Sigrdrifa

What the woken valkyrie gives Sigurd is a syllabus. Victory runes are to be cut on the sword, on the hilt and the guard, naming Tyr twice. Ale runes are cut on the horn and on the back of the hand, marked with a nail, against another man's wife betraying a guest's trust. There are runes for helping a woman in childbirth, cut on the palm and clasped round the wrist; sea runes for the mast and rudder; limb runes for healing, cut on bark facing east; speech runes against being answered with hatred at an assembly; mind runes for outthinking anyone. The section is one of the fullest accounts in Old Norse of what runes were held to do, as opposed to what they spelled.

The poem then turns to counsel, eleven pieces of advice on conduct: on kin who have killed, on oaths, on lodging near a corpse, on trusting the son of a man you have killed.

And then the text stops. The Codex Regius, the manuscript that carries almost the whole of the Poetic Edda, has lost a gathering of eight leaves at exactly this point. The end of Sigrdrifumal and a substantial part of the Sigurd cycle are gone with it, and what is known of the missing material comes from the prose Volsunga saga, whose author was clearly working from a fuller version of these poems. The single largest gap in Old Norse poetic tradition opens in the middle of this speech.

The word sigrdrifa can be read as a compound meaning something like driver or bringer of victory, which is exactly the kind of descriptive term Old Norse poetry applies to valkyries generally. It can also be read as the personal name of one particular valkyrie. The manuscript does not decide it, and editors have gone both ways for two centuries. Nineteenth century editions often printed it as a name and titled the poem accordingly; a number of later editors treat it as an epithet and take the figure to be unnamed in the verse itself.

That matters because of who else is in the cycle. The Volsunga saga and Snorri's prose both identify the valkyrie whom Sigurd wakes with Brynhild, and the prose links inserted between the poems in the Codex Regius encourage the same reading. If sigrdrifa is an epithet, the identification is easy. If it is a name, the tradition holds two separate women whom Sigurd meets on a mountain, and the cycle has a duplication in it.

The cycle has other duplications, so neither answer is decisive. The verse material about Sigurd, Brynhild and the Gjukungs was assembled from poems of different dates and regions, and it contains episodes told twice with different names and motivations. Whether this is one of them is genuinely unsettled among editors.

The atlas therefore holds Sigrdrifa as her own entry while recording the identification as disputed, which reflects the state of the argument rather than settling it.