On the Death of Sinfjötli

Sinfjötli and Borghildr’s brother wanted the same woman. Their rivalry ended when Sinfjötli killed him. Returning to his father Sigmundr’s household, he found that the dead man’s sister would not accept his presence. Borghildr demanded that her stepson leave. Sigmundr offered compensation instead, and she had to receive it.

At the funeral feast, Borghildr carried the ale. She brought Sinfjötli a horn containing poison. He looked into it, understood the danger, and told his father that the drink was tainted. Sigmundr took the horn and drank it himself. The prose explains why he could do so: poison could harm him neither inside nor outside his body, whereas his sons could resist it only on their skin.

Borghildr brought a second horn. Again Sinfjötli recognised the poison; again Sigmundr drank in his place. The repeated gesture protected the son without ending the danger within the household. Compensation had settled the killing formally, but the woman serving the drink was still pursuing revenge.

She came a third time, adding reproaches if Sinfjötli refused to drink. He warned his father once more. Sigmundr answered with the obscure instruction to let the drink pass through his beard. Whatever protection he intended, it did not save the young man. Sinfjötli drank and died at once.

Sigmundr lifted his son’s body and carried it a long way until he reached a narrow fjord. A man with a small boat offered to ferry him across. The boat could not hold them all, so the body went aboard first. The boatman told Sigmundr to walk around the fjord. Then he pushed off and immediately vanished.

The text never names the ferryman. Identifying him as Odin is a familiar interpretation, but the surviving prose leaves Sigmundr on the shore with the unexplained disappearance of his son. A tale dominated by poisoned cups ends with a vessel carrying the dead beyond the father’s reach.

The bridge then moves toward the next generation. Sigmundr returned south to his own kingdom and married Hjördís, Eylimi’s daughter. After he fell fighting Hundingr’s sons, she married Álfr, son of King Hjálprekr. Sigurðr grew up there. The brief account places his childhood after another family tragedy, rather than giving Sinfjötli’s death a revenge or reconciliation it does not contain.