Oddrún’s Lament

Borgný was in labour and could not give birth. When Oddrún heard of her distress, she brought out a horse, saddled it, and rode across the open country to the hall. Inside, a servant told her that Borgný needed help. The children’s father was Vilmundr, with whom Borgný had shared a hidden relationship for years.

Oddrún sat at the labouring woman’s knees and chanted powerful charms. A boy and a girl were born. Only then could Borgný speak. She called on Frigg, Freyja, and the other gracious powers to help Oddrún as Oddrún had helped her. The poem begins with an act that saves life before turning toward the losses that have shaped its healer.

Oddrún answered without easy warmth. She had not come because Borgný had always deserved kindness from her. She was fulfilling a promise to help those in need. Borgný protested that she had accompanied Oddrún like a sister. Oddrún remembered the evening when Borgný had reproached her for giving Gunnarr a drink, treating the intimacy as something no other maiden would have dared.

Their disagreement opened the way to the history of that love. Oddrún recalled growing up cherished in her father Buðli’s hall. Before his death, he had arranged a rich inheritance for her and intended her marriage to Grímhildr’s son. Her sister Brynhildr was to wear a helmet and live as a warrior woman. The father’s plans imagined honourable futures for both daughters.

Brynhildr possessed lands and people and worked at her weaving. Then Fáfnir’s slayer came, and the marriage deceptions overturned her life. Oddrún speaks of the fighting and the broken stronghold in compressed images, then of the discovery that prompted her sister’s revenge. Everyone would hear how Brynhildr died beside Sigurðr. Those events had become the grief of the whole family.

After Brynhildr’s death, Oddrún loved Gunnarr. He sought permission to marry her, offering Atli great wealth, even the treasure Grani had carried. Atli refused to accept marriage-gold from Gjúki’s son. A union supported by her father’s remembered wishes was now barred by her brother’s authority and the hostility between the households.

The refusal did not end their love. Oddrún laid her head on Gunnarr’s shoulder, and people said they had seen them together. Atli at first insisted that his sister would never do anything dishonourable. Oddrún’s recollection questions the confidence with which anyone predicts another person’s behaviour when love is involved.

Atli sent men to watch them. The spies found the lovers beneath one covering and saw what they had been sent to discover. Gunnarr and Oddrún offered rings to keep the matter from Atli, but the men hurried back with their report. Knowledge that should have reached Guðrún was kept from her. The poem makes the discovery part of the hostility leading toward the brothers’ deaths.

When Gjúki’s sons rode into Atli’s court, Högni’s heart was cut out and Gunnarr was placed among serpents. From that enclosure he played his harp, hoping Oddrún would hear and come to help him. The sound travelled beyond the walls that confined him. In this poem the music is a call to a particular person, not merely a final display of courage.

Oddrún was away at Geirmundr’s, preparing a drink, when she heard the harp’s sorrowful voice. She ordered her attendants to get ready and set out across the sound. The woman who had ridden to help Borgný now remembered another urgent journey, undertaken because someone she loved was in danger.

She arrived too late. Atli’s mother came crawling in serpent form and struck Gunnarr to the heart. Oddrún could not save him. The poem gives that final bite a personal identity: behind the snake was another member of the family that had forbidden their union.

She wondered how she had continued living afterward, for she loved Gunnarr as herself. Borgný had now heard the great grief behind her words. Oddrún ended her account, and the poem closed with the completion of the lament.

The two emergencies answer one another without becoming the same. Oddrún could not reach Gunnarr in time, but she did reach Borgný. She could resent the other woman’s earlier judgment and still honour the promise to help her. Her survival is not presented as forgetting. It is the condition that allows hands and a voice formed by sorrow to bring someone else safely through danger.