Yggdrasil · Gods and Their Allies

Sigrdrífa: Awakening into Knowledge

A sleeping valkyrie woken by Sigurðr, who answers with greetings, rune-lore and counsels.

Myth and literature · Quotation

In Thorpe’s translation

“She was named Sigrdrifa, and was a Valkyria. She said that two kings had made war on each other, one of whom was named Hialmgunnar; he was old and a great warrior, and Odin had promised him victory. The other was Agnar, a brother of Hoda, whom no divinity would patronize. Sigrdrifa overcame Hialmgunnar in battle; in revenge for which Odin pricked her with a sleep-thorn, and declared that henceforth she should never have victory in battle, and should be given in marriage. ‘But I said to him, that I had bound myself by a vow not to espouse any man who could be made to fear.’”

2. Long have I slept, long been with sleep oppressed, long are mortals’ sufferings! Odin is the cause that I have been unable to cast off torpor.

  • Benjamin Thorpe (translator), The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson (the Poetic Edda) (opens in a new tab) (19th c.; Norroena ed. 1906), The Lay of Sigrdrifa, prose after stanza 4 and stanza 2 (Thorpe’s numbering; other editions differ) Rights: Public domain. Nineteenth-century translation, in the public domain. Text as published online by Project Gutenberg (ebook #14726).
Myth and literature

What the sources say

In Thorpe’s version, Sigurðr rides up Hindarfjall and sees a great light in the fell. Inside a shield-wall he finds an armed warrior asleep. He lifts the helmet, sees that it is a woman, and with his sword Gram cuts the corselet from her, top to sleeves. She wakes, asks who has cut it and says that Odin is the reason she could not shake off her sleep. She greets Day, Night, the Æsir and the earth, and gives Sigurðr a cup of mead.

The prose then says that she is Sigrdrífa, a valkyrie, who had been punished by Odin for giving victory to the wrong king, and that she had vowed to marry no man who could be made to fear. She teaches Sigurðr runes for victory, for ale, for childbirth, for the sea, for healing and for speech, and then counsels him on kin, oaths, quarrels, the dead and enemies’ kin. The runes and their effects are claims made inside the poem, not instructions from the sources.

Myth and literature · Context

Names and background

Thorpe prints the poem as its own lay under the name Sigrdrífa, and follows it with fragments headed with Sigurðr and Brynhildr. Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál, in Anderson’s translation, tells of a woman in helmet and mail whom Sigurðr wakes by cutting off her mail; she first calls herself Hild and her name is then given as Brynhildr, a valkyrie. So one source gives her the name Sigrdrífa and the other Brynhildr, and how the two names relate is not settled by these two texts; editors and readers differ on whether they are one figure.

In Thorpe’s stanzas the word sigr, victory, is played on in the sig-runes. Her story of Odin’s sleep-thorn explains why she lies as she does.

Historical evidence

Where the sources attest it

The scene is told in the poem called here the Lay of Sigrdrifa (Sigrdrífumál), in Thorpe’s edition, with stanza numbers that differ in other editions, and in Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál, where the woman is named Brynhildr. Thorpe’s prose frame, which says Sigrdrífa was a valkyrie punished by Odin and bound by a vow, is part of the same printed lay and not a separate source. No archaeological or pictorial evidence for the sleeping valkyrie is cited here.