The _Lay of Gudrun_ (_Gudrúnarkviða_) which comes in the manuscript immediately before the _Lay of Sigurd_, is a pure heroic idyll. Unlike most of its companions, it leaves the details of the Volsung story very much in neglect, and brings all its force to bear on the representation of the grief of the queen, contrasted with the stormy passion of Brynhild. It is rightly honoured for its pathetic imagination of the dumb grief of Gudrun, broken up and dissolved when her sister draws away the covering from the face of Sigurd. "But fire was kindled in the eyes of Brynhild, daughter of Budli, when she looked upon his wounds." The refrain of the poem increases its resemblance to the form of a Greek idyll. The verse is that of narrative poetry; the refrain is not purely lyrical and does not come in at regular intervals. The _Tregrof Guðrúnar_, or _Chain of Woe_, restored by the Oxford editors out of the most confused part of the original text, is pure lamentation, spoken by Gudrun before her death, recounting all her sorrows: the bright hair of Swanhild trampled in the mire; Sigurd slain in his bed, despoiled of victory; Gunnar in the court of the serpents; the heart of Hogni cut out of his living body--"Saddle thy white steed and come to me, Sigurd; remember what we promised to one another, that thou wouldst come from Hell to seek me, and I would come to thee from the living world." The short poem entitled _Qviða Guðrúnar_ in the manuscript, the _Ordeal of Gudrun_ in the English edition, has a simple plot. The subject is the calumny which was brought against Gudrun by Herkja, the cast-off mistress of Attila (that "she had seen Gudrun and Theodoric together") and the ordeal of water by which Gudrun proved her innocence, while the falsehood was brought home to Herkja, the bondwoman. The theme is slighter than all the rest, and this poem, at least, might be reckoned not unfit to be taken up as a single scene in a long epic. Some of the Northern poems in the epic measure are almost wholly made up of dialogue. The story of _Balder's Doom_ is a dialogue between Odin and the witch whom he raises from the dead. The earlier part of the story of Sigurd in the "Elder Edda" is almost all dialogue, even where the narrative measure is employed.