Some grief weeps. Other grief waits\u2013and settles the score.<\/p>\n
Gudrun Gj\u00fakad\u00f3ttir knows both sides. First fate takes Sigurd, her first husband. Then she loses her brothers. Her second husband is named Atli\u2013the legendary figure behind Attila, king of the Huns. He lures Gunnar and H\u00f6gni into his hall. An ambush.<\/p>\n
They seize Gunnar at once. H\u00f6gni fights back. He kills eight men before they cut the heart from his chest. He dies laughing.<\/p>\n
What comes next has few equals. The Atlakvi\u00f0a, one of the old Eddic poems, tells it without mercy: Gudrun avenges her brothers. First she kills Atli’s own sons. Then she kills Atli himself. In the end she burns the entire hall down\u2013with everyone still inside it.<\/p>\n
At the feast beforehand, she tells her husband whose flesh he has just eaten. The later Atlam\u00e1l piles on one more cruelty: the skulls of her own sons serve as drinking vessels.<\/p>\n
Revenge costs something. Gudrun pays too. She walks into the sea, wanting to die. But she does not sink. The waves carry her to shore, to King J\u00f3nakr. A new life begins\u2013but the curse stays loyal to her. Later, J\u00f6rmunrekkr has her daughter Svanhild trampled by horses. Her last sons die under a hail of stones.<\/p>\n
Behind this poem lies real historical blood. Scholars consider the Atlakvi\u00f0a one of the oldest poems of the Edda\u2013perhaps composed around 900, not written down until around 1270. The core of the story reaches back further still: Attila himself dies in 453, on his wedding night with Ildico.<\/p>\n
Gudrun makes a poor role model. She is a warning. Whoever drives revenge to its end burns down their own hall in the end\u2013and everything still living inside it.<\/p>\n
This tale has been passed down mainly through the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. As with all orally transmitted myths, the material was only written down centuries after it originated, so later influences and differing versions cannot be ruled out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some grief weeps. Other grief waits\u2013and settles the score. Gudrun Gj\u00fakad\u00f3ttir knows both sides. First fate takes Sigurd, her first husband. Then she loses her brothers. Her second\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1857,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"hrafn_pipeline_status":"","hrafn_quelle":"","hrafn_flags_offen":0,"hrafn_kritik":"","hrafn_master_hash":"","hrafn_notion_id":"","hrafn_bibliothek":"","hrafn_fakten":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-heroic-sagas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1495,"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions\/1495"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrafn-wikinger.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}