Guðrún’s First Lament

Guðrún sat beside Sigurðr’s body without weeping. She did not wring her hands or cry out as the others expected. The grief was so great that her heart seemed ready to break, yet no tears came. Men approached to console her, then women wearing gold, each bringing the memory of suffering that might somehow reach her.

Gjúki’s sister Gjaflaug spoke first. She had lost husbands, children, sisters, and brothers, and had nevertheless gone on living. Her account made loss into a terrible accumulation, a measure of what one person might endure. Guðrún remained dry-eyed beside the dead man. Another woman’s survival did not yet offer a way into her own grief.

Herborg, queen of the Huns, told a longer story. Her husband and seven sons had died in the south. Her parents and brothers had been lost when wind and sea overwhelmed their ship. She had prepared the bodies and their resting places herself, completing the work of burial without anyone beside her to offer comfort.

Before those losses could recede, she was captured and made a slave. She dressed another ruler’s wife and tied the shoes of a woman who struck her out of jealousy. A queen reduced to serving a cruel mistress, Herborg knew both bereavement and humiliation. Yet even this account could not make Guðrún weep. The repeated silence was not a refusal to understand the other women; her own sorrow remained inaccessible.

Then Gullrönd, Guðrún’s sister, intervened. However wise the speakers might be, they had not found a way to comfort a young wife. She uncovered Sigurðr’s body and turned his face toward Guðrún. Look at the one you love, she urged. Put your lips to him as you did when he was alive.

Guðrún looked once. His hair was clotted with blood. The eyes that had shone were gone from her, and the breast she knew had been opened by a sword. The others’ accounts had offered comparisons; Gullrönd placed the particular man before her. She could no longer remain beside an indistinct covered body and keep its meaning at a distance.

She sank against the pillow. Her hair loosened, her cheeks reddened, and tears ran down onto her knees. She wept so fiercely that the geese she kept in the courtyard cried out. The sound carried beyond the chamber, bringing the household and its living creatures into the release of grief.

Gullrönd said she had never seen a love like theirs. Guðrún had been happy nowhere, at home or abroad, when Sigurðr was absent. Now Guðrún could speak of him herself. Among Gjúki’s sons he had stood like a tall leek above the grass, or a bright jewel set above other stones.

Beside him she had felt greater than the warrior women around her. Without him she was as small as a leaf on a willow. She missed her companion in his seat and in their bed. Her brothers had caused the emptiness in both places and the tears of their own sister. Her lament named the people responsible instead of making death an impersonal misfortune.

She warned Gunnarr that the gold would bring him no happiness. The rings and the broken oaths would return upon him. She remembered a day when the courtyard had been full of joy as Sigurðr saddled Grani and rode away to seek Brynhildr’s hand for another man. What looked like the beginning of a fortunate marriage had carried disaster back into the house.

Brynhildr heard and cursed the woman who had released Guðrún’s tears. Gullrönd answered her sharply, accusing her of ruining rulers and marriages. Brynhildr placed blame upon her brother Atli and recalled the sight of Sigurðr’s treasure. The exchange did not reconcile the women. Brynhildr stood by a pillar, gathering herself, her eyes burning as she looked at Sigurðr’s wounds.

The prose conclusion says that Guðrún left for the wilderness and travelled to Denmark, where she stayed with Þóra, Hákon’s daughter, for three and a half years. Brynhildr would not live after Sigurðr. But the poem’s central achievement is the scene before those departures: grief that could not speak, women trying to reach it, and one uncovered face that finally broke the silence.