Guðrún

Guðrún got Sigurðr by her mother's potion and lost him to her brothers' knives, waking beside her murdered husband in blood. The poems give her grief its own genre: in Guðrúnarkviða she sits tearless and dangerous over the body until a wise woman bares the corpse's face — 'one tear fell,' and the court exhales, because a woman who cannot weep will do something else instead.

Something else arrived on schedule. Married against her will to Atli (legend's Attila the Hun), she watched him lure her brothers — Gunnarr and Högni — to his court for the Rhine-gold and kill them: Högni's heart cut out, Gunnarr in the snake-pit. Norse widowhood has protocols, and Guðrún observed none of them: she killed the two sons she had borne Atli, served their hearts to their father at the funeral feast, told him so at table, then knifed him in bed and burned the hall over the household. The poets do not flinch, and neither does she: 'brightly shone the fire.'

She tried to drown herself and failed — the sea carried her to a third marriage and further ruin, her daughter Svanhildr trampled by horses, her last sons dispatched to a doomed vengeance. Guðrún is what the cursed gold does to the person it doesn't kill: the cycle's designated survivor, outliving everyone she loved and everything she did about it.

The daughter of the Gjúkungs

Gudrun was born into the family that would destroy everything it touched: daughter of King Gjúki and Queen Grímhildr, sister to Gunnarr, Högni, and Guttormr. Her mother's sorcery is the household's defining tool — it was Grímhildr's ale of forgetfulness that stripped Sigurd of his memory of Brynhild and steered him into Gudrun's marriage, and Grímhildr again who later forced Gudrun, drugged and grieving, into the marriage with Atli. The Völsunga saga never pretends Gudrun chose either husband freely; her tragedy begins as other people's policy.

For a while, the policy looked like happiness. Gudrun's marriage to Sigurd made her the wife of the greatest man alive, mother of his children, and owner — fatally — of the ring Andvaranaut, which Sigurd took from Brynhild and gave to her. It was Gudrun who ended the queens' quarrel at the river by producing that ring, proving to Brynhild that the man who rode the fire had been Sigurd in disguise. She could not have known she was signing her husband's death-warrant, but the saga's cold geometry runs through her hand: the curse of the dwarf's gold moves ring by ring, and Gudrun passed it its cue.

Grief without tears

She woke soaked in her husband's blood — her brothers had sent Guttormr to stab Sigurd in their bed — and what the poets did with her mourning became one of the glories of Old Norse literature. Guðrúnarkviða I, among the most admired poems in the Poetic Edda, shows her seated by the body, unable to weep, while noblewomen take turns reciting their own worst sorrows to break her open. Nothing works until the wise Gullrönd pulls the shroud from Sigurd's face and tells Gudrun to kiss him as if he were alive. Then the tear falls, the grief pours through, and the poem lets us hear the court's relief — because, as the imagery makes clear, a grief that cannot find water will find fire. Brynhild stands at the scene's edge, "fire burning from her eyes," the poem's other unweeping woman; she chose the pyre. Gudrun's path was longer.

Gudrun and Atli: the terrible feast

Grímhildr's remedy for her daughter's grief was another ale of forgetting and another dynastic marriage: to Atli, king of the Huns — legend's refraction of the historical Attila. The match imported history's most feared name into the cycle, and the old poem Atlakviða tells what came of it with brutal economy. Atli lured Gunnarr and Högni to his court, wanting the Rhine-gold — Sigurd's hoard, now his wife's family's secret. Gudrun sent warning (a ring twisted with wolf's hair; in the later poem Atlamál, a runic message her brothers' wives helped garble), but the Gjúkungs came anyway, and Atli took them: Högni's heart was cut living from his chest, and Gunnarr, who alone now knew where the gold lay, laughed at the heart and kept the secret into the snake-pit.

What Gudrun did next made her a figure the North never forgot and never quite dared judge. She killed Erpr and Eitill, her own young sons by Atli; had their skulls made into cups and served their father their blood mixed in his wine and their hearts as feast-meat; told him, at table, exactly what he had eaten; and that night, with Högni's son by some accounts beside her, stabbed Atli in his bed, fired the hall, and burned the Hunnish court to the ground. Atlakviða gives her the exit line without comment: the fire shone brightly. The poem calls no one a monster. It presents a woman from whom everything had been taken twice, completing the arithmetic her age understood: her brothers, whatever they had done to Sigurd, were her blood, and Atli had killed them for gold.

The third life: Svanhild and the sea

Gudrun walked into the sea with stones in her arms, and the sea refused her. The waves carried her to the land of King Jónakr — a third marriage, three more sons — and to the cycle's last movement, told in Guðrúnarhvöt and Hamðismál. Svanhildr, her daughter by Sigurd, in whose eyes the poems say something of her father's brightness lived, was married to the aged Gothic king Jörmunrekkr (the historical Ermanaric), slandered, and trampled to death under horses. Gudrun did what she had always done with unbearable news: she weaponised it, goading her sons Hamðir and Sörli to a vengeance she and they both knew was doomed. They died killing, mutilating the king but falling under stones — and Gudrun was left alone at the end of the cycle, reciting her whole catastrophic life in Guðrúnarhvöt, asking finally for a pyre of her own. She is the person to whom the whole story happened: the North's definitive survivor, and its proof that surviving is the curse's longest sentence.

In the primary sources

No figure in the heroic corpus gets more poems. The Poetic Edda devotes Guðrúnarkviða I, II, and III to her griefs, Atlakviða and the longer Atlamál to the Hunnish revenge, and Guðrúnarhvöt and Hamðismál to the Svanhild episode; the Völsunga saga binds it all into prose. Snorri summarizes the sequence in Skáldskaparmál in the Prose Edda. The German tradition split her in two directions: in the Nibelungenlied she is Kriemhild, and the revenge is inverted — Kriemhild destroys her brothers to avenge her husband Siegfried, where Gudrun destroys her husband to avenge her brothers. The contrast is the clearest window we have onto how differently the two cultures weighed marriage against blood.