October 19, 2026
There is a post earlier in this series that took you up the mountain, through the wall of fire, and into the shield-tower where a woman lay asleep in armor that had grown to her. You met her waking, her blessing of the day and the night, her punishment, and the stanzas where she says the end will be bad and he says he will not run. If you haven't read it, it stands on its own, and you should.
This is the rest of the poem. Not the story, since the story is only a handful of stanzas, but everything the old compilers poured in around it: a cup of beer with a vegetable in it, a god hanging on a tree for wisdom, runes carved on the teeth of an eight-legged horse, and eleven pieces of advice that have, as the translator says, nothing whatever to do with her. It is the most chaotic poem in the Edda. I find it hard to stop reading.
He has asked her for wisdom, and she answers with hospitality. The prose says she took "a horn full of mead and gave him a memory-draught," and then she speaks:
"Beer I bring thee, | tree of battle, Mingled of strength | and mighty fame; Charms it holds | and healing signs, Spells full good, | and gladness-runes." — Sigrdrifumol 5, trans. Bellows (1923)
Tree of battle is a warrior; the poem calls its men trees and blades by turns. The stanza is followed in the manuscript by a gap, and Bellows says this stanza "perhaps, but by no means surely" belongs with the same lost poem as the first.
A little further on there is a stanza I would put at the top of any list of the Edda's most practical lines. It is about cups.
"Ale-runes learn, | that with lies the wife Of another betray not thy trust; On the horn thou shalt write, | and the backs of thy hands, And Need shalt mark on thy nails. Thou shalt bless the draught, | and danger escape, And cast a leek in the cup;" — Sigrdrifumol 7, lines 1–6, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows' note explains the custom: "a guest on his arrival received a draught of ale from the hands of his host's wife, and it was to prevent this draught from bewitching him that the runes were recommended." And the leek? "Leeks were long supposed to have the power of counteracting poison or witchcraft." (The manuscript gives only the first six lines; the last two are borrowed from the Volsungasaga, and I have left them out.)
Mark the rune Need on your nails. Bless the drink. Drop a leek in. It is the most ordinary advice in the poem, the kind of thing a sensible aunt would say before you go to a feast in a strange house, and it is aimed at exactly the danger a hero walks into, in an earlier telling in this series, with nothing in his cup but ale. That is my reading, not Bellows', and I will not push it further. But the woman who tells him about the leek is not the one standing by when the cup is passed.
Then the poem drifts, as it does, into another poem's business. The runes are listed (that is where we got the birth-runes and wave-runes and branch-runes of the earlier telling), and then the list simply stops, "though the manuscript indicates no gap," and in comes an older story about how the letters were got.
"Them Hropt arranged, | and them he wrote, And them in thought he made, Out of the draught | that down had dropped From the head of Heithdraupnir, And the horn of Hoddrofnir.
"On the mountain he stood | with Brimir's sword, On his head the helm he bore; Then first the head | of Mim spoke forth, And words of truth it told." — Sigrdrifumol 13–14, trans. Bellows (1923)
Hropt is Othin, one of his many names. Heithdraupnir and Hoddrofnir, Bellows says, "seem to be names for Mim," the wise being whose severed head Othin keeps for counsel. Bellows calls stanza 14 "clearly in bad shape," and honestly I think a poem about runes ought to arrive in a little bad shape, as though each of the lines had been scratched in over some other lines. But the picture is there: a god on a mountain with a borrowed sword and a helmet, and a head that speaks true words to him, and from that draught, the letters.
The next three stanzas are the strangest in the poem. Bellows labels them "a wholly distinct rune-chant," and I think the word for what they do is inventory.
"He bade write on the shield | before the shining goddess, On Arvak's ear, | and on Alsvith's hoof, On the wheel of the car | of Hrungnir's killer, On Sleipnir's teeth, | and the straps of the sledge.
"On the paws of the bear, | and on Bragi's tongue, On the wolf's claws bared, | and the eagle's beak, On bloody wings, | and bridge's end, On freeing hands | and helping foot-prints.
"On glass and on gold, | and on goodly charms, In wine and in beer, | and on well-loved seats, On Gungnir's point, | and on Grani's breast, On the nails of Norns, | and the night-owl's beak." — Sigrdrifumol 15–17, trans. Bellows (1923)
Look at where he writes. The shield that stands in front of the sun; the ear of one horse that pulls the sun and the hoof of the other; the teeth of Sleipnir, Othin's eight-legged mount; a bear's paws and a poet's tongue; a wolf's bared claws and an eagle's beak; the end of a bridge; the point of Othin's spear, Gungnir; the breast of Grani, which Bellows identifies as Sigurth's own horse, the one that wouldn't walk without him; the nails of the Norns. Wine, beer and a chair you like to sit in. Glass and gold. (Bellows adds that "Hrungnir's killer" is "a conjectural addition," since the line is in bad shape.)
It is the whole world in one breath, from the sun's shield to a favorite chair, and every surface carries a letter. I take it as a kind of boast: where would you not write a rune?
The stanza after the one that earlier telling quoted (the shavings stirred into the mead and scattered to gods, elves and men) closes the rune-lore with a promise I like even more.
"Beech-runes are there, | birth-runes are there, And all the runes of ale, And the magic runes of might; Who knows them rightly | and reads them true, Has them himself to help; Ever they aid, Till the gods are gone." — Sigrdrifumol 19, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows warns that "the whole stanza is chaotic," and that several of its lines "look like spurious additions." But the last two lines have the ring of something old and certain. Ever they aid, till the gods are gone. A gift that outlasts the givers.
After the runes, and after the choice that the earlier telling ended on, the poem becomes something else entirely: a list. Then first I rede thee... then second... then third... up to then eleventh. Bellows says it is "a set of numbered counsels closely resembling the Loddfafnismol," a collection of maxims in the Havamal, "which manifestly has nothing whatever to do with Brynhild." In his account, the compiler simply used "whatever verse he could find without much questioning as to its origin."
I am going to read it anyway, because the compiler did hang it on her, and because it is good.
"Then first I rede thee, | that free of guilt Toward kinsmen ever thou art; No vengeance have, | though they work thee harm, Reward after death thou shalt win." — Sigrdrifumol 22, trans. Bellows (1923)
The first rule is the hardest: do not take revenge on your own kin, even when they hurt you. The second, which the earlier telling quoted, is not to swear an oath you cannot keep. Then it goes on to advice you could hang in a hall: don't argue with fools at the assembly, don't wrangle with drunks, and, in a stanza Bellows calls doubtful, "Let the silver of kinship | not rob thee of sleep," which seems to mean not to lose your head over a bride-price. The more you read, the more it sounds like someone brusque and good who has seen everything go wrong at least once.
Some of it is dark in a practical way:
"Then seventh I rede thee, | if battle thou seekest With a foe that is full of might; It is better to fight | than to burn alive In the hall of the hero rich." — Sigrdrifumol 31, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows explains what that means: "Many a Norse warrior met his death in this latter way; the burning of the house in the Njalssaga is the most famous instance." Go out and fight. A man who stays inside a burning hall is not safe; he is only waiting.
And then, in the middle of the list, a pair of stanzas that nobody expects from a battle-maid:
"Then ninth I rede thee: | burial render If thou findest a fallen corpse, Of sickness dead, | or dead in the sea, Or dead of weapons' wounds.
"A bath shalt thou give them | who corpses be, And hands and head shalt wash; Wipe them and comb, | ere they go in the coffin, And pray that they sleep in peace." — Sigrdrifumol 33–34, trans. Bellows (1923)
Whoever you find, however they died: bury them. Wash the hands and the head. Comb the hair. Pray that they sleep in peace. Bellows thinks the second of those stanzas is "probably an interpolation," and I don't mind. It is the kindest thing in the poem, and it is put in the mouth of the chooser of the slain.
The tenth counsel is a warning about family, and it reads differently if you have read the rest of this cycle:
"Then tenth I rede thee, | that never thou trust The word of the race of wolves, (If his brother thou broughtest to death, Or his father thou didst fell;) Often a wolf | in a son there is, Though gold he gladly takes." — Sigrdrifumol 35, trans. Bellows (1923)
Race of wolves, Bellows says, means "family of a slain foe." Don't trust the kin of someone you killed, however politely they take your gold. Lines 3–4, he adds, are "probably interpolated," which is why the parentheses are there. But even without them, that often a wolf in a son there is is a line that has stayed with me. I have no proof the compiler meant an echo; I am only telling you I heard one.
The poem ends, so far as anyone can tell, with this:
"Battle and hate | and harm, methinks, Full seldom fall asleep; Wits and weapons | the warrior needs If boldest of men he would be.
"Then eleventh I rede thee, | that wrath thou shun, And treachery false with thy friends; Not long the leader's | life shall be, For great are the foes he faces." — Sigrdrifumol 36–37, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows says stanza 36 is "probably an interpolation," and that lines 3–4 of the last stanza "may well have come from the old Sigurth-Brynhild poem," inserted here "where they do not fit particularly well." So the final lines of the poem, the ones the manuscript tradition hands us, might actually be the words that came just before her warning in the vanished original.
And here is the last honest oddity: the end is not even in the right manuscript. A whole folio of eight sheets is missing from the Codex Regius, "the gap coming after the first line of stanza 29," and the rest of the counsels come from "later paper manuscripts, which were undoubtedly copied from an old parchment, though probably not from the complete Regius." Bellows calls what survives "an extraordinary piece of patchwork," and says that only stanzas 2–4 and 20–21 can be confidently assigned to the poem about the sleeping woman, which he calls "as fine as anything in Old Norse poetry."
Here is what I take from it. Whoever put the thing together over the centuries could not stop adding. Every time a lesson about runes or cups or burying the dead or not trusting a wolf-son came to hand, somebody hung it on the one wise woman who was standing there on a mountain in the fire, and whom Sigurth had asked to teach him what takes place in all the worlds. A poem cannot be called badly built when people kept bringing it things to hold. And the last thing we hear her say, whoever actually said it, is a plain truth about leaders: not long the leader's life shall be, for great are the foes he faces.
If you want to follow this series to the next fire, new tellings come to the newsletter first. Keep a leek in your pocket, wash the hands of the dead you find, and don't write your runes on anything you wouldn't want to keep.
Sources: Sigrdrifumol (the Ballad of the Victory-Bringer), 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: a poem Bellows calls "the only Norse poem of the Sigurth cycle antedating the year 1000 which has come down to us in anything approaching complete form," and "unquestionably much the older" of the first two Guthrun laments. A king named Thjothrek, who has lost most of his men, sits beside a woman who has lost more, and the two of them lament their griefs together. She begins at the beginning: "A maid of maids | my mother bore me," and a few lines on, Sigurth "rose o'er Gjuki's sons / As the leek grows green | above the grass." Next week: the Second, or Old, Lay of Guthrun, which reviews her sorrows from Sigurth's death in the forest through the slaying of her brothers to Atli's dreams, and which comes with a note saying that even the annotator's setting for it is wrong.