I have done and I may not undo, I have given and I take not again:
Art thou other than I, Allfather, wilt thou gather my glory in vain?’”
Sigurd’s infant son was also slain, and poor Gudrun mourned over her dead in speechless, tearless grief; while Brunhild laughed aloud, thereby incurring the wrath of Gunnar, who repented now, but too late, of his share in the dastardly crime.
While the assembled people were erecting a mighty funeral pyre—which they decorated with precious hangings, fresh flowers, and glittering arms, as was the custom for the burial of a prince—Gudrun was surrounded by women, who, seeing her tearless anguish, and fearing lest her heart would break if her tears did not flow, began to recount the bitterest sorrows they had known, one even telling of the loss of all she held dear. But their attempts to make her weep were utterly vain, until they laid her husband’s head in her lap, bidding her kiss him as if he were still alive; then her tears began to flow in torrents.
The reaction soon set in for Brunhild also; her resentment was all forgotten when she saw Sigurd laid on the pyre in all his martial array, with the burnished armor, the Helmet of Dread, and the trappings of his horse, which was to be burned with him, as well as several of his faithful servants who could not survive his loss. She withdrew to her apartment, distributed all her wealth among her handmaidens, donned her richest array, and stretching herself out upon her bed stabbed herself.
In dying accents she then bade Gunnar lay her beside the hero she loved, with the glittering, unsheathed sword between them, as it had lain when he had wooed her by proxy. When she had breathed her last, these orders were punctually executed, and both bodies were burned amid the lamentations of all the Niblungs.
“They are gone—the lovely, the mighty, the hope of the ancient Earth:
It shall labor and bear the burden as before that day of their birth:
It shall groan in its blind abiding for the day that Sigurd hath sped,
And the hour that Brynhild hath hastened, and the dawn that waketh the dead: