Helgi

Helgi is the great warrior-hero of the Helgi lays in the Poetic Edda — slayer of Hunding and Hothbrodd, beloved of the valkyrie Sigrún, and the centre of one of the most haunting love stories in the corpus. Born to a glorious doom, he wins his battles and his valkyrie-bride, then falls in the feud his victories kindle. But the lay does not end at his death: Sigrún's grief is so great that Helgi rides back from the burial mound, his hair white with the frost of the grave, to spend one last night in her arms before he must return to the dead before cockcrow. The image of the dead hero riding home to his grieving love, and the living woman lying down in the howe to hold him one last time, is among the most beautiful and strange in all Norse poetry — love reaching across the very threshold of death.