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Poetic Edda

"I have a greater  grief to tell;My seven sons  in the southern land,And my husband, fell  in fight all eight.(Father and mother  and brothers fourAmid the waves  the wind once smote,And the seas crashed through  the sides of the ship.)
7.[1] "The bodies all  with my own hands thenI decked for the grave,  and the dead I buried;A half-year brought me  this to bear;And no one came  to comfort me.
8. "Then bound I was,  and taken in war,A sorrow yet  in the same half-year;They bade me deck  and bind the shoesOf the wife of the monarch  every morn.
9.[2] "In jealous rage  her wrath she spake,And beat me oft  with heavy blows;

    tioned, nor is it clear what a "queen of the Huns" is doing in Gunnar's home, but the word "Hun" has little definiteness of meaning in the poems, and is frequently applied to Sigurth himself (cf. note on stanza 24). Herborg appears from stanza 11 to have been the foster-mother of Gollrond, Guthrun's sister. Lines 5-7 may be interpolations, or may form a separate stanza.

  1. ↑ Lines 1 and 2 stand in reversed order in the manuscript; I have followed Gering's conjectural transposition.
  2. ↑ Herborg implies that the queen's jealousy was not altogether misplaced.

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