The Helgi Lays — Heroes, Valkyries, and the Grave

The Helgi lays stand a little apart in the Edda — three poems about a warrior-hero, Helgi, and the valkyries who love him, full of battle-fury and storm-imagery and an oddly tender strangeness. The first, the Lay of Helgi Hjörvarthsson, opens with the hero winning the love of a valkyrie, Sváva, who shields him in his battles.^[1]

These poems give us the heroic ideal in its purest, least historical form: the young war-leader who lives fast and bright, wins a supernatural bride, and dies early. And they carry one of the Edda's strangest beliefs — that Helgi is reborn: the hero of the first lay dies, and is born again as Helgi Hundingsbane in the lays that follow, and his valkyrie with him. It is a vision of love and heroism so strong that not even death can end them; the same souls return to find each other across lifetimes. For an atlas of the Norse world, the Helgi lays are where the warrior-hero and the valkyrie — the chooser of the slain — meet at their most luminous and most doomed.

The two greatest poems of the cycle tell of Helgi Hundingsbane — Helgi the slayer of Hunding. They open in grand mythic style — 'in olden days, when eagles screamed, and holy streams fell from heaven's crags' — as the Norns come at the hero's birth to weave his fate and stretch the threads of his glory across the lands.^[1] From the first he is marked for greatness and for an early end.

Helgi grows into a mighty war-leader, slays the warrior Hunding and his sons, and wins his name and his wars. The lays are thick with the language of battle — fleets gathering, banners, the clash of hosts, the valkyries riding the storm-clouds above the slaughter. This is the heroic poetry the Viking Age loved: the leader who gathers a following, fights great battles, and earns undying fame. But woven through it, from those Norns at his cradle, is the certainty that such a life is brief — that the blaze of glory and the early grave are the same bargain, the one the whole Norse heroic world accepts with open eyes.

At the heart of the Hundingsbane lays is Sigrún, a valkyrie — a 'chooser of the slain' — who loves Helgi and chooses him as her own, against the marriage her father has arranged for her with another man, Hothbrodd. She rides the storm-clouds above Helgi's sea-battles, shielding his ships, and openly declares her love and her defiance of her family's will.

To win her, Helgi must fight: he slays Hothbrodd and, terribly, most of Sigrún's own kin — her father and brothers among them — in the battle that frees her to be his.^[1] Sigrún chooses Helgi even over her own blood, and the lay does not pretend the cost is small: she has her love, but it is built on the corpses of her family, and one kinsman survives to carry the feud forward. It is a very Norse knot — love and honour and kin-loyalty pulling against each other, no choice clean, the valkyrie's fierce will cutting through it all. For a moment Helgi and Sigrún have their victory and their love. It will not last long.

The feud Sigrún's choice opened comes back to claim Helgi. The one kinsman of hers who survived the battle — her brother Dag — is bound by the duty of vengeance for their slain father and brothers. Though Helgi is now his sister's husband and his own sworn brother-in-arms, the blood-debt cannot simply be forgiven in this world. Dag borrows Odin's spear, finds Helgi, and kills him.^[1]

So Helgi dies as the heroes of this world so often do — not of his enemies but of the feud, the chain of obligated vengeance that the love-match had set in motion. Sigrún, learning that her own brother has slain her husband, curses Dag with terrible words. The bright brief life is over, exactly as the Norns at the cradle had decreed. But the Helgi lays are not finished, because they have one more scene — the strangest and most beautiful of all — to give, on the far side of the grave itself.

Helgi is laid in his burial-mound — but he does not stay quiet. One night he rides back from Valhöll to the howe, his wounds still bleeding, his hair thick with the frost of death. Sigrún's maid sees him and tells her mistress that the dead hero waits at the mound, that the wounds bleed and he bids Sigrún come and stanch them.^[1]

And Sigrún goes. She climbs into the grave-mound to her dead husband, and there she makes a bed and lies the whole night in the arms of the dead Helgi, who tells her she is the cause that he is 'drenched in grief's dew' — that her weeping falls on him bloody each night before he sleeps.^[2] They drink a last draught together though love and lands are lost.^[3] At cockcrow Helgi must ride the reddening road back to the dead, and Sigrún is left in the empty mound. It is one of the most extraordinary scenes in early European literature — a love that reaches across death itself, the living woman lying in her dead lover's arms in his grave, tender and terrible at once. Soon after, Sigrún dies of grief, and the lay says that they were born again — Helgi and his valkyrie returning, once more, to find each other.

The Helgi lays give the atlas something none of the other poems quite do: a sustained, tender vision of the Norse dead, and of love and heroism strong enough to cross between the worlds. Twice over they tell of the hero reborn and the valkyrie returning to him; and at the centre stands that unforgettable grave-scene, the living woman in the howe with her dead husband, his wounds bleeding for her tears.

It connects to the whole shape of this corpus. The ghost in the mound — the dead who walk, who must be answered, who reach back into the living world — runs all through the family sagas (the draugar of Eyrbyggja, Glám in Grettir's saga), but there it is mostly fearsome. Here, in the oldest poetry, the same belief is turned to love instead of horror: the dead Helgi rides back not to terrorise but to be wept over and held one last time. And behind it lies the deepest Norse conviction of all — that fate is not even ended by death, that the same souls and the same loves recur, that the heroic life is a thing too bright for a single span. The Helgi lays are where the Norse imagination looks straight into the grave and finds, against all expectation, not only doom but tenderness, and a love that asks to be born again.