Page:Poeticedda00belluoft.djvu/362

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

Poetic Edda

came to Valhall[1], then Othin bade him rule over everything with himself.

(VII)

Helgi said:

38.[2] "Thou shalt, Hunding,  of every hero
Wash the feet,  and kindle the fire,
Tie up dogs,  and tend the horses,
And feed the swine  ere to sleep thou goest."

(VIII)

One of Sigrun's maidens went one evening to Helgi's hill, and saw that Helgi rode to the hill with many men. The maiden said:

39.[3] "Is this a dream  that methinks I see,
Or the doom of the gods,  that dead men ride,

  1. ↑ Valhall, etc.: there is no indication as to where the annotator got this notion of Helgi's sharing Othin's rule. It is most unlikely that such an idea ever found place in any of the Helgi poems, or at least in the earlier ones; probably it was a late development of the tradition in a period when Othin was no longer taken seriously.
  2. ↑ This stanza apparently comes from an otherwise lost passage containing a contest of words between Helgi and Hunding; indeed the name of Hunding may have been substituted for another one beginning with "H," and the stanza originally have had no connection with Helgi at all. The annotator inserts it here through an obvious misunderstanding, taking it to be Helgi's application of the power conferred on him by Othin.
  3. ↑ Here begins the final section (stanzas 39-50), wherein Sigrun visits the dead Helgi in his burial hill. Doom of the gods: the phrase "ragna rök" has been rather unfortunately Anglicized into the work "ragnarok" (the Norse term is not a proper name),

[326]

This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.