Gudrun's Grief and the Fall of the Niflungs

This journey takes up where the Sigurd lays and the bright meeting on the mountain leave off — on the far side of catastrophe. Sigurd has been murdered (the betrayal the prose Völsunga saga tells in full), and the cycle's second half opens on his widow Guðrún sitting by his body in a grief so total she cannot even weep.^[1] The women around her tell their own sorrows to loosen her tears, but she sits stone-still until at last the dam breaks.

Guðrúnarkviða — the Lay of Guðrún — is one of the great elegies of early European poetry, a study of stunned mourning that feels startlingly modern. And it marks the tonal turn of the whole legend: the first half is heroic adventure — dragon, gold, valkyrie — but from Sigurd's death onward the Völsung story becomes pure tragedy, a chronicle of grief, betrayal and revenge spiralling outward from one murder. Guðrún will be at the centre of all of it, no longer the bride of romance but the survivor on whom every loss falls.

Time passes; Guðrún is married — against the grain of her grief — to Atli, king of the Huns. He is the legend's memory of the historical Attila, whose name thundered through fifth-century Europe and lodged in Germanic poetry for a thousand years; here he is recast as the treacherous king at the centre of the Niflungs' doom. And Atli covets one thing above all: the cursed Niflung gold, the same hoard of Andvari and Fáfnir, now held by Guðrún's brothers.

So Atli sends a messenger to invite Gunnar and Högni to his hall with every show of friendship.^[1] But Guðrún, suspecting the trap, sends her brothers a warning — a ring wound about with a wolf's hair.^[2] Högni reads the danger in it. And here the legend turns on the iron logic of the heroic code: the brothers see the trap clearly, and they go anyway, because to refuse a summons for fear would be shameful. They ride to Atli's hall knowing it may be their death — the same fey, open-eyed walk toward doom that runs through every layer of this atlas, from the gods at Ragnarök to Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi turning back at the shore.

At Atli's hall the welcome turns to ambush, and the Niflung brothers fight a doomed last battle. Högni is terrible in it — the lay says he slew seven with his keen sword and flung an eighth into the fire^[1] — but the brothers are overwhelmed and taken. Then comes one of the most famous and most savage scenes in all Norse poetry, the test of the hearts.

Atli's men, seeking the secret of the gold, decide to cut out a man's heart. First they kill a coward, Hjalli, and bring his heart — but it trembles on the platter, and Gunnar scorns it as no hero's heart.^[2] Then they cut out Högni's living heart — and Högni laughs as they do it, and his heart lies still on the platter, unmoving even in death.^[3] It is the supreme image of the Norse heroic ideal: a man so utterly master of himself that he can laugh while his living heart is carved from his chest, his courage absolute and untouched by the body's terror. Whatever else one makes of this grim world, it produced in Högni's laugh one of literature's purest emblems of defiance.

Now only Gunnar is left alive, and he alone knows where the Niflung hoard is hidden — and with Högni dead, he declares the secret will die with him; he will never tell.^[1] Rather than yield the cursed gold to Atli, Gunnar chooses death and silence, denying his murderer the very thing he killed for. The gold sinks into legend, lost forever in the Rhine.

For his defiance Atli has Gunnar cast bound into a serpent-pit to die.^[2] There — in a detail the whole North loved — Gunnar plays a harp with his toes, his hands being bound, soothing the snakes for a time before one stings him to death. The image rhymes deliberately with another in this atlas: Ragnar Lodbrok, generations later in legend, also dies defiant in a snake-pit, singing. The serpent-pit is the heroic death of the cornered king — stripped of everything but courage and a last gesture of art and scorn. Gunnar, who long ago helped betray Sigurd, ends as he could not have begun: unbreakable, taking the secret of the doom-gold into the dark with him.

Atli has his murders but not his gold — and now he must answer to Guðrún, whose brothers he has killed. Her vengeance is the most appalling in all Norse legend, and the lay tells it without flinching. She kills the two young sons she has borne to Atli, and at the victory-feast she serves their father their own children's hearts and blood to eat and drink — then tells him what he has consumed.^[1]

Then she finishes it: she stabs Atli in his bed, gives his blood to the bedclothes, and sets fire to the hall, burning Atli and all his household within.^[2] It is horror piled on horror, and the lay does not soften it or moralise — it simply lets the cursed gold's logic run to its end. This is where the heroic ethos of vengeance, pursued absolutely, arrives: a woman destroying her own children to wound her husband, a hall of the dead, a family annihilated root and branch. Guðrún has answered the murder of her brothers in the only currency the feud knows, and the cost is everything. The cursed gold of Andvari has taken its final, total harvest.

With Atli's hall in ashes the Völsung cycle reaches its bitter end — and the legend opens, at its very close, onto real history. Atli is Attila: behind this tale of a treacherous Hunnish king and the Burgundian brothers he destroys lies the genuine fifth-century catastrophe of the Burgundian kingdom on the Rhine, crushed in 437, and the death of Attila in 453. The poetry has transmuted those distant events — Huns, Burgundians, a lost kingdom, a fearsome king — into the myth of the cursed gold and the fall of the Niflungs, the same story that, further south, became the German Nibelungenlied.

So these lays are a second great hinge of the atlas — not myth into legend, as the Sigurd lays were, but legend into history. The cursed gold that began in the gods' hands in Völuspá's world runs all the way down: from Odin and Loki, to the dragon Fáfnir, to Sigurd's doom, to the murder of the Niflungs and Guðrún's revenge — and out the far side into the real wreck of nations on the fifth-century Rhine. To read the Atli lays is to watch the Norse imagination touch recorded history at last, and to see the whole vertical of this corpus complete: gods, heroes, and at the bottom the hard ground of things that actually happened, all strung on one unbroken thread of fate and gold.