Editing Gudrun (section)

====''Guðrúnarkviða II''====
In ''[[Guðrúnarkviða II]]'', Gudrun is at Atli's court. She laments of her fate to Thiodrek (Þjódrekr, i.e. [[Dietrich von Bern]] and tells the story of her tribulations leading to her marriage to Atli. She recounts how Sigurd was killed and how she then wandered to Denmark, where she stayed with King Half for three and a half years. Then her family came for her, and her mother Grimhild gave her a potion to forget her sorrow. Then she was forced to marry Atli. One night, Atli awoke and told Gudrun that he had had a dream that she would kill him and cause him to eat his sons.{{sfn|Millet|2008|p=298}} Gudrun interprets the dream in a way that makes it seem harmless.{{sfn|Sprenger|1999|p=151}}

The poem is probably one of the most recent in the ''Poetic Edda''.{{sfn|Sprenger|1999|p=152}} Its account of Sigurd's death generally follow the account in ''Brot af Sigurðarkviðu'', but ignores Brunhild and includes the detail that Gudrun went into the woods to mourn over Sigurd's body.{{sfn|McKinnell|2014|pp=257-258}} The inclusion of the figure of Thiodrek points to continental influence on the poem.{{sfn|Millet|2008|p=305}} The last stanza is incomplete, and scholars debate whether the poem originally also included Gudrun's killing of Atli and his sons.{{sfn|Sprenger|1999|p=151}}

Victor Millet notes that the detail of the potion of forgetting helps explain why Gudrun does not seek to avenge Sigurd; he connects this to a possible attempt to discount the continental version of the story, which the poet appears to have known.{{sfn|Millet|2008|p=305}} The use of the name Grimhild for her mother, the cognate name for Kriemhild, and that character's manifest wickedness may also derive from the continental tradition.{{sfn|Millet|2008|p=306}}