Guðrúnarkviða I

Henry Adams Bellows considered it to be one of the finest of the eddic poems with an "extraordinary emotional intensity and dramatic force".

Alfred Tennyson's poem Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead was inspired by Benjamin Thorpe's translation of the lay.

Bellows notes that this information serves no purpose in the poem, but that the Völsunga saga also mentions that she had eaten some of Fafnir's heart, after which she was both wiser and grimmer.

Sátu ítrar jarla brúðir, gulli búnar, fyr Guðrúnu; hvar sagði þeira sinn oftrega, þann er bitrastan of beðit hafði.

To her the warriors wise there came, Longing her heavy woe to lighten; Grieving could not Guthrun weep, So sad her heart, it seemed, would break.

"So was my Sigurth o'er Gjuki's sons As the spear-leek grown above the grass, Or the jewel bright borne on the band, The precious stone that princes wear.

Gullrönd retorted that Brynhildr was a hated woman who had brought sorrow to seven kings and made many women lose their love.

By the pillars she stood, and gathered her strength, From the eyes of Brynhild, Buthli's daughter, Fire there burned, and venom she breathed, When the wounds she saw on Sigurth then.

[3] The lay ends with a prose section which tells that Guðrún went into the wilderness and traveled to Denmark where she stayed for three years and a half with Thora, the daughter of Hakon.

[10] Referring to Sigurðarkviða hin skamma, the prose section ends by telling that Brynhildr would soon take her own life with a sword after having killed eight of her thralls and five of her maids in order to take them with her.