October 19, 2026
There is a poem in the Edda that opens with the most ordinary sentence in the world, I was a girl, and ends mid-breath, with a man lying awake in the dark who remembers, and then the manuscript just stops. In between, a woman tells the story of how her life was taken apart. She does it in the order she can bear to say it.
Earlier tellings in this series gave you pieces of her. You met her at the river, where a true thing was said to the wrong woman. You watched her sit beside a dead husband and not weep, in the First Lay. And in the telling of the ale, you saw the cup her mother mixed for her, which I won't pour again. This is the other lament: the Second, the Old Lay of Guthrun. Bellows says it is "unquestionably much the older" of the two, a hundred years older, in all likelihood, and the only poem of its cycle from before the year 1000 that survives nearly whole. It is also a mess. I love it for both reasons.
The prose opening says that King Thjothrek "was with Atli, and had lost most of his men," and that "Thjothrek and Guthrun lamented their griefs together." Bellows is blunt about this: the annotator who wrote that line was wrong. The famous king of the Goths, Dietrich of Bern in German story, "had not reached the North at all" when the poem was made, he says, and the annotator took the setting from a later poem. So the frame is borrowed. Ignore it, and listen to who speaks.
"A maid of maids | my mother bore me, Bright in my bower, | my brothers I loved, Till Gjuki dowered | me with gold, Dowered with gold, | and to Sigurth gave me." — Guthrunarkvitha II 1, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bright in my bower, my brothers I loved. Everything that is coming is already folded into that line. Then she says what Sigurth was to her, in the one stanza she gives herself to be happy in:
"So Sigurth rose | o'er Gjuki's sons As the leek grows green | above the grass, Or the stag o'er all | the beasts doth stand, Or as glow-red gold | above silver gray." — Guthrunarkvitha II 2, trans. Bellows (1923)
A leek above grass is a small thing to compare a hero to. I think it is a good one, because it is the greenest, straightest thing in a meadow, and you can see it from across the field. (Readers of the previous telling will remember another leek, in a cup. The Edda keeps its images in a small cupboard and takes them out again.)
Then the brothers. She says it flatly. They could not sleep or settle their quarrels until Sigurth was dead. And the poem does not give us the killing, which is told elsewhere and which earlier posts did not flinch from. It gives us a horse.
"From the Thing ran Grani | with thundering feet, But thence did Sigurth | himself come never; Covered with sweat | was the saddle-bearer, Wont the warrior's | weight to bear.
"Weeping I sought | with Grani to speak, With tear-wet cheeks | for the tale I asked; The head of Grani | was bowed to the grass, The steed knew well | his master was slain." — Guthrunarkvitha II 4–5, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows notes that in this version Sigurth is killed at the assembly, in the open, "as 'German men say,'" and not in his bed, as the northern tradition has it. But what lasts about the stanza is the horse. She does not ask the brothers first. She goes to the animal, crying, and asks it, and the animal answers the only way it can, with its head down in the grass. It is the first time anyone tells her.
The brothers come second, and they are almost kind, in the way of men who have done something terrible and are already tired of it.
"His head bowed Gunnar, | but Hogni told The news full sore | of Sigurth slain: 'Hewed to death | at our hands he lies, Gotthorm's slayer, | given to wolves.'" — Guthrunarkvitha II 7, trans. Bellows (1923)
At our hands. He says it. Hogni tells her where to find the body and what to listen for ("the ravens cry... wolves are howling"), and she answers with a curse that turns out to be an omen: Ravens yet thy heart shall rend, in a land that never thou hast known. His own answer is short, "Greater, Guthrun, thy grief shall be if the ravens so my heart shall rend," and I do not know how to read it except as the one honest thing a guilty man can say, which is yes, and it will not stop with me. (That reading is mine.)
"From him who spake | I turned me soon, In the woods to find | what the wolves had left; Tears I had not, | nor wrung my hands, Nor wailing went, | as other women, (When by Sigurth | slain I sat)." — Guthrunarkvitha II 11, trans. Bellows (1923)
That is the stanza the First Lay borrowed (Bellows says so in a note, that stanza 1 of the later poem "seems to be based on" this one), and it is the reason I keep coming back to the old lay at all. She goes into the woods to find what the wolves left. She does not cry. She does not do any of the things the poem's own world teaches a widow to do. Bellows marks the last line as "probably spurious," and I would not miss it if it were taken away, because the stanza has already said it.
Then the lines that follow:
"Never so black | had seemed the night As when in sorrow | by Sigurth I sat;" — Guthrunarkvitha II 12, lines 1–2, trans. Bellows (1923)
The rest of this stanza and the next are broken (the manuscript has holes, which Bellows marks with a row of dots), but what is left of 13 is a wish. Best of all methought 'twould be if I my life could only lose, or like to birch-wood burned might be. To burn like a log. To be used up and gone. It is as raw as anything in the Edda, and it is only a few lines.
After that she walks away. "From the mountain forth | five days I fared," she says, "till Hoalf's hall | so high I saw," and there, in Denmark, she stays "seven half-years" with a woman named Thora, Hokon's daughter, and does what women did in the evenings of the old world.
"With gold she broidered, | to bring me joy, Southern halls | and Danish swans; On the tapestry wove we | warrior's deeds, And the hero's thanes | on our handiwork;" — Guthrunarkvitha II 15, lines 1–4, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Sigmund's ship | by the land was sailing, Golden the figure-head, | gay the beaks; On board we wove | the warriors faring, Sigar and Siggeir, | south to Fjon." — Guthrunarkvitha II 16, trans. Bellows (1923)
Sigmund is Sigurth's father. Sigar and Siggeir are names out of the oldest part of his family's story (Bellows' note traces them to the tale of Sigmund's twin sister). That is my reading, not the poem's, and I will label it as such: she spends three and a half years in a stranger's hall, where nobody knows her, weaving her husband's family into the cloth. Nobody asks her to. The poem says the work was "to bring me joy." Grief, at the loom, turns out to be a kind of company.
It does not last. Bellows says the next stanza has lost its lines, and that the saga fills in the gap: "Now Guthrun was somewhat comforted of her sorrows. Then Grimhild learned where Guthrun was now dwelling." That is the end of the weaving.
Grimhild, who made the first cup for Sigurth and the second for his widow, wants her daughter home, because Atli has threatened war if he cannot have Guthrun as his wife. (That is Bellows' note, not the poem's.) She calls her sons.
"Her needlework cast she | aside, and called Her sons to ask, | with stern resolve, Who amends to their sister | would make for her son, Or the wife requite | for her husband killed." — Guthrunarkvitha II 18, trans. Bellows (1923)
Amends. This is the old law, the wergild, a price paid for a death. Gunnar and Hogni are "ready... gold to give," and the party sets out for Denmark. Atli's long-bearded messengers arrive, with mantles red and brown hair, and each of them brings gifts and kind words.
"Each to give me | gifts was fain, Gifts to give, | and goodly speech, Comfort so | for my sorrows great To bring they tried, | but I trusted them not." — Guthrunarkvitha II 21, trans. Bellows (1923)
I trusted them not. After that comes the cup, which I told earlier and will not tell again, except for the stanza that closes it. Bellows warns us that the stanzas are scrambled, and that the draught does not seem to work: she has forgotten, she says, and then, a few stanzas later, she plainly has not. One editor, Vigfusson, moved the whole cup to follow stanza 34. But on the page as we have it, the next thing she says is this:
"Then I forgot, when the draught they gave me, There in the hall, my husband's slaying; On their knees the kings all three did kneel," — Guthrunarkvitha II 25, lines 1–3, trans. Bellows (1923)
Someone then offers her the world: gold that was her father's, Frankish halls, Hunnish women "skilled in weaving, who gold make fair," and the wealth of Buthli. Bellows thinks Atli himself speaks, not Grimhild, and I think he is right. It is a bridegroom's speech. She says no.
"A husband now | I will not have, Nor wife of Brynhild's | brother be; It beseems me not | with Buthli's son Happy to be, | and heirs to bear." — Guthrunarkvitha II 28, trans. Bellows (1923)
Nor wife of Brynhild's brother be. Of all the reasons she could give, that is the one she gives. The woman who sent Sigurth to his death has a brother, and she will not marry into that family. Her mother answers in the old way, with comfort: do not seek revenge on men, even though the blame began with us, and "happy shalt be as if both still lived, Sigurth and Sigmund, if sons thou bearest." Guthrun's reply is the line I would put on a stone:
"Grimhild, I may not | gladness find, Nor hold forth hopes | to heroes now, Since once the raven | and ravening wolf Sigurth's heart's-blood | hungrily lapped." — Guthrunarkvitha II 30, trans. Bellows (1923)
The dialogue goes on across alternate stanzas. Grimhild says the king she has chosen is the noblest there is, and that Guthrun can take him or live without a husband. Guthrun sees the end from there.
"Seek not so eagerly | me to send To be a bride | of yon baneful race; On Gunnar first | his wrath shall fall, And the heart will he tear | from Hogni's breast." — Guthrunarkvitha II 32, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows says she is foretelling "what will (and actually does) happen." Those who have read ahead know it: the invitation, the feast, the hall of the Huns. Her mother weeps, hears it, and offers more: lands, "with all that live there." And the lament has one more line for this scene:
"So must I do | as the kings besought, And against my will | for my kinsmen wed, Ne'er with my husband | joy I had, And my sons by my brothers' | fate were saved not." — Guthrunarkvitha II 34, trans. Bellows (1923)
She is married to save her kin. It does not save them, and in the lines that follow she says she "could not rest" until she had taken the life of "the warrior bold, the maker of battles." Bellows' note on stanza 35 says plainly who that is. It is the man she has just married.
There is a gap after this. A few lines carry the wedding party "a week through lands so cold," then "a second week... the waves we smote," until the gates of a foreign hall open and they ride in. Then, Bellows says, "a considerable gap," and the lost stanzas are where Guthrun's account of "the slaying of her brothers" would have been. The poem skips it. The one thing she most needs to tell is the one thing the manuscript does not have.
What we have instead is the end of the night.
"Atli woke me, | for ever I seemed Of bitterness full | for my brothers' death." — Guthrunarkvitha II 38, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows suspects stanzas 38–45 may not belong to the lament at all, and may be a leftover from another poem about Atli's dreams. Whatever their origin, they close the poem, and they are the strangest thing in it. Atli wakes. The Norns, he says, have shown him visions, and the first is that Guthrun, "with poisoned blade," pierced his body. She answers calmly. Bellows' note reads it as a promise to cure an abscess by burning it out, an answer "intended merely to blind him to her purpose." Then the dreams get worse.
"Of plants I dreamed, | in the garden drooping, That fain would I have | full high to grow; Plucked by the roots, | and red with blood, They brought them hither, | and bade me eat." — Guthrunarkvitha II 41, trans. Bellows (1923)
"Hounds I dreamed | from my hand I loosed, Loud in hunger | and pain they howled; Their flesh methought | was eagles' food, And their bodies now | I needs must eat." — Guthrunarkvitha II 43, trans. Bellows (1923)
Plants pulled up by the roots, hawks that fly from his hand to an evil house, hounds whose flesh he has to eat. Bellows' own note says what they mean: they "forecast the death of his two sons, whose flesh Guthrun gives him to eat." Guthrun's reading of the dreams, he says, is "intentionally cryptic." He cannot make sense of stanza 44 either; the words, he says, are "more than doubtful." So the interpretation of Atli's nightmare, the one place in the poem where Guthrun speaks with the cold voice of an oracle, is the one thing nobody can quite translate.
And then:
"On my bed I sank, | nor slumber sought, Weary with woe,-- | full well I remember." — Guthrunarkvitha II 45, lines 1–2, trans. Bellows (1923)
"With these two lines the poem abruptly ends," Bellows writes, and adds that scholars cannot agree who is speaking them. He thinks Atli, and I think so too. It is a man lying in the dark, remembering, with the knife already in the house.
That is how it ends: the oldest lament in the cycle, a woman's story told in the order she could bear it, and then, at the last, a man lying awake who is about to learn what the dreams meant, cut off before the telling. I take it as an accident of the manuscript. I also cannot read it as anything but fitting.
If you'd like to follow the series into the Hunnish hall, new tellings land in the newsletter first. Check on your horse. Weave something. And don't take a drink from anyone who needs you to forget.
Sources: Guthrunarkvitha II, en forna (the Second, or Old, Lay of Guthrun), 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 Third Lay of Guthrun, a short poem that opens with a king who never laughs. In Benjamin Thorpe's 1866 translation, Atli has a serving-woman named Herkia, "who had been his concubine," and she tells him that she has seen Thiodrek and Gudrun together. Atli is "much afflicted." Gudrun swears her innocence "by the white sacred stone," then asks for a boiling cauldron, seven hundred men to watch, and her own bare hand: "She to the bottom, plunged her snow-white hand, and up she drew the precious stones." What happens next, and to whom, is the part Thorpe's last lines call "Gudrun's wrongs avenged." Next week: the Third Lay of Guthrun, and the ordeal of the boiling kettle.