Page:Poeticedda00belluoft.djvu/458

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Poetic Edda

The Volsung young,  in battle valiant,—Himself would have had her  if all he had seen.
4.[1] The southern hero  his naked sword,Fair-flashing, let  between them lie;(Nor would he come  the maid to kiss;)The Hunnish king  in his arms ne'er heldThe maiden he gave  to Gjuki's sons.
5.[2] Ill she had known not  in all her life,And nought of the sorrows  of men she knew;Blame she had not,  nor dreamed she should bear it,But cruel the fates  that among them came.

    tails, and in stanzas 32-39 appears a quite different tradition regarding the winning of Brynhild, which I suspect he had in mind throughout the poem.

  1. ↑ Southern hero: Sigurth, whose Frankish origin is seldom wholly lost sight of in the Norse versions of the story. On the episode of the sword cf. Gripisspo, 41 and note. Line 3 may well be an interpolation; both lines 4 and 5 have also been questioned, and some editions combine line 5 with lines 1-3 of stanza 5. Hunnish king: Sigurth, who was, of course, not a king of the Huns, but was occasionally so called in the later poems owing to the lack of ethnological distinction made by the Norse poets (cf. Guthrunarkvitha I, 24 and note).
  2. ↑ This stanza may refer, as Gering thinks, merely to the fact that Brynhild lived happy and unsuspecting as Gunnar's wife until the fatal quarrel with Guthrun (cf. Gripisspo, 45 and note) revealed to her the deceit whereby she had been won, or it may refer to the version of the story which appears in stanza 32-39, wherein Brynhild lived happily with Atli, her brother, until he was attacked by Gunnar and Sigurth, and was compelled to give his sister to Gunnar, winning her consent thereto by representing

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