Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

Teutonic Myth and Legend: Chapter XXVII. Helgi Hundingsbane

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This is a mythological retelling from Donald A. Mackenzie's 1912 survey of Germanic/Norse legend, drawn from the Eddic tradition — specifically the cycle of Helgi Hundingsbane from the *Poetic Edda*. The narrative follows Helgi, son of the great hero Sigmund, from his warrior youth through his killing of King Hunding, his love for the valkyrie-princess Sigrun (won by defeating her betrothed in battle), and his death by betrayal: her brother Dag, armed by Odin himself, spears Helgi from behind to avenge their slain kinsmen. The text's emotional center is the aftermath — Sigrun's grief literally wounds Helgi's corpse in Valhalla, drawing his ghost back to their reunion at his grave mound, where they spend one final night before he must ride back to the realm of the dead. Mackenzie frames the romance with unusual directness as a tragedy of fate ordained by the norns, in which Sigrun's love is inseparable from the bloodshed it caused. The piece closes by appending the Scottish ballad "Clerk Saunders," positioning it as a later folk survival of the same theme — a murdered lover's ghost returning to a grieving woman — arguing continuity between Norse myth and British balladry. Readers interested in Eddic source material, comparative mythology, or the Victorian/Edwardian popularization of Norse legend will find this a fluent but interpretively light retelling, richer in narrative atmosphere than scholarly apparatus.

Teutonic Myth and Legend: Chapter XXVII. Helgi Hundingsbane

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