Guðrún Remembers Her Sorrows

Guðrún remembered a youth in which she loved her brothers. She had been a bright maiden in her mother’s house before Gjúki gave her gold and married her to Sigurðr. Beside her brothers, Sigurðr stood like a green leek above the grass, a stag above other animals, or red gold above silver. Then those same brothers could find no peace until they had killed him.

Grani came home without his rider. The sound of the horse’s hooves announced an arrival, but Sigurðr did not follow. Sweat covered the animal accustomed to carrying him. Guðrún went to Grani with tears on her cheeks and tried to question him. He bowed his head into the grass. The horse knew his master was dead, though he could not give her the answer in human words.

For a long time she hesitated before asking her brothers. Gunnarr lowered his head. Högni told her that Sigurðr lay slain by their hands, left for wolves, and that Gutþormr had died too. She would find her husband on the southern road, where ravens cried and eagles waited for food. The directions led away from the household into a landscape already claiming the body.

Guðrún answered with a curse on Högni’s heart, imagining ravens tearing it in a foreign country. He said that such an event would give her still more reason to weep. Their words look toward his own death while neither can undo Sigurðr’s. The man who had helped destroy her happiness could still be someone whose loss would wound her again.

She went alone into the woods to find what the wolves had left. Beside the dead man she had no tears and made none of the gestures expected of mourning. No night had ever seemed so dark. She wished that the wolves would end her life or that she could burn like birchwood, rather than remain in the world that had brought her there.

Afterward she travelled for five days until she reached a great hall in Denmark. For three and a half years she stayed with Þóra, Hákon’s daughter. The poem gives this refuge a different texture from the courts and battlefields around it. The women worked with gold thread, making pictures of halls, swans, ships, warriors, shields, and the remembered deeds of rulers.

Sigmundr’s ship appeared in their embroidery, its gilded prow and armed company formed by their hands. The work offered companionship and an occupation for grief without requiring that the past disappear. Battles that had destroyed households could become images stitched within a household. For a time, Guðrún’s life had room for another woman’s company and the slow making of something beautiful.

Grímhildr learned where her daughter was living and turned to the problem of bringing her back into the family’s plans. She asked who would compensate Guðrún for the husband and son she had lost. Gunnarr and Högni were willing to offer gold. Horses, wagons, and emissaries followed. The possibility of reconciliation arrived with the machinery of another marriage.

Grímhildr gave Guðrún a bitter, cold drink containing strange ingredients and powerful signs. Runes covered the cup, and the mixture was meant to subdue memory and sorrow. The poem describes the drink’s effect, yet Guðrún continues to speak with piercing knowledge of what has been done to her. Forgetfulness here does not produce a simple, permanent erasure that makes the following conversation painless.

Her mother offered gold, lands, fine hangings, skilled women, and the wealth that would become hers as Atli’s wife. Guðrún refused. She did not want another husband and did not wish to marry Brynhildr’s brother. The offer treated prosperity and new children as a path out of bereavement. For Guðrún, neither could restore the particular people who had died.

Grímhildr urged her not to avenge her sorrow upon the men, even while acknowledging that the family bore blame. With sons, she suggested, Guðrún might be happy as though Sigurðr and the child Sigmundr still lived. Guðrún answered with the image of the scavenging animals that had tasted her husband’s blood. The memory resisted the exchange her mother was proposing.

She also foretold the danger of the marriage. Atli would turn against Gunnarr and tear Högni’s heart from his breast. Grímhildr wept at the threatened fate of her sons, then renewed her offers of land. Her daughter’s warning could move her without changing the policy that exposed the family to it. Guðrún finally yielded against her will for her kinsmen’s sake.

The bridal party travelled through cold country, over water, and through dry lands before reaching Atli’s high-walled home. Gates opened to admit the new wife. The poem then moves into a later conversation within that marriage, one overshadowed by the deaths Guðrún had predicted. It does not pause to retell the whole campaign against her brothers; memory and anticipation now crowd the same voice.

Atli woke from frightening dreams. He had seen Guðrún strike him with a poisoned blade. She offered a reassuring interpretation: a dream of iron might signify a fire or the treatment of an illness. He described growing plants pulled out by the roots, bloodied and brought to him to eat. Then he dreamed of hawks whose hearts he consumed with honey.

The images became increasingly difficult to comfort away. His cherished animals were lost, and he was made to eat what he loved. Guðrún spoke of sacrifices and the killing of beasts. Her explanations concealed the human disaster those images pointed toward. The audience who knows the later revenge hears another meaning beneath every attempt to soothe him.

Atli lay down without finding rest. The poem leaves its ending in the pressure of those dreams rather than staging the fulfilment. Guðrún’s long account has carried us from a loving childhood to a marriage filled with concealed hostility. Between them stand the riderless horse, the vigil beside the corpse, and the embroidered refuge where she briefly had something to do besides answer one loss with another.