Sigrun's Second Night: The Mound Scene of Helgakvida Hundingsbana II

Sigrun is already recorded as dying of grief after Helgi's death and that the poem's closing stanzas hold the two were reborn as another hero and valkyrie pair. Between those two facts sits a scene the existing account does not cover: Helgakvida Hundingsbana II's own ending, in which Helgi returns from the dead to see Sigrun one final time. A servant woman tells Sigrun she has seen Helgi ride with a great retinue into his own burial mound, and Sigrun goes to the mound to find him there, his hair thick with frost, his body marked with blood, his hands wet, which he explains as every tear she has shed for him falling cold and wet onto his corpse. Sigrun does not turn away from what she finds. She prepares a bed inside the mound itself and the two spend the night together as though he had never died, but before daybreak Helgi must return to Valhalla, and the poem is explicit that the visit cannot be repeated: Sigrun goes back to the mound once more hoping to see him again and does not. She lives out the rest of her life waiting for a return the poem never grants her, which gives the reincarnation already recorded its full weight: it is not a consolation offered instead of reunion, but the only reunion the story allows her, arriving only after an entire lifetime spent waiting for the one that could not be repeated.