In the _Atlamál_ there is very much less recognition of the previous history than in _Atlakviða_. The story begins at once with the invitation to the Niblung brothers and with their sister's warning. Attila's motive is not emphasised; he has a grudge against them on account of the death of Brynhild his sister, but his motive is not very necessary for the story, as the story is managed here. The present scene and the present passion are not complicated with too much reference to the former history of the personages. This mode of procedure will be found to have given some trouble to the author, but the result at any rate is a complete and rounded work. There is great difference of treatment between _Atlakviða_ and the Greenland poem _Atlamál_, a difference which is worth some further consideration.[29] There is, however, no very great difference of scale; at any rate, the difference between them becomes unimportant when they are compared with _Beowulf_. Even the more prolix of the two, which in some respects is the fullest and most elaborate of the Northern heroic poems, yet comes short of the English scale. _Atlamál_ takes up very little more than the space of the English poem of _Maldon_, which is a simple narrative of a battle, with nothing like the tragic complexity and variety of the story of the vengeance of Gudrun. [Footnote 29: See pp. 150-156 below.] There is yet another version of the death of Gunnar the Giuking to compare with the two poems of _Attila_--the _Lament of Oddrun_ (_Oddrúnargrátr_), which precedes the _Atlakviða_ in the manuscript. The form of this, as well as the plot of it, is wonderfully different from either of the other two poems. This is one of the epic or tragic idylls in which a passage of heroic legend is told dramatically by one who had a share in it. Here the death of Gunnar is told by Oddrun his mistress, the sister of Attila. This form of indirect narration, by giving so great a dramatic value to the person of the narrator, before the beginning of her story, of course tends to depreciate or to exclude the vivid dramatic scenes that are common everywhere else in the Northern poems. The character of the speaker leaves too little independence to the other characters. But in none of the poems is the tragic plot more strongly drawn out than in the seventy lines of Oddrun's story to Borgny.