It was most in these latter days that his fame went far abroad,
    The helper, the overcomer, the righteous sundering sword;
    The loveliest King of the King-folk, the man of sweetest speech,
    Whose ear is dull to no man that his helping shall beseech;
    The eye-bright seer of all things, that wasteth every wrong,
    The straightener of the crooked, the hammer of the strong: 
    Lo, such was the Son of Sigmund in the days whereof I tell,
    The dread of the doom and the battle; and all children loved him well.

    Now it happed on a summer season mid the blossom of the year,
    When the clouds were high and little, and the sun exceeding clear,
    That Queen Brynhild arose in the morning, and longed for the eddying
      pool,
    And the Water of the Niblungs her summer sleep to cool: 
    So she set her face to the river, where the hawthorn and the rose
    Hide the face of the sunlit water from the yellow-blossomed close
    And the house-built Burg of the Niblungs; for there by a grassy strand
    The shallow water floweth o’er white and stoneless sand
    And deepeneth up and outward; and the bank on the further side
    Goes high and shear and rocky the water’s face to hide
    From the plain and the horse-fed meadow:  there the wives of the
      Niblungs oft
    Would play in the wide-spread water when the summer days were soft;
    And thither now goes Brynhild, and the flowery screen doth pass,
    When lo, fair linen raiment falls before her on the grass,
    And she looks, and there is Gudrun, the white-armed Niblung child,
    All bare for the sunny river and the water undefiled. 
    Round she turned with her face yet dreamy with the love of yesternight,
    Till the flush of anger changed it:  but Brynhild’s face grew white,
    Though soft she spake and queenly: 
                                      “Hail, sister of my lord! 
    Thou art fair in the summer morning ’twixt the river and the sward!”

Then she disarrayed her shoulders and cast her golden girth,
And she said:  “Thou art sister of Gunnar, and the kin of the best of
the earth;
So shalt thou go before me to meet the water cold.”

Then, smiling nowise kindly, doth Gudrun her behold,
And she saith:  “Thou art wrong, Queen Brynhild, to give the place to
me,
For she that is wife of the greatest more than sister-kin shall be. 
—­Nay, if here were the sister of Sigurd ne’er before me should she go,
Though sister were she surely of the best that the earth-folk know: 
Yet I linger not, since thou biddest, for the courteous of women thou
art;
And the love of the night and the morning is heavy at my heart;
For the best of the world was beside me, while thou layest with Gunnar
the King.”