The Last Vengeance

Long before the teller’s own day, Guðrún urged her sons to avenge Svanhildr. Their sister had been trampled beneath Jörmunrekkr’s horses. The household that had once seemed full of kin was stripped around her. She compared herself to a tree deprived of branches and leaves, standing alone after the force that had torn away everything supporting it.

Hamðir answered with the memories her demand left out. She had not welcomed her brothers’ courage when they killed Sigurðr beside her. The blood on her bed had come from a deed they considered necessary too. And when she avenged Gunnarr and Högni by killing her sons by Atli, she increased her own sorrow while destroying possible allies.

Sörli tried to end the quarrel. What could she ask them to do that would not give her more reason to weep? She already mourned brothers and children. Now she would mourn them too, for they sat on their horses destined to die far from home. They agreed to act without pretending that the journey promised a safe return.

Their purpose was to strike a powerful king within his own stronghold. The poem’s difficult passages allude to counsel and protection, but do not give the smoothly explained equipment and instructions found in later prose. What becomes clear at the fight is that ordinary iron cannot wound the brothers. Their apparent invulnerability will have a limit.

On the road they met Erpr, their half-brother in this telling. They asked what help he could give them, treating him as an inferior companion. He answered that he could help as one foot helps another, or one hand its fellow. They did not understand—or would not accept—the claim that strength becomes effective through cooperation.

Erpr’s answer was proud, and the exchange grew hostile. The brothers drew their swords and killed him. Before reaching the man responsible for their sister’s death, they shed the blood of another member of their own family. The poem names the immediate result with terrible clarity: they had reduced their force by a third.

They sheathed their weapons, adjusted their cloaks, and continued. Near Jörmunrekkr’s hall they passed a hanged body, a grim sign of the violence that had already taken place there. This passage is difficult, and the victim’s relationship is expressed inconsistently across the associated stories. The scene’s force is plain enough: the approach to the king’s feast is marked by a gallows.

Inside, men were drinking so loudly that the arriving horses went unheard until a horn sounded. A warning reached Jörmunrekkr: armed men had come, brothers of the woman he had killed. The king laughed, touched his beard, and held his golden cup. He wished to see Hamðir and Sörli before him so he could bind them and hang Gjúki’s descendants.

The wish was granted in a form he had not intended. The brothers broke into the hall. Cups shattered, blood ran among the drinkers, and the royal gathering became a battlefield. Hamðir and Sörli cut off Jörmunrekkr’s hands and feet. Hamðir called attention to the result: the king had wanted to see them, and now his own severed limbs lay in the fire.

But Jörmunrekkr still had his voice. He roared that the men should be stoned, because neither sword nor spear would bite them. In this poem the order comes from the king. No arriving one-eyed stranger is needed to reveal the weakness. The warriors could stop striking uselessly with steel and use the heavy objects available around them.

Sörli reproached Hamðir for opening his mouth. He had courage, but courage without understanding was not enough. Their enemy remained alive to give the order that could destroy them. At that point they recognised what Erpr’s answer had meant. If their brother had been present, he could have cut off Jörmunrekkr’s head while they disabled his hands and feet.

The task had required three cooperating men, and they had killed the third. They had set out to avenge a sister and repeated the family’s destructive pattern on the way. An appeal to the norns could name the pressure of fate, but it could not erase the moment when they themselves drew the swords against Erpr.

They said that brothers should not fight one another like wolves. The recognition came when there was no time to act differently. Stones were answering the protection that had made blades useless, and the king’s hall held no route back to the road where Erpr lay.

Still they claimed the courage of their last fight. They stood above the slain Goths like eagles upon branches, and their fame would remain whether death came now or later. No one, they said, lived beyond the evening appointed by the norns. The boast and the regret occupy the same ending: they had fought greatly and had also made the fatal mistake that prevented their purpose from being fulfilled.

Sörli fell by the gable; Hamðir fell at the back of the house. The poem stops with the two bodies in separate parts of the hall. It does not return to Guðrún to give her another speech or invent a final survivor who repairs the family.

At the close of Codex Regius, the long chain of heroic households reaches this stark scene. The brothers possess extraordinary courage and protection, but neither can replace the kinship they destroyed. Erpr’s simple comparison—one limb helping another—becomes understandable only after the hand that might have completed their vengeance has been cut away from their own company.