October 19, 2026
There is one poem in the Guthrun cycle where she is believed, and it is probably the least loved poem in the cycle. Scholars have been polite about it for a century and a half. I think it deserves a fairer hearing, because it does something the other Guthrun poems never allow: it lets her win.
It is very short. Ten stanzas. Thorpe, in 1866, gives it a headnote in prose, and the whole story is already inside it:
"Atli had a serving-woman named Herkia, who had been his concubine. She informed Atli that she had seen Thiodrek and Gudrun together; whereat Atli was much afflicted. Then Gudrun said:" — The Third Lay of Gudrun, headnote, trans. Thorpe (1866)
The poem opens on a marriage that is already over, though neither of them has said so. Guthrun is the one who notices that her husband has stopped being able to look at her.
"1. What ails thee ever, Atli! Budli's son! Hast thou sorrow in thy heart? Why never laughest thou? To thy jarls it would seem more desirable, that thou with men wouldst talk, and on me wouldst look." — Third Lay of Gudrun 1, trans. Thorpe (1866)
And on me wouldst look. If you have followed this series from the river, you know what she has been through to be asked to stand in that hall at all: a cup she did not choose, a husband she did not choose, brothers who did not come home. Now her husband sits in his own court with his jaw set, and the first thing she says to him is a question about his health.
He tells her.
"2. It grieves me, Gudrun! Giuki's daughter! that in my palace here, Herkia has said, that thou and Thiodrek have under one covering slept, and wantonly been in the linen wrapt." — Third Lay of Gudrun 2, trans. Thorpe (1866)
Her answer is the best thing in the poem, and I want to be careful about it, because it is easy to read past.
"3. For all this charge I will give my oaths by the white sacred stone, that with me and Thiodrek nothing has passed, which to man and wife only belongs;
4. Save that I embraced the prince of armies, the honoured king, a single time. Other were our cogitations, when sorrowful we two sat to converse." — Third Lay of Gudrun 3–4, trans. Thorpe (1866)
She doesn't claim it never happened. She says she embraced him once, and tells him why: other were our cogitations, when sorrowful we two sat to converse. They were two grieving people in a house full of ghosts. Thjothrek, in the German legends, is the great Goth who lost his men and his kingdom; here he has come to Atli's hall as a refugee, and Guthrun, the woman who has just lost her brothers, sat with him. That is my reading and not the poem's, but the poem gives her one more sentence to build it on.
"5. Hither came Thiodrek, with thirty warriors; now there lives not one of those thirty men. Surround me with thy brothers, and with mailed warriors; surround me with all thy noblest kinsmen." — Third Lay of Gudrun 5, trans. Thorpe (1866)
Now there lives not one of those thirty men. She doesn't say how thirty men died. The poem doesn't either. Then she makes her demand: not a hearing, but a crowd. Bring your brothers, bring your armed men, bring every noble kinsman you have. If she is going to be put on trial in this house she wants every witness in the room.
"6. Send to Saxi the Southmen's prince; he can hallow the boiling cauldron." — Third Lay of Gudrun 6, trans. Thorpe (1866)
This is the ordeal of the kettle. A pot of water is brought to the boil, a priest or a holy king blesses it, and the accused reaches in. If the hand comes out unharmed, God (or the gods, or the stone) has spoken. Bellows' introduction, as I have it, notes that this sort of trial seems to have reached Norway with the Christian king St. Olaf, who died in 1030, and that it still feels foreign in the poem: it needs an outsider, a southerner, to bless it. That is one reason the lay is dated so late, and why it sits so oddly next to older, harder poems. (I am reporting this from a summary of Bellows' notes, not from the page itself. Take it as a pointer, not a quotation.)
Thorpe, in his own note to the poem, goes further. "The falsification of the story, the pitiful subordinate part acted by Thiodrek, the perfect silence of all the other poems on this event, and the ordeal of the cauldron, sufficiently show that the poem is a later composition," he writes.
I can agree with all of it and still think it is a good scene.
"7. Seven hundred men entered the hall, ere in the cauldron the queen dipt her hand." — Third Lay of Gudrun 7, trans. Thorpe (1866)
Seven hundred men. She asked for witnesses, and she got an army of them. Then the one stanza of the poem that sounds like the old Guthrun:
"8. Now Gunnar comes not, nor call I Hogni: I shall not see again my loved brothers: with his sword would Hogni such wrong avenge: now I must myself purify from crime." — Third Lay of Gudrun 8, trans. Thorpe (1866)
Now Gunnar comes not. She says it aloud, in front of seven hundred men, in front of the husband who killed them. Nobody in the hall answers. Hogni would have drawn his sword. Hogni is not coming. So she walks to the fire herself.
"9. She to the bottom, plunged her snow-white hand, and up she drew the precious stones. 'See now, ye men! I am proved guiltless in holy wise, boil the vessel as it may.'" — Third Lay of Gudrun 9, trans. Thorpe (1866)
Thorpe's footnote says the iarknastein of the original, the "precious stones," "was a milk-white opal." A milk-white stone, brought up from the bottom of a boiling pot, by a snow-white hand. I would be lying if I said I knew what the poet meant by it, but it is hard to imagine it was accidental. The woman has been asked to prove that she is clean, and what comes up out of the water is the color of purity.
And here is what I think the poem is for.
"10. Laughed then Atli's heart within his breast, when he unscathed beheld the hand of Gudrun. 'Now must Herkia to the cauldron go, she who Gudrun had hoped to injure.' No one has misery seen who saw not that, how the hand there of Herkia was burnt. They then the woman led to a foul slough. So were Gudrun's wrongs avenged." — Third Lay of Gudrun 10, trans. Thorpe (1866)
The first thing she asked him was why never laughest thou? And the last thing the poem gives us is Atli laughing. His heart laughs, and the laugh costs someone her hand. Herkja is the accuser, the former concubine. She is handed over to the same kettle and fails it, and then she is taken to a bog. Thorpe's note says the "foul slough" was a punishment "known to the old Germans." The poem ends there, on the words so were Gudrun's wrongs avenged.
It is not a comfortable ending. I don't think it is meant to be. In this poem the husband gets his faith in his wife back, the servant who lied is destroyed, and the ordeal that saves Guthrun is the same ordeal that kills Herkja. Justice here is a kettle: whoever it burns is wrong.
The other Guthrun poems know better. In them, nothing is avenged, nothing is proved, and the grief goes on past the end of the lay. This one gives her a single clean afternoon in which she is believed, and I am glad of it, even knowing how little it weighs against what came before.
If you'd like to follow the series on into the lament of a woman who is not Guthrun at all, new tellings land in the newsletter first. Keep your hand out of the kettle. Believe the woman who tells you why she was sitting there.
Sources: The Third Lay of Gudrun (Guthrunarkvitha III), translated by Benjamin Thorpe, The Elder Edda of Saemund Sigfusson (1866), with Thorpe's footnotes; Bellows' introductory notes (1923) summarized, not quoted. Public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: the Lament of Oddrun, the poem that follows this one in the Codex Regius. Oddrun is Atli's sister, and in Bellows' 1923 translation a king's daughter named Borgny "could not give birth to a child" until Oddrun came to her. "I have heard it told | in olden tales | how a maiden came | to Morningland." Oddrun saddles a black horse and rides across the country, sits "at the knees of the woman," and chants her "potent charms." Then she tells Borgny, in a voice that suddenly isn't about Borgny at all, about a man named Gunnar, a harp, and a pit full of serpents. Next week: the Lament of Oddrun, and the harp in the snake-pit.