maidens, she donned her richest array,
and stabbed herself as she lay stretched upon her bed.

The tidings soon reached Gunnar, who came with all haste to his wife
and just in time to receive her dying injunction to lay her beside the
hero she loved, with the glittering, unsheathed sword between them,
as it had lain when he had wooed her by proxy. When she had breathed
her last, these wishes were faithfully executed, and her body was
burned with Sigurd's amid the lamentations of all the Niblungs.

In Richard Wagner's story of "The Ring" Brunhild's end is more
picturesque. Mounted on her steed, as when she led the battle-maidens
at the command of Odin, she rode into the flames which leaped to heaven
from the great funeral pyre, and passed for ever from the sight of men.

"They are gone--the lovely, the mighty, the hope of the ancient
Earth:
It shall labour and bear the burden as before that day of their
birth:
It shall groan in its blind abiding for the day that Sigurd
hath sped,
And the hour that Brynhild hath hastened, and the dawn that waketh
the dead:
It shall yearn, and be oft-times holpen, and forget their deeds
no more,
Till the new sun beams on Baldur and the happy sea-less shore."

The death scene of Sigurd (Siegfried) is far more powerful in the
Nibelungenlied. In the Teutonic version his treacherous assailant
lures him from a hunting party in the forest to quench his thirst at
a brook, where he thrusts him through the back with a spear. His body
was thence borne home by the hunters and laid at his wife's feet.

The Flight of Gudrun

Gudrun, still inconsolable, and loathing the kindred who had
treacherously robbed her of all joy in life, fled from her father's
house and took refuge with Elf, Sigurd's foster father, who, after the
death of Hiordis, had married Thora, the daughter of King Hakon. The
two women became great friends, and here Gudrun tarried several years,
employing herself in embroidering upon tapestry the great deeds of
Sigurd, and watching over her little daughter Swanhild, whose bright
eyes reminded her vividly of the husband whom she had lost.

Atli, King of the Huns

In the meantime, Atli, Brunhild's brother, who was now King of the
Huns, had sent to Gunnar to demand atonement for his sister's death;
and to satisfy his claims Gunnar had promised that when her years of
widowhood had been accomplished he would give him Gudrun's h