ABSTRACT
The story, however, at the start of The Lay of Hamðir is that Svanhildr, Guðrún’s daughter by Sigurðr, has been executed by the Gothic emperor Jlrmunrekkr, to whom Guðrún’s family unwisely married her off, on an unfounded suspicion of adultery with Randvér, Jlrmunrekkr’s son by an earlier marriage. Somewhat ruefully, Hamðir and Slrli ride to the land of the Goths to carry out their mother’s vengeance, meeting Erpr on the way, who is their half-brother Jónakr’s son by his previous marriage. Erpr offers his help but they cut him down instead, when he accuses them of cowardice, for having failed to understand the wording of his offer, to help them sem fótr Lðrum ‘as one foot to another’ (stanza 13). Later (when Jlrmunrekkr’s head, the limb they leave last in their slow-paced removal of his legs and arms, divines their weakness and orders their destruction by stoning to death) the brothers come to regret not bringing Erpr, who would have started with the head. Savagely enough, the poem as it stands appears to mythologise ‘family’ as one entity with its members functioning as limbs. This is hardly a theme to be found in The Wife’s Lament. Nonetheless, the position of the Wife there under actreowe ‘under an oak tree’, on line 28, does open up all kinds of possible meanings, such as the notion that the Wife, in her exiled state, is now comparable with the oak as a solitary but powerful tree, much as Guðrún comes to be with the massive aspen, or poplar, left standing high above the scrubland in a holt ‘copse’.
