Guðrún

Summary

Guðrún, daughter of King Gjúki and his wife Grímhildr, sister of Gunnarr and Högni, was the wife of Sigurd, then of Atli, then of King Jónakr. She is the one who outlives everyone in the stories of the Völsungs and the Niflungs: her first husband is killed by her brothers, her second husband kills her brothers and is killed by her, and her sons by the third die avenging their sister. Most of the Poetic Edda poems that tell her story give it in her own voice: three Lays of Guðrún, Atlakviða, Atlamál, Guðrúnarhvöt, "Guðrún's whetting", and Hamðismál; Snorri gathers them in Skáldskaparmál 48–50, and the Völsunga saga in chapters 25–44.

Sigurd was killed in her bed, and she sat over him and did not weep. She did not wail or beat her hands as women do, and she was ready to burst with grief. The wives of the nobles came and told her their own sorrows so that she would weep: her aunt Gjaflaug had lost five husbands, two daughters, three sisters and eight brothers; Herborg, queen of the Huns' land, had lost her husband and seven sons and her kin at sea and then been taken captive as a servant. Guðrún did not weep. Then her sister Gullrönd lifted the cloth from Sigurd and said: kiss him as you embraced him alive. Guðrún looked once at his hair running with blood and his darkened eyes, and wept until the tears flew, and the geese in the yard cried out in answer. Then she told her brother Gunnarr: you will not enjoy the gold; the rings will be your death, because you swore oaths to Sigurd.

She went into the forests and then to Denmark, where she stayed seven seasons with Þóra, Hákon's daughter, embroidering with her Sigmund's ships and the battles of kings. Her mother Grímhildr came with her brothers, offering gold as atonement for her husband; she would not accept it, so Grímhildr gave her a drink from a horn carved with runes and mixed with the strength of the earth and the sea, and with it she forgot their guilt. Then Grímhildr told her she would marry Atli, brother of Brynhildr. Guðrún said: I do not want Brynhildr's brother, and he will kill Gunnarr and tear out Högni's heart. Then she was married against her will. Atli dreamed one night that she stabbed him with a poisoned sword and that he ate the hearts of two of his hawks with honey; she said that iron in a dream means fire.

Atli coveted Fáfnir's gold, which had passed to her brothers, and invited them to his court. Guðrún saw the plot and sent them a message in runes, and sent Högni a token, a ring tied with a wolf's hair; the prose Dráp Niflunga says it was Andvari's ring. Atli's messenger altered the runes on the way; Högni's wife Kostbera read them and saw they had been altered, and still the brothers went. When Guðrún saw her brothers hard pressed she threw off her cloak, took a naked sword and fought beside them; she felled two warriors and struck Atli's brother so that his leg was cut away. The brothers were taken; Högni's heart was cut out and Gunnarr was thrown into the snake pit.

Guðrún did not weep for her brothers in the hall of the Huns, nor for her sons. Atlakviða says she came out to Atli with a gilded cup and then told him: you have chewed your sons' hearts with honey, and you will never again call Erpr and Eitill to your knees. Atlamál adds that she killed the two boys, made cups of their skulls in which she gave him their blood mixed with his drink, roasted their hearts and served them to him saying they were a calf's, and then told him. Then she went in to him as he lay drunk and asleep and killed him with a sword, with Högni's son beside her in Atlamál, and burned the hall over those inside.

Then she walked into the sea to drown, but the waves lifted her and carried her to the land of King Jónakr, who married her; she bore him Hamðir, Sörli and Erpr. With her was her daughter by Sigurd, Svanhildr, who was married to Jörmunrekkr, king of the Goths, and trampled to death under his horses. Guðrún told her sons: why do you sit and sleep, you are not like Gunnarr or Högni. She gave them mail-coats that iron could not bite; they went, killed their brother Erpr on the way, then cut off Jörmunrekkr's hands and feet, and he told his men to stone them, since iron would not bite them, and they died. Guðrún sat weeping and counting her griefs: three husbands, three households, and worst of all Sigurd in the bed, Gunnarr and the serpents, Högni's heart. Then she called on Sigurd to come for her from the house of the dead as he had promised, and asked for a high pyre of oak.

The idea the story turns on is that Guðrún does not choose. Her father gives her to Sigurd, her mother gives her to Atli with a drink of forgetting, the waves carry her to Jónakr. But when she does choose, she chooses blood: she grieves for the husband her brothers killed, then sides with her brothers against the husband who killed them, killing her sons by him for their sake, and then sends her sons by the third husband to die avenging their sister. Her tears in the story are held back and then let go: she does not weep for Sigurd until his face is uncovered, she does not weep in the hall of the Huns, and at the end she sits weeping and counting.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the two essays do not read it. Guðrún is a compound of guð, the old form of gunnr, "war, battle", and rún, "secret, whisper". We read the first member as Arabic jund: j becomes hard g, n drops in guð and stays in gunnr, and d answers ð. In Lane jund is "an army; a military force", "a collected body of men prepared for war". We read the second member as ranna: ranna, arannat, "she cried aloud", said of a woman raising her voice in weeping; "the women cried loudly in their wailing"; and ranna ilayhi, "he gave ear, listened, to him". On this reading Guðrún is the cry of the host: the woman who sends whispers and runes to her brothers and cries over the slain, which is what the story makes her: she warned her brothers by a secret message, sat weeping over each of her dead, and put on mail and fought in their ranks.

Linguistic Root

Cleasby–Vigfusson gives gunnr as "war, battle, only used in poetry", with the "older form guðr", and notes it in men's names such as Gunnarr, in women's names such as Gunnhildr, and at the end of names such as Hildigunnr. Orel derives it from *gunþz, Burgundian *gunþs, and sets it beside Hittite kuen-, "to smite, to kill", and Sanskrit hánti, "to strike, to kill". So the n is original: assimilated in gunnr, lost in guðr.

Lane, under j-n-d: jund, "an army; a military force; a legion; a body of troops", "a collected body of men prepared for war", auxiliaries; jannada, he collected armies. So the two words share a field: war in Norse, the army that wages it in Arabic. J becomes hard g under the Juthoor laws, as in jamal and camel, and n is n. The weak point is that the Germanic þ of *gunþz answers an older t by Grimm's law, while Arabic d answers a Germanic t under that law, so here the d does not follow the rule. But Kroonen's dictionary of Proto-Germanic shows that this þ is not part of the root: gunnr and guðr go back to an archaic feminine formed with a t-suffix on the root meaning "to slay" that the Hittite and Sanskrit words keep. The root is g and n alone, and jund answers them with its first two letters, its d standing where Germanic has the suffix. So the weak point has moved from the root to the suffix, and what remains is that the root means slaying while jund means an army.

The Norse dictionary says the original notion of rún is "scrutiny, mystery, secret conversation", that Gothic runa renders Greek "mystery" and "counsel" in Wulfila's Gospels, and that one of its senses is "a woman's whispering"; it cites two of Guðrún's own poems: "I called the Huns to counsel" in Guðrúnarhvöt 12, and "we sank together into whispering" in Guðrúnarkviða III 4, where Guðrún swears that all she and Þjóðrekr did was sit whispering their sorrows. Lane, under r-n-n: ranna, "he raised his voice in weeping"; ranīn, crying aloud in weeping, or a plaintive voice; arannat, "said of a woman in her wailing"; and ranna ilayhi, "he gave ear, hearkened, or listened, to him". So r and n join voice and listening in Arabic, and whisper and secret in Norse.

Key Mythic Narratives

The boiling water

In Guðrúnarkviða III Herkja, Atli's servant and mistress, says she saw Guðrún and Þjóðrekr together under one cover. Guðrún swears by the white holy stone that she embraced him only once, and that the two of them sat whispering their sorrows, and asks for the man who hallows the boiling cauldron. Seven hundred men come in; she plunges her white hand to the bottom of the cauldron and brings up the precious stones, saying: see, I am cleared. Atli's heart laughs when he sees her hands unhurt; then Herkja plunges her hand and it is scalded, and they lead her to a bog. Stanza 8 says what lies beneath it all: Gunnarr does not come, I do not call Högni; Högni would have avenged this shame with his sword; now I must clear myself.

The speech of birds

The prose at the head of Guðrúnarkviða I says that men tell how Guðrún had eaten of Fáfnir's heart and so understood the voices of birds, as Sigurd understood them when he tasted the heart's blood.

The Goths behind the story

The sixth-century historian Jordanes tells that Hermanaric, king of the Goths, had a woman named Sunilda tied to wild horses and torn apart because her husband had betrayed him, and that her brothers Sarus and Ammius struck the king in the side, so that he lived on sick until he died. This is Jörmunrekkr of Hamðismál, Svanhildr trampled by the horses, and her brothers Hamðir and Sörli. Atli's death in his bed at a woman's hand has another witness, on the Atli page.

Symbolic Reading

The essay rereading the Norse myths reads the valkyries as women who choose, and says that in Scandinavian society a woman had the right to choose her husband. Guðrún, beside Brynhildr, is the other face of that image. Brynhildr chooses and is deceived only in her choice; no one asks Guðrún. In Guðrúnarkviða II she says her father "adorned her with gold and gave her to Sigurd", and she is married to Atli while saying no, so the only choice left to her is vengeance.

The poems make her a voice before they make her a deed: three lays are spoken by her, and Guðrúnarhvöt opens with her words and closes saying that "this tale of sorrow" has been told so that women's grief may be less. The story keeps a woman's work at a death, weeping for the slain, counting her griefs and urging vengeance, and makes it the whole of Guðrún's work.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The woman closest to Guðrún in Greek myth is Medea in the story of Jason. Jason broke the oath he had sworn to her, and she killed her two sons by him to punish him through them. Guðrún kills her two sons by Atli because he killed her brothers and broke his oaths to Gunnarr, oaths she reminds him of in Atlakviða. The difference is that Medea avenges herself on a husband who left her, while Guðrún avenges her brothers on a husband who killed them.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses Procne kills her son Itys, cooks him and serves him to his father Tereus, because Tereus raped her sister and cut out her tongue; the father calls for his son as he eats, and she tells him: the one you ask for is inside you. Guðrún tells Atli: you have chewed your sons' hearts with honey. In both stories a woman avenges her kin on her husband, feeds him their children, and then tells him.

Hamðir and Sörli kill their brother Erpr on the way, and then, as they cut off Jörmunrekkr's hands and feet, Hamðir says: the head would be off now, if Erpr lived. In the Shahnameh Rostam kills his son Sohrab in single combat and only then learns who he was. In both stories a man kills his kinsman with his own hand and learns too late that he needed him.

The message Guðrún sent her brothers was carved runes, altered by Atli's messenger and read by Kostbera, so it is a witness of the runes as writing that carries news, can be forged, and can be read.