Brynhildr

Brynhildr began in Odin's service and ended it with a career-limiting act of conscience: promised victory to one king, she gave it to the younger, better man instead. The Allfather stabbed her with a sleep-thorn and decreed marriage — her terms, wrung from him, were a wall of fire only the fearless could cross. On the mountain Hindarfjall, Sigurðr crossed it, cut the mail from her, and — in Sigrdrífumál — received from her a course in rune-lore and right conduct that reads like the valkyrie's syllabus. They swore to marry; the gold ring sealed it.

The machinery of the curse then ground: Sigurðr, dosed with forgetfulness, wooed her again in Gunnarr's borrowed shape, since Gunnarr's own courage failed at the flames. She married the man she believed had crossed the fire. When Guðrún, quarrelling over precedence at the river, flashed Andvaranaut and the truth with it, Brynhildr's world inverted: the only man who ever met her terms had been the trick played on her.

Her response is the saga's cold heart: she laughed once — a sound that frightened the court — then engineered Sigurðr's murder, and told her husband afterward exactly what he had destroyed. She distributed her gold, mounted Sigurðr's pyre, and gave the North its supreme image of ruinous love: the shield-maiden burning beside the man neither fate nor forgetting could quite unmarry from her. Wagner's Brünnhilde carried her into the opera house; the original needed no music.

The valkyrie who defied Odin

Brynhild's story begins above the battlefield. As one of Odin's valkyries — the choosers of the slain, who award victory and gather the dead for Valhalla — she carried out the god's verdicts until the day she overruled one. Odin had promised victory to the old king Hjálm-Gunnarr; Brynhild judged his young opponent Agnarr the better man and felled Hjálm-Gunnarr instead. In Sigrdrífumál, where she tells the story herself under the name Sigrdrífa ("victory-driver" — a title some scholars read as a separate figure the tradition merged with Brynhild), the offence and the sentence come in one breath: Odin stabbed her with the sleep-thorn, ended her career as a valkyrie, and decreed that she would marry.

Her counter-move defines her. If marriage was the punishment, she would set its price: she swore to wed only the man who knew no fear, and the sleeping-place Odin gave her — the mountain Hindarfjall, in a rampart of shields, behind a wall of fire — became her filter. It is one of the most striking bargains in Norse literature: a woman sentenced by a god negotiates the terms of her own sentence, and nearly wins.

Brynhild and Sigurd on Hindarfjall

Sigurd, fresh from killing Fáfnir, rode toward a light on the mountain and found what he took for an armoured man asleep. He cut the mail-coat from her with Gram — it fitted as if grown into her flesh — and Brynhild woke, asking who had the strength to break her sleep. What follows in Sigrdrífumál is not a love scene but a seminar: she brings him ale charged with charms and teaches him victory-runes, ale-runes, help-runes for childbirth, sea-runes, limb-runes, speech-runes, and a run of hard-won counsel about oaths, quarrels, drink, and the dead. It is the fullest surviving statement of what a valkyrie knows, delivered to the one pupil worthy of it.

They swore themselves to each other, and in the Völsunga saga's telling the pledge was sealed with the ring Andvaranaut — the cursed dwarf-gold from Fáfnir's hoard passing, with terrible economy, from the dragon-slayer to the woman whose ruin it would organize. The saga adds a later meeting at the hall of her brother-in-law Heimir, where Sigurd finds her weaving his own deeds into a tapestry and the vows are renewed. Brynhild, who has the valkyrie's foresight, tells him plainly it cannot end well: he is fated to marry Guðrún. She is right, and marries him anyway in every way that words can.

The deception: who really rode the fire?

At the Gjúkung court, Queen Grímhildr's potion of forgetfulness deleted Brynhild from Sigurd's mind, and he married Guðrún. Then the family came for Brynhild herself: a queen of her lineage was too valuable an alliance to leave on a mountain. Gunnarr rode to woo her — and his horse refused the flame-wall. He borrowed Grani; Grani, knowing his rider, would not move. So Grímhildr's magic swapped the shapes of Gunnarr and Sigurd, and Sigurd rode the fire a second time wearing another man's face. For three nights he lay beside Brynhild with the naked sword between them, and took Andvaranaut from her hand.

Brynhild kept her oath to the letter: the man who crossed the fire had claimed her, and she married him. That the letter and the truth had been split apart by witchcraft is the tragedy's engine. She had set one condition — fearlessness — precisely because it could not be faked. It was faked anyway, by the only man who genuinely possessed it, on behalf of a man who did not.

The truth broke at the river, where Brynhild and Guðrún quarrelled over whose husband had precedence. Guðrún produced the ring. Brynhild went pale, said little, and went home; the saga gives her days of terrifying stillness in bed before the storm. When it came, it was not grief but sentence: she told Gunnarr she had been betrayed by every oath around her, and that she would destroy his marriage, his alliance, and his honour unless Sigurd died.

Why did Brynhild have Sigurd killed?

The question has kept readers arguing for eight centuries, because the sources let both answers stand. The legal answer: her oath bound her to the man who rode the fire; the deception made her marriage a fraud and her oath a mockery, and in the honour-culture of the sagas the injury could only be paid for in the life of the man at its centre. The human answer, which the poems keep letting slip: she loved Sigurd, could not have him, and could not endure Guðrún having him. In the Short Lay of Sigurd she says it without armour — she has lived with one husband and loved another, and of all the griefs the worst is that Sigurd is not hers. Both answers are true at once, which is why the scene where she laughs — once, loudly, at Guðrún's wail over the body — is so frightening. It is the sound of a verdict being executed and a heart breaking, and the court cannot tell which.

She did not survive her own sentence, and never intended to. She told Gunnarr the full truth — that Sigurd had kept faith, that the sword had lain between them, that Gunnarr had killed the better man for a lie — distributed her gold to her household women, and ran herself through with a sword, asking to be burned on one pyre with Sigurd, the blade laid between them again as it had lain in the borrowed nights. In Helreið Brynhildar ("Brynhild's Ride to Hel"), one of the strangest poems in the Poetic Edda, her funeral wagon is stopped on the road to the underworld by a giantess who accuses her of ruining lives; Brynhild answers with her own account of the whole story and closes with the line the entire cycle has been building toward: she and Sigurd will live out the next life together, and the giantess can sink.

In the primary sources

Brynhild's dossier is rich and contradictory. In the Poetic Edda: Sigrdrífumál (the waking and the rune-wisdom), the fragmentary Brot af Sigurðarkviðu and the complete Sigurðarkviða in skamma (the murder and her death), Helreið Brynhildar (her posthumous self-defence), and Guðrúnarkviða I, where she appears at the funeral with "fire burning from her eyes." The Völsunga saga stitches these into one narrative and adds the prior betrothal at Heimir's hall. Snorri summarizes the cycle in Skáldskaparmál. The German tradition tells it differently: in the Nibelungenlied, Brünhild is a superhuman Icelandic queen defeated by trickery in athletic contests rather than a valkyrie behind fire, and she survives the poem — the pyre belongs to the Norse alone. Wagner's Brünnhilde, sleeping in fire on a mountain, is built mainly from the Norse version, which is why opera audiences already half-know Sigrdrífumál without having read it.

Brynhild and the gods

Brynhild is the cycle's clearest casualty of divine politics. Odin punished her not for failure but for judgement — for choosing the better man against his instruction — and everything that follows flows from the god's sentence: the sleep, the fire, the oath, the fraud. She belongs beside Sigmund and Sigurd as proof of how the Allfather uses his favourites; the difference is that the Völsung men die in battle and go to him, while Brynhild, dismissed from his service, rides to Hel on her own terms and answers to nobody on the way.