole; Your lives ere this | should ye all have lost, If sooner this fate I had seen." — Reginsmol 6–7, trans. Bellows (1923)
Gave not with hearts that were whole. Hreithmar is the one who speaks that line, the man holding the ransom, and he is right about everything except the part where he gets to keep it. The gods paid because they had to. They paid with a stolen ring and a stolen net and a flayed child's skin. And the thing paid, as Loki tells him to his face, is a death sentence with the wrapping still on.
What follows is dispatched in a few lines of prose, and it is as quick as a slammed door. Fafnir and Regin ask their father for a share of the payment for their brother, and he refuses. Fafnir pushes a sword through him as he sleeps. Hreithmar's dying words go to his daughters Lyngheith and Lofnheith, and one of them answers: though a sister loses her father, seldom revenge on her brother she brings. Fafnir takes all of it. Regin, cheated twice (of a brother, and of a share), asks his sister how to win his inheritance and is told, in a stanza of unusual sanity, to ask kindly, "better will," and not to "seek with the sword." Then the poem says: "All these happenings did Regin tell to Sigurth."
You can hear what the dwarf is doing. He has just told a boy a long story in which gold is the thing that unmakes a family, and in the same breath he is describing where a great deal of it is lying.
Now the poem turns, and turns to another source entirely. Bellows says the next stretch "may be the remnants of a lost poem belonging to the Helgi cycle," and the stanzas sound it: Regin, greeting his pupil, calls him "the noblest hero beneath the sun," and calls him "Yngvi's heir," which Bellows says "is, of course, absurd" for Sigurth, and one of "the many reasons" to think the stanzas belonged to another hero. Sigurth, asked to go after the dragon, says no: first his father's death. Hunding's sons "will laugh," he says, "if the hero sooner seeks the red rings to find than his father's vengeance." The king gives him ships. And off a certain headland, the sea rises.
A man on the mountain: "Who yonder rides | on Rævil's steeds, O'er towering waves | and waters wild? The sail-horses all | with sweat are dripping, Nor can the sea-steeds | the gale withstand."
Regin: "On the sea-trees here | are Sigurth and I, The storm wind drives us | on to our death; The waves crash down | on the forward deck, And the roller-steeds sink; | who seeks our names?"
The Man: "Hnikar I was | when Volsung once Gladdened the ravens | and battle gave; Call me the Man | from the Mountain now, Feng or Fjolnir; | with you will I fare." — Reginsmol 16–18, trans. Bellows (1923)
Every noun in that exchange for a ship is a kenning (steeds, sea-trees, sea-horses), which is the poem showing off. And the answer is its own small shock: this is a man who gave a battle to Volsung once, and gladdened the ravens, and he has just offered to come aboard under any of three names. Bellows' footnote tells us who: "Hnikar and Fjolnir: Othin gives himself both these names in Grimnismol, 47." The Seizer (Feng) appears nowhere else.
"They sailed to the land, and the man went on board the ship, and the storm subsided."
That is the whole of the miracle, in one sentence. No staff raised, no speech. He comes aboard and it stops.
And then Sigurth does what a sensible young man does when a god has just walked onto his ship: he asks a practical question.
"Hnikar, say, | for thou seest the fate That to gods and men is given; What sign is fairest | for him who fights, And best for the swinging of swords?"
"Many the signs, | if men but knew, That are good for the swinging of swords; It is well, methinks, | if the warrior meets A raven black on his road.
"Another it is | if out thou art come, And art ready forth to fare, To behold on the path | before thy house Two fighters greedy of fame.
"Third it is well | if a howling wolf Thou hearest under the ash; And fortune comes | if thy foe thou seest Ere thee the hero beholds." — Reginsmol 19–22, trans. Bellows (1923)
Three good omens: a black raven on the road, two eager fighters at your own door, a wolf howling under the ash tree. (And, in the last line, a piece of plain advice dressed as an omen: see your enemy before your enemy sees you.) Bellows notes that these stanzas are "strongly suggestive of the Hovamol," and the stanza on the setting sun, he says, is "clearly an interpolation," drawn in by the common sense of that last line; the wedge-shaped battle formation, he adds, was said to be Othin's own invention, "taught… only to the most favored warriors." Then two more, and these are the ones I love:
"Foul is the sign | if thy foot shall stumble As thou goest forth to fight; Goddesses baneful | at both thy sides Will that wounds thou shalt get." — Reginsmol 24, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Combed and washed | shall the wise man go, And a meal at mom shall take; For unknown it is | where at eve he may be; It is ill thy luck to lose." — Reginsmol 25, trans. Bellows (1923)
Combed and washed, and a meal in the morning, for unknown it is where at eve he may be. The god of war's best counsel is: go to the fight clean, and fed, because you may not come back. I'll call that mine, not the poet's, but it is hard to read the stanza and miss it: of everything Othin can teach a boy before a battle, the part worth having is that he not die hungry.
The Gripisspo told us the whole of Sigurth's life in one afternoon. This poem gives us its first three acts in the clumsiest possible way, and yet something in the order is right. A man teaches a boy how to read a day: the raven, the stumble, the wolf. He teaches him as gold lies waiting in a story he has been told by a man with an interest in the outcome. The god doesn't say the gold is cursed. He says: wash your face.
Sigurth wins his battle. Lyngvi falls, "and his two brothers with him," and Regin, who had a hand in the grisly business that followed (Bellows' note, quoting the later prose, says it was Regin who advised carving "the bloody eagle" on the captured king's back), says the poem's last word, a verse of praise: few were more fierce in fight than his son, who reddened the earth and gladdened the ravens. Then Sigurth goes home, and Regin "egged him on to fight with Fafnir" again.
The ravens, you notice, are in the stanza where Othin names himself, and in the last stanza Regin speaks. Everyone in this poem is feeding them.
New tellings come to the newsletter before anyone else. May your gifts be given with whole hearts and received the same; may the next stranger on your own headland ask your name before he asks you to trust him; and may you always, whatever the omens, go out combed and washed and fed.
Sources: Reginsmol (the Ballad of Regin), 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: the very next page of the manuscript, with no gap, no heading, and, Bellows tells us, only a faint "Of Fafnir's Death" written in the margin. A trench across a dragon's road. A sword called Gram. And a young man who, as the great worm lies dying, will not give his name, because in olden times, the prose says, the word of a dying man was believed to have great power if he cursed his foe by name. He calls himself "the Noble Hart" instead. (He does not keep it up for long.) Next week: the Fafnismol, and the conversation between a hero and the thing he has killed.