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.