The _Old Lay of Gudrun_ (_Guðrúnarkviða in forna_), or the tale of Gudrun to Theodoric, an idyll like the story of Oddrun, goes quickly over the event of the killing of Sigurd, and the return of Grani, masterless. Unlike the _Lament of Oddrun_, this monologue of Gudrun introduces dramatic passages. The meeting of Gudrun and her brother is not merely told by Gudrun in indirect narration; the speeches of Hogni and Gudrun are reported directly, as they might have been in a poem of the form of _Atlakviða_, or the _Lay of Sigurd_, or any other in which the poet tells the story himself, without the introduction of an imaginary narrator. The main part of the poem is an account of the way in which Gudrun's mother, Grimhild, compelled her, by a potion of forgetfulness, to lose the thought of Sigurd and of all her woes, and consent to become the wife of Attila. This part is well prefaced by the quiet account of the life of Gudrun in her widowhood, before Grimhild began her schemes; how Gudrun lived in the house of Half, with Thora, daughter of Hakon, in Denmark, and how the ladies spent their time at the tapestry frame, working pictures of the heroes, the ships of Sigmund, the ranks of Hunnish warriors. In the manuscript there are found at the end of the _Old Lay of Gudrun_, as if they were part of it, some verses which have been separated from it by the editors (_C.P.B._, i. 347) as a "Fragment of an Atli Lay." They came from a poem of which the design, at any rate, was the same as that of the _Old Lay_, and Gudrun is the speaker. She tells how, after the death of Gunnar and Hogni, she was wakened by Atli, to listen to his evil dreams, foreboding his doom, and how she interpreted them in a way to comfort him and put him off his guard. In English poetry there are instances of stories introduced dramatically, long before the pilgrimage to Canterbury. In _Beowulf_ there are various episodes where a story is told by one of the persons engaged. Besides the poem of Hengest chanted in Heorot, there is Beowulf's own narrative of his adventures, after his return to his own people in the kingdom of the Gauts, and passages still nearer in form to the _Lament of Oddrun_ and the _Confession of Gudrun_ are the last speech of Beowulf before his death (2426-2537), and the long speech of Wiglaf (2900-3027) telling of the enmity of the Gauts and the Swedes. But those are not filled with dramatic pathos to the same degree as these Northern _Heroides_, the monologues of Oddrun and Gudrun.