Sigrún

Sigrún is the valkyrie at the heart of the Helgi lays — and the lover whose grief reaches across death itself. She loves the hero Helgi Hundingsbane and chooses him against her father's will, rejecting the man she was betrothed to; Helgi kills her kin to win her, and the feud that follows eventually kills him. But the lay does not end at his grave. Sigrún's mourning is so fierce that Helgi rides back from the burial mound, his hair white with the rime of death, and she runs to him and lies down in the howe to spend one last night in his arms before he must ride back to the dead at cockcrow. It is among the most haunting images in all Norse poetry — the living woman holding her dead lover in the grave. Sigrún herself does not long survive him: she dies of grief, to be (the poem hints) reborn and reunited with him again. Love that will not let go even at the door of death.