![]() ![]() ![]() Even if the collection of stanzas were in any real sense a poem, which it emphatically is not, it is certainly not the “Ballad of Sigrdrifa” which it is commonly called. The mistake made by the annotator in thinking that the epithet “sigrdrifa,” rightly applied to Brynhild as a “bringer of victory,” was a proper name has already been explained and commented on (note on Fafnismol, 44). Even its customary title is an absurd error. Properly speaking, however, the strange conglomeration of stanzas which the compiler of the collection has left for us, and which, in much the same general form, seems to have lain before the authors of the Volsungasaga, in which eighteen of its stanzas are quoted, is not a poem at all. That stanza has been completed, and eight more have been added, from much later paper manuscripts, but even so the conclusion of the poem is in obscurity. ![]() ![]() The end of it has been entirely lost, for the fifth folio of eight sheets is missing from Regius, the gap coming after the first line of stanza 29 of this poem. The so-called Sigrdrifumol, which immediately follows the Fafnismol in the Codex Regius without any indication of a break, and without separate title, is unquestionably the most chaotic of all the poems in the Eddic collection. The Ballad of The Victory-Bringer Introductory Note ![]()
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