Guðrún Urges Her Sons to Vengeance

After killing Atli, Guðrún walked into the sea intending to die. The water would not take her. It carried her across a fjord to the country of King Jónakr, who married her. She bore more sons, and Svanhildr, her daughter by Sigurðr, grew up in that household. Another marriage and another generation began after the ending she had sought.

Svanhildr was married to the powerful Jörmunrekkr. His adviser Bikki encouraged the king’s son Randvér to take her, then reported the matter to the king. Jörmunrekkr had Randvér hanged and Svanhildr trampled beneath horses. The prose tells the accusation and punishment with little expansion, leaving the young woman’s death as the event that calls Guðrún’s surviving sons to action.

When she heard, Guðrún asked them why they sat idle and spoke cheerfully while their sister lay dead. Were they nothing like Gunnarr and Högni? If they possessed her brothers’ courage, she said, they would seek vengeance. Her appeal made the dead men into examples of resolve, momentarily setting aside the harm those same men had done to her.

Hamðir would not set it aside. She had not praised Högni’s deed when Sigurðr was murdered in bed and her white coverings were soaked with blood. Nor had her revenge on Atli left the family stronger. By killing her own sons she had destroyed men who might now have ridden with them to avenge Svanhildr.

Nevertheless, the brothers asked for their war-gear. Guðrún went laughing to bring out helmets and long coats of mail. Her words had achieved their immediate purpose. The sons mounted their horses, but Hamðir named the consequence before leaving: they would not return. She would have to drink a funeral draught for her sons as well as for Svanhildr.

After they rode away, Guðrún went to sit by the gate and wept. The incitement turned into a lament for her whole life. She had known three hearths and been brought to three husbands’ houses, but Sigurðr had been dearer than all the others. Her brothers killed him, then gave her to Atli, where still greater sorrows followed.

She recalled summoning her young sons and killing them to answer her brothers’ deaths. Then came the attempt to drown and the waves that carried her back to life. Jónakr’s bed had brought more children. The sequence did not become happier through repetition; each new household extended the circle of people she could lose.

Svanhildr had been the dearest of her children, bright in the hall as a ray of sunlight, surrounded by attendants. Guðrún had given her gold and fine clothes before sending her to the Goths. Now the daughter’s beautiful hair had been pressed into the mud beneath horses’ feet. The remembered gifts could not protect the person who wore them.

Guðrún compared the hurts she had endured: Sigurðr killed beside her, snakes reaching Gunnarr’s heart, Högni’s heart cut from his living breast. She did not discover a scale that made any of them small. The images gathered around Svanhildr’s death and the sons now riding toward another disaster.

She called to Sigurðr to bridle his horse and return. No son or daughter remained beside her to bring comfort. She remembered a promise that they would come to one another across the boundary between the living and the dead. If he could not come from Hel, she would go from the earth to him.

She asked for a high pyre of oak. Fire should consume the breast filled with misery and melt the sorrow pressed around her heart. The poem does not narrate the lighting of that pyre. Its final voice wishes less suffering to those who hear the lament.

The story therefore closes with an appeal rather than another completed death. Guðrún’s speech has sent her sons away and left her facing the cost of her own words. What began as a demand that they remember their sister becomes the mother’s inability to stop remembering everyone.